The foot traffic on Orchard Street tended to be local, and the buildings on this particular street were all similar in appearance. Brownstones and row houses, every one of them neat and well-cared for.

Some had been sectioned into apartments, while others stood as single homes. While the neighborhood was not affluent, neither had it sunk yet into complete disrepute. It was respectable and discreet.

The neighbors also watched out for one another, and while they rarely gossiped, there were few secrets among them about who came, and went and when.

The house the fishmonger would have directed him to was the fifth of seven along this particular block. It had a narrow little entry porch on the front, and unlike its fellows had a tall hedge around the back garden. From the street, three stories were visible and the yard looked no deeper than any of its peers.

A large gray tabby tom basked in the sun on the front steps, blinking somnolent and watchful eyes over the street.

Mesteno's sense of direction was notoriously poor, and finding his way to Orchard Street, or more accurately the risk of getting himself lost had kept him from attempting the journey sooner. That, and perhaps the stereotypical awkwardness that any man felt about turning to someone in the medical field for help. He'd a particular dislike of the larger hospitals, and the usual healer he visited, an Englishman of some renown had begun to sigh in dismay whenever he arrived upon his doorstep, wearied of lecturing a mind too obstinate to heed logic.

So to Ailis he had gone instead, a rangy, sinewy creature who prowled rather than walked, and looked like bad news even from a great distance. Nevertheless, he kept his smiles as civil as he was able, and tried his utmost not to raise any eyebrows when he arrived at the house he'd been directed to.

Strange that the simple presence of the tabby cat, all slit-eyed and content in his sun spot served to put him at ease. He rapped upon the door with bandaged knuckles, the effect muffled, and then crouched, all jutting knees and elbows to croon a greeting to the feline, offering fingers to sniff at for approval or rejection before offering a scratch behind an ear.

The cat was indisputably self-assured of his reign over his domain. He waited until the man was practically on the steps to bother rising at all, and when he did it was with a lazy, arching stretch that made casual display of his claws. Just as casually he sheathed them again and accepted the gift of the man's scent and the scritch of greeting as his rightful homage. He eyed the fellow through green slits and yawned broadly before butting his head into the hand to plainly demand another caress.

After a moment, there was the sound of a door inside opening and closing, and that was all of the warning given before the front door was swung open. The woman who stood there in dark trousers and a tunic was decidedly not Ailis. Middle-aged and plump, her dark hair was pulled severely back from a face that was as bronzed as Ailis was pale. Her expression was completely impassive as she took him in, before enquiring, "Yes?"

His palm stretched flat, fingers wide above the butting of the cat's head, and he cracked a smile, entirely unaware of how savage the show of teeth must have seemed as he doted on the demanding animal for the duration of his wait. Not long at all, as it turned out, and no sooner had he heard the door crack open than he was straightening, knees crunching noisy as a man decades his senior, eliciting an uncomfortable grimace.

It wiped his smile away entirely, but there was nothing sullen or disrespectful about him as he found himself making eye contact with a stranger instead of Ailis. Old habits came bubbling up, fingers itching to reach for a cap that wasn't there.

"Salve, ma'am. I was hopin' to find the d--," now what had that title been? He struggled to recall, decided he'd only mangle it thanks to the weight of his accent, and rechose his words. "...the lady that does the healin' business. Miss Orway?" He spared the matronly woman any attempts at charm. No flashy smiles or youthful charisma. He'd the distinct impression that she was the sort to prefer honesty over performance.

She looked him over one more time for good measure, and then ducked her head and stepped back to allow him onto the enclosed porch. The cat apparently decided to join them, giving a stiff-legged stretch of each hind leg as he sauntered inside between them. The woman did not speak again.

The small entry was orderly and immaculate, with a flagstone floor, pale walls and dark woodwork and furnishings. Hooks hung beside the door for cloaks or coats. At best, the room was eight feet wide.

Another closed door separated the outer door from the rest of the house. Heavily carved, leaded glass at the top gave hint to light in the space beyond.

The woman turned the brass knob and opened the second door to admit him into the home, proper. A wash of greenery - life - rolled out in welcome. The place could surely be a slice of some elvish woodland hollow if it weren't set in a cave of a dark old house walled in bookcases.

The first room, the living room, ran the width of the house. A shady staircase ranged up from the left side of the room and was mostly hidden by floor-to-ceiling stands from which hung in numerous pots of plants and herbs. The furnishings were a combination of English men?s club leather and slightly faded twill wingbacks in muted greens and golds. A worn but beautiful rug covered most of the floor, and dark wood stretched out on each side of it throughout the rest of the room.

