The Gembound: The Price of Keeping Chapter 41: Volume 2: Chapter 39 — Waking

Read chapter 41 of The Gembound: The Price of Keeping by Taliorn on NovelPedia.

Volume 2: Chapter 39 — Waking She rose to the surface of herself like a coin surfacing in a glass; slow, wavering, then suddenly there. The ceiling was pale limewash; the window's edge held a strip of evening. The ache across her ribs was not a blade anymore, but a book's worth of pressure banded shut. The air tasted wrong. Stale bread and vinegar, and something sweet-rot underneath that meant infection had tried and failed. Her mouth was cotton-dry; her tongue stuck to her teeth. When she tried to swallow, the muscles in her throat discovered they'd forgotten the sequence and had to relearn it, one painful click at a time. She counted her fingers without moving them. Ten. Counted her toes the same way. Ten. The inventory felt childish and unnecessary. The Gem pulsed once in her chest, acknowledgment without commentary, and she knew without asking that it had kept her alive when her body would have preferred to stop. When she tried to sit up, her body argued. Heat pulsed under the stitches; the world tipped. "Eliza," Yara said, or tried to. It came out of the air. Eliza leaned into the frame at once, hair knotted, eyes sleepless and bright. "Don't; don't do that," she said, which Yara understood to mean "don't move," "don't die," and "don't make me say please" all at once. "You're three, no, four, days out. Fever broke this morning." "Water," Yara managed, and Eliza was already moving, cup in hand, before the word finished. The first sip hurt. The second hurt less. By the third, her throat remembered it was meant to work, and she drank until Eliza pulled the cup away with the firm gentleness of someone who'd seen what happened when the fevered drank too fast. "Slow," Eliza said. "You kept nothing down for two days. Your stomach needs convincing." At the foot of the bed, two orange colossi shouldered the curtain aside and poured themselves into the room; horned, long-muzzled, armored with dragon-like scales, smoke soft on their breath. Sam reached her first; Harry was a close, affronted second. They tried to be careful and still weren't, talons clicking once on stone before they remembered to pad; they coiled themselves along the bed like siege engines put at rest. Their heat was a second quilt. Their tremor was a storm under scale. Sam made a sound in his chest that wasn't quite a growl, wasn't quite a whine. Distress shaped like devotion. Harry nudged her shoulder with his muzzle, careful as breaking glass, and when she didn't immediately respond, he did it again, harder, and she felt the Gem pulse its irritation at them both. Gentle, she thought at them, and felt the command ripple down the bond. They stilled instantly, but the tremor in their scales didn't stop. They'd thought she was dying. Maybe she had been. “It’s all right,” Yara told them, setting a palm to each ridged brow. Her hands shook. She let them. The Gem lay quiet in her chest like a kept coal. Not gone; settled. “The wound?” she asked, when her breath obeyed again. Eliza glanced to the side, where a brass tray held clean instruments and a dirty cloth. “Sealed from the inside,” she said. “Gem work. I stitched what I could see. It left you a scar like a seam.” A knuckle rapped the bed rail once, softly. “Don’t tear it.” Yara's hand drifted to the bandage without permission. Under the linen she could feel the ridge of new flesh, thick and ropey. Not clean like a blade cut should have healed. Puckered. The Gem had closed her from the inside out like sealing a wineskin, function over beauty, survival over vanity. "How bad?" she asked. "Bad enough that I sent for the physician and then sent him away when he suggested cutting you open to 'drain the corruption.'" Eliza's voice went flat on those last words. "I told him the corruption, and I had an understanding, and he wasn't part of it." Despite everything, Yara's mouth twitched. "And he left?" "After I showed him the door with Marcus standing in it." Eliza's fingers drummed the ledger once. "He was very cooperative