It had beenthree weeks since the last slaughter. The death that came along with the war was inevitable. But Evelina still mourned when lives were lost.
A soldier screamed in pain, his cries as mangled as his leg. Evelina quickly pressed crushed linndula root to the open wound.
“Please pass out,” she whispered—more a prayer to Eurydice than anything else. She pressed harder, quickly wrapping his calf in bandages with her other hand. The scream abruptly stopped. She glanced at his face, finding his eyes closed and his breathing shallow.
Relief and adrenaline swept through her body, one after the other. Relief that the soldier had passed out and was no longer in agony; adrenaline as she pressed her two fingers just below his jaw to ensure he still had a pulse.
Her shoulders relaxed when she found the faint tapping rhythm of his heartbeat—slow, but there.
Taking advantage of his unconscious state, she used a salve imbued with the lead healer’s Essence to keep him unconscious.She rubbed it into each temple, careful to avoid the thick gash oozing blood from his cheek. Then she rifled through her satchel until she found another salve, this one thicker, a pale blue color, and layered it over the soldier’s open wounds. The remedies might all be temporary—needing reapplication often—but it would heal their bodies ten times faster than a fae struck with a ferrum blade could usually heal.
As she looked around the room, it struck her that these were the lucky ones. The ones who had survived. They were all lined up in this small wooden cabin, cot after cot. A Mother Tree was painted on the door, the symbol of a healer’s ward that housed the wounded.
Unfortunately, this was only one cabin of many, full to the brim with wounded fae. This refugee camp had nearly been full before the latest arrivals had shown up. Soon, she didn’t think it would be able to house any more wounded.
Once she was satisfied the soldier wasn’t going to slip away to a blissful afterlife in Caelum, she moved on to the next victim. She paused, taken aback at how similar he looked to a boy she once knew. The pointed ears poking out from shaggy, dark brown hair, the midnight eyes, and the way he looked at her as if she held all the answers in the realm.
“Will they follow us here?” the boy asked. His eyes were wide and filled with worry. He was so young. The clothes he wore told the story of a boy who lived in a farming village—Woodland, most likely.
She cleared her throat, shaking off the memories. “Doubtful. Word came about an hour ago that Viridian forces stopped the rebels from advancing. They pushed as far south of the palace as they could, but we held strong.”
The boy opened his mouth to reply but was instead accosted by a wet, bone-rattling cough.
Evelina had seen her fair share in her time as a healer, and this one was simple. She quickly got to work, mixing rennew powder into a cup for him to drink, and to his credit, hedowned it in a few gulps—even without it being warmed. She had him lie down and sat with him for a few moments to make sure the effects of the rennew started to work. It was fast-acting, his cheeks already filling with color and his cough calming.
It was often humans who needed the magic of a healer, their bodies unable to mend themselves in the way fae could. But fae weren’t exempt from pain. Immortality didn’t protect them from a ferrum blade, or curses from another, especially if their Essence was drained.
The need for healers only seemed to grow as the war dragged on. Evelina’s time was split between tending to the wounded in the refugee camps and mixing and replenishing tonics in the infirmary at the palace. She wanted nothing more than for this war to end, but for as long as there were those needing healing, she hoped she could always be here to help them.
The walk back to the palace felt longer than the walk to camp. A few other healers trailed silently alongside her. When she thought of the incoming people seeking healers and shelter, her adrenaline carried her all the way to the camp. But now, with the sun starting to set and the forest quiet, her thoughts were too loud, her eyes too heavy.
Attacks close to the border were pushing more and more fae toward the palace, forcing them to relocate with their villages burned or destroyed. Moros and his endless human army were not the only threat anymore. A fringe group of dark god worshippers had morphed into something far more dangerous within the borders themselves. Unlike the human soldiers mindlessly pillaging towns and heckling villagers, these fae rebels knew the land.
They were lethal. Calculated.
At some point, they had started leaving the symbols of the dark gods in the wake of their destruction: orange flame enveloping a tree for Vidaris, white flame over a star for Nyx, and blue flames atop cresting waves for Xenos.
Before the wyverns arrived, Evelina had so much faithin life, so much pride in bearing the Manor name. But now it felt like the whole world was turned against them. And even though she knew the empire had to fight back to protect the realm…death was death. A life was still lost. Perhaps it was her years in training as a healer that made her understand how precious life was.
Her steps faltered as she arrived at the lunaria garden by the palace, the other healers going ahead to return to the infirmary. Evelina paused in the garden. It rested alone on a small patch of soil, nestled between pine trees and lined with wooden stumps along the perimeter.
The boy from earlier had looked just like the boy from her dreams. Flashes of her and Daimon sitting between the lunaria flowers as younglings, of midnight eyes that watched her so closely, filtered into her mind. It was always the place she felt safest with him. Though the flowers looked the same, somehow it felt empty now.
“Why these flowers?” Evelina asked, her voice unsure.
Daimon grabbed her hand and pulled her behind him. “Because no one comes out here. We can dream for hours without being found.”
She didn’t have to be convinced after that. She walked alongside him, her dress swishing against the leaves on the ground.
He stopped abruptly in the middle of the garden and sat down.
“What are you doing?” she laughed.
He tugged on her hand, motioning for her to sit down beside him.
“And get my gown dirty?”
It was his turn to laugh. “Since when have you ever cared about that? You spend more time in the herb garden than anywhere in this realm.”
