Get Out of My Tent!
The healing tent was full of screams tonight.
The Emperor had won. That was what they would say in the morning. Norayne, secured, decisive, worth the cost. They would mean it, too. The men who said such things were rarely the ones who spent the night listening to what winning sounded like.
“Hold him,” I said, not looking up.
Hands obeyed. They always did.
The boy on the cot was seventeen at the outside. A Tharrish arrow had gone in under his cheekbone and stopped where no arrow had any business stopping, and his good eye held on mine with the flat patience of a man out of options. The sergeant who had carried him in stood at the foot of the cot with his hands hanging empty.
“He’s out of the fourth,” the sergeant said. “His name’s Berin. He’ll tell you nineteen. He wrote nineteen at the table and I let him.”
“I don’t need his name. I need his head still.”
The sergeant took the boy’s shoulders. I had learned in my first year to keep names out of my mouth the same way I kept magic out of my hands until the last moment. Both were finite. Both went fastest on men who were going to live anyway.
“This is going to hurt,” I told him.
I always said it. Not because it helped. Because it felt like it should.
“Bite.”
He did.
I set my palm against his face, careful the way you touch a body already broken, and reached inward.
The magic answered, as it always does when you ask correctly. A reservoir deep enough that you could forget it had a bottom, if you were the forgetting sort.
I did not rip it free. That was what apprentices did, and it was how men died on the table with the wound already closed. I unmade the arrow’s presence from the injury outward, persuading the flesh that the metal had never been there at all. For one suspended moment it existed nowhere. Then it was in my hand, slick and warm.
He screamed. Of course he did. Pain did not negotiate just because you were efficient about it. But what was left was survivable, and that was the point.
I packed the cavity with yarrow-soaked linen and fed in one thread more, thin as hair, no more than the wound required. Enough to persuade the bleeding to slow. There was a vessel under the break I did not love the look of, deep enough that linen would have to do the work of a hand. I set the packing tight against it and made a note to look again before I slept.
That’s all, I told the reservoir. Save the rest.
The surface of it dipped. Not much. But I felt it, the way you feel the first degree of cold before the temperature has dropped enough to matter.
“Next,” I said, and straightened.
The tent tilted.
I caught the frame of the cot and held there a second longer than I should have needed. Through the open flap the sky was bleeding out at the horizon, closing a day that had started with drums in the grey before dawn. My apron hung soaked against my legs. A piece of gristle had wedged into the laces of my boot, and I had decided not to examine it.
Down the canvas, Joren had been working his own cases since midmorning. Five years trained, capable enough now that I rarely watched him. I caught his eye and gave him the small nod that asks a question rather than answers one. He rolled his shoulders back. Still standing. Still thinking. Good enough.
I was already counting as I reached for my needle. Half the reservoir, perhaps less. Thread and linen while they held, magic only where nothing else could reach.
I was needle deep in an open belly when the tent flap was wrenched back hard enough to snap a peg.
Cold hit first. Then him.
He filled the doorway the way weather fills a sky. Tall, built by use rather than vanity, plate dented twice down the left side where a blow had come close to getting through. Black hair cut short against olive skin, a nose broken once and set well, ink running out of his collar and down both arms to the wrist, dense enough to read as a record rather than a decoration. Not handsome. Striking, which is a different problem.
Joren was six feet inside the entrance with his hands in a man’s thigh. The officer looked past him as you look past a tent pole, found me at the far end of the rows, and came. He did not search first.
“You,” he said. “Healer. Come with me.”
“Busy.”
“Now.”
I did not look up. “I said busy. Get in line or find someone else.”
He crossed the tent in a handful of steps far quieter than they had any right to be, the quiet that comes from years where noise gets people killed. The sword at his hip caught the lantern light strangely as he came, less reflection than acknowledgment, as though the light had been noticed and found unimpressive.
Heat came off him, a man who had been fighting since dawn and had not yet cooled.
“I have a soldier down,” he said.
“So does everyone.”
“I need you.”
“They all need me.” I pressed down on the wound under my hands. “Whatever rank you hold, it does not change what is in front of me.”
