Healing the Scarred Alphas novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Eleven Beds

Mabyn works through the beds and trades barbs with Gethin, Cadoc searches her room, and a roar from the tower in the night shows her the wound nobody dares to dress.

Aldith did not bite me.

She sat on the back step of the infirmary at dawn with her unlit pipe in her teeth.

She watched me cross the yard with a basket of boiled linen.

"Don't thank me for the stores," she said before I opened my mouth. "I won't help you with them."

"I didn't ask you to."

"You'll want the key to the herb room."

She dropped it into my basket without getting up.

"The shelves are labelled. The comfrey's gone to dust, but there's honey. Don't touch my ledger."

"I wasn't going to."

She went back to staring at the wall.

The boy was awake when I looked in on him.

He sulked under a blanket with a wooden sheep clutched in his fist.

"It hurts," he told me.

"It's meant to. It's how you know it's mending."

"Can I go home?"

"Tomorrow, if you stay in bed today."

He scowled, but he lay back.

His mother had slept in a chair beside him.

She woke when I set the sheep straight on the pillow.

She took my hand in both of hers and did not say anything, and I found I couldn't either.

Gethin was waiting at the first of the eleven beds.

He had pulled his shirt off and hung it on the post.

He wore a plain, nervous grin.

Three raised silver scars ran from his left collarbone down across his chest to the opposite hip.

The skin around them was puckered and angry.

"I'm asking," he said. "In case that's how the term works."

He spread his arms.

"I'd like you to look at me. I've been told I'm decorative."

"Sit," I said.

He sat on the edge of the cot.

I washed my hands in the basin and warmed the bone needle over the lamp.

Under the scar tissue I could feel tiny grit lodged in the old wound.

Every flake of it was silver.

"This is why it never closed," I said. "Your own healer washed the skin and never went under it."

"She said it was a curse."

"It's grit."

"Grit," Gethin repeated, delighted. "It's grit, Cadoc, I told you!"

From the doorway, a dry voice said, "You never told me anything."

Cadoc leaned against the post with his arms folded and his good eye on my hands.

"Your brother's first," I said. "Then the others. Don't get in my light."

"I'm not leaving you alone with him."

"Then hold the lamp."

He stared at me for a long moment.

Then he crossed the room and took the lamp.

The silver came out in tiny bright flecks, one after another, onto a square of white linen.

Gethin did not flinch once.

He talked the whole time, about a goat that ate his mother's good shawl.

He talked about the three days Cadoc spent in a tree at fifteen refusing to speak.

By the time I lifted the last flake from the longest scar, Cadoc was laughing under his breath.

Neither of them seemed to have noticed.

I packed the wound, wrapped it with clean linen and sat back.

"There. Don't sleep on it."

Gethin looked down at his own chest.

"It doesn't ache."

"It will tomorrow. Then it won't."

"Two years of that," he said softly.

"I know."

The lamp dipped in Cadoc's hand.

He set it down and went out without a word.

I did four more beds before the light failed.

They had given me a tiny stone cell above the herb store.

When I climbed to it, there was a key in the lock and a heel of bread on the pillow.

Someone had also been through my things.

The roll was lying a half inch to the left of where I'd left it.

The pot of salve had been opened and closed again, and the lid wasn't quite true.

Cadoc was sitting on the foot of the narrow bed in the dark.

"You were quick," I said.

"The last one slept in here," he said. "She had the bed by the window."

His voice was perfectly even.

"She was polite, too. She brought us cakes she'd baked, and she laughed in all the right places."

"And?"

"When I caught her with her hem open and the stuff in her fist, she swallowed it."

He said it with no inflection at all.

"I carried her down the stairs myself. She weighed less than my pack."

I sat down on the stool and my hands went cold.

"I'm sorry."

"I didn't tell you for that."

"Why, then?"

"So you'd know what I'm watching for."

He stood.

"I don't think you're her. I think you could be worse, someone who does good first."

He stopped at the door.

"Thank you for Gethin."

He was gone before I could answer.

I lay awake a long while on the narrow bed where a girl had died.

I listened to the river and the strange hold breathing around me.

Near midnight something roared.

It came from high up in the main tower, a raw animal sound, with nothing of a man in it.

Doors banged below.

I was on the stairs before I knew I'd moved.

Aldith stood at the foot of them in her nightdress, white-faced, with her unlit pipe shaking in her hand.

"Don't," she said. "It's Torren's burns. They open every night, and he won't let anyone near them."

"Not you?"

"Not me. Not the brothers." She swallowed. "He says he'd rather have the pain than have us see it."

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