Ash and Quill(74)

"How long do you intend to keep her out?"

"A day, maybe two," Askuwheteau said. "I was trained for this, Mr. Brightwell, back when the Library thought me worth saving. Even the Iron Tower needs Medica. As someone with a trace of the talent, they thought I was . . . worthy." He drenched that word in a rich sauce of irony. "The treatment is sound. Certain specific compounds to help her quintessence heal properly. Certain others to keep her conscious mind from interfering with that process."

"But she'll come out of it fine," Jess said. He made it a statement. The doctor said nothing either for or against it. "She'll be all right." The silence stretched on. "This is where you agree with me."

Askuwheteau dragged a chair over and put it beside Morgan's bed. "Sit," he said, "before you fall. I can hear the state of your lungs from here. You realize that breathing in the vapors ruptures the lining of the lungs?"

"Stop avoiding the question." Jess realized his voice had grown edges, despite the faint wheeze in it. "We saved your life!"

"And I've saved hers," Askuwheteau snapped back. "If I hadn't kept her in this coma, she'd insist on trying to help you and your big friend."


      ///
       
         
       
        

"Did-" Jess didn't want to ask, but he forced himself. "Did anyone else make it out?"

"None that lived," the doctor said. His voice sounded tight and angry, but his eyes were flat and distant. Unfeeling. "There's only so much to be done, by doctor or Medica or even Obscurist. Greek fire takes most who are touched by it even in passing." He finished his inventory of the bag and snapped it closed. "They tell me we will be leaving just after dark. Your party and mine. I've asked for us to travel with you for a while, and then we will leave on our own for Boston, where we have tribal relations who will take us in."

"I thought-I thought you'd stay with the Medica."

"Why? So I can treat the soldiers who destroyed my people?" Askuwheteau looked down at the coat he wore, with the Library's symbol on it. "It's like wearing someone else's skin."

Jess understood that. He didn't quite know how to reconcile himself to wearing a Library uniform now, either. He remembered the blank silence of Troll and his soldiers in the shower tent, the quiet suffering in their eyes.

Maybe none of them knew how to do that anymore.

"Can I stay with her awhile?" Jess asked, and took Morgan's cold, entirely limp hand in his scarred, burned one.

"Please yourself," Askuwheteau said. "I need to go sit with my people and offer prayers for my friends."

Then he was off, long strides, his long black braid bouncing against the new Medica robe he wore. He'd abandoned his battered old hat. He now looked like any Medica professional, though one badly in need of solid meals. He didn't fit here. Maybe he didn't fit anywhere.

He will, though. We all find our place, Jess thought, and brushed his thumb across Morgan's knuckles. And if we can't find one, we make one. We find our way through what's done to us, and come out the other side.

We heal.

He raised her limp fingers to his lips and whispered, "Please come back."



Three hours passed, and Jess watched the color of the light washing the west side of the tent. It had gone from pale gold to the color of honey to a rich orange, and then dark. He could almost pretend-almost-that it was a normal day, normal sunset, that the air didn't reek of smoke and ash and death.

That the flickering, ominous glow to the west wasn't the simmering remains of a city that would take weeks to finish burning. 

He hadn't been able to sleep, though he'd been very tired; he kept running things through his mind in obsessive detail, looking for the risks, the tricks. The biggest risk, he thought, was that Brendan wouldn't help him . . . But somehow, he knew that his brother would. It had been there, in the inflection of his voice, in the way he wouldn't meet Jess's eyes as he lied for their father.

Santi had asked what they would be willing to do. Jess doubted he had any idea that this would be the price of that question.

"Jess?" The whisper was soft, but it went right through him-not a sharp intrusion, but a wave of relief, and he looked down to see that Morgan's eyes were open, her dry lips parted. Her fingers tightened on his. "Jess?"

"I'm here," he said. One part of him hoped this was good, her waking this early. Askuwheteau seemed to believe that she'd sleep for the rest of the day and through the night, but the doctor was gone now, and the important thing was, she was awake. "How do you feel?"