On Silver Wings

After the Knife

Beau held his cheek, the blood trickling between his fingers. "It hurts like hell, Marcus." His words came out slightly slurred. Rightly so, for the Mad man's knife had deeply cut his cheek to the point that when he spoke or breathed he could feel the air around him searing through the slice.
"No doubt, milord. What happened out there?" Marcus rested his broad hand on Beau's shoulder while he stood next to the office desk on which Beau sat, being tended.
As the Gamewell physicians mended his wound, carefully cleansing and stitching, Beau relayed, between pauses and gasps, the situation. The description of the fellow who had screamed that Lord Jester was dead was eerily familiar and he marvelled again at how quickly the blade had come. "He had speed, Marcus. Incredible speed. But no direction. If he weren't insane, the guards would have had trouble with him. I sware, I know his face... "
"As it was, I hear they had quite a bit of trouble indeed. Two of them suffered injuries. They had to chain the fellow before they took him to the Lady Jester. And she, in her fashion, insisted on having him unchained."
Beau started to his feet, ripping out the last two stitches that had been sewn. "She what!? OW!!" He looked and saw the needle still in the doctor's hand, reddened floss dangling from it. He allowed them to subdue him so that the precision stitches could be finished and the wound washed again in a healing salve that was absorbed in moments.
"I should be there with her. She shouldn't be in a room with that mad man loose!"
"Indeed, milord. She sent for you as soon as this has been tended. But she wanted to speak with him before you arrived since your mere name seems to enrage him so. Apparently, she has seen him before."
Beau let out a smile that tugged his stitches and made him frown almost as quickly as he'd smiled. "Wise woman, my mother." And then he wondered at the rest and brushed away the doctor's hands.
"This is why she's in charge." Marcus said even as they moved out of the Mayor's office and toward the office of the Mayoress of Gamewell.