Thorns of Decision (Dusk Gate Chronicles) Page 15

“Those things bite?” she asked, remembering the cute otter-like creatures she’d once seen swimming in a river here.

  “Any animal will bite if it thinks you’re going to mess with its babies,” William said, pressing the edge of his shirt to the wounds, which were starting to bleed more heavily now. “Linnea, can you get my bag?”

  * * *

  Inside the clinic, Jacob was organizing some supplies on a shelf, while Eldon Hardridge slept nearby. “What happened?” he asked, as soon as he turned around and saw them.

  Linnea told him the story while he took William’s hand in his and examined the bite wounds.

  “That’s an occupational hazard I forget about sometimes,” he said when she was finished. “It doesn’t look too bad Will. I do want to clean it out really well and get some antibiotics in you, though since it is a bite. You might need one stitch on this top one, but I’m not sure. It’ll be fine by tomorrow, though, I’m sure.”

  William nodded. “That’s about what I thought.”

  “Yeah. Why don’t you go over to the house side and sit down at the kitchen table? I’ll get some stuff together and come in and get it numbed up for you.”

  Quinn almost laughed at the face William made as they walked into the kitchen and sat down at the round, wooden table. She didn’t, of course, because she knew exactly how he felt. Her own stomach twisted as she sat down next to him.

  Linnea followed them in a minute later, carrying a thick, white towel Jacob had given her, and she and Quinn spread it out across the table so Will could lay his hand on it.

  “I’ll go grab you another shirt, Will,” Linnea said, “so you don’t have to sit here in that bloody one.”

  When Linnea had disappeared down the hall, he turned to Quinn, his face a unique shade of gray. “You don’t have to stay and watch this. I know you don’t like this kind of stuff.”

  Her chest tightened a little at the anxiety in his voice, and she took his uninjured hand in hers. “You can’t get rid of me that easily, Will. Besides,” she said, working to put a joking tone into her voice, “I’ve heard so often that you’re just as bad with needles as me – you’re going to deny me the chance to see the show for myself?”

  “You’ve seen it before – when we donated blood in Philotheum.”

  She shrugged. “That didn’t count – it was for Thomas, and it didn’t even hurt.”

  He gave her a dark look. “I always knew you had an evil streak.”

  “I definitely do,” she said, waggling her eyebrows up and down until he smiled. “I will leave if you really don’t want me here,” she added. “Otherwise, I’ll stay right here and hold your hand – I just won’t watch. So you tell me. Do you want me to leave you alone?”

  A look of indecision crossed his face just long enough for her to have her answer. “Never mind,” she said. “I’m staying.”

  “I should not be so bad about this stuff,” he said. “I’m a healer. I do this to people.”

  “In my experience, healers are the worst patients,” Jacob said, coming into the room. “Almost all of us struggle with anxieties and a low tolerance for pain. I suspect it’s the Maker’s way of increasing our empathy.” Quinn was grateful that the supplies he carried were tucked in a small basket with a lid.

  “Well, you’ve definitely got the empathy thing down,” she said to William, squeezing his hand.

  “I don’t think that time when you were little helped anything either, Will,” Jacob said as he sat down at the table next to them, taking William’s hand and starting to poke gently around the bite marks. William stiffened slightly, and Quinn rubbed the back of his other hand with her thumb.

  Linnea came into the room then, carrying a folded shirt, which she handed to William. “I sort of remember hearing stories about that,” she said. “You had stitches in your foot?”

  “Yeah, that’s not a memory I like to dwell on,” William said, shrugging out of the ruined shirt and putting on the clean one, carefully avoiding the injury on his hand.

  “What happened?” Quinn’s eyes were wide as she reached for his hand again.

  “Well, you have to remember, Quinn, our world is not exactly like yours,” William started.

  She looked up at him in surprise; until this moment she hadn’t been sure if Jacob knew she was from another world, but when she glanced over at Jacob, he didn’t look surprised at all.

  “No,” Jacob said. “This happened when Will was little, maybe about five?”

