Chapter Text
Chapter I
Damian
"And look at this! When were you going to say something?"
"I wasn't. It's just a minor wound."
"Damian, you're bleeding."
"That's normal for wounds."
"And you're running a temperature— oh, for the love of the Lady. Where are your glasses?"
Damian frowned down at his forearm and made a half-hearted attempt to tug it out of Jullanar's hold. "I'm not certain. Fitzroy asked to try them on some time ago, and forgot to return them."
Jullanar whirled around to glare at their wayward bard, who had, in the meantime, wandered off after a butterfly and had to be called three times before he came jogging back to their little camp, smiling brightly.
The smile turned into startled and concerned blinking when Jullanar demanded that he return Damian's glasses so he could see his infected wound for himself, and Fitzroy flopped down on the ground and started to pull things out of his bag with an alarmed air. By the time the glasses emerged, he was surrounded by a little crater of odds and ends, which he had to crawl over to offer the glasses to Damian.
"They made everything strange and distorted and very blurry!" he explained to Jullanar. "I didn't mean to – I thought they were decorative, and I was just keeping them for him, I swear, but he never asked to have them back!" Golden eyes anxious and wide, he stared up at Damian, still seated on the log beside Jullanar. "Has he gone blind without them? I certainly didn’t mean for that to happen!"
Dear Lady, she was certainly going to become a Woman of Character in this company. Surely even the staunchest of matrons would agree that any young woman capable of traveling with these two had to be a lady of iron composure and the sternest dignity.
"No, Fitzroy, he isn't blind," she explained in a tone that was (she hoped) patient but not patronizing. The things this strange boy didn’t know! "It's just that he needs the glasses to see things that are close to him well, so you should leave them in his care."
"Ah! But they make things so blurry?"
"Because you don't need them," she explained. Beside her, Damian was carefully unfolding the glasses one-handed and trying to move his injured arm as little as he could. "For him, the glass makes things look clearer."
Fitzroy looked mildly unconvinced by the lack of science, sense or poetry in her explanation, but she didn’t quite know how the glasses helped one to see well, herself – she had always assumed magic. There had been something about the curvature of the lens and thickness of the glass and the bending of light in one of the books she had read, all of which certainly sounded like magic.
She did not understand it well enough to explain it to a mage who thought that glasses were merely a piece of jewelry, though.
"Well, if you're sure they're helping him," Fitzroy agreed, however. He sat back amidst his circle of treasures and began to pack up again. This meant that he was soon absorbed in admiring his collection rather than packing them away, and occasionally offered some of them (colorful rocks, scraps of clothing, mismatched pieces of jewelry and glass, books and pieces of paper with unfinished lines scribbled on them, and a truly astonishing amount of trinkets he was gathering to wear in his hair when it grew out) for Jullanar to admire as well, which she did dutifully.
She meant to ask if he had truly never met anyone with glasses before, but then Fitzroy held up a feather of beautiful orange and she was reminded of how he had reacted to roosters, shadows and children. Perhaps not.
"What did he say?"
She turned to Damian, who was gingerly setting the glasses on his nose, still one-handed. This done, he blinked a few times, just as he always did when he was adjusting to the glasses altering his vision. "He thought they were…" She paused. Unsurprisingly, Damian had yet to introduce her to words like decorative. "... like this," she finished, touching her earrings to indicate jewelry.
Damian frowned and squinted at the earrings, simple silver hoops, as if he had never noticed them before. Probably he hadn't. "I suppose you wear them on your ears, in a way," he acknowledged with a doubtful air.
Jullanar considered and abandoned several ways to attempt to explain that Fitzroy did not think that Damian’s glasses were a strange sort of set of earrings, and finally settled on, "Why didn't you ask for them when he forgot to return them?"
"I thought he must need them, too."
Jullanar thought that Fitzroy simply liked to gather shiny objects that attracted his attention, but refrained from saying so.
He turned to look at his forearm, his expression tightening momentarily when he had to twist his arm to see the shallow cut near his elbow. His frown deepened. "It should be closing already. What's wrong with it?"
"It looks infected, doesn't it?"
This earned her an inscrutable look, which Damian then turned back to the cut, his face still and thoughtful in a way she had come to recognize.
… Oh.
He must have cut himself so many times in his pursuit of mastery, but he wouldn't have been able to see enough detail to know what an infected wound looked like. Of course he wouldn't. He would have learned to tell how serious an injury was by the amount of pain he was in, and by how large the wound appeared, and this one had seemed like a small cut.
She asked, “Didn’t you realize it might be infected when it wasn’t healing, and you started to become feverish?”
He glanced up at her and then back at the wound. “It was bandaged, I didn’t realize it wasn’t closing up. It wasn’t hurting that much. And it’s not so uncommon to feel achy and tired after a long day.”
Of course a mild fever wouldn’t even register for Damian. Jullanar, who tended to be bedridden and halfway to delirious at the slightest spike in her temperature, sat back and wondered why she had even imagined that her friend would notice such minor inconveniences as rising fever and a painful, infected wound.
"Oh, bother." She sighed and held out her hands expectantly, and after a moment’s hesitation, he held out his arm. Damian’s mother had probably helped him tend to his injuries and taught him how to do it himself – she had seen him bind a sprained wrist so swiftly, and bandage Fitzroy’s knee when the silly bard had tripped over a loose rock and scraped himself – but of course, correctly tending to an injury required seeing what was wrong with it. Jullanar, on the other hand, had little to no experience in taking care of injuries, but she had learned something from listening to her father talk about his work, and she had read books, and at least had the sense and sight to recognize that a wound was getting infected – surely she could manage this.
“Fitzroy, is there any alcohol in your bag?”
Fitzroy looked up from stuffing the last of his trinkets in, considered, and then, his expression brightening, started to unpack again in search of something.
Damian had clearly learned enough Shaian to decipher her question, for he was already frowning down at Fitzroy before the bard triumphantly pulled out a bottle of some sort of amber liquor. “I don’t like to drink alcohol,” he ventured, glancing at Jullanar.
“It’s for your wound,” she said briskly. And me. She was already feeling queasy about the whole business, but she was pretty sure that the wound needed to be cleaned and rebandaged, and she wasn’t about to show her weakness in front of her friends. “Here, hold out your arm and stay still…"