Kushiel's Scion - Jacqueline Carey [122]
"Needle and thread," I snapped, gazing around at the ring of silent faces. "Name of Elua! Does no one carry it?"
"Here." A calm voice; Sidonie's lady-in-waiting, Amarante. From somewhere in her purse, she procurred an embroidery kit. Kneeling at my side, she handed me a threaded needle. "Do you know what you're about, highness?"
"Not really," I said grimly. "Anyone?"
No one answered. So I set about the unpleasant process while all the fine gentry of Terre d'Ange busied themselves trying to catch Sidonie's mare. I thought about the Tiberian chirurgeon, Drucilla, whom I had known in Daršanga. I remembered the advice she had given, dying; the lives she had saved. I thought about Phèdre and Joscelin. She had done as much for him, once, when they were lost in a Skaldic blizzard. He bore the scar to prove it.
I sewed up Alais' dog.
It was a messy business, but I did it. Amarante of Namarre knelt at my side, blotting away the welling blood with a wadded piece of what looked to have been fine embroidered cloth. Alais wept, holding Celeste's head. For a mercy, the wolfhound was too weak to struggle.
"Will she be all right?" Alais pleaded when I finished. "Will she?"
I wiped my brow with the back of my hand, unwittingly smearing it with blood. "I don't know, Alais," I said honestly. "Let's get her to a proper chirurgeon and see."
Maslin had not been idle while I worked. He had sent for a wagon and ordered his men to built a makeshift stretcher out of a pair of saplings and his own cloak. I stood aside, watching them ease Celeste into it.
"Hold out your hands, highness." It was Amarante who spoke, her apple-green eyes grave. I obeyed and she tipped a waterskin over them, sluicing away the blood. When she had finished, she drew a silk kerchief from her bodice, wetting it. "Here, bend down."
"My thanks, lady." I let her mop my brow. "You were a great help."
She smiled slightly. "The young princess loves her dog very much."
It was an oblique comment; but then, she was a priestess' daughter. I merely bowed in response and said, "Yes, she does."
It was a somber party that returned from the Queen's Wood. Maslin's men did their job, carrying the injured wolfhound out of the forest with care, slung between them on his cloak. Once we were out of the forest, I rode with Alais in the wagon while Gilot led the Bastard for me. Together we cradled Celeste, cushioning her as the wagon jounced along a rutted path. Alais wept steadily, tears forging two shining paths down her cheeks.
"She saved us," she said. "She did, Imri!"
"I know, love," I said softly. "I know."
On one side of the wagon, Maslin rode, glancing at me with stony hatred in his eyes, dried blood flaking on his face. On the other side was Sidonie. I didn't dare look at her; for fear of remembering the feel of her body beneath mine, for fear of the strange flutter in my chest.
Ah, Elua!
What had happened between us?
I was not sure.
And I was afraid.
* * *
Chapter Twenty-Five
Alais' dog celeste lived, and I turned eighteen. The credit for the former went to the Queen's Eisandine chirurgeon, Lelahiah Valais, who tended her with the same deft professionalism she accorded her human patients. She clucked her tongue over the shoddy workmanship of my stitches, crude as they were. When the wolfhound's wound festered, she induced maggots to clean it, then packed it with an odd allotment of bread-mold and spiderwebs. It looked ghastly, but it worked.
The dog survived.
And I gained my majority.
I had thought, a great deal, about Tiberium. Since Eamonn had departed, I had thought about little else. The thought of leaving Phèdre and Joscelin filled me with anxious misgivings; and yet there was exhilaration, too. I yearned to escape from the web of rumor that surrounded me; the suspicion, the sly mockery. I yearned for the freedom to reinvent myself; the freedom to learn and explore the world. But on the day of my natality, the Queen herself begged a boon.
"Stay," she said simply. "Please stay, Imriel; at least until Drustan returns."
I glanced