  William nodded.

  “It was a little while after our grandfather had died, and Stephen had just barely taken the throne.”

  Quinn had forgotten that Jacob and William were cousins.

  “Our grandmother had decided to move back to Dreyden, the town where she was from. It’s right by the seashore, and a whole crew of us went down there with her.”

  “It was sort of a family vacation,” William said. “My mother and father took all of us kids – Thomas and Linnea were so little. I was little. And many of my father’s siblings brought their families too.”

  “How old were you, Jacob?” Quinn asked, really wondering how old he was now – she’d never asked.

  “Oh, I guess about ten cycles. Will’s five cycles younger than I am.”

  It would never cease to amaze her how young people in this world were, when they were already married, starting families, running a clinic. It was, as William had said, a much different world than her own.

  “Anyway, we were all at the beach, running around and playing, when all of the sudden Will just starts screaming. He’d stepped just the wrong way on a broken seashell; such a simple little accident, but it tore into his foot really badly.”

  She found herself squeezing William’s hand even tighter.

  “It was mid-summer and so many people at the time were on holiday. Dreyden is just a small town. There were only two healers there who treated injuries, and the one who was open wasn’t even a fourth born.”

  “What?” Quinn asked. “Is that possible?”

  “Yes,” Linnea answered. “A birth gift isn’t some kind of sentence to a particular profession when you grow up. Not all fourth-borns – not even most, really, – actually go into practice as healers. They’ll do other jobs helping people, or they’ll work with animals, or they’ll do something else entirely. Look at Lily and Graeme – they’re both fourth-borns, and Graeme is even trained as a healer, but he spends more time raising the children than healing, and back in their village he was more active as a leader on the council.”

  “If every fourth born became a healer, we’d have more of them than we know what to do with,” William said. “And there are other talents that make for good healers as well – it’s not really relevant to the story whether this particular healer was a fourth-born, Jacob.”

  “Okay, you’re right. He might have been quite talented at lots of things in his practice. Dealing with scared little kids wasn’t one of them. That much I remember. Even at ten, I knew that I did want to be a healer when I was grown. Whenever Nathaniel was around, I followed him like a shadow, trying to learn all of his new tricks. At the time, I had no idea where he was coming up with some of this stuff. But anyway, Nathaniel wasn’t on this trip, and so I went with your parents to this healer in the village, dying to see what he would do.”

  “And what did he do?” Quinn asked, scared now to hear the rest.

  William turned to her, and he actually chuckled at the look in her eyes. “You make it sound like a horror story, Jacob. The guy didn’t seem compassionate, but he probably wasn’t a monster, either. It’s not like he had a lot of choices about what to do. He didn’t know the things we’ve learned from another world. And he didn’t have the medications or the ideas for them that we’ve borrowed from there, either. They still don’t have a clinic like ours in Dreyden, as far as I know. My foot was torn up pretty badly. It needed to be sewn up, and that’s what he did. He put six stitches in the bottom of my foot.”

  “With no anesthe
tic.”

  “No. And no tiny little suturing needle, either.” William said, shuddering now at the memory. “All I really remember is screaming the entire time while my parents held me down. It felt like it took a hundred cycles for him to finish, and even when he was done, it didn’t feel better. It hurt for weeks.”

  For a moment, Quinn was glad that she hadn’t grown up in Eirentheos.

  “Not to mention there were no antibiotics,” Jacob said, looking at her. “The next day when his whole cut started to get puffy and infected, Stephen and Charlotte cut their part of the trip short and rushed Will back to the castle. Although the older kids stayed with the rest of our families – they just took Will and the other little ones with them. So, I guess I don’t even know what ended up happening with it after that.”

  “Nathaniel was back at the castle by then, and he took care of it,” William said. “He had anesthetic and antibiotics, but I still screamed every time he got within two feet of me.”

  “And needles have freaked you out ever since,” Linnea said lightly.

  “Yeah, my excuse is not as good as yours, Will,” Quinn joked.

