I awoke in the dark to a smelly rag pressed firmly across my mouth and nose. I struggled, taking a deep breath – because that’s what you do when you have something over your face when you first wake – and kicked out. Someone grunted. I sucked the smell, a combination of sour mash, rosemary, and something spicy like ginger root, into my chest and nose and I could feel it swirling around in my body.
I struggled to rise but many bodies, it seemed, held me down and sat on my flailing arms.
The smell overwhelmed my thinking and I lay still, not unconscious, but unresponsive. I hated this feeling. I heard them rustling around in my bags and in Torgood’s bags. Where was Torgood? Had they knocked him out using the same “physicker’s assistant”?
The smell and feeling clung to me and I remembered the burning on my arm and the pain in my head and someone singing to me as she tended my wounds. Her voice had been very familiar and comforting. I’d always assumed it had been Jeslynn but I realized now it hadn’t been.
“Storm god’s balls, he heavy,” a man grunted and my upper body lifted. Someone tied a blindfold over my eyes and I panicked. A memory of a burning beam, falling from the ceiling and hitting me in the face and burning my eyes made me cry out and thrash about.
“Get him, sit…damnation. Here, tie him.”
“Torgood,” I croaked, but got no answer. They stuffed the smelly rag in my mouth and I slipped into delirium.