Chapter IV #3
Go, a voice ordered. A woman’s voice, rich and mellow and infinitely desirable.
Fia, who’d often been beaten for waywardness, did not hesitate.
She woke from the bloodborne dream—a gift granted by the goddesses—and obeyed.
With crimson still staining her hands, she took nothing, for there was nothing to take, and left her village behind, following the winding trail to Corrin, which she had never traveled before.
There, she found both devastation and the daughters of the Beloved Three.
Fia could not sort out why, of all people, the goddesses had called her to Corrin, or why they wanted her to tend the injured there, but she was devout in her own way.
Too poor and too ignorant to have encountered much leechcraft, she could do stitchwork and sever a limb without losing the contents of her stomach.
It was enough. In the hospital tents where she lent her service, the wounded outnumbered their attendants four dozen to one.
On the fifth day of her service, Fia knelt beside an Honorian soldier with a ruined arm.
She no longer wondered why she had been called.
All she knew now was the work. The man on the mat before her—for the makeshift hospital on the plains had run out of camp beds days ago—was old enough to be her grandfather, a grizzled veteran of many battles, with the scars to show for it.
He lay stoically as Fia looped a rope around his wrist, securing it to an iron peg driven deep into the earth.
A sick smell of infection rose up as she handled his injured arm, and he went gray beneath his weathered tan.
“Here. I’ll hold him, if need be, and help with clearing up when you’ve finished,” someone said softly from nearby, and Fia nodded, recognizing the voice. Ariana Lyrien, one of the women sworn to the goddess of stars.
Letting out a breath, Fia turned to her borrowed instruments—bonesaws and fleshcutters, all scrupulously clean.
Half the work she did was in hauling and boiling water and cleansing the tools she’d been given.
She answered directly to the daughters of Raea, overseen by a fastidious soria called Aurelia, and they insisted on rigid order and hygiene.
Selecting a thin, wickedly sharp knife, Fia looked down at the soldier.
“I have nothing for the pain,” she said evenly. “If the goddesses are merciful, you’ll lose consciousness in a moment. If they’re not, well. The soria here will pray for you.”
The dark-haired Lyrien girl at Fia’s side nodded, perfect in her piety. “Of course. You have all my prayers, now and until this is finished.”
But the soldier’s mouth twisted. “I don’t hold with the old goddesses. I’m Honorian, and an Inver, and loyal to my house. I serve Tyrus, god of war, and no other, so save your breath.”
Fia and the Lyrien soria traded a glance. Neither of them gave any response to the Honorian soldier’s statement—he was, after all, Fia’s countryman, whether they agreed on religious matters or not.
A choking groan rose from the soldier as Fia made her first cut.
She worked quickly and precisely, having undertaken the same task a hundred times since leaving the mountains.
Though the soldier held tight to Ariana’s hand, he did not require restraint and did not lose his wits.
Sweat stood out on his forehead, and his face was a twisted mask of agony, but he kept quiet and stayed still.
Fia admired that—some of the men she’d tended screamed and writhed, and while she could not blame them for doing so, it made her work more difficult, and their own cure more uncertain.
If infection did not take hold again, this soldier’s arm would heal well, for his composure meant Fia was able to do the job neatly, and with care.
At last, the ruined arm came away, a length of flesh left to be sewn over the remaining stump.
“Here,” Ariana said, reaching for Fia’s bloodied instruments. “Let me.”
Fia readily relinquished them, taking up her needle.
She stitched quickly, absorbed in the work, knowing Ariana would keep a close eye on the soldier.
The Lyrien girl crouched near his head, cleaning bonesaw and knife with great care, and set aside the water she’d used and the soldier’s soiled bandages for lavandaria feminae, the art of washing that reserved blood for offering to the goddesses.
Fia had nearly finished her stitchwork when the soldier spoke, his voice a fraying thread. She glanced up, pushing strands of tawny hair away from her face with the back of one bloodstained hand.
“Girl,” he said. “Thank you.”
Fia made no answer. She was never sure what to say when men offered her their thanks.
She could not wave away her work as being of no consequence, and could not tell them they were welcome to it.
They were not—Fia wished more than anything to live in a world where such service was not necessary.
