to settle this.”
“Not while you’re toting that hand,” Kay said.
I looked and saw that the knuckles were already red and swollen. I’d been so angry I hadn’t really registered the damage. When I tried to flex my fingers, pain shot up my forearm.
“Uh-huh,” Kay said wryly. “A sword jockey with no sword hand; choice.”
Someone knocked softly at the door. “It’s Dr. Gladstone,” a woman’s voice said, and she entered without waiting for an invitation. She closed the door behind her, looked around, and said, “I can’t work with romantic mood lighting. Turn up that lamp, will you?”
Kay adjusted the wick, the room grew brighter, and I got my first look at Iris Gladstone. She was about thirty, clad in a distinctive white coat and toting the little black satchel of her profession. Everything about her spoke of strength and elegance, from her short black hair to eyes so big and blue it was like looking into the sea itself. She seemed somehow too glamorous for such a down-and-dirty job as physician. Or maybe because she was such a knockout, I couldn’t imagine her tending bloody injuries.
“That’s better,” she said as the lamp stopped flickering. “So I was told there’d been an accident in the kitchen,” she said in a deep, take-charge voice. “Somebody slice open a finger?”
“Ah… no,” Kay said, and stepped aside to reveal the girl.
The doctor’s face darkened when she saw the injuries. Her hands quickly danced around the bruised eye and cut lip, brushing back the hair to check for other marks. She murmured soothingly to Mary, then turned and glared at us with the kind of fury only the morally righteous can have. “And which one of you chivalrous sons of bitches did this?” She glanced at my manacles. “You?”
“You’ll probably get a visit later from a knight with a broken nose,” I said. “His fist matches up with those bruises.”
She stared at me for a moment as the words got through her fury. Then she noticed how I cradled my hand, and the tiniest smile I’d ever seen moved across her moist, voluptuous lips. “So does your fist match his broken nose?”
I shrugged. “I swatted a fly.”
A flicker of appreciation, but no more than that, touched her face. Then the hard look clamped down again. “Amazing how often you armor-clad assholes manage to hurt the people you’re supposed to defend, especially if they’ve got breasts.” She opened her black bag and brought out a small jar of ointment. “Now, will one of you boys be genuinely useful and light a couple more lamps? I’d like to see what I’m doing.”
I took down a pair from a shelf with my good hand. Kay took them from me, arranged them for best effect, and lit them. Gladstone ignored us, but that was okay. It gave me the chance to watch her slender form as she worked, attending to the wounds with efficient gentleness. She produced vials and powders from her bag and applied them sparsely, but with a feather-light touch. Mary obeyed the doctor’s entreaties, and within moments she’d stopped crying and started to lose the red flush of panic.
“Will she be all right?” I asked softly, not wanting to startle the girl.
The doctor looked up and our eyes met. It was no more than an instant, but it was enough. Sometimes you meet someone and just know, instantly and without a doubt, that you’re destined to cross all the boundaries that separate you. The process defies logic and common sense, but everyone’s experienced it at least once. At that point in my life, it had happened twice before, and both those women were dead. It scared the hell out of me to feel it again for this no-nonsense doctor, and I was actually glad I had a murder to solve to help keep my mind off it.
“Yes,” the doctor said. “Eventually.”
“May I ask her one last question?” I said.
“Not on my watch,” Dr. Gladstone snapped as she applied a bandage over the girl’s split cheek.
“No, it’s okay,” Mary said. “I want to help.” She looked up at me with the tiniest spark of renewed defiance in her battered eyes.
I asked gently, “What happened to the rest of the apples?”
She looked blank and thought for a moment. Finally she said, “I don’t know.”
“All right, that’s enough,” Dr. Gladstone snapped. She put her hands on her hips and gave us both a hard expression that would’ve done credit to a North Sea berserker. “This girl’s coming back to the infirmary. If I even smell a knight in shining armor trying to get near her, I’ll show you what an angry doctor can do to one of you walking meat sacks.” She turned away to stow her gear back in her bag and added, “And you-come see me about that hand in about three hours. It should be nice and painful by then.”
“Miss, I’m truly sorry,” Kay repeated to Mary. “We’ll make sure you get the best care, and those men will pay for what they did to you.”
Mary nodded, but her eyes had gone glassy again and I had no idea if she really heard his words.
We went back into the main hall. Once the door shut behind us I asked Kay, “Do you know her? That doctor, I mean.”
“Sure. Iris Gladstone. She was with us on a couple of campaigns back before Marripat Hill when she was still a girl apprentice. She stitched up a cut on my back once.”
I nodded, resolved to seek out this Iris Gladstone later whether my hand hurt or not. Assuming, of course, I wasn’t locked up awaiting execution. “She’s tough.”
If Kay knew what I meant from my overly appreciative tone, he let it pass with a shrug. “Field doctors have to be. Since peacetime, she’s trained healers to go out into the country, opening their own practices.”
“You don’t use moon priestesses?” That altruistic but secretive sisterhood operated hospitals in most parts of the world.
“There are no moon priestesses on Grand Bruan,” Kay muttered. “They’re against the law.”
I was about to ask why when I spotted Agravaine and his pals huddled conspiratorially near the main door. When they saw us, they looked away, then at the ground, then slunk off into the crowd.
“Those guys really push it,” Kay said. “Now what?”
“Let’s go talk to the queen before Agravaine has a chance to get to her.”
“The queen?” Kay said, and sounded startled. “Why do you think Agravaine would go to the queen about any of this?”
I looked at him in genuine surprise. “You’re kidding, right?”
“Humor me.” The suspicion in his voice added the unspoken, Unless you’re more involved than you’ve said.
“It’s simple. Who else would’ve sent him to intimidate a key witness whose testimony implicates the queen? That girl is the one link between the queen and the apples. Another couple of minutes and they would’ve had her convinced apples didn’t even exist. And even if the queen didn’t personally send them, they were surely doing it on her behalf.”
Kay nodded. “Pretty simple when you explain it that way.”
“My question is why? If all the other Knights of the Double Tarn are against the queen, why are those three on her side?”
Before Kay could answer, a new voice yelled, “You!”
DeGrandis, his cheeks reddened with wine beneath his face powder, waddled toward us. “That’s close enough,” Kay warned when he was about ten feet away.
He pointed one frilly yellow sleeve at me. “Why is that man running around loose? He’s a murderer! We’ve heard all about him and his crimes, from a very reliable source!”
“This gentleman,” Kay said in the voice he must’ve used on the battlefield, “is not running around loose, as you can see.” He rattled the chain between my manacles. “And he’s under my sword at the moment.”
“Well, I assure you we will not allow him to leave Nodlon Castle,” DeGrandis snapped. His chins wobbled with outrage. Behind him, his fellow nobles muttered encouragement from a safe distance.
Kay wasn’t impressed. “You’ll do as you’re told for the moment. Now please rejoin your friends and await an official announcement. Sir.”
DeGrandis gave me a look as if I’d snatched the last piece of pie from the table, then returned to his group. Among them, Lord Astamore resumed weaving the mendacious tapestry of my criminal exploits.
“Thanks,” I said to Kay. “He might’ve rolled right over me if he got too excited.”
Kay nodded. “Yeah.” Then he frowned and, in the same difficult pleading tone he’d used when he asked me