He was not the first officer to stand where he was standing. They came every few months, certain their man was the exception and the arithmetic would come out differently if they leaned on it. I refused them without heat, because heat made them argue and arguing cost time.
“Get out of my tent,” I said.
It came out wrong. Too fast, too loud, pitched to carry the length of the canvas, and the man under my hands flinched at the sound. I heard it leave me and could not call it back.
The silence after it was measured rather than empty, a man taking stock of a situation he had expected to resolve differently.
“Will you come,” he said. Not a question. A statement shaped like one.
“No. Not while these men need me.”
I felt the quality of his attention without meeting it. Quick. Final.
“You’re certain.”
“I am.”
He nodded once, as though I had confirmed what he suspected. Then he bent, put his shoulder into my stomach, and stood.
The world inverted.
What came up my throat was not outrage. It arrived from further down and a great deal older, and for one breath I was not in the tent at all. I heard myself make a sound I had not made in six years of this work, thin and scraped and nothing like me, and the shame of it landed before the anger did.
“Put me down.”
He was already moving, and what struck me through it was how easy he found it. He had fought all day. I could see it in the way his left side carried slightly wrong, an old injury making itself known through the fatigue. A healer notices. Even upside down. Even furious.
Joren reached the flap before we did, moving to intervene, which was the wrong instinct and entirely characteristic of him.
“No,” I said, from somewhere near the level of the man’s hip. “Back to your patients.”
“But Elira, he can’t just take you.”
“They need you more than I do. The spear wound in the third cot. Count to a hundred before you touch the packing or you’ll lose him.” His face did what his face always does when I am right and he hates it. “Go.”
He went, though not without a last look back that I chose not to see.
There were two healers working in that tent, and it occurred to me somewhere around the level of this man’s hip that he had never asked which one he wanted.
Then the canvas swung past and I saw my own tent from outside, which I had never done while it was full. Two dozen men in rows under a roof with no healer under it. It looked exactly like what it was. My throat closed around it. I breathed through the closing and thought instead about the spear wound, and about the vessel under the boy’s cheekbone, and whether the packing would hold until morning.
We were through into the cold. Men turned to look and then, sensibly, looked away.
That was when I heard it.
Low. Dry. Coming from near the sword hilt swinging at his hip.
“This won’t end well.”
A woman’s voice. Distinctly unimpressed. Not his.
I went still, not from fear but from the confusion of a person who has perceived what should not be possible and is not certain she did not invent it. The sword did not look back, but the light caught the blade at an angle that felt less like reflection than attention.
He ducked into a tent at the far edge of camp and set me on my feet, and I locked my knees against the tilt of the world and refused, on principle, to fall.
“You,” I said, “are the most arrogant man I have met in six years of this campaign.”
He was not listening. His attention had gone past me, and I followed it and forgot what I had been about to say.
The woman on the cot was built for the work she did. Broad through the shoulders, forearms corded from shield work, a large woman laid out small by blood loss. Her skin had gone the waxy grey that arrives just before the body stops pretending. Her features were sharp and familiar in a way that explained exactly why he had come.
The man kneeling beside her looked up. Fair-haired, broad through the chest, crying without permitting himself to make a sound about it. Above him, two swords hung from the tent pole rather than one.
I went to the cot without being asked. That was not a choice.
“How long?”
“Not long.” He steadied his voice on the way to the end of the sentence. “She held the line. Wouldn’t let us bring her in until it was secured.”
Of course she had. It was in her even unconscious, the set of a woman who had decided and then not been moved.
I put my fingers to her throat. A pulse, faint but there. I reached inward, and the reservoir answered slower this time, a well that had been asked a great deal and was keeping a record of it.
It was bad. Deep and tearing and not clean.
“She should already be dead,” I said.
Nobody contradicted me.
I peeled back the packing, laid my hand over the wound and reached, and that was when I found it. A second presence, small and separate and alive, holding to her failing life with the tenacity of a thing that knows how little time it has.
A child.
And not merely a child. A witch, exceptionally strong, and beneath that, unmistakable even this early, the deep particular resonance of a healer.
I pulled back. Kept my face still. Kept my voice level.
“She’s pregnant.”
