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Yu descended back into the common room.

Every head turned. Dozens of eyes caught him in an instant, held him, and for a heartbeat he thought he might choke under their collective stare. Oh god, they saw right through him. They saw that he was more fake than them. Yu turned away, angled himself toward the kitchen – escape, work, anything – but the way was blocked.

The borman stood planted before the door. He loomed like a wall, arms tense at his side, staring at whatever lay behind the wood with a heavy, simmering impatience. There was no way past him.

Yu halted.

Nothing happened.

The borman did not notice Yu, and Yu did not want to get closer than his five plus one steps. So there they stood; the borman staring at the door, and Yu staring at the borman, and everyone else at the tables staring at Yu. It was awkward.

"Hey …," Yu forced sound out of his beak. He realised too late he had forgotten the borman's name. "Uhm. Borman."

The beastkin turned, his gaze sinking down onto Yu.

"Well, sorry, I mean, let me through," Yu spoke like a beggar who halfway through remembered that he could afford a voice. If anything, he should give commands. He was supposed to be a guard. And this was just a borman, after all — well, that was the reason why he was both disgusted and afraid; too low to respect, too brutal to dismiss.

The borman shifted aside, though hardly enough. Far less than five steps. Yu rushed past and into the hallway, keeping his count – one, two, three, four, oh fuck me five – and all the while he felt the beastkin's restlessness at his back. Six steps took him to the left-hand door. Four more carried him to the sick bay's threshold. Here, he slowed. Stopped. And with deliberate effort, he pressed the door open.

Despite everything, there was a part of him that actually wanted to see what was wrong with the selder. But his eyes were caught by the shaman first, and for several moments, he could not tear them away.

She sat beside the human.

Around the hip and left leg, she had laid loose pieces of woven cloth. They were damp with fatty liquids. More of that thick, glistening salve smeared the human's left foot. The shaman was working it in — With her hands.

She sat at the end of the bed, with her back upright and her petal-scales and cloak spilling around her like an elegant robe. Every line of her posture suggested composure and dignity. And yet her hands … her hands actually touched it. She touched the human's bare foot —

Yu's stomach twisted.

With a display of utmost calm, the shaman caressed the dirty, swollen, frost-burnt flesh, including all of the disgusting stumps at the end, these featherless and scaleless and clawless and so utterly revolting appendages that were the human's toes. It was not a brief touch, god no, she even pressed her fingers into those tiny gaps between them, massaging the yellow ointment deep into the skin. Slowly. Carefully. As though she were not utterly disgusted by it. As though she really cared.

Yu's evulsion spread like heat under his ribs. He looked away, anywhere else — toward Bubs, toward the krynn.

Bubs was between beds, and the krynn on the far side, next to the selder, who lay stretched on his stomach. Several glass vials lined the stone recess above the cot, their contents catching the orblight like stagnant water. One more, a thin, transparent, fragile-looking vile, rested in Bubs' hand. In his other he gripped a strange tool, something that was either two painfully large needles attached to a metal handle or a very minimalist comb. He dipped the two points into a shallow bowl of ashen liquid that was placed on the tray in front of him, then drew it slowly across the selder's back. He did not seem to inject the liquid. The teeth did not pierce, yet the sound was wrong, a faint rasp against skin. Each time before re-dipping, Bubs rinsed the points with the clear fluid from the vial.

Yu did not understand what Bubs was doing, but he felt relief. He was relieved that Bubs finally switched his focus. He edged closer.

The selder's fur was short and straight. It clung tightly to his body. Between the strands, from his shoulder blades down to his hip, ran a pattern. It was neither of natural colouring, nor paint. Not healing like wounds but also not raised like scars. Not quite a tattoo. Something between all those things; a network of deliberate markings coiled just beneath the skin. The shapes were geometric: circles nested within circles, lines with sharp angles cutting across symmetrical curves. The fur had not been cut or torn out, but because it was white, just like the skin beneath, the lines shone clearly through. They were distinguished by different colours. Grays, pale oranges and muted blues marked what looked like separate symbols seeping upward from the inside. They were etched close, with individual lines of one symbol often running into the empty spaces around the other shapes, though never crossing.

