Chapter Text
Daniil Dankovsky had never felt any particular way towards bulls. However, after less than a day in that damned provincial town, he was ready to wish every one of the creatures erased from the face of the earth.
Of course he had expected livestock there. But as a distant reality, pastoral ambience – lowing in the fields, maybe a ripe scent wafting in occasionally when the breeze turned the wrong way. Not plodding through the streets, celebrated by the locals with banners and music and, according to one of the few who would stop celebrating long enough to explain the madness to him, ritual slaughter soon to come. The town seemed pathologically obsessed with bulls, far beyond their status as a source of food and income – to the point where, when one of them strayed from the parade line just to shove Daniil in the street, most of the witnesses took its side.
Never mind the fact he hadn’t been even remotely in its way, as some of them claimed. Never mind that he tried, still, to be civil, grumbling only under his breath as he scooped up the spilled contents of his carpetbag from the filthy cobblestone. He only cursed loud enough for the bull to conceivably hear when he tried to stand and his right ankle buckled beneath him.
Only in agony, but god forbid he hurt a bull’s feelings. Never mind that it had an entire parade in which to take solace, while he had a single smirking man who helped him to his feet but refused to just take him back to the Stillwater the way he requested.
“Doc should take a look at that,” he said, taking advantage of the fact Daniil couldn’t stand without his support to turn him eastward down the street, opposite of where he’d wanted to go. “Don’t worry, he’s not going to put you down like a broken-legged bull. You look too lean and stringy to be shipped off to the cannery anyways.”
In a backwards settlement like that, Daniil almost couldn’t discount the risk of being butchered and eaten. If they loved bulls so much more than outsiders, which were more likely to end up on dinner plates? He declined to give his defiant escort any ideas in that regard, and not only because his next step, stumbling over a streamer left lying in the street, left him breathless with pain.
“I can think of at least one bull I’d like to see put down,” he said, once he could do so without letting any undignified sounds slip through the grit of his teeth. “It’s not the most conventional treatment for a sprained ankle, but I’m sure it would make me feel better.”
“It’s only the Kin that’ll follow him out to the barrow,” his escort said, as if that both clarified and settled things. “They’ve got a real taste for blood. Might turn your soft stomach.”
“You know nothing about me or my stomach,” Daniil grumbled. “And do you mean to say that-”
“City-bred, fed only the milk of good manners since you first sucked your mother’s teat?” The other man hauled him along with mockingly cheerful disregard for whether he could keep his feet under him or just dragged them behind. Up and over the bridge that spanned a substantial tributary of the local river, into a markedly humbler section of the town – its street dirt instead of stone, its yards cluttered with laundry lines and water barrels and tanning hides. “’Course, it seems you’ve swallowed at least a few bitter curses along the way. You won’t make many friends around here by spitting them at bulls.”
“Should I have thanked it instead? It attacked me completely without provocation.”
“Attacked?” the man scoffed. “If it had attacked you, there wouldn’t be enough of you left to put in a can. No, that was just a friendly nudge.”
“A friendly nudge that might leave me unable to walk properly for weeks. Damn it all,” Daniil muttered more to himself, stared more at the dirt street than the humble houses they passed by. “As if today wasn’t already...”
A complete disappointment, a waste of the desperate journey he had made halfway across the country. It seemed wonders truly did exist in that town, exemplified by the weightlessly elaborate tower hanging over its western horizon, but whether Simon Kain’s rumoured longevity was among them, he seemed doomed never to discover. The Kains had dismissed him utterly, deeming him unworthy of their secrets by some esoteric standard they had never bothered to explain. He hadn’t even had the chance to lay eyes on Simon himself.
He couldn’t return to the Capital empty-handed. Couldn’t betray the trust his colleagues had placed in him. But if the keepers and benefactors of the town’s miracles wouldn’t so much as speak to him, what else could he do? Who else could he-
“I’m sure some of them would call it a blessing,” his escort said, hurrying him through the wooden gate of what must have been the doctor’s house. “Having your ankle twisted by one of Bos Turokh’s own emissaries on earth? Who knows? Maybe it’ll mean good luck for you somehow.”
