Ch 17: TERMS AND CONDITIONS

“Would you at least tell me if my guts are hanging out?”

“They’re not.”

“You didn’t even look!”

“I’d be able to smell it,” Marten said shortly. “And, respectfully, now that your armor is off, you reek, but not of offal.”

“Give me a minute to pull myself together, and I’m going to get up and slice you open from left to right so you can see how it feels.”

Marten ignored the threat. Fionnobhar wasn’t getting up without assistance. “That leads me to my first question,” he said. “Why have you continually stepped in to save me, when you clearly have so little regard for human life?”

“That’s why you’re letting me bleed to death? Because you want to know if you're special, somehow?” The knight scoffed. It sounded wet. “I saved you because you were there, okay? And I was bored—I’d been travelling alone for a while, by that point—and I thought some company would be nice. That’s it.”

“I don’t figure into your quest whatsoever,” Marten clarified. “This—” He gestured to himself, the clearing, the campfire— “is a result of mere happenstance.”

“Yeah. I just wanted somebody to talk to. And, like I said, maybe somebody to write up my exploits to make me into a proper hero. Obviously, I chose the wrong man for the job.”

“To be fair, I did tell you as much,” Marten said.

Fionnobhar spat a mouthful of blood at his feet in response.

“Tell me about your quest.”

“I already did,” Fionnobhar said mulishly.

“In light of the witch’s warning, I’d like to know more. Between her posthumous curse and our encounter with the boar tonight, I’m inclined to believe there’s more to her than a mad old woman speaking nonsense and riddles. She warned you of the end of the world. I want to know what darkness she saw in your lady to make her so afraid.”

“She didn’t see anything. My lady lives in a temple to the north. Their paths have never crossed; they don’t know each other.”

“Why does she want the heads of a thousand magical beasts?”

“Because that’s what Endenreste told her would prove my worth!” Fionnobhar’s hands spasmed around his cloak as a shiver wracked him. Another cup of blood pulsed from his wounds, running over the leather like a river.

“If Endenreste actually spoke to her, your lady would be the only mortal soul to communicate with the gods since the Second Age,” Marten pointed out.

“Are you calling her a liar?”

Marten had never met the knight’s lady love, and he hoped he never would. He didn’t know whether she was a liar, but Fionnobhar had decapitated the last person to insult her. Marten intended to give the whole subject a wide berth.

“No,” he said carefully. “But perhaps something has been lying to her.”

“You mean, whatever she’s worshipping isn’t actually the goddess of death?”

“I don’t know.”

“No,” Fionnobhar said, after a minute. “No, she’s too smart for that. Endenreste is talking to her because she’s fucking special, and that’s it.”

“Alright.” At the very least, Marten believed that Fionnobhar believed what he was saying. Whatever had compelled the witch to her dread prophecy, Fionnobhar couldn’t tell him.

“You know, if you let me die here, there’s a good chance the curse won’t break, and you’ll be stuck hauling my corpse around,” Fionnobhar said.

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“The thought had occurred to me,” Marten agreed. He’d been running through different possible outcomes all night, and felt none the wiser for it. “Or it could result in my death, as well. I haven’t decided if that’s preferable to our current situation.”

“That’s fucking cold, doc.”

“Yes. But, let’s assume we both live, and I’m forced to travel with you as a result of this curse until we can break it.”

Marten shifted forward onto his knees to take over the compress, checking on the state of Fionnobhar’s injuries. The blood was slowing, but Fionnobhar needed that tunic removed and his wounds cleaned in short order. Marten’s window to pry answers from the knight was quickly closing.

“I want rules in place for our journey together. I won’t stop you from collecting your heads, but you won’t be adding any more people to your collection. No witches, no curse-victims, nothing. People are off-limits.”

“What if,” Fionnobhar said, spitting out more blood, “I want to argue that if they have magic, they’re not really people?”

“Then I let you finish dying here, and we find out what the witch’s curse does next.”

Fionnobhar shuddered. The pain had to be immense; it was a miracle he was still coherent. “Fine,” he conceded, far faster than he ever would have done if he were whole and healthy. “Fine, no people. What else?”

