“Let’s just have Gen look at you, to make sure,” he said, patting her hand as ifshewas the one who needed reassuring. Ophele’s eyes narrowed as she watched him move about the bedchamber, fetching her water, removing her slippers, and stoking up the fire, all of which did not really need doing and especially did not need doing byhim.Experimentally, she wiggled her toes. Might she be more hurt than she knew? Remin knew more of these things. Maybe it was something to fuss over, falling off a horse.
But no; she had taken enough knocks in her life to know whether she was really hurt or not, and as Remin himself noted, she did have a good deal of sense. Ophele watched as Remin paused at the washstand with his back to her, his big hands gripping the table there, his shoulders moving as he drew a long, deep breath.
“Remin,” she said, and tried to inject a little uncertainty into her voice. “Is it really so bad, falling off a horse? I don’t feel hurt, but…”
“No,” he said immediately, and came over to take her hand. “It’s not. It’s probably just as you said, wife, we weren’t going that fast…”
Ophele nodded, her eyes fixed on his face as she listened to him reassure her. It seemed she had discovered at least one possible variable, in the equation of Remin’s fear.
***
“…and then, when he was five, it started to be a light yellowy-green,” continued Mistress Tregue, lady of the Tresingale public house. Helpfully, she tilted back the head of her offspring so that Genon Hengest might have a better view of the boy’s snotty nose.
“I see,” he said politely.
Oh, for the days of a straightforward case of gangrene.
When a second herbalist had arrived in the valley, Genon had mostly been worried about some quack peddling a lot of trashy cure-alls, robbing Remin’s folk blind and probably creating a wave of new patients for Genon himself. Herbs and tonics were serious business, and not meant to be handed out for every sneeze or fart.
And then, once it seemed Dagober Brestle wasn’t going to kill anyone, Genon had worried that the valley’s inhabitants might actually prefer the new man. Brestle looked like an herbalist straight out of a woodcutting, after all: a fortyish family man with a broad, kindly face and a woodsy air about him, and spectacles that Genon waspositivehe did not need.
Whereas Genon Hengest was a twisted old gargoyle with a crooked shoulder and half a face.
More than thirty years had passed since a dousing with boiling oil had left him half-bald and one-eyed, his flesh melted into pink-silver runnels and his left shoulder permanently crabbed. Genon knew how other people saw him. It was a sad truth that when a lot of folk saw a burned man, they assumed he must have done something to deserve it. A world where an innocent man could be burned so horribly was a terrible, frightening place.
But despite the catastrophe that had forever changed the course of his life, Genon knew he had been luckier than he deserved.
Lucky that he had found a healer in Ereguil with experience in burns, who preserved his life and the motion of his body. Lucky that Duke Ereguil had introduced him to Remin. Lucky that when the summons came to march to war, Genon hadn’t been off another errand, though he had already packed his bags and saddled his horse. And it was only by the blessings of the stars that Remin was still alive after so many stabbings, shootings, and poisonings, including a crossbow bolt that hadbeen smeared with some mysterious substance that began to rot his fleshthe moment it entered.By the time they got Remin to Genon’s tent, he’d had to cut away almost a pound of flesh above the young man’s right hip.
To be sure, Genon was the one who had done the cutting and cauterizing, but Remin had survived something that would’ve killed any other man three times over.
You couldn’t watch a man endure that and not admire him.
And so, like so many others, Genon had elected to stay with Remin when the war was over, knowing that he was not so much skilled in his healing asincrediblyfortunate in his most famous patient. If Remin had ever called for another healer, Genon would have bowed his head and stepped aside.
He never had. And a surprising number of people were willing to have a gargoyle for a healer so long as that man also served His Grace, the Duke of Andelin.
“Do you find it’s especially bad in certain places, or certain times of year?” he asked Mistress Tregue, who had had him in three times to inspect the boy’s snot and was a bit of a hypochondriac besides. Genon suspected the trouble was an imbalance of air, specifically the amount of dust in it. Mistress Tregue was of the opinion that her middle son’s nose was about to fall off.
It was the first time Genon had considered a referral to Brestle.
“He does sneeze a lot more after he’s been to the woodpile,” the mistress began, and the doors of the tavern burst open on a wild-eyed Sim, one of the footmen from the manor.
“Mr. Hengest, sir!” he gasped, sweating. “His Grace says you must come up to the house, the lady’s had a fall off her horse and he said to fetch you double quick!”
“Did you see her yourself?” Genon asked, rising at once and gathering his things.
“Aye, His Grace was carrying her up the stairs.”
“Any broken bones or blood you could see?”
“Well…no sir,” Sim admitted.
“Was she speaking clearly?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good.” This was not so much for his own benefit as to curb the valley’s gossips, particularly the avid-eyed Mistress Tregue, who would’ve had the duchess on her deathbed by sundown and alarmed the whole town if Genon didn’t squash it quick. “She’s a sturdy lady, our duchess, for all her size. Mistress Tregue, excuse me. Lead the way, boy.”
