The Witch Queen's Secret

IT WAS INTERESTING, sort of. Once you got over wanting to heave your breakfast up onto your boots. The two men who’d brought the wounded one in held him down while Lady Isolde worked. Dera’s job was to hold her needles and thread, hand what Lady Isolde needed to her at the proper times, and keep wiping the blood away so that she could see what she was doing.

  First, Lady Isolde cut the hole in the man’s belly a bit wider. Which seemed lackwitted to Dera, until she realized it was so the coil of his guts that was hanging out could be fit back in. Lady Isolde asked for water and oil, and smeared them over the pallid tubes of innards before she did that. And she had Dera hold the edges of the wound open so that she could get them slid back into place. Then she had the two fighting men shake the wounded man just gently, side to side.

  Dera had been biting down on her own lips, but she must have made some squeak of a sound, because Lady Isolde looked up and said, “It’s all right. It helps the intestines settle into their proper place, that’s all.”

  And then she started to stitch up the wound. Watching, Dera could almost believe there was some magic about her, just as the stories said. Lady Isolde used two needles at once, changing them from hand to hand—and all so sure and steady she might have been darning socks, not a man’s belly and guts. At first Dera was too much taken up with watching—and trying too hard not to be sick—to pay mind to anything else. But then, after a bit, she realized Lady Isolde was speaking to herself under her breath, quick and low, all the time she worked.

  “Climb on my back, the water horse said, and I’ll carry you across.” Dera knew that story, about a ceffyl-dwr, a water horse that could take the shape of a man, who tried to get a fair maid to climb on his back so that he could take her deep down to the bottom of his river and make her his wife. She hadn’t realized she was staring, though, until Lady Isolde put in the final stitches and then looked up again with a little twist of a smile. “The story gives me something else to think about besides how much pain I’m causing him.”

  “I know.” Dera looked down. The wounded man had fainted halfway through; he was lying now with his eyes shut and his mouth slack. “I remember from—” She stopped and squeezed her eyes tight shut. Because if it was stupid to cry at a bit of kindness from a fine lady like Lady Isolde, it was stupider yet to cry over the dead baby girl Lady Isolde had delivered. The baby who’d been fathered by who-knew-which of the men she’d serviced, and who she’d never have managed to keep warm and fed living on the road with winter coming on.

  “I’m sorry,” Lady Isolde said again. “Truly sorry, Dera.”

  Dera opened her eyes and realized that Lady Isolde had put a hand over hers. Both their hands were smeared, sticky with blood. “Don’t be, my lady. Nothing you could have done.” She felt her chin jerking up and down and the tears puddling behind her eyes, so she bit her lip harder and said, “What do we do now?”

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