  He shrugged. “Nobody needs an excuse. Needles suck.”

  Quinn giggled. Linnea and Jacob smiled, but gave him odd looks, and she realized that probably wasn’t a common phrase in Eirentheos. It surprised her a little that for all of the mannerisms William hadn’t picked up in Bristlecone, that one would make the cut.

  “Honestly, though, I’m sure that experience is one reason that anesthetics and antibiotics were some of the first things I really got interested in studying here. Between Nathaniel and me, we can manufacture both here in Eirentheos.”

  “Well, given that you’ve stitched me up here twice, I’m grateful for that one,” Quinn said.

  William smiled. “I’m sure. We still have a long way to go, though. That cut on your leg – if you’d have done that in your own world, you probably wouldn’t have even had to have shots – did you know that?”

  “No!” She frowned. “You tell me that now?”

  “Yeah ... for a small cut like that, they’d have been able to use a numbing cream and then stitch it up – no pain at all.”

  “And you don’t bring the cream here?”

  “Sometimes we do, but there’s usually limited space and there are other things we’re trying to bring back. I keep a little on hand at the castle clinic, just in case I ever do need it for little kids, but most of the time it’s not a priority item. It doesn’t keep forever, you can’t always use it – your arm was way too beat up for anything but the shots – and it takes about an hour before it works, so it wouldn’t have actually been practical when you injured yourself while we were walking. I meant more that if something like that had happened in your world, you’d have taken a car to the emergency room, and they’d have been able to use it there.”

  She sighed. “It is different here. And I know you do run out of stuff before you can bring more back.”

  He nodded. “Yeah ... it’s not like we can keep our entire kingdom stocked on medical supplies by buying them in your world. Mostly, we bring stuff back to study it and try to figure out how to make it, or something similar, with what we have here. We make needles and syringes. They’re not as small and perfect as they are in your world – and we use glass instead of plastic – but we’ve come a long way. We make a kind of anesthetic and our own antibiotics ...” he stopped talking, sucking a breath between his teeth, and his other hand, still in Quinn’s, clamped down hard.

  “Speaking of which,” Jacob said. “Sorry, Will. I figured I’d get as far as I could with that while you were distracted.”

  “I guess that’s one way to do it,” Linnea said, putting her hand on William’s shoulder until they both felt him relax again. “You okay, Will?”

  He nodded as Quinn heard the clink of the syringe being set down on the table. “Yeah,” he said, as Jacob turned his hand over so he could get to the wound on the other side, “I think I’m just going to go with hating needles because they suck.”

  13. Alvin

  “Quinn! Over here, I’m open!” Linnea called. Quinn spun around and in the same motion threw the crumple ball neatly into Linnea’s waiting hands before Simon could get in front of her.

  Linnea, in turn, passed the ball to Joshua, and he managed to toss it into the two-point goal just before Thomas blew the whistle from the bleachers. From the other end of the field, where he was guarding the opposite goal, William cheered.

  “You’re tied up!” Thomas yelled. “Half-time!”

  Max’s team, which included Quinn, William, Linnea, and Joshua, all headed up into the bleachers surrounding Thomas, who was keeping score and trying his best to referee from where he sat. Now thirty days past his surgery, he was doing much better. He got around really well now, but William wasn’t anywhere near clearing him to play a contact sport like crumple.

  Before allowing their opponents to break, though, Simon gathered them at the edge of the field. Today’s game was a re-match from one yesterday, where Max’s team had beaten Simon’s thoroughly. As she filled a glass of water from a pitcher, Quinn could see Rebecca and Evelyn down in the huddle, rolling their eyes at each other. She giggled.

  “What’s so funny?” William asked, right in her ear, startling her.

  She whirled around to face him. “Nothing. You boys just take your crumple a little more seriously than we girls do,” she said, nodding to Simon’s group.

  “Says the girl who nearly knocked over my little brother a few minutes ago trying to intercept the ball.”

