Book One – Chapter 19

So Yu’s night was far from over.

He pushed stools all around the kitchen to put back the bottles to wherever he thought he got them from. Nothing looked as he remembered, and he had no confidence in any of his choices, but he kept arranging and rearranging until he believed that there was somewhat of a system in it. Though believing, as Bubs had so kindly pointed out, was apparently not enough for this kitchen. Well, Yu did not know better, and there was other shit to do.

Next, he hauled the mess out of the sink, got the water running, and then rinsed and scrubbed every mug and every bowl and every last spoon and ladle. It was like trying to wash a crime scene, with the greatest crime being that he had to do all of this alone.

The bandage on his left arm came undone within the first half hour. Yu continually failed to refasten it, and then gave up, simply because there was no difference in how it hurt, bandaged or bare. The skin around the burns had tightened, pulsing with heat even through the salve. Yu felt it, but not as much as he should. He felt almost nothing. Earlier in the day, it had been so bad. His wings had felt like they would fall off. Then the pain had vanished abruptly, after … well, after what had happened. Then it had started to return, in strange, uneven waves, fading and then resurging in unpredictable but always shallow tides. Now it was like his wings were not even there anymore, like the pain had reached that turning point where the body finally gave up signalling and everything just turned into that numb sort of subtle stinging. It kept his anxiety up.

Bubs eventually finished with the human. By the time she was prepared to return to the sick bay, Yu was crawling between the hearth pots and the centre workbench to sweep the spills. The stew and spirits on the floor had congealed into a disgusting map of his incompetence. Yu was scrubbing, scratching and scraping at the ground so hard he might well have been a dwarf trying to sand down the rock in search of mountain blood. When he heard movement by the surgery door, he paused and drifted closer. Any sort of commotion offered an excuse for a break; the commotion now being faint threads of conversation. Yu listened but found that there was nothing to gain. They had just brought in Estingar to help handle the stretcher, and after that, it was all clean-up; muted instructions and the shifting of equipment.

Yu returned to his own work.