I steeple my fingers over my grimace and take a deep breath. "Leesh, I'm afraid you might have to draw some aggro from Piper's mysterious patron."
She sighs, but nods. "Because I call myself by my real name here, they'll probably find me anyway."
"You may need to run interference," Sekhmet says.
"At the very least, we need to determine their intentions," Hikaru replies, hand over his chin, finger stroking the beginning of wispy whiskers. "We know they have... call it Earthside information, but that's all we know."
"And Earth has as wide an assortment as Mundus?" Siobhan more states than asks, one side of her lip curling up in amusement despite herself.
Hikaru half-bows to her. "As I said. Not nearly enough info to speculate."
"And if, in my opinion, they mean us well?" Alesha asks.
"Then we would be very relieved to meet them," I say, tilting my head and ears at her.
Sekhmet snorted her agreement. "You get why we're paranoid."
"I do," Alesha says. "I'll talk to Piper tomorrow, play coy about the other names on the list. For now, let's take our siesta, and then finish up the job we started."
I raised my glass of the nearly soft drink I ordered called small beer; I could, apparently, drink to that.
Humberto Quinyone, their patriarch, has a hunched gait and close-shaved stubble, his mouth curled into a sneer at the stubborn barley he's trimming for the harvest with a sickle. He leads others, from 8 to his eighty, in tending to several patches of fields; here, barley; there, rye; here and there a bit of wheat, some turnips, whatever grows well in the small and scattered patches his clan has to work with.
And where Humberto leads his family works all the more efficiently to match his example; he works with the shocking speed born of experience, but the youngest of his family have no such excuse for nearly matching him, step for step.
"It seems you have Aurora's blessing, Senor Quinyone," I say. And it does; to inspire confidence and competence with leadership from the front is Her textbook Least Boon.
"Why are you bothering an old man at work, Adventurer?" he grumbles.
"What the Contessa demands I must obey," I said. "But also to see how a godbotherer might help your family, Senor."
He laughs, eyes narrowed, posture defensive. "We've plenty of preachers here. What have you got that can help that they haven't?"
"Time," Hikaru answers, shrugging.
He opens his mouth, then puts a hand over it, stroking his beard. Thinking.
"Why spend it on us, then?" he says, getting back to work. The other clan members, who had stopped to stare at us, don't all return to work, but most of them do.
I shrug. "Because if the problem we're chasing decides to be your problem, we want to solve them."
Alesha adds, sotto voce, "And because we can tell when someone is bearing their pain well, and don't think they deserve to be in pain."
She gestures, subtly, pointing the crossguard of her sword towards one of the stronger men with his thick mustache, muscular arms, and powerful - if large - belly. Who I can see after Alesha points him out is favoring his left foot, unable to exert all of his considerable strength.
Humberto turns on her, raising his scythe hand. "How dare you -"
"Ser, we are offering you my healing magic," I say very quickly - very softly. "I don't know what you think we are doing, ser, but I really do wish you a fine and profitable Jubilee year, and this might be how you get it. Ser."
He looks at me, then at him. At me, then at Alesha, then at him.
Then he sighs. "Baltasar, please show our - guests - to the house. We can finish without you if they keep you till sundown."
He glares at him - his grimace more afraid than enraged as he approaches him, tries to argue with him. "Papa, I can still -"
"Aurora's tits, boy, stop torturing yourself and get off that damn foot," he says - and there's no cruelty to it. "The vixen thinks she can help, let her try."
"Vixen?" I say, flattening my ears. "Why don't you just skip to - pulling my nose off if you're going to try that?"
The patriarch is so shocked by this that there's a moment of silence, before his son Baltasar laughs. "Gods. Some village idiot's disappointed there wasn't a muzzle under it, then?"
Hikaru blinks, then shrugs. "The youngest of the Kosmas children."
That gets more laughter. "Not so much higher than us after all!" he says. "Alright, vixen, lead on and tell me what else I'd call you."
"Given my nom de guerre, I'm not sure I have room to be offended," I mutter. Then, out loud, "Call me Deedee."
