“Gods bless that magus, he thinks of everything, doesn’t he?” I said to Pol. He grunted and waved me toward the inn’s back door.
We went inside to the taproom, where the magus and the two Uselesses were waiting for us. There were deep bowls of stew set out on the table, but before Pol would let me have mine, he wanted to look at my wrists. The magus looked over his shoulder and then sent the elder Useless up to his room to get a relief kit with bandages and little pots of salve in it.
Pol got one of the lanterns off the wall and put it on the table beside him. The landlady tsk-tsked and brought out a bowl of warm water, a cloth, and more soap. Pol started to work on the right wrist first, while I looked at my dinner regretfully. After he had rinsed it with the soapy water, he rubbed a little salve on top of the scabs on the two sores, one above each of the bones in my wrist. Then he wrapped the wrist carefully in a clean white bandage. It was a tidy job, and I was impressed. I was off my guard when he took up my left arm. There was just one sore, but it ran all the way across the top of my wrist. Instead of a scab it had raw patches and bubbles of fluid trapped under flaps in the skin. Without any warning, Pol slid a knife under one of the flaps and twisted it open.
I screamed at the top of my lungs. Everyone in the room jumped, including Pol, but his knife was well away from my wrist by then. I struggled to get out of his grip, but he had his hand clamped on my forearm, and he held on like a vise. I tried with my right hand to pry his fingers loose, but they didn’t budge. As I went on yelling and twisting his fingers, Pol without a word put his knife down on the table and reached into the relief kit. What he brought out was the wooden gag they put in someone’s mouth before doing something drastic like cutting off a leg. He held it up in front of my face.
“That’s enough,” he said.
I thought about explaining that that sore had been there for weeks. I’d been so careful not to let the manacles bang it, and I’d favored it and done everything I could to keep it from hurting anymore and he could have warned me before he stuck his great godsdamned knife into it. But I looked at the gag in his hand and shut my mouth. I contented myself with wiggling and whimpering a little as he opened each of the infected spots, cleaned the entire sore, and rubbed salve onto it. When he had it wrapped in a bandage, I sniffed and wiped my nose and turned to the table to eat my dinner.
Useless the Elder was looking at me in amusement. “Not exactly stalwart, are you?” he said.
I told him what he could do with his own dinner and got a poke in the rib cage from Pol’s elbow. I sulked through the first few bites of my stew before I noticed how good it was. While I savored it, I listened to the others talking and gathered that the older Useless was named Ambiades and the younger Sophos. They weren’t related to each other, but they were both apprentices of the magus. I ate until I was too exhausted to keep my head up anymore and fell asleep on the table with the last bite still in my mouth.
CHAPTER THREE
I WOKE IN THE MORNING in one of the inn’s upstairs rooms, lying on the floor. From where I lay, I could see the webbing underneath the bed next to me and how much it sagged under Pol’s weight. He must have carried me in and laid me out on the rug before going to sleep himself. I looked enviously at his bed, but at least I was on a wood floor, not a stone one. There was a rug underneath me and a blanket pulled over me.
I reached up with one hand and pushed the hair off my face. I usually wore it long enough to wrap into a stubby braid at the base of my neck, but it had grown beyond that in prison. Sometime during my arrest I had lost the tie that held it, and it had been hanging down in my face and tangling into knots ever since. The previous night’s rinsing had washed out some of the dirt, but the tangles were still there. I thought about borrowing a knife from Pol and cutting it all off but discarded the idea. Pol wouldn’t lend me the knife, but he’d cut the hair off himself, and that would be painful. Besides, I liked my hair long. When it was clean and pulled back from my face, I liked to think it gave me an aristocratic look, and it was useful. I sometimes caught small items in the hair at the top of the braid and hid them there.
Still, matted and tangled, the hair was not aristocratic. I pushed it off my forehead for the time being and sat up. Pol’s eyes opened as I moved, and I discarded any thoughts of sneaking away even before I discovered that I was chained to the bed. My ankle was padded by someone’s spare shirt, and locked around it was an iron cuff with a chain that looped around the leg of the bed. Only by lifting the bed, with Pol in it, could I have gotten free. I wondered whose idea the shirt and the blanket had been. Pol didn’t seem like a man sensitive to personal comforts.
I had another wash, this time with warm water in a washroom at the end of the hallway outside the room. The magus and his two apprentices were already there, stripped to the waist, splashing water around as they got themselves clean. They looked up as Pol and I came in, and I could see that they all three expected me to resent more soap and water.
“I washed last night,” I pointed out to the magus. “Look”—I held up my arms—“I’m very clean. Why am I washing again?”
The magus stepped away from the basin that held his shaving water and caught one of my arms. He was careful to grip it above the clean white bandages before he turned my hand over and held it up to my face so that I could see the black dirt still ingrained in the folds of my skin.
“Wash,” he commanded, and before I could protest further, Pol grabbed me from behind and pushed me over toward an empty basin lying next to the others on a shelf that ran waist height along the wall. Holding the back of my neck with one hand, he lifted a pitcher with another and poured steaming water into the basin.
“I can wash myself,” I pointed out to no effect.
He added a washing cloth and soap and went to work on my face. When I opened my mouth to complain, I got soap in it. I attempted to slip away, but could not. The hand Pol had on my neck stretched easily from one side of it to the other. He was merciless to my bruises, and I did my best to stamp on his toes in retaliation. He squeezed harder on my neck until I stopped. He soaped my shoulders and bent me at the waist with another squeeze, in order to soap my back. Bent over, I saw that his knees were within reach. I might have grabbed one and thrown him to the floor, but I didn’t try. This was no time to demonstrate unsuspected abilities. Besides, if I missed the grab, I would only look silly and I had had enough of that.
Pol rinsed off the soap with a pitcher of water. I pulled myself upright and tried to look disdainful, but the bath wasn’t over. Pol marched me across the room to a wooden tub full of water and pushed my head under while I was still howling in outrage. He lifted me out, and while I coughed, he rubbed more soap into my hair and pushed me under again.
When the grip in his fingers finally lessened, I dragged myself away and threw myself, dripping water, to the other side of the bathroom. I watched him warily while I coughed the water out of my lungs. He stood patiently while I twisted water out of my hair. When I snarled that I could have more easily washed myself, he tossed me a towel, and then he lifted one arm and gestured leisurely with a finger toward the door.
His face was almost expressionless, but the corners of his mouth twitched. Jutting out my jaw to conceal the expression on my own face, I stalked down the hall and recovered my shirt and overshirt from the room where I had slept.