Before she was done speaking, Strigan was striding across the snow. I followed.
On closer inspection I saw the driver was only a child, barely fourteen. In the passenger seat lay sprawled an adult, unconscious, clothes torn nearly to shreds, in places all the way through every layer. Blood soaked the cloth, and the seat. Her right leg was missing below the knee, and her left foot.
Among the three of us we got the injured person into the house, into the infirmary. “What happened?” Strigan asked as she removed bloody fragments of coat.
“Ice devil,” said the girl. “We didn’t see it!” Tears welled in her eyes, but didn’t fall. She swallowed hard.
Strigan appraised the makeshift tourniquets the girl had obviously applied. “You did everything you could,” she told the girl. She nodded toward the door to the main room. “I’ll take it from here.”
We left the infirmary, the girl apparently not even aware of my presence, or Seivarden’s, where she still lay on her pallet. She stood for a few seconds in the middle of the room, uncertain, seeming paralyzed, and then she sank down on a bench.
I brought her a cup of fermented milk and she started, as though I had suddenly appeared from nowhere. “Are you injured?” I asked her. No misgendering this time—I had already heard Strigan use the feminine pronoun.
“I…” She stopped, looking at the cup of milk as though it might bite her. “No, not… a little.” She seemed on the verge of collapse. She might well be. By Radchaai standards she was still a child, but she had seen this adult injured—was she a parent, a cousin, a neighbor?—and had the presence of mind to render some small bits of first aid, get her into a crawler, and come here. Small wonder if she was about to fall to pieces now.
“What happened to the ice devil?” I asked.
“I don’t know.” She looked up at me, from the milk, still not taking it. “I kicked it. I stabbed it with my knife. It went away. I don’t know.”
It took a few minutes for me to get the information out of her, that she’d left messages for the others at her family’s camp but that no one had been near enough to help, or was near enough to be here terribly soon. While we were talking she seemed to collect herself, at least slightly, at least enough to take the milk I offered and drink it.
Within a few minutes she was sweating, and she removed both her coats and laid them on the bench beside her, and then sat, quiet and awkward. I knew of nothing that might relieve her distress. “Do you know any songs?” I asked her.
She blinked, startled. “I’m not a singer,” she said.
It might have been a language issue. I hadn’t paid much attention to customs in this part of this world, but I was fairly sure there was no division between songs anyone might sing and songs that were, usually for religious reasons, only sung by specialists—not in the cities near the equator. Maybe it was different this far south. “Excuse me,” I said, “I must have used the wrong word. What do you call it when you’re working or playing, or trying to get a baby to sleep? Or just…”
“Oh!” Comprehension animated her, for just a moment. “You mean songs!”
I smiled encouragingly, but she lapsed into silence again. “Try not to worry too much,” I said. “The doctor is very good at what she does. And sometimes you just have to leave things to the gods.”
She curled her lower lip inward and bit it. “I don’t believe in any god,” she said, with a slight vehemence.
“Still. Things will happen as they happen.” She gestured agreement, perfunctory. “Do you play counters?” I asked. Maybe she could show me the game Strigan’s board was meant for, though I doubted it was from Nilt.
“No.” And with that, I had exhausted what small means I might have had to amuse or distract her.
After ten minutes of silence she said, “I have a Tiktik set.”
“What’s Tiktik?”
Her eyes widened, round in her round, pale face. “How can you not know what Tiktik is? You must be from very far away!” I acknowledged that I was, and she answered, “It’s a game. It’s mostly a game for children.” Her tone implied she wasn’t a child, but I’d best not ask why she was carrying a child’s game set. “You’ve really never played Tiktik?”
“Never. Where I come from we mostly play counters, and cards, and dice. But even those are different, in different places.”
She pondered that a moment. “I can teach you,” she said finally. “It’s easy.”
Two hours later, as I was tossing my handful of tiny bov-bone dice, the visitor alarm sounded. The girl looked up, startled. “Someone’s here,” I said. The door to the infirmary stayed shut, Strigan paying no attention.
“Mama,” the girl suggested, hope and relief lending the tiniest tremble to her voice.