Unnatural Issue

by Mercedes Lackey

  “Revenge,” Peter agreed grimly.

  “We have to get to him!” she cried, and flung herself out of her seat and dashed out the door.

  “Wait!” Peter called out. “Wait!”

  She was already gone, the door slamming shut behind her. He ran to follow, hoping he could catch her before she ran off into the night to do something brave but stupid.

  But she had not, as it proved, gone very far.

  He had barely gotten out of the door himself when the clatter of horse hooves and the rumble of wheels on cobbles to his right warned of a cart approaching at high speed.

  But as it whipped around the corner, he saw it wasn’t a cart, it was an ambulance, driven by his own Uncle, whose grim face told that he too had sensed the dark perversion of Earth magic out there somewhere between the village and the Front. Susanne was already up beside him; Uncle Paul pulled his horses to a stop just long enough for Peter to fling himself in the back, and they were off again.

  He clung to the side of the ambulance, being thrown all over the vehicle as Paul directed it regardless of the presence or absence of roads. It was a terrible ride, not only because of the nausea he felt from that foul magic out there, but because as they neared the first line of trenches, it was clear that there was a bombardment going on. Shells pounded into the earth ahead of them—occasionally, one exploded far too close to them for any sort of comfort. Evidently Paul didn’t care; the horses were not allowed to slack or swerve, and when an Earth magician determines that an animal will do something, that animal has very little choice in the matter.

  He fought sickness, fought despair, fought the crushing demand that he simply lie down and give in. He couldn’t imagine how Susanne and Paul were feeling; he only got the reflection of the necromantic magic because it was not of his Element, but they were getting it right in the teeth.

  They were heading directly into the thick of the bombardment. Shells were falling all around them, and still the ambulance plunged through a night made hideous with explosions and the stench and bitter chill that accompanied necromancy. Inside the wagon, Peter could only cling and ready his own magic.

  Then, suddenly, the chill vanished, and the stench, though it remained, went back to the normal stink of the trenches, if such a thing could be considered normal.

  A moment later, the ambulance slewed sideways as Uncle Paul skidded it to a halt.

  Peter plunged out, over the now-vacant driver’s seat and invoked mage-sight so he wouldn’t have to strike a light. Susanne and Paul were ahead of him, descending into a crater with entrenching shovels in their hands. They too must have invoked mage-sight, since they were moving as surely as if it were broad daylight.

  Susanne glanced up as he displaced a shower of dirt onto her. “Down here!” she shouted, and at first he wondered why she was shouting at him, but then he saw the faces of three men looking over the rim of the crater on the opposite side. “Charles Kerridge is down here! He’s buried, help us get him out!”

  They jumped as if they’d been stung and tumbled down into the crater, that being the fastest way to get to the bottom. They joined Uncle Paul and Susanne in pitching aside rotting body parts and digging. Just as Peter got there, one of the men threw a torso aside and exposed a still-living person. Charles!

  Quickly, Susanne put two fingers under his jaw to get a pulse. “He’s alive!” she shouted. “Hurry! We have to get him out of here before the shelling starts again!”

  Now all six of them worked feverishly to free the unconscious man from his noisome burden. Within moments, they had him out, and they carefully rolled him onto his back. He was still unconscious.

  Paul scrambled up to the ambulance for a canvas stretcher; they rolled Charles into it, then, as Susanne took temporary charge of the horses, all five men manhandled the thing and its burden up the slope of the crater and into the ambulance.

  “Field hospital,” grunted Uncle Paul. “Closest one is English.”

  “Go!” Peter shouted, waving them to go on. “I’ll find my way back; I need to look for someone.”

  “All the other men are accounted for, sir,” said one of the soldiers who had helped them get the stretcher out.

  Paul nodded, but Susanne would know what he meant. He was going to try to hunt down Richard, who surely could not have gotten far!

  “Go,” she told Uncle Paul, just now climbing onto the driver’s bench and taking the reins from her. He nodded as she dove into the back of the vehicle to be with the patient. He slapped the reins on the backs of his horses, and they shot off again.

  Peter watched them go. Charles Kerridge would live or die by the combined skills of Susanne and whatever doctor he got. There was nothing that he could do about that.

  But he had a necromancer to hunt, and when he found the man . . .

  . . . things were not going to go well for him.

  Uncle Paul pulled up his lathered horses at the tent marked with the red cross, shouting in French—which, of course, the English staff didn’t understand. Susanne decided it was safe enough to leave Charles for a moment and stuck her head through the flaps at the front. “English officer!” she shouted, motioning Uncle Paul to be silent. “Buried by shelling!”

  A dozen men swarmed over the ambulance then, extracting Charles and the stretcher he was still tied down to, and running him to the tent, while Susanne kept alongside, her medical bag bouncing off her hip with each step. Someone pulled the tent flaps aside ahead of them, and they were inside the heat and glare of the field hospital.

  Someone grabbed her elbow before she could follow Charles to the surgeons. “You speak English?” asked a man with orderly badges.

  “I am English,” she replied. “I’m working with the nursing sisters of St. Claire down the line.”

