The Tyrant's Tomb

I sat up on my elbows. I was bare-chested. My wound had been rebandaged,
so I couldn’t tell how bad it looked underneath, but the pain had
subsided to a dull ache. Tendrils of purple infection still snaked from my
belly, up my chest, and down my arms, but their color had faded to a faint
lavender.
“Whatever you did obviously helped,” I said.
“We’ll see.” Pranjal’s frown was not encouraging. “I tried a special
concoction, a kind of magical equivalent to broad-spectrum antibiotics. It
required a special strain of Stellaria media—magical chickweed—that
doesn’t grow in Northern California.”
“It grows here now,” Meg announced.
“Yes,” Pranjal agreed with a smile. “I may have to keep Meg around.
She’s pretty handy for growing medicinal plants.”
Meg blushed.
Buster still hadn’t moved or blinked. I hoped Pranjal occasionally put a
spoon under the unicorn’s nostrils to make sure he was still breathing.
“At any rate,” Pranjal continued, “the salve I used wasn’t a cure. It will
only slow down your…your condition.”
My condition. What a wonderful euphemism for turning into a walking
corpse.
“And if I do want a cure?” I asked. “Which, by the way, I do.”
“That’s going to take more powerful healing than I’m capable of,” he
confessed. “God-level healing.”
I felt like crying. I decided Pranjal needed to work on his bedside
manner, perhaps by having a better collection of miraculous over-the-counter
cures that did not require divine intervention.
“We could try more horn shavings,” Meg suggested. “That’s fun. I mean,
that might work.”
Between Meg’s anxiousness to use the cheese grater and Buster’s hungry
stare, I was starting to feel like a plate of pasta. “I don’t suppose you have
any leads on available healing gods?”
“Actually,” Pranjal said, “if you’re feeling up to it, you should get
dressed and have Meg walk you to the principia. Reyna and Frank are
anxious to talk to you.”
Meg took pity on me.