There were books everywhere, and plants anywhere a pot or a stand could be hung or established. Garden herbs, woodsy greens and shrubs, some tropical varietals - a few in Victorian glass houses. A tall birdcage full of finches sang near the hearth.

The taciturn woman might not have been the most welcoming in demeanour, but Mesteno was not off put by her reluctance. If anything, he was curious as to how she, and someone as head-strong as Ailis had seemed managed to reside together without butting heads.

"Gratias tibi," he murmured when she stepped aside, and he waited respectfully, like the well-behaved young man he wasn't, for her to permit him further in. The external facade of the building, the dark, oppressive shade of the woodwork and his host's reticence had all but persuaded him that it was going to be dreary inside, quiet save for ticking clocks and softly padding feet, but the greenery, the myriad fresh scents and the birdsong from the cageful of finches managed to distract from such things effortlessly. "Someone's got green fingers," he remarked absently, glancing across at the plump woman with the faintest curl of a smile as he moved further into the living room.

A furtive sweep of his eyes about the area for Ailis drew his attention to the staircase, but he stood there awkwardly rather than dare exploration. This was not his territory, and he stuck out like a sore thumb. Too vibrantly coloured with his shock of blood and gold hair all tangled to his hips, too untidy and full of faults to even feel comfortable sitting down uninvited when the interior was so obviously well maintained, He felt like he might risk dirtying things.

Beyond the main room, like an unending image in a mirror, was a dining room, some sort of work room, and a kitchen. The woman closed the door behind him and called something in a strange tongue; a small, dark head appeared in the farthest doorway before answering some sort of affirmative and disappearing again. A door in the back opened and closed.

The tom sauntered through the living room toward the kitchen. He owned the place, after all. Past the couch, however, a fluffy gray head peeked over the back of a chair and just as suddenly, the kitten leapt. Pounce. Jump back. Freeze. Both cats started at each other past the instance of shock, and then both bolted, the tom chasing the solid gray ball of fluff up the stairs at a gallop.

The older woman motioned him forward with a gesture of her hands, ducking her head again. 'Yes' might just be the extent of her vocabulary in Common.

There was no risk of him understanding what it was the woman had called, not when he'd enough trouble with something as simple as accents upon the common tongue, so he arched a brow, observed the interaction with there here and gone again stranger in the back, and remained rooted where he stood, the feline antics giving him no small measure of entertainment. The self-proclaimed king of the castle seemed to have a would-be usurper to keep in check, and he muted his laughter to something barely above whisper volume, wedging fists into pockets, jeans slung low on his hips and strapped in place by a tangle of broad, leather belts.

Catching the woman's gestures from the corner of his gold-shot eyes, he tried to determine where she meant to herd him to - the stairs? A seat? The door where the fleetingly glimpsed stranger had been?

He took a hesitant half-step forward, and went wherever she ushered thereafter.

The sound of the back door opening and closing again preceded the appearance of both the young girl and Ailis, saving him from trying to interpret the cook's hand signals for much longer.

"Ah! Ye're come. Welcome!" she greeted him cheerfully and passed the garden basket she was carrying off to the girl. The cook moved past him and went through dining room and workroom to disappear back into her demesne. The hand off of patient was complete with Ailis's appearance. "Come on back, an' let's see what we've got. I'll jus' duck back 'ere an' wash m'hands first."

If he knew anything at all about plants, he would see as he moved through the house that everything in the pots had a use, whether medicinal, cosmetic or culinary.

Mesteno's expertise with plants was precisely nil. He understood which plants were poisonous to his horses, and scoured their paddocks for ragwort. He knew the shoulder high kweneskat which grew like
a golden sea in summer months. Caring for it? Making use of it? Better left to those who knew, but he at least suspected that the greenery he passed was medicinal, and squinted at each pot he passed as if he might find something familiar in the foliage, or any blossom he spotted growing.

Ailis' appearance was a relief, but he still gave the cook a smile when she wandered away, to thank her for letting him in...and because it seemed the sort of thing polite folks would do.

"Salve!" he greeted the wise woman, heading her way with no further explanation needed. "No rush, I'm not about to snuff it while you clean up," he grinned, less reserved with the show of his teeth now that there was a familiar face about. He didn't mean to look so savage when he smiled. He just did, almost giving an impression of a carnivore's fangs, though inspection would have proven them entirely normal for a human male. The work room looked the place to be for patching up, and so it was there he stopped, keeping a shrewd eye out for any more pouncing kittens.

Only the one in residence, and since the gallop of paws had ceased above them, the king and the jester had possibly reached a temporary accord.

As for the workroom? It was just the sort of place you might find in any hedge witch's house in the north of England. A heavy oak table, shelf after shelf filled with dried herbs and seeds and powders, line after line of bottles full of tinctures and infusions. Several sizes of mortar and pestle. Distillation equipment. Scales.

