The Complete Liveship Traders Trilogy: Ship of Magic, The Mad Ship, Ship of Destiny. Robin Hobb
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tossed his selections on the bunk beside her. He moved the lantern a bit closer; it was still too dim to see clearly. She winced as his fingers walked over her scalp, trying to part her thick dark hair and find the source of all the blood. His fingers were wet with it; it was still bleeding sluggishly. Well, scalp wounds always bled a lot. He knew that, it should not worry him. But it did, as did the unfocused look to her eyes.
‘I’m going to have to cut some of your hair away,’ he warned her, expecting a protest.
‘If you must.’
He looked at her more closely. ‘How many times did you get hit?’
‘Twice. I think.’
‘Tell me about it. Tell me everything you can remember about what happened tonight.’
And so she spoke, in drifting sentences, while he used scissors to cut her hair close to the scalp near the wound. Her story did not make him proud of his quick wits. Put together with what he knew of the evening, it was clear that both he and Althea had been targeted to fill out the Jolly Gal’s crew. It was only the sheerest luck that he was not chained up in her hold even now.
The split he bared in her scalp was as long as his little finger and gaping open from the pull of her queue. Even after he cut the hair around it to short stubble and cleared the clotted strands away, it still oozed blood. He blotted it away with a rag. ‘I’ll need to sew this shut,’ he told her. He tried to push away both the wooziness from whatever had been in his beer and his queasiness at the thought of pushing a needle through her scalp. Luckily Althea seemed even more beclouded than he was. Whatever the crimpers had put in the beer worked well.
By the lantern’s shifting yellow light, he threaded a fine strand of gut through a curved needle. It felt tiny in his calloused fingers, and slippery. Well, it couldn’t be that much different from patching clothes and sewing canvas, could it? He’d done that for years. ‘Sit still,’ he told her needlessly. Gingerly he set the point of the needle to her scalp. He’d have to push it in shallowly to make it come up again. He put gentle pressure on the needle. Instead of piercing her skin, her scalp slid on her skull. He couldn’t get the needle to slide through.
A bit more pressure and Althea yelled, ‘Wah!’ and suddenly batted his hand away. ‘What are you doing?’ she demanded angrily, turning to glare up at him.
‘I told you. I’ve got to stitch this shut.’
‘Oh.’ A pause. ‘I wasn’t listening.’ She rubbed at her eyes, then reached back to touch her own scalp cautiously. ‘I suppose you do have to close it,’ she said ruefully. She squeezed her eyes shut, then opened them again. ‘I wish I could either pass out or wake up,’ she said woefully. ‘I just feel foggy. I hate it.’
‘Let me see what I have in here,’ he suggested. He knelt on one knee to rummage through the ship’s stores of medicines. ‘This stuff hasn’t been replenished in years,’ he grumbled to himself as Althea peered past his shoulder. ‘Half the containers are empty, the herbs that should be green or brown are grey, and some of the other stuff smells like mould.’
‘Maybe it’s supposed to smell like mould?’ Althea suggested.
‘I don’t know,’ he muttered.
‘Let me look. I used to restock Vivacia’s medicines when we got to town.’ She leaned against him to reach the chest in the small space between the bunk and the wall. She inspected a few bottles, holding them up to the lamplight and then setting them aside. She opened one small pot, wrinkled her nose in distaste at the strong odour, and capped it again. ‘There’s nothing useful in there,’ she decided, and sat back on the bunk. ‘I’ll hold it closed and you just stitch it. I’ll try to sit still.’
‘Just a minute,’ Brashen said grudgingly. He had saved part of the plug of cindin. Not a very large part, just a bit to give him something to look forward to on a bad day. He took it out of his coat pocket and brushed lint off it. He showed it to Althea and then carefully broke it in two pieces. ‘Cindin. It should wake you up a bit, and make you feel better. You do it like this.’ He tucked it into his lower lip, packed it down with his tongue. The familiar bitterness spread through his mouth. If it hadn’t been for the taste of the cindin, he thought ruefully, he might have tasted the drug in his beer. He pushed that aside as a useless thought and nudged the cindin away from the earlier sore.
‘It’ll taste very bitter at first,’ he warned her. ‘That’s the wormwood in it. Gets your juices going.’
She looked very dubious as she tucked it into her lip. She made a wry face and then sat meeting his eyes, waiting. After a moment she asked, ‘Is it supposed to burn?’
‘This is pretty strong stuff,’ he admitted. ‘Shift it around in your lip. Don’t leave it in one place too long.’ He watched the expression on her face slowly change, and felt an answering grin spread over his own. ‘Pretty good, huh?’
She gave a low laugh. ‘Fast, too.’
‘Starts fast, ends fast. I never really saw any harm to it, as long as a man had finished before he came on watch.’
He watched her awkwardly move the plug in her lip. ‘My father said that men used it when they should have been sleeping instead. Then they come on watch all used up. And if they were still on it when they were working, they’d be too confident, and take unneeded risks.’ Her voice trailed off. ‘“Risk-takers endanger everyone”, he always said.’
‘Yes. I remember,’ Brashen agreed gravely. ‘I never used cindin aboard the Vivacia, Althea. I respected your father too much.’
For a moment silence held, then she sighed. ‘Let’s do this,’ she suggested.
‘Right,’ he agreed. He took up the needle and thread again. She followed it with her eyes. Maybe he’d made her too alert. ‘There’s no room in here to work,’ he complained. ‘Here. Lie down on the bunk and turn your head. Good.’ He crouched down on the floor beside the bunk. This was better, he could almost see what he was doing. He dabbed away the sluggishly welling blood and picked out a few stray hairs. ‘Now hold the gash shut. No, your fingers are in the way. Here. Like this.’ He arranged her hands, and it was no accident that one of her wrists was mostly over her eyes. ‘I’ll try to be quick.’
‘Be careful instead,’ she warned him. ‘And don’t stitch it too tight. Just pull the edges together as evenly as you can, but not so they hump up.’
‘I’ll try. I’ve never done this before, you know. But I’ve watched it done more than once.’
She moved the plug of cindin in her lip, and he remembered to shift his own. He winced as it touched a sore from earlier in the evening. He saw her jaws clench and he began. He tried not to think of the pain he inflicted, only of doing a good job. He finally got the needle to pierce her scalp. He had to hold the skin firmly to her skull as he brought the tip of the curved needle up on the other side of the cut. Drawing the thread through was the worst. It made a tiny ripping noise as it slipped through, very unnerving to him. She set her teeth and shuddered to each stitch, but did not cry out.
When it was finally done, he tied the last knot and then snipped away the extra thread.
‘There,’ he told her, and tossed the needle aside. ‘Let go, now. Let me see how I did.’
She dropped her hands to the bed. Sweat misted her face. He studied the gash critically. His work was not wonderful, but it was holding the flesh closed. He nodded his satisfaction to her.
‘Thanks.’ She spoke softly.
‘Thank you.’ He finally said the words. ‘I owe you. But for you, I’d be in the hold of the Jolly Gal by now.’ He bent his head and kissed her cheek. Then her arm came up around his neck and she turned her mouth to the kiss. He lost his balance and caught himself awkwardly with one hand on the edge of the bunk, but did not break the kiss. She tasted of the cindin they were sharing. Her hand grasped the back of his neck gently and that touch was as stimulating as the kiss.