A clicking sound made Yu look up. Another made him turn his head.

Deltington entered the room. He stopped just one step in and gave Bubs a short nod.

Yu realised then that he had just been staring. Exactly as before, while Bubs had undressed the human. Yu had then gone off to fetch Deltington, vanished without a word, made more of a mess in the bathroom, and now returned only to continue where he had left off — again standing around and staring around.

Be involved. Be caring, like a guard should be. Be … harmless.

"Uhm, so, is this what makes him sick?" Yu asked. His voice went out flat, not aimed at anyone in particular. "These … markings?"

It was the best he could do to sound open, unjudging — to show that he bore no disdain for the shaman. At the same time, it was a chance to soften Bubs' earlier suspicions. The easiest way to suggest that Yu had of course not listened in on their conversation, or on anyone else's, for that matter, was to say something presumably obvious but wrong. He had to make that a habit. To ensure the guards that Yu was not eavesdropping by default, he then and again had to utter some dumb assumptions that were still more plausible than random as long as you knew nothing.

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So Yu said, "Are these witch runes? I mean, they look like curse marks?"

Bubs looked at him, sharper now than at any other point today.

Yu held the gaze but felt a coil twist inside him. It was a good question, he told himself. The travellers had come with a witch. So of course, the crossbreed of a failed wizard who knew nothing and a dumb novice guard who noticed even less would latch on the most obvious danger, on this only possible explanation.

That said, it was an honest question, too. Because the markings truly looked like runes. Yu's eyes kept slipping back to them. The detailed lines. The complex symbols. To make sense of them, Yu drew from the little bits of knowledge he had taken from Ayenfora; which was a few hours of lessons between two months of getting beaten to shits. This presumed education had barely gotten him through the first letters of the most basic of wizard languages. Still, he had learned that in principle, wizard scripts used letters. They formed words by combining letters, much like Teh. Faramyr was different. It relied solely on runes, which were a sheer endless amount of symbols. Each symbol represented a whole word. Yu had no idea how anyone was supposed to learn something like that by heart, but apparently, witches did just that. What made Faramyr even more complicated was that a single rune could represent more than one word, and when used for witchcraft, their meanings shifted depending on how individual runes were combined, how large they were drawn in comparison, and how they leaned into each other. It also mattered when and where they were put down, and if it was a place with lots or little energies. Also, on what they were drawn, and with what substances. In short, you could not simply read them out, like wizards did with their spells. If it all came down to linguistics, it was right there in the name; wizard magic had spells, because they spelled out their words and scripts. Witches had witchcraft, because in their vexed handywork, anything and everything made a difference.

And now — here they were, abstract shapes carved across the selder's back. Circles splitting into geometric lines, and sharp angles breaking into wild curves. Coloured to separate them, yet fitted so close their lines almost touched. The longer Yu looked at them, the more they reminded him of the few examples he had seen of Faramyr.

Yu had been the one to ask Bubs about their origin, but the mianid's rigid stare seemed to press the question right back into him.

"I heard of this one case, where …" Yu started and stopped, as he remembered how people had reacted last time he had shared a war story. Too late. The words were already out, so he had no choice but to continue. "Well, there was this one time, where the Shaira —"

A weird noise cut him short.

The human jerked, violently, once, then again. From one second to the next, her breath came ragged. Tears and whines escaped her; horribly broken, breathless sounds that slipped out between clenched teeth — too soft to be suppressed screams, too sharp for mere whimpering. Then her jaw began to rattle and her teeth clattered together, rapid, uneven. It was the wrong sound in the wrong place, because it came unnervingly close to bill-clapping, which was the fina way to show amusement. So from what Yu heard, she was laughing full of pain.

