A glance at my arm confirmed it hadn’t been sawed off. Yet. It lay strapped to a brace of wood. Jagged lines of stitches closed the flesh over the bone. Infection could still arise and require amputation. Or worse, it could kill me.

“What is my diagnosis?” I asked into the empty hush. “Broken arm and ribs?”

Above me, Ashley nodded and gently ghosted his fingers across my forehead, his mouth wrapping around the word, Concussion.

“Anything else broken?”

No, he said without sound.

“And my ears?”

When he didn’t answer, it was Priest who shook his head, his expression grim in the lantern light. Then he started talking, his features growing harder and meaner-looking with every word.

“What? I can’t…” I couldn’t even hear my own voice. “What are you saying?”

He made a face that usually accompanied a low growl. He was frustrated that I couldn’t hear him. Frustrated for me.

“The doctors can’t fix my hearing,” I said.

His nostrils flared, confirming my assumption. My heart sank with sadness and anger, but I was too tired to cry.

I’d lost my hearing when the plank of wood slammed into my head. Was it a brain injury? Or something torn inside my ears? Perhaps it would heal on its own. My mind seemed too lucid and focused for the damage to be brain related.

Or so I thought until I woke again that night.

Within hours, I plunged into feverish confusion. Lethargy sank into my muscles. Chills wracked my body, and fuzzy vision disoriented the world around me.

Infection had set in.

48

I succumbed to delirium.

Time slipped away. Conscious feeling spooled in starts and stops. The doctors hovered at the edges of the murky silence, conversing and administrating medicine, but I couldn’t make sense of it. Couldn’t concentrate enough to read lips or body language.

Someone had moved me to the bed in my cabin. Drenched in sweat and confusion, I was given draughts of laudanum for the pain and blood-letting treatments to purge the infection from my veins.

The bleeding and opium rendered my incoherency worse. I lost days.

Either Priest or Ashley was always stretched out beside me on the mattress. Always. Even if I couldn’t see or hear them, I felt them. A hand in my hair, fingertips on my skin, lips against my neck, comforting, reassuring. I never slept alone.

Their constant presence gilded my darkest hours.

Amid intervals of fogginess, I found new gifts from Priest waiting for me on the table beside the bed. Severed fingers and toes. Two ears. An entire foot. Then the stump of another. Most of the extremities had been flayed to the bone—likely before they’d been sawed off.

As the body parts arrived, I wondered if my arm would meet the same fate. I checked it often, relieved to find it still attached and lying beside me on its brace.