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Post by moralhazard on Jul 8, 2019 18:13:32 GMT
Kara glanced down at her side, then back up at the cleric. Was it worse than she thought? She shifted slightly, feeling the skin around the burn pull. It hurt, but it was only superficial. Pain was a gift, telling you when to slow down. Kara knew pain, knew it well and intimately, and the physical kind she did her best to embrace. What she felt on her side was like a gentle warning, a reminder not to press herself too far, to be a little more careful against fire in the future, nothing worse.
The cleric began again, that bright and cheerful note back in her voice, or so Kara thought. So Kara hoped. She shrugged a little at the term ‘very well fit,’ not quite sure what to make of it. She wasn’t sure who Rommel the cargo lifter was, but, yes, Kara thought she could probably out-wrestle him. It would depend, but she was a fighter, not a cargo lifter, and usually that meant certain advantages.
“Upset wizard,” Kara offered. After a moment, she added, “fire and ice spells.” That seemed like a thing the cleric might need to know; Kara wasn’t sure if it mattered that she’d been hit with ice after fire, but she figured it was the sort of information a healer might care about. The ice had hurt worse than the fire. She ought to have twisted the other way; Kara would remember that for next time. Better to have two injuries than one like this.
Kara sneezed when the little pot came out, eyes wide. She turned her head away, lifted her arm, and sneezed again, stomach rippling. She glanced back at the cleric, a little suspiciously, but did her best to hold still, eyes watering.
Kara glanced down at the long scar down her side. Uryon’s cleaver had split her open there, just a few days after she’d first come to Waterdeep. Iara’s healer had stitched her together, and Caim had helped – but Horund, angry that Kara had beaten his challenge, had tracked her down and landed a lucky blow against the healing wound, breaking something inside of her. That pain – Kara didn’t think she would ever forget that pain. She had had worse, but she couldn’t think of many.
After a moment, she shrugged. “S’fine,” with no apparent hesitation, to demonstrate, Kara lifted one hand and pressed firmly against the angry scar, intending to prove to Rosemary that it didn’t hurt. The other recent looking scars included a small line peeking out from the bottom of her breastband – Gulken’s axe – and faint remnants of bruises, just a few yellowed ones, from where her armor had battered at her when she had led a squad against an orc horde. There, too, on her side – a small splotch left behind from the purple wormling that had stung at her, briefly paralyzing her.
“No,” Kara shook her head at the cleric’s question, lowering her hands to her legs and sitting still and patient. She sneezed again into her elbow, but didn’t try to escape the salve.
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Post by pastels on Jul 19, 2019 13:20:29 GMT
There were few wounds like these in Eldhearth; most were cuts and grazes, broken bones, infections and fevers and rashes that could be tended to with a simple tonic and enough bed rest. There were the occasional life-threatening cases—for example, a hunter who strayed too deep into the forest and unwittingly crossed paths with a wolf pack, and an adventurer who dropped twenty feet off the Feather Falls with one unlucky misstep—but those were left up to the senior clerics, or the Exalted herself, while Rosemary brought in bandages and whatnot. The worst she handled, in fact, was that bear trap injury with the caravan before their arrival in Waterdeep. It wasn’t as if she was bad at medicine. On the contrary, the others said she did well and Rosemary felt she caught on to the lessons quick enough. She had a head start, too—Adair got into all sorts of trouble during their childhood. Her brother, bless his heart, reined in his boundless energy and waited whenever she tried one traditional remedy after another on his bruises.
Sidra tasked her instead with assisting supplicants in the pond, the ones with the sad, lined faces and the heaviest hearts anchored by years of regret like thick, salt-crusted chains. “You have a calling for it,” she said, fond as any mother could be. But—and this Rosie realized when a sweet old woman started weeping in front of her, wrinkled hands crumpling letters left behind by dead sons and daughters, while she looked on in helpless terror—she was no good at that either.
“Oh! Fire and ice!” Rosemary repeated and turned back for the bag. Another moment’s digging resulted in a tiny glass jar, stoppered by a thick wad of paper, which held a thin, pale fluid up to the half mark. She flicked her wrist out and spun it around; the mixture swirled within the glass like watered down rum. “They must have been very upset, then.”
