7
Garric saw two worlds as if painted one in front of the other on walls of clear glass. Part of him wondered which image was real. The other part knew that both were.
He lay on a straw bed in the inn's common room. He could see and hear. He believed he could walk and talk if he wanted to, but the part of Garric's mind that made decisions within its glass walls didn't see any reason that he should do those things, or anything.
Nonnus, Tenoctris, and the members of Garric's family were nearby. Even Lora's face bore a look of concern, though for the most part she showed her worry by complaining peevishly about things that didn't matter.
Cashel sat in a corner with his head in his great hands, mumbling apologies for what had happened. Garric would have said—truthfully—that it was his own fault, if he'd chosen to speak. He'd had eyes only for the monstrously large seawolf in front of him. Nobody would have guessed five seawolves together; but nobody would have guessed four either, and the arrows he'd put through the pair in the marsh might not have anchored them so solidly that they couldn't waddle out to attack.
Ilna bustled to and from the common room, doing the necessary work of the inn that the family was too distracted to handle. When Ilna caught Garric's eyes on her, she nodded calmly. Her face was expressionless, but there was a tight line in the muscles of her jaw.
Other members of the community passed through to commiserate, to drink a mug of ale, and mostly to be entertained by the excitement. Garric was well-liked, but this attack was the biggest event to have occurred in Barca's Hamlet during the lifetime of the oldest resident.
"Five of the monsters! And the storm like never a storm before. I tell you, Rasen, this is a portent. I'm going to inform Count Lascarg."
"Katchin, you said it was a portent when the big sea bass jumped over the spillway before you could net him, when all it was is you're as clumsy as a hog on ice. Did you inform your friend the count about the bass too?"
Garric's right calf muscle was badly chewed; the whole leg felt like a block of ice. Nonnus had cleaned the wounds, but instead of cauterizing the deep penetrations with glowing iron he'd packed them with spiderwebs and smeared ointment on top.
"Shouldn't you stitch the tooth marks closed?" Reise's voice, frightened and diffident.
"Piercing wounds have to drain," Nonnus replied quietly. "Especially when they're made by teeth, and seawolf bites are even worse than human bites for festering. With the Lady's help, these will close into nothing worse than a dimple."
Tenoctris wore a different shift from that in which she'd been treated the day before, though this one was patched as well. Her right cheek and the backs of her hands were bright red with the sheen of fresh salve, but she appeared otherwise to have made a full recovery from her ordeal. Her skin was startlingly white where she wasn't sunburned.
While the others stood aside, Tenoctris and the hermit worked on Garric in parallel. The castaway had written on a thin board, then chanted as she burned the wood in one of the charcoal braziers Reise kept to heat the upstairs rooms during the winter. The smoke curled about Garric in a ring which air currents didn't seem to disturb. Sometimes he read words in the haze, though the meanings trembled away like fish glimpsed in the depths.
The flames flickered blue; the smoke had a coppery odor very different from the usual resinous warmth of burning pine. Garric knew Tenoctris' actions were part of the reason he felt so oddly dissociated, but the thought didn't disturb him.
Nothing disturbed him now; not even the realization that the woman he'd pulled from the surf was a wizard.
The flames died. The smoke continued to rotate slowly around Garric, but he thought that might be an illusion like the words he read in it. Nonnus rose from where he'd been kneeling beside the inn's stone fireplace and joined Tenoctris by the bed on which Garric lay.
"Will he be all right?" Ilna asked from the door of the kitchen. Garric smelled stew prepared with a wider range of spices than his mother used. The odor was pleasant, but hunger was as foreign to him as it was to a corpse.
"His humors are coming into balance very nicely," Tenoctris said. "He's a strong young man. And the wounds themselves have been expertly cared for."
She nodded to Nonnus; her short gray hair looked like a skullcap. "He should come through with nothing more than a few scars."
"With the Lady's help," the hermit agreed/cautioned.
"You were praying," Tenoctris said, her voice catching occasionally as though there were rust between the syllables. Garric couldn't identify her accent, even now when part of him seemed to understand the whole workings of the cosmos. "When you worked on me as well."
Nonnus shrugged. "I hope the great gods exist," he said. "I'm sure that the little spirits of place do. I pray because I hope the gods will help me do good, and because I need to hope."
"I'll go now," Cashel said, rising with the awkward strength of a team dragging its plow through a boggy swale. "The gear needs to be brought in from the pasture, Garric's book and bow and all. Beilin gathered the flock, or so he says."
He stepped over to the bed, knelt, and wrung Garric's right hand in both of his.
"We'll eat here tonight, Cashel," Ilna called from the kitchen doorway.
"As if I could eat!" her brother muttered. Then he was gone.
"I see planes of force," Tenoctris said to the hermit, speaking as a specialist in conversation with a craftsman of a differing specialty. "The other things folk talk about, gods and fate, good and evil—those things I've never seen."
"Oh, I've seen evil," Nonnus said. His voice was soft, and his smile was as bleak as a winter sky. "I've been evil, mistress."
Two worlds drifted about Garric, both of them clear: his friends and family, and the whirlpool beneath a lowering fang of rock. The maelstrom's current was as slow as the stars turning. It gripped Garric and the monsters frozen with him in its toils.
On the sea's dry floor, a hooded figure cast for Garric's soul with a line of violet fire.