He makes a good show of hiding it, but Baltasar's limp was obvious every step of the way back to the Quinyone house to his settling in a chair at the kitchen table. It's larger and longer than the home of the Kosmas family, but not as much; it must be cramped, and cold, when all of them are sleeping - even with the second-floor beds for the married couples above.
"I'll need to touch the area to treat it," I say - I apologize for, in advance. "Let me know if there's pain, and what kind."
He nods, grunting as he takes off a work boot, dense woolen socks, finer linen socks. I take a swollen and discolored ankle in my hand as he takes off the other and his grunt - and hissed-in breath - is sharper, more painful.
"Bruising, swelling. No outer wound. Doesn't look like it needs to be drained. What's the quality of the pain?" I ask.
"Quality?" he mutters. "It's - like being stabbed and on fire at once."
I start my chanting, channeling cool Breath and wrapping healing wind around my arms and palms. When next I apply my fingertips to the wound, Baltasar sighs and slumps in his chair as if he'd just gotten a shot of morphine.
I may have given him the equivalent high just by taking the pain away. Curing the bruise and setting the sprained bone is the work of seconds for a warpriest like me. As I set the bone and the nitrogen in his ankle and heel pops, the thought occurs to me that I may be the only chiropractor from Earth who isn't a bullshit artist and I grin.
He rolls his heel, staring in disbelief. "Holy mother of the wheat, how -"
"Sir, I fight monsters for a living," I say. "And help my company recover from such adventures afterward. This kind of healing is nothing compared to closing a sword wound, or the frostbitten punctures of an ice spear."
"Or curing the poison and closing the wounds of a beast's fangs," Hikaru says, frowning, eyes snapping up from watching my technique to Balthasar's eyes. "Tell me, how did you get that injury?"
Balthasar leaned back and sighed. "Some beast digging at our beets and cabbages a few nights ago," he said. "I thought I brained it with a spade, but it lashed out with - something whiplike, and with longer reach than it had a right to."
"Something like a fox with a mane?" Alesha asked.
"Something like. Yes, foxlike until the tail stretched out," he said. Then, after a moment's pause, he added: "That's what you're after, isn't it? You're here after those beasts."
Hikaru's smile is thin-spread over his face, without much for the corners of his eyes. "Imagine more of your clan disabled by such things, during a Jubilee year, no less. Yes, we're here to stop more attacks like that."
Alesha folds her arms. "The Quinyone's aren't the only family being assailed by these things, but where they annoy the others, they could ruin yours. Imagine more of your brothers off their feet for the harvest -"
"-Or more of our sisters who cannot weave wool or press curds while the sheep eat our fodder, aye, you need not invite the serpents to dine with us." He sits up, testing his ankle.
"It wouldn't surprise me if you need a day to get back in practice with that foot," I say. "It's cured, but you need to re-adjust your balance."
"What's a day to the months it could have been?" Baltasar says. "How can I thank thee enough for this blessing, Priestess?"
I take a deep breath. "Keep us informed about the family's fortunes, and call us in to heal anyone too injured or sick to work. Especially let us know if there are more monsters running around in your fields. We were sent by the Contessa specifically to deal with them and their source."
"I doubt my old man will object to that," he says mildly. "Not after all the hours of toil you've saved him. But still, let us thank ye proper come Gratitide next week."
I blink. "Gratitide?" I ask.
"Aye," he says, puzzled. "I'm sure the heralds will come to announce Our Lord's generous contribution to it, but I'll see if we can welcome you to our table."
Alesha puts a hand on my shoulder. "We would gladly break bread with you - let us think on an appropriate contribution to the holiday."
"It is around that time, of course it is," Hikaru says - but he's frowning. "We may need to report to Lord Orlando - and that may involve an invitation to his table - but we will make what appearance we can."
He rolls his eyes. "Sneak us a pigeon or whatever fool trifles he spends our coin on, then."
"He may not even object to that," I say, pasting on a smile. "Now let's talk again to your dad - we all have a lot of work to do."