  She shrugged. “I got it, didn’t I? And Daniel’s fine. He knows there’s tackling – he likes that part of it.” At twelve cycles, Daniel was always chomping at the bit whenever he got the chance to participate in something with his older brothers. He had, actually, snagged a pass that had been headed for Quinn in the early part of the game. His grin had been too much fun to watch for Quinn to be bothered – but she hadn’t passed up the opportunity later to steal one from him.

  William grinned, then took the glass from her hand, and drained it. “Thanks.”

  She rolled her eyes, and he leaned in and kissed her on the cheek.

  She pulled back, stunned, and looked around at the small group in the bleachers. Nobody seemed to be paying any attention to them. “Are we doing this in public now?” she asked quietly.

  Over the last couple of weeks, their relationship had definitely grown. They were nearly inseparable – when William wasn’t off checking on a clinic, or working in his lab, although he’d even invited her in there a few times lately. But they’d kept their relationship quiet and low-key, mostly stolen kisses here and there, and one afternoon they’d managed to slip off for a long horseback ride and picnic with just the two of them.

  “Officially? I don’t know. But these are my siblings, and Linnea and Thomas have known for quite a while now. It’s a pretend secret here, if it’s a secret at all.” He grinned again, and picked up the pitcher to refill her glass.

  “You’re in an awfully good mood,” she said, smiling.

  He closed his eyes and took a deep, relaxed breath before opening them again. “It’s a beautiful day out. It’s not so miserably hot now that we’re getting closer to autumn, and we’re all out here together having fun. In a little while, everyone will come out for picnic dinner. What’s not to be happy about?” He handed her the glass, and picked up another one to fill.

  “Quite true. It’s important to bask in the good days when the Maker grants them.”

  William and Quinn both jumped, startled at the new voice behind them, they both whirled around quickly to investigate its source.

  “Alvin!” William said, his eyes wide at the sudden appearance of the older man.

  “Still good with names I see, Prince William. And you, Lady Quinn, are you enjoying this lovely day as much as your companion here?”

  “I ... uh ... Yes, I am. Thank you, Alvin.”

  “We wer
en’t expecting to see you here today, Alvin. It’s a pleasant surprise,” William said.

  Alvin smiled, his blue eyes sparkling underneath his white eyebrows. “I usually surprise myself. Never do know where the day will find me. Today I was drawn to find the pleasure of your company, maybe take in some crumple.”

  Quinn frowned; she was learning to associate the appearance of Alvin with significant events here in Eirentheos. The last time she had seen him was when they’d first realized that Thomas was missing. She had a feeling that his visit today wasn’t coincidental.

  “Well you’re always welcome here, Alvin. Would you like a glass of water?” William asked, his hand reaching for the handle of the pitcher.

  “Maybe in a little while, thank you. Actually, I thought I’d come to check in on Thomas and see how his recovery was coming along ... and I thought also that I might could have a short conversation with the Lady Quinn.”

  William looked as shocked as she felt, but he nodded. “I’ll take this glass up to Thomas,” he said. “He is doing much better, he’ll be happy to see you, Alvin.” Then he walked away.

  Quinn turned back to face Alvin, wondering what he wanted. It wasn’t the first time she had ever talked to him alone. In fact, she realized now that he’d somehow managed to get in a few private words with her every time she’d ever been to Eirentheos. And perhaps even more often than that; lately she’d begun to wonder...

  “Yes, milady, it is me you encounter sometimes as you dream.”

  “What? How ...”

  Alvin’s expression was warm and gentle as always, belying the nervous feeling his words were causing in her stomach. “Some questions are asked before we’re really ready to know the answers,” he said. “And you, Beloved, have choices to make before you’re ready for the answers to some of your questions.”

  Her mouth dropped open. “That doesn’t make any sense. How am I supposed to make any choices before I have the answers to my questions?”

  “Ah ... you have it backwards my dear. You must make your choices first, and the answers will follow. I’m surprised, after discovering a world such as this one connected to your own, that you would still be under the impression that you were promised things would make sense.”