The raw scrape of the fiddle cut through the fog of Lysander's fever, a lifeline thrown across a chasm of pain. Orlov the Storm watched him, those pale, unsettling eyes calculating. The question hung in the alley's foul air, sharp as the reek of infection. What do you have?
Lysander tried to form words, to beg or bargain, but his throat was a desert. A violent shiver wracked him, making his teeth clatter against the mud caking his jaw. He had nothing. No coin. No favors to call in. Only the ruined nightshirt, his broken body, and the fading echoes of sterile concertos that meant less than nothing here.
Orlov's thin lips pursed. He made a low, clicking sound with his tongue. "Nothing. Just as I thought. Pretty feathers, hollow bones." He straightened, his long coat swirling around his thin frame like shadow given form. For a terrible moment, Lysander thought he would simply walk away, leaving him to the rats and the creeping rot in his blood. Despair, colder than the mud, seeped into his bones.
Then Orlov sighed, a sound like dry leaves scraping stone. "Useless." He spat the word into the alley filth. "But that noise…" He jerked his head towards the street where the fiddle still cried its raw, untamed song. "That noise bothers me. And dead bodies bring Enforcers sniffing. Bad for business." He crouched again, his movements surprisingly fluid. "Can you stand? Even a little?"
Hope, fragile and desperate, flickered. Lysander tried to push himself up onto his elbows again. Agony exploded across his back, white-hot and blinding. He gasped, collapsing back into the muck, vision swimming with dark spots. A low moan escaped him.
"Didn't think so." Orlov didn't sound surprised. He scanned the alley, his gaze sharp and assessing, lingering on overflowing refuse bins, a rusted iron grate, a pile of discarded, sodden burlap sacks. "Right. This will hurt. Scream if you must. No one cares." He moved behind Lysander.
Before Lysander could process the words, Orlov's surprisingly strong hands gripped him under the arms. He hauled Lysander upwards with a grunt of effort. The world tilted violently. Fire consumed his back, tearing a ragged scream from his throat that echoed off the grimy bricks. His legs buckled, useless. Orlov half-dragged, half-carried him deeper into the alley's gloom, away from the street's indifferent flow, towards a recessed doorway choked with damp straw and broken crates. The stench of rot intensified.
Orlov lowered him, not gently, onto a relatively dry patch of compacted dirt beside the doorway, partially shielded by a leaning stack of worm-eaten timber. The jolt sent fresh waves of nausea crashing through Lysander. He retched, bringing up only bile, acrid and burning.
"Stay." Orlov commanded, the word short and final. He vanished back towards the alley mouth.
Lysander lay panting, trembling uncontrollably. The fever burned hotter now, a furnace beneath his skin. The pain in his back was a constant, sickening throb, radiating outwards, making his limbs heavy and alien. The fiddle's song drifted closer, then faded slightly. He focused on it, clinging to its rough, angry energy as his world narrowed to the patch of damp dirt beneath his cheek, the smell of decay, and the relentless drumbeat of his own failing heart. Silas's face swam in his fever-vision, cold and implacable. Kael's impassive eyes. The crack of the lash.
He heard Orlov returning, his boots scuffing on the stones. He dropped something heavy and metallic beside Lysander with a clang. Lysander forced his eyes open, blinking against the blur.
Orlov knelt. He held a short, wickedly sharp knife, its blade dull in the gloom but honed to a cruel point. Beside it lay a small, grimy leather pouch, a stained metal flask, and… a coil of what looked like thick, waxed gut string. The kind used for instrument strings.
Panic, primal and immediate, surged through the fever haze. "No…" Lysander rasped, trying to scramble away, but his body refused to obey.
"Hold still, fool," Orlov snapped, his voice losing its earlier detachment, sharp with impatience. "Unless you want the rot to eat you alive. This isn't the Orpheum. No soft beds or silk bandages here." He uncorked the flask. The pungent, eye-watering smell of cheap, raw spirits filled the tiny space. Orlov didn't hesitate. He poured a generous amount directly onto the open wounds on Lysander's back.
The world dissolved into pure, white agony. It wasn't fire; it was liquid ice and acid poured onto his raw nerves. Lysander arched off the ground with a strangled scream that ripped his throat raw, his vision whiting out completely. He thrashed, but Orlov's knee pinned his hip to the ground with surprising strength. The pain was absolute, obliterating thought, reducing him to a writhing, screaming animal.
"Cleansing," Orlov stated grimly, ignoring the screams, pouring more spirits. "Best we can do." He tossed the empty flask aside. "Now the knife. Hold him down, girl!"
Lysander, lost in the blinding pain, barely registered the command. Then, a new presence. Smaller, fiercer. Hands, smaller than Orlov's but surprisingly strong, clamped down on his shoulders, pressing him flat against the dirt. He caught a glimpse of wild, dark hair escaping a frayed shawl, intense dark eyes narrowed in concentration, and the faint scent of rosin and woodsmoke cutting through the stench of spirits and decay. It was the fiddler.
"Bite this," a voice said, low and rough, shoving a thick strip of leather, greasy and ancient, between his teeth. Lysander bit down hard, the scream trapped behind the gag as Orlov, without preamble, brought the knife to his back.
