“Balderdash,” said Ephraim.
It was the strongest word Hullvardr had ever heard him use.Not quite the strongest tone—that had come on the last Winter Solstice, when Hullvardr had kissed him and Ephraim thought him insincere, and the mortal’s delicate heartstrings had snapped and lashed them both with the broken ends, but all was mended now.
For while Ephraim’s brow remained knit—with bewilderment and concern alike—his voice was low and calm and everything Hullvardr ought himself to be but even moreso everything he wished to hear.“At present, the tending of the wound is far more important than its origins.There will be time enough for you to tell me the whole of it when you’re feeling more yourself.”A wistful smile drew lacework lines at the corners of his eyes and carved filigree into his cheeks.“When the event is far enough in our past to have become merely anadventurerather than amisadventure.”
Hullvardr couldn’t help but smile in return.If he’d had his strength about him he would’ve drawn Ephraim down into an embrace.For the moment he could only part his lips to ask to hear more of Pickwick’s papers.
But before he gathered breath for speech, a heavy thud resounded in the outer corridor.
Ephraim drew up, startled.Then, as more thuds reached even his mortal ears—a steadyclomp, clomp, clompup the stair—he glanced to Hullvardr for guidance.
Hullvardr didn’t need to put on a brave face.Genuine relief suffused his whole frame.
“The bone-setter?”Ephraim ventured.
Hullvardr nodded.
Ephraim sighed—soft, quiet, glad—and smiled.“Then I suppose I had better let her in.”
Ephraim knew not what to expect of a fae bone-setter.
He’d already begun on the wrong foot from the first mention of the trade by assuming the practitioner was a man rather than a woman.From there he struggled to return to the proper track.As he knew even less of women than he did of the fae, his assumptions ran thin and in the vaguest possible direction.What little imagination he had to spare in the face of his dear Hull’s agonies summoned a wispy willowy sort of creature with damselfly wings and diaphanous garb—a sort of nymph to Hull’s apparent satyr, he supposed, though he knew full well that Hull was a huldrekall and satyrs merely his distant cousins.How such a delicate individual as a lady nymph would do something so visceral as setting bones he did not know.Magic, perhaps.A wave of a wand, a whisper of a spell, and Hull’s leg would knit back together in its proper shape as if no dreadful accident had ever befallen him.
The trudging step up the stair forced Ephraim to reconsider his theory.
However, Ephraim had always lived a life of more practicality than theory, and the practical response was to arise, open the door, and bid the bone-setter welcome to his humble office.He set his mind to the task at hand and ignored the pang beneath his breast-bone at having to move even so far as mere yards away from his poor dear wounded Hull.Nevermind that Hull had put on a courageous smile and appeared immensely relieved at the thought of the bone-setter’s imminent arrival.
Ephraim opened the door to find an immense figure towering over him.In her left hand she carried a bag not unlike Dr Hitchingham’s, save that it was about thrice as large.As for the lady herself, she was almost as broad as the doorway.Sable-haired, heavy-set, and well-endowed in particular attributes which didn’t necessarily attract Ephraim’s notice on most ladies but which even he could not ignore in her.The oddest thing to his eye was her garb.While Ephraim didn’t typically give much thought to ladies’ fashion, even he couldn’t fail to notice that she’d dressed in a gown which might have been the fashion some fifty years ago, if not more; the fashion of his youth, which made him feel very old and yet young again in the same moment.
The second-oddest thing was that she appeared to be otherwise a perfectly unremarkable mortal woman.
Panic fluttered into Ephraim’s throat.Had he, in fact, mistaken his guest?Was this not the fae bone-setter?How much of Hull’s true form was revealed, visible over his own shoulder even now, to a stranger?—?
“Well met, Grytha,” said Hull in a cheerful-if-strained tone.
Ephraim supposed that settled the matter.
Grytha, who ‘til now had stared down at Ephraim none-too-approvingly, raised her eyes to meet Hull’s over his shoulder.In a deep and rumbling voice, she intoned.“Good morrow, Hull.”A pause ensued as her dark gaze returned to Ephraim.“And to you.”
“Mr Ephraim Grigsby, Esquire, at your service,” he told her, all-too-late recalling his manners.He withdrew and held the door open for her entrance.“Pray come in out of the chill.”
Bemusement glinted in her eyes as she accepted his invitation with a nod and crossed the threshold.To Hull, she said, “We’re among friends, then?”
Hull nodded.
She cast a wary glance back at Ephraim.Before he could think how to reply to it, she turned away again and, with a roll of her shoulders like two millstones grinding together, shrugged off her glamour.
The garb and bag remained the same, as did the hair.The flesh bloomed to a blue-grey shade, and her brow bore spiralling horns like Hull’s.Her hooves, broad as those of a horse, just barely peeked out beneath the hem of her skirt, and her tufted tail lashed.
All told, Ephraim found Grytha far from ethereal.She was perhaps the most solid woman he’d ever beheld.He supposed he oughtn’t have expected otherwise; as Hull was not a satyr, she was clearly not a nymph.
But as Hull seemed at ease in her presence, Ephraim would strive to feel likewise.
Meanwhile he found himself torn between his desperate desire to stay close to Hull and his worry of getting in the bone-setter’s way while she puts his precious Hull back to rights.He determined that standing by Hull’s head would permit him to take Hull’s hand without making an obstacle of himself.Hull shot a grateful glance and a brave smile up at him in return.Ephraim belatedly realised his free hand was absent-mindedly brushing the dark curls back from Hull’s brow.
Grytha did not hesitate to make herself at home in their office.Her bag came down atop Ephraim’s desk with a definitive thud.
“Have you been dosed?”she asked Hull.
