From Iron and Ruin

Bandage.

Chapter 31: Bandage.

A fire roared in the hearth of the Magin's huts.

I sat on a bare cot with only slip covering my essential bits as Magin healer Beatrice and Fyr picked glass from my wounds. Fyr's hands were stained with blood, her eyes dark with exhaustion as she worked. The only giveaway to her emotions was the flickering stone at her neck.

"How could this happen?" She paused, pulling back a strand of her fiery hair. "How could they just break into the Keep?"

"Assassins are trained to exploit any weaknesses." Matthaeus stood on the other side of a thin curtain, his shoulder propped against an aged, wooden beam. He had arrived into the huts, following the scent of my blood with golden hair darkened by the rain.

"There are no weaknesses in my stone," Gwen thundered, cracking her knuckles.

"And that is a weakness." Matthaeus hummed lazily. "A belief that your defence is infallible will be your down-fall."

Gwen straightened furiously. "My stone work is -"

"Beautiful," Matthaeus eased, his voice like honey. "And most likely, not the cause of the assassin's entrance."

Softly, Beatrice tipped my chin up. She had fed me poultices to abate the effects of whatever the assassins had tried giving me. Each one tasted more rotten than the last.

They would have slaughtered me in my sleep. All those years of training, all that fight burning in my bones and I would have had my throat slit in my sleep by cowards.

"Where is Mahon?" I asked as Fyr pulled a shard of glass from my leg. Beatrice was working quickly behind her, the sharpness of her magic knitting at my skin, muscle and flesh. She would heal the wound just enough to keep it from being dangerous, and to stave off infection but not completely. She believed in the magic of the body too.

Who knew that being backhanded through glass would cause it to slice through me like I was butter? I hadn't felt the pain in Ewyn's Hall- hadn't noticed the tears in my night-clothes before Hoyarn pointed it out, red-faced.

"Pacing. Securing." Kohen sat on the other side of the curtain too, pressing up against the fabric but facing the door. In his arms, sat his healing hawk. "Too many darkened corners. Too many possibilities."

"He hasn't come to check on me," I hummed lightly, but they all saw right through that.

"Will I smack him for you, Shiny?" Gwen asked. "Maybe rattle his rotten brain?"

"No," I winced, biting down at my lower lip as my skin itched, the muscle knitting together. Beatrice was good. "No. He has better things to be doing than checking up on me. It isn't like I don't end up injured on a regular basis."

I caught the look Fyr and Gwen shared - a sort of helpless acceptance.

"Why didn't they just poison you?" Fyr sat down the bowl filled with glass shards beside me. I glimpsed down at it, lips curling in disgust at the bloody sight. "It doesn't make sense."

"They wanted my head. For Vanya." Her name was poison on my tongue, but her title gave her power. She didn't deserve it.

"If you had died alone in your room, they could have taken your head." Fyr pointed out.

Beatrice checked a wound along my arm, her voice soft. "I suspect the drug you were given was to paralyze you. You wouldn't be able to move, but you would feel everything."