There was no delicacy. No precision. Only brutal necessity. Orlov used the knife point to probe the swollen, angry edges of the deepest lacerations. Lysander felt the blade scrape against inflamed tissue, felt pressure as Orlov dug out pockets of thick, foul-smelling pus. Each touch was a fresh explosion of torture. He writhed, muffled screams tearing from his chest, tears streaming down his filthy face. The fiddler held him down, her grip unyielding, her breath coming in short, sharp bursts against his ear. Her presence was an anchor, not of comfort, but of grim, shared endurance.
"Deep," Orlov muttered, his voice tight. "Festering. Need to stitch. Hold him."
He put the knife down. Lysander, drenched in sweat and tears, trembling violently, tried to focus. Orlov picked up the coil of gut string and the knife again. He cut a length of string, then, horrifyingly, dipped the point of the knife back into the spirits flask he'd refilled from somewhere. He held the blade briefly over a small, flickering flame he conjured from a tinderbox – Lysander hadn't even seen him light it. The metal glowed faintly red for a second.
Then Orlov did the same to the end of the gut string, searing it stiff.
"Brace," was all the warning he gave.
The needle was the knife point itself. Orlov used the sharp tip to pierce the ragged edges of Lysander's torn flesh near the top of one of the worst wounds. The pain was a hot, precise spike driving deep. Lysander bucked, a guttural sound tearing past the leather gag. The fiddler bore down, pinning him. Orlov pulled the seared, stiffened end of the gut string through the puncture, then repeated the agonizing process on the other side of the gash, pulling the string taut. A crude, brutal stitch.
Lysander lost count of the punctures. Each one was a separate, exquisite hell. The smell of seared flesh mingled with the spirits and infection. His world shrank to the pressure of the fiddler's hands, the scrape of the gut string through his flesh, and Orlov's low, rhythmic curses. He drifted in and out of consciousness, the fever painting lurid nightmares against the back of his eyelids: Silas conducting the Enforcers with a lash, Kael playing a concerto on his spine, his parents dissolving into discordant notes.
He surfaced again to feel a final, rough knot being tied against his ravaged skin. Orlov sat back on his heels, wiping his knife blade on a filthy rag. His face was sheened with sweat, his pale eyes grimly satisfied. The fiddler released her grip, sitting back on her haunches. She was younger than Lysander expected, perhaps early twenties, her face smudged with dirt but sharp-featured beneath, her dark eyes holding a fierce, wary intelligence. She wiped her hands on her patched trousers, her gaze fixed on Orlov's handiwork.
Orlov poured the last of the spirits over the crudely stitched wounds. The agony was less this time, a duller roar beneath the numb exhaustion. Orlov then scooped handfuls of cold, wet mud from the alley floor and packed it thickly over the stitched area. The shock of cold was almost a relief.
"Mud draws heat," Orlov grunted, wiping his hands on his coat. "Best poultice we've got." He looked at the fiddler. "Brynn. Keep an eye on him. If the fever breaks before dawn, he might live. If not…" He shrugged, the gesture encompassing the alley, the filth, the indifference. "The Dump takes what it's owed."
He gathered his knife, pouch, and the remaining gut string, standing with a groan. He gave Lysander one last, unreadable look. "You owe me, broken bird. Remember that." Then he melted back into the alley's shadows, disappearing as abruptly as he'd arrived.
Silence descended, broken only by Lysander's ragged breathing and the distant chaos of the Crescent street. He lay trembling, the mud cooling on his back, the crude stitches pulling with every shallow breath. He felt flayed, sewn back together with scrap, packed in filth. But the consuming, sickening throb of infection had lessened, replaced by a fierce, localized burning around the stitches and a deep, bone-aching exhaustion.
He turned his head weakly. Brynn still crouched beside him. She held her fiddle loosely in one hand, the bow in the other. Her dark eyes studied him, not with pity, but with a sharp, assessing look, like a scavenger evaluating found materials. She saw the fine linen of his ruined nightshirt, the remnants of aristocratic pallor beneath the grime and fever-flush, the utter brokenness.
"Orlov doesn't waste gut string on corpses," she said finally, her voice low and raspy, like the bow on her strings. "So fight, pretty bird. Fight hard. Or his knife goes dull for nothing." She lifted the fiddle to her chin, the movement practiced and sure. Without another word, she drew the bow across the strings.
The sound wasn't the wild fury of before. It was lower, slower. A deep, resonant thrum that vibrated through the packed earth beneath Lysander. It was a lament, raw and aching, but beneath its sorrow pulsed a fierce, unwavering thread of resilience. It spoke of survival against impossible odds, of enduring pain, of finding breath when the world tried to choke it out. It was the sound of the Crescent itself. It was the sound of his own shattered body fighting the poison in its veins.
Lysander closed his eyes. He didn't have the strength to speak, to thank her, to explain. He focused on the deep, resonant thrum of the cello string vibrating through the wood, through the air, through the mud packed against his wounds. It wasn't a cage. It was a lifeline, rough and strong, pulling him back from the edge of the abyss Orlov had named the Dump. He let the sound fill the hollow spaces the pain and betrayal had carved inside him, and clung to it as the fever raged and the alley's shadows deepened. The fight, Brynn's music seemed to say, had only just begun.