Page 37 of The Guardian

Chapter Thirteen

At first, the wounded came in a slow trickle, bloodied, groaning, some carried between two warriors. Then the flood began.

Men poured into the great hall, which had been hastily cleared of benches and banners to serve as a makeshift infirmary. The sharp cries of pain and the moans of the injured rose to the high timbered ceiling as they were laid upon the tabletops.

The air was thick with the scent of blood, sweat, and herbs. An insufferable mix of life and death intermingling in one space.

In the corridors just outside, women worked with frantic purpose, their fingers raw from tearing linen into bandage strips. Kitchen servants pounded herbs into pastes, the grinding of pestles against stone a constant, desperate rhythm. At every hearth, water boiled furiously, steam rising in ghostly plumes as boys and gray-haired elders dashed back and forth with brimming buckets to cleanse wounds and soak cloths.

The healers and their apprentices moved swiftly from man to man, their faces drawn, their hands slick with blood. A smear of ash across the forehead marked those closest to death. Those who needed tending immediately.

Ailith hurried in, an armful of fresh bandages clutched to her chest, just as a scream split the air. A warrior writhed on a table, his leg a twisted ruin of bone and torn flesh. The grim-faced healer barked without looking up, “Drop that. Hold him down, I’ve got to take the leg.”

The man thrashed, lifting his head and crying out, “No! Dinnae! It can heal!”

Ailith’s breath caught when she saw the injury, only a single tendon clung to the mangled lower limb. Her stomach twisted. No healing could save that. She moved quickly, placing a firm hand on the warrior’s shoulder.

“It’ll heal,” she lied, her voice low as she accepted a cup of whiskey laced with herbs and pressed it to his lips. “Drink. It’ll dull the pain.”

He drank, but not enough. The poor man howled in pain as the tether between flesh and bone was severed. She didn’t look away. She couldn’t. He was someone she’d seen before, laughing in the courtyard, sparring in the yard, a man now reduced to raw agony.

The moment it was over, the healer ordered the wound to be bound and wrapped as they moved on. There was no time for rest, no time for grief. Ash-marked men lay scattered across the floor, and the healer barely spared a breath before pointing to the next.

Ailith followed, her apron blood-soaked, her fingers trembling. A man they went to was already dead, and the healer whispered a prayer as he closed the man’s eyes. “Come,” he said hoarsely, “we go on.”

She paused just a heartbeat longer. The man who’d passed was old, older than any warrior should’ve been on that field. “Ye were brave,” she whispered, brushing her bloodied knuckles against his brow.

Her body ached. Muscles throbbed. Hours had bled into one another, and still the wounded came. As dawn’s pale light trickled through the windows, they reached the last few injured. The healer cleaned and bandaged a gash and nodded. “He’ll live.”

He accepted a cup of honeyed wine and a piece of bread from a weary servant, then looked to those around him, exhausted, blood-streaked, hollow-eyed. “Eat. Drink. We begin second rounds shortly.”

Ailith slumped onto a stool for the first time in hours, the basket of healing supplies slipping from her grip.

The battle was over. But the fight to keep them alive had only just begun.

Ailith hadn’t seen Hendry.

Not among the injured brought in. Not with the laird, who had returned from the battlefield flanked by his closest advisors, their faces gray with exhaustion and grief. She’d searched every face in the overcrowded great room. Her eyes scanning each man laid out on pallets and tables, bodies packed shoulder to shoulder. Every surface was occupied. Twenty-three, by her last count. And still, none of them was Hendry.

The dead had been taken elsewhere. Whispers passed through the corridors said they were laid in neat rows along the side of the manor, draped in linen and watched over until the guards could bear them to their kin. Ailith hadn’t dared to look. Not yet.

He had to be alive. He had to be.

The thought of anything having happened to him crippled her. Fear tightening her chest until she could barely breathe.

She would never recover if he were gone. Surely fate would not be so cruel. With or without her, Hendry deserved a long and happy life, to fall in love again, to live a full life.

Outside, the courtyard was chaos, organized, desperate chaos. People hurried in every direction, some carrying water, others food. Small fires blazed where women cooked aromatic stews in iron pots. A few had erected makeshift shelters, wooden frames hastily lashed together and thatched with straw. Smoke curled upward into the gray morning light as families huddled near the warmth, keeping the chill at bay as best they could.

Past the well, she caught sight of a cluster of long tables just outside the kitchens. Women worked there with red-streaked hands, binding wounds, setting dislocated limbs, sewing gashes closed. One woman stitched a soldier’s arm, and though his jaw clenched with every pass of the needle, he remained silent. Brave or numb, Ailith couldn’t tell.

And then, she saw him.

Hendry.

He sat shirtless at the edge of a bench, hunched to his right, his face pale and drawn. A healer stood beside him, gently pouring water into a long cut on his left shoulder. His eyes were squeezed shut, jaw tight with pain, but he made no sound. The muscle along his jaw twitched with each touch.

Ailith’s breath caught.