"My Wife"

Yeah. That old chestnut

===?? Spring 1386==========

The Rook the hospital sent was a baby-faced blond human man who introduced himself and explained that he was in his final year of practical physician training at the College, but had completed his healing studies, had some firsthand experience in infectious disease control, and all that remained now were some requirements for priesthood in the Ravanite order. The unsolicited nature and routine manner with which this was rattled off gave me to think that he must catch a lot of shit for the fact that he looked about all of sixteen years old, which obviously he wasn’t and couldn’t be. He set to without much fuss, and it was immediately apparent that he was both clever and attentive, and gifted at restorative sorcery in the bargain. Seeing him at work gave me a first, unwelcome taste, of what it was to feel a little bit old and comparatively unaccomplished upon encountering a very promising younger person.

He was in my good books, though, because after briefly eyeing his patient’s human barnacle he had neither commented nor chased me off as I’d half thought he might. He looked a bit familiar. Plenty of the Rooks did, which was probably a byproduct of my having lived fourteen years at the orphan home in Blackchapel. At any rate, trying to place whether he had been a ward like me, or perhaps simply attended primary while I was in secondary, was a welcome distraction from all the troubling notions currently haunting me.

Curry did me the favor of handling all the talking, even before by the time all the routine wizard shit was concluded, Curry was finally able to draw in a full breath without coughing, ****, or any other threats of imminent ****. He was unquestionably in his right mind, the color was back in his cheeks, and he could finally speak above a whisper. All of these—signs of hearty good health.

“Magnus—one more thing. And—” A short interlude followed, during which I still didn’t work out that and, plus a significant pause, meant me, until Curry looked down at me to see why I hadn’t reacted. I realized with a rush of embarrassment that I hadn’t introduced myself earlier, because I’d been too distracted with alternating my private game of Guess That Orphan! with dark reflections on the mingled admiration and regret I felt watching him be good at his life’s work, and contrasting it with my own spectacularly calamitous personal history concerning sorcery.

Once he had both our attention, he looked at Curry and said, “I just wanted to make sure you both understand before I leave, that I have complete confidence you would be on a recall slab in the morgue right now if she hadn’t done everything you described. You’re alive right now because of the incredible lengths of lifesaving effort your wife went to last night. Just—”

The young Rook broke off in faintly startled confusion when Curry’s reaction to this heartfelt speech was convulsive laughter. “She’s—” he giggled, laughing even harder at the way we were both staring at him. I realized I was frowning at him. But, well. I’d been rather enjoying the high praise. “She’s my Watch Guard partner,” he said, reining it in a little but still laughing. “Not my wife. In some circles they distinguish between the two.”

It seemed that not dying, and then being magically restored to probably better than he was before he even got sick, had afforded Curry not only a surfeit of constitutional fortitude, but of tasteless good cheer as well.

I stared at my partner and dearest friend a long moment, as he choked with mirth, and as my vision blurred with the **** of that sudden disbelieving indignation I always experienced in accompaniment with immediate, incandescent anger. I sat abruptly up, the better to fry him in extract of hell, which only made him laugh harder.

The priest’s earnest composure dissolved in the face of this unexpected turn. “I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to give any offense,” he fumbled, which had Curry wiping tears from his watering eyes, as he continued to giggle, albeit in a twitchy kind of way as he tried to adopt an expression suggesting penitence.

“Since you’re recovered enough now from your near **** by suffocation to laugh over how me struggling to keep you alive made somebody mistake me for a person who gives some kind of shit about you,” I informed Curry hotly as I scrambled off the bed, “I’ll just let you alone and be grateful I don’t have to empty any more of your goddamn piss jars down the privy or stop you **** on your own sputum or humor any more of your absurd fucking delirious visions. Since you’re not wrong thinking all that is shit a fucking wife should do!”

“F—Fauzia—” Curry began, except he was still giggling a bit, with the result that this half-assed effort at placation came off so token it had rather the opposite of the intended effect.

Even though I was fully aware that both Yergen and Baggett were downstairs and full in earshot of this whole humiliating spectacle, I stopped in the door to his room so I could shriek at Curry, “Have a great fucking time without me, you idiot bastard, next time you decide it might be fun to get fucking sick and die!”

I felt a bit bad, for the extremely awkward position this put the priest in, especially because I was pretty sure from what he said that he understood this whole interlude with Curry had cost me something. But I had been so certain that Curry understood my feelings exactly—if this stranger did, so too he must!—and it was everywhere apparent that he did not! The rapid, unceremonious evaporation of my previous conviction made me **** to get gone from here before I started to cry for real.

I sprinted down the stairs, past Yergen and Baggett, who were clearly undecided to what extent they should intervene in this penny store drama. “I have an errand,” I informed them, not caring what an obvious lie this was, and because I had no shoes on I went into the mud room off the kitchen garden and jammed my feet into the galoshes of Nan's she kept in there. They were far too big for me, but still better than tearing my feet up on the street cobbles. I didn’t want to go back through the house, so I pocketed the key to the garden gate and let myself out that way.