The shock came first.
Tish looked down. The boy was looking up at her with gleeful eyes, his teeth, stained red, clamped around her fingers. Red?
Then the pain came.
It raced up her knuckles to her elbow like white fire, paralysing her. It was somehow worse than the time she had jumped off Ashkavar Castle. That pain had been everywhere. It had knocked her out and brought her back, unruly and unavoidable.
This pain had a specific point. It had a purpose.
And it wore the face of a young boy.
Tish was vaguely aware of Nayan's shouts. "Do something!" Nayan was screaming at the three other people, Davin's guardians. "Tell him to stop! She is bleeding!"
Tish looked up at the three people. At Maren. They were staring at her too. Not at her face, but at her fingers.
And they were salivating.
For some reason, Tish remembered the statue in the town square: the Saintess surrounded by wolves. Tish felt nauseous.
Nayan had knelt beside her, cursing under her breath. She gripped Davin's jaw firmly. "Let go," she said. "I don't want to hurt a child."
Davin whined, more like an animal than a human child, and bit down harder. Tish felt his sharp teeth dig deeper. Her knees went weak, and she fell more than she sat.
"Hey, hey." Nayan was rubbing her back. "You can heal, right? Heal."
Tish nodded jerkily and focused on her holy power, rushing it toward her palm, her fingers. She felt a rush of relief, and for one impossible second she felt her flesh and tendons knitting back together under his teeth.
Then Davin bit down again, and Tish screamed. It was a desperate sound, torn from the cavity of her chest by undiluted fear and agony.
Then she heard a sick, wet sound. The adults had finally moved. They tore Davin away from Tish, along with her fingers.
Tish fell sideways and curled into a ball, shivering and hyperventilating. She was crying, a mixture of hiccups and sobs, as she clutched her bleeding hand.
"It's okay," Nayan said, bending over her. "Don't look at your hand." She pressed a torn cloth against it. "Breathe through your mouth, slow and steady."
Tish tried. She really tried. But her breaths came out shaky.
Nayan bent down and picked her up, surprisingly easily. Tish went willingly, hiding her face in Nayan's neck.
Her fingers were still in the boy's mouth.
The thought drifted up from somewhere far away, calm and strangely polite, as if it belonged to somebody else. Someone should get them back.
She heard other voices then, firm and angry: Benevian soldiers. Her scream must have alerted them. She opened one eye and caught the fluttering red capes as they closed around the little group of four, including the boy, who stared at her with blood leaking from his mouth. Tish's blood.
He didn't move. He didn't blink. Not even his throat moved. He stood perfectly, eerily still, like a child waiting to be told what to do next.
Tish didn't want to know whether her fingers were still in his mouth or whether he had already swallowed them.
She squeezed her eyes shut again.
The next time she opened them, Nayan was stepping out of the medical center into the open air. The late-morning light had warmed a little, enough to feel on her skin, though it stayed thin and pale. It did nothing to chase away her shivers. It only made her sweat.
Tish spotted the Benevian soldiers gathering, marching behind Nayan as the Parthan General carried her who knew where. Tish didn't feel reassured. Across the square, she could still see the statue of Saintess Anastasia, the wolves surrounding her as she stared down at Tish.
The Saintess didn't look peaceful to Tish now. She looked frozen with mute horror. Her palms, turned upward, no longer looked like a blessing. They looked like surrender to a terrible fate.
And the wolves kept gnawing at her robes, her throat... her hands.
Somewhere beneath the numbness, the pain had dulled by a fraction, as if her magic were quietly working on its own. Tish was too tired to feel relieved.
She closed her eyes again.
__________________________________________
"Percival Leonhart. Do you like men?"
The mist in the bathhouse was making Rudra sleepy. He tried to keep his eyes open even though his eyelids felt heavy as lead. The steam clogged his nose so thoroughly that he could barely smell the goat sitting two feet away.
"Why are you silent?" he asked again. "I don't judge homosexuals."
Rudra was vaguely aware of Mamon stopping his futile attempt to scrub his own back. Mamon had got out of the water to sit on a stool in a corner with a back scrubber and soap, the only one among the three men who was actively trying to follow the Saintess's command to the best of his ability.
