Fire - Kristin Cashore [150]
It was not a pleasant surgery. The drugs were good, but they took away the pain alone, not the sensation of her fingers being stolen from her hand; and later, when the drugs wore off, the pain was terrible.
And then, over days and weeks, the pain began to fade. When no one but her guard was around to hear, she fought with her fiddle, and was astonished with how quickly the fighting turned into something more hopeful. Her changed hand couldn’t do all that it had formerly done. But it could still make music.
HER DAYS WERE full. An end to the war had not put an end to treachery and lawlessness, particularly in the kingdom’s far reaches, where so much went unseen. Clara and Garan often had spy-room work for her. She talked to the people they set her to, but the work she preferred was in the palace infirmary, or even better, in the city hospitals, where all kinds of folk came with all kinds of needs. It was true that some of them wanted nothing to do with her, and in the usual way, even more of them wanted her far too much, and they all made too big a fuss over the role she had played in saving the king’s life. They talked about it as if it had been all her doing, and none of Nash’s, and none of the kingdom’s best surgeons’, and when she tried to deflect their praise, they began on the subject of how she had tricked Lord Mydogg’s war plans out of Lord Gentian and assured the victory of the Dells. How such rumours had been started, she didn’t know, but it seemed there was no stopping them. So she moved among their moods calmly, building barriers against their admiration, helping where she could, and learning practicalities of surgery that astonished her.
‘Today,’ she announced triumphantly to Garan and Clara, ‘a woman came in who’d dropped a cleaver on her foot and cut off her own toe. The surgeons reattached it. Can you believe it? With their tools and their drugs I almost believe they could reattach a leg. We must give more money to the hospitals, you know. We must train more surgeons and build hospitals all over the kingdom. We must build schools!’
‘I wish I could take my legs off,’ Clara groaned, ‘until this baby is born, and then have them reattached afterwards. And my back, too. And my shoulders.’
Fire went to Clara to rub her shoulders, and to ease into Clara’s mind and take away what she could of Clara’s haggard feeling. Garan, who was not attending to either of them, scowled at the papers on his desk. ‘All the mines in the south that were closed before the war have been reopened,’ he said. ‘And now Brigan believes the miners are not paid enough. Nash agrees, the vexing rockhead.’
Fire slid her knuckles against the knots of muscle in Clara’s neck. The metalsmith of the palace had made two fingers for her that attached to her hand with straps and helped her with picking things up and carrying. They didn’t help with massage, so she pulled them off, and pulled her headscarf off too, releasing the tension of her own scalp. ‘Mining is hard work,’ she said, ‘and dangerous.’
Garan slapped his pen onto the table beside her metal fingers. ‘We are not made of money.’
‘Isn’t it the kingdom’s gold they’re mining?’
He frowned at this. ‘Clara, where do you stand?’
‘I don’t care,’ Clara moaned. ‘No, don’t leave that spot. It’s exactly right.’
Garan watched Fire massaging his extremely pregnant sister. When Clara moaned again, his grimace began to turn up at the corners. ‘Have you heard what people are calling you, Fire?’ he asked.
‘What is it now?’
‘“The monster life-giver”. And I’ve also heard the term “monster protector of the Dells” bandied about.’
‘Rocks,’ Fire said under her breath.
‘And there are ships in the harbour that have put up new sails in red, orange, pink, and green. Have you seen them?’
‘Those are all colours of the Dellian standard,’ Fire said - other than pink, she added quietly to herself, ignoring a streak of pink in her peripheral vision.