The bandage came away in strips, stuck fast with old blood, and Tam Murray peeled each one back like a man removing a plaster he already knew would hurt.
“Three days,” he said, not looking up.
“Fell on the fence-post Tuesday last.
I thought it’d close on its own.”
Walter had been at the grinding-stone when the shop bell rang, and Una had taken one look at the boy slumped against his father’s side and jerked her chin toward the counter yours before disappearing into the back with a haste that told him more than her face had.
Now he crouched in front of an eight-year-old who smelled of fever-sweat and old wool, and the last strip of linen came away, and the wound underneath told its own story before Walter had said a word.
Red, past the ordinary red of a healing cut.
Hot enough to feel without touching.
Streaked dark along the shin in lines that ran up toward the knee like something reaching.
Eachann didn’t cry.
He’d gone past that somewhere in the last day, into the flat, glassy stillness of a child too tired to perform pain for an audience, and that stillness scared Walter more than tears would have.
“May I look proper,” Walter said, to the boy, not the father, because a person got a say in what happened to their own body whatever age they were.
Eachann gave the smallest nod.
The moment Walter’s attention settled on the leg really settled, the way he’d once settled on a monitor before a call turned bad the world doubled.
It came without warning, a strange stereo vision laid over the ordinary one: the wound as wound, red and swollen and streaked, and underneath it, or beside it, or somehow through it, a second understanding arriving whole and certain infection, bacterial, spreading along the tissue plane, the dark lines marking its advance toward the groin.
A taste rose at the back of his throat, faint and metallic, like a coin held too long under the tongue.
And laid over that, close enough to touch, the answer in the other register: yarrow bruised fresh with honey, packed direct against the wound; willow-bark steeped strong for the fever that was already climbing behind the boy’s glassy eyes.
Herb-Sworn, said a voice behind his sternum, brief, almost pleased in a way that surprised him with how much he wanted to hear it again.
Well chosen.
Proceed.
Walter set his jaw and did not let his face show what had just happened inside it.
“Today.
Now, if you can stay an hour.”
“I’ve the room paid one more night,” Tam said, and something in his voice cracked open at the edges relief, maybe, or the exhaustion of a decision carried alone too long and finally, mercifully, set down.
“Whatever it takes, Master Bryce.
I’ve not the coin for much, but whatever it takes.”
“It won’t take coin you don’t have.” Walter was already moving water on to boil, the good wine down from Una’s shelf, the roll of clean linen she kept for exactly this.
“It’ll take an hour, and your hand steady while I work, and a promise you’ll change the dressing the way I show you, twice a day, without missing.”
The boiled water had cooled to bearable by the time Walter worked it into the wound, cloth wrapped twice round two fingers, slow, methodical, watching Eachann’s face for the flinch that told him where to ease off.
The boy made one thin sound, quickly swallowed, and Tam’s hand tightened on his son’s shoulder hard enough that his knuckles went pale.
“Nearly done,” Walter said, which was true enough to count as honest.
“You’re doing well.
Better than most grown men I’ve had on this bench.”
That earned him something not quite a smile, too tired for that, but a flicker of attention in the boy’s eyes that hadn’t been there a minute before.
“Grown men cry?”
“Grown men cry plenty.
Just quieter, usually.
Takes practice.” Walter kept his hands moving, kept his voice level, and felt the fever-taste at the back of his throat sharpen by a degree, a warning he filed away without breaking rhythm.
The salted wine came next, thinner application, enough to fight what the water alone wouldn’t reach, and then the poultice yarrow crushed fine, honey worked through it until it held together, packed direct against the wound and bound over with linen wrapped snug but not tight.
Walter’s hands knew the motion by the third fold, though he’d never done this exact preparation before in his life; something in the doing felt less like learning and more like remembering, which unsettled him in a way he didn’t have time to sit with right now.
“Twice a day,” he told Tam, once the dressing was set.
“Clean hands.
Willow-bark tea, three cups between now and tomorrow night, for the fever.
If the red climbs past where I’ve marked” he touched a line just above the boy’s knee, drawn faint with a wet fingertip “you get him back here.
Doesn’t matter the hour.
Doesn’t matter what it costs to hire a cart.”
“And if it doesn’t climb?”
“Then in three days you’re back anyway, so I can see it’s closing the way it should.” Walter met the man’s eyes and let him see, deliberately, that this wasn’t a suggestion dressed as courtesy.
“I mean that, Tam.
Three days.”
Tam Murray nodded like a man agreeing to a debt he intended to honor to the letter, and something in his shoulders came down half an inch the first real ease Walter had seen in him since he’d walked through the door with his son’s weight half-carried against his side.
Una didn’t ask him anything when he came through to the back room an hour later, which was itself its own kind of question answered.
The fever hit exactly the way it had announced itself would not sudden, not dramatic, just a slow climb up through his chest and into his skull, the room going a half-degree too warm, his shirt sticking at the collar though nothing in the shop had changed.
He sat down on the bench harder than he’d meant to, and his hands, when he looked at them, had picked up a fine tremor he hadn’t given permission for.
Four hours, Margaret had said once, before he’d even fully understood what she meant by it.
Peaks at one.
He did the arithmetic anyway, out of old habit, the way he used to time a patient’s fever curve against the clock on a wall.
Una set a cup down in front of him without a word mint, the leaves still faintly green through the steam and settled onto the stool across the bench with her own cup, watching him with an expression that wasn’t quite concern and wasn’t quite anything else he had a name for either.
“Ye’re shaking,” she said, eventually, matter-of-fact, the same tone she’d have used to note a jar out of place.
“Long day.” It came out steadier than he felt, which was, he supposed, the only kind of victory available to him right now.
“Aye.” She didn’t push it, and didn’t look away either, and the two of them sat there a while in a silence that wasn’t uncomfortable so much as it was two people deciding, separately, not to ask questions they weren’t ready to hear the answers to.
Outside, through the propped door, Walter could hear Tam Murray’s cart wheels finally starting the long road back toward the croft, his son wrapped warm in the back of it, carrying with him a dressing that would hold and a fever that would break and three days’ promise that Walter intended to keep whether the boy’s leg needed it or not.
His own fever climbed another degree, quiet, patient, exactly on schedule, and he drank the mint tea while it did small victories, taken where they came, the only kind that counted for anything out here.