“Yes. We sent runners to warn them, as much as possible. A few days ago, after they made the citadel as safe as they could, Strongwind Whalebone and Mouse left with five hundred men to try and catch up with them.”
“The galley that rowed away-did it turn back to the White Bear Sea?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so. It sailed off to the west. That’s the last time anyone saw them.”
A chilling thought struck him, as he recalled the blast of magical fire and the sight of the gatehouse tower teetering, crumbling. “Moreen? Is she… where is she?”
Again Feathertail cast her eyes downward, and Kerrick saw tears glistening.
“She lives! Tell me she lives!” he cried, lurching upward, reaching toward her with both hands.
“Yes, she lives,” said the lass, clutching both of the elf’s fists in her own. “But she was grievously injured. She lost one eye. Dinekki says that we can only pray that she will be able to see out of the other one, when the bandage is removed.”
“Take me to her!” Kerrick declared, throwing back the covers. His muscles were weak, his nerves shaky, but he felt he must do something. “Please, Feather-give me my trousers and tunic.”
“Can you even walk? You’ve been so weak,” she demurred. “You should have something to eat, start to get your strength back.”
“I need to go now,” he said impatiently, determined to see the chiefwoman.
It took several minutes to get him dressed, which didn’t encourage a fretful Feathertail. “I’ll take you to her room, but it’ll be up to Dinekki if you can see her or not.”
They followed a sun-washed corridor, great arching open-air windows on one side and a wall of black slate on the other. He felt a rubbery weakness in his knees and had to be supported by Feathertail. The stones had been soaking up heat through the early weeks of the nightless summer, and now they radiated a comforting warmth.
Kerrick stopped halfway so that he could lean against one of the windowsills and catch his breath. They were high in the keep, with a commanding view of the courtyard. The first thing he noticed was the absence of the gatehouse tower. There was a gaping hole in the wall and shattered stones stained with blood all around the gate area.
Beyond, he saw the Courrain Ocean, blue and pristine, extending to the north. The lower terraces could be glimpsed, and Kerrick sadly noted the trampled fields, burned houses, and wrecked buildings dotting the view.
Another dozen steps brought them to Moreen’s room. Feathertail knocked quietly and led the elf into the comfortable anteroom. Dinekki was sitting at a table, mixing something brown and gooey in a large bowl. The elder shaman looked up from her poultice, uttering a snort of surprise when she spotted Kerrick. “I wondered when you’d be comin’ round here,” she remarked curtly. “Finally got those shivers out of your system, did you?”
Kerrick felt a flush of shame. He said nothing.
“He wanted to… that is, he wondered if he could see her,” Feathertail explained, after an awkward silence.
“Yes. Probably just what she needs.” The elder shaman squinted appraisingly at Kerrick. “That is, if you’re sure you’re up to it.”
“I am,” he said levelly.
Dinekki nodded toward the sleeping chamber, and Feathertail watched anxiously as the elf crossed the antechamber, knocked softly, and opened the door.
“Hello?” Moreen turned toward the entrance and Kerrick suppressed a gasp. Her eyes were wrapped in a white gauze bandage that wound around her head. One cheek had been scraped raw, was now covered with a red scab. Her body, always petite, looked like a child’s now, buried in a great mound of down quilts. Yet somehow in spite of those hurts, she managed to twist her mouth into her familiar ironic smile, one corner of her mouth tilting up while the opposite curved down.
“Kerrick? It’s you, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” he said, coining to the edge of the bed, kneeling. “How… how did you know?”
“I didn’t know,” Moreen replied, with a tiny shrug, “but I’m glad you’re finally up. They told me what you did, and I know how you suffered for donning the ring a second time in one day. It nearly killed you, it seems.”
“That’s nothing now-but you! Are you in pain? How do you fare?”
“No broken bones,” she said flatly. “Just had my face smashed by a half ton of gravel. And no, it doesn’t hurt very much any more. When Dinekki takes this bandage off, by Chislev, I promise you that I will be able to see!”
“Your goddess’s, and Zivilyn Greentree’s blessings as well.” The elf invoked the deity of his sailor’s clan.
“The floor is cold, is it not?” asked the chiefwoman, as Kerrick shifted his weight uncomfortably from one knee to the other.
