With endless thanks to
EmilyMiller
and
Jackie.Hikaru
for proofreading this.
May Belfana set stars upon both your brows.
✯
Farmer Pinner's ox had stepped on his foot, and I was terrified that I might need to amputate it.
Sweat slicked my hair into messy skeins; my forearms burned and my back ached.
The farmer's voice was hoarse from screaming, despite the sum of all my tincture of Valerian that he'd gagged down between swigs of execrable pear brandy and the bouts of eyebrow-raising curses he'd shouted at me, his sons and the unlucky ox.
He'd been on my table for well over an hour.
His sons were strong, but even they were now flagging and struggling to keep him flat. His eyes were wide and his neck sinews bulged taut as cables...
My cheek still ached from where he'd lashed out and caught me with one of his loaf-sized fists. A stupid mistake - I should have known better than to be where I'd been. But Farmer Pinner was one of the few men of the village who seemed to approve of my presence here in this muddy pustule on the backside of beyond... so I would risk much to save him and, by extension, this tenuous home I'd fashioned for myself.
I'd set some of the minor bones, but the worst of the fractures would not cooperate. I'd been wrestling it for the last half an hour, and my strength was fading.
If I could not fix it...
"Come on, come on!" I gasped. "Move, you...
bastard
..."
Click
Farmer Pinner screamed, arching bodily up from the table... then slumped back down again, gasping for breath as his bestial desperation ebbed.
"That's it," I panted. "That was the one we needed. The rest is just small bones - less critical. He'll keep the foot."
"Thank Belfana," said one of his sons. The elder, the darker one.
Rufus
, my exhausted mind reminded me.
"Will he walk again?" asked the younger, Balan.
"With a limp, but... he'll walk."
I shifted my aching thumb, eased my shoulders, marshalled my strength...
Click. Click.
Two of the remaining little bones moved back to where they should be. He'd arrived in a cart, incoherent and mad, with nothing but a swollen mess of tissue and broken bone attached to the end of his right leg. And now he would leave my hovel with something that almost approximated a foot.
The swift easing of the pain allowed the Valerian to finally overcome him. He relaxed and, soon enough, started to snore like the bear that he in many ways resembled.
The boys shared a rueful chuckle, then turned to me with abashed grins.
"Sorry he punched you, Mistress Willow," the elder of the two said. "Are you alright?"
I shrugged. "It's all part of the fun," I said, letting any implied obligation slide away and getting another embarrassed chuckle from both.
No favours. That was my rule. People hated to owe outsiders like me any favours. I'd learned that early and often along the road between...
there
and
here
.
I checked my patient's foot; noted the healthy flush of returning blood to the little toe. The skin was already warmer to the touch.
Relief rushed through me.
I lowered his limb to the table and started my clean-up. I splinted his leg with two ash staves and some lengths of the threadbare linen that Widow Oldberry had gifted me when she left Longbarrow for the last time. And I gave a soft but firm refusal of the three copper coins Rufus Pinner tried to force on me - a prince's ransom in this barter-based society - but gave a grudging accession to his request that when winter came around they be permitted to repay me with sausages and other preservable bits of pig.
(I loathe pork - but beggars cannot be choosers, and it was the smallest of obligations to a animal-rich family like the Pinners; one I felt I could safely accept)
I stood watching as the boys carried their father back to the cart. They lifted him and slid him gently in the load bed before encouraging the shamefaced ox off into the gathering dusk; I could hear Farmer Pinner's snores long after they and the creaking wheels had faded into the shadows.
Job done.
I sighed, raised my fingers to my jaw, and bit down hard against the shooting pain.
Was it fractured? Or just cracked?
I probed the line of bone under my right eye, the Chirurgical processes running on automatic...
No, neither - just bruised, somehow. I was extremely lucky; Farmer Pinner was an incredibly strong man and his punches would probably make even an angry bull reconsider.
Exhaustion descended like a curtain; I sat down on my rough stone threshold and slumped sideways against the weathered wood of my rickety door's frame. I stared up at the swift inner moon and her pocked and shattered face. It would be an hour yet until her larger, more distant sister rose.
A wave of homesickness took me - a desire for the tall pines and white stone of the Imperial City, a desire to once more watch the stars from the great orrery on the School's western rooftops...
