Chapter Three
Chapter
three
It is not yet dawn, but already I am on my way to the infirmary. My boots are a steady rap in the eerie quiet, carrying me down darkened streets.
“You’re about early,” a voice says as its owner falls into step beside me. His gait betrays no limp despite the slim shin brace I know he still wears beneath his stiff leather boots—the final trace of a recently healed fracture. His copper hair is a dull flame in the dim light of dawn.
“So are you,” I return, brows lifting. “Kicked out of bed by one of your many suitors?”
“You’ve got it all wrong, Ace. They beg me to stay. Beg. On their knees, tears in their eyes.” Farley grins at me. “I thought I’d get an early start before reporting for duty at the barracks.”
“Duty?”
“Didn’t you hear? I finally got approval to rejoin active rotations. You’re looking at a fully reinstated member of the Ember Guild.” His chest puffs in self-importance. “I’ll be leading my own unit.”
“That’s a big step.”
“Not really. I have a wealth of experience in ordering men around.”
“In the bedchamber, maybe. Not on the battlefield.”
His grin turns impish. “They’re not all that different, if you’re doing it right.”
My eyes roll at his innuendo. “Are you certain you’re ready for this?”
“I’ve been ready since the day you first set my bones back in place.”
“Just be careful—”
“Och, woman! Don’t nag. I’ll not ruin all your healing efforts on my first day back.” He pauses. “You’ve got more important healing to do now.”
My grip tightens on the basket hooked over the crook of my arm.
It is full of salves, tinctures, and elixirs, the tiny bottles clinking musically with each step.
I’d spent a good portion of this night in the stockroom, hunched over a mortar and pestle, grinding herbs until my fingers went numb.
Just as I have every night this past week, since Pendefyre left the city.
According to Mabon, he’s gone to survey the plateau’s pastoral provinces, where Dyvedi farmers are battling the blight like never before. He left no word as to when he’d return.
My irritation at that fact, along with my inability to sense his presence through the bond, has left me even more restless than usual.
Though if insomnia has one benefit, surely it is productivity.
The shelves have never been so tidy, the stores of herbal remedies never so well stocked.
A good thing, as we are in sore need of them at the infirmary.
A nasty influx of spring flu has swept through the capital, sending countless patients into my care.
At one point in my life, back when I was helping Eli heal sick folk in Seahaven, such rapid spread would’ve worried me terribly.
Compared to battle wounds and crushed limbs, however, some mild coughs seem a flimsy threat.
I have lost count of the number of wounded soldiers and civilians I’ve treated over the past two months.
I am not one of the Life Guild, with their austere sand-hued uniforms and rigorous apprenticeship requirements, who treated injured Caelderans in the time before the battle.
But they need all the help they can get.
With the old hospital ward buried beneath a pile of rubble, medical supplies are in short order.
Healers who know how to administer those supplies are even more scarce, since the vast majority of them were inside when the walls caved in.
In the beginning especially, folks would stare at me with wide eyes and speak in hushed whispers whenever I came around to their cots to examine their wounds.
That’s her.
The Remnant of Air.
See the storms in her eyes?
The chatter has died down recently. Or perhaps I’ve just gotten better at ignoring their awestruck murmurs as I change blood-soaked bandages and set bone breaks and check sutures for signs of infection.
Much as I chafe against the growing myth that surrounds me, there is precious little I can do to set the record straight.
And even less cause for it, according to my friends in the Ember Guild.
The people need something to believe in, Ace, Farley chastised me only days ago. A god in their midst might just make them feel safe again. Let it alone, will you?
“Have you seen Carys?” he asks now, as we approach the barracks. They are quiet this time of night—sparring pits empty, archery targets unoccupied, torches burning low.
My throat feels suddenly tight. “Only through the window.”
“You should try again.”
“She doesn’t want to see me. She’s made it quite plain. Or have you forgotten how she slammed the door in my face?”
“She’s grieving, Ace.” He sighs and shakes his head. “She lost her—”
“I know what she lost,” I cut him off. “Just as I know who she blames for that loss.”
“She needs time. She’ll come around.”
“Mmm.”
“Doubt all you want. I’m right. True friendship doesn’t disintegrate overnight.”