“No, not at all, not in this warm summer air.”
“Well, still, you should get a chair, anyway,” Moreen declared. “I mean, stay here awhile, won’t you? Let’s talk.”
* * * * *
For a week he kept to her side, taking his food and drink in the chair, talking to her whenever the chief-woman was awake, and holding her hand gently during her long hours of sleep. The long slumbering seemed to do her immense good. She began to eat more gustily, and the skin of her cheek healed so cleanly that Dinekki pronounced there would be no trace of a scar. As to her remaining eye, they could only pray to all the gods that it would be intact when the bandage was removed. The shaman sternly warned that the poultice must be allowed to do its work and that the healing required a full fortnight of insulation from light or air. So the gauzy cloth remained in place, even as Moreen spoke enthusiastically about all of the things she would do as soon as she was back on her feet.
Bruni visited several times each day, bringing reports of the ogre marauders, news of the progress of repairs and of prospects for the upcoming fall harvest. “It will be a lean winter, again,” Bruni warned, “but there’ll be enough in the larder so that no one has to worry about starving.”
“That’s all we can ask for,” Moreen agreed, fidgeting under her covers, twisting her hands in her lap. Kerrick knew she was tempted to pull off some of her bandaging.
At last, one day, Dinekki came through the door with a bowl of steaming water. Feathertail brought a stack of clean cloths, and the shaman sat beside the injured woman. Kerrick leaned over her shoulder to watch, but she clucked him away.
“We’ll both want all the light we can get,” the old woman declared. “Now, you sit up in bed, Lady Chief-woman, and let’s see how your face is healing up.”
Dinekki’s bony fingers were steady as they touched the bandage, gently tugging at a knot behind Moreen’s ear. The shaman elder painstakingly unwound the strands of gauze, until the last coils of the bandage fell away.
Moreen immediately turned toward the window with a smile on her face. “The daylight-I can see it!”
Kerrick tried not to show the shock he felt. Moreen’s right eyelid was swollen shut and surrounded by a purple bruise. Her left eye gleamed beneath wounded skin.
But Moreen was laughing, turning from the window to the old woman. “I see you Dinekki-you saved my eye! Feather, and Kerrick! You’ve never looked so good, any of you!”
“That’s what we need to know. Now, close up and let me wash you off, then a little more of the poultice and a few more days with the bandage.
Moreen nodded, and the shaman dipped a sponge in the steaming water and started, very gently, to wash the chiefwoman’s ravaged face. An hour later a fresh bandage was in place, and-aided by a draught of Dinekki’s spirits-Moreen slept deeply, without movement or dreaming.
Kerrick went to get a loaf of bread from the kitchen and brought the meager sustenance back to her room. He took his place beside the bed and watched her sleep through the pale daylight of the midnight sun.
* * * * *
Moreen felt a bizarre contentment as she slowly recovered. Her strength seemed to increase every day, as did the clarity of her vision. She took a certain amount of pleasure from the black eye patch, a piece of soft sealskin, that she had taken to wearing over her scarred eye socket.
A week after her bandaging was removed she rose from the bed, took Kerrick’s arm, clutched it tightly as he led her through the room and down the hallway. It was the sight of the shattered gatehouse that brought back her memory of helplessness, the horror and doom of the ogre attack. She stood with Kerrick on one of the high ramparts of the keep and looked across the courtyard to the place where her citadel had been so cruelly invaded and nearly conquered.
The gap between the towers had been mostly sealed off with a pile of stones, leaving only a path wide enough for a single file of people to pass into and out of Brackenrock. She knew that Bruni had dispatched work parties to the timber groves to the east of the citadel, along the shore of the White Bear Sea. They were using oxen to haul lumber up the mountain, and by the end of the summer there would be more than enough to repair the gates.
She had been reassured, countless times, that her instinctive order to evacuate had saved at least fifty men and women in the towers and on the walls, as well as many Highlanders and Kerrick. Those in the courtyard had been spared the full brunt of the horrific explosion wrought by the ogres.
Though one tower still stood, it was neither occupied nor functional. The explosion had ripped out stairways and doors, cracking support beams and loosing cornerstones. Both towers would have to be rebuilt from the ground up.