Where He Cannot Reach

Rishi woke because the cloth moved.

He had turned a little in his sleep. A bandage pulled across his shoulder, and the skin beneath answered with enough heat to wake the rest of him. For a moment he remained exactly where he was.

Beside him, Maeril opened her eye.

“How long?”

“I have just woken.”

She looked at his hands, then at the careful angle of his head.

“Good. I would hate to discover you had been conducting an entire morning without me.”

He smiled faintly. It did not make anything hurt. That seemed useful to know.

“Can you sit?”

“With time.”

She gave him that first. Then she put a hand where he asked and helped him rise without dragging the bandages across his back.

His kit waited on the table, laid out before they went to Fell. Maeril had added the salve from the parlor beside his wash and fresh dressings.

He took his left hand out of its covering. The skin was tender and slightly raised around the darkest turns. Maeril watched him press a clean, damp cloth down and lift it without rubbing.

“I can do those.”

“I know. I can too.” He looked at her. “I will need you for the rest.”

She nodded and began cutting a longer strip of cloth.

He tended his hands, then raised one foot onto a low stool to reach the ankle without pulling at his back. There was comfort in knowing the work. The hand doing it shook when he reached too far; he moved the jar closer.

“No healing magic over it,” he said. “The skin needs time to settle around the inscription.”

“Then we shall give it time.”

Maeril loosened the covering at his nape. Where an edge had stuck, she wet it and waited. Rishi leaned forward with his arms supported on folded cloth. She could hear the small changes in his breathing more clearly from behind him.

“That corner,” he said.

“I see it.”

She waited longer. When the dressing lifted, it came free without taking him with it. She eased the broader covering from his back.

The line at his scalp was so fine she had to lean nearer to follow it. Segmented knots descended through the nape and spine, opening across the shoulders into the lattice she had made. Broken circles found their continuations when he breathed. The black had a depth her temporary ink had never possessed; beside it, silver-white script hid in the lamp’s angle.

She turned her head a little. There was the interval she had spent most of an afternoon resolving. Fell had put it exactly where it needed to live.

“Beautiful,” she murmured.

“Is it?”

She looked at the rawness around the line.

“Yes. Inconveniently.”

His shoulder moved with the beginning of a laugh. She waited for it to settle before touching him again.

The old scars remained unmistakable. Her brush had gone around some and across others, and Fell had kept those choices. At the barbed whip, she slowed.

“Still there?”

“Yes.”

He breathed out.

Maeril cleaned the new line beside the old mark. Its curve passed the whip, returned, and continued into the greater pattern.

“It does not get to be the loudest thing anymore,” she said.

Rishi’s hand relaxed on the folded cloth.

When she returned to the corrected shoulder with the salve, her fingers grew slower. She knew why the skin was redder there. Yesterday she had watched the line become permanent. This morning she had to touch the place where it hurt.

“Maeril?”

“I am here.”

“You have gone quiet.”

She rested her hand on a clear patch of skin.

“I wrote this into you.”

“Yes.”

The simplicity of the answer nearly undid her.

“I want it to keep you alive.”

He turned enough to look at her. “So do I.”

She held his gaze, then returned to the open jar. For a little while there was only the sound of cloth and his breathing. She applied less pressure at the tender junction. He told her when it eased.

Each new wrap concealed part of what she had made. She adjusted them until his breath and the reach of his arms could move within them, then checked the edge at his neck once more.

The finished work looked like clean cloth.

She helped him arrange a place to rest with his back clear of the chair and his forearms on the padded table. Then she closed the jars, rinsed her hands, and sat beside him. For once, she left the scattered papers where they were.

He turned one palm upward on the cloth. She put her fingers against the unmarked center, lightly enough that he did not have to close his hand.

The new bandage moved with his next breath.