His own shirt hung on the wall-hook at the opposite end of the nest. He felt rather well-rested and thought he might have enough strength and cunning to retrieve it without her notice. She was mortal like him, after all. Her senses couldn’t be so keen as Shrike’s or other fae. He would feel far more comfortable, he knew, with a shirt between his bare flesh and her gaze.
But the moment he endeavoured to sit up—not even successfully moving his body, just tensing muscles in preparation to move—his wound reminded him of its existence with an agonizing pulse of pain which began as the suddenstabbing of a dozen-odd daggers and bled out into a burning ache that spread through his whole frame.
While he did his best to stifle his unmanful yelp, a strangled sound nevertheless escaped his throat, and both Shrike and Everilda whipped their heads toward him.
Shrike leapt up at once and flew to Wren’s side. There he knelt and seized his hand in his own, whilst the other cupped Wren’s cheek as his deep burr murmured, “Steady—steady.”
Everilda, meanwhile, poured a mug of tea from the kettle and added a few drops of laudanum. This she handed off to Shrike, who brought it to Wren’s lips and cradled the back of his head to bring him up to it.
Wren gladly drank of the potion. He felt less glad when Everilda pulled back the quilt and furs to expose him to his hip-bones.
“A sharp pain?” she asked him, her eyes on his bandage. “Like something ripped or snapped?”
“Just a twinge,” Wren insisted. “Fading already.”
She didn’t look convinced. “The bandage ought to be changed. We’ll see what lies beneath it and judge better then. After the poppies have a chance to do their work,” she added, with a glance at the mug Wren had not yet emptied.
With Shrike’s assistance, Wren dutifully sipped his tea. It took a quarter-hour for him to finish. As he sipped, Everilda busied herself by filling a cauldron from the hot tap in the hollow stump and setting it over the fire to boil. After another quarter-hour had passed, Everilda asked him if his pain had diminished enough to allow him to stand.
“You need only walk to the work-bench,” she explained in response to his wary expression.
His wariness did not, however, arise from his feeling daunted at the prospect of further pain. He glanced to Shrike, to his shirt still hanging on the hook, and back again.
Shrike understood him in an instant and arose to retrieve the shirt.
By the time he’d returned to Wren, Everilda had turned away to tend to her boiling water—which Wren still didn’t understand the purpose of, but if it kept her back to him whilst he dressed, he thought it all the better. Shrike helped him throw his shirt on over his head and tug its hem down past all he wished to disguise.
Everilda hauled her cauldron off the fire and across the cottage to Shrike’s work-bench. Wren had just time enough to note how curiously barren it’d become whilst he slept before she heaved the cauldron and sluiced boiling hot water over the whole of it.
Wren glanced to Shrike to see what he thought of the steam rising off the wood of his work-bench.
Shrike, however, seemed not to notice anything out-of-the-ordinary about her actions. Instead he wound his arm through the crook of Wren’s and, once Wren had swung his legs out over the edge of the bed, gently drew him upright until he stood on his own two feet.
Wren leant heavily on Shrike and hobbled towards the work-bench. As he drew near it, he noted curious dark blotches in the wood-grain. Not knots, but rather sprawling irregular stains of a red so dark it seemed almost black, as if someone had spilt port wine.
Belatedly, he recognised it as blood.
And, as he was the only one with a gaping wound in his side which had just recently been stitched up by a chirurgeon, and no bloodstains appeared anywhere else in the cottage, he was forced to conclude that the chirurgy had occurred on Shrike’s work-bench, and the blood was his own.
Again he turned to Shrike. It felt natural to seek reassurance in his warm dark eyes. But Shrike didn’t meet his glance.Shrike’s gaze had fallen to the bloodstain, and the grim line of his mouth and the hard clench of his jaw bespoke his displeasure. A shudder overtook him—one Wren could feel with their arms so entwined—and he looked away.
A pang struck Wren. He knew not how to begin to apologise for despoiling Shrike’s work-bench. Nor did he know how to scrub out blood from wood. He wondered what it would cost to replace the stained planks. Surely someone in the Moon Market knew carpentry. He made note to investigate the matter when he had strength enough to wander out of Blackthorn under his own power.
But before he could even begin to compose an apology, Shrike had turned to him with a wan smile and, as if Wren weighed no more than the ethereal hart itself, picked him up to seat him upright atop the work-bench. Wren’s pulse fluttered for reasons beyond surprise or his invalid condition.
“Thank you,” Wren managed, startled but no less grateful. He couldn’t support his own weight. Still, with his arms arranged around Shrike’s shoulders, and Shrike standing firm and strong as any oak, he kept himself from collapsing.
Everilda, meanwhile, had gone to scrub her hands and arms from fingertip to elbow in the scalding hot water of the hollow stump.
“Now, then,” she said as she returned to the work-bench. “If you would be so kind as to remove your night-shirt.”
Wren balked. He’d only just got it back on. And now she wanted it taken off again.
Evidently aware of his reasons for hesitance, she added, “It’s nothing I’ve not seen before.”
Which was true enough. And yet, it did not make Wren feel any more comfortable. “Yes—well—still.”
Another moment of awkward silence passed whilst Everilda and Shrike waited with more patience than Wren deserved for him to say something sensible.
