MAREN
Three rules for working the hard roads.
Don't stop after dark. Don't accept credit. Don't get involved in anything you can't stitch closed in under an hour.
The thing in the ditch is going to break all three.
I'd been walking since dawn, counting miles the way other people count coins. Fourteen down, six to go before the next settlement. My boots have worn a blister on my left heel that I've been ignoring since midmorning, and my pack digs into the groove it's carved between my shoulder blades over the past two years. The straps need adjusting. I'll do it tonight when I stop.
The road stretches ahead, rutted and mud-slick from last week's rain. Birch trees crowd the edges, their bark peeling in white curls, the leaves just starting to turn gold at the tips. Autumn coming. I can smell it under the mud and the green, that faint sweetness of decay that means the cold isn't far behind.
I should pick up the pace. Winter on the roads is its own kind of death sentence. A portal would cut three days off the route, but portals cost more than a wandering healer makes in a month.
So I walk.
The sound stops me first.
Something big, breathing wet and wrong. Not an animal. I've heard wounded deer, gored bears, dying wolves. They don't sound like this, this wheeze with holes in it, this gurgle underneath that means blood in places blood shouldn't be. This is different somehow.
I slow down before I can tell myself not to.
The ditch runs along the road's edge, carved deep by spring floods and filled now with dead leaves and shadows. I make out the shape of something down there, too big to be human, too still to be alive.
I should go around. The tree-line curves north and I could skirt the whole mess, add maybe two miles to my day, still make the village before full dark if I move fast and don't look back.
My feet stop walking.
Damn it.
I pick my way down the embankment, mud slicking under my boots, grabbing at birch saplings to keep from sliding.
The smell hits me first.
Blood, copper-bright and fresh. Underneath it, something that smells like hot metal, like nothing that should be coming from a living body.
The body takes up most of the ditch.
Nine feet of armored flesh, maybe more, twisted into the mud with his limbs bent wrong. His skin is bronze and rough, the texture of old oak. Blood everywhere, black and red mixed together, soaking into the dead leaves, painting the mud. The wounds are deep. Four parallel gashes across his chest and side, the edges already going gray with the first creep of infection.
Bogatyr.
The word surfaces from somewhere deep, from stories my father told me when I was small. Giants who swore oaths and kept them, who fought monsters. Berserkers.
I’d heard they were extinct.
This one's breathing. Barely. Each inhale sounds like tearing cloth.
I slide the rest of the way down and land on my knees beside him. Up close he's even bigger, shoulders three times the width of mine, hands that could wrap around my entire head with room to spare. The heat coming off his body is wrong, too hot, fever-hot, and when I press my fingers to his throat to find a pulse, his skin burns against mine.
“Still alive,” I mutter. “Barely. Blood loss severe, infection starting, internal damage unknown. Possibly unsurvivable. Definitely stupid to try.”
I rip my pack off.
The supplies spill out onto the muddy leaves. Needle and thread, the good kind I traded three days' work for. Clean bandages, not enough but better than nothing. The half-empty bottle of alcohol that cost more than everything else combined. I line them up on a flat rock and try to see the wounds as wounds, as problems to solve, not as the death sentence they probably are.
Pressure first. The worst bleeder is the gash across his ribs, pulsing dark with each labored breath. I press both hands against it and lean my weight in. His blood wells up between my fingers, hot enough to make my skin ache.
“Pressure on,” I tell the unconscious body. “Just keep breathing. You keep breathing and I'll keep working and we'll see who quits first.”
