“Revenant,” Kit pointed out, though neither Gabe nor the wizard paid heed.
“So what?” Moog spluttered. “We just hand her over? They’ll eat her, Gabriel.”
“NO EAT!” Teresa interjected. “NO EAT WING WOMAN.” Some of the fight went out of Moog then, and Gabe actually looked relieved, until the elder smiled excitedly. “USE FOR MAKE BABIES.”
Moog threw up his hands, exasperated. “Babies! They’re going to breed with her, Gabriel. Are you still okay with this?”
“She’s dangerous,” Gabe murmured, but without his earlier conviction.
Moog jabbed a finger on Gabriel’s plate armour. “You’re dangerous. Heathen’s bloody balls, I’m dangerous. Ganelon’s a natural fucking disaster! Excuse my language,” he said to the chieftain, though if she understood him she gave no indication. “So Sabbatha has a sordid past! Don’t we all? We’ve all done plenty of things we’re not proud of.”
Clay thought of Ganelon trapped in the Quarry, a prisoner in his own flesh. “We can’t give them Larkspur,” he said. “Or Sabbatha, whichever she is. We just … can’t.”
Gabriel sighed in resignation. “Okay, fine. So Kit stays?”
“I feel like that should be off the table by now,” Kit said. “Also, I am lamentably ill equipped for making babies.”
“No one stays,” Clay uttered.
Gabriel set his jaw. “We fight, then.” He glanced around, trying to number the guards within the smoke-shrouded interior of the tent.
There were six, Clay knew, since he’d already counted, though one was an old man and was holding his spear upside down.
“You and I can handle these,” he told Gabriel. “Moog, you get outside and warn the others. Light some fires, maybe open a few of those cages we saw. Gabe and I will be right behind you. Got it?”
Moog closed his eyes. “No.”
“Good. Now when … wait, no?”
“There’s another way,” said the wizard. “A better way. We don’t need to kill anyone, or leave one of us behind.”
Clay glanced over Gabriel’s shoulder. The chieftain was watching them with the appraising regard of something waiting for you to die so it could peck at your corpse.
“Moog, if it involves faking our deaths I don’t think it’s gonna work this time.”
“No, I know,” said Moog. He reached up and pulled the pointed hat off his head. “But this will.”
Chapter Thirty-six
Rambling On
Moog was right: They settled it without blood, though the wizard looked close to tears when negotiations ended and he handed the enchanted hat to Teresa, who in turn offered it to the chieftain, who reached her hand inside and drew out a slab of raw red beef.
“She’s not even using it right,” he complained.
The massive woman wolfed it down almost without chewing, and afterward loosed a tremendous belch, which Teresa took the liberty of translating.
“CHIEFTAIN IS PLEASED,” he announced.
“She ought to be,” Moog grumbled. “This …walrus gets free steak for life, and we get stuck with a … stuck with a …” He trailed off, absently smoothing his beard against the front of his robe.
Clay placed a consoling hand on his shoulder. “Moog, you did—”
“Her fingers,” he hissed.
“I saw them.”
“No, you didn’t. You didn’t, Clay. You didn’t see them.” The wizard’s voice skirled higher with every word. He took hold of Clay’s arm, his fingers trembling like a child hauled from the waters of a winter lake. “Clay, they’re healed.”
Clay shook his head. What the wizard said didn’t make sense. The rot didn’t heal. The rot spread. The rot withered your flesh and made husks of your organs. The rot killed you. Always.
Moog was starting to bounce on the soles of his feet. A smile that threatened to tear his face in half spread from one ear to another. “They’re healed! Clay, look! She’s licking them!”
And so she was. Scant minutes ago those fingers had been useless, diseased beyond hope of reclamation.
Except apparently not.
Moog slipped around Clay and leapt toward the chieftain’s bedside. The guards made to intercept him, but Teresa settled them with a wave. Shooing the servant girl away, the wizard knelt beside the gargantuan woman and flexed his hands like a thief preparing to tackle an especially complex lock. “May I?” he asked.
The woman rolled her big shoulders and offered her right arm to Moog, while the other plunged back into the magic hat and withdrew an uncooked chicken leg.
The wizard marvelled over the pudgy pink fingers. “I can’t believe it,” he breathed. “They’re still a bit stiff, actually, but otherwise … I just can’t even believe it.”
Teresa cleared his throat and pointed toward the chieftain’s feet. “SAME HERE. STONE SKIN. IS BETTER NOW.”
Sure enough, the woman’s right foot was sheathed in a black crust that flaked off as she wriggled her toes. Moog laughed and clapped his hands. “Brilliant! Beautiful!” He looked to his friends. “It’s the mudweed. It must be. I mean, it fixed Matrick’s arm almost overnight. It set the bones in Sabbatha’s wing. Your nose, Clay—it was broken, right? Does it even hurt?”
Clay blinked. “Actually, no.” He hadn’t thought of it since waking up this morning. He touched it now, cautiously, and found there was no pain at all. It was still crooked, but since he’d had as many broken noses as he’d had birthdays, crooked was the best he could hope for. “But you—” he broke off, because what if it hadn’t been the mudweed that cured the rot? Moog might very well have built up his hopes only to see them dashed to pieces again.
“Yes, I smoked it, too,” said the wizard, and his eyes drifted to the tip of his left foot. “With everything that’s happened, I suppose I haven’t … I mean, I can’t feel it, but …” He went very still, and Clay could see his dear old friend steeling himself against the possibility of disappointment. With the trepidation of a frightened child kneeling to peek under its bed, Moog reached down and used both hands to remove his soft leather boot, and then slowly, cautiously, pulled off the sock he was wearing underneath.
His face crumpled, and just as quickly reformed—like a mask shattering in reverse. He tried opening his mouth to speak, but couldn’t seem to.
And so Clay spoke for him. “It’s gone.”
“It’s gone,” Moog gasped, as though he’d been holding his breath. He closed his eyes and exhaled a long, shuddering sigh.
The wizard sat for a while with his boot in his lap. His expression, bathed in the orange glow of smouldering embers, was torn between relief, disbelief, and utter misery. “All those years,” he moaned eventually. “So much wasted effort. So many dead ends. But I knew. I knew there had to be a way, and now there is. A cure for the rot,” he said with a mystified chuckle. “No more waiting for death. No more watching it happen. Now we can save them.”
He laughed again, but there was a bitter edge to the sound. He grinned, but the grin was a broken thing, and breaking still, until Moog was only baring his teeth below eyes that brimmed over with tears. “I could have saved him,” he whimpered, then brought his slender hands to his face and began sobbing.
Clay had no doubt who he was. Although Fredrick had been gone for nineteen years, his death was a wound the wizard had cauterized but never, ever allowed to heal.
They stood in silence as the wizard wept, unburdening himself of years and years of unexpressed grief. Only the chieftain seemed indifferent, noisily sucking meat from her chicken leg.
And so it goes, thought Clay. Life was funny, and fickle, and often cruel. Sometimes the unworthy went on living, while those who deserved better were lost.
Or not lost, he considered, since they lingered on in the hearts of those who loved them, who love them still, their memory nurtured like a sprig of green in an otherwise desolate soul. Which was, he supposed, a kind of immortality, after all.