This wasn’t Strasbourg. Priests weren’t calming the screams with their divine words of comfort. Nuns weren’t bringing her fresh linens or bowls of clean water and alcohol. Clerics weren’t stopping the bleeding. The hands holding them down were farmer’s and fishermen’s. The bowls were still dripping red on the sides from being hastily swished in the lake before they were filled with another bottle of vodka. The linens were still damp and frayed from being cut to smaller and smaller pieces by swords too dull to be taken to the front. The only words to breach the screams were her own, telling them to hold them down because there was nothing to numb the pain of the incisions she had to make to get to whatever she was trying to reach.

  They were forcing liquor down throats to make them drunk before surgeries. That was the best they could do. They were using saws meant for building houses. The screams were becoming just another noise blending into all the rest. Just another thing that Maud found herself no longer paying attention to as she cut around an arrow, sewed two bleeding tubes together, pressed and seared chunks of an organ together with a red hot iron the size of a needle.

  The Anatolian Surgeon, Abdullah Faruq, or Faruq for short, had given her so many different ways to do things, she felt like she was starting over. Their tubing for transfusions, he said, were too unclean without proper washing. He had other kinds, made from a coated wax that was flexible and they could reuse it after a quick flushing with alcohol. He showed her how to open a rib to reach the organs beneath and reattach pieces—or tell if they had been damaged too much to do so—without a Cleric being needed. He even showed her how different incisions, sometimes outside of where the wounds were taken, were better than going through the same place, especially when a lung was pierced and the other lung was straining to inflate.

  Their tools were different than what she was used to, as well. They had vises for isolating the organs, handpumps to circulate blood out of the work area and back through the body, hand pumps for the patient to breathe once they finally screamed themselves out of consciousness, among so many others. Some of them looked so complicated and odd shaped that Maud tried to avoid using them even after he showed her how to use them, sometimes sending the wounded that she knew would need those their way instead of working on them herself.

  Faruq yelled at her the first few times, but once he saw that she was handling so many more without overcomplicating herself, he didn’t complain again. She didn’t cry, only yelled back that she didn’t want to risk it without a Cleric to bring them back if she made a mistake. He didn’t like it but didn’t yell at her about it again. She was triaging those to him while caring for the more numerous, other wounds without him…including amputations. And, without Clerics, there were far more amputations.

  By nightfall, the wounded were all that filled the Great Hall and Bailey. The villagers were no longer sitting around or meandering helpers. Those who weren’t helping with the walls and the remaining soldiers or trenching in the village across the drawbridge, were helping with the wounded. They were helping Maud and the other physicians with anything and everything they shouted for, helping get beds emptied of the many who didn’t survive their surgeries or their waits to get treated, helping to get them filled again with the next in line, helping to wash linens as quickly as they were being dirtied, helping to clean tools, helping in unimaginable ways. And the wounded that didn’t have beds inside the Hall? They were being stuffed into every place they could find, into every nook and cranny they could fit. At least, until they died. Then they were carried out and put in carts and wagons to be wheeled out of the castle, and that was as far as Maud bothered to think about it between splashes of her hands in alcohol and the next faceless injury.

  “The Olga’s called for their reserves! They’ve begun the retreat!” The cheer made Maud hesitate while pinching an artery to stop it from bleeding through the tear she was about to sear back together. “We did it!”

  Cheers erupted all across the Hall. The sweat ridden face of the man whose leg she had her hands in gave her a weary, hopeful and pale smile.

  She grinned back. She didn’t feel the same hope as she watched the tear fall from the back corner of his eye.

  He was trembling from the pain she was inflicting with every second she took, pain she could never imagine, and yet he was smiling through it. For the first time since the battle started, it wasn’t just a faceless wounded on a table.

  It was Preston Vorner, Samma and Damon’s father.

  She pressed the hot iron to the ripped artery and carefully made sure it moved over the entirety of it. Preston screamed. The men around him pressed with all their weight to keep him down as she sewed the stitches with thread that Faruq’s people used because it dissolved without causing problems internally.

  Maud finished with him and moved on. They weren’t faceless anymore. She saw men who had danced in the festival with Draka and Olaf. She saw vendors who had sold her herbs and trinkets. She saw the father who had handed his son for her to carry on her lap as she rode back into the village.

