Preserving the Ingenairii (39 page)

She had been stunned by the moments in the plaza.
 
There was nothing like this, no experience, no memory, no advice that she could call upon as she reacted, and so she had panicked.
 
She had run blindly, and had run right towards the demons.
 
She felt her stomach flip, and suddenly she felt terribly sick as it hit her – she had run towards the demons.
 
Their evil had been around her, and had made her ill.
 
They were terrible to behold.
 
She has seen her own death about to occur, until the warrior jumped in to save her.

“Those demons,” she muttered as she recollected the sight of them, and vomited the fear and pain out.

“I have the same reaction,” a voice said.

She wiped off her mouth with the back of her hand, humiliated that anyone might see an imperial family member do such a thing.

“When I know I’m about to go fight the demons, I get so afraid I throw up,” the warrior was speaking, she saw as she turned and looked at him.
 
His eyes were amazingly gentle, not like a demon in human form at all.
 
And then he passed out.

“You have to save him,” another voice said.
 
Jeswyne screamed again, startled by the voice behind her.
 
She fearfully turned around.

There was a man standing ten feet away.
 
He was small, and swarthy.
 
“Where did you come from?
 
Who are you?” she asked.

“My name is John Mark, and that will mean nothing to you.
 
You have to save our friend here, or he is going to die very soon, and that would be very bad
–
 
bad
for you personally, and bad for the whole world,” the man told her.
 
“Listen to me closely, with your heart.

“There is a small stream over there,” he pointed.
 
“Run over there and gather up ferns along its bank.
 
Look for the ferns that have red spots on their fronds.
 
Pick as many as you can.
 
Then when you come back, look for the tree that has green and white splotches on the bark.
 
Pick as much of that bark as you can.
 
Use two rocks to mash the bark and the ferns together,
then
smear the mix on all the wounds.
 
All of them,” John Mark emphasized.
 
“You are a good girl, with a good soul.
 
Do this and you will reap the rewards,” he added, then disappeared.

Jeswyne gasped loudly.
 
She stood up, compelled by the inexplicable hallucination, and ran in the direction John Mark had directed.
  
The brush was thick, and she stumbled into the stream before she knew she had reached it.
 
Her rich, golden sleeveless robe was covered in slime and filth she saw, as she stood up and shook the water off her arms.
 
A thicket of ferns was hanging over the brook bank, directly in front of her, and she saw the prominent red spots on the leaves.

She yanked the ferns out of the ground, pulling and pulling ‘til she had an armful.
 
She stepped up onto the bank, hitched up her skirt, and started her walk back to the wounded warrior.
 
She squinted, and saw the tree with mottled bark, so she put down her ferns to free her hands for picking the bark loose.
 
Three fingernails broke, and she cried briefly in anger but kept ripping pieces from the tree trunk.
 
With reluctance, she piled the bark pieces inside her clothes to carry them, then refilled her hands with ferns, and found her way back to Alec’s side.

With the botanical medicines piled next to the injured warrior, she ran back to the creek and picked up two stones, then took them back as well.
 
What had been the apparition she had seen, she wondered.
 
Was it one of the dryads she heard about in the southern forests?
 
Had it even been real, or had she just imagined it?

She sat Indian-style, placing the flat stone in her lap, and began to grind bits and pieces of the materials together.
 
Why
should she
even be treating this person, she asked herself.
 
He may have saved her at the end of the ordeal in the plaza, but he had begun the whole catastrophic string of events when he came out throwing knives at her guards in the first place.

What in the world had happened?
 
They had been surrounded by a wall of demons caught in that brilliant light weapon the warrior had, then the blue flash had erased all sight as it made the air itself glow.
 
She’d shut her eyes, and heard a noise, not loud but somehow able to drown out the demons’ screams.
 
Then the ground was soft instead of hard, she heard silence instead of pandemonium, and when she opened her eyes….

She realized her stone was covered in the mashed plants.
 
Setting it gently aside, she knelt next to the warrior.
 
She saw wounds to his ear, his shoulder and his leg – in
both calf
and thigh, plus small cuts up and down his arms.
 
She slathered a small portion of the mash across the mangled ear,
then
studied her next step.
 
She was going to have to disrobe him, she realized with panic.
 
Jeswyne had never seen a nude man before, and she didn’t want to start now.
 
Nonetheless, the dryad had told her to treat him, and she saw that it was necessary to uncover his wounds.
 
The Lady Jeswyne, such was her title, unbuckled Alec’s belt and removed his pants.
 
Blushing, she smeared the medicine on his wounds, noting the many scars that he already carried.

He clearly had been a warrior of note.
 
There was a great deal of blood, which she thought she ought to wash away, so she carried his pants down to the brook and soaked them in the water, then carried the dripping cloth back to Alec, so that she could use it to clean him.

When she returned and knelt down next to him again, his eyes opened, and his hand reached out to grab her wrist.
 
“Let go!
 
Let go!
 
I’m not trying to hurt you,” she struggled to pull away from him.

“Did you take my pants off just to look?” he asked, then released her.

