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Custas lay half-reclined on the hospital cot, three flat pillows in greyish pillowcases propped behind his back. Sunlight broke through the tall window and fell across the blanket in slanting rectangles. He was absently picking at a thread sticking out of the seam on the sleeve of his hospital shirt. The thread would not give, and he tugged harder, making the seam crackle. Tartah, seated on a low stool beside his right ankle, lifted his eyes. His gaze was calm, but a spark of disapproval flickered in the depths of his pupils. He said nothing and lowered his head again, concentrating on the complex system of straps and wooden splints holding the broken limb immobile.
The ward smelled of camphor spirit and dried lavender laid out in linen pouches on the windowsill. From somewhere towards the Fish Market came the distant cries of traders praising their fresh catch of small cod, and that noise seemed, here in the quiet of the hospital wing, a sound from another world.
"You didn't sleep again. Is something wrong?" Tartah asked quietly. He was unwinding the old bandage, and the dry linen cloth rustled under his fingers like autumn leaves beneath one's feet.
Custas finally left the thread alone and dropped his hands onto the blanket.
"It's too quiet in here," he replied. "At our camps there's always something rustling, creaking, Dagda spouting some nonsense in his sleep. And here there's nothing like that. You can only hear, sometimes, mice scratching about under the floor."
"There are no mice here," Tartah said evenly. "Master Nornoa keeps a cat."
He removed the bandage fully and now carefully palpated the swollen ankle. His fingers were cool and sure. Custas gave a slight start at the touch but did not pull the leg away; he only clenched his teeth. Tartah noticed this and paused his palm for a moment, looking not at the leg but at Custas's face, at his dark cheekbones, at the perspiration breaking out on his forehead.
"Does it hurt?" Tartah asked.
"Bearable," Custas answered and smiled. The smile came out a little crooked, but in it, as always, lurked something roguish, as though he knew a joke he had no intention of telling. "And are you always this caring, or is it just with me?"
Tartah averted his gaze first. He took from a metal tray a damp cloth soaked in a decoction of mountain arnica and began gently wiping the skin around the splint. His movements were precise, but a faint blush rose on his cheekbones, making the translucent freckles on his nose more noticeable.
"It's my job," he replied dryly.
"Job," Custas repeated, drawing out the word. "And if it weren't your job?"
Tartah placed the cloth back onto the tray and straightened up. He looked at Custas directly, and in his grey eyes something sharp flashed, almost angry. Not even at Custas — at himself. For blushing, for growing flustered. For being unable to answer simply and shortly, as befitted a future healer.
"You ask stupid questions," he said, and his voice sounded harsher than he intended.
Custas gave a short laugh and leaned back against the pillows, folding his arms behind his head. The hospital shirt stretched across his chest, outlining a lean but sturdy body, accustomed to long journeys and work with baggage.
"And you answer them, which means they're not so stupid after all."
Tartah said nothing. He turned to the small table and began rearranging the instruments: silver tweezers, a little jar of dark green ointment, a roll of fresh bandage. His fingers moved quickly, but it was clear he simply wanted something to occupy his hands. Custas turned his head on the pillow and began to look at Tartah. He looked openly, without shyness, as if studying a painting at a fair. The ginger hair, cut as short as it was possible to cut it while still remaining attractive, the pale neck with a touching little mole behind the ear, the grey apprentice's robe, worn at the elbows.
And the silver cross, swinging on its chain with every movement.
"You have beautiful hands," Custas said suddenly.
Tartah was holding the jar of ointment between his fingers, and it trembled, nearly slipping out. He set it carefully onto the table, then exhaled slowly and turned back to Custas.
"Do you even understand what you're saying? Have you no shame?" There was no hardness at all in his voice.
"I understand," Custas nodded. "It's not my head I broke."
He suddenly extended his hand and touched Tartah's wrist. Simply touched, without pressure, the pads of his fingers against the thin skin where the little vein pulsed. His hand was hot, almost burning.
"Don't," Tartah said and pulled his hand away. But he did not do it at once, only after a fraction of a second, and that delay was noticeable to them both.
Custas withdrew his palm and laid it on top of the blanket.
"All right," he said calmly. "I won't."
Tartah stood by the cot, his arms fallen to his sides. He wanted desperately, down to an itch in his fingers, to strike himself on the cheek, to deliver a ringing, sobering slap for the way his heart was beating too fast, for the way his voice had trembled, for having allowed this dark-skinned boy from the east to crawl so deep under his skin at all. But he restrained himself — he always restrained himself with patients.
