Tavara knelt before her and tugged. First one boot, then the other, came loose with a grinding, sucking sound. Glory wiggled her feet, sighing in relief. Hello, toes. She stood—carefully—and pushed the bedraggled remains of her Elizabethan slops down over her hips.
"Any chance of a bath?" she asked hopefully. Now if she could just get those damned bracers off. She never wanted to see any part of this S&M rig-out again!
"Soon," Tavara answered, sounding like nurses everywhere. "What did you do to your hands?"
Glory looked down at them. They were mittened in the black velvet panniers she'd torn from her costume, and only the fingertips showed. The dye had run, staining her skin a greyish black—at least, she hoped it was the dye. She'd torn a couple of fingernails. The fingers looked swollen, and her hands felt stiff.
"Ripped them up pretty good, didn't I?" she said disinterestedly. "Just help me get these bracers off," she added, "And then you can bandage to your heart's content."
The leather bracers that covered her arms like opera-length gloves laced for fit, and normally Glory just slipped them on and off like bracelets, trusting friction to keep them in place, but they'd been soaked through and dried several times since she'd put them on last, and by now they'd shrunk a bit. After struggling with them for a few moments Tavara got a knife and sliced through the lacings. She pulled them open, freeing Glory from the last vestige of Vixen the Slayer.
Only . . . not. She's me now, and I'm her. It's not the clothes, or the makeup, or the sword. It's all the rest. It's what's inside.
Tavara brought another blanket and let Glory stand to wrap it around her sarong-style—apparently this was going to take a while—then started to unwrap the makeshift bandage that covered her hands. It was soon apparent it was stuck to the flesh (a happy thought, that), so Glory got to balance a bowl of green-tinged water on her knees, soaking the cloth on her hands free (the dye ran, turning the water black; a relief of sorts), while Tavara gave her a makeshift sponge-bath and exclaimed over each of the various cuts and bruises she discovered as though Glory had gotten each one of them just to make extra work for Tavara.
Glory wasn't really looking forward to seeing what was underneath the velvet. She could still feel the way the hilt of the sword had dug into her flesh with a thousand tiny needles. And then the Warmother had bled all over her.
"You tore the bandage on your shoulder loose," Tavara said accusingly.
"Hurm?"
"Here. On your shoulder. I told you to leave it there until it fell off, and you didn't. Does this hurt? There's a bruise."
"Bleeding hell!" Glory yelped, as Tavara dug her thumb in just below Glory's right shoulderblade. "Of course it hurts, you fool girl—I sprained it!" And a little quarterstaff practice on top of things hadn't helped any.
She glared over her shoulder at the little Allimir in a fashion that would have had the healer cowering under the furniture a few days before, but now Tavara stood her ground.
"I'll strap it for you so you can rest it, once you've dressed. There's bruising and some scrapes, but it doesn't look too bad."
"That's because it isn't your shoulder," Glory muttered under her breath. The jolt of pain had roused her to full wakefulness again, and she started picking at the wet cloth, pulling it away from her hands. Whatever was in the water seemed to numb the pain, or else she was used to it by now. Tavara didn't object as she peeled her hands free and dropped the wet cloth to the floor. She held her hands up, inspecting them critically.
Both palms were starred with dozens of bloodless wounds, covering them from the heel of the palm all the way to the middle of the second finger joint, all the places where her hands would have touched the sword. They looked like razor cuts, and where they intersected, there were pits in the skin where chunks of flesh had been torn away. Both hands were swollen, as if from a burn, but her right hand—the one that had held the stake—was puffiest, covered with tiny broken blisters.
All things considered, Glory was just as glad it had been too dark to see clearly up there on the mountaintop.
Even Tavara didn't have any smartmouthed nursery rejoinder to make when she saw Glory's hands.
"What did you touch?" she said in a small voice.
"Something poisonous," Glory said. "But they bled a lot."
"Then that— That's good. It will have washed the poison away."
I hope, hovered unspoken between them.
Tavara bandaged her hands with a thick black foul-smelling salve that felt cold and gluey, followed by yards and yards of bandage going halfway up her arms until her hands resembled thumbless boxing gloves. She daubed Glory's other scratches with something that simply burned, and then finally relented and helped Glory into her jeans and T-shirt. It was something of a shock to confront once more the image of her doppelganger—painted, coiffed, and immaculately armored, glaring menacingly up at her from her own chest.