O! Water Hot is a noble thing!

By the time Curry knocked gently on the door, then nudged it open with a tray in hand, I was feeling a bit more like a person again than a doll somebody had played too rough with and tossed aside, and the steaming hot warmth of the water had made me pink all over and a bit less sore.

“Hey, Fuzzy,” Curry said, setting the tray down on the privy without looking in my direction. “I made whiskey toddies. Don’t worry, I used Nan’s good stuff. Not that garbage of ours.” He came over and sat down on the bathroom floor, leaning with his back against the tub and carefully passing one of his nan’s hot tea glasses over his shoulder to me in its silver holder. I slid the curtain over enough to take it, holding the hot cup gingerly in both hands.

“Thanks,” I said, and tried a sip. It was smooth, and sweet, and very strong. I took another drink, then set it on the little shelf next to the tub and lay back in the water, leaning my head against the side of the tub his back was against. “Magnus?” I asked after a while.

“Yeah?”

My heart was pounding hard enough that it took me a moment to remember the simple words I’d settled on. “It was Lydell,” I said carefully.

There was a silence while Curry took that in. He understood now, why I thought I oughtn’t to report it. The watch guard gossip mill was a furiously active machine, which was how we knew that in the half season since academy graduation, Lydell had twice been in the kind of trouble that most people’s careers never survived. Nobody seemed to know who was to blame for this, but it didn’t really matter why when the reality we faced was that he emerged from sticky situations unscathed, meaner than ever, and bearing a grudge against whoever he blamed for the fuss.

“I turned a corner in the locker room and ran headlong into him,” I confessed tearfully, “and at first I thought he was moving to stop me taking a fall, but instead he had me against the wall quicker than I could have got away. He tore my leggings open—he said because he didn’t believe too much in warming up to it, except the reason I was in there at all was Captain Veatch kept me so busy I never got to pee all afternoon and I really had to go. He scared me so bad telling me all the stuff he was going to do to me and how little sluts like me always came round to liking it in the end, that I couldn't hold it anymore and I peed all over his arm. He got mad that his uniform sleeve was wet so instead of doing any of the stuff he said, he hit me pretty hard and left. I don’t remember what happened just after that but I realized I was afraid to go back to the Fourth like I was supposed to, so I came here instead.”

There was a short silence after I’d gotten that terrible speech all the way out, and then Curry reached over his shoulder and offered me his hand. I reached up and took it. “I don’t mean to make light of something so fucking awful,” he said after a moment, “but I don’t honestly know if any watch guard officer has ever done something quite so heroic as urinating on Markus Lydell.”

This made me cry again.

“Oh, fuck, I’m sorry, that wasn’t funny—” Curry began, but I stopped him.

“—no, it’s not you,” I said in a halting tone, “it’s just, how much I’ll miss your joking, if I have to leave the watch. I don’t know what I’m meant to do, if the captain wants to loan me back to the Sixth again. I don’t want to quit,” I said in almost a whimper again, “or get reassigned. I want to stay partners with you. But I can’t report it, right? Nothing will really happen and of course he’ll find out. Only, if I don’t do anything, what if I see him again? What if he has some notion he wants to finish what he started?”

I let go Curry’s hand so I could sit up and wipe my eyes and have another drink of my toddy, which had cooled to a more drinkable temperature. I downed about half of it, then said mournfully, “I really truly didn’t think things like this happened to watch guard officers. I’m genuinely that fucking stupid.”

Curry had been quiet for the last couple minutes. “Don’t say that," he said fiercely once I stopped talking. "You had every right to expect to be safe at a watch house."

“What if I’m not cut out for constable work after all?” I asked.

“That’s for you to decide,” Curry said with some heat, half turning to me, then remembering he was facing away for a reason. “Not for somebody else's actions to decide for you.”

“What would you do?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said, suddenly subdued. “I don’t know if there’s a right choice. The worrying part is also not knowing how many wrong choices there might be.”

