“I told you she would hear me!” Pira cried in triumph before her mother hushed her. Calli’s eyes met Shia’s in question, and Shia gave the tiniest of nods before dismounting. The impossibility of Shia hearing Pira’s voice was something that they would think about later—but Shia suspected that it would not be more than a few winters before Breyburn would have another white visitor.
“How many? How bad?” Shia started unloading her herb packs, glad that Calli had always been sensible. She was sure that most merchant’s wives Calli’s age would have been in hysterics, instead of calmly gathering the wounded into their own homes for care.
“Captain Nolan and two others were dead before the bandits left, but I think Sergeant Dara will be well soon enough. Several of the guardsmen can only have their pain eased, I think, but most of the others have lesser wounds. Twelve injured guardsmen, including the worst.”
Shia sucked in her breath. With three deaths, that was more than half of the town guard unable to act. No wonder those who remained were bewildered and uncertain. She handed two packs to Calli and swung the others over her shoulder, absently tucking the fir branch she had brought into the lamp bracket beside the door before she realized that she had harvested a silver pine, the tree of Kernos’ protection. She whispered a brief petition for the god’s hands to hold all those whose wounds she was about to tend, then followed Calli inside the house.
“And the others? The men at the gates said some of the merchants were attacked.” She reached out her hand to touch Calli’s arm as they hurried down the hall to the chapel. “Your husband? Is he—”
Calli’s breath hitched, but she kept walking. “Injured, but not the worst. Master Widthan may not last the night, though, nor Josette. And Master Riordan is gone.”
“Lord Corus will need to be informed, although I don’t know that he’ll be able to send any men from Torhold—the muster to Karse has spread his forces thin,” Shia said faintly. “He will need to send word to Haven, to the Heralds. His Majesty must also know of these new attacks, especially if they are organized. It might be they had help from Karse. Either way, if they met with what they deem success, they will be back. And Herald-Trainee Teo must be told of his father’s death.” She hoped her voice didn’t sound too strangled. Well, if it did, let Calli think that it was fear of more bandit raids that stole her breath. Even three years later, the strange empty ache that had blossomed as she watched him ride down the Old Quarry Road still swelled within her whenever she thought of him. “Take me to Sergeant Dara, first, then I’ll see the worst of the rest.”
For Shia, the next candlemarks passed in a blur of treating the wounded, moving from one injured person to the next. Thankfully, Calli was for the most part accurate in her assessment of the severity of injuries. Sergeant Dara had been knocked unconscious, but her other wounds were minor. She regained her senses while Shia was applying healing poultices to the cut that laced across her leg, and it was clear that she was in full possession of those senses. She began directing the remaining guard, propped up in her cot, the captain’s sword bared across her knees. She even dictated a message that two of the merchants’ sons would take down the mountain roads to Torhold on the fastest of the town’s horses.
Calli Stadres proved a surprisingly capable pair of hands assisting Shia, readily learning how to mix the basic poultices and clean and dress the lesser injuries. And if, between one patient and the next, she always walked down the hall to stand for a few moments at the door to the room where her husband slept, bandages swathed around his head and shoulder, Shia could hardly blame her.
When they had finished tending the last injured merchant, Shia was pleased with her work. She even thought that her herbs might be able to bring around a few of those that Calli had thought would not last. Josette, the innkeeper, she was sure, would make it, although she herself wouldn’t be able to take credit for that. The old woman was just too stubborn to, as she put it, “let ’em put paid to me if’n I wouldn’t let ’em put paid to my inn.” She had grumbled and complained about the damage to the inn while Shia had “fussed” over her, but she had finally accepted the sleep tea and let her body get to the more important business of healing.
Shia was glad, though, that she had been gathering in the area of the mountain where she had been, at that height, several of the best wild plants for bleeding injuries developed a higher potency. And today she had harvested an inordinate amount of those plants, more than she ever needed for the normal injuries of the remote mountain town. This was not the first time, however, that she had harvested without thinking about it. Every so often she would gather herbs in a daze, seeming neither to hear what was around her nor even to see what she was doing. She had learned to trust it, those rare occasions, for what she gathered in those moments was always used—like the time when she and her mother had gone to harvest feverdraw, and she had found her basket full of the elm bark they used in tinctures and teas for throat ailments, and that winter a coughing illness had stricken the town.
“Pira, stop twirling about like that! You’ll make me too dizzy to think!” Calli Stadres laughed as her daughter danced in the shaft of sunlight that lanced across the sunroom, her outstretched hands scattering tiny bits of seed-fluff that floated and glinted in the air around her. Her mother turned back to the worktable, reaching one hand around to rub her lower back. “Some days, I don’t know how I’ll ever keep up with two—” Her voice cut off when she saw Shia’s face, and she lunged forward to take the mortar and pestle from the young woman’s hands before she dropped them.
“Shia, what is it? What’s wrong? Are you well?”
Shia leaned forward until her head rested on the cool stone slab laid across the top of the table, trying to calm the roiling in her stomach.
“I . . . am well,” she managed. “Captain Dara . . .” her voice trailed off as another wave of something that felt like pain and anger hit her. Then, as soon as it had come, the feeling fled, replaced by the same surety of wrongness that she had felt up on the mountain when the town was first attacked. She pushed her hair out of her face and met Calli’s worried eyes.
“I think the troop has been ambushed.”
“How do you . . . ?” Calli’s eyes widened when Shia only shrugged, and she glanced over at Pira. The young girl had stopped twirling but just stood in the sunbeam, looking at her mother in confusion. Calli took in a slow breath of relief that her daughter had not been affected, then nodded slightly.
“I’ll check the bandage kits while you rub the powders for the poultices. We’ve set so many supplies aside from caring for the traders that we shouldn’t need to prepare too much new.”
By the time Captain Dara brought the wounded of her small troop back to the room in the Stadres household that had served as a makeshift infirmary since the first attack, Calli and Shia had prepared enough that they were immediately able to care for the worst of the injuries. This time, at least, none were life-threatening.
Shia unwrapped the hasty field bandages and held Lieutenant Fellan’s arm tightly, trying to keep from jarring his newly realigned shoulder as she attempted to match up the shattered bones of his forearm. “You seem to have had the worst of it of all the group,” she murmured. He had already bitten his lip to bleeding on the ride back to the town, and her liquor-laced herbal concoction for pain had barely started to take the edge off.
“Don’t know how they do it,” he muttered hazily. “They dance around the town when there’s traders, then slink off into nowhere. Traders’re coming ’round less, too. If’n we can’t stop ’em, it’ll be a thin winter. Cap’n Dara’s good, but she’s only one.” He grunted as Shia made a last shift of his wrist, then settled to a drugged sleep as the herbs deepened their effects. Letting his arm rest on the splint on the low table beside them, Shia closed her hands lightly over the break, trying to sense if anything still was out of place beneath the skin. Her fingers tingled slightly, feeling the heat of injury spreading up from his flesh, and she held her hand there for a longer moment, as though she could force the angry heat to subside and the bone to knit together.