A tired, mocking grin and a few brief tears of self-pity were all I allowed myself. Daughters of Umbriel were not allowed regret. Regret was for the weak, for the common man.
Not for us.
My stomach growled and interrupted my bitter thoughts; I remembered that I hadn't yet eaten. I had the makings of bread, but hadn't had time to make dough this morning because I'd needed to find herbs; so all that was left was the two-day-old wild onion and barley soup that simmered on my little dirt hearth beneath the bundles of plants on my improvised drying racks above it.
I permitted myself a moment to hide my face in the crook of my arm, and another moment to think of the sumptuous feasts I'd known as a child...
I felt a presence.
I raised my head.
Two beady eyes glittered in the moonlight, a beak clicked in irritation.
Then Lamira honked at me and flapped her wings impatiently - her cream feathers pale against the coming night. She wanted her own meal; she'd been patient with me but now I'd exhausted her willingness to wait any longer.
I allowed myself one more indulgence, one more moment of self-pity.
Then I clambered to my feet, and dug her seeds from the little canvas sack that hung on the hook behind my so-called door.
I filled her carved tray for her and stood, listening to the noises she made - the soft, happy grunts of a feeding goose, the rustle as she fussed with her wings and shook her tail feathers in delight.
I turned away, and stared up at the moon above us...
And wished, once more, that Aurora could have been merciful and just... killed me.
✯
Dawn brought an insistent and irritating nibbling from Lamira; her rough reminder that she wanted to go out and explore.
My body ached; both from setting Farmer Pinner's foot and from the inadequate support of my grass-and-fern-stuffed canvas sleeping... lump... that I pretended was a mattress.
A flash of memory - the azure and white star-and-swan-dappled silk that wafted over my enormous feather bed, in that long-ago life...
I stared up at the low, warped rafters of my hut.
Oh, how far I'd fallen.
A honk, an indignant peck.
I sighed and rose, heedless of my nudity, and fumbled with the door toggle on its short length of poorly-cured leather.
I opened the door; Lamira forced her way past my shins, clucking and griping softly to herself.
I took my robe from its peg and wrapped it around myself - another gift from Widow Oldberry, a moth-eaten green silk that was still far, far too rich for this... rural wilderness.
She'd been so kind to me. I'd done my best for old Master Oldberry, but even a lapsed School chirurgeon cannot banish cancer.
So I'd eased his final days, and helped her shrive and prepare him, and stood beside her as the small congregation of local men entrusted him to Belfana and covered him with six feet of rich Longbarrow loam.
And I'd watched as they hung the little iron bells around his grave to keep him there.
An old superstition - the Bells of Belfana - but a powerful one. Especially out here in the Wild.
I peered out, breathing in the cool morning air.
Mist still clung to the ground, obscuring...
... a patch of shaman's mushrooms! I could see them just breaking through the soil. A good omen; they were a powerful weapon in my limited arsenal, and I hadn't seen any for a while. Three days, and I would be able to harvest them.
A Vee of wild geese cut the sky above me; honking faintly as they began their southwards flight away from winter.
Lamira watched them for a brief moment; I tried not to acknowledge the relief I felt as she returned to the remains of last night's seed with no further visible interest. She was just a goose - a wilful and impossible bird at best - and yet she was my closest friend and, some days, the only one who seemed pleased to see me.
The dawn brightened into morning.
I washed my face in a bowl of cold water, my unscented, home-made soap harsh on my skin.
The ripples died away and I stared at my faint reflection in the scummy surface - at my tired eyes and straggling off-blonde hair and the lines that were starting to gather at the corners of things...
I suddenly realised that I was nearly twenty-six.
I'd survived two hard years here... and now winter was tapping his fingers and smirking on the threshold once more.
I would need to gather more firewood. And more medicines against winter chills. And... luck willing... a fox or a wolf I could trap for the fur for gloves and, maybe, a lined hood...
Winter in Longbarrow was a different kind of cold - and I was and would always be an outsider here. The locals would come to my hut - close to the trees, safely distant from the village - when they needed medicine or herbalism or some little bit of my hoarded lore.
But mostly what they gave me was a gentle, benign neglect, punctuated by brief moments where they remembered I existed and brought me small helpings of whatever they didn't need but couldn't be bothered to throw away.
They'd miss my skills were I to die. They'd bury me and perhaps put bells around me...
But they'd not mourn me, of that I was quite certain.
✯
