He refused them this entertainment, though the woman’s touch was as merciless as any torment devised by Hades.
She wiped her palms on her skirts and eyed him sidelong. "I am called Othra," she said, as if carving her name in granite.
Her slate eyes sparkled with a humor so dry it threatened to ignite. "Healer, midwife, fixer of all things soft and leaking. This will not be gentle."
Apollo considered a retort, something barbed and dazzling, but found himself caught by the steadiness of her stare.
’She sees me like a frog sees the fly, something to be taken apart.’
He nodded, which cost him another flare of pain. Othra grinned, revealing teeth more wolf than woman, and set about her work.
She barked orders at the children, who scattered, and then drew her implements from a pouch stitched with runes. The contents were simple, almost insultingly so.
A bone-handled knife, a pot of sticky resin, a wad of dried moss, cords of sinew, a flask that promised only agony.
Othra pressed the flask into Apollo’s hand. "Drink," she said. "For the pain, and to keep your tongue from wagging too much."
It was not the honeyed nectar of Olympus, nor even the mulled wine of a prosperous city. It tasted of scorched roots and regret, and left a raw scorch that ran all the way to his toes.
For a terrible moment, he wondered if it was poison, or if Othra simply enjoyed watching her patients squirm. She gave him no time to ponder, the blade was already slicing through the skin, brisk as opening fruit.
The world went momentarily white. Apollo, who had witnessed the sundering of cities and the birth of stars, fixed his eyes on the strange, unyielding face of Othra, refusing to grant her, or the mortals gathered, the spectacle of a scream.
The knife worked beneath his ribs, deft and merciless, and he felt the peculiar liberation of pressure, the slither of something foreign leaving his body. Blood surged, hot and immediate, pouring over his hip and onto the packed earth.
Othra clucked her tongue, working the moss into the wound with the same economy as a scribe copying out a familiar curse. "You don’t bleed like a man, but you heal like one," she said, voice pitched low for his ears alone.
"What are you, Lio? What brings you to crawl at the edge of our world?"
He managed, through teeth gritted tight enough to splinter, "Curiosity. And the enduring stupidity of hope."
She laughed, not unkindly, and set about cauterizing the wound with a sliver of sun-heated metal pulled from the fire. The smell was obscene, Apollo watched the curl of smoke rise from his own flesh, and for the first time felt not horror, but a kind of detached interest.
’So this is suffering, unadorned by fate or prophecy.’
When it was done, Othra bound him in linen and bark, tracing a sigil over the dressing that prickled with faint, familiar energy. The pain ebbed, replaced by the recollection of ancient songs, snatches of the old tongue, threading harmony into agony.
The other mortals drifted out, eyes averted and feet avoiding the black blood slick, but Othra lingered, wiping her hands on a scrap of rag and regarding him with a raptor’s patience.
"Can you stand?" she asked, and before he could muster a dignified refusal, she slung his arm over her bony shoulder and levered him upright.
He balked at letting a woman.. let alone one smaller than certain breeds of ram, bear his weight, but found the alternative, collapsing face down into his own ichor, unpalatable.
They shuffled through the mossy threshold, his wounded side jolting with each step, down a slope where smoky sunlight filtered through the teeth of the pine forest.
Othra’s hut was not the sort of place one discovered by accident, it was wedged into the roots of a dead yew, its walls wattled with bone-white reeds, its door a repurposed shrine tablet that bore the faded, vandalized likeness of some forgotten saint.
The air inside pressed close and hot, heavy with the scent of simmering poultices and old grief.
Othra eased him onto a pallet layered with sheep pelts and dried ferns. He caught his breath, taking in the interior.
Bundles of herbs strung from rafters, a shelf lined with clay vessels, a cracked mirror leaning drunkenly against the wall, reflecting his own face.
Bloodless, eyes sunk and burning. Othra’s eyes, he noticed for the first time, were a queer shade between slate and stormcloud, more mineral than liquid, and her lashes so pale they looked singed away.
The left eye drooped at the outer corner, lending her every glance a slantwise calculation. On her cheek, just below the bone where a warrior’s helmet would rest, was a seam of old scar, as if someone had tried to split her face and failed.
He watched as she moved about the room.
First to the shelf, where she scraped a spoonful of amber resin into a cup, then to the hearth, where a kettle, blackened and lopsided, hung over a blue-tongued flame. She poured water, the steam leaping up as though it, too, wished to escape the confines of this place.
"I will not ask your true name again," she said, not turning. "It is a small village. Most who come here do so for one of two reasons: to disappear, or to ransom the dead."
She dropped a twist of herb into the cup. The scent was sharp, resinous, astringent as betrayal. "But you are neither kind. You have the hands of a harper, the feet of a runner, the stare of a thing that remembers better times."
Apollo tried to muster a compliment. "You see much for a healer."
"Pain opens the eyes," she replied, setting the cup beside him. "Drink. Not for the wound, but for the fever. There is a sickness running through the valley."
She rolled up the sleeves of her tunic, revealing arms corded with sinew, burn marks striping the skin in parallel crescents. "Started with the spring lambs, as it always does. Now it takes the children first, and the old. Soon it will take the rest."
She unstoppered another flask, this time pouring a measure into her own callused palm, rubbing it between her fingers before daubing it onto Apollo’s wound.
"You need not fear it. Your malady is older, and less contagious."
The taste of the tea was an assault, resin and vinegar, undertones of rot, a bitterness that snagged his tongue and refused to let go. Apollo drank regardless, holding Othra’s gaze, refusing to submit to her scrutiny.
He had seen healers before, on battlefields, in firelit halls, beside the sickbeds of doomed heroes, but none with hands so quick to cut away the parts that could not be saved.
She watched as he drank, arms folded, and finally settled herself on a stool opposite. For a time, they listened to the rain.
Othra worked a blade between her nails, prying out the dirt and sap with surgical precision, while Apollo contemplated the ceiling’s slow and rhythmic drip.
He grew aware, gradually, of the absence within him. Where once there had been a sun.
Clean, inextinguishable, forever rising, now there was only the faintest glow, the memory of radiance. He could feel the world pressing in, hungry, unconcerned with what had been lost.
Apollo wondered what the gods dreamt of, if they dreamed at all, or if, once cast down, even dreams proved a luxury.
"You will want to sleep," Othra said, at last. "When you wake, if you wake, you will tell me what you are running from. I will have payment, one way or the other."
He considered the threat, measured its weight, and found it almost comforting. "I have nothing worth your trouble."
Othra snorted. "Then you will owe me. I collect debts with interest. Ask anyone." She gathered her tools, arranged them in a hessian bundle with the same care she’d used on his flesh, and turned back at the door.
"I will send the boy with broth in the morning," she added, then left him alone with the fire.
Sleep was not a voluntary act. It seized him, dragged him under long before he let the cup slip from his hand.
The darkness that greeted Apollo was not the gentle velvet of oblivion but a world of shapes and memory, burned into him as stars cling to the night.
He saw, briefly, his old self. Radiant and despised, torching the world with each act of kindness. He saw the face of the father who had thrown him down, and the mother who had wept at the edge of the heavens as he fell.
Mostly, he saw the faces of the mortals he’d scorned from afar, now so close that their breath mingled with his own.
He woke once, in the deep blue before dawn, to the sound of the boy Othra had sent, the one with the missing tooth, setting down a bowl of broth by his head.
The boy watched him for a moment, uncertain, then whispered, "I thought you would look different. Or be dead."