Chapter 16
The shooting had stopped, but nothing about Harlan's settlement felt calm yet.
Grace moved through it helping where she found a use for her hands — steadying a door somebody needed to carry a wounded man through, gathering dropped rifles into a pile near the barricade so nobody stepped on one in the dark later, checking a shed wall that had taken rounds to see whether it would hold through the night.
She didn't try to direct Harlan's people the way she directed her own.
She simply worked wherever a gap opened.
Smoke hung faint over one corner of the settlement where a shed had caught fire before somebody beat it out.
A child sat wrapped in a blanket near the main building, wide-eyed, being minded by an older woman who kept a hand on his shoulder without saying much.
Somewhere a horse whinnied, spooked by all the noise and smell of the last hour, and somebody went to settle it.
Harlan moved among his own, slower than usual, the old injury dragging at him worse than Grace had ever seen it. He wanted to check on everybody himself, walking the length of the settlement despite the leg clearly costing him with every step.
"Sit down," Grace told him, the second time she caught him gritting through it.
"I'm not one of your people."
"No. Mine listen occasionally."
He didn't sit, but the corner of his mouth twitched, close enough to a smile that Grace counted it as a small win and moved on.
Russ worked over one of the wounded a few yards off, steady hands doing what he could with pressure and cloth. Danny and the Bennett cousin stood near the tree line where the attackers had broken off, watching the direction two of them had run.
Two had gotten away. Harlan knew it, and he didn't like it.
Grace wasn't sure she felt the same.
One of Harlan's men came over to report it plain — two Ravagers had broken for the trees during the last exchange, moving under their own power, gone before anyone could get an angle on them.
"Should've run them down," Harlan said.
"With what?" Grace asked. "We've got wounded people needing hands right now. Chasing armed men into cover we don't know, tired and short on daylight, isn't a trade I'd make."
An older man nearby, gray-bearded, missing part of one ear from some accident long before any of this, spoke up without being asked. "Maybe letting two go ain't the worst thing."
Harlan turned on him. "How do you figure that?"
"They tell whoever's left what happened here. Maybe the next bunch thinks twice before they try it."
"Men like that understand losses better than warnings," Russ said, not looking up from his work.
Grace agreed with both of them. The Ravagers had come expecting frightened people with nothing behind them. Instead they'd run into resistance from the front and armed strangers hitting them from behind, and two men carrying that story away might do more good than two more bodies would have.
Harlan didn't enjoy admitting it, but he didn't argue further either.
"Let them tell it," Grace said.
"Tell what?"
"That coming here costs more than it's worth."
They heard the horses before they saw them, and the guards challenged the riders on instinct before anybody recognized who it was.
Luke came in leading the pace, hard but controlled, no sign he'd run the horse past what it could give, sweat streaking both his face and the animal's neck.
Rebecca rode close behind him, a satchel across her body and a look on her face that had already shifted from the woman recovering at Karen's house into something sharper, more purposeful, closer to the woman who must have practiced medicine for years before any of this happened.
Billy Jean came last, saddlebags loaded with cloth and water containers she must have gathered at a run, her horse blowing hard from the pace.
Grace felt the relief first, seeing Rebecca upright and moving under her own power. The second thing she noticed was Billy Jean.
"You were supposed to stay home."
"I did," Billy Jean said. "Then Luke showed up covered in dirt saying people had been shot."
"I wasn't covered in dirt," Luke said.
Billy Jean looked at him. "You were."
Grace didn't waste time arguing it either way. Luke swung down and went straight to see to the horses, hands moving fast but careful over sweat-soaked hides, and Grace let him have that job. He needed something ordinary to do with his hands after the day he'd had.
"Where are the worst ones?" Rebecca asked, already swinging down.
Grace pointed toward the building where Russ had gathered the wounded. Rebecca moved that direction without waiting for anything more.
Rebecca went through the room fast but not carelessly, assessing before she touched anyone, moving from patient to patient with a focus Grace hadn't seen from her since she'd arrived at the Hollow half-dead.
A man lay pale on a makeshift pallet, a wound through the upper thigh that had bled heavily before somebody got pressure on it.
Rebecca knelt beside him first rather than reaching straight for the wound, checking his foot for warmth, pressing his toes and watching them color back, asking him to move them.
