58. First Wave
First Wave
The week after the meeting at the Kettle went the way of a week a man set against the coming of the cold months.
Kain put the last of the smokehouse work in against the wall.
He put up jerky from the deer he had hung the morning of the cool turn.
Carol came down two mornings with a stack of glass jars on the seat of her cart and showed him how to put up fruit.
The jars went on the high shelf above the stove the way the jam jars from the festival had gone up there, only with more order.
Carol's order was a different order from Kain's order.
Carol's order held its place against a man reaching in for a jar without looking.
Carol took the cart home at the end of the second morning. Will Martinson stood at his barn door when she came up the drive and didn't lift a hand at Kain at the gate. Kain didn't expect the hand and didn't miss it.
Two C-rank rode in from the south on the first cold morning of the week.
They came through the door of Sam's store at the wrong pace for a door that quiet, a man and a woman in armor that was yellow at the chest and black at the joints, a pattern Kain didn't know from the country around Tillamore.
They signed the charter without reading it.
They paid the posting fee in copper. They asked Sam where the dungeon was.
Sam handed them the hand-copy of the map.
"First light tomorrow," the man said.
"Three days at the most before any of you ride back through this door," Sam said. "That's the posting rule."
"Sure."
They were gone before the bell over the door had stopped.
Kain stood at the counter and watched the door close behind them.
"They didn't read the charter," he said.
"They didn't."
"They didn't ask after the second floor."
"They didn't."
"Two of them."
"Two of them."
Sam set the registration in the day's stack and went back to pricing axe-heads.
Kain rode home and worked the stone wall along the garden corner the rest of the morning, and thought of the two of them at the bar the night before, the brashness of them, the certainty in the man's face, and the way the woman had cut her brother off with a coin slapped on the wood at the end of the dinner.
She had been the brisker of the two. The man had been the louder.
The two of them in the room had taken up more room than the room had to give.
He didn't know either of their names. He hadn't bothered to ask.
At four fifty-eight the next afternoon, a commotion ran up the street.
Kain was at the stove of the Kettle getting the coals warm and the butter melting when the shouting came in off the boards. He looked up at Sasha.
"I've got the stove."
"I've got the street."
He went out through the front of the Kettle.
The man was at the door with the woman in his arms. The color of him was the color of an unwashed shirt. Dried blood caked the both of them. The woman was out cold. The horses were nowhere on the road.
Kain held the door open.
"Inside. Someone fetch Maggarie."
He pulled three tables out from the wall and shoved them together into a long surface. He took the woman off the man. She was heavy. He carried her to the tables and laid her across them.
Blood from the wound on her shoulder started down onto the floor as Kain worked the armor off her.
The steel was gouged in places by a crushing weapon. In other places the steel had been eaten through and was pockmarked and tattered at the edges of the eating. He got the breastplate off her, and the upper armor with it, and a long gash ran across her right shoulder.
He pressed the heel of his hand into the wound. He nodded at the man.
"She'll live. It's bad but it isn't deep. It keeps breaking open."
The man nodded, swayed once, and went down sideways into a chair that splintered under him.
"Smelling salts," Kain called. "Where's Maggarie."
Maggarie came up the boardwalk at a run.
The two of them got the woman up the stair into the cheapest room in the Kettle. Kain helped the healer strip the rest of the armor. They cut the woman's tunic at the right places to bare the wounds without baring more than the work asked.
The shoulder gash was a few inches deep at the worst of it. Maggarie frowned.
"Not too bad. Something caught her good."
"Survey team mentioned beetles. The armor was eaten by acid."
"Acid." Maggarie set both hands on the woman's middle and worked her fingers along the ribs. She drew the tunic up an inch and showed Kain a burn in the shape of a hand-print across the midsection. "Match the armor."
"Match."
"Strong poultice. Yarrow. Honey. The dark powder. Oren."
Oren ran past the door of the room and was back inside a stretch with a bundle from the healer's house under his arm.
Kain helped grind the herbs in a small bowl, the powder going into honey, the honey going into the bowl, the bowl going onto the burn.
The lighter poultice went onto the shoulder gash.
A clean strip of linen went over the both.
Maggarie tied the strip at the woman's shoulder.
"You ever see damage like this."
"A few times. Not exactly like this. In the cities I worked in, when a C-rank party came up out of a B-rank dungeon, they came up looking like this. Beat up. Not dead. I helped field healers stitch up worse in the woods."
"Why."
"Extra coin. Made sure I knew how to handle a wound on the job."
「Skill Updated: Field Medicine C → C+」
"Makes sense."
The man came up off the chair below them at some point in the next hour. He didn't say much. He sat on the floor outside the door of the room and watched the door. When Maggarie came out and told him the woman would live, he nodded once and went back to the door and stayed there.
Kain went down the stair and scrubbed the long table at the bottom of it clean of blood. Sasha came up beside him with a second brush.
"Acid beetles. Stone crawlers."
"Acid beetles. Stone crawlers."
"The next party."
"Will hear about this one. Will come in better gear. Will be better at it. Will come back beat up in some other way."
"Then there'll be a third."
"Then there'll be a third."
They scrubbed the table. The blood came off the wood in a long brown stretch and went into the bucket.
A week later the woman could walk again, and the two of them rode out at first light. The man paid Sasha at the bar for the room. He laid a silver on the wood beside the cup of coffee she had poured him.
"Obliged."
"Take care of yourselves."
"We will."
That was the all of it.
Kain stood at the porch of the Kettle and watched them ride north out of town.
The woman rode straight in the saddle but with one hand on the pommel and the other one held against her side.
The man rode behind her, watching her, and didn't look back at the Kettle, and didn't look back at Sam's store, and didn't look at anything at all except the back of the woman in the saddle in front of him.
They went up the road and around the bend and out of sight.
Kain went back inside.
Sasha had a fresh pot of coffee on. She poured him a cup without asking and set it on the bar.
"First wave."
"First wave."
He drank the cup off and went back to the work.