Blade and Balm

The hydra's blood was still steaming when I got home.

It pooled in the seams of my armor, thick and black and smelling like burnt copper. Three of its heads had snapped at me before I took the fourth. I'd have taken all five if the thing hadn't turned tail and slithered back into the marsh. Coward. Smart, too. Most monsters that survive me learn to run.

I shouldered the guild door open and the whole common room went quiet the way it always does when someone comes in wearing a fight.

"Kestrel." Mira's voice cut through the smoke and the low mutter of drinkers. She didn't look up from the table she was wiping down. "You're bleeding on my floor."

"It's hydra blood."

"Is it your hydra blood?"

I checked the gash along my forearm. Shallow. Already knitting. "Some of it."

She set down her rag and came around the bar, and that's when I let myself really look at her. Five foot four of stubborn, hair pinned up in that crooked way she does when she's been working since dawn, sleeves rolled past the elbow. Her hands were still wet. She reached for my face and turned it toward the lamp.

"You're pale," she said.

"I'm always pale. It's the northern blood."

"You're paler than usual." Her thumb pressed under my jaw, checking my pulse. Healer's habit. She does it to me the same way she does it to dying men on stretchers, and I've never once told her to stop. "Sit."

"Mira."

"Sit down, Kestrel."

I sat.

The common room slowly remembered it had other business. Someone laughed too loud near the fire. A dwarf at the corner table went back to losing at dice. The guildhall smells like every guildhall in the world: old beer, wet wool, iron, and whatever stew they've been reheating since the founding of the city. I've bled in six kingdoms and they all smell the same.

Mira knelt in front of me with a basin and a cloth and started cleaning the cut. Her fingers are quick. Precise. She doesn't flinch at blood anymore, not even mine, which is saying something because she used to faint at the sight of it back when we were fourteen and stupid and I brought her a rabbit I'd killed with a rock.

"You went out alone again," she said.

"The others were busy."

"The others are always busy when you decide to be an idiot."

"I killed four heads."

"You killed four heads and let the fifth go, which means it'll heal up and come back twice as mean, which means someone else has to go out there and finish it, which means." She stopped. Breathed. Wrung the cloth out over the basin. "Which means I have to sit here and wonder if you're coming back."

There it is. That's the real wound. Not the arm.

I caught her wrist. She let me.

"I came back," I said.

"You always come back. Until you don't."

She's right, of course. She's always right. That's the thing about loving a healer. They see the body the way a carpenter sees a house. They know exactly how much load the beams can take before something cracks.

I leaned forward and kissed her.

Right there. In the middle of the guildhall, in front of the dwarf and the drunk and the two half-elf twins who'd been eyeing me since I walked in. It wasn't a small kiss. I don't do small kisses. I got my good hand in her hair, pulled the pin loose, and felt the whole length of it come down warm against my knuckles. She tasted like tea and the mint she chews to stay awake on night shifts. She made a sound low in her throat, half protest, half not.

When I pulled back her face was pink to the ears. The twins were staring. The dwarf had stopped pretending not to.

"You're filthy," she said.

"I know."

"You smell like a swamp."

"I know."

"You're going to get us thrown out of the guild."

"They'd have to throw out half the guild. Have you seen what happens at the winter feast?"

She laughed. That laugh, the real one, not the polite one she uses on patients. It's a stupid laugh. Too loud. Snort at the end. I'd burn down a city for it.

She stood and hauled me up by the collar and marched me toward the back stairs. "Come on. You're getting stitched and bathed, in that order, and then you're eating something that isn't jerky, and then we're going to have a conversation about the word 'alone.'"

"That sounds like a lot of steps."

"It is. Move."

Our room is up two flights and down a hall that leans a little to the left. The guild gives rooms to members who've been around long enough to stop getting killed, which apparently includes both of us now. It's one room. One window. A bed that's too small for two people and somehow still holds us every night. A shelf where she keeps her salves and I keep my whetstone and the little wooden horse she carved me when we were kids, back before either of us knew what we were going to be.

She sat me on the edge of the bed and went to work. Needle. Thread. The sting of it is nothing. I've had worse. I watched her face while she sewed me up, the little crease between her brows, the way she bites the inside of her cheek when she's concentrating. Twenty-two years old and she already has the hands of a woman who's saved more lives than she's lived years. I've watched her pull a man back from fever with nothing but cold water and stubbornness. I've watched her hold a soldier's guts in with her bare hands while she shouted for a stretcher. She's the strongest person I know, and she's never once picked up a sword.

"There," she said, tying off the thread. "Don't do anything stupid with that arm for two days."

"No promises."

"Kestrel."

"I'll try."

She kissed the inside of my wrist, right over the pulse, which is a thing she does that undoes me every single time. I don't know why. It's such a small gesture. But it's hers. It's ours. It means I'm still here.

Then she stood and pointed at the washbasin and I stripped out of the armor while she watched, because she always watches, and there's no shyness left between us. We've known each other since we were six years old, two gutter kids in the same crumbling quarter of the city, stealing bread and splitting it. She was the one who found me crying behind the tannery the day my mother died. She was the one who held my hand when I signed my name to the guild ledger and swore my sword to the crown. I've loved her since before I had a word for it.

The water was cold. She'd already used the warm for the patients. I didn't care.

When I turned around she was sitting on the bed with her knees drawn up, watching me with that look. Not the healer look. The other one. The one that means the door's shut and the world can wait.

I crossed the room in three steps and got on the bed and kissed her again, deeper this time, my wet hair dripping onto her collar, her hands flat against my chest. She pulled me down and I went. I always go. Her mouth is the only place I've ever surrendered without a fight.

We stayed like that for a long while. Long enough that the lamp burned low. Long enough that her hair was a mess and my stitches were pulling and neither of us cared. Her skin is warm and she smells like herbs and the soap she makes herself and underneath all of it just her, just Mira, the smell I've been falling asleep next to since we were old enough to rent a room.

"I hate it when you go out alone," she said against my mouth.

"I know."

"Then stop."

"I can't promise that."

She pulled back and looked at me. Really looked. And there was something in her face I couldn't read, which is rare, because I can read her like a page.

"What?" I said.

"Nothing. Not yet." She kissed my forehead and rolled off the bed. "Eat something. I have a shift in an hour."

"Mira."

"Eat. Sleep. Stay alive. We'll talk tomorrow."

She pulled her hair back up and pinned it and was out the door before I could ask her what she meant, and I lay there in the dark with the taste of her still on my lips, listening to the guild settle down for the night, and I thought about the way she'd said *not yet.* Like there was something coming. Like she knew something I didn't.

The hydra was still out there. Five heads become six, then seven. Someone would have to go finish it.

I didn't sleep well.