Bos Turokh – he had heard that name murmured and cheered and called out in what could have been supplication several times across the festive crowd. A local deity? Of course the town’s worship would be yoked to bulls as well.
“The only way I could count myself lucky at this point is if I never see another bull again,” he said. “Even I could die a happy man then.”
The man helping him up the doctor’s steps made a strange sound, a scoff or chuckle stifled in the collar of his coat. Daniil managed the ascent only by leaning on him more heavily than ever, and without enough breath left over to ask what was so damn funny.
Whatever it was, it kept his escort smirking even as he knocked heartily on the door, as if this were all just good sport for him. Part of the day’s festivities, an intermission to let the audience stretch their legs before the main event. The strains of music and, yes, the ripe stench of cattle carried on the breeze even here; however far Daniil had to detour, sprained ankle be damned, he would avoid the whole circus on his way back to the Stillwater. He had seen enough bulls to last a lifetime, smelled even more, and besides-
The door swung open. Hoofed feet creaked on the floorboards just inside.
A bull’s heavy feet and furred legs. Daniil raised his head in incredulity bordering on outrage – had that bastard really dragged him halfway across town just to reach the punchline of a bad joke? – and his thoughts slipped like a gramophone’s needle losing its place in a record’s grooves. Hanging in silence as he took in the swell of those legs to muscular, bipedal thighs, clothed in the same glossy chestnut fur and a sturdy leather kilt, and above...
Above, bovine features ceded entirely to the human, to the leather-clad trunk and brawny arms of an improbably large man. He had stooped to peer through the doorway, and Daniil could still only just see the base of the powerful horns that curved from the sides of his head.
Below them, his ears, too, were bovine and furred, twitching along with his nose as he took in the sight (and smell, and sound?) of them. He...
He couldn’t be. A contradiction, an impossible thing standing right there in front of Daniil, frowning like any man whose time was being wasted.
“What is it, Grief?” he asked, in a voice that would have carried as resonantly as any bull’s if he had raised it. “I don’t have time for games today. They’re going to be waiting for me.”
A bull-man for the bull festival? Daniil’s mind spun like a silent record; more than his sprained ankle made him unsteady on his feet. With every blink, he waited for reality to correct itself somehow, to make what he seemed to be seeing into something more sensible, more possible. But the man in front of him continued to be half bull, and the man at his side chattered away as if that were nothing remarkable.
“Our big-city guest had a run-in with one of your cousins. Turned his ankle. I told him it could have been worse, but you know that type. Soft as overripe apples – and they bruise about as easily, too.”
“I-” Daniil started, but couldn’t bring himself to finish with anything as mundane as -told you to take me back to the Stillwater. Not with this creature beyond the ken of modern science standing before him.
A creature of myth, though he glared like any other man being gawked at. “I’m not a tourist attraction,” he said.
“Of course not,” Daniil’s escort – Grief, apparently, which suited how much he’d been giving Daniil – said, still all smirking amiability. “You’re our dutiful doctor. And it really was a nasty turn he took. See?”
He stepped away from Daniil’s side with no more warning than that, no time for Daniil to shift the weight that fell on his throbbing ankle. He bit off an undignified yelp as his leg began to buckle, and just that quickly, the bull-man’s hand was wrapped around his elbow. Faster than any ordinary physician’s instinct to catch a falling patient, holding him up with what looked to be no effort whatsoever.
“Fine,” he huffed. “But don’t think I believe for a second that you brought him here out of the goodness of your heart.”
“I wouldn’t insult your intelligence like that, friend,” Grief said, tipping him a lopsided salute as he stepped down from the porch. “We all know you’re smarter than the average bull. Not quite as good-looking, though.”
Leaving Daniil there, just like that, with the hand of the impossible on him, close enough to smell both the leather that bull-man wore and his living bovine scent. To feel the heat of his body, no taxidermic mockery posed in a circus sideshow, but truly alive, wholly, seamlessly real, and still frowning at him like the ill-timed guest he was.