I blow out a breath. “She’s asked for space. I’m giving it to her. The best I can do for now is stay close enough to keep an eye on her and the baby.”
The choice to dwell in the apothecary’s home has as much to do with his mortar and pestle as it does proximity to my old friend, a stone’s throw from her dressmaking shop on High Street.
My large picture window offers a prime view of the blue building at the end of the block, where every so often a slender female figure in a dark cloak slips out the front door, a small bundle swaddled against her chest. Baby Nevin is growing rapidly and seems healthy enough, judging by the hungry cries I hear echoing down the lane from the open windows of his nursery.
I long for the days before Fyremas when I was welcomed in with open arms and a warm cup of tea.
The last—the only—time I visited afterward, I saw the condemnation written plainly on Carys’s grief-shrouded features, read the blame blazing in the depths of her green eyes, well before she had a chance to close the door.
“Ace, I just think maybe—”
“Enough, Farley.” I shake my head. “If someday she decides she wants me back in her life…I’ll be there. But I will not force her to forgive me merely to ease my own guilt.”
“I’ve told you a thousand times, you have nothing to feel guilty about. No one blames you for Uther.”
“Stop.”
His mouth snaps shut at the severity of my tone.
Despite his gentle prodding, Farley knows better than anyone that Carys is not yet ready to forgive and forget my role in her husband’s death.
For it was at my urging that Uther went into the palace; at my word that he raced headlong toward danger.
If not for me, he would not have been on that bridge when the turrets crashed down upon it.
If not for me, he would still be alive.
It will take longer than a few weeks for such a wound to heal. I am not naive enough to believe Carys can ever forgive me, that our friendship will ever recover.
“I’ll pop by her shop later, after my rotation,” Farley assures me. “Make sure she’s holding up all right. See if I can get her to rest for a span while I watch over the babe.”
“You’re a good friend, Farley.”
“So are you, Ace. Only a matter of time until Carys sees through her grief and remembers that.”
We go our separate ways, Farley disappearing into the barracks, me continuing on past the stables to the old warehouse we converted into an infirmary some time back.
It is dark inside, the space lit only by a handful of candles flickering in their sconces.
The air smells of herbs and sweat and days-old blood.
Most of the patients are asleep in their cots, but some moan lowly in pain as they thrash, their foreheads dotted with perspiration from the fevers that ravage their weakened bodies.
By the far wall, I spot Lestyn, a scrappy, bespectacled lad several years my junior, in his tan Life Guild uniform.
He is technically still a trainee, as he had not yet completed his decade-long novitiate when the world came apart at the seams, but his skill has grown by leaps and bounds these past two months.
His quick, capable fingers are currently tending to a soldier who took a Reaver axe to the shoulder—one of our last patients from the battle still to be discharged.
Most would have died from blood loss or infection, but the man is of strong stock.
He’s lingered for weeks in increasing agony as his spliced muscles slowly stitch themselves back together.
Lestyn glances up when he hears me enter, nodding a silent greeting, his elfin face hardly visible in the candlelight. I return his nod as I slip off my cloak, trading it for a freshly bleached apron on the hook beside the door.
Grabbing the salve of eucalyptus and camphor from my basket, I follow the sound of coughing toward the frail elderly woman reposed on a nearby cot.
She is unlikely to last the night, her congested lungs failing a bit more with each passing hour.
I cannot save her. Not now. But I can rub salve on her chest to ease her labored breaths and hold her hand as she slips beyond my reach.
I can sop the sweat from her brow and close her eyes when they turn unseeing.
This is the hardest part of healing—knowing when it is time to stop.
Admitting that the battle, however hard-fought, has been lost. Setting aside your tools and tonics to instead embrace the uncomfortable truth about living: namely, that it always comes to an end.
Whether crushed in an instant beneath a fallen palace or whittled away in sluggish increments by the passing years, death is an inescapable inevitability.
Try as we might to postpone its arrival, eventually it comes for us all.
I hope, when at last it takes me, I do not see it coming. I have no desire to look death in the face. Not when I fear I might see my own eyes staring back at me—two storm clouds of chaos ushering my shattered soul to the aether, no match for the maegic I have unleashed.
Upon myself.
Upon the world.