Turned out that Emrys’ spirits were great for lots of stuff like moving bodies and digging holes and scaring the shit out of Rose. They were also fairly good for brief bathroom breaks on the path and helping them set up a safe place to sleep that night.
What they sucked for was directions to the nearest village with a healer. Emrys explained that they mostly slumbered and didn’t travel a lot unless they were in a river or maybe a storm, and there were none of those around. They had been told there was a village, of course, but the directions had sort of been “fifteen to twenty miles that way down the path” and that five mile difference was quite a lot with unconscious ladies with badly swollen legs on your lap, to say nothing of the fact that they weren’t entirely sure how far they had gone in the first place.
On the other hand, unconscious ladies with badly swollen legs are sometimes helpful.
It was about mid-morning the next day when Rose heard her crying. She wasn’t even awake yet, but it happened all the same. They stopped and gave her some water. After a bit she was able to take it and got herself under control a bit. She was burning up, which was not a surprise.
“Hey, look,” Rose started, “we’re trying to find you some help. You know a village or something around here?” She got a sort of a reply, but it was nothing she could understand. Rose wasn’t even sure it was in a language she spoke. Well, shit. “Hey! Look, we’re trying to help!”
Emrys put a hand on her shoulder. He leaned down next to her ear and spoke softly. “Where do you need to go?” She did answer this. Almost inaudibly.
“Magati. The Witch. Resforo.”
She was asleep again shortly after, occasionally crying in her sleep or making small pained noises when a rock or bump in the path caused a bump. Emrys looked contemplative.
“That make any sense to you?”
“Well, maybe. I think I might be able to help, actually. I will need time to confer with the spirits.”
“Lucky for you, I need one of those toilet breaks.”
When she got back Emrys was sitting in front of a very small fire. It was crackling in a lively way and there was a sort of a strange sound coming from it, but by the time she got close it was all done and the fire was sputtering and dying. Emrys looked up. “There IS a witch.” He looked uncomfortable. “They also work with spirits, though in a very untrained way. But the fire knew of her, so she can’t be far. Fire spirits move quite a bit more than some others because they are drawn to whatever fires tend to burn and slumber in between them. Good luck for us.” He looked ahead on the path. “I hope.”
At the very least, it was accurate information. It was less than an hour before they passed a large rock and directly on the other side, found what looked like an even smaller and less used trail. That flimsy path wound about the hill for almost half a mile, to the point where Rose was thinking that they should turn around, but that was when she saw smoke rising ahead. It was thin, but it was smoke. As they climbed up past the last hill before the smoke, Rose gasped a little. They had come into a sort of oasis. All around and for the past few days the ground had been rocky, sparse, with occasional stalwart, if thin, trees and scrub that held on too tight to life, like a clingy partner.
But this was suddenly lush and green. There was a squat house ahead with a weird stained glass window under the eave and a few short stumps holding up a roof over a sunken porch. Around it was a pond, a number of green shrubs, what looked like a small garden, and the whole thing was surrounded by a small white wooden fence that looked as though it were in need of some repair and a solid coat of paint. All the same, considering they’d spent days in what was a desert in all but name, this was simply amazing. Emrys was saying, “I concur” before she even noticed that she’d said, “holy shit”.
“Hey, man. I don’t want to knock what you do, but THIS is fucking magic.” Emrys did not argue.
He was, though, the one to knock on the door. Rose couldn’t exactly navigate the few stairs down to the porch with a semiconscious woman on her lap. He gave a quiet rap on the door, which Rose thought sounded timid, but it was only a few deep breaths before the door opened.
There was a short form on the other side, but it wasn’t until Emrys moved aside so she could see that Rose caught sight of the dwarf.
Her flesh, like a lot of dwarves, was a mottled grey. Her hair was thick and black, though not terribly long. It continued down the sides of her face, ending in some dense mutton chops, though not a beard as she had seen of several other dwarves. The woman was wide. Not really fat, as might have been the case with a human that wide. She was simply built thicker than a human might be. Her eyes took the sight in for a moment, likely trying to make sense of it. It wasn’t every day you saw a dark skinned warrior sleeping on the lap of a slightly lighter woman in a wheeled chair. They probably looked like some sort of strange two headed beast for a moment there.