“Yeah.” I gulped the rest of the toddy, then sank down into the warm water again, draping my arm over the side of the bath and setting my hand on his shoulder. “I don’t think anybody else in the watch has a partner as good as you. Including you.”

Curry reached up and put his hand over mine. “No, I really do have somebody just as good.”

“Thanks for sitting with me,” I said weakly. “I wish I wasn’t such a mess.”

Curry curled his fingers around my hand and I felt him shrug. “It’s all right. Sometimes we’re a mess. But we take care of each other.”

I leaned my head on the tub again and we sat there in silence a while, Curry still holding my hand and letting me snuffle gently to myself. “When did you last eat something?” he asked eventually.

I couldn’t remember. “Breakfast-time? Must have been? Or else last night’s supper?”

“Do you think you could keep anything down?”

“Maybe. I think I only got sick because I recalled—something specific about it.” I shuddered. “I’m trying pretty hard not to think about that. Probably I’ll be fine. What time is it? Did you already eat?”

“Haven’t eaten, no. And not very late. Probably not even nine yet.”

“Maybe I’ll just try a little of what you’re having? If it’s not too much trouble.”

He nodded, then seemed to hesitate. “You should stay here tonight. Unless you prefer your place. And if you do I’ll walk you there.”

I snorted a little. “I never prefer my place. I’m not willing to overstay my welcome with you, but you can always assume if you invite me, I’m staying. My place is a dump.”

“It’s not… that bad.”

“There isn’t a single square inch of that whole building that doesn’t have the stink of sour cabbage cooked into the walls,” I pointed out.

“Well, all right, I guess that’s true,” he admitted. “Either way, you’re invited. And anyway, Nan’s always in such happy spirits with you around. She loves having you here. You’re practically doing us a favor to stay over. I think you make it feel more bearable for her that my mum’s gone.”

“Really?” I asked, then decided, “You’re just saying that to cheer me up.”

“Not a bit of it. She talks about you so much one of her friends asked why they never heard about this granddaughter before and were you from the Mivian branch of the family.”

“Oh. That’s… really nice.” I said in a small voice. “Well… for my part your nan makes it seem like I can imagine how it must feel to properly have a mother.”

“You’re lively, and clever, and funny, and hot-headed, like Mum was.” Curry turned his head just enough to catch me in his peripheral vision. “If Nan thinks you might be coming over she’s always asking me stuff like does Fossy like plums, does Fossy like picnic eggs, will Fossy eat mushrooms or should she leave them on the side? Does Fossy like spicy mustard?”

“I like all those things. Especially mushrooms. I’ll eat those any way you like. Cooked, raw, anything. I would rather eat mushrooms than about anything else in the whole world.”

“I’ll make sure to tell her.” I saw the side of his cheek lift in a smile. “Nan also has a passionate fondness for mushrooms.”

“Want to hear an orphanism?” I asked. Curry had coined this silly term for minor anecdotes about my institutional upbringing describing experiences with unexpectedly idiosyncratic effects on my perception compared with other people.

“Always.”

“I never even tasted a mushroom till last year, because at the home they try to keep costs down and mushrooms aren’t as economical as some foods.”

“Really?” Again he started to twist to look at me, then caught himself. “Sorry.”

“Here, I should get out of the tub so you can actually look at me while we’re talking, it’s starting to cool anyway and I feel quite a lot better than before. And, um, it doesn’t hurt as much now.”

He gave my hand another hard squeeze and released it. “Then I’ll get you a towel and wait just outside for you.”

“Thanks. I’ll tell you about my first mushroom in a minute.”

Curry brought me a towel, then to my embarrassment had to explain to me how to drain a bathtub of this sort, which didn’t have a stopper on a chain as I’d seen on other plumbed tubs, but rather a built-in stopper controlled by a little lever next to the pump.

He stood outside the bathroom door waiting while I dried off, and as I pulled my clothes back on I told him the story of the first mushrooms I’d tasted, in a tart at an expensive restaurant near the academy, which I had impulsively gone to on my own after being summoned there and notified of my acceptance.