Custas, as if sensing his state, changed the subject.
"Listen," he said, "what's going on out there? I've been stuck in here a month. The window's too high, I can't see anything. All I hear is the gulls screeching."
Tartah slowly returned to the stool and sat down. He took the roll of bandage and began to apply a new layer, tight and even, coil by coil.
"On Weaver Street they've set up a new spice stall," he began, and his voice gradually regained its usual calm. "A family from the Bay Lands is trading there. They have black peppercorns, anise in bundles, and saffron. They say it's genuine, not dyed safflower. All the housewives are arguing whether it's more worthwhile to buy from them or to wait for the caravan from Ezrest."
Custas listened, his head tilted slightly to one side. His eyes had come alive; interest had kindled in them.
"Saffron," he repeated. "Dagda once bought saffron from a trader down south, added it to rice porridge. It turned yellow, like a chick. Tasted bad."
"Then the saffron was poor," noted Tartah, not distracted from the bandages. "Or far too much was added."
"Most likely both," Custas agreed. "Dagda isn't really much good at cooking, anyway."
He fell silent, listening to the distant noise from the market. The gulls above Kalhn were crying especially loudly today, and the wind carried the smell of salt and fish, mingled with coal smoke from the smithing quarter.
"You said he's your father," Tartah said cautiously, fastening the end of the bandage with a small silver pin. "But you don't look alike. And you call him by his name, too."
"He took me in when I was a child."
Tartah nodded without raising his eyes. He did not know that story; Custas never particularly talked about himself, even when asked. He recalled that when Custas was still thrashing in fever, he had spoken much, disjointedly, mixing eastern words with their tongue so that Master Nornoa could barely make it out. But back then Tartah had listened to him differently, not really taking any of it in. He was faint-hearted; he pitied everyone. However, if one did not nip that in the bud and let oneself be steeped in the pain and grief of every patient, no nerves would ever suffice. Now he was listening somehow differently.
"Have you been in Kalhn long?" he asked, though he already knew the answer.
"A month," Custas adjusted the pillow under his head. "As soon as I broke my legs, Dagda found this hospital. He said we'd be staying. That we'd try to settle down."
"And before that?"
"And before that we roamed everywhere. Along the coast, around the fairs, once even went to the capital. But Dagda didn't like it there. They don't much care for… well, people from the east, there."
Tartah set aside the bandages and began putting the instruments away into a canvas wrap. He usually worked in silence, but Custas noticed how his face had changed — his lips pressed together a little tighter, a barely perceptible crease appearing on his forehead.
"Have you never thought that somewhere there ought to be a home for you?" Tartah asked without looking at him. "Not a wagon and not a coaching inn."
Custas did not answer for a long time. The ward fell quiet, only the floorboards creaking under Tartah's feet as he stepped over to the apothecary cabinet.
"I've thought about it," Custas said at last. "I think about it all the time."
It was, in truth, a very sad thing, to be forced to wander the world.
A person always needs a place he can return to.
Tartah, tucking the wrap under his arm, stepped out into the corridor and pulled the door shut behind him with exactly enough force for the leaf to settle into the frame without a sound. In the stone box of the hospital wing, it smelled of whitewash, vinegar for washing floors, and a barely detectable wisp of smoke from the kitchen hearth, where Mistress Brig, the housekeeper, had been simmering a thick barley broth with a mutton bone since early morning. Tartah stopped by the wall, pressed his forehead against the cool plaster, and took several slow, measured breaths, waiting for the stupid, utterly misplaced trembling in his fingertips to subside. The touch of that hot palm on his wrist still burned him, and he grew furious with himself so fiercely that he nearly ground his teeth. But he said nothing, not even in his mind, and simply peeled himself from the wall and walked down the corridor towards the warmth and the food.
The kitchen at the hospital was tiny, stretched out like a pencil case, with a single window overlooking a yard where a sickly bush of Kalhn briar grew. Mistress Brig, a broad-hipped woman in a grease-stained apron, was stirring the brew in the cauldron and did not even turn around at the sound of Tartah's footsteps.
"Take that bowl there, I've already filled it. There's a crust of bread on top — only don't put it in the soup, it'll get soggy, and then he won't eat it."
