by Shae Ford
“Like Death, she will,” Kael growled. “Come on, Kyleigh. Let’s find Baird and —”
“And what?” She raised her brows. “Where are we off to, exactly? What’s the plan?”
He didn’t know. He couldn’t go down the mountains, and he couldn’t go up. Once again, he found himself trapped in their middle. And Kyleigh seemed to know it.
“From where I’m standing, it looks as if you’ve got two choices,” she said, crossing her arms. “You can either float around the mountains for the rest of your life, moaning through the trees like a lost spirit, or you could do something useful. I’m choosing the latter.”
“No, you aren’t choosing anything. You’ve gotten yourself into trouble, and now I’m stuck here while you pay off your debts. How long is that going to take, by the way?”
“It’ll take as long as it takes.”
She grinned over her shoulder at him as she walked down the hill. Gwen followed her with a smirk, leaving Kael alone with the wildmen.
They clung to their wounds and stared through the weary film on their eyes, waiting. Kael sighed heavily — sighed, because then he wouldn’t have to feel the strange ache in his heart.
He took Griffith by his good arm and led him up the hill. “Come on. Let’s get those wounds patched up.”
*******
The hospital sat by itself at the top of the slope. Its elongated walls looked like witches’ teeth: blackened and chipped, sticking up at odd angles. The roof was completely gone. Kael didn’t want to go any closer, but his legs seemed to have a mind of their own. They dragged him until he stood inside the ruins.
Mangled remains of cots littered the floor. Many had been overturned or broken. The only things left inside the tonic cabinet were a few broken bottles of ointment. Heat from the fire must’ve devoured the rest.
Planks creaked under Kael’s weight as he made his way to Amos’s office. A knot rose in his throat when he saw the warped desk and the ashen frame of Kyleigh’s cot. But what hurt him the worst was something he’d never thought he would miss.
Amos’s healing tomes lay scattered across the floor — empty covers with their titles burned away. Charred nubs of pages still clung stubbornly to their spines. How many times had he wandered in late at night to find Amos bent over one of those books …?
“Well?”
Griffith was standing behind him, waiting patiently — along with a whole company of wildmen. Kael had been so wrapped up in his thoughts that he’d actually forgotten about them.
“Right. I’ll tend to the most serious wounds first,” he said, thinking back to the days when the hospital had been full. “Head wounds, broken bones, mangled limbs and the like. Then I’ll take care of anybody with a scratch or scrape. Oh,” he fixed the wildmen with what he hoped was a severe look, “and if you think you’ve got something lodged where it shouldn’t be, let me know first thing. There’s nothing worse than sealing somebody up only to find out that you’ve got to spilt them open again. Understood?”
When he received an acceptable number of nods, Kael got them all lined up — and tried not to think about how much he’d just sounded like Amos.
His first patient was an old man with a gash that looked as if a sword had come down on the top of his head. Kael had to spend several minutes draining the curdled blood and infection from the wound before he could start the sealing.
“Another day like this and you would’ve been dead,” Kael muttered as he rubbed his thumb along the white scar on the old man’s scalp, smoothing it away. “You should’ve taken care of it sooner. I’m shocked that it didn’t kill you.”
“What choice did I have?” the old man grumbled back. He checked Kael’s work gingerly with the tips of his fingers, mouth parted slightly.
“Well, you could’ve gone to one of the other healers.”
“Other healers? How many healers do you think we have?” The old man leaned to glare at Griffith. “If I’d known he was rattled, I wouldn’t have let him split me open!”
Griffith shook his head, smiling. “He isn’t rattled. He’s just daft.”
Kael wasn’t sure that daft was much of an improvement over rattled, but it seemed to put the old man at ease. The moment he’d wandered away, Griffith explained:
“There hasn’t been a healer born among the wildmen for years. It doesn’t happen often, and they don’t stay for long.”
“Because they’re weaker than the others?” Kael guessed.
Griffith raised his brows. “Weaker? No, there’s no weakness among whisperers — only balance. We need each other. The healers don’t stay because it’s too rough on them, I think. They get all weepy around wounds.” He shrugged. “At least that’s what my father used to say.”
Kael wasn’t sure if his father had gotten it right. As far as he could remember, wounds had never made Amos weepy. If anything, he’d only gotten grumpier around them. But he saw no point in trying to explain this to Griffith.
The line of wildmen seemed endless. Kael covered himself in such a fog of concentration that after a while, he didn’t see their faces anymore. He would slip out for a moment as they approached, like a sea creature breaking above the waves. Once he’d found where they were wounded, he would duck back under and lose himself to the depths.
Not long ago, the healing would’ve exhausted him. There would’ve been no chance of him patching up an entire village without getting some sort of whisperer’s headache. But after his time in the plains, this sort of work seemed … simple. He was certain nothing could’ve ever exhausted his mind quite as much as the endless days he’d spent dragging lines across the Fields. Sealing skin together was an easy thing, by comparison. And though the wildmen kept coming, he found he always had a little more to give.
Though he grew paler by the minute, Griffith refused to be healed until all of the other wildmen had been taken care of. “To be Thane is to put the needs of my people first. I may not be Thane yet, but one day I will be. This is good practice,” he said with a smile.
Kael thought it was ridiculous for Griffith to have to suffer any longer than necessary. But at the same time, a small part of him understood. “All right. Just tell me if you start to feel faint,” he grumbled.
The last clump of wildmen was mostly just flesh wounds. Several of them had punctures on their arms and chests — the marks of Titus’s hounds. They went deep, sometimes scraping the surface of bone. It was remarkable that so many of the wildmen had survived their wounds.
At last, the final patient left the hospital, and it was Griffith’s turn. He stood stiffly, his wounded arm turned out of Kael’s reach. “If you’re a healer, why do you have so many scars? I’ve seen you wiping them away all day,” he added.
Kael thought about it for a moment. “I suppose I don’t erase them because they remind me of things I don’t want to forget.”
“What kinds of things?”
“Stories.”
He pointed to the scar that split Kael’s eyebrow. “What’s the story behind that one?”
Griffith was dragging his feet. Kael had seen that same wide-eyed look on the faces of Amos’s patients before. And he wasn’t going to waste time answering pointless questions. At his order, Griffith reluctantly untied the sling around his neck.
Rags covered his arm from elbow to wrist. They seemed to be made out of the same rough material as the wildmen’s garb. “Didn’t you have any proper bandages?” He frowned when Griffith shook his head. “Well, these skins are too thick to use for binding. They won’t let your wound breathe. Next time use a little moss if you don’t have anything better.”
The first layer of skins was stiff with dried gore. He knew from the smell alone that Griffith’s wound was badly infected. But it wasn’t until he pulled the last few strips away that he realized just how serious things were.
Misshapen lumps warped the line of Griffith’s arm. Purple bruises blossomed down the length of it, swelling against the sharp hills pressed up against his flesh.
His hand sagged over his wrist, hanging uselessly at the end of his mangled arm.
Puncture wounds dotted the lumpy flesh in twin arcs: one line on the top of the limb, and one underneath. They were swollen and puffed, weeping a mixture of white and red. Any other healer would’ve cut it off at the elbow and been done with it. But Kael thought he could fix it.
The trouble was that he would need Griffith to stay awake. His arm was so badly mangled that at some point, he would need him to move his fingers just to make sure he’d gotten it all put back together properly.
It was going to be a long, painful process — more than any child should have to bear. But Kael had a plan. “I’ll make you a deal: you tell me about your wound, and I’ll tell you about mine.” He gestured to the mangled arm. “How did that happen?”
Griffith shrugged. “It was the red devil — the King beast of Titus’s army. He was taller than my father, his body was covered in blood-red fur. His claws were nearly the size of my chest. Gwen clubbed him over the head — otherwise, I think he would’ve finished me. The devil got a taste for my blood, though.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “I could hear him chasing me the whole time we ran down the mountains. But I’m not worried. Gwen’s going to hunt him down and make me a necklace of his claws.”
“What makes Gwen think she can kill him?” Kael said.
“She kills everything. And if she says she’s going to do something, she will. So I’ve told you about mine.” Griffith jerked his chin up at Kael’s scar. “Now tell me about yours.”
“Fair enough. Well, one day, I was sailing off to fight the Witch of Wendelgrimm when this nasty storm blew in …”
Kael drifted in and out of his story while he worked. He pressed the infection from the punctures and sealed them closed. Then came the tricky part: Griffith’s arm was so severely broken that he had to split his skin open and patch the bone together from the inside.
Though it must’ve been incredibly painful, the boy never flinched. He asked Kael every detail about the tempest and his battle with the Witch. Then once that story had been told, Kael showed him the scars on his leg — the rounded marks left by the wolf monster that’d mauled him in Bartholomew’s Pass.
He grimaced when Kael told him about the wolves — though it probably had more to do with the bits of bone floating around in his arm than the story. “You got bitten too, then. Did it hurt?”
Kael slipped out of his concentration for a moment to mumble: “Of course it did.” He was trying desperately to figure out which pieces fit where. It was like working on a very slippery, bloody puzzle —
“Did it hurt a lot?”
“Yes, it hurt a lot.”
“Did you cry?”
“No.”
Griffith snorted. “Be honest. Did you —?”
“No, I didn’t cry,” Kael snapped. He jerked himself out of his trance completely, with every intention of telling Griffith to kindly shut it. But the look on the boy’s face stopped him short.
His chin was pointed stubbornly upwards; the freckles across his nose stood out like stars against his pale skin. “I cried when the red devil did this to me. I didn’t mean to, but it hurt so badly and we’d run so far …” His good hand trembled as it balled into a fist. “I hate it here. I want to go home.”
It was difficult not to hurt for Griffith. Kael had spent his whole life dreaming about running away from Tinnark, going off on an adventure through the lowlands — perhaps he would even accomplish something so great that he would be made a knight of the realm. But at the end of every dream, Kael had always imagined what it would be like to come home.
He’d imagined the looks the Tinnarkians would give him when he walked through the streets. Marc and Laemoth would burn at the sight of him; Brock would have to eat his words. Roland would be overjoyed. He would wrap Kael against his boney chest and say he’d known all along that he was bound to do great things.
And Amos … well, Amos would be so proud that he would have to actually admit it — out loud and for all to hear.
Tinnark was where Kael’s adventures always began. It was the reason he left — but it was also the reason he returned. In many ways, growing up in such a miserable blot of village had given him a reason to dream in the first place. It had taken him a long while to realize it, but Kael finally understood just how important Tinnark had been.
So many of his dreams hadn’t been about the adventure, at all …
They’d been about coming home.
Once Griffith went quiet, Kael was able to finish quickly. He pieced the bone fragments together and sealed them into place. Griffith was able to wiggle his fingers and move his wrist around, so he figured he’d set it properly. Now all he had left to do was seal the split he’d made down Griffith’s arm.
He was just about to begin when he felt a pressure on his hand. Griffith traced the jagged scar that Eveningwing had left behind, the one that cut between his fingers. “What about this?”
“That was given to me by a man who thought he wanted to kill me, but we wound up being good friends,” Kael said simply.
He sealed the gash shut and had gone to smooth the scar when Griffith jerked his arm away. “No, I want to keep it. Maybe someday I’ll give you a scar,” he added with a grin, “then you’ll always remember me.”
The brightness in his eyes darkened Kael’s heart; the daring edge of his smile cut him like a sword. Griffith’s face was a painful reminder of one he would never see again. He could do nothing more than nod stiffly back.