  “Good!” The man pulled her away. “We’ve got a full ward, more coming in, and only two nurses—”

  He didn’t have to say anything more. He pointed her at a line of men bedded down wherever there was space, and she went to work.

  It was the job of the nurse, not the doctor, to remove small pieces of shrapnel and the odd bullet and to clean and bandage the wounds. The doctor only diagnosed, operated, set bones, or sometimes set up an irrigation station to keep a particularly bad wound clean. The nurse took care of everything else.

  So all the smaller wounds on these men had been left for the nurses to tend.

  As gently as she could, she did her job, adding a dose of healing magic with every bandage she tied in place, every suture she set. The orderly hadn’t lied; the tent was inundated, so much so that the ones it was not possible to save had been shuttled to one side and were being seen to by a French priest and a chaplain.

  Susanne felt a lump rising in her throat, and her eyes stung with tears, to see so many. All those lives, all those boys—so many of them were boys, barely eighteen, who should have been enjoying life right now, not dying on the cold ground in a foreign land.

  She dashed the back of her hand across her eyes and went back to work.

  It seemed like an eternity laboring in a hell of blood, shattered limbs, moans and screams. Finally, she finished working on a boy who cried for his mother as she pulled bits of shell casing out of his thigh and mercifully had passed out before she was half done. She looked up.

  There were no more patients.

  The ward was quiet. The orderlies were going from patient to patient administering sedatives, but the doctor in charge was watching her with bemusement, his arms folded over himself.

  “I know what you’re doing,” he said bluntly. “Did you follow a lover over? Are you even a nursing sister?”

  Caught off-guard, she avoided the first question, and answered the second. “Not . . . exactly. What I could do convinced the Mother Superior that I was a nursing sister.”

  “Oh, you’re good,” the doctor acknowledged. “And you can be using those skills on the men on the ship on the way back across the channel. But since you aren’t a trained nurse, and yo
u shouldn’t be here in the first place, I’m going to make sure you go back. When you get permission from your father and the proper training, you can come back.”

  “But—” she protested. Or tried to.

  “No buts,” the doctor said, frowning ferociously. “You are going back. You aren’t a nursing sister, and you aren’t French. Don’t argue. There’s a spare cot behind that partition. Feel free to get some sleep on it. I’ll be needing your skills until the hour that the ship leaves. Oh! Where are you staying?”

  Too tired to resist him, she told him. “I’ll send someone for your things,” he promised. But at that point, she didn’t care. She found the cots for the staff, with two already occupied, and fell into the nearest. She was vaguely aware of someone draping a blanket over her as she was bludgeoned by sleep.

  She woke to someone shaking her shoulder. That same someone pressed a cup of hot liquid—coffee—into one hand and a plate of beans and bread into the other, then moved on to the next sleeper.

  Then it was all to do over. She still was unable to get to Charles. She did hear from Peter, however, in the form of a note delivered along with her things. Did not find RW. Trying to get you assigned here. So far, no luck. Looks like you’re being shipped back no matter what. P

  Well, there it was.

  She returned to the cot to find all of her things neatly packed beside it. It was a relief to at least be able to change her clothing but a shock to find a very official-looking document inside, ordering her to a transport ship. The document informed her that if she did not comply, she would be assumed to be a spy, and would be arrested and charged.

  She could scarcely sleep that night, despite exhaustion; she kept having nightmares—in some, she was back in England, at Whitestone Hall, being pursued by trolls. In others, she was here in France, in a gaol cell, with walking dead trying to reach her through the bars. None of her magic would work, and she was utterly alone. No one answered her screams for help.

  The next morning, she was awakened the same way—except that the meal this time was bread and bully beef—and went about the ward doing what she was ordered to in a fog. She rapidly lost count of the days she had been there, and while her diligent work finally made the doctor stop frowning every time he looked at her, she eventually had to make up some nonsense about being an art student to get the others to stop treating her as if she were a camp follower. At least she had listened diligently to all the art talk and was able to pretend to some expertise, though she feared what would happen if somehow, someone got hold of some art supplies and pressed her to paint.

  That would be a total disaster.

  Perhaps a week after she and Charles had arrived at the field hospital, she woke to someone shaking her roughly, without the usual coffee and food. “Get yer gear, miss,” said a strange voice. “Yer bein’ shipped out with the invalids.”

  Only half awake, she huddled herself into her clothing, got her bags, and—

  And stopped a moment, to leave the medical kit with the precious syringe and needles on the bed of one of the other nurses. She wouldn’t need it where she was going, and they would.

  Then she picked up her gear and followed the sound of voices out into the gray dawn.

  Stretchers were being loaded into more ambulances, all motorized ones. Without so much as a word, a soldier looked at her, looked at a paper in his hand, and took her by the elbow. She was summarily boosted up into the back of a crowded ambulance.

  “Take care of’ em,” the man said brusquely, and banged on the side of the vehicle. It took off with a lurch.

  She checked all the drugged and semiconscious passengers in her care; none was Charles. From the records left with each, all were common soldiers.

  She was beginning to get an idea of why she was being kept from Charles. Not because anyone suspected anything—because he was an officer. Suspect, with no clear idea of what, if any, training she had had, she would not be allowed near an officer. But she was a pair of hands, and that was better than nothing for the Tommys.