  She saw her way into the fresh air and up onto the walls overlooking the crossing to the Clevlan Towers and the glowing haze of the battle beyond.

  Snow had begun to fall. Little white flurries scurried down in flutters from a sky that was black and fading into a red and blue glow beyond the silhouette of the jagged towers and the embattlements surrounding them. Her breaths were white puffs as she leaned on the wooden planks of the walls with a hug of her shoulders against the chilled air that was almost a welcomed contrast to the dank warmth within the Hall of horrors.

  “I won’t take long,” Maud said when a quick glance behind her caught Faruq following her. “I just need a moment.”

  “Take the night, Princess,” he said as he found himself a place to rest an elbow on the higher part of the wall and look out toward the battle beneath his hanging hand. “You’ve done more than any of us could have asked for.”

  Maud’s vision blurred as her eyes welled. She rubbed at the burning of the freezing within her nostrils from her snivels. “I didn’t know that…I didn’t expect untrained volunteers to be among them. That man was an old friend of my father’s. His sons are with the boys trying to get to Strasbourg.”

  “I treated another who has two sons out there as well,” Faruq nodded with a long sigh. “I believe you worked on one I had to re-treat, because he had a complication later, who’s your uncle. Gregory, I believe his name is.”

  Maud’s eyes shot wide as she turned to him.

  He grinned, “They taught you to see the wound and not the wounded, I know. It makes it easier for some.”

  “Uncle Gregory, is he…?”

  “He’ll recover,” Faruq grinned warmly. “You did your work well and I fixed what had been undone with good timing. He had another wound that was hidden from you, is all. We found it before it was life threatening.”

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  “I won’t let that happen again,” Maud turned back to the battle’s glow. There were red and blue explosions erupting like thunder and lightning from it, resounding through the breeze that tossed the fluttering snowflakes. “I’ll do better as the night goes on.”

  “As the night goes on, you’ll be resting,” Faruq eyed her. “I think you’ve reached your limit for the day.”

  “I can continue,” Maud shook. Her breaths were a continuous puff, no longer having time to dissipate between. “I’m fine, believe you me. I’m not stopping until my mother and father are returned.”

  “I have no doubt,” Faruq’s smile was even warmer beneath a thick crinkled brow. “But those steady hands of yours won’t be as steady until your eyes and mind can focus on the wound again, until you can unsee the men and women they belong to. And you won’t be able to do that until you get some rest and rekindle that fire in your exhausted heart.”

  Maud raised a brow. “Incredibly perceptive of you.”

  Faruq chuckled. “The Queen Who Took Their Boots stands before me with tears in her eyes and you think I’m not aware that you have reached a limit in your heart that is far beyond what any other could withstand? I’ve been doing this for fifteen years. You’ve been at this for what? A combination of a few months, from what I gathered from the Cardinal? You’ve already exceeded any expectation by tenfold. Now, go be a worried daughter and comfort your family, get some food in your belly, and get some sleep—if you can—and come back tomorrow when you’re ready and all other obligations have been fulfilled.”

  Maud nodded in agreement and watched him sink back down the stairs from the wall. She returned to watching the horizon, wondering what each of the flashes were, what might be happening beyond those silhouettes that were becoming the stands for candles with ringed halos around the balls of light at their tips.

  Below, it wasn’t just wounded coming across the pontoon bridge anymore. It was soldiers as well, like the rush of a flooding river around the rocks that were Nina’s wagon and the other cartloads, along with a few mounted knights. The air filled with voices that rose from below her as well as carried in the breeze along with the smell of burning flesh and damp grass. The booms in the distance were more thunderous and vibrations shook Maud’s feet.

  The candles around the towers on the hills became clusters of sparkling stars. Maud squinted her eyes and leaned towards them.

  Then, with a whistle and a roar, the starry clusters became bright arches through the sky so quickly that she jerked back. For a single blink, the night beyond the hill crested by Draka’s old house, beyond the towers named after her dead father and brother, became bright as morning with a fiery explosion so loud that her ears popped and her head rattled.

