Page 18 of Remmen

I nearly argued and then actually looked at Otho. There was a bull on his table with a fever cooking behind his eyes and three more out on the bench holding various pieces of themselves, and Otho had the gray, scraped-out look I’d clocked on him my first hour on this planet.

I’d worn that look. I knew exactly what it did to a person, being the only pair of hands in the building.

I didn’t argue. He needed help, not criticism.

“You’ve got a fever in here, a broken something out there, and a man who checked himself out with a hole in his gut,” I said. “You’re one person. Let me run the dressings. I’ve done field aftercare for years. I can help Mestyn; I’ll look at anybody else out there too stubborn to come to town, and I’ll flag anything that looks iffy. That should let you hold down the fort out here. I’m not asking to counsel anybody, Otho. I’m asking to be your hands.”

“The dressings,” he allowed. “Nothing else. You touch a wound. Not a head.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it.”

He grunted, which I’d figured out was Otho for fine, and started loading a kit into my arms. Clean wraps. A jar of the herb stuff that made his whole place smell like a crushed garden. A suture set in case somebody’d popped one. It was the most anyone in this town had trusted me with since I got off the ship, and I worked very hard not to look as pathetically thrilled as I felt.

Maisie loaned me her buggy to get out there. She’d waved off my thanks in the tavern like it was nothing, and it turned out to be a little hover thing her husband built her so she wouldn’t have to stretch herself across a minotaur truck every time she left the house.

It fit me. Actually fit me, seat and controls and all. On this whole oversized planet that was novel enough that I nearly teared up over it, which would’ve been unhinged, so I didn’t.

I didn’t tell Remmen I was going.

I chewed on that for the first mile and decided it was fine. He was the mayor. He had a town. I was a grown woman with a med kit and a buggy and I didn’t need a giant’s signature to do my job.

And if I told him, he’d want to come — or, worse, he’d tell me not to in that low, careful voice, and then I’d have to decide whether I was going to listen. Way simpler to just drive.

The fact that it also bought me an afternoon where nobody was reading my face for what it did around him was a bonus. I decided not to poke at it.

The ranch looked worse by daylight, without an emergency to give me something to do. The roofs sat low, built to take the wind. A yard beaten flat by hooves. And men. Six, seven of them, peeling out of doorways the second I came over the rise, folding themselves into a loose line between me and the buildings. Arms crossed. Faces shut.

I turned the buggy off, climbed out, and got the kit up on my hip.

“Morning,” I said. “I’m here to change Mestyn’s dressing. Somebody want to point me at the patient, or should I knock on every door till I find him?”

Nobody answered. Nobody stopped me either, and after a second a big one at the end tipped his head at a door. Close enough to a welcome.

Mestyn was propped in a cot two sizes too small for him. Better color than last time, though that was a low bar, seeing as last time he’d been bleeding out on me in the grass.

He watched me come in, a flat, mean, waiting stare. I knew that stare. It was the stare of a man working out how fast he could get rid of me.

“They sent me a bride,” he said.

“Not a bride. They sent the one who knows how to keep your insides inside.” I set the kit down and hooked a stool over with my foot. “Lie flat. Let’s see what you tore loose getting your fool self out here.”

He didn’t lie flat. He watched me peel the old dressing back instead. Underneath was ugly and angry at the edges but closed. It was holding, with no red streaks yet, and I let out a breath I’d been holding since the door.

Then he started in on me.

It was filth, and good filth, aimed to make a nice Agency lady go pink and pack up and drive home clutching her pearls. Very detailed. Very much about what he figured I got up to with the men in town, and which parts. A younger me might’ve gone scarlet.

But the safety briefings on Perren had swearing in them. I have never once lost a filth contest to a man I was actively bandaging.

“That’s anatomically ambitious,” I said, pressing the fresh dressing down without looking up. “You’d tear a stitch. Which — hold still, you enormous baby.” I smoothed the tape flat.

Behind me, Rauf made a noise like a laugh he’d tried to strangle in the crib.

Mestyn’s head came around. For a second I thought I’d lost him. Then his mouth pulled sideways, and he sank back an inch, and the meanness in the room dropped a notch.

“Rauf said you crossed a whole tavern to say hi to him,” he said, like it was a charge. “In front of everybody.”

“I did.”