The Name of the Wind

I had one long moment of exhausted pure relief. The autumn air was fresh and sweet despite the woodsmoke, and the stone roof of the church was cool under my feet. Feeling rather smug, I tucked the scale and loden-stone back into my travelsack. I drew a deep breath and looked out over the town I had saved.

Then I heard a grating noise and felt the roof shift beneath me. The front of the building sagged, crumbled, and I staggered as the world fell out from underneath me. I looked for a safe roof to leap to, but there were none close enough. I scrambled backward as the roof disintegrated into a mass of falling rubble.

Desperate, I leapt for the charred branches of the oak tree. I grabbed one, but it snapped under my weight. I tumbled through the branches, struck my head, and fell into darkness.

CHAPTER EIGHTY-TWO Ash and Elm...

I woke in a bed. In a room. In an inn. More than that was not immediately clear to me. It felt exactly like someone had hit me in the head with a church.

I had been cleaned and bandaged. Very thoroughly bandaged. Someone had seen fit to treat all my recent injuries no manner how minor. I had white linen around my head, my chest, my knee, and one of my feet. Someone had even cleaned and wrapped the mild abrasions on my hands and the knife wound from three days ago when Ambrose’s thugs had tried to kill me.

The lump on my head seemed to be the worst of the lot. It throbbed and left me dizzy when I lifted my head. Moving was a lesson in punitive anatomy. I swung my feet off the edge of the bed and grimaced: deep tissue trauma to the medial-poloni in the right leg. I sat up: oblique strain to the cartilage between the lower ribs. I got to my feet: minor spraining of the sub ... trans ... damn, what was that called? I pictured Arwyl’s face, frowning behind his round spectacles.

My clothes had been washed and mended. I put them on, moving slowly to savor all the exciting messages my body was sending me. I was glad there wasn’t a mirror in the room, knowing I must look completely battered. The bandage around my head was rather irritating, but I decided to leave it on. From the way things felt, it might be the only thing keeping my head from falling into several different pieces.

I went to the window. It was overcast, and in the grey light the town looked awful, soot and ash everywhere. The shop across the street had been smashed like a dollhouse under a soldier’s boot. People moved about slowly, sifting through the wreckage. The clouds were thick enough that I couldn’t tell what time it was.

I heard a faint rush of air as the door opened, and I turned to see a young woman standing in the doorway. Young, pretty, unassuming, the sort of girl that always worked at little inns like this: a Nellie. Nell. The sort of girl who spent her life in a perpetual flinch because the innkeeper had a temper and a sharp tongue and wasn’t afraid to show her the back of his hand. She gaped at me, obviously surprised that I was out of bed.

“Was anyone killed?” I asked.

She shook her head. “The Liram boy got his arm broke pretty bad. And some folk got burned and such ...” I felt my whole body relax. “You shouldn’t be up, sir. Doctor said you weren’t likely to wake up at all. You should rest.”

“Is ... has my cousin come back to town?” I asked. “The girl who was out at the Mauthen farm. Is she here too?”

The young woman shook her head. “It’s just you, sir.”

“What time is it?”

“Supper’s not quite ready, sir. But I can bring you something if you like.”

My travelsack had been left by the side of the bed. I lifted it up onto my shoulder, it felt odd with nothing inside except the scale and loden-stone. I looked around for my boots until I remembered I’d kicked them off to get better traction running around the rooftops last night.

I left the room with the girl trailing behind me and headed down to the common room. It was the same fellow behind the bar as before, still wearing his scowl.

I walked up to him. “My cousin,” I said. “Is she in town?”

The barman turned the scowl toward the doorway behind me as the young girl emerged. “Nell, what in God’s hell are you doing letting him up? I swear you haven’t got the sense God gave a dog.”

So her name really was Nell. I would have found that amusing under different circumstances.

He turned to me and gave a smile that was really just a different sort of scowl. “Lord boy, does your face hurt? It’s killing me.” He chortled at his own joke.

I glared at him. “I asked about my cousin.”

He shook his head. “She hasn’t come back. Good riddance to bad luck, I say.”

“Bring me bread, fruit, and whatever meat you have ready in the back,” I said. “And a bottle of Avennish fruit wine. Strawberry if you have it.”