Where she had not found herself caught up in the excruciating intimacy of watching others suffer and die.
“How old are you?” the soldier breathed, sounding exhausted beyond all reckoning.
Fia fixed her eyes sullenly on the neat row of stitches she’d nearly completed. “Fifteen.”
“Fifteen. And not sent to Vesper, or to support the army here?”
“No.” This time, Fia set her jaw. “And it’s lucky for you I wasn’t.”
“There.” Ariana’s sweet voice fell upon them both like music, as she set the last of Fia’s gleaming cutting tools back onto their tray. “Nothing to do besides sanctify the blood now.”
The soldier did not repeat his thanks to Ariana. He did not look at her at all, for she was not Honorian, and worse yet, served gentle Lyria of the Stars, both of which rendered her beneath his notice.
“Will you do the bandaging?” Fia asked Ariana, as she tied off her last stitch. “You’re neater about it than I am.”
She said it pointedly, and mostly for the soldier’s benefit. Ariana, a true daughter of stars and faultless in her obedience, moved to Fia’s side at once.
“I’d rather you did it,” the soldier muttered, but Fia waved a careless hand.
“No. I’ve been going since dawn, I mean to sit and breathe for a spell.”
She did just that, a resolute and thorny presence, and enough to deter the soldier from any further rudeness.
Truth be told, Fia’s feet ached from pacing the aisles of the long hospital tents, her knees ached from kneeling at makeshift bedsides, and her back ached from crouching over the half-dead men they gave her to tend.
She was a bundle of minor pains and fatigue, but had known a great deal worse back home, so she took the opportunity to watch the Lyrien girl at work.
Ariana was a small, bird-boned thing, black-haired and milk-pale like so many from Corrin, the tiny nation that served as the continent’s last refuge for sons and daughters of the stars.
In Fia’s homeland of Honoria and in Caervallion, which they had just made war against, Lyria’s worship, service, and order were expressly forbidden.
Some were still graced with the goddess of stars’ mark, but they were expected to ignore it—to spend their lives faithless, or to cleave to the more brutal faiths Honoria and Caervallion had come to embrace.
Only Corrin still kept a cloister for Lyria and held to her ways, serving as an oasis of peace at the heart of a continent embroiled in wars.
Or it had done, until Honoria and Caervallion, the bloodthirstiest of Corrin’s neighbors, chose Lyria’s last refuge as their battleground. Corrin did not make war, but their neighbors had brought war to it, nevertheless.
None of that could be read in Ariana Lyrien’s face, though.
No grief, no distaste, no resentment toward one of the men who’d ravaged the green fields of her peaceable home.
She bandaged what was left of the soldier’s arm with practiced hands, and try as Fia might, she could see nothing but serenity in the other girl.
Serenity and compassion, all the way down.
Not all the Lyrien sorias or fratrias were like that, either—since leaving the mountains, Fia had found some less perfect in their devotion than others.
But Ariana? As far as Fia could tell, Ariana never faltered.
She made Fia want to be better, to be different, to become someone other than who she’d been when she walked out of her mountains.
Another Lyrien devout approached with a smile—a boy this time, and one of the youngest and least skilled among them, who kept what Raea’s sorias grimly referred to as the Middle Watch.
It was the hinterland everyone who came under their care must pass through—a suspended time, when death was as close as life, and survival for those they tended hung in the balance.
Some soldiers emerged from the Middle Watch convalescent and were returned to the remnants of their respective armies, who waited in terse encampments at Corrin’s northern and southern borders.
Others emerged with the inevitability of death written in every line of them, and were given over to the daughters of Silith, the changeful and mysterious moon.
While Raea’s sorias alone were permitted to draw blood if it might save a life, it was Silith’s sorias who were able to bring about a painless and bloodless death with their skills as herbalists and chemists.
The long tent they oversaw was an eerie, silent place, with an otherworldly calm all its own.
Fia had wandered into it once by mistake, and knew she’d never be able to find the heart or the courage to return.
“I’ll take these,” Ariana offered, balancing the tray of instruments on one hip, as Fia gathered the blood-soaked linens and bucket of crimson water.