Chapter 5 The first wound

After Garrick left, I thought I was free for a while.

I was mistaken.

A woman came out of the beam of light shed by the torches and said my name as if it was one that she knew very well.

She ordered me to follow her.

She moved with the sleekness of one who had less patience for nonsense. Her braid was silver and pulled tight against the base of her neck. Her hands smelled of boiled root and sage. She faced me and took in my measure in a quick flick of her gaze.

"You Anika Vale?"

“Yes,” I said. My voice was small in the empty hallway. The candlelight made the stone glow softly but it could not thaw the chunk of ice in my chest.

"I am Eira," she said. "The pack healer. You were brought in as a healer, I was told you stitch and bind. You'll be useful in the infirmary."

Useful. The word was acrid on my tongue.

"Useful to them?" I asked. "Or useful to me?"

Eira's tone was flat. "Useful is useful. Now we will put you to work where the lodge needs you. Come."

She gave me no time to object, if  Eira wanted to be polite she could have softened the words, but she did not.

We walked down sconce-lined hallways until the chatter of pack members faded. Eira kept to a steady pace, I kept to equal as I looked around.

Eira pushed a door open and stepped into a room that reeked of steamed herbs and boiled bones. Shelves lined the walls, mortars and pestles sat at the ready. A brazier, a shallow stone basin was mounted in one counter. Dried willow and lavender bunches hung from the rafters. A coarse table was already cleared and prepared for work.

“Here,” Eira said, pointing. “We have to be ready before the warriors come back. Tend what I ask and keep your hands moving. We do not want to be surprised.”

She set down a list upon the table and scrolled through it the way that an individual would browse through a plan. "Salves in the left bowls. Poultices on the second shelf. Boil water over the brazier and strain it twice. Prepare compresses. Two splints with leather bindings. Clean needles. Sterilize with boiled ash. Bandages should be folded and stacked. A tray for tourniquets. Have a burner lit and a pot for the cauterizing iron."

She spoke like a woman who had given orders in worse places than this. I read the list, then again. The names of herbs, the procedures, the order of things. My hands move automatically, if I could prepare salves and lay out bandages my mind would not have to keep pretending that it was sane. The work focused me.

"Do you know how to blend myrrh with oil?" Eira asked.

“Yes,” I said. "Equal quantities of fat melted and rendered, then a sprinkle of powdered myrrh and a rubbing of willow bark. Heat very gently until it changes color and then pour while still warm."

She nodded. "Okay. Grind the willow fat first. Use the pestle that lies on the counter. Be careful to keep temperature in mind. If you heat the oil too hot it will burn the compound."

Her tone was crisp. I approached the mortar, took up the pestle in hand, and began the beat. Grind. Press. Turn. Grind. Muscle memory overrode what my mind had been told to recall. The lodge would not care about why I had been traded. They would care about whether the salve worked.

She watched me work without speaking, she adjusted the placement of my wrist or the pressure on my thumb once, maybe twice. She spoke not one word of Garrick. She spoke not one word of the market. She spoke of stitches, of a knot that worked, of why certain herbs were kept separated in case of contamination. She moved smoothly around the room. She was the one who peeled bark from sticks and knew where to cut for maximum healing sap. She was the quieter strength of the household.

Then other women arrived. They arrived with the quiet confidence of one who has been called to do what they must. In no time at all, we had a line of busy hands. There was one woman named Mara who took the poultices away. Another, Lis, piled up bandage stacks and began to fold them with meticulous speed. They didn't say much, they worked like they'd been doing this since the day they were born.

We got through the lists that Eira had made, I boiled water, waited for the roll when it steadied, pulled the kettle back and strained. I heated oil and blended the powdered myrrh until the blend went amber. I put salve on clean cloth and rolled it into little, tight rolls. I labeled bowls with shavings of wood that Eira told me to burn around the edge so the odor wouldn't blend.

