Valiant Read Free Page B

breath puffed out before me. The garret was dark. One large window let in a pool of light that didn’t dare spread beyond my place at the top of the stairs. There weren’t rooms, just rope strung between hooks in the wall and a pillar to curtain off a sleeping area.
    This was my new home. I’d have cried, but I was too angry for tears.
    For the next hour, servants wrestled beds, cutting tables, and trunks up the stairs, while Father shouted instructions.
    But it was Father’s silence, after the servants left, that scared me. He stood in the middle of the dirty room, his hands pressed against his head.
    “Father?”
    He didn’t respond.
    “Did you hurt yourself yesterday when you—”
    He jerked his head to look at me. “See to the fabric trunk, Saville!”
    I didn’t move.
    “Now!” he barked.
    I shoved the trunk against the far wall, scraping it across the floor’s rough planks.
    “Careful, Saville!”
    “The fabric is
in
the trunk!” I shouted. “Pushing it across the floor won’t hurt your precious cloth.”
    Father took a step toward me. “I told you—!”
    The words slurred in his mouth and he stumbled. Something was wrong—horribly wrong. A great length of fear unfurled inside me.
    Father slapped his fingers over his mouth, as if he could force it to work. When he looked up at me, I saw fear in his eyes, too. He tried to speak as I helped him to his narrow bed. Halves of words tumbled out of a mouth he couldn’t control.
    “Father, I’m going for a physician, do you hear me? I’m going to get help.”
    My terror made the next hour seem like two lifetimes. It felt like months to find the physician, years to convince him to follow me.
    I didn’t think Father would be alive when I returned.
    I dragged the doctor to Father’s bed. “Do something!”
    The doctor held a candle close to Father’s face, pushing back his eyelids as if he could somehow look into his head, then moved the candle back and forth, ordering Father to watch it.
    He couldn’t.
    I saw no sign of the man I’d known. Father just lay there. I didn’t even know if he could see us.
    “Apoplexy,” murmured the doctor.
    “What?” I asked.
    The doctor waved his hand dismissively. “Apoplexy, the paralysis that comes when someone has been struck by God.”
    “Struck by God …?”
    “What else could the old doctors call it? It’s an imbalanceof bodily humors. Bile builds up in the body, pressing against the brain. Finally, it causes great damage. A victim loses his speech, the ability to move, even.”
    I looked down at Father, his eyes wide and unblinking.
    “But what do we
do
?” I asked.
    He shrugged. “Some doctors drill into the head to relieve the pressure. Blood follows the bile, you see, and when the blood is allowed to drain away, the patient sometimes improves.”
    I nearly gagged. “Who would even try something so awful?”
    “Katar has done great work with prisoners in Yullan, though fewer than half survived the procedure.”
    “Fewer than half survived having someone drill into their skulls? I wonder why.”
    For the first time, the doctor noticed that I was not pleased with him. His eyes narrowed as he looked around the room. “It’s a good thing this happened to a tailor—”
    “
The
tailor,” I corrected, thinking of Father’s sign.
    “You’ll need fabric, lots of it,” the doctor said. “You’ll have to diaper him like a child.”
    He seemed to take some satisfaction from my horror.
    “You don’t want this bed ruined, do you? Change him often, girl, or it will create sores.”
    “I’ll take care of him,” I said. The doctor wouldn’t see me cringe again. “Then what?”
    He glared at me, disappointed by my reaction. “He either dies, or he recovers.”
    “Recovers? How long will that take?”
    Another shrug. “He may be able to speak again. He may be able to walk. Or he may just stay there, in the bed.”
    I looked down at Father.
Time to recover or to die …

    Later that night, I