“I’ll get you settled on the couch and give you something for the pain,” he said, pulling Daniil across the threshold with what might have been a polite amount of strength in a smaller body. But his size made it inarguable, irresistible, more like being moved by a flood current than a man. “After that, I’ll have to leave you here to rest for a while. I have duties today that can’t wait.”
“Duties,” Daniil echoed, a dip of that mental needle, trying to catch on coherent thought. He couldn’t gape dumbly at this creature forever. He was a scientist facing the unknown, the incredible, and his duty was to learn everything he could from the experience. “What duties would those be? What...if you don’t mind my asking, what are you, precisely? I’ve never seen a cr- a man like you before.”
“I do mind,” the bull-man said, leading him down a rustic wooden hallway just as quickly as his ankle could bear. From that half-step behind, Daniil had an excellent view of the tail that protruded from a slit in the back of his kilt, long and tasselled and twitching with unmistakable agitation. “My name is Artemy Burakh. Like he said, I’m the doctor here. That’s all you need to know.”
No, no, it absolutely wasn’t. Daniil’s fingers itched with the urge to reach out and touch that tail, to feel for himself whether it was as real and attached as it looked. The bull-man’s, Burakh’s, hooves clomped heavily across the floorboards, all the disparate parts of his body working together in what seemed like perfectly natural sync. His horns were even broader than they had looked from the doorway, and tapered to pristine white, eviscerating points.
“My interest is strictly professional, I assure you,” Daniil said. “I’m a doctor myself, a research scientist from the capital. I-”
Burakh stopped short between one clomping, creaking step and the next. Tendons flexed in his powerful neck, but his grip remained only tight enough to propel Daniil forward when he began moving again.
“While you’re under this roof, the only thing you are is my patient,” he said. “That means you do as I say and keep your questions out of my personal life.”
His bedside manner certainly left much to be desired. But before Daniil could decide whether it was worth the risk of alienating that taciturn marvel of undiscovered science by telling him so, Burakh pulled him to another, more decisive halt in an alcove standing off the main hall. There, a couch as quaintly weathered as everything else about the house promised respite at last from the jarring and dragging of his damaged ankle.
“You can rest here,” Burakh said. “I’ll get you that painkiller.”
With that, he stomped off down the hall. There might have been no other way for him to move, considering his sheer, incredible size and the vocal nature of the house’s floorboards, but he did seem to be making a particular show of it, and his tail lashed at the back of his kilt with even more agitated energy than before.
Daniil sank down on the couch only once he was out of sight. It seemed he had been far too hasty in diagnosing his journey as wasted. Not all of that town’s scientific marvels were locked in the gated garden of the Kains’ approval. Burakh was no supposedly immortal man, but still...
His steps creaked with even more thunderous weight on the floor above. He was still a trove of unexplored mysteries; it seemed to be a busy, stressful day for him, not the sort where he would be at all inclined to entertain out-of-town guests or their questions, but if Daniil could find a better way to approach him-
Burakh returned at the same stomping, nearly stampeding pace that had carried him away, with a pillow tucked under one muscular arm and a bottle curled tight in his fist. When he loosened his grip on it, it proved to have no label, no reassurance to offer concerning the garishly yellow liquid that sloshed within.
“Keep that leg elevated,” Burakh told him, tossing the pillow onto the couch beside him. “And drink this. It’ll help with the pain.”
“What is it?” Daniil asked as Burakh pressed the bottle – warm from having been held, or by nature? – into his hands.
“Twyre,” Burakh said. “I have to leave now. They’ll be waiting for me.”
All those ill-timed questions filled Daniil’s throat and itched in his fingers. But crowding someone who didn’t recognize their own importance to scientific progress was, as he had learned on more than one regrettable occasion, a sure way to alienate them completely. He could choose his moment, especially situated as he was in that scientific marvel’s house. Burakh would hardly be able to avoid him forever.
“Of course,” he said. “Thank you.”
Burakh narrowed his eyes at a capitulation he clearly hadn’t expected. But only for a moment before he must have felt time’s whip at his back again, driving him down the hall and out the front door.