When she spoke her voice was lower than a human’s would have been. Richer. “Decima.” She spat on the ground. “Bring her inside if you must.” She retreated into her house. Rose and Emrys looked at one another. From the look on his face, it was clear that this wasn’t what he’d been expecting either.
Emrys wasn’t small, but he was solid enough to get her down from the chair and into the house. Rose, feeling about ten stone lighter, easily balanced down the three stone steps into the sunken porch. In fact, it wasn’t just the porch, the whole cottage was sunken, which made a lot of sense for a dwarf, she suspected. Peering inside she saw a small main room with more stained glass windows along the back wall, though they were more of yellows and light greens to keep the room brighter. There was a fire going in the deep hearth, some handmade chairs of wood with cushions nearby, but not on them. The dark and dry wooden walls were clearly some local variety and there was a lot of storage above the walls and under the eaves. The thatch was visible from inside. It all smelled rather like fire, heavy herbs, and a sort of wet rock, despite the lack of any being visible. There was a large wooden table with a wavy top in the same material as the chairs. The dwarf hastily removed a potted plant and a stone bowl from it.
“So,” Rose began, “Are you two friends or…” she tailed off as the dwarf gave her a blank look.
“She is an oathbreaker and a murderer. I hate her more than almost anyone alive.” She gave Rose a blank stare for a long moment before indicating the table. “But I will be ground to dust before she dies under my roof once hospitality has been given, so lay her on the table.” At the last minute, while Emrys was struggling with the woman, the dwarf placed a soft looking crochet blanket across it. Dwarves were hard for Rose to read at the best of times and these were not the best of times, but there was something there apart from hate.
The dwarf set to work almost immediately. The first thing she did was untie the leg and remove the wooden haft with a muttered, “is this a weapon?” under her breath. Rose maneuvered herself to the side of the fire. Might as well take advantage of the time to dry her socks and warm her body and relax her legs, which had given an angry shake this morning and she hadn’t wanted to take enough time to calm them down properly.
Watching a witch work was something else. She cracked an egg into a bowl, added a dash of something from a jug and a pinch of some sort of powder from a pouch near the window. Rose figured that was going to be a potion, but she drank it herself! She inhaled deeply and began to sniff around the woman. “Infection. Bad. It’s in the blood. Not all the way in the bone yet.” She gestured to Emrys. “You, hand me that sack!” He did, moving faster than Rose had ever seen him move (when he wasn’t falling down, that is). She created some sort of herb paste with tallow and honey and a heap of whatever was in that sack. Before she applied it, she looked closely at the leg from a few different angles. She looked to Emrys. “You set this?” He waved to Rose and the witch looked at her. Rose nodded. The witch nodded back, though to herself. “Not too shabby. Probably saved the leg. Still, a little adjustment…” She gave a quick and practiced twist and push. A scream erupted from the woman on the table, but Rose couldn’t tell if she was conscious or not. The paste was next, followed by some clean bandages and a pair of sticks. These were much more reasonable in size than the ones Rose had used: flat with some sections cut out for wrapping the cloths. Well …. it was no mace handle, but she tried.
But that wasn’t all. Because nothing Rose had seen so far was really magic.
The dwarf woman made her way to the southern windows and opened one. She took a long hooked needle down from a place on the wall where it was stabbed into some bunches of yarn. It looked to Rose like the sort of needle you’d use for crochet. The witch took it to the table and placed herself on the other side of the window, so that the unconscious woman’s body was between the window and herself. She placed her hand on the table and raised the needle in the other. Rose didn’t even have time to avert her gaze before it happened, so unexpected was what came next. She plunged the needle into her spread hand, right in the middle. Emrys made a whimpering noise and Rose grunted, but the witch herself was quiet until she opened her mouth to speak.
“I call to the spirits of pain, you who reside in the south with its mad gods. You who thrive on misery, rise. I welcome you to my hearth to bargain, for I have need of one such as you.”
Rose didn’t know what she was expecting, but whatever it was, it was grander than what she got. There was a sour voice by the fireplace. “I hear you, witch. We bargain.” But there was nothing there. Rose looked everywhere around the hearth from the wood pile to the wooden mantle to the grate to the broom, but there was nothing to see. Only hear.
