Page 28 of Beds and Blades

Caen was already there when I arrived.

She had not changed out of the leather coat. The pendant at her throat was bright. Not the steady ambient glow of its resting state, but something sharper. More purposeful. The blue-white light looked less like illumination and more like a tool being applied.

The infirmary occupied a long, low room off the inner courtyard, built for function rather than comfort. Narrow beds lined the walls, most of them already occupied. Shelves climbed nearly to the ceiling, crowded with folded linen, rolls of bandage, metal instruments, stoppered bottles, ceramic jars, and glass vials filled with liquids that glowed faintly in colors no responsible medical substance should possess.

Bundles of dried herbs hung from the beams. Something silver simmered in a black iron pot over the hearth, giving off steam that curled upward in spirals. Several shallow bowls had been arranged along one table, each filled with dark paste, powdered minerals, crushed leaves, or something that looked unpleasantly like ground bone.

The air was warm from the hearth and thick with the competing smells of blood, smoke, vinegar, herbs, hot metal, and the sharp mineral scent of whatever passed for antiseptic in Mytharo.

Caen was not working alone. Two women moved alongside her. One managed the supplies; the other performed triage at the far end of the room with calm, methodical thoroughness.

Neither of them was a mage. They did not have pendants. They operated less like magical practitioners and more like overworked doctors in an emergency room.

Fast. Focused. Irritated by inefficiency. They moved through the infirmary quickly, knowing where every supply was kept and exactly how little time they had to use it.

I helped the wounded into the room, held things when Caen needed a hand free, did the small practical work of someone with a two-hour undergraduate first-aid course. I had the good sense to stay out of the way of someone who actually knew what she was doing.

Caen stood over one of the wounded with her eyes closed, her hands hovering just above the torn flesh. The pendant at her throat brightened from blue-white to something almost silver, and the light moved down her arms in thin, luminous threads.

For one impossible second, the infirmary changed.

The blood on the table shone like garnet. The steam from the hearth bent toward her. Every shadow in the room seemed to draw back, not in fear, exactly, but in recognition.

Then the wound began to close.

Not like a vampire’s wound. Not that brutal, obscene refusal to remain damaged. This was different. Living. Flesh remembering what it had been and agreeing, piece by piece, to become whole again.

The soldier made a sound low in his throat. Caen’s mouth went flat. The pendant flared once, bright enough to turn the room blue at the edges.

Then it was done.

The skin was sealed. The bleeding had stopped. Only a pale scar remained where the wound had been.

The soldier watched his arm magically heal as if this were a casual, everyday occurrence.

I had spent my entire academic career as a woman of evidence. Sources. Peer-reviewed conclusions. Arguments that could survive scrutiny and footnotes and hostile committee questions.

Now I was standing in a frontier garrison in another world, watching torn human flesh close beneath a woman’s hands while blue-white light poured from a pendant at her throat.

There was no framework for this. No hypothesis broad enough to contain it. Magic was real.

Magic was closing a wound while I stood there with a roll of bandage in my hand and absolutely nothing intelligent to say.

Caen moved to the next bed.

The soldier there was young. Younger than seemed fair.

The wound was in his leg, high and deep, close to where the femoral artery ran. The amount of blood on the floor told the story before Caen’s expression confirmed it.

She went still in the way of someone who had already reached the end of the calculation. Then she worked anyway. Because that was what she did.

The pendant brightened. Her hands hovered over the wound. For a moment, the light gathered there, silver-blue and fierce.

Then it faltered.

Caen opened her eyes.

“I cannot heal what has already given way,” she said.