Once the opportunity to observe his hybrid legs in motion had ended, Daniil settled into a sigh and the couch’s deep, broken-in comfort. That stunning discovery had been its own sort of painkiller, a potent distraction from his injury. But without Burakh to study, the throbbing ache below his knee took its place again at the centre of his awareness. He tugged up his trouser leg to assess the swelling, which was already starkly apparent even through a black sock’s camouflage and promised to be far worse soon.
In a practical sense, it would have been better for him to return to the Stillwater before swelling and stiffness made movement even less feasible than it already was. But it seemed the man who had so kindly insisted on dragging him to this rustic, leather-reeking end of town instead had been right about it being a stroke of luck. He could almost hope it would be properly impossible for him to walk, at least for a day or two. Long enough for him to make a better effort at plying Burakh with the possibility of great scientific advancement – or fame, if that was more to his tastes.
For the time being, he tugged the cork from the bottle and took a careful whiff of its contents. The scent was more delicate than its colour suggested, less like the Capital’s medicine than the breeze that had cooled the morning air when he’d first stepped from the train. Twyre...Ms. Yan had mentioned something about that, hadn’t she? A local herb soon to be in full bloom, peculiar to this region and, according to her, extraordinary in both its healing properties and deleterious effects.
He risked a sip, and the taste bloomed across his tongue with liquor’s intoxicating heat. Potently herbal, yet somehow, not unpleasantly so. His breath seemed clearer for that sip, and so he risked another, letting its heat spread delicate roots down into his stomach.
Scientifically unstudied herbs prepared by a scientifically unstudied creature...what other curiosities might he find in that house? Whatever duties had driven Burakh out of it in such haste, they seemed likely to keep him away for some time. A quick investigation could do no harm.
Except, perhaps, to his ankle if he wasn’t careful. He steadied himself up from the couch with all due caution, leaving the bottle behind to better use his hands for purchase. With the wall to guide him, he made good time to the very ordinary kitchen that turned out to be at one end of the hall. No different from the sort where any man without hooves or horns would make his meals, except...
Wasn’t that, in and of itself, extraordinary? The kitchen’s surfaces had to be inconveniently low for a man of Burakh’s stature, and there – as he had half-expected, the wood at the top of the door frame was laid open in several deep gouges. As if Burakh hadn’t stooped quite low enough to fit his horns through without damage.
What did it mean that the house hadn’t been built for a man of his size? Had he moved there recently, or had he really been putting up with ducking and stooping for his entire adult life?
The next door Daniil tried led to no answers, at least not to those questions. What lay beyond was hardly a room at all, floored only in dirt and rocks so large it seemed as though they must have lain there all along, with the house simply being built around them.
Among them, defiant of the room’s darkness, grew at least a dozen strange plants. Humble, weedy things he didn’t know by sight, but the scent they laid over the loam was far more familiar. He had just breathed it from a bottle, after all. Were these all varieties of twyre, then? Grown close at hand to support Burakh’s medical practice?
The house seemed built more for them than for him. The cramped size of its rooms, too, would have to be uncomfortable for such an uncommonly large man. Maybe he had more space to roam upstairs, but Daniil wasn’t likely to see it that day. The stairs stood too steep for him to risk in his current state, and besides, the last door he opened on the ground floor revealed treasures enough to occupy far more than a single afternoon.
Two of its walls were lined with bookshelves, crowding what looked to be Burakh’s study down to barely more than a short corridor. A desk took up most of its remaining space, and Daniil stole the chair from that to situate himself more comfortably for his search.
Medical texts far more ruggedly used than most of those at the Institute breathed their musty aromas into his face. Mingled with them were books on botany, to the point where both sometimes bled into the same volume. Handwritten notes on twyre, exhaustive in detailing the effects of different varieties on the human body, were wound around illustrations of the very plants he’d seen in that dirt-floored room. But his skimming ceased when he opened a book bound in unmarked leather to find a sketch of what looked very much like an awkward midpoint between a human foot and bovine hoof.