“No! No!” she said indignantly, blushing furiously.
 
“How dare you!
 
The dryad told me to heal your injuries, and I thought I needed to uncover your wounds to treat them.”
 
Her eyes were wandering up into the trees, left, right, briefly at his eyes, and then back upward, as she looked anywhere but at his body.

“What are you treating me with?” he winced as a pain lanced through his head.

“I mixed some ferns with red spots on them and some tree bark that is green and white and brown,” Jeswyne answered.

“Are you a trained healer?” Alec asked.
 
“That’s a good poultice to use for now.”

“No.
 
The dryad told me what to use.
 
He said you would die soon if I didn’t treat you,” she responded quickly.

“Dryad?
 
Who’s Dryad?” Alec didn’t understand.

“It’s a tree spirit.
 
I’ve heard of them before, but never met one, until now,” Jeswyne told Alec.

“My back hurts,” Alec put the dryad identity question aside.
 
“Please remove my shirt, and treat my back.”
 
He fumbled at the buckles on the bandoliers, trying to help her undress him.

“Should I treat your shoulder too?” she asked.

“You can treat any part of me you want to; just know that I’m engaged to be married,” Alec grinned slightly as he closed his eyes.

“You’re a bad man!” Jeswyne said indignantly.
 
“A member of the imperial family isn’t like that!”
 
She pulled one sleeve loose, and Alec rolled onto his side. “Oh, that looks wicked,” she said softly, seeing his back for the first time.
 
He had clearly suffered tremendous harm trying to fight against the demons.
 
She smeared the last of her medicine on it.
 
“Will that make you better?” she asked.

“Yes, I think it will help me heal.
 
I need to rest, and I’m afraid I’m not going to be much help for you the next few days,” Alec answered.
 
“I’m not sure what time it is, but you ought to go gather as much fire wood as you can find, so we’ll have a supply for the night.”

“Someone will come rescue us before then, won’t they?” Jeswyne stood up.

Alec looked at the girl for the first time, trying to sense her character.
 
He noticed the eyes that seemed to glow; they were such a light brown they almost seemed golden.
 
She seemed to squint when she looked in the distance – she was nearsighted.
 
Her face was plain.
 
She was no beauty, but she was the emperor’s niece, he reminded himself.
 
She’d have plenty of suitors when the time came. She seemed to have a steadiness about her, despite all that had happened to her in the past hour or so: dead guards, demons, a change of time, stuck with a bloody, wounded enemy soldier.
 
She was holding up well, not falling into hysterics.
 

If only she had run in some other direction, away from the demons, he never would have put her in the position she was in – stranded in some unknown era.
 
Fortunately she didn’t know how bad it was.
 
“What’s your name?” Alec asked.

“I am the Lady Jeswyne, daughter of Sergey, the Duke of Tintgavel, niece to Emperor Mikhail of Michian,” she answered, sounding haughty as she revealed her name and title.
 
“My name is not ‘stupid girl,’” she instructed him firmly.

“Lady Jeswyne, thank you for taking care of my wounds,” Alec said.
 
“I apologize for speaking inappropriately back in Oyster Bay; those demons scattered my wits and my manners!
 

“My name is Alec.
 
I don’t think anyone is going to find us for a long, long time, and we have to prepare for that.
 
You go gather firewood,” he shuddered as a spasm overtook him.
 
“I’ll be here, and we can talk tonight.”

Jeswyne looked at Alec, evaluating the situation, and decided to do as he suggested.
 
She felt she had already stooped below her dignity as a member of the imperial family, but she also realized how little relevance her title bore in her strange, unsettled circumstances.
 
She scouted around in the nearby brush, and discovered that fallen timber was easy to find close to their location.
 
Over the course of several trips, Jeswyne built up a respectable pile next to Alec.

“Help me sit up, and I’ll tell you if I see anything we can eat,” Alec asked.

Jeswyne dutifully helped Alec upright.
 
“That plant over there,” Alec pointed, “has leaves that are edible.
 
And those stalks, the pink ones over there, can be roasted,” he told her.
 
He closed his eyes and dropped his head to rest, and began to gently snore within seconds.

The girl was torn between a feeling of obligation to gather the food and a concern that she was allowing herself to act in a manner below her station.
 
She nonetheless gathered a respectable pile of the foodstuffs Alec had pointed to,
then
sat down next to him.
 
He had slid back down into a recumbent position, and was lying asleep.
 
She looked at him, thinking about the wounds she had treated.
 
She had put her medication on each wound, without thinking about how it must feel to have all of them cumulatively inflicting pain.
 
And that was on top of the effort he had put into his battle in front of the palace; in all her years of watching tournaments and display matches, she had never seen anyone work so effectively with weapons.

The forest was darker now.
 
She realized that the sun was setting, and the background noise of insects and other creatures was changing.
 
She considered how odd it was that someone so strong would suddenly be completely in her care and vulnerable.
 
With the stroke of one of his knives, she could do to him what three demons and numerous soldiers had not, gaining revenge for what he had done to the empire.
 
But now was not the time to try; she was dependent on him for the time being.