When Rudra spoke, Mamon lowered the sponge slowly and stood up to drag his stool wisely away from Rudra and Percival. As for Konstantin (yes, the goat had infiltrated the bathhouse about twenty minutes ago, and Rudra had stopped asking why on earth this animal kept following someone like him, who was far above it in the food chain), he had settled in the corner, chewing on a washcloth.
Percival, for his part, didn't speak. Through the bangs of his dark, plastered hair, he glared, eyes gleaming with absolute loathing.
It struck Rudra, in passing, that no one had come to the bathhouse since they got in. Not a messenger, not a soldier. "No one has reported to me since breakfast," Mamon had grumbled earlier, as if it were a personal insult. Rudra filed the thought away.
Percival finally opened his mouth. "You are," he spoke, no, snarled, "an absolutely disgusting man! I'm glad I'm here to keep an eye on you!"
Rudra stared. "Eye on me," he mused, echoing those words, tasting their flavour in his mouth. "For what?"
"So that you leave Tish alone," grunted the man. "So that you cease lusting after her. She is safer with a woman."
"Nayan likes women," Rudra informed him helpfully. He watched the panic set in Percival's eyes for a good two seconds before assuring him, "Don't worry. She's happily married."
Relief washed over the so-called hero's face before he froze and paled with anger. His hands strangled the towel sitting by his elbow at the edge of the water as he realised Rudra was playing with his anxiety.
"You think this is funny?" He stood up, the water sloshing violently around his waist as he waddled toward Rudra. "Don't you know the mess you're making in her life just by being around her?"
Rudra remained relaxed against the smooth stone backrest. Konstantin bleated a warning. But it was too late.
Percival grabbed Rudra's throat.
"Percy!" the Benevian Prince called out to him loudly. His voice shook a little. Percival didn't budge. Konstantin became still.
Rudra was almost amused. It would take nothing, one flick of his wrist, to snap this mortal's neck like a dry twig. He let the fingers tighten anyway, curious how far a foolish human would push himself.
"You broke her," Percival said flatly. "She went to Partha with hope and love and came back a hollow shell." His grip tightened, firm fingers pressing into Rudra's windpipe with righteous determination. "She didn't... couldn't talk. She never said what you had done to her." His face twisted with rage and disgust. "You looked at someone so pure and good like Teresa and ruined her. You ruined her life. You ruined her innocence."
It became hard for Rudra to breathe. It wasn't exactly because he was being strangled. Perhaps partly because of that. And the other part... He kept remembering how hollow Tish's eyes had looked when he had practically kidnapped her from her quarters, imprisoned her in his own room and force-fed her under the excuse of employing her as a "poison taster."
Perhaps, instead of trying to save her body, he should have tried to save her soul first.
"I know what I did to her," Rudra didn't deny it; a dragon doesn't back off from his liabilities. "But I need the answer. I need to know..."
"You need to know," Percival hissed, "why she saved you in your stupid fucking dream?" He spat out the words with utter annoyance. "Because that's what she does! She helps people not for any reason! She does it because she is Tish!"
The words struck something deep and soft inside Rudra (which he would aggressively deny if anyone ever asked), something hidden behind his ribcage.
Bleeding, naked, weak. And Tish hovering over him uselessly, eyes full of tears and nose full of snot, her fingertips red from the cold as she tried to work her healing magic to save Rudra from the fatal wound from the Sword of Mamon.
He would never forget the desperate eyes, the stubborn set of her jaw. The way she had looked at his gaping wound and decided she wasn't ready to let him go like that.
Was it all that? Tish being Tish?
"What?" Percival asked again, his voice filled with dry amusement. "Did you think there was something else? Some deeper meaning?" He chuckled. "Did you think she loved you or something?" He burst out laughing. "You can't be serious! She's a Saintess and you! You are a monster!"
Rudra's blood ran hot. A growl rose up in his throat along with the familiar heat of draconic fire. He could melt Percival Leonhart down to the bone. Right here.
"Your Highness!"
Suddenly a soldier rushed into the bathhouse, looking dishevelled. Mamon, who had been quiet until now, barked, "Knock before entering, you fool!"
"There is no time!" panted the soldier.
Rudra didn't look away from Percival, and neither did Percival look away from him.
Until the soldier said the next line.
"The Saintess... A child bit off her fingers."