He could, slow and shaky, but he could. He could move his toes, his foot was warm, and Rebecca found a pulse below the wound.
All good signs. The leg appeared to be getting blood, though she made clear that didn't mean he was out of danger.
"How long's he been like this?" Rebecca asked the man holding pressure on the wound.
"Better part of an hour."
She nodded, checked his pulse at the wrist, checked his eyes, and moved to the wound itself, working the dressing loose enough to see without undoing whatever good the pressure had done.
A second man had taken a round clean through the upper arm, painful and bleeding but controlled, his hand warm, fingers moving when Rebecca asked.
She cleaned it and dressed it and moved on, telling him plainly it looked worse than it was likely to end up being, provided he kept it clean and didn't use the arm hard for a while.
A woman had a graze along one shoulder, ugly-looking but shallow, and Rebecca told her plainly it could wait behind the others.
A younger man sat holding his head, dazed from a chunk of wood that had caught him when a shed took a hit nearby.
Rebecca checked his eyes, asked him questions Grace couldn't follow the purpose of — what day it was, how many fingers she held up, whether his vision blurred — and told him to sit quiet and be watched rather than left alone for the next several hours.
She had none of the equipment David and Karen were hoping to find, days away by now with no way to send word either direction.
Clean water. Pressure. What dressings Billy Jean had carried down.
Antiseptic where it made sense to use it.
A little pain relief, carefully rationed.
Whatever oral antibiotics the Hollow could spare, weighed against how badly this man needed them compared to whoever might need them next.
Grace helped where Rebecca pointed her, and Rebecca gave instructions short and clear enough that nobody needed to ask twice.
"Hold pressure here." "I need more clean cloth." "Not that bucket — the boiled water." "Get him lying flat."
Nobody questioned her once they'd watched her work for five minutes. Harlan tried to hover near the worst patient, and Rebecca handled it without missing a beat.
"Can you walk?" she asked him.
"Yes."
"Good. Go find me more clean water."
Harlan looked like a man who hadn't been given an errand in a long while and didn't care for the feeling, but he went, and Grace had to look away to keep from smiling.
She watched Rebecca work a while longer, struck by how far this was from the woman who'd staggered through the Hollow's gate barely able to stand. She didn't let herself dwell on it. There'd be time for that later.
In the middle of the work, one of Harlan's residents leaned in to ask Grace where the newly wounded should go once Rebecca cleared them.
"Madam Mayor, where do you want these?"
Grace answered without thinking twice about the name attached to the question, and pointed him toward a clear stretch of floor near the wall.
Harlan's head turned. Grace noticed and didn't react.
A minute later, he said, "What?"
"Nothing."
"Didn't sound like nothing."
"They call you that now?" Harlan asked.
"Some do."
"Why?"
"You'll have to ask them," Grace said, and went back to what she was doing. He knew exactly why. She wasn't going to spell it out for him twice in one day.
Once the worst of the rush eased, Luke and Billy Jean helped outside — carrying water, moving gear, handing out what food Harlan's people had ready, checking the horses that had carried them all in.
They ended up near Harlan eventually, the three of them standing close enough that avoiding conversation took a real effort. Harlan looked at Luke. Luke looked back. Billy Jean looked at Harlan and said nothing at all.
Harlan broke first. "What?"
"Nothing," Billy Jean said.
"Didn't say anything," Luke added.
Harlan glanced toward Grace, clearly hoping for rescue. Grace kept her eyes on the water she was hauling and offered none.
Later, when somebody nearby called her Madam Mayor again, Billy Jean looked at Harlan a second time, longer than the first.
"Would you stop doing that?" Harlan said.
"Doing what?" Billy Jean asked, entirely innocent.
Luke had to look away to keep from grinning outright.
Rebecca returned to the leg wound once the rest had been stabilized, cleaning it further and checking it a second time before she'd trust it to sit overnight.
She explained to the man's wife what came next.
The bleeding was controlled, but that wasn't the same as safe.
Infection was the real danger now. He needed fluids if he could keep them down, rest, and close watching — fever, swelling, worsening pain, confusion, or bad-smelling drainage meant sending for her immediately, day or night.