  She set her chin stubbornly. If that was how it was—well, these men were going to get better care from her than the officers got from their “real” nurses. She tended them assiduously, trickling healing into them as soon as she could concentrate. As the light grew and the ever-present pounding of guns faded slightly into the distance, traffic on the road increased. Abruptly, the ambulance lurched, and the sound of the tires on the road changed to the rattle of tires on cobblestones.

  We must be at the port.

  But the rattling woke several of the boys, who, confused by their surroundings, thirsty, anxious, began making plaintive requests of her. That kept her occupied right up to the point where the ambulance stopped again.

  The canvas doors were pulled open; the same soldier with the papers was there, waiting, along with several stretcher bearers. He didn’t so much “help” her out of the back of the ambulance as pull her out, and dump out her bags at her feet. Clearly she was expected to deal with them herself.

  He gave her just enough time to pick them up before taking her by the elbow again and marching her up the gangplank, following and preceding men with invalids on stretchers. At the top, there was another soldier, and with obvious relief, her escort surrendered her, and her papers, to this fellow.

  He passed her off to a sailor, who, with a bit more courtesy, escorted her to a tiny bunk in a room with six of the same in the bowels of the ship, showed her where to stow her things, and then took her to a giant ward in what must have been a ballroom. Clearly this had been a passenger ship, now pressed into service as a hospital ship for the journey across the Channel, and a troopship back to France.

  This time she found herself in service not as a nurse, but as a lowly aide. It was with a profound sense of relief that she felt the ship begin to move. At least the trip across the Channel would only take a few hours.

  And then what?

  She considered this as she emptied basins, scrubbed the floors after accidents, took away filthy, bloody bandages and dressings. Right now, she had nowhere to go but Whitestone Hall, and that, she would never do. Richard was clearly in France now, but there was no guarantee that he would stay there.

  And she wanted to be near Charles, no matter what.

  Peter had managed to get her quite a nice sum of money when he understood that she was being sent back. It was more than enough to set her up anywhere.

  All right, then. She would stay in London. It would be hard for Richard to find her there. He would never expect that she would be working in a hospital. She could get another job as an aide—and since she didn’t drink, didn’t steal, didn’t purloin the patients’ drugs for herself, she could probably get transferred to Charles’ ward fairly quickly, assuming that it just didn’t happen as soon as they found out that she was several cuts above the usual sorts of aides.

  She smiled to herself. That was the answer. She’d be there, even when she wasn’t officially on duty. She’d be there whenever he needed something, and when he did need something, she would make sure that she was the one to give it to him, by hook or by crook. Men fell in love with their nurses all the time. Why not this time?

  Indeed. Why not?

  19

  IT wasn’t hard to get a job at Bethnal Green Hospital. She was clean, young, and not drunk. She also used an assumed name, figuring that Susanne Whitestone was on some sort of list; she became Constance Weatherby, which was the real name of one of Prudence’s sisters. Prudence would never know, and it was unlikely that anyone would ever travel out to the wilds of Yorkshire just to verify the story of a nursing aide. Nor was anyone going to find Richard Whitestone to verify the reference letters that Susanne forged.

  Peter’s money paid for a clean little room in a boarding house; all of the other boarders were actual nurses. The room was scarcely bigger than a closet, but after the Front, it seemed like the height of luxury.

  As she expected, the fact that she was sober, honest, hardworking and
uncomplaining swiftly elevated her to the officers’ ward, a floor of private and semiprivate rooms, so the work wasn’t as hard, though it was just as back-breaking and unpleasant. Within hours of getting the assignment, she had found Charles’ room and knew what was wrong with him.

  He had lain unconscious or semiconscious all of the time in France and for the better part of a week after he had arrived here. They had no means of caring for a man in what amounted to a coma in France, hence the haste in shipping him back to England.

  As soon as she determined which room was his, she spent as much time as she could in it or near it, pouring healing into him, willing him to come out of his blank state while she scrubbed floors. His physical wounds were all broken bones, relatively easy to repair. It was clearly his mind that had gotten the worst of it.

  November passed, and December arrived, bringing with it more cold rain. She couldn’t help but think of Peter and the others still over there, and what this meant to the ones in those stinking trenches. The papers no longer spoke of it all being over by Christmas, but they kept up the fiction that the men on the Front were living in decent conditions, making life in the trenches sound like a stint of rough camping. When she read that, she wanted to hurt someone. The only comfort was that as men trickled back to Britain on leave, people were actually learning the truth. Or at least, as much truth as their loved ones would give them, or let slip.

  She channeled all her fury at the idiot generals, the lying politicians, and the hateful Germans into an outpouring of healing for Charles. And it must have worked.

  On Friday of the first week in December, he woke up.

  She wasn’t in his room when he did, but she heard the nurse’s exclamation and the familiar sound of his voice, weak, raspy, and querulously asking where he was. Her heart leaped and started pounding; she wanted to jump up and run into his room, but she knew that if she did that, she would find herself reprimanded at best and dismissed at worst. So she restrained herself and slowly scrubbed her way closer to his door.