Victor only paused for a moment of breath, leaning hard against a wall as Kijani wrung out her hair. Gulping another lungful of air, he launched himself away again to stumble up the wood stairs to the upper lofts of the cider mill. Thankfully he had remembered to disengage the press earlier. Even as the gears continued to rumble loudly and fill the air with the grindings of machinery, the wooden press remained thankfully still. There were other issues to deal with, however. 

At the top of the stairs, he limped across the causeway to where the controls for the sluice gate were. Shaking violently, Victor grabbed the crank and shoved the lever with all of his might around. Outside, he could hear the gate slowly closing off the sluice so that the water returned to its natural flow. The great water wheel slowly spun to a stop as the source of its motion ebbed away. Moving himself along hand over hand, he reached the axle break and push his shoulder against the heavy lever to lock the wheel in place. There was no helping the dam outside now. Victor was not about to chance running back outside into the throes of the storm to try and raise the floodgates; the dam would either hold back the water, the water would simply flow over it, or… the dam would break to send a tumultuous wave of water and stone pounding down the creek.

Wearily, he struggled back down the stairs. He could feel the chills entering his bones and stealing the warmth from his chest, his reasoning starting to get cloudy. It was there, clear as day to him, that he was in trouble! Only he had no way of conveying it! His lips seemed to move independently of his mind as he looked towards the young woman and said, “Get your clothes off.”

He said nothing more until he reached the bottom of the stairs. The he glanced up at the shocked look upon her face. “Oh stop that,” he muttered irritably, “Gotta get these clothes off, Miss Kijani. The water… the cold… seeps into your body. Can kill you. Need to get… warm and dry. Especially dry. There’s empty sacks over there. Bit rough, but they’ll do for modesty. I’ll be… I’ll be over there…”

Without another glance at her, Victor limped his way slowly around the massive press to the far side of the mill. It seemed to take a very long time to him. By the time he reached an unobtrusive spot and started to pull off his own jerkin and shirt, he completely forgot why he was doing so. Worse, with his back turned towards the doorway, he had little idea that he was stripping to the waist in view of his guest across the building!

Broad and muscular, it was clear that Victor had spent a hard life doing a great deal of work and manual labor. It was also just as clear that the war had left his mark on him. Here and there flashes of scars could be seen on his torso, but these paled in comparison to the criss-crossing pattern of welts that danced across his back. Some were raised and some were gouged, but all were purple-red and tinged with a silver-white around the edges. 

At some point Kijani’s host had been flogged. Badly.

Victor, still unaware, lost complete track of what he was doing. His shirt and vest were in a sudden puddle atop his boots, and he was trembling a great deal. He knew it was cold, but… he couldn’t remember why… or where he was exactly… or anything else other than the fact that he was cold and light headed.