I returned my scimitar to its sheath with a shaking hand, cursing internally as the tip wavered off the mark. Usually I would stabilise it with my left hand, but that was clutched against my chest to try to stop it moving about. By the time the hilt finally clicked home against the locket, Munter had come to a halt where Kaczmarek was hanging up her arquebus again and the prince and the magus had gathered.

Feeling the stitch in my side, I breathed slowly and deeply for a moment before climbing from the saddle as smoothly as I could with only one hand. The motion still pulled at my hand, but I made it down in one piece. Immediately, my legs began to quiver, but I schooled them back into discipline with as much focus as I could muster.

“We’d better try to round up some of their horses as remounts,” I began, “And then be on our way again. We can stop to tend our wounds once we’ve made some distance. The Torreans are sure to be back when the piquet doesn’t return.”

Kaczmarek gave me a sceptical look. “I think we’d better swap the order of those,” she said with a raised eyebrow and slightly strained voice. “You’re cut up pretty badly.”

I waved my good hand dismissively. “It’s superficial. The blade struck through the double cuff, it’s only shallow. Bruise black and purple and ooze for days I don’t doubt, but I shan’t die of it.”

“Schreiner,” the jäger pressed, voice uncharacteristically gentle. “Your side is a mess too. The Torries won’t be looking until the piquet is really late, and even when they do look it’ll take them a while to get here. We can stitch you up first, then leave.”

“Hmm?” I asked, nonplussed. “My side’s right fine—the blighter only caught my coat, there’s nothing to it. I have a devil of a stitch though. Must be all the riding instead of marching I’ve been doing.” I forced a weak smile, patting my side to demonstrate. My fingers, just rinsed clean by the rain, came away in runnels of red and pink. I blinked. “Ah, Immer.”

“I agree with the jäger, Schreiner,” His Highness said, face pale and eyes averted. With a visible effort, he met my gaze. “I’m really alright. I’ll round up the horses, just… please listen to them.”

I bowed my head in deference. Balance was suddenly hard to come by. “As you say, your Highness,” I agreed. Reluctant as I was I couldn’t help but agree with them. How did I not notice earlier? I found myself wondering. Well, doesn’t matter now. I gritted my teeth. “We’d better make for shelter anyway,” I said. “At least the cover of the scrub.”

Kaczmarek and the magus nodded. She drew a deep breath and straightened, turning to trudge through the thick grass and turned sod where the horses’ hooves had churned it. “No reason to wait about out here, I guess.”

I sucked in a breath of my own and jammed my bad hand under the strap of my cartridge pouch just above where it crossed under my sword belt. It wasn’t perfect, but it was easier than holding it all the time. It only tugged at the wound if I pulled my arm. I set out after the jäger for the tree line.

The distance through the flat grey afternoon light seemed endless, but at last Kaczmarek stopped her limping progress forward—punctuated at regular intervals by curses—well up the river from where we had started, the point where we had met the river almost wholly obscured. The belt of scraggly trees was so narrow that one could easily see out to the sides, of course, but a little safety was better than no safety.

By the time we stopped my jaw was aching from being clenched so tight and my vision was swimming a little at the edges. I let Munter’s rein slip from my hand and leaned back against the bole of a gnarled tree, sliding down it until I sat on a rock cradled by its roots. It was terribly uncomfortable, but I was beyond caring. As an afterthought, I reached up and tugged the dragonet from its cradle at the horse’s side.

“Reckon you can shuck that coat?” Kaczmarek asked, appearing at my side with the sack of medical supplies. Huh. I hadn’t thought she’d had time to get that out and pick her way here. I stared at my side and arm for a long moment before experimentally plucking at the ragged cloth with my good hand. The pulling elicited an involuntary hiss, and I half-chuckled through my teeth.

“Not unless I shed my skin like a snake, I think,” I gritted out. Looking back up, I saw the magus replacing the jäger, rifling through the pouch with a critical eye. My arquebus lay at his side, half-cocked and the hammer closed.

“If you are laughing like that, it means most likely your lungs are fine,” he observed blandly. I blinked away a raindrop.

“I didn’t… know you knew healing, magus,” I said in response.

“Of course I do,” he said, snapping a small pair of shears open and shut. “To be a magus is to be learned in many arts. To know life you must know the body. Now stay still.” He leaned towards me with the shears and I reflexively shied away with a choked sound.

“What are you doing with those?”

“Cutting away your coat, gefreiter,” he said in a patient tone while I held my eyes closed and tried to breathe while my good fist clenched of its own accord. “Unless you should like to shed your skin it is the easiest way.”

Before I opened my eyes again there was a gentle pressure at my side and then the sound of cloth giving way. I opted to keep them closed, half-drowsing despite the situation. Strange how that happens, my old friend the wretchedly flippant part of my mind mused while the magus worked. Give a man a close brush with death where he’s unhurt, he won’t sleep all night. Cut him up a little and he’ll be asleep before he hits the ground.

“—Heavens, Berg, and Immer!” I spat as a fresh stinging pain accosted my side.

“I am sorry, friend,” the magus said, dabbing at the wound with a cloth doused in some dark mixture with an acrid odour. “The wound must be cleaned before stitched it is. Only a little more.”

True to his word, a moment later he produced a fresh torment with a sharp needle and waxed threads. I stared at the tree a couple of metres ahead of me and recited scriptures in my head while he worked, forcing my breaths to be even. Finally, I felt a soothing cold and braved looking down to see the Afamacian laying a cloth pad over the site. He looked at our medical supplies again and clicked his tongue in annoyance.

“This hold.” He directed me, and I numbly pressed down on the pad with my good hand. “I must get… I do not have the word. Just a minute.” He leaped to his feet and vanished to his horse, but what felt like only half a second later he was back, with a clay jar.