Just as exhaustively, that page explained the shifting of bones, the hardening of cartilage, the treatment required to make the process less agonizing than it would be if left in nature’s hands alone. Did that mean...?
Flipping back several pages confirmed it, or at least that book’s view on it. A process of transformation, not induced by a physician, but overseen as it took its natural course. The metamorphosis of the lower appendages, the growth of the horns and tail, and of the body entire, a dramatic increase in height and muscle mass. It couldn’t actually be that...
Could it? Was it somehow easier to believe a half-bull could be born, hooves and horns and all, than that a man could become one? He could take nothing for granted, dismiss nothing as too outlandish, not at that early stage. The important thing was to collect as much data as possible – he could determine later how to test and winnow it down to the truth.
Though some part of his mind still tried to recoil from the book’s next section. To dismiss as lurid fantasy, no matter how dryly, objectively discussed, the way it described the half-bull’s mating habits. How, for approximately a week at the height of the twyre bloom-
The door down the hall closed with enough force to make him flinch. Hoofed footsteps creaked on the beleaguered floorboards.
The study had no clock, no windows. No way for Daniil to guess how much time he had let slip away. If he had been sure on his feet, he might have had just enough time to dart back out to the couch and pretend he’d been there all along. But with his ankle stiff and swollen enough to punish even his preliminary attempts to flex it, all he could do was sit and wait to be found out.
Burakh’s steps paused in the hall as he must have caught sight of the empty couch and the almost-full bottle. And, beyond them, the study door Daniil had been careless enough to leave open. A thrill of something sharper than shame climbed his gut as those steps creaked closer – could it have been fear, knowing how cornered he was and how absolutely he couldn’t overpower the man who stooped to peer through the doorway?
Burakh’s glare was every bit as formidable as he would have expected under the circumstances. Daniil cleared his throat as if it had no reason to be, closing that book and sliding it carefully back into its place on the shelf.
“You have an impressive library,” he said.
Burakh’s nostrils flared in a particularly bullish way. He had brought home a powerful aroma of his own, one that, even from several strides’ distance, Daniil couldn’t help but recognize as blood.
“You’re supposed to be resting,” Burakh said.
“I’m not on my feet, am I?” Daniil pointed out, before good sense could catch up with him. Antagonizing a man he had undeniably intruded on, one who smelled overwhelmingly of blood, didn’t seem like the act of a man who cared to see the sun rise again.
“I didn’t mean to pry. Truly,” he lied. “I’ve just never been able to resist a well-stocked library. Most of these volumes seem to be handwritten and focused on the local region – are they your work?”
That impressive glare of Burakh’s didn’t budge. “They were my father’s,” he said.
Past tense and Burakh’s stony tone both implied that further probing questions might indeed lead Daniil to meet the author of those texts, but only insofar as any souls might stumble on each other in whatever came after death. A pity – Burakh Senior seemed as though he must have been a keenly observant and scientifically curious man, a true kindred spirit. Perhaps he would have been more open than his son to answering questions in the name of scientific progress.
“My condolences,” Daniil said. “He was clearly an exceptional man. I wonder if-”
“You’re staying at the Stillwater, right? No one is going to be taking you back there tonight,” Burakh interrupted. “They’re all too busy cleaning up the mess from today. I’ll send you back with one of the water carts in the morning.”
Had he always been so bullishly blunt in temperament, or was it another consequence of his...condition? Perhaps Daniil would have found the answer if he’d had a little more time with that book. But the odds of Burakh letting him borrow it, or permitting him any more freedom to roam under his roof, seemed drastically slim.
“I understand we may have gotten off on the wrong foot,” he said. “I didn’t mean to offend. But you should understand, your condition is extraordinary. I don’t think anything like it has ever been documented – in a credible scientific manner – outside of this town.”
“Hm,” Burakh said, as if it were a complete sentence. Or a satisfactory answer. “Do you think you can walk to the kitchen? I’ll be making dinner soon.”
He would much rather have stayed where he was until it was ready. But, contrary to what some of his peers in the Capital would say, he was capable of sensing when he was pushing his luck. Under particularly compelling circumstances, he was even capable of caring.
