Page 58 of Ship of Smoke and Steel

She nods. “It’s good to meet you.” Her Imperial is accented, but fluent, like that of most of the people I’ve met here. She nods to Meroe. “She’s doing well. Were you the one who set her leg?”

“I hope I didn’t screw it up too badly.”

Sister Cadua gives a small smile. “Not too badly. It should heal clean, though it will take some time.”

“Good.” I look back at Meroe. “Do you know when she’ll wake up?”

“Soon, I imagine. By tomorrow, unless there’s something wrong I don’t know about.”

I nod. Sister Cadua leans close to me, examining my face with a professional eye.

“You look exhausted.”

“It’s been a busy day,” I admit.

“You can go home,” she says. “I’ll send someone when she comes to.”

“Home is … a bit tricky at the moment.”

“Ah.” She pauses. “There’s an empty bed in the next room. And we could spare you a bowl of crab juice, I daresay.”

“Very kind,” I say. “And the catch?”

“I’d like to examine you.”

I turn that over in my head for a while, but it seems only fair.

Sister Cadua is all brisk efficiency. She hustles me into the next room, and I strip off my new clothes and stand patiently while she walks around me. She touches the marks, carefully.

“They don’t hurt?”

I shake my head. “Feels perfectly ordinary.”

“And you say these came from some kind of mushroom?”

“Yes,” I say, belatedly realizing this might not have been such a good idea. Sister Cadua seems sharp enough to poke holes in my hasty cover story. “It wasn’t like anything I’ve seen up here,” I improvise. “Probably only lives in the Deeps.”

“Hmm.” She frowns. “Could you sketch it?”

“Meroe would do a better job, once she wakes up.”

She nods. “It sounds like a useful thing to add to our repertoire. I may suggest an expedition to retrieve some.”

“I don’t know if I could find my way back to the exact spot,” I say.

Sister Cadua waves a hand. “It will be difficult, of course. But without a Ghul talent in the crew, we need all the help we can get.”

I yawn. “You must get some ghulwitches as sacrifices.”

“Less frequently than you might think,” she says. “The only one I know of served in Shiara’s clade, but he was killed more than a year ago.”

There’s more to that story, but her expression warns me not to dig into it. I’m certainly not about to tell anyone Meroe’s secret, even if it still gives me the creeps when I think about it too hard. Sister Cadua indicates that I should get dressed, and leans out into the hall to summon a bowl of crab juice.

“It’ll be just the one night, you understand,” she says. “We need the space for the injured, most of the time.”

“Don’t worry,” I tell her. “After tomorrow, I’ll have somewhere to go.”

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