“No murders, whether they have magic or not.”

“Fine,” Fionnobhar said, even faster this time. “We can argue about the definition of murder after you’ve patched me up.” He audibly ground his teeth. “Listen, doc, I’ll agree to literally anything right now if it means you’ll fix me, okay? Just take this as a blanket statement that I’ll meet all your terms, and we can hash out the details after you’ve put my insides back where they fucking belong. I swear it.”

Marten nodded, his stomach swooping in relief that Fionnobhar was choosing to make it easy for them both, and ran to retrieve his surgical tools and get to work.

The first thing he did was measure out a dose of poppy milk, just enough to take the edge off the pain and keep the knight compliant without putting him to sleep. As Fionnobhar swallowed it, Marten set about the rest of his armor, unbuckling and removing as much as he could without moving the knight or jostling his wounds.

“I need to take that tunic off.”

“I think it’s the only thing holding me together,” Fionnobhar said. The poppy milk left him sounding dazed, and limp as a ragdoll inside the stiffness of his armor.

Marten was surprised how easily Fionnobhar allowed him to strip the metal away, considering how Marten hadn’t seen so much as a flash of skin from him before. He somehow doubted it was the drug’s doing; the dose wasn’t high enough for such a lowering of inhibitions.

“Why do you never remove your helm?” he asked, as he got the last pieces of armor off Fionnobhar’s torso, setting them aside.

“Can’t see my face,” Fionnobhar mumbled.

Mentally, Marten ran through a list of disfigurements that might prompt a knight to hide his features. “Whatever you look like, I assure you, I’ve seen it all before, and likely worse.”

Using a pair of scissors from his kit designed for that exact purpose, Marten deftly slit the seams of Fionnobhar’s tunic on either side, neatly peeling the leather away from his body in two stiff slabs. Underneath, Fionnobhar wore a simple cotton shift. It was completely red with blood.

“Not ugly,” Fionnobhar said. The muscles in his stomach jumped when Marten touched him, mapping out the edges of his wounds. “Made a promise. She told me to hide my face as long as I went questing, so I am.” He lifted one hand to clumsily tap the chin of his helmet.

“Don’t move,” Marten chided, fetching a clean cloth and a bottle of ethanol from his satchel. “Why did she tell you to hide your face?”

“No distractions,” Fionnobhar said, leaving Marten to puzzle over what exactly that meant in context. “Didn’t think about how lonely it would get,” Fionnobhar admitted, “going months and months without anybody being able to see me.” Fionnobhar’s words were losing their shape, slurring together as the drug pulled him deeper. “And I like company. That’s why I was glad when you said you’d come with me, after you didn’t die. Nice having somebody to talk to.”

Marten hummed in response as he turned his focus from the conversation to the surgery at hand. Fionnobhar had two deep gashes across his torso on a diagonal where two of the boar’s tusks had caught him, tearing through the metal like paper and using his own armor as an additional weapon against him. Marten wasn’t nearly well-enough equipped to deal with the severity of such injuries, not on the road on the edge of the woods with nothing but the light of a campfire to work by.

And, now that his hands were covered in Fionnobhar’s blood, the knight was his patient, and he couldn’t sit back and allow his patient to die.

“You’re getting field dressings to hold you through the night,” Marten told him, “and then at first light, we need to move you to get help.”

“You can’t fix me right now?” Fionnobhar asked plaintively.

“I can keep you alive, but not much more than that.” Marten didn’t look at the knight, busy cleaning out those gashes as best he could before packing the wounds and firmly wrapping them with clean bandages. “The best I can do for you right now is give you more drugs to dull the pain.”

“Please,” Fionnobhar said emphatically. “Gods, yeah, load me up.”

It wasn’t a solution, but it was all Marten had to offer. As Fionnobhar gulped down the drops through his visor, Marten almost felt bad about withholding aid for those minutes at the beginning, though rationally, they wouldn’t have made a difference. Fionnobhar was alive, the bleeding had slowed, and, as long as the boar didn’t return, Marten could keep him alive at least until dawn.