“From tree sap,” he said. “It is—sticky. It will hold the dressing until later.” So saying, he carefully adhered strips of bandaging across the dressing with it.

“Immer, are you sure you’re not a shipwright?” I groaned. “I didn’t think I needed to be caulked.”

He half-smiled for a moment. “In Dar Kosole they close wounds directly with the sap of the tree. No stitches.” He frowned for another fleeting moment while he checked around the edges of the bandages. “Also in Dar Kosole medicine is for putting a soldier back onto the battlefield, not for letting him live. We pray you have a long life still, eh?” He gently patted my shoulder while I tried—with mixed success—not to laugh. The few tugs were worth it, I judged.

“Now the hand, please. Can you get free? If I pull I may hurt you.”

I gingerly extricated my hand from the straps, with only a few winces and one curse. Alemayehu carefully took my arm like he was holding a delicate vase, pinching my hand between fingers and thumb and holding my elbow.

“The sleeve, push it up, please.” He asked. “Eh, only the coat. The shirtsleeve I think we must cut.”

I managed to do as he asked, and a minute later after some more careful work with the shears he turned my arm this way and that like a merchant inspecting the aforementioned vase, his eyebrows rising. “The stars favour you much, gefreiter. This will not even need stitches. But the—jäger says you stopped a sword with this?”

I let my head fall back against the tree in relief. I’d not lose the hand. Though I’d thought I was sure, it had apparently weighed on me more than I’d thought. “And cleaning?” I asked, cracking one eye open.

The magus froze, cloth in hand. “I am sorry. Every open injury needs cleaning before dressing.”

“Ah, Immer.” I closed the eye again. “Thank you, Magus Alemayehu,” I said. I had not been expecting to have a healer with us. Kaczmarek’s surgery would… probably… be better than wrapping it in cloth and praying, but it was a relief to have an expert.

“It is only my—duty.” Then he wiped at my arm with the cloth and I nearly bit my tongue.

***

I woke in partial darkness with a start, a rock jamming into my back and a blanket and cloak I didn’t remember wrapped around me. With another start I realised I was lying on my back staring up at the roof of a lean-to I didn’t remember erecting, the orange light of a fire I didn’t remember being started flickering on its surface. I went to sit up, but had to bite back a curse as a throbbing wave of pain hit me in the attempt. The injuries. Of course. With the help of my good hand I managed to scramble up into a sitting position. Two more cloak-wrapped bundles slumbered next to me, one small and one full-grown.

At the mouth of the lean-to Kaczmarek sat by the fire, stitching a rent in her jacket with her lips drawn in and clamped between her teeth in concentration. She looked bigger in just her shirtsleeves, somehow. Without the jacket hanging just wrong she looked more like a grown woman than a boy still waiting for his growth spurt.

“Go back to sleep, Schreiner,” she said quietly, not looking up from the jacket. Nevertheless, she managed to prick herself and hissed quietly. Ignoring her, I crawled around the two sleepers as best I could on my good hand to sit nearer the fire.

“His Highness?” I asked in a murmur.

“Completely fine,” she said. “He came back with three of the horses apologising for not making it four, a bit after you passed out.”

I cringed. “That was reckless of me. I shouldn’t have let him go alone…” I trailed off. “Why didn’t you wake me?”

Kaczmarek looked up just enough to side-eye me. “You bleeding near died, didn’t you? I said it’s fine. You should go back to sleep. You’ll need it tomorrow. We decided this place was safe enough and we’d rather have you alive and fighting fit than make an extra kilometre by dragging you through the mud.”

“The same goes for you.”

She snorted softly. “I’ve had worse injuries from falling in a bramble patch. Man barely knew what a sword was or how to fight in a press.” She gestured at a badly mended slit in the shoulder of her shirt, clinging damply to a thin red line underneath. “See? Practically nothing after he got through my jacket. Bruise like a peach, though, probably,” she added with unreasonable cheer. I shook my head.

“I’d call you mad, but it was my call to start a fight with a full squad.” I huffed a shaky laugh. “Two to seven odds, huh. You a gambler, Kaczmarek?”

She grinned in the firelight. “We’ve been over this. I don’t gamble, I make the books. I always win.”

“Could be you should be doing both,” I countered. “Bet on yourself, win twice.” She pricked herself again, muffling a curse into her cuff. “Unless it’s a needlework contest.”

She threw me her favourite gesture we’d had to warn the prince off using, and I laughed quietly again, hunching over against the tugging.

“You really should go back to sleep, you know,” she said. “You need to heal up, and I can’t sleep anyway. No point both of us staying on watch.”

“Me neither,” I said, gesturing vaguely. “Not without ten beers or a full mug of hard liquor, anyway. And I don’t drink on campaign.”

“Bad habit, that,” she snorted again. “What’ll you do if you lose a battle?”

“Never had to find out yet,” I answered smoothly. “Hopefully I never do. Though with victories like these, maybe I don’t need to.”

“A real hero out of legend.” She shook her head. “Not going back to bed?”

I shrugged. “Fire’s warm. How’d you start it?”

“The prince. The kid’s a wizard with flint and steel, we used some tinder from the bags and somehow he made it work. Dunno how he does it.”

“Same way you hit shots over hundreds of metres, probably.” I propped my chin on my hand and stared into the fire.

“Probably,” she agreed, biting off the thread and turning her jacket to stitch yet another rent.

Time passed, with only the crackling and steady hiss of the wet wood in the fire disturbing the croaking of the river frogs. I must have drifted off to sleep at some point, because it felt like it was only the blink of an eye and the sky was lightening and my muscles were stiff and sore and my knees seemed locked solid from sleeping while sitting on the ground.