Page 4 of Son of a Witch (The Wicked Years 2)

Her mind went briefly to those days in the Pertha Hills of Gillikin, days sharper and more wonderful in memory than what she could apprehend of current life. The taste of pearlfruit leaves! The water on her father’s wagon roof when the rains came. The rains came so much more often in her youth. The snow smelled of things. Everything smelled. Wonderfully or not, it was wonderful that they smelled. Now her nose hardly worked at all.

She said a prayer or two.

Liir. That was his name. Liir.

She prayed to remember it when the time came for her to wake up.

4

THE NEXT MORNING, before Oatsie Manglehand gathered her band together for the final push to the Emerald City, she took Nubb to a small plain parlor. There they met with the Superior Maunt, Sister Doctor, and Sister Apothecaire.

When the Superior Maunt sat down, the others sat. Since she abstained from morning tea, the others abstained.

“If we are to help this boy, we must share what we know,” began the Superior Maunt. “I’ve picked up all sorts of hearsay. A report from Sister Doctor, if you please.”

Sister Doctor, a beefy woman with questionable credentials but proven expertise in diagnosis, wasn’t sanguine about the prospects for the invalid. “He appears to have suffered little from exposure, so he will have been left for dead only shortly before you found him.”

Oatsie didn’t speak to this. She didn’t want to begin by contradicting a professional woman, even if she thought Sister Doctor had to be wrong.

Sister Doctor pressed on. “He is a shattered man, quite literally. It isn’t mine to guess how he came to be so wounded, but his state is like nothing I’ve ever seen. One of his legs is broken in multiple places; both his wrists are sprained. One of his shoulder blades is cracked. Many of his ribs. Four of his fingers. Three of the bones in his left foot. Not a single bone punctured the skin, however. And, apparently, no blood loss.”

Not unless the blood ran off in the rain squall, thought Oatsie, but kept still.

Sister Doctor rubbed the back of her neck and grimaced. “I spent so much time setting bones that I could do only a cursory exam of his organs. He is breathing shallowly and with difficulty. The phlegm that runs from his nose is both yellow and bloody. This suggests respiratory troubles. Sister Apothecaire has her own notions about this—”

“To start with the question of the discharge,” began Sister Apothecaire, somewhat overenthusiastically, but Sister Doctor spoke over her.

“Sister Apothecaire can speak presently. I utter no opinion about her…conjectures.”

“The heart?” asked the Superior Maunt, overriding the old tired conflict.

“Working.” Sister Doctor grunted as if in disbelief at her own answer.

“The guts?”

“The word might be wobbly. I suspect an imploded spleen or the like, and septic poisoning. There’s a funny color in the extremities and on certain contusions that I don’t care for at all.”

“What color is that?” asked the Superior Maunt.

Sister Doctor pursed her lips. “Well, I’m a bit overtired. We worked all night, you know, without resting. But I should have said there’s a green tinge to the bruises, ringed with a plum-yellowy margin.”

“Suggestive of internal bleeding, you think…or a disease? Or maybe something else?”

“He may be comatose or he may be brain-dead. I have no way of knowing. Though his heart is good, his color, as I say, is not, so circulation may be failing. The lungs have been compromised severely—whether by a preexisting condition or by some aspect of his adventures I cannot venture an opinion at this time.”

“To conclude—” The Superior Maunt rolled her hand in the air.

“Death by nightfall, maybe tomorrow morning,” said Sister Doctor.

“We could pray for a miracle,” said Nubb. Oatsie snorted.

“Sister Apothecaire will handle treatment,” said Sister Doctor, making it sound as if she thought prayer would be a wiser course.

“You could pray for a miracle,” said Sister Apothecaire to Nubb. “I have other work to do.”

“Sister Apothecaire,” said the Superior Maunt. “You have something to add?”

Sister Apothecaire pushed her spectacles down her nose, then removed them, huffed upon them, and wiped them clean on the hem of her apron. She was a Munchkin and exhibited the Munchkin farmwife’s passion for hygiene—not a bad attribute for a person in her profession. “It’s all puzzling,” she agreed. “We have made him as comfortable as we could, and as the mercy of our mission requires. With tape we have bound his limbs to splints and shims. Should he live, he may regain some degree of motor function.”

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