Kingdom of Ash

Elide’s hands remained steady as she plucked up the thin knife and passed it to Yrene.

“Will it wake him?” she asked while Yrene bent over the unconscious warrior and examined the infected wound that was gruesome enough to turn most stomachs.

“My magic has him in a deep sleep.” Yrene angled the knife. “He’ll stay out until I wake him.”

Elide, to her credit, didn’t retch as Yrene began to clean out the wound, scraping away the dead, infected bits.

“No sign of blood poisoning, thank the gods,” Yrene announced as the cloth beside the man became covered in the discarded rot. “But we’ll need to put him on a special brew to make sure.”

“Your magic can’t just do a sweep through him?” Elide tossed the soiled cloth into the nearby waste bucket, and laid down another.

“It can, and I will,” Yrene said, fighting her gag as the reek from the wound stuffed itself up her nostrils, “but that might not be enough, if the infection truly wishes to make an appearance.”

“You talk about illnesses as if they were living creatures.”

“They are, to some degree,” Yrene said. “With their own secrets and temperaments. You sometimes have to outsmart them, just as you would any foe.”

Yrene took the mirrored lantern from beside the bed and adjusted the plates within to shine a beam of light on the infected slice. When the brightness revealed no further signs of rotting skin, she set down both lantern and knife. “That wasn’t as bad as I’d feared,” she admitted, and held out her hands over the bloody wound.

Warmth and light rose within her, like a memory of the summer in this frigid mountain pass, and as her hands glowed, Yrene’s magic guided her within the man’s body. It flowed along blood and sinew and bone, knitting and mending, listening to the aches and fever now running rampant. Soothing them, calming them. Wiping them away.

She was panting when she finished, but the man’s breathing had eased. The sweat on his brow had dried.

“Remarkable,” Elide whispered, gaping at the now-smooth leg of the warrior.

Yrene just turned her head to the side and vomited into the waste bucket.

Elide leapt to her feet.

But Yrene held up a hand, wiping her mouth with the other. “As joyful as it is to know I shall soon be a mother, the realities of the first few months are … not so joyous.”

Elide limped to the ewer of drinking water and poured a cup. “Here. Is there anything I can get you? Can—can you heal your own sickness, or do you need someone else to?”

Yrene sipped at the water, letting it wash away the bitter bile. “The vomiting is a sign that things are progressing with the babe.” A hand drifted to her middle. “It’s not something that can really be cured, not unless I had a healer at my side day and night, easing the nausea.”

“It’s become that bad?” Elide frowned.

“Terrible timing, I know.” Yrene sighed. “The best options are ginger—anything ginger. Which I would rather save for the upset stomachs of our soldiers. Peppermint can help, too.” She gestured toward her satchel. “I have some dried leaves in there. Just put some in a cup with the hot water and I’ll be fine.” Behind them, a small brazier held a steaming kettle, used for disinfecting supplies rather than making tea.

Elide was instantly moving, and Yrene watched in silence while the lady prepared the tea.

“I could heal your leg, you know.”

Elide stilled, a hand reaching for the kettle. “Really?”

Yrene waited until the lady had pressed a cup of the peppermint tea into her hands before she nodded to the lady’s boots. “Can I see the injury?”

Elide hesitated, but took her seat on the stool beside Yrene and tugged off her boot, then the sock beneath.

Yrene surveyed the scarring, the twisted bone. Elide had told her days ago why she had the injury.

“You’re lucky you didn’t get an infection yourself.” Yrene sipped from her tea, deemed it still too hot, and set it aside before patting her lap. Elide obeyed, putting her foot on Yrene’s thigh. Carefully, Yrene touched the scars and mangled bones, her magic doing the same.

The brutality of the injury was enough to take Yrene’s breath away. And to make her grind her teeth, knowing how young Elide had been, how unbearably painful it was—knowing that her very uncle had done this to her.

“What’s wrong?” Elide breathed.

“Nothing—I mean, beyond what you already know.”

Such cruelty. Such terrible, unforgivable cruelty.

Yrene coiled her magic back into herself, but kept her hands on Elide’s ankle. “This injury would require weeks of work to repair, and with our current circumstances, I don’t think either of us can undergo it.” Elide nodded. “But if we survive this war, I can help you, if you wish.”

“What would it entail?”

“There are two roads,” Yrene said, letting some of her magic seep into Elide’s leg, soothing the aching muscles, the spots where bone ground against bone with no buffer. The lady sighed. “The first is the hardest. It would require me to completely restructure your foot and ankle. Meaning, I would have to break apart the bone, take out the parts that healed or fused incorrectly, and then regrow them. You could not walk while I did it, and even with the help I could give you for the pain, the recovery would be agonizing.” There was no way around that truth. “I’d need three weeks to take apart your bones and put them back together, but you’d need at least a month of resting and learning to walk on it again.”

Elide’s face had gone pale. “And the other option?”

“The other option would be to not do the healing, but to give you salve—like the one you said Lorcan gave you—to help with the aches. But I will warn you: the pain will never entirely leave you. With the way your bones grind together here”—she gently touched the spot on Elide’s upper foot, then a spot down by her toes—“arthritis is already setting in. As the bones continue to grind together, the arthritis, that pain you feel when you walk, will only worsen. There may come a point in a few years—maybe five, maybe ten, it’s hard to tell—when you find the pain to be so bad that no salve can help you.”

“So I would need the healing then, regardless.”

“It’s up to you whether you want the healing at all. I only want you to have a better idea of the road ahead.” She smiled at the lady. “It’s up to you to decide how you wish to face it.”

Yrene tapped Elide’s foot, and the lady lowered it back to the floor before putting her sock back on, then her boot. Efficient, easy motions.

Yrene sipped from her tea, cool enough now to drink. The fresh verve of the peppermint zapped through her, clearing her mind and calming her stomach.

Elide said, “I don’t know if I can face that pain again.”

Yrene nodded. “With that sort of injury, it would require facing a great many things inside yourself.” She smiled toward the wagon entrance. “My husband and I just went through one such journey together.”

“Was it hard?”

“Incredibly. But he did it. We did it.”

Elide considered, then shrugged. “We’d have to survive this war first, I suppose. If we live … then we can talk about it.”