Work Text:
In the corner of Dulcinea Septimus’ sickroom, Palamedes Sextus and Camilla Hect sat side by side. In the chair by the bed was Harrowhark Nonagesimus, who was watching the door as if expecting any number of ghosts to walk through it. In the bed was Dulcinea Septimus. She had listened with wide-eyed concern to Palamedes’ account of the situation, fevered and drawn, before falling back into a fitful sleep.
Palamedes had sent away the priests, the room barely big enough for the four of them. Now he was searching through the medical bag he’d left from last time. He’d already put antiseptic on Camilla’s wound, but not anaesthetic, and as the adrenaline wore off it was starting to hurt. Camilla had been keeping pressure on it with a folded-up handkerchief and the bleeding had mostly stopped.
Camilla wanted nothing more than to be in bed. Instead, she sat in the sickroom, and extended her arm to rest her hand on the top of Palamedes’ thigh when he gestured. He was as tense and taut as a bowstring.
The handkerchief was discarded, no longer worth saving. It had probably been washed a hundred times in a sink of cold water to rinse out blood sweat. They’d need a lot more than that tonight. There was blood on their clothes, their hands, the rims of Palamedes’ glasses where he hadn’t wiped it all off. It was sticking down the hair on Camilla’s arm and drying around the sides of her fingernails. It could have warded their rooms for a week.
Palamedes started to clean around the wound with a wet cloth, careful not to start it bleeding again. He would be overlaying diagrams of the muscles and nerves, trying to determine exactly what the sword had hit.
“It’s the flexor,” Camilla said.
Palamedes’ eyebrow lifted. He rotated Camilla’s arm inwards.
“And the extensor.”
Just for a second, Palamedes closed his eyes. Any other time he might have sighed, but there was something fizzing inside him that kept his shoulders drawn up tight even as his hands were perfectly gentle. He was angry, and he was offended, and most of all he was afraid, and there was nothing more Camilla could do.
Palamedes pressed gauze onto the wound and had Camilla hold it while he tied the bandage. Then he turned around to face her as best he could, his bony knees jabbing into her thigh. “That’s temporary,” he said. “Would you put your hands out, please, forearms pronated.”
Camilla did, and followed his directions as he assessed the movement in her wrists and fingers, telling him what hurt. It was like being in anatomy lessons again: flex, extend, adduct, abduct. The muscles that Marta the Second’s sword had hit were involved with three of those. Palamedes would write down his notes on it later, whenever that was. Across from them, Dulcinea languished, and Harrowhark looked into a distance that no one else could see.
“I concur,” Palamedes said. “Flexor carpi ulnaris and extensor carpi ulnaris. Unlikely anything deeper, and nothing’s severed. I’m sorry, Cam, it must hurt. You can take off that bandage and I’ll do the anaesthetic.”
“It’s fine,” Camilla said, unwinding the bandage and folding it for later. Palamedes looked up from the medical bag to assess the condition of the gauze; it was largely clean, which seemed to satisfy him. All bleeding stopped eventually. This was the better way. As Palamedes filled the syringe, Camilla allowed herself a moment of fantasy, imagining being locked in their rooms with hot tea and all of her veins intact. But she was here, gritting her teeth at the burn of the anaesthetic. Palamedes’ other hand was laid along the side of her arm, his lean necromancer’s palm over her pisiform bone. Camilla focused on the coolness of his skin, the smell of sweat, her still-fast heartbeat.
Palamedes carefully turned her arm, tracing one fingertip from the back of her wrist up to the wound.
“What do you think?” Camilla asked.
“I think it nicked the basilic vein,” Palamedes said. “It shouldn’t start bleeding again if we’re careful.” His fingers wrapped loosely around her forearm, just above the wrist. He could have made the full circle easily if he’d wanted to.
Camilla looked up into the knife-sharp gleam of his eyes, and examined him as he examined her. Eventually, she nodded. Palamedes nodded in turn, an acknowledgement.
Palamedes’ hand lifted slowly from her arm and went to the medical bag, pulling out a small pouch. “I’m going to suture it,” he said. “I don’t want it opening every time you try to lift something. With any luck the nerves won’t give you any problems.”
When they were fourteen, Camilla had seen an exercise go painfully wrong: a classmate had taken the point of a blade straight to the shin. It had opened a vertical split below the knee, through the pale globs of subcutaneous fat down to the epimysium of tibialis anterior, blood seeping in to pool at the bottom and run out down the leg. It had taken twelve stitches to close and the nerves had healed wrong. Apparently, to this day, touching an area at the top of the scar could be felt just under the skin an inch to the left. This was the kind of thing Camilla had no time for. Palamedes would have said that this category included most things, if you had asked him.
From the pouch came scissors, thread, forceps, needle holder, a short, curved needle. Camilla gently pressed around the wound to check if the anaesthetic had kicked in properly. There was just pressure, no pain, the skin totally numb.
“Ready?” Palamedes asked, lifting the needle to eye level to thread it.
“Yeah.”
He looked from the needle back to her.
“I should have had you enter some tournaments,” he said.
Camilla snorted. “Your line about the Alexandrites getting me didn’t need any more use,” she said.
“As I have said, the Alexandrites would have been lucky to have you, but it seems that their luck was hampered by a series of inexplicable administrative misfortunes.”
Camilla smiled, just a little bit. She reached out her arm.
Palamedes sutured neatly and carefully. Camilla watched the exertion in his wrist, the blue veins underneath as it turned over to push the needle through, first one side of the wound, then the other. The tugging sensation on her skin as he lifted it crawled up her arm and down her spine. It distracted her from the immense tiredness that had descended on her, weighing her down at every joint.
The last knot was tied, the thread cut, a new bandage tied. Palamedes pressed gently down on it where it was secured.
“I’ll look at them again tomorrow,” Palamedes said. “Whenever that is.”
Camilla moved her left hand up to her right shoulder to press on the coracoid process, rotating her shoulder forward to feel it move. “Better see what the Ninth and Fourth find down there first.” She flicked her eyes towards the Ninth necromancer, who was either listening intently or not at all.
“Whatever it is, the Ninth will probably have something to say about it,” Palamedes said.
Camilla looked at Palamedes. Palamedes looked at Camilla. Camilla decided not to.
Palamedes nudged her leg with his knee, which he could have used instead of the suture needle. “Anything else I need to look at?”
“No, just the arm.”
“I thought so,” Palamedes said, arranging everything back in the bag. “You did well, Cam.”
She shook her head. “Should have dodged it. Less trouble for you.”
Palamedes’ expression did something abrupt and awful. “Cam—”
“I know,” Camilla said. She breathed out through her nose. “And you know what I’m going to say, so I won’t.”
Palamedes smiled, just a little bit. “I know,” he said.
They sat there in the corner of the sickroom, side by side, with the near-silence and the smell of antiseptic. The anaesthetic would last for a few hours, the quiet probably less. For now, there was no more blood.