We’ve barely made it to the inner doorway when a woman with a dark-purple streak in her hair intercepts us.
“Humans,” she says, speaking in a way that makes it sound not like a greeting but an assessment. “You have chest wounds, but you’re mobile. Petra will tend to you. Go to the empty bed at the very back of the room.”
She pauses to take a breath and then lowers her voice. “Stay away from the Blacksmiths. Their own healers are all busy helping the guards that returned from the mines today, so some have been sent here instead. Pain has made them murderous tonight.”
I take a moment to consider how pale she is. There’s a faint splatter of blood across her cheek. It doesn’t appear to be her own, but another healer in the near distance has a split across her lip.
My own blood boils. It takes a certain kind of person to hurt someone who is trying to help them.
Thoren’s gaze flashes to me and I recognize the anger in his eyes before he asks the woman, quietly, “What is your name, lady?”
She blinks at him, possibly because of the honorific ‘lady’ that our father taught us to use when addressing women. “I’m Sybil.”
“Don’t worry about us, Sybil,” he says, his jaw clenching. “We can take care of ourselves.”
Since we left the mountain, Thoren has been withdrawn, but now I sense the increasing anger that must be writhing within him.
I reach for him, but he’s already stepping into the room.
I follow closely on his heels, keeping watch and making the most of the wide aisle to steer clear of the two Blacksmiths in the beds at the front. Bandages are wrapped around various parts of their arms and legs. One of the healers—another woman with a dark-purple streak in her hair—is placing ointment across what appears to be a burn on one of the Blacksmiths’ arms.
One glance at both Blacksmiths’ faces tells me Sybil wasn’t exaggerating.
We quickly reach the empty bed on the right hand side at the back of the room, making it past the humans and the other healers along the way.
We’re still holding the apple cores and we deposit them onto a table beside our allotted bed.
Already, I’m contemplating the merits of using our deep light to fully speed up the healing process. The healers are visibly exhausted. There aren’t enough of them to deal with all of the injuries I’m seeing—mostly burns, but a lot of cuts too.
A young woman kneels next to the last bed on the other side of the aisle. She’s facing in our direction, but her head is down,her forehead pressed to the hand of a young man who lies, unmoving, on the bed.
She wears a pale-purple streak in her hair, fainter than those of the other healers. When she looks up, I see that her face is an oval shape with a pointed chin and her eyes are large and brown.
She can’t be much older than Thoren, maybe only fourteen.
She bats at the tears trickling down her cheeks, hurrying to cross the aisle toward us, but Thoren speaks first. “Are you okay?”
She stares at the hand Thoren holds out to her, and then her eyes fill with tears again.
Her whisper is barely discernable above the sounds around us. “He was my friend.”
Was.
The young man on the bed doesn’t appear to have any visible wounds or broken bones, until I focus on his face.
There’s a cut above his left eye and a thick streak of blood down that side of his face, partially concealed by the way his head is tilted toward the mattress.
Unbidden, I suddenly flash back to the moment I first saw Asha. The wound on her forehead. Just like this one.
Except that a small fleck of copper metal rests on this boy’s forehead at the edge of his wound.
The young woman has taken Thoren’s hand and he steadies her, but her eyes widen when she focuses on the blood on his shirt. “That’s a bad wound.”
She gestures to the empty bed. “I’m Petra. I can help you.”
I can’t stop myself from stepping into her path. “How did your friend die?”
She tenses and I recognize the flood of intense fear that washes over her, as well as the sudden stillness of the nearest healer and the men in the beds closest to us.
