Page 131 of Elven Crown

Rebecca settled her head back against the pillows and let out a raspy sigh. “You can say that again.”

As soon as she’d said it, the infirmary fell deathly silent.

Worried that something had happened to the healer now, Rebecca cracked open her eyes and found Zida staring at her with a highly discomforting mix of surprise and amusement. “What?”

A crooked, clawed finger wagged in her face. “I knew it. Iknewyou were Old World. Hell, I’ll be thelastperson to look at that pretty face of yours and assume you’re not hiding nearly as many years behind it as you can see on mine. I had a feeling. This whole time, I had a feeling. Even when you elves are sogoodat hiding all those extra little details.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Rebecca said flatly.

“Oh, no?” Zida cocked her head and studied her patient sideways, like a rickety old crow listening for the sound of a fat, juicy worm squirming around beneath the soil. “Tell ya what. I might not be too old to get excited about it, but Iamold enough to understand when I’ve taken a thing too far.”

Was this the woman’s way of apologizing and trying to take it back?

“Listen,” Rebecca said through another grunt, “as fun as this is, there’s still a splinter sticking out of me, so can we—”

“Oh, psh!” Zida waved her off before turning toward the wheeled cart of supplies beside her to rifle through its contents. “All work and no play, blah, blah, blah. It’s not like I expect you to tell me your whole life’s story or anything. Damn. Here, drink this.”

She thrust a vial of watery, black-tinted liquid under Rebecca’s nose and wiggled it back and forth.

“What is it?”

“All of it,” Zida snapped. “And don’t tell me you’re starting to have doubts about my methods too, eh? The shifter’s hard enough to deal with, but I thought you and I already had an understanding.”

Being compared to Maxwell rankled Rebecca’s pride. She took the vial from Zida’s hand.

After two seconds of fumbling at the stopper with weak fingers, she found the vial snatched back out of her grasp until the cork popped out and Zida handed it back. “And I do meanallof it.”

Rebecca knocked back the potion just as she’d been told and might have vomited the foul stuff back up all over the floor if there hadn’t been a shard of wood in her guts making the act of leaning forward so damn painful.

After she choked back the urge to vomit a second time, that urge finally subsided. The pain that had pulsed through her belly like a hot poker digging around beneath the coals faded and dimmed into an uncomfortable annoyance.

A massive sigh of relief escaped her as the agony faded, but that relief didn’t last long.

Because then Zida snatched up her patient’s left arm in both clawed hands, turned it over one way and then the other for a close inspection, and dropped it back onto the mattress with a thump. “All right, spit it out. What aren’t you telling me?”

Rebecca frowned at her. “Nothing.”

Always the best line to fall back on when she had no clue what this crazy old woman was talking about. Even though, in this situation, she knew exactly what Zida was talking about.

The healer glanced pointedly at the lack of homunculus wound on Rebecca’s arm. “Uh-huh. Right. Well, until I know what I’m working with, and I meanallthe juicy details, all I can do is the generic bare minimum here.

“I’ll take out the splinter, patch you up, pump you with fluids, and if that’s all you need? Well, then we can say I’ve done my job. I’m keeping you here for the next twenty-four hours, minimum. No excuses.”

“I really don’t think that’s necessary,” Rebecca rasped.

Zida folded her arms and nodded. “For observation.”

Rebecca wouldn’t be talking her way out of this one.

This was nothing like what she’d hoped today would become, but she didn’t have the energy to fight the old healer or to pretend she had no idea what Zida was talking about.

Rebecca was already on thin ice with the woman. That much she did know.

For however long, Zida had already suspected Rebecca was an old-worlder, and Rebecca had confirmed it with a mindless slip of the tongue, because she was too out of it to recognize whennotto respond to an old-world Xaharí expletive inEnglish.

Pair that with the Bloodshadow crest Zida had to have seen in Rebecca’s possession the last time she’d paid the infirmary an overnight visit, and there was already enough evidence there to support serious suspicion on Zida’s part.

Not that the healer would have recognized an unimaginably old, rare, seldomly seen crest like that belonging to the Bloodshadow Elves, but shehadto have noticed that box in Rebecca’s jacket pocket that night.

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