He moved his left foot under the heavy covers, trying to twine his two feet together for comfort as he usually did on cold mornings. His dreams that night had been slightly disturbing, and he wasn’t certain yet if he was aroused, confused, or just needed to relieve himself. A soldier once had told him, when he had been younger and living at the military Keep at Jibiril Bay, that when demons stalked his sleeps, he should imagine them as lovely women, and attempt to woo them. He understood the drive to do such now in his twenties as he had not when he had been merely ten.
He fried again to twine his feet together for comfort and warmth.
On the third attempt, his mind had regained enough cognition for Myrl to realize the futility of this particular set of familiar movements.
His right foot wasn’t there to cross over with its mate anymore.
It was just gone. Forever more, never there.
His leg had been wounded in the attack on the palace, suffering deep cuts that had slashed him down to the bones of his lower leg. Then, after being stitched and wrapped up, when he had insisted upon leading one of the main parties charged with clearing the halls of the monstrous invaders, an infection had set in. Later, his leg had been broken with a deafening, blindingly painful snap and crack. Myrl thought that he and the mad mage had killed one another in those final moments, and had been at least satisfied that he had been able to stop some of the madness infecting the city, and preying upon his people, before his mind let go of consciousness.
And then he awoke in his bed. Less a foot, and half of the lower section of his right leg. A knife had been driven into his abdomen, and his stomach had needed stitching up as though he were a child’s doll that needed mending. In all the confusion and fury, Myrl hadn’t even remembered receiving the stomach wound.
That had been three weeks ago now, as he remembered his place in the world and his purpose. Some awakenings to clarity came slower on some mornings than on others.
Like today.
Myrl used his left hand to pull the covers from his face, and look at the windows. There was a possibility of gauging the time of day, if he was able by the light entering around the edges of the heavy wooden shutters and the curtains that separated his sleeping quarters from the rest of the Kingdom of Rhiada.
He had found, to his great detriment, that if he laid in his bed too long, trying to coax sleep back in, he would get a headache bad enough to make him wish he had just slithered out of bed at the moment his eyes had opened. It had been this way since he was very young. Before his parents had been taken from him, even.
The room itself, he saw, was in a state of almost total darkness, with what little light there was just barely slipping out from under the door that led to his study, and a little more from under the door that led to his sitting room. Otherwise the room was as dark as it could ever get while the fire in his room’s fireplace had the coals thoroughly banked and covered in ashes, awaiting Molly, his room maid, to come by and rouse them back to life as she did every morning just before dawn.
Looking to his windows, he saw not a scintilla of illumination creeping in about the edges.
It was well before dawn then, he knew. Three of his larger windows faced to the East, and seeing the sun, Blessings of Rhoona on us all, rise every morning was one of his favorite times of the day.
He slid the stub of his still tightly wrapped and bandaged right leg to the edge of his bed, and let it peek out from beneath his heavy blankets. The sting in the stitches of his stump let him know that it didn’t enjoy the view at all.
With a moan, he dug in his left heel, and levered his body sideways from the bed, throwing off the covers, and grabbing the corner of his headboard in one hand and the edge of the frame of his bed in the other. With a heave and a twist, Myrl sat upright on the side of his large bed and let his left leg drop, bumping his heel against the side of the bed before it touched the stone floor.
His right leg, what was left of it, he kept extended straight out in front of him. Pointing at the far wall like the rounded nose of an exuberant waterdog after a fallen goose.
With slow and deliberate caution Myrl lowered the stub to point at the floor. He had begun to train himself out of the now pain inducing muscle memory that made him swing both legs out and down, which lately caused his newly shortened leg to bang its still tender nub against the broad, carved black oak boards that made up the side of the bed.
Not painfully banging his injury against things was becoming a hobby. Or, at the very least, and avid interest. Having achieved it once so far today, he was ready to face the day with this success in hand.
A slight cramp was forming in the truncated right calf, so he flexed then straightened both of his knees, and closed his eyes, imagining having two complete legs, and flexing “both” of his ankles and wiggling all ten of his toes.
The cramp in his right limb immediately subsided.
He giggled to himself at the image of his five toes now down in a small stone casket in the family vault flexing and wiggling in the darkness. It was silly, and ridiculous, but letting the thought play out in his mind allowed him to laugh at the absurdity. It kept him from screaming, or crying, so what was a little random giggling from the King compared to that alternative?
Then, it was his intent to grab the crutch, heave himself up, and then hobble to his bathing room.
What happened instead, however, involved Myrl reaching for the crutch, missing it, knocking it over, leaning after the beautifully carved, rapidly falling, walking aid as it slid toward the floor at speed.
His lean took him over the edge, and he twisted in a flailing panic like a fish trying to avoid landing in the boat after it had been hooked. But, like that self same fish, Myrl flopped down ungracefully. Unlike the fish, his own embarrassing landing was to the area next to his bed, pulling one of the top blankets down atop himself in a smothering, slithering mass.
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“...fuck…”
It was mumbled from beneath the blanket, but Myrl felt its inclusion into today’s conversation was a necessary, even an integral, point that had needed to be made.
He did manage to land mostly on his back, with the shortened right leg extended above his body, a thick serpent’s head poking out of the mound of bed coverings.
He waited, trying to judge if his antics had made enough noise to make his nurse descend upon him in all of her mighty wrath.
Not a single hinge creaked as he lay on the floor.
Not slamming his nub to the stone floor as he fell… Another victory.
…huzzah… and later today, I will go RIDING! HA! Ha… haha…
He would have another session of forced healing performed upon his person around sunrise. He had wanted to get in a quick bath before that happened. But now, as he threw off the blanket AGAIN, he realized that the water would not be ready.
His servants had not yet started to fill the bath with heated water.