  People below huddled together and rushed even faster to get through the gate. The pontoons swayed and swished to cries of those on it, with splashes as some fell off of it.

  Maud was shaking again. The silhouette on the hill became the bones of rising flames casting red and orange reflections over the hundreds of armored men and women rushing down the hill in chaos.

  The towers became pillars of fire. Draka’s house was being torched. There were glowing dots of torches being carried to the edge of the forest on either side of Draka’s house and tossed into it, along with hundreds, maybe thousands, of flaming arrows being shot in high arcs over tops of the trees. Glows burst within the forest in the distance on either side of the field that had once been her family’s, the forest that she had spent her childhood playing in. Twisting fires licked at the night sky all along the hill as if it were the edge of the world as Maud’s tears snaked down her cold cheeks.

  “Make way!”

  The sight of the three horses riding through parting soldiers, one of them with two riders, made Maud rock to lean over the wall for a better look at them. A passing glimmer of a torch over her mother gripping Draka from behind, riding the first of the three horses, made her leap into a sprint down into the crowded bailey.

  “Get those shields over the Hall walls finished and finish drenching the field!” Aurie called as Draka helped her down from the saddle before getting off himself. She turned toward the crossing over the gate with a pointing finger at the men, “Make sure they destroy the pontoons and the portcullis is braced! They withheld their paladins the entire fight.”

  Maud practically tackled her, making her stumble with how hard she slammed into her with her tight embrace. Aurie’s armor prodded into her, but she didn’t care. She was too glad to see her alive, to be able to hold her without having her stretched out on another cot. She was okay. Maud’s hands were sliding over her sides and the back of her neck for wetness.

  “I’m fine, Windleaf,” Aurie said in her ear. She could hear the trembling smile. “I didn’t do any fighting. Draka and I weren’t in any fighting.”

  Maud felt Draka’s hand on her shoulder and instantly turned to hug him just as tightly, just as gladly. His sigh of relief sucked in against her cheek and fluttered loose strands of hair around her ear. She hummed.

  “Thank you for keeping her safe,” Maud said to him. Then, once he released her, his cold gauntlets moving from around her back, she looked around at the others, “Where’s Adrian?”

  Aurie and Draka met gazes and then nodded toward the two horsemen who had followed them. Maud let out a screech as she sprinted through them to get to Adrian, who still had one foot in a stirrup of Pearl’s saddle. Him, she knocked into the ground.

  “Oh, for the love of—!” Adrian cried out as he hit the ground beneath her and her kisses. “Maud…really…if…you…could…not…make…Draka…murder…me…by…being…IMPROPER!” He threw her sideways from him.

  Olaf helped him to his feet while Draka lifted Maud to hers. Draka shook his head and flicked her nose.

  “He could have died!” Maud stomped Draka’s foot.

  Draka hopped on his other back from her and shot a glare at Aurie with a wave for help.

  “I’m starting to think I might have bitten more than I can chew,” Adrian said under his breath to Olaf, who was laughing too hard to do much else.

  “Maud!” Aurie shouted. “Control yourself!”

  Maud only rushed Adrian again, this time folding into a tight embrace and tucking her head into his steel chest. “I’m glad you’re back. I’m glad you’re alive. I’m so glad you’re alive.”

  She didn’t see the distance in Adrian’s smile. She didn’t see the haze in their eyes as the four exchanged knowing glances. She only felt his hands wrap around her in a tightness that made her body curl against his armor, wishing that he didn’t have it between them, wishing they didn’t have to wait for more. She didn’t want to ever take a chance that there won’t be more again. He was back in her arms and she didn’t want to let him go again.

  “Me too,” Adrian lay his head on the top of her coif, his weight creasing through it, “Me too.”

  “You punch that one,” Aurie narrowed her eyes at Draka, crossing her arms, “And I’ll thump you.”

  Draka rolled his eyes with a dismissive wave at her.

  “Did you set my family free, by any chance?” Adrian was rubbing Maud’s back.

  Maud’s eyes shot wide to meet Aurie’s wincing glance from the other side of Draka. Shit, I knew I forgot something. With all that was going on, her mind spiraled as her heart raced, Alice or Valmond might have reminded me…but…where is Alice? Oh, no. Where has Alice been all this time?