“W-what are you doin’!? Oh my goodness!” When she returned, the woman seemed to take her words as an invitation to prod at her wound. Instantly, Rosemary yelped and tried to pry, no, push Kara’s fingers away from the scar. With both hands carrying a container, the cleric wasn’t really in the best position to stop said action, and it played out as well as a kitten batting a yarn ball would. “Stop pushin’ your own wound ‘fore you break it again, lady!”
And she could too, with those muscles!
The healer cleared her throat and tore her eyes away from the myriad of wounds dotting Kara’s body, but she had gotten more alarmed by the second. The stranger said there were no other wounds but… “You know, you’ve gone and got fightin’ more times than anyone I’ve met! How do you manage it all? Isn’t it tirin’? Goodness! Who's helpin' you out on all of these scrapes?” She looked around for another stool and plonked down in front of her patient, the two jars balanced delicately on the same palm as Rosie uncorked the glass bottle. Remembering the reaction (sneezes!) from earlier, she glanced up and smiled. “Uh… No worries over these, I made them! Annbeth helped, of course, and she’s been doin’ this even before I was born! She’s been teachin’ me these days, Waterdeep has a lot of different plants from what I’m used to. Oh, uh… You’re not allergic to garlic, are you?”
And, you know, as if she hadn’t just asked Kara one question after another, the cleric launched into an explanation with that same calm, even voice—this runny tonic would go first, she said, then the salve to reduce the swelling, followed by the healing magic to knit the damaged skin and muscle deep beneath. “It helps some folk when I explain things,” Rosemary added as an afterthought as she leaned in to begin the application.
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Post by moralhazard on Jul 19, 2019 13:43:52 GMT
Kara nodded slightly at Rosie’s description of the situation. Yes, the wizard had been very upset. Kara was mostly just glad none of the acid had gotten her; the way it had eaten through the wood in the bar was worrying, and she didn’t like to think about what it might have done to her. The fire and ice hurt. It hurt badly. But she thought it was superficial; it would heal in time, and if she was lucky, the scar tissue wouldn’t pull too badly.
Rosie yelped at her not to touch it. Kara blinked at the healer, looking down at it. She didn’t quite see what the problem was; it was only scar tissue. It didn’t hurt much anymore; it looked worse than it was. The wound beneath was gone; there was no heat or tenderness left to it that might suggest some infection lingering somewhere deep inside the skin. Caim had burned all that out for her. Kara was just as glad he hadn’t healed it without a trace, like he had her first injuries from the fight with Horund; some fights she liked to be reminded of. Uryon had bested her once, and if in the end she had won, it hadn’t been without cost.
Rosie’s pawing hands weren’t strong enough to move Kara’s small scarred ones, but the former guard held very still at the healer’s touch, not flinching or jerking away, letting Rosie try.
“No,” Kara said in response to the question about garlic. She was still thinking over Rosie’s earlier words, the question she had asked. Isn’t it tiring? The cleric’s words flowed over her like water, soft and pleasant, not hard and rushing. Kara nodded absently, once, when she thought it was required.
Kara looked down at Rosie’s hands, the salve. She didn’t need to answer, she thought. She could keep quiet and let the healer do her work. But - unbidden - the words rose slowly.
“It is tiring,” Kara thought about the night before, the fight in the bar and the tabaxi on the street. She thought about Belerick in the alley and his accidental blow to her side. She thought about Horund and Uryon and Gulken. “Not doing it is worse.” She looked back up at Rosie, with no particular expression on her face, nothing but honesty.
Then, having said her piece, Kara took a deep breath and steeled herself for the healer’s touch. She still felt a little suspicious about all those salves, and her nose tickled a little again, but she was glad that Rosie wasn’t relying too much on magic. It wasn’t exactly clear to Kara if the healer did mean to magic her or had just been explaining that she might, but Kara felt like she’d been clear enough about not needing it. She wouldn’t try to do Rosie’s job for her or to fight her; that didn’t help anyone.