“This woman is in great pain. I want you to take the worst of it. I know you want it, so don’t pretend otherwise. If you do, I give you leave to stay on my hearth until she leaves my cottage to feast upon what remains.”
“That’s clever, but you know that pain felt over time is but a dim memory of the agony that she feels now.”
“This is untrue. She feels nothing now. She sleeps, beyond your touch. But, if you take the pain, as I ask, she will be able to wake and then she will feel it. Less pain, true, but less is more than none.”
“You have a bargain, witch.”
That was it. No poof of light or weird sounds or smells. Just “a bargain” and then it was done. The thing hadn’t even really hesitated, almost like it was a common song and dance for them. The woman on the table seemed to be breathing easier right away.
But the witch wasn’t done. Over the next hour she treated with other spirits. Spirits of flesh and bone and blood as well were spoken to (and never seen). Emrys was watching with fascination. And each time she came up with some clever means of talking them into helping the woman. She never used their names. She always said they had to leave when the woman left the cottage. She never promised more than could be delivered in that time as far as Rose could tell. She’d never even heard of this sort of magic.
When everything was done the witch walked to the chair by the hearth and sat in it heavily. No cushion. Just into a hard wooden chair. She looked comfortable, but her eyes were heavy. She looked at Rose. “Girl, get me some of that soup in a stone bowl.” Rose did it. She wasn’t usually pleased about someone ordering her around or calling her girl, but she was in this woman’s home and she’d just seen her do some very weird shit. Not only was Rose a little afraid of her, but she damned well had earned some soup. The soup smelled very herby and a little like foul eggs, but the dwarf sipped at it like it was tea, occasionally scraping at the bowl with a metal spoon, though Rose could not imagine why.
“Look,” she eventually said, “I don’t mean to be rude, but we have no idea who you are.”
The dwarf let her pale blue eyes rest on Rose. “Likewise. Decima needed to be seen to first, and I am not a good host at the best of times. Call me Opal.”
“Right. Opal. Nice to meet you. I’m Rose and this is Emrys. We appreciate your hospitality.”
Opal’s eyes flashed wide for a moment. “I have not given you my hospitality, girl. I let you in, but no promises were made.” After she said it she seemed to wither a bit, as if she didn’t have the energy for much else. “But I may as well, since you do not seem to be leaving. As long as you mean none here harm you may remain until Decima leaves.”
Rose wasn’t sure what had just taken place, but she knew that some people with her own talent were quite particular about the way they used language. She figured this Witch might be the same. “Decima. You called her that before. I’m guessing that’s her name?”
The dwarf wrinkled her brow. “You did not know?”
“Nah. We -,” Rose exhaled deeply. She looked to Emrys.
He stepped in, “We met her on the road in conflict with another woman. Probably a thief. She was wounded in the conflict.” Holy shit, that was diplomatic. “But we didn’t have a chance to exchange names. She was in pain after and unconscious shortly after that. She said just enough to bring us here.”
Opal narrowed her eyes, but didn’t argue so Rose spoke up. “And you two know each other?”
The witch sipped her soup but did not move in any other way. She was like a statue! “She killed my brother. She may be the worst person I have ever met.”
Rose wasn’t sure what to say to that. She knew what she’d do to someone who even scratched her sister. But Emrys said, “And still you save her life? You must be very principled.”
Opal looked annoyed at him. “Helping the injured is not extraordinary. That’s why it’s called basic decency.”
Rose decided to change the subject. “You know anything about some freaks called the Sundered Countenance? We heard they hole up in some ancient dwarven fortress or something.”
Opal looked like she might be about to spit again, but thought better of it, seeing as it was her own floor. “I know them, yes. After Kaldun fell to infighting, they were among the filth who tipped the scales and took the city’s most sacred sites.”
Emrys spoke up. “I was always taught that the cultists were the ones who took the city. I heard nothing of infighting.”
“That is because humans like to think that they are the cause of all things, but it is not so. Before the cultists came, the dwarves were fighting among each other. It probably looked more complicated from the inside, but Witches are not part of such things. The matriarchs mistrusted one another and the factions fell to rumors and lies. Those lies did come from the outside, but it wasn’t humans, I think. Not that the Sundered Countenance are human. I don’t think even your overly permissive people would claim them. They have not mutilated just their faces, but their spirits. Their connection to the thing they worship is not only a single direction. They are most foul.” She turned to look into the fire. “I can direct you, though. I advise you not to seek them out, but I know the way.”