"What is happening?" He needed this to stop.

The hallway door flew open. The borman charged in.

Deltington caught him just after threshold, one wing raised like a barrier. There was no fight. The borman halted as soon as he saw his human.

Meanwhile, Bubs had covered the bowl in front of him with a lid, and discarded of the vial and needle comb in his hands. He got off his stool, pushed it from the selder's cod closer to the human's and got back on. By now, she was twisting, striking out with blind strength. He did not have the size or weight to contain her.

On the other side of the bed, the krynn stood frozen, staring, as useless as Yu.

"Deltington," Bubs called out. "Help strap her down."

"Sure," the ulbatan moved at once. The borman lurched forward as well, but Deltington turned on him in the same instant. Pressure built — sudden, suffocating. Without a word, the borman was held at the threshold, watching from the doorway while Deltington stepped in for Bubs. As the human writhed in pain, he stripped her coat away and began securing her with two separate leather straps from underneath the bedframe. He bent low, fastening them across her chest and hip.

Only now did Yu notice that the human was not lying on the bed's mattress, but on a thin sheet spread over a flat frame that was placed atop the mattress. As Yu spotted how this frame was secured to the bed, hinged at the corners, he finally recognised it as a stretcher. Metal handles jutted along its frame, each with more of the leather straps attached. They lay tucked in beneath, prepared between the frame and the mattress underneath. Deltington and Bubs drew them out one by one, looping them over the girl's limbs, cinching each in place. Not so tight as to crush, just enough to hold, to let her writhe and strain without breaking free. It was practiced hands doing practiced work.

"Why is she like this?" Yu asked. "I thought you gave her potions?" The moment the words left his beak, he realised he had betrayed himself. "I mean, she did, right? She must have. Gotten the potions, I mean. I see them all there, at her bedside."

The shaman replied far too composed for the scene before them. "We applied potent medicine to her legs, to draw out the frost. It sits deep, and has done great harm. One can only imagine the discomfort this poor child must endure." Her tone carried no strain and no urgency, as if there was not a crying, dying human right there between them.

"Her body must remain responsive," she went on. "For what is to come, she must not lose all strength. The pain is dulled, be assured. It is her body, not her mind, that reacts. We hope in due time, she will not remember any of this suffering."

"Enough talk," Bubs said. "You two take care of the selder."

Suddenly, everything happened very fast.

Deltington gave quick instructions to the krynn. They did not lift the stretcher from head and foot, but from either side. Deltington kept to the human's right, close to the ruined leg, so he could simultaneously guide the krynn and control the stretcher at the most crucial point. Between them, they raised her smoothly. Meanwhile, Bubs hurry-waddled about the room, plucking things from shelves and recesses with twitchy precision: bottles, small stoppered vials whose contents caught the orblight in strange swirls, a basket with rolls of gauze, a pouch of dried herbs, and finally a slim leather pouch from a cupboard. All of it went onto a small trolley table.

While watching the commotion, Yu added up his own pieces. He counted one and one together, literally, and at the end of that math, realised that when Bubs had said you two, he had meant the shaman and him. One, the shaman, and two, Yu.

"Wait — no! Bubs, what do you mean?"

"Magic's not my division," Bubs said flatly. "Everything beyond the body, that's yours."

With that, he went for the only other exit out of the room, a set of double doors back at the far wall. He pushed one open with his back and pulled the trolley through. From the next room came the muted clatter of glass and metal as he set some of his things down. A moment later he returned, holding the left door open for Deltington and the krynn.

"You two tend to the selder until relieved by me or Deltington," he repeated, eyes flicking between Yu and the shaman.

"I —" Yu started.

"Treat him to your ability," Bubs cut him off. "Shaman, waste no thought on conserving potions. Strengthen him. But do not let him fall deeper into sleep. He may speak about his needs, when he wakes. Do not leave him unattended and tell me at once if his condition worsens."

"I will," affirmed the shaman.

I won't, thought Yu.

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