Claw

Part Six

Part Six:

I must have slept a long time because, when I woke, the blood had dried around me only to be coated in a fresh and sticky new layer, my sickly pale hands shook and I could barely find the energy to sit. I pulled the apron from my head and tore it into strips with the help of my knife. I tied the makeshift bandage around the knife wound from the old battle first. Then, gently I prised the arrow head from first my thigh and then my calf, wrapping each tightly in an increasingly red bandage. The shoulder was more difficult. The arrow head had become trapped between the ligaments and bones and I spent more time than anyone would have liked wiggling it to and fro, giving up and collapsing into the dirt before trying again, until finally it came free. The awkward shape of a shoulder also made the bandage more difficult to tie than any of the rest. With the bleeding at least slowed, I crawled over to where I had left my pack, soon taking deep gulps of water. I forced the food down my throat despite the nausea that still wracked my stomach and soon my hands were not so sheet-like. I caught a glimpse of the last man and realised one awful truth. This man did not work for Damián. There was no insignia that the last group carried. There were no house colours or other obvious signs. But the thing that gave these men away the most was their age. Damián would never have hired middle-aged men to track us down. What use was it killing me alone anyway? No, these men weren’t Damián’s. I had almost been killed by one of the many bandit groups that stalk the flatlands, the ‘clay-pirates’ as they like to call themselves, and the thought made me more disgusted in myself than I ever had before. How could I almost be defeated by such amateurs?

Another night resting and drinking, filling my body with nutrients and sleep, left me in a better state again. I washed the wounds and retied the bandages the next morning. I was going to get home even if it killed me and started out, limping heavily, through the flatlands. I left the four men for the animals.

Somehow, and I’m still wondering how, I made it free of the flatlands. With every step I took away from the rust-red, cracked clay I came closer to hope. My hair was matted with sweat and my clothes cracked when I moved they were so soaked in blood and clay when I finally arrived in a village. The guard had the impossible idiocy and indelicacy that only soldiers are capable of possessing to ask for my travel papers. Luckily, I had not lost them in all that I had experienced since I left Nefolr months ago and pulled the roll of paper from where it was tucked into my corset before handing it to the guard. He held it gingerly, careful not to touch the bloodstained corner, and read it through more thoroughly than I had ever seen travel papers read before.

“Which lord authorised this?” he asked, pointing at the cracking seal in the bottom right-hand corner.

“Lord Amalric,” I said, my voice sounding foreign in my ears after so many weeks of silence.

The guard looked dubiously at the papers for a moment more before reluctantly handing them back and letting me through the gate.

I spent the night in luxury; a warm bath and a mattress felt like it after the almost two weeks it had ended up taking me to get through the flatlands. I turned out my pockets and bought myself the third dress of my trip. The thing was brown and plain but I had long passed the point of caring. With my wounds washed with alcohol, an experience I did not wish to repeat, and retied with real bandages, I waited outside the village for a cart to pass. If they were going to Heimili then they would probably pass through Nefolr. Soon, one arrived and that was how I passed through the gate into my master’s estate.

Ethelred saw me arrive and called Master who immediately called the doctor.

I was a broken toy, too battered and bruised to be put back together again with glue. It was a month before I left my bed. It was two months before I could walk without a stick. The doctor said I might never have had to use a stick had I not needed to walk myself out of the flatlands on a fractured ankle. That was all easily healed, though. My body had no issues with the wounds to my legs. It was the troublesome shoulder that proved to be my undoing. All my wiggling with the arrow had caused some permanent damage, the doctor could not explain to me what it was, and my inability to tie the bandage properly had caused an infection to make it worse. Master did not know what to do with me. What use was an assassin who couldn’t raise her arm above horizontal?