It was Emrys who said, “That would be most kind.”
Opal stood as if she hadn’t been sitting for almost an hour and began to look into jars and cupboards. “I offered you my hospitality, but I don’t have any food fit for you to eat. My soup would probably kill you, but I can have something fit for humans by morning.” She set about mixing ingredients. “Feel free to avail yourself of the sleeping room. It is mostly for guests these days.” She looked to the woman on the table thoughtfully. “I will need to keep her within sight of the hearth until she wakes anyway.”
Rose had rather expected the bedroom to be, well, a bedroom. It barely counted. This was the other side of the red and brown stained glass they’d seen from the front. Where one might expect a bed there was a slab of stones. To their credit, they were quite flat on the top, but holy shit was it not a bed. There was a rolled up mat to the side that provided very little give, but it was better than the rocks.
“Please, take the …. bed,” Emrys said. “I will sleep on my roll on the floor.”
“Don’t act like that’s noble. There’s barely any difference.”
“Not so. The floor over there is wooden. It may be more comfortable.” He tried to hide his smirk, but the little shit was clearly pleased with himself for setting that one up. “I will likely not sleep much anyway. I do not believe that she will bring harm to the woman, but her talk of hating her unsettles me.”
Rose shrugged. “I figure if she wanted to kill her she wouldn’t have mentioned it. And I’m not sure I could stop her anyway. She could poison her with some weird herb mush and I’d never know. Hey, I noticed you didn’t chat her up about spirits. Feeling shy?”
“Feeling terrified. I have never seen anything like what she did. It makes no sense to me. And I think it wise to keep my knowledge to myself lest I create conflict.”
“Yeah, I noticed that her spirits talked like normal folk and you have to use that weird language. What’s that about?”
Emrys actually managed to look grim. “I have no idea. I have never heard a spirit speak the speech of mortals before. They do not even understand it. I will need to do more research into this later.”
The bedroom was a disappointment, but the washroom was not. Rose got a proper bath, discovering blood and dirt and (will it never end) coal dust even in crevices in which she would never choose to have those things. But the water was not just warm, it was actively hot. Given the lack of comfort anyplace else, Rose wondered if that was just for visitors, too. She wasn’t complaining, though. She spent a good deal of the time after her (long) bath with ointment going over little scrapes and cuts on her lower body.
She felt almost nothing down there. Sometimes pressure or movement, but no pain, no pleasure, no light touches, nothing like that. She couldn’t, for example, feel the warmth of the bathwater in her legs, but she could, in some ways, tell that it was warm because of the effect. Relaxing the muscles was a big one. But the lack of feeling also meant that any cuts she got below the belt (so to speak) could turn into a mess if she didn’t wash and dress it. So she went over herself with ointment that she kept for just such eventualities. She’d apparently gotten an angry bruise and a scrape on her shin at some point. She also used a brush to scrub more coal dust out from under her toenails. She used a small kit to trim the toenails (the fingernails were still chewed shorter than they should be). She spent less time than usual trying to remember what her calves used to look like.
Then she washed everything she owned. That was an exaggeration, but the chair got a wipe down and a once over. The cushion (which was badly in need if it) got a full wash and dry in a wooden bucket. Holy shit, that was an improvement. The clothes she’d been traveling in got the same treatment (she had a set of long underthings for sleeping or emergencies, so she wasn’t nude in some stranger’s washroom). She gave her shoes a brushing. She gave her teeth and hair a brushing. Her hair was getting longer than she liked, but she had already imposed enough. No need to ask the witch for shears, too. Eventually she noticed that she was starting to nod off while mending her trousers and she surrendered and turned in (this was also when she noticed that Emrys was already asleep on the floor without having gotten to bathe, but she didn’t feel too bad. He’d get his change tomorrow).
To the witch’s credit, the house was warm and comfortable. The stone bed wasn’t as bad as Rose had feared, probably because she’d been sleeping on the ground for days. Once she got her own bedroll down on top of the straw mat, it was actually an improvement. And despite being in a new place, she slept harder and deeper than she had in weeks.
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