To a little stone cottage.

Nils did his best to help Constance get him standing, bracing his shaken body against the wall on his unwounded side.

Finally upright, Nils leaned heavily on Constance, his blood adding to the mud stains on her blue dress.

"Your dress..." Nils mumbled.

"Silly boy, it's only a dress," she said. She kicked the door open and maneuvered them out into the street. "Now, I know someone who can patch you up."

"Ah," Nils breathed.

"Who knows?" she then added, "You might even get that bath that we talked about."

Nils clung to Miss Foxworth as she steered him through the streets, up and away from the busy port-tavern area. She led him through an arched gate wound with the yellow trumpet flowers of jessamine. She helped him sit down on a stone bench in the shade.

"Wait here," she said.

Nils clutched his side and breathed shallowly, the pain in his side biting each time he breathed in. Despite the pain, the thing that bothered him the most was that he had lost his sailor's knife. There was nothing special about it except it was his first, own, and only. His self-absorption and downward gaze meant he was surprised as someone stepped up. The soiled blue dress marked Miss Foxworth, reassuringly, while the other...?

Nils looked up to see Constance Foxworth return with a formidable woman, broad and tall, with thick bare arms of a deep brown shade. Her hair was wrapped in brightly colored cloth, and she looked at Nils appraisingly.

"Can you hear me, sailor boy?" she asked.

He nodded. "Y-yes, ma'am," he said, his voice wavering a little with pain.

"Can you stand?" she asked.

Nils pushed up from the stone bench and stood unsteadily in front of her. The rest had helped a bit.

"Good, follow me," she said. She turned, her loose skirt swishing.

Constance helped steady Nils as the woman led them through the door of a stone cottage that must have been built as part of a larger city estate; though small, it was of well-fashioned masonry topped with an expensive imported slate roof.

The woman indicated that Nils should sit down in a wooden chair in the center of the main room. Despite the daylight filtering into the cottage, she lit four candles, one by each wall. She kindled a little dish of charcoal beneath a brass bowl that made crackling sounds and sent up threads of sweet smoke.

"Help him stand, Constance," the woman said. "I must remove his clothes."

Miss Foxworth helped Nils to stand and steadied him as the woman removed his bloody shirt and breeches. Nils quivered but did not complain or resist.

With two women standing close, touching him, Nils' prick twitched and swelled half-erect. Down, down, down, he thought. But there it stayed. And still there was pain, and a little trickle that must be blood oozing down his side to his hip.