Eira's instructions kept coming, gentle and functional. "Trim the edges of the bandages so they don't fray. Double-apply the leather to the splints so it grips well. Get an alternative set ready for the head. If a man comes in with a puncture, bring me the cauterizing iron. And if his breathing is shallow, give him the wine compress and then the willow salve, don’t put wine on an open bone.”

We straightened it all out, it took a few hours by the brazier and stone sink. We set aside a small pile of herbs with a fresh, bitter smell: willow, lavender, comfrey, myrrh. We had a tray ready for the hot iron and water nearby so that if a person needed a tourniquet we weren't going to be rummaging.

Outside, by noon, the sky had lightened as the first of the returning scouts arrived. The corridor outside the infirmary hummed. Voices rose and dropped. The ring of boots on flagstones and men talking sliced through walls like wind.

Eira rinsed her hands and shot me a look that could have been approval or challenge. "Ready?"

I nodded. My hands were bruised from milling and my arms ached from the pestle between them, gentle aches that informed me I had done the work. The air was full of sap and smoke and the stench of boiled ash.

The initial storm of warriors came through the doorway like weather. They poured in together, rough and swift and smelling of sweat. One of them had a wound that already bled onto his armor. Another's forearm was wrapped up because a knife nipped and the artery was nearly nicked through. A third had his shoulder broken from a horse fall. The first demand was for someone to cut the wet cloth back and reveal the damage. Eira issued orders in crisp clarity.

“Bring him in here," she directed, gesturing towards the table. "Undress and heat him up. Anika, hot water and clean dressings. Mara, poultices. Lis, prepare the tourniquet."

The men moved and we followed behind them. The wounded were awkward, each a story. Blood thundered in the cramped space. Ointment fogged when it hit unhealed flesh. The heat of the brazier was now less indulgence and more tool. Eira and the other women worked with speed, hands clean and capable. I measured out salve, applied poultices, and wrapped bandages that held firm.

One of the men had an open, flattened wound across his thigh and required a deep stitch. The sword cut to the depths. Eira called in the cauterizing iron. Iron on flesh stank and made me flinch, but I kept my hands steady. I focused on the thread, the loop, the pull of the needle. The stitch brought edges together and the man breathed more easily.

We didn't pause, the door groaned on its hinges and another warrior was brought in; a younger man with a broken collarbone and an ash-covered face. They laid him on a cot. His breath smelt of pine sap and something that had been burnt.

"You do the splints," Eira said, nodding towards me.

I measured and cut wood, wrapped leather, and tested the support. My hands performed the motions on instinct, performing the motions with the dexterity of someone who had learned to keep other human beings alive so that they can do it again.

While we worked, the hall gossip was out of our range. There were nothing but our footsteps, the men's half-whispered oaths, and the soft hiss of the steam from the kettle. It was a sentimentless room. It accepted efficiency.

For an instant, as I knotted off, my flesh crawled like a stretched taut thread. I lifted my eyes. The doorway was a row of shadowy corridor, and within it I saw the row of hairline of someone standing by the door. The silhouette's hairline was unmistakable even at the slant. I felt the room catch its breath under the same compression that tightened my throat as Garrick entered a hallway.

My fingers lingered, the knot unstarted. Eira gazed up at the same time and then down at me with a look that I could not read.

"He has returned," she murmured.

No one spoke. The gravity of Garrick's return transformed all. The men cursed in silence. The wounded moaned softly and remained quiet. My heart pounded in the skin of my throat.

Eira did not step back from the table. She fixed me and the activity at hand with her gaze, which indicated that she desired the work to be the focal point, she did not wish for us to be distracted by the power that was present.

I felt Garrick before I saw him. It was a pressure, a tightening of the atmosphere. The atmosphere altered. Men stiffened without necessarily being instructed to do so. Cedar scent hit me like a memory one could not scrub from one's skin.

"Anika," he said, his voice barely above a whisper.

My breath left me, I spun around, and when I saw him standing in the doorway, the sight of him made my chest double over as if I'd been punched.

I gasped.