He glanced up from Sindra’s knee, now wrapped in fresh antiseptic-soaked bandages, to Sindra’s face, contorted in pain, with keen distaste that he hoped his glasses magnified enough to demonstrate how tired he was of that joke.
“And you apparently misheard yours,” he said to his newest patient. “I would have thought a soldier would be made of sterner stuff.”
“If my name were Sindra Stern, I’d agree,” the woman growled. “As the Great General saw fit to call me Sindra Honest, I’ll do you the courtesy of pointing out that this shit”—she gestured to the bandages—“fucking hurts.”
“It hurts much less than the infection the salve keeps out, I assure you,” Meret replied, cinching the bandage tight. He dared to flash a wry grin at the woman. “And you were warned about the importance of keeping the joint clean, so in the interests of honesty, I believe I could say I told you so?”
Sindra’s glare loitered on him for an uncomfortable second before she lowered her gaze to her knee. And as her eyes followed the length of her leg, her glare turned to a frown.
The bandages marked the end of her flesh and the beginning of the metal-and-wood prosthetic that had been attached months ago. She rolled its ankle, as if still unconvinced that it was real, and a small series of sigils let off a faint glow in response.
“Fucking magic,” she said with a sneer. “Still not sure that I wouldn’t be better off with just one leg.”
“I’m sure you wouldn’t be able to help as many people without it,” Meret added. “And the spellwrighting that made it possible isn’t technically magic.”
“I was a Revolutionary, boy,” Sindra said with a sneer as she pulled her trouser leg over the prosthesis. “I know fucking magic when I fucking see it.”
“I thought that the soldiers of the Grand Revolution of the Fist and Flame were so pure of ideal that vulgar language never crossed their lips.”
Sindra’s face, dark-skinned and bearing the stress wrinkles of a woman much older than she actually was, was marred by a sour frown. It matched the rest of her body at least. Broad shoulders and thick arms that her old military shirt had long given up trying to hide were corded with the thick muscle that comes from hard labor, hard battles, and harder foes. Her hair was prematurely gray, her boot was prematurely thin, and her heart was prematurely disillusioned. The only part of her that wasn’t falling apart was the sword hanging from her hip.
That, she kept as sharp as her tