Sugar and Snow
It was Burden’s Moon, a time for peace and clan, when he spotted her from across the battlefield approximately three seconds before a grenade blew up in his face.
It wasn’t the first time it’d happened to Henrik. After seventy years on the Orclind’s front lines, he’d been blown up, sliced, shot, and beaten in just about every way a person could imagine and most ways they couldn’t. A grenade didn’t faze him much.
And it sure didn’t knock the sight of her out of his head. Although he did question whether she was real or not for a moment, because that sort of thing had happened to him once or twice.
Henrik pushed himself out of the blood-soaked mud and grit, his ears ringing, and tried to focus his doubled vision on the woman in white. They’d ambushed the shifter battalion just before sunrise, sending the camp into bloody chaos as men ran for their guns and animals exploded from skin.
It was a large camp meant to act as a command center for several other smaller units, which made it a juicy target for an orcish raiding party like Henrik’s.
Not only could they loot the supplies sitting nice and pretty in crates, but they could take men out when they thought they were safe surrounded by so many others.
It made sense that they’d have a healer — or it did once, back when the war was still new. Henrik couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen one on the battlefield. He’d even heard whispers among his men that they were all dead.
That was how they knew the world was coming to an end. When there were no more healers, the gods would abandon them — if they hadn’t already.
His stomach lurched as he focused his swimming vision on the white figure knelt in the mud several yards away from him. For a moment, she didn’t look human. She looked like Grim herself, dressed all in white, come to bring mercy to the wretched souls caught in the war.
Snow had begun to fall, veiling her in a pale glow. It softened the world between bomb blasts. Even from several yards away, he could make out the way snowflakes settled on her, as soft and gentle as a touch from the goddess she so resembled.
Mercy, he thought, something in him moving with tectonic force. The goddess of death and mercy knelt before him, wreathed in pure white snow, and whispered in his ear again, “Mercy.”
And then she twisted her upper body, turning to face him as she tried to save her patient. A flash of red broke the illusion of divinity and brought her back to the battlefield.
Her apron was soaked with blood, nearly obscuring the Healer’s Hand emblazoned on her chest.
That symbol should’ve protected her. It should’ve protected all the healers, no matter what side of the war they fell on, but it’d become a target instead. Everyone knew that the quickest way to knock out a battalion was to take out their healer, and as the war dragged on, their numbers dwindled.
Officially, their orders were to capture any healers found in battle and conscript them into service, but in the heat of a firefight, the chances of being able to do that successfully were low.
And if capture wasn’t an option…
“Healer!” someone to Henrik’s left bellowed. His head swivelled just in time to see a rifle lift.
Instinct roared in furious denial. He’d seen too many innocent healers murdered, and this one could not, would not join their numbers.
Without thinking, he sprang to his feet.
His hammer, a bloodied weapon that’d seen more battles than it should’ve, swung in a wide arc through the smoky air.
The impossibly heavy weapon slammed into his fellow soldier with a sickening crunch.
The rifle flew out of the orc’s hand and landed in the snow-topped muck that’d once been a field.
Henrik didn’t wait for the soldier to hit the ground before he swung the hammer back toward his side and tucked it close, making running easier. His vision still wasn’t quite right, but it didn’t stop him from sprinting toward the healer.
Bullets whizzed by his ears as he made his huge body a target for every shifter on the battlefield. Several grazed him, but none managed to stop him. His hammer was a heavy weight in one hand as his boots sank into the churned soil, made thick and sticky by slush and freshly spilled viscera.
Despite the dust and smoke and snow in the air, his vision narrowed to that slim white figure knelt in the filth like a glowing beacon.
He saw and heard nothing around him even as he swept aside a rugged, blond-haired shifter with a vicious blow of his hammer.
The bite of bullets didn’t slow him down, and neither did the percussive blasts of explosives pockmarking the landscape in all directions.
For as long as he lived, Henrik would never forget the moment she looked up at him.
Mercy.
The war disappeared. The blood, the pain, the misery of decades of fighting for nothing — all of it vanished when she finally looked up from her work to see the storm bearing down on her.
Large eyes set in a moon-shaped face met his own with neither fear nor resignation. She stared him down, her chin set and her hands still pressed into the flesh of her mangled patient.
She didn’t try to run. She didn’t flinch or scream.
The healer watched a battle-hardened orc carrying a bloodied warhammer come down on her without a modicum of fear.
In another life, at another time, he might’ve stumbled. He might’ve lost his mind completely as he beheld the perfect creature staring back at him like a goddess come down to ease the suffering of mortals.
But in this lifetime he was a soldier, and when a cry of warning went up, he didn’t stop to think about anything besides keeping her alive.
It was pure instinct to fling his body over hers a mere moment before an explosive detonated only a few feet away.
He landed hard on top of her, his much larger and tougher body pressing her into the filth.
The shifter she’d been tending to didn’t even have a moment to let out a cry before his battle was ended, taking him far beyond what even the best healers could do.
Heat flashed across Henrik’s body, searing him through the layers of his thick wool uniform and armor.
The pain barely registered.
The world went very still as he pressed his face into the healer’s dark hair, revealed by her fallen hair-covering. Despite the acrid smoke and blood that permeated everyone and everything on the battlefield, the scent of violets reached him.
Another flash of heat, so very different from that of an explosive, scorched the flesh of his hands and feet.
Henrik gasped, his powerful limbs contracting around the soft body below him. Something inside him cracked open under the force of an invisible hammer’s blow, letting loose a flood of instinct.
My mate. My mercy. My blessing.
The words were formless but certain, an unshakeable feeling that brooked no argument. They came from something inside of him that was beyond logic, beyond battlefields or loyalty to clan and queen. They were immutable and undeniable.
Henrik rose up on his hands to behold the blessing he’d been given. She lay beneath him, her eyes closed but her breathing steady, apparently knocked unconscious either by his hard landing or the explosive.
Raising a shaking hand, he cupped her dirtied cheek. His flesh, once a pale gray, had blackened not from the dirt, but from the gift he never dreamed he’d receive: the kohl.
“Thank you,” he breathed, stroking the smooth skin below the grime. His voice was little more than a smoke-roughened croak. Even if she’d been awake to hear it, she might not have understood it.
The cold mud shuddered under them as another bomb went off. Debris flew over their heads, pelting his back with stones, bits of what was once an encampment, and the gods only knew what became of men when they met explosives.
Instinct had always been a powerful force in him, but he’d never experienced it like he did then.
Henrik’s vision sharpened as a wave of adrenaline washed over him. He didn’t feel his wounds or his fatigue. There was no hunger or the persistent soreness of a body that’d seen too much battle.
He was new.
All at once, he understood what he had to do.
Henrik didn’t have time to be gentle as he slung his mate over his shoulder.
She weighed less than his field pack, which he’d somehow managed to retain through the ambush.
Gripping the backs of her thighs with one possessive hand, he held tight to his hammer and surged to his feet.
“All will be well,” he promised his healer. Fear and worry evaporated. All that existed in him was the instinct to protect her and the unshakeable certainty that he’d do anything to earn the gift the gods had given him — even if that meant abandoning the cause he’d sacrificed seventy years for.
No, he thought, eyeing the horizon through the smoke. I didn’t fight for the Orclind.
Seeing a narrow opening in the fighting, he bent at the waist and charged.
His boots threatened to slide in the slushy mud, but he somehow managed to keep his balance as he dodged snarling shifters and the ear-shattering pop of explosives.
His own people didn’t fire on him, though they should have.
If they noticed he was running away from them rather than toward them, they did so far too late.
His legs never carried him faster than they did when he sprinted with reckless speed through the battle.
When he finally cleared the smoke, he didn’t stop.
When the sounds of gunshots and bombs exploding faded, he didn’t stop.
When gentle snow became a howling blizzard, he didn’t stop.
He ran until he could run no more, compelled by the ancient instinct to protect and hide that which was most precious. He ran and ran, blood soaking his uniform and fingers gone numb from cold.
Only when he reached the remains of an abandoned town did he finally slow.
I did it for her, he realized, nearly delirious with exertion and blood loss. I did all of this for her. Now I have to get her safe. She needs a nest. Where can we nest?
The sky was rapidly darkening. The cold was as sharp and clean as a blade on his tongue. The building storm added to the pounding urgency in his veins. He could survive the elements, but his fragile mate couldn’t.
It was another blessing that found him stumbling blindly into the nearly collapsed shell of a factory. Barely visible on a scorched brick wall were the words Western Beetsugar.
All in all, it looked entirely unfit for habitation from the outside, which was probably why it’d been overlooked by scavengers and others seeking shelter. When Henrik took his hammer to a heavy metal door on the undamaged side of the building, he was astonished to find a nearly untouched office.
It appeared that the main manufacturing zone had been the hardest hit, but the administrative center had been untouched — including what he could only assume was the boss’s office.
As the wind began to howl outside, he deposited his mate onto the tile floor as gently as he could.
Henrik resealed the metal door and barricaded it with several heavy desks before he prowled around the rooms, hammer in hand.
When no threats appeared and now armed with the knowledge that a mostly intact washroom was just down the hall, he returned to his mate.
She didn’t stir as he hastily barricaded the office door, too. The single high window had already been boarded up, probably by the owners of the factory shortly after war broke out, so he was able to relax a little.
It was by no means a satisfactory nest, but it would do for now.
Henrik’s kohl-darkened hands trembled as he unclipped his sleeping mat from his pack and laid it out on the dusty floor. She felt as delicate as spun glass in his clumsy hands as he arranged his mate on it.
“You’re safe now,” he assured her, falling onto his haunches. Twining their fingers together, he leaned his aching back against the cold wall and finally let out a slow exhale of relief.
She couldn’t hear him, but he still promised her, “I’ll build us a fire in a moment, my blessing.” A soft laugh escaped his rough throat. “It’ll be our first Burden’s Moon bonfire.”
He rested his head against the wall. A smile pulled at his lips. As soft as a breath, he whispered, “What a gift.”