He was relieved when the boy finally left.
Then Gwen walked in.
“Don’t get too comfortable, mutt. You’ve got one more patient,” she said as she strode towards him. She stood with her hands on her hips, eyeing him through the purplish bruises that spread out from her busted nose.
Kael set it quickly, cracking the bone back into place. He reached to seal the split on her mouth, but she knocked his hand away. “I’ll tell you when you can touch my lips, mutt.”
He had no interest in touching her lips. “Fine. Was there something else?”
She pointed to a mass of dried blood near the top of her shoulder. When she pulled her shirt taut, he saw a hole about as big around as a man’s finger torn through the furs.
Kael scowled — a flimsy defense against the sudden burn in his face. “I can’t work through that small a hole. You’re going to have to unbutton your shirt.”
“Sure I have to.” Gwen’s hands went to her tunic. She looked him in the eyes as she undid the first bone clasp. “You men are all the same, always trying to catch a glimpse —”
She looked rather shocked when Kael reached across and ripped the hole open, tearing it to fist-sized. “I’m not trying to glimpse anything. Now hold still.”
“Whatever you say, mutt.”
He tried to ignore the way her words slid across his ears.
There was a hole in Gwen’s shoulder. Her skin was puckered around it and the edges were swollen red. He could see a nasty infection growing in its center. But the most unsettling thing was the ring of deep cuts that surrounded it.
They reminded him of the scars he’d seen on Baird’s eyes. The cuts fanned from her wound like bursts from a star — jagged in some places, raised and scabbed along their ridges. Some of the lines had slipped and been cut too deeply. One of them wept red drops down her skin.
“There’s a piece of something lodged in there,” she said.
Kael placed his hands. His toes curled as he felt the depth of the cuts. “How many times did you try to dig it out?”
“Several,” she growled.
Gwen sat still while he worked. Kael had to split her skin open to get the object out. It took him several tries to latch onto its slippery surface. But when he finally did, the object came out cleanly: it was the full head of an arrow.
“Are you finished?”
“Just about.” Kael sealed the last bit of her skin closed and smoothed the scar away. “There.”
Gwen rolled her shoulder a bit, testing it. “Good work.” Her skin was quite a bit paler than it’d been before, and it made the black design on her face stand out sharply. “You’re free to go.”
Kael followed her to the door. “I’m not going anywhere without Kyleigh.”
“Suit yourself. But if you stay, you’ll be expected to work. I won’t have any layabouts squatting in my village.”
“Fine.” Kael followed her down the hill, past the charred houses and into the heart of Tinnark. “Where’s everybody gone?”
Gwen looked at him as if he was stupid. “It’s dinner time.”
“All right, but where are they …?”
The words stuck in his throat. A shadow of a building lurked at the top of his eyes, and he realized they were headed towards the Hall.
Memories rushed out of the darkness: the Hall’s roof was ablaze, its walls were warped against the heat. Brock, the head elder of Tinnark, lay dead beside it. After what had become of the hospital, he didn’t know if he had the courage to look at the Hall. It was only after several deep breaths that he forced his gaze up.
Nothing could have prepared him for what he saw.
The Hall was restored. New shingles lined its sloping roof and the air was heavy with the scent of fresh pine. The oaken doors had been re-carved and set into place. Twisting images of dragons and warriors adorned their surface, locked in an epic struggle.
“How …?”
“How what?” She followed his gaze to the Hall and snorted. “Please, that’s nothing. Give them a couple of weeks, and my craftsmen will have this village looking decent again.”
“You have craftsmen?”
“Of course I have craftsmen. Who do you think does the cooking?” she said with a smirk.
Kael’s pace slowed as his eyes wandered over the Hall. The two large beams that stood on either side of the doors had been carved into the shapes of bearded men. They were dressed for battle, each with a rounded shield across his chest and his axe raised high.