“Yep.” She grabbed a sandwich and devoured it whole. Unable to remember the last time she’d eaten anything, she was suddenly ravenous.
Bael picked through the bottles on the food tray, sniffing at a few until he found one he liked the smell of. But instead of drinking, he poured it all over the wound on his arm, stiffening in pain. Kett frowned; he was wasting good saki.
“Food good?” Bael asked as he took a pair of tweezers from the tray and started picking at the hole in his arm. He watched Kett as she demolished the sandwiches and started on the noodles, eating them with her fingers.
“Right now I’d eat a raw kelf,” she said, raising her eyebrows at him.
“Kelfs really annoy me.” He paused, apparently realizing she wasn’t impressed by that. “You do know I was joking, right?”
“You do know that kelfs aren’t known for their sense of humor, right?” She grabbed a kebab and ripped the meat off with her teeth.
“Well, I do now.” He extracted something from his arm and dropped it on the tray. “How’s your leg?”
“Five by five.” The empty kebab stick clattered on the plate.
“What does that mean?”
“Fine.”
“Well, clearly it’s not, since five minutes ago you couldn’t even move. What happened?”
She swallowed a handful of noodles and washed it down with beer. “Just an accident.”
“An accident involving something with big teeth?”
She gave him a sharp look, not easy to do with a mouthful of tomato. Swallowing the food, she said, “Really big.”
“What was it? A dog?”
“Bigger.”
“Are we going to play that game where I ask questions and you answer with single words? ’Cos we could be here for some time.”
Her mouth once again full, Kett held her hands about ten inches apart. Bael raised his eyebrows. She chewed and swallowed and said through half a mouthful, “Sabertooth.
He whistled. “You got bitten by a sabertooth tiger?”
She shrugged and quaffed some more beer. “Yeah. Piece of advice? If a sabertooth tiger ‘really annoys’ you, don’t pick a fight with it. Don’t taunt it. Just get the fuck out of there.”
Bael opened his mouth, then closed it and nodded. He gestured at the tray of medical supplies. “I think the pills in the brown bottle are painkillers.”
“Think?”
He picked up the bottle and squinted at the unfamiliar alphabet. “Well, take one and find out.”
Rolling her eyes, Kett took the bottle. Her Xinjiangese was rusty, but she’d learned the important words. And sadly, an important word for her was “painkiller”. She recognized it on the label and slugged a couple of the tablets.
“Brave,” Bael said. “I like that in a girl.”
“Read the label,” she said.
“I like that in a girl too.”
“What? Literacy?” She rested her head back against the edge of the bath.
He frowned at the symbols on the bottle. “It’s more like deciphering a code,” he said.
“If you think of it that way, all language is,” Kett said, closing her eyes, an image of the strange symbols around the cave mouth coming to mind. She suddenly felt sleepy. No telling what was in those bloody pills.
“Very profound for someone who’s naked.”
“I’ve always found nakedness a great excuse for profanity.”
Bael laughed. “Yeah, me too.” She felt him inch closer. “Kett?”
She yawned. “Yeah?”
“What really happened to your leg?”
“Told you. Pissed off a tiger.”
“Really?”
“Mmm. It came off worse though. Have one of its teeth somewhere.”
His hand touched her shoulder, caressing her slick skin. “What about your back?”
“It didn’t bite me there.” It was getting harder and harder to stay awake.
“No, I mean these.” His hand edged between her back and the wall of the bath, and traced the scars on her skin.
“Mmm. Tell you later.” Kett curled toward him, his body big and solid and comforting. “Sleepy now.”
“Those must be some pills.”
“Mmm,” Kett said, and slipped into blissful unconsciousness.
It was a testimony to the power of the pills that Kett woke slowly, groggily, instead of ricocheting awake on full alert, as she usually did. One by one, ideas trundled into place in her brain. The room was dark. The bed was soft and warm, and the sheets smelled sweet and clean.
Nuala’s house? She sniffed at some other scent that drifted over the bed, something slightly cloying, like jasmine or some other flower. But Nuala wasn’t inclined to leave flowers in Kett’s room, which usually only smelled of leather and wood polish. Besides, she hadn’t been to Elvyrn in ages.
The mattress dipped with someone else’s weight. Kett’s eyebrows rose in the dark. Someone big. Someone male. Well, it was nice to know she hadn’t switched sides. Someone-
Oh yeah. Now she remembered. Bael. The silver chain. The cave. The burnt remains.
Kett lay still for a while, frowning. What the fuck had that whole thing been about? She had woken in some pretty interesting circumstances in her life-once, memorably, to find that she’d recently been dead-but they’d generally been reasonably traceable. Last thing she remembered before the cave was performing for the Maharaja and his family, then going to bed in the modest suite provided for her in his palace. She’d been thinking about the journey home and planning to get up reasonably early to make a head start.
She sure as hell didn’t remember crossing the Realm, taking off her clothes and wandering into a cave, chaining herself to a naked hottie and suspending herself from the ceiling. That was the sort of thing, Kett figured, that ought to stick in your mind.
She shifted, her leg aching. Probably she ought to get up and see if there was any liniment on that tray of medical supplies. Did Miho know about her leg? Well, she must have seen the scar earlier. It was hard to miss.
The bed was warm and soft, and she didn’t really feel inclined to move. On the other hand, the longer she just lay there without sorting her leg out, the worse it would get. It was like an old cartwheel, she thought grumpily as she pushed the covers back. Keep it well oiled or it’d rust over.
This was proven when she swung her leg out of bed, tested its strength and found it to be totally useless. With a flash of sudden pain, it crumpled beneath her and she toppled to the floor, crying out as she hit the cold wood.
Her leg hurt so much she almost blacked out for a second, sound and vision dimming, her breath snatched away. Then sound returned and she heard someone scrambling from the bed, calling her name.
“Kett? What the- Are you okay?”
Hmm. He was kind of adorable when he was worried. Or maybe pain was making her delirious.
“Don’t,” she cried as his hand moved to touch her leg. “Just don’t touch it.”
He snatched his hand back, and instead touched her shoulder as she rose up on her elbows and surveyed her leg with dismay.
“What happened?”