Tartah took the wooden tray on which Mistress Brig had assembled everything needed in advance: a deep clay bowl full of thick barley soup with strands of tender mutton and rounds of carrot, a hunk of grey bread with a crisp crust, a clay cup of diluted herbal infusion, and a little dish of dark, almost black buckwheat honey, which was to be added to the drink to help the bones knit better. He nodded silently to the woman and carried the tray back, trying not to spill the soup on the turns.
When he opened the door of the ward again, Custas was sitting in the same pose, but the pillows behind his back had slipped sideways, and he himself was absently winding around his finger that same thread from the seam, now reduced to a short, pitiful scrap. He lifted his head at the sound of the opening door, and his eyes immediately fell on the tray.
"Oh," he said with genuine animation, "are they actually going to feed me today? I was nearly about to eat the blanket."
"Don't eat the blanket," Tartah replied, entering and setting the tray onto the bedside table, having first pushed aside a stack of old anatomical atlases he had brought Custas for entertainment and which Custas, judging by the untouched pages, had never even opened. "It belongs to the hospital, it's state property; they'll dock Dagda's pay for it."
Custas snorted and made to reach for the bowl, but Tartah stopped him with a short gesture and adjusted the pillows, propping them higher so the patient could eat half-reclined without straining his back. As he did so, his fingers accidentally brushed against Custas's shoulder, feeling through the thin fabric of the shirt a hard, sinewy muscle, and Tartah clenched his teeth again, cursing himself for even noticing such a thing. Custas, it seemed, had noticed nothing. He had already taken the spoon and carefully scooped up some soup, blowing on it and squinting at the steam.
"Tasty," he informed with his mouth full.
"Mistress Brig is generally good at it," Tartah agreed, seating himself on the edge of the stool. He drew from the pocket of his robe a little flask of a cloudy liquid, set it on the table beside the tray, and pushed it closer to the cup. "This is white willow bark extract. Add it to your drink. It will help ease the pain by nightfall."
Custas glanced sideways at the flask and nodded, his mouth still full. He ate greedily, quickly, not at all the way people eat who are accustomed to measured meals at a table laid with a cloth. He held the bowl aloft, bent low to the spoon, and broke off large chunks of bread and dipped them straight into the soup, unconcerned about the crumbs scattering onto the blanket. Tartah watched this with a sharp, aching feeling akin to pity, only deeper and more complex. He suddenly pictured Custas eating just as hurriedly by a campfire, somewhere on the verge of a trade road, holding his bowl with his knees while the wind blew sparks into the wagon, and that image resonated in him with a quiet, wrenching pain.
"You were talking about home," Custas said, looking up from his food and wiping his lips with the back of his hand. "Yes, I think about that. I think about what it must be like — to know you have a place you can always return to. Where everything is yours: every floorboard, every cup, every nail in the wall. I don't know what that's like."
Tartah could not find what to answer. He himself had lived all his short life in one and the same room at the hospital, which he shared with two other apprentices, and his own idea of home was hazy, connected more with the scent of herbs and the drumming of rain on the roof tiles than with any specific place.
But he understood what Custas was talking about.
"Dagda tries," Custas went on, and his voice softened, losing its usual mocking note. "He tries very hard. When we'd only just arrived in Kalhn, he went to the town mayor, asked for permission to stay. They issued him a temporary residence permit for traders and craftsmen, but there's a whole heap of conditions."
Tartah listened, his head inclined. He knew how the town, standing at a crossroads of trade routes, always regarded newcomers with suspicion, especially those who could not boast a lineage or at least a letter of recommendation from a respected member of the community. He knew that at the market, wandering musicians were sometimes chased off by the guards, and innkeepers were reluctant to let them across the threshold, fearing trouble from the town council. And he knew that people from the east, with their dark skin and distinctive accent, received in Kalhn three times as many suspicious looks as any other foreigner.
"And how are you treated here?" he asked cautiously, unsure if he had the right to pose such a question.
Custas shrugged and dispatched the last spoonful of soup into his mouth. He chewed, swallowed, washed it down with the infusion from the cup, and only then replied:
"Different ways. Mistress Brig, for instance, she's good. She brought me an extra pillow on the very first day, though I hadn't asked. But the apothecary on the street corner… The old goat looked at us as though we'd stolen his purse, even though Dagda was only asking directions. And the children sometimes shouted things after us, too. But I'm used to it."