She was visible in the kitchen from there, her back to him as she washed her hands in the big old sink. Past her, a window looked out over the back garden. A trick of perspective perhaps made it look impossibly long. There was a jewel of a greenhouse to one side, a large kitchen garden beside it and what looked like an orchard at the back.

"If ye'd sit on th' table, ye'll want t' take off yer shirt," she called over her shoulder.

He'd seen such rooms in other towns, where old ways were the ways, and modern medicine, or those technologies which found their way into the city from the Stars End direction were frowned upon as suspicious. Still, it had been years since he'd had chance to snoop around in one, and while Ailis scrubbed her hands clean of the great outdoors, Mesteno picked up this phial and that with surprisingly gentle fingers, just to see what she had upon her shelves.

He faltered when she called back again, as if he'd been caught in the act, and gingerly set down the powder he'd been squinting at to consider the table. Well, he'd known it was coming, no sense in putting off the imminent and unavoidable. Sliding onto the table, he sat with wilted spine and tugged his shirt off over his head with a great crackle of static from his hair, and left it sitting to one side in a crumpled heap.

The bruising from the injury to his ribs was still in the black and blue phase, with just the beginnings of plum fading at its edges. It spread wide over the left side of his rib cage...and what a ribcage it was!

He was starved wolf lean, might have been abjectly thin were it not for all the sinew and hard, flat muscle, unpadded by so much as an ounce of fat. It was not pretty to look upon when a man's spine juttedthat way, but entirely more disturbing were the great furrows of old scars carving abstract lines through it all. Pointelle stars pale from old projectile injuries. Ridges like angry seams where he'd been sewn together like a torn rag doll. He'd runes carved across his shoulders beneath the lion's mane of his hair, and savage, metal rings laddered his spine, rooted in the lean muscle to either side - one torn loose and absent - and one wing of his collarbone healed crookedly beneath a great mass of scar tissue.

It had earned him enough wrinkled noses in the past that he waited with thinned lips, in case she appeared revolted.

She checked the rattling kettle and murmured something to the girl, who translated to the cook. More water, boiling, was the request. She poured a little of what was there into a washbowl and tempered it with cold water, taking up the bar of homemade soap and some towels from the basket on the counter, and carried those through to the workroom.

The scars got barely more than a raised eyebrow from her. Neither revulsion nor pity marred her expression as she came around with the bowl and set it beside him. "Ah, yer a survivor," she murmured.

"Na wonder y'were out an' about like no' a thin' was wrong." A quick smile, intimate and warm, reassuring. "'Ow bad d' they 'urt?"

The apprehension which had inhibited him for those few moments he waited bled away in an instant. Tension fled to relax his muscles, and though he didn't slouch with elbows to thighs as he might have normally (perfect posture was not something this young man ever attempted, not cared to) there was no doubt he was now at ease. His fingers laced together loosely, and he peered with open, golden-eyed curiosity at the items she'd brought in with her.

"Don't heal as quick as I used to," he confided, as if once upon a time he might never have sought help, but was now forced to. "There's all these hen-peckin' types get snippy with me if I don't look after myself, too," he added with a chuckle, likely inferring that Riley was one such example, though he did not give her name.

"They hurt," he stated simply, "but I'm pretty sure nothing in there's punctured 'cause been no blood comin' up, no shortness of breath 'cept when I try'n run or ride or haul a wheel barrow about. S'very inconvenient," he grumbled good naturedly. He hadn't time to be stuck idle!

"Good. No breaks in th' skin means I can use boneknit." He still got a close visual inspection, before she soaked a washrag in the warm water and worked the soap on it. "Goin' t' wash y' first, so th' skin is clean. Won't hurt. I've a ligh' touch." She didn't give him a lot of warning, before the warm cloth began the first careful sweep along his back on the bruised side. "Do y' have anyone tha' can rewrap these durin' the day? Shoul' be done three or four times for a couple o' days wi' fresh poultice."

Her inspection would have reassured - any bleeding had been beneath the skin, no splits to his tawny hide to limit the use of her powders and potions.

"Boneknit? An' what's that when it's about?" he asked her, talking because doing so would aid in his distraction from any discomfort. The warmth of the washrag was not unpleasant, and her touch was as
light as she'd told him, so there was no cringing away. Still, given his intimacy with painful experiences it would have taken someone particularly heavy handed and deliberately clumsy to provoke any reaction. He sat there weathering it with insouciant chatter. "Three or four times sounds an awful lot - I can't do this to myself?" Poultice...she'd warned him it was likely to smell foul, and the only person he was likely to be taking his shirt off in front of happened to find anything pungent particularly offensive.