He knew he could probably manage to heat the water himself using his Talent, but Ashe would be upset with Myrl for endangering himself by pushing his Talent too hard when he had been injured so badly.
The stab wound to his abdomen had been a concern for the doctor treating him. The old man was a Talent himself, and had almost killed himself trying to speed the healing of Myrl’s internal injuries.
It was a field of the Talent and magic that Myrl had been very ignorant about mere weeks ago. And now, Myrl found he was constantly thinking of the loose metaphorical footing most of those Talents who specialized in healing had.
…loose footing… and now I’ve lost a foot myself… ACK! Never say anything like that out loud, mannerless lout… his mind went regularly to what Ashe, and to some extent Myrl himself, would describe as inappropriate thoughts.
The elderly healer from the Leech Hall who had been turning his Talents toward the healing of Myrl had explained to the curious young king that, like all other forms of magic bent to use by one’s Talent, the healing done required energy to achieve.
THe body made and provided the energy to heal itself, but when Talent was used to speed the process, extra energy was required. Myrl’s own body would kill itself trying to prove that amount of energy. So the doctor, Master Niall Phaidic, added his own personal stores of energy to help speed that healing.
But the body ate that energy at a faster rate than either body could naturally produce, and so Myrl had been fed five and six full meals every day, remained absolutely famished, and had lost almost all of his body fat. The elderly Talent Healer had been left exhausted after every healing session, and had also been fed more food than Myrl thought the old man could possibly consume. And Master Phaidic apparently also slept close to sixteen bells every day on top of that. He and Myrl took many of their meals together now, so as to be certain both men were getting the recommended amounts of food to keep them both going during this process.
Myrl thought the old fellow was a good guest at meals, didn’t talk too much, and most of his stories were from the perspective of a very kind, very patient old man. And like Myrl, Niall also loved cakes and pies at the end of every meal.
Sitting up, and then using his reclaimed cane, and the heavy chair that his head had just missed hitting the edge of as he had fallen to pull himself up, Myrl now stood awkwardly, his shortened limb bent at the knee and pointing back behind him. Mylf felt this wasn’t an acceptable pose for a monarch.
But, he had seen only a very few monarchs since his own Coronation.
Actually, in person, were he to be honest, he had met no other monarchs since his own Coronation. And now he was judging himself, his injured self, on a pretense of what was and wasn’t “acceptable” for a very limited group of people, none of which he had met since his own parents’ deaths when he was a child.
…I may as well start judging the fashion sense of the Forest Children, I’ve never met any of them, either… at least, not that I’m aware of… They’re better at magic than most humans… especially the use of Glamours…so, maybe I have… That made him smile a little. But only a little, as then he set off for his bathing chamber at an awkward and uncertain shambling hobble.
Sitting in the dimly lit bathing chamber, there was a large basin of fresh water less than an arm’s length to his right, and near to hand on a rack to his left, soap, a selection of sponges and cloths, several scraping strigils, and some small bottles of scented oils.
This small basin of water would do for now. The large stone tub he might need to enter later in the day after he exhausted himself moving about the court, attempting to be king as though he had two whole legs, and an unscarred stomach.
Myrl thought he might forgo the oils, many of them were too pungent for his sensitive sense of smell. Not having gotten used to their use when he was in exile, he now found many of the courtiers who visited him here at the palace overwhelming.
He rarely mentioned it, but sometimes, he knew, it showed on his face, and either Ashe or Elbana would sweep in to politely guide the offender from being in such close proximity to the King. They often did this in the most politically savvy ways possible, and left the offender feeling like it had been their very own idea to sit just a little further from their King as they petitioned him for whatever reason it had been that they had come to court to ask for Myrl’s intercession on their behalf.
What little Night Clothes he wore, usually just whatever braies he had worn that day, he now stripped off, and tossed to the bin in the corner to be collected and washed. It scandalized his dressing servants that their king wore such “base” cotton or linen short underpants to sleep in, rather than the array of fine night clothes they had specially made for him.
Myrl had thought he would wear such things, too, before he had actually come to live at the palace. But once in the city of Ghlow, he had reverted to the simple process of stripping down to his knickers, and crawling into bed as he had done almost every night while he had been sequestered in Jibiril Keep.
Concentrating on the water in the basin now, Myrl cleared his mind as the short lifetime of rigorous training had taught him to do. And with a building of his Will, he marshaled his Talent, and sighed out the word “Furnia” as he let his Will push his Talent into the water of the basin.
After a slowly concerted count of thirty, the water began to gently steam in the large stone oval vessel in which it sat. Dipping a washcloth in, Myrl began to soap himself up, and then methodically spong himself off, wringing the dirty, sweat laden soapy water into the empty second basin that sat next to the steaming first basin beside him.
The hot water felt so good on his fatigued muscles, he now regretted not waiting on the servants to prepare a full bath.
“You should have waited for your servants. These people depend on you for their lives, and you are being petulantly impatient. Mistress Alia will be very distraught with how you have endangered yourself just to warm some bathing water.” The voice, deeply resonant, and as familiar to Myrl as his own came suddenly from the deep shadows by the dirty clothing bin where his braies now rested.
“FUCK!” Myrl noted, not at all startled, his heart not suddenly racing, and Myrl not suddenly wishing he had attempted a use of the bedpan before he had gone to bath.
“So,” his mentor now inquired. “Is the king ready for the day ahead, or shall I call for his bathing assistants?”
With a resigned sigh, Myrl said, “No. Just hand me the robe. I’m sure Master Phaidic will be here with the dawn, as always, and he can almost kill us both trying to heal me further. Then we can have some breakfast.”
He thought a moment, sourly, as Ashe handed him his blue robe. “Well, several breakfasts. All at once. As fast as I can shove it down my gullet as my body demands it.”
“That’s the spirit, Sire.”