Relieved babbling and a fair bit of crying broke out behind me. I felt like babbling and crying a little myself. I wiggled my bound shoulder and worked it around, and it caused me no pain. I felt the power that the gods had promised me, and I scanned the area for a private place to restore my leg. It would be a lengthy, arduous endeavor.
Before I could struggle up to stand on one leg, Halla lifted me and set me upright. She whispered, “Thank you. Without you, I do not know who I would be.”
I wanted to stab her first, then break her neck, and then interrogate her about how she had ruined my life. I wasn’t in shape to do any of those things, though. Rather than let on that I knew about her betrayal, I said, “Whoever you’d be, I know you’d annoy the hell out of me.”
She smiled, grabbed me, and kissed the top of my head.
THIRTY-SEVEN
I had never restored anything bigger than a hand and a forearm. Bringing back my leg taxed me more than I would have expected, but Pil sat with me through the entire five-hour ordeal.
Halla would have been much more helpful to me than Pil. Her experience was greater by far, but I couldn’t bring myself to trust her. When I told Halla I wouldn’t need her for the effort, she looked surprised and maybe a little hurt. She didn’t object, though. She went back to helping Bea, who had proven skilled at organizing both children and adults for the passage south.
After the healing ended, Pil said it was the most rewarding thing she had done the entire trip, since she was there to mock me when I took a step on my new leg and tumbled like a baby bird.
I thought the problem was that I was wearing only one boot. After all, my newly restored leg had arrived barefoot. But when I pulled off my old boot, I still couldn’t walk worth a damn. It turned out I had made the new left leg an inch shorter than the right. An hour’s work resolved that problem. However, I fell down twice more before I figured out that the knee was half an inch higher than it should have been.
I relaxed enough to let my body decide for itself where all the parts should be. Twenty minutes after that, I eased myself outside and experimented with walking, marching, and skipping. When I sprinted to the dockside and back, I felt fully restored.
Pil handed me my right boot. I glanced around for the other one but then realized it was probably still on my severed leg back in Memweck’s guest quarters.
“Bib!”
I turned in time to catch my missing left boot as Pil tossed it to me.
She said, “There’s your sticky boot.”
My eyebrows raised. “What was that?”
“Sticky boots. They stick to things, so I would call them sticky boots, which I guess whoever created them might have another name for them, but if he wanted to fight over names, he should have shown up.”
I stared at the boots, holding one in each hand.
Pil walked over to me. “I thought you knew. You should have suspected. Do you think I’m going to pull that boot off your nasty, bleeding leg if it’s just a regular cowhide boot? And then carry the smelly thing over a hundred miles for you? Are you a crafty old sorcerer, or are you not?”
I answered that by furrowing my brow like the worst student in class. “What do you mean by ‘sticky’?”
Once I had pulled on the boots, Pil made me try walking up the side of the warehouse. The boots did stick and hold my weight, but when I tried to walk as if I was standing on the ground, I collapsed and fell off.
“You should creep like a lizard,” Halla suggested.
I tried, but I couldn’t hold on with my hands. I fell off again.
“This is perplexing,” I said. “Are you sure they don’t give these out at parties to keep the kids busy?”
Halla got on her hands and knees to examine the boots. “You may need a rope. Or something to dig handles in the wall.”
“I’ll think on the problem.” I shrugged. “At least they fit well.”
Four ships lay in the harbor, all of them unknown to me. The captains planned to depart in a week when the spring storms would have passed. I engaged two of them to carry the twenty-seven of us across the sea to Dunhold, a far more reputable port than Fat Shallows. However, when I opened my pouch, I found no gold lump. Instead, the pouch contained a large hole in the bottom that the gold had worn through. The gold might have escaped any place between Paikett and Memweck’s domain.
I have never had much yearning for wealth, so I didn’t feel sad to lose the gold. The loss presented a challenge, though, since we couldn’t pay for passage south. I turned to Whistler, who wasn’t as rich as he believed, but who possessed infinitely more money than me now.
Whistler scratched his eyelid for a couple of seconds. “Well, I had plans. But plans don’t mean much when you’re stranded in the goddamn northern kingdoms. I beg pardon.” He shrugged out of his pack and pulled from it one of the golden plates from the crypt.
“Grave robber, eh?” I said.
Whistler grinned and handed me the plate. “Belongs to the dead ancestors, my ass.”
We took rooms at the landside inn, and with twenty-two children, we filled up the place. Whistler helped Bea care for the children. He cursed about it and taught the kids a lot of new words, but Bea showed no doubt that it was Whistler’s job to help her.
I tried to avoid