He said it lightly, almost indifferently, the way one speaks of things that long ago ceased to cause pain, but Tartah caught in his voice a tiny, almost imperceptible little crack — the very one that always appeared when Custas spoke about something truly important. And he suddenly understood that he wanted to fill that crack, to seal it with something warm and dependable, but he did not know how, because he had been taught to heal bones and muscles, not wounds of the soul, and he had no idea at all from which side to approach those.
"You're used to it," he repeated quietly, "but that doesn't mean it should be that way."
Custas set the empty bowl aside onto the tray and looked at Tartah with a long, attentive gaze. In his dark eyes there was no longer any mockery, only something open and a little bewildered, while Tartah averted his own eyes entirely. His right palm did indeed twitch towards his face, but he caught it with his left and squeezed, pressing his fingers into his knuckles almost to the point of pain. Custas noticed this movement and frowned, but said nothing, only broke off a piece of bread crust and held it out to Tartah.
"You eat, too," he said. "You're as pale as chalk, you know. Probably skipped breakfast again."
"I'm not hungry," Tartah replied, but he took the bread, and after a pause, bit off a small piece. The crust was hard, with a taste of caraway and oven ash, and for some reason just now it seemed incredibly delicious to him. He chewed slowly, gazing at the slanting rectangles of sunlight that over the past hour had shifted from the blanket to the floor, and thought that Custas, despite his broken legs, his immobility, and all his vulnerability, somehow managed to look after him. And at that thought he again wanted to strike himself on the cheek, because a patient should not look after a healer, it was wrong, it turned all their roles inside out.
"Do you know what else I think about home?" Custas asked quietly. "Home isn't just about any roof over your head. It's when someone waits for you in the evening, when you have a key to the door, and you know that behind that door you'll always be welcome. With Dagda and me, it's like this: we're together, we're family. But we've never been home. We're just on the road all the time."
Tartah swallowed the crumbs and placed the rest of the crust on the edge of the tray. Then he raised his eyes to Custas and said, very quietly:
"Perhaps Kalhn might become your home."
Custas looked at him as though trying those words on himself, testing their strength the way one tests a coin, tossing it on one's palm. Then he smiled, slowly, almost imperceptibly — this time without roguishness, without defence, just grateful and tired.
"Perhaps," he said.
Tartah nodded, rose from the stool, and began to clear the tray. His hands moved habitually, calmly, and he no longer felt the trembling in his fingers. He wanted very much to stay, to sit a while longer, to listen as Custas talked about the roads, about fairground songs and night camps beneath the stars, but he knew he still had many tasks: dressings in the next ward, instruments that needed boiling, a calendula tincture he had promised to strain before evening. So he simply took the tray and moved towards the door.
"The legs are knitting well. Please don't strain yourself any more. And then, starting next month, I'll be helping you learn to walk again."
"Listen… when I can walk again… would you maybe want to? Well… I don't know. Go out with me, for instance? I'll understand if you refuse, if you think it's improper and all that. But, you know…"
"First manage it."
Custas leaned back against the pillows and closed his eyes. He heard, outside the window, over the distant market noise, some bird begin to sing — a simple robin, of the kind that nested in numbers under the eaves of the hospital wing. He heard Mistress Brig clattering dishes in the kitchen.
Tartah, meanwhile, reached the kitchen and set the tray on the edge of the chopping table.
Mistress Brig glanced fleetingly at the empty bowl and grunted in approval. Tartah took a clean cloth, dried his hands, and went through to the apothecary closet, where on a narrow shelf stood rows of clay pots of ointments, dark glass bottles, and bundles of dried herbs suspended from the ceiling beam. He found the jar of arnica extract, turned it in his fingers, and set it back in its place. Tomorrow he would go to the ward again, would sit once more on the low stool beside Custas's right ankle and begin the next examination. Would ask how he had slept. Would listen to some joke.
Would blush, grow furious with himself, and still restrain himself.
He stepped out of the closet and paused by the corridor window, looking at the sickly briar bush in the yard. It had already finished blooming, but small, hard berries had set on the branches, which by autumn would swell with redness. Tartah shoved his hands into the pockets of his robe and felt a forgotten scrap of bandage, crumpled into a ball. He took it out, carefully smoothed it, and rolled it into a tiny, tight little coil — merely to occupy his hands.