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Post by pastels on Oct 5, 2019 13:33:53 GMT
Rosemary hummed as she worked, a force of habit brought from the days when her hands hovered above coarse fabric instead of damaged flesh. The hospice settled into a comfortable silence. She was used to the repetition of application and healing – the clerics of Featherdale relied on curatives and the miraculous waters in the nearby glade. Her methods had to shift a bit since arriving in Waterdeep. Asides from the practical reason that a lone healer casting spells for each patient wouldn’t keep conscious for long, Rosie thought that there was something nice in going back to the basics. It involved Eldath in the process. It set the body on a slow, gentle path, instead of rushing onward to force a wound shut – sudden as a hammer on hot steel. At the same time, well… There were barely enough cots in here to accommodate herself and Annbeth, much less a full house. Sometimes patients had to pop in and pop out! Just like freshly baked bread, except much less fragrant.
The tune paused when her taciturn patient answered, and for a moment there it seemed Rosemary did not hear a word. Then… “I see.” She didn’t know how to argue against that kind of reasoning – and she shouldn’t. At least, that was what her heart whispered. There was a nagging feeling, not entirely unfounded, that trying to sway Kara on this would be like pushing a boulder uphill. “That makes it worth doing, then.”
She leaned back to inspect her work and carefully wiped both hands on her apron. “Done!” Rosemary announced rather cheerfully, though a warning gleam entered her eyes when she glanced at Kara’s face. “If you’re to get back in it, please try to get a good night’s rest, an’ proper meals – all that!” She clapped her hands together, bits of herbal salve stubbornly lined under a nail or three, then nodded. “You said so itself, it’s tirin’. You must be on your best, then! Right?”
With the main task crossed off the list, the cleric stood up and gestured for Kara to do the same.
“Um, I’d like to give you the rest to make sure it heals nicely but…” Rosemary frowned and held up one of the glass bottles at eye level, the one with what looked like moonlight caught in water. It was nearly empty. “I used most of it up on this fierce-lookin’ gent the other day, said he got scalded by the missus. Goodness!” A pause. “Can you come back tomorrow afternoon? Or whenever you're free, really! I’ll have another batch ready for you by then, quick as one-two-three!”
Rosemary smiled and added, “And I’m sure our unconscious friend over there wants to thank you in person! Well, once he’s awake, anyway.”
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Post by moralhazard on Oct 7, 2019 4:08:02 GMT
Kara watched Rosie evenly when the other woman had finished applying the salve. She listened to Rosie’s instructions to rest, to eat proper meals. After a moment, Kara nodded, solemnly, as if Rosie’s chatter had been actual medical instructions; as if the suggestion to get some sleep and eat enough was something she had to focus on and remember.
Kara rose with Rosie. She could feel the difference already; the skin still pulled, gently, with her movement, but the pain was less. There was a pleasant cool feeling against the burn, rather than the hotness she had had before. Yes, Kara thought, it would be easier like this. She pulled her shirt back on, and then her tunic as well, the scars that marked her torso disappearing beneath the cloth once more.
Kara looked at the mostly empty bottle, then back at Rosie. She liked the strange little healer; she liked the way she filled the silences with words, words enough that Kara did not feel her own lack. Kara’s eyes drifted back to the bottle, but she banished thoughts of regret for using so much of Rosie’s salve. Kara was not a healer; she wouldn’t second guess Rosie’s judgment.
Kara didn’t like the idea of being thanked; she didn’t need it, and more often than not it made her uncomfortable. She preferred to avoid thanks; she knew, too, that sometimes people were not grateful, and she didn’t begrudge the lack. “Yes,” Kara nodded, when Rosie asked if she’d come back, and didn’t specify when. Tomorrow afternoon, she told herself, fixing it in her mind. For now, she would go and see if she could still catch a half-shift at the Dock Ward; if it was too late for the afternoon, then she would find an evening shift, and she would eat in the morning, as instructed.
“Thank you,” Kara said, looking at Rosemary still. She stepped back, then, gathering her things, and left without another word, passing through the cots and out into the city beyond, glaive still strapped to her back.
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Post by pastels on Nov 27, 2019 1:01:25 GMT
Wordcount:
Rosie: 5,396
Kara: 5,370
Submitting for bookkeeping!
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