Scarlett Emberheart's Arc

Chapter 7 of 14

Scarlett left the sand with the short blade still in her fist and her ribs screaming under the plate. The marshal called five days rest before the next bracket. Talon Brightshield met her at the tunnel and did not speak. He took her arm and walked her past the crowd to the hospital, up the wide stone steps, and into a bed by the arched window. He set his palm on her side. She felt the heat move through the plate and into her bones. Talon breathed out hard. His own face went gray. He sat down on the stool beside the bed and did not stand up again for an hour. Aldric came in the second morning wearing a plain cloak with the hood up. He kept to the far wall and watched. He did not speak to her. He nodded once to Talon and then studied the room the way a man studies ground before a fight. Scarlett understood. A prince at her bedside would draw knives. A stranger in a corner would not. She let him watch. She trusted the watching. Talon worked on her every day. He set the broken rib on the first pass. He felt it knit under his hand and he felt his own chest ache in the same place, the way his god asked him to pay. But the pain did not leave her. She woke each morning worse than she had gone to sleep. Her skin held a sick heat. Her mouth tasted of iron. Talon asked himself out loud what he was missing. He asked the ceiling. He asked his god. He got no answer. A nurse in a clean apron came and went with broths and cloths and a small brown bottle she poured into the water pitcher. She dabbed Scarlett's brow. She smoothed the blanket. She stayed longer than the other nurses. By the fourth day Talon set his hand on Scarlett's side and felt the rib whole and the flesh warm and wrong. He looked at Aldric across the room. "The bone is set," he said. "She is worse." Aldric did not move from the wall. "Then it is not the bone," he said. Talon shook his head. "I cannot find it. I do not know what I am fighting." He said the words plainly because there was no softer way. He feared a hurt magic could not reach. He said that too. The blonde nurse gathered her tray at the end of the shift. She tucked the small brown bottle into the pocket of her apron. She smoothed Scarlett's blanket one last time and turned toward the door. At the threshold she glanced back at the bed, at the paladin bent over his patient, at the hooded man against the wall. Her mouth moved into a small, private smile. Then she walked out into the corridor and was gone.