He pushed himself up from the chair, trying tentatively to place weight on his ankle and coming far closer than he would have liked to whimpering. Neglecting to elevate it for what must have been hours had not, he knew very well, been medically advisable. But trivialities like swollen joints had been easy to defer to the future with entire territories of new knowledge at his fingertips.
Burakh must have judged that he could manage well enough with the wall to aid him. He turned to clomp heavily back down the hall, leaving Daniil to follow at his own painful pace. An assortment of scuffling, shuffling, bull-in-a-china-shop sounds filled the kitchen by the time he arrived, and he limped through the doorway to find Burakh bent over a counter that was, indeed, far too low for him. He had taken the time first to pull the chairs out from the table, and to place the pillow from the couch on one of them, creating another very pointed opportunity for Daniil to elevate his ankle.
A doctor after all, despite his brusque manner. Daniil took him up on the invitation this time, sitting back to watch as he unwrapped and sliced what looked like a very fresh, bloody package of beef. And there was something vaguely morbid about that, wasn’t there? A man with a bull’s furred legs and heavy hooves chopping and cooking the flesh of...not one of his kind, but perhaps, as Grief had said, a distant cousin.
With how much of the smell he’d come back soaked in, could he have been responsible for slaughtering the bulls at the centre of the day’s celebration? A duty he had spoken of with the weight of tradition – now, that was more than vaguely morbid. For the town to appoint the local bull-man as their honoured butcher...
Burakh moved on to busying himself at the stove, as charmingly mundane in his conscientious cooking as the kitchen was with him in it. A man who, in myth, might have raged through a labyrinth, stooping intently instead over what looked to be a rural approximation of beef stroganoff.
“Thank you for opening your home to me,” Daniil said. If he backed off from the wrong foot they had begun on, perhaps he could start forward again from the right one.
“You aren’t the first patient who’s needed to stay the night,” Burakh said. “It happens.”
In other words, he was still just a patient under that roof, meant to act and be treated like any other. There had to be a way for him to make Burakh see his own value to modern science. A way to appeal to what was important to him, but with the savoury aromas of dinner starting to crackle in the air, Daniil couldn’t steer his mind to one. When was the last time he had eaten? Had it really been the scant breakfast he’d picked at on the train that morning?
And outside the kitchen window, the town looked to be settling already into darkness. He had indeed lost hours in that study, in trying to understand the breakthrough standing before him. If Burakh hadn’t returned, he would surely have carried on for hours more.
Could he have imagined, back on the train, what sort of dinner he would be sitting down for? Burakh deposited a pair of bowls on the table, heaped high with that hearty, unpretentious fare, and settled onto a chair as undersized for him as everything else in the house. Even the cutlery seemed toylike and delicate in his hands, and Daniil spent a minute watching him eat before remembering to do the same himself.
Dinner tasted the same as it looked, rich and filling with no ambitions of being anything more. It was just as well – the taste all but vanished from Daniil’s awareness with his second bite, crowded out by the questions he couldn’t just blurt out to Burakh. Such as whether his transformation really had taken agonizing weeks, how it had felt for his feet to stretch and thicken into hooves, or whether it was true that, for several days at the height of the twyre bloom, he would be seized by a mating instinct so powerful that he’d lay hold of anyone nearby to satisfy it.
“So...did your father also undergo this transformation?” he ventured. “I would assume it must have some genetic component, or else-”
Burakh dropped his fork into his half-empty bowl with an emphatic clatter. Daniil flinched, and cursed, only inwardly.
“You said you didn’t mean to pry,” Burakh said. “Do you always do this much of it by accident, then?”
“You’re a doctor yourself,” Daniil said. “Would you not be curious if you encountered a completely unknown medical condition?”
“I would remember I was talking to a person, not just a condition. How would you like it if I put your life under a microscope that way? I could start by asking why you’re dressed like a man. Or is that the fashion for women in the capital now?”
A hoof to the chest couldn’t have left Daniil so breathless. Wouldn’t have sent such a powerful ache throbbing from his sternum to the pit of his stomach. He tried to swallow the sudden, perfect dryness from his mouth, to not look down at himself, not search for how his disguise must have slipped. Was that why an obvious scoundrel like Grief had been so smirkingly eager to help him to Burakh’s door?
“How-?” fell from his lips before he could decide whether he wanted to know.
“They may not be able to smell the difference, but I can,” Burakh said.
Of course. The book had mentioned that as well, the sense of smell sharpening along with horns and hearing. Daniil tried to fill his lungs through that hoof-kick ache, the sense of sudden nakedness. To speak as if he felt neither.
“I am a man,” he said. “The fact I was made so by science, by transformation, doesn’t make me any less of one. I...suppose you and I are both chimeras, in our own ways.”
And if someone had gawked at his ‘condition’, probing him with unwanted questions, he would have been just as hostile as Burakh. More so – he certainly wouldn’t have made them dinner or let them stay the night, no matter their sorry state.
“I apologize,” Daniil said. “I crossed a line. I won’t ask any more questions of you. In exchange- no, not in exchange. As a favour to a fellow chimera, I hope you won’t share what you’ve discovered with anyone.”
The Capital’s scorn for him had at least been laid under a lacquer of cold, condescending civility. How would a tiny provincial town still stained with the blood of animal sacrifice react to such a modern scientific aberration in its midst?
How would a doctor and butcher of that town react? Burakh frowned across the table at him, taking him in, whatever peculiarity of scent had given him away, with slow, expansive breaths.
At last, he released one of them in a sigh, pushing his chair away from the table. “I didn’t look at your ankle before,” he said. “I should at least have examined it before leaving you here alone.”
Was that his way of apologizing? Or accepting Daniil’s apology? At the slightest nod from Daniil, permission granted, he lowered himself to one knee – an awkward operation, by the looks of it, with his shins and feet rearranged into that roughly bovine shape. But there was no such clumsiness in his hands as he rolled Daniil’s sock and trouser leg away from the swollen flesh they had started to fit too tightly. His fingers were quick and light as landing butterflies, conscientiously gentle despite their overwhelming size. He turned and probed the joint with almost enough care to avoid waking any more pain in it, and Daniil remembered to breathe only when it stirred enough to pull a hiss through his teeth.
“The ligament is torn,” Burakh diagnosed, “but not badly. Try to avoid walking on it any more than you need to for the next few weeks. The more you rest, the sooner you can get back to poking around in other people’s houses.”
“I hadn’t intended to stay in this town for long,” Daniil said. After the Kains’ chilly reception, he had been debating whether to leave with the next train. But now...
He would keep his word to Burakh. No more questions, no unwanted prying of any kind. But did that mean he had to give up entirely on understanding this fascinating new phenomenon? He needed time to consider his next move, and it seemed his body had just given him that time by fiat.
“You’re a doctor yourself,” Burakh said, scowling up from under his lowered horns. “I shouldn’t have to tell you how much worse you could make this by hauling around a suitcase.”
Several suitcases, along with his carpetbag. Yes, perhaps he should take this as a sign to extend his stay. Thanatica would survive his absence a little longer, and he could still return to it with evidence of the supposedly impossible. Not all was lost yet.
“I hadn’t intended to stay for long,” he repeated. “It seems my plans will have to change now. Perhaps it’s for the best – I’m not the sort of man to put much stock in fate, but...”
But if he had been, he could have believed that, for once, it was acting in his favour. Guiding him, however roughly, to the revelations he’d been seeking. Perhaps such things could only ever have been found in remote towns, places not already dissected by modern science.
Perhaps that bull shoving him to the ground really would be the start of his luck turning around. If the book he’d been interrupted in reading was accurate, after all, several weeks in the town would grant him more than an opportunity to become more naturally acquainted with Burakh. It would let him observe for himself whether those bullish instincts really did bloom with the twyre – whether Burakh, so meticulously gentle in touching his injured ankle, could truly be overcome enough to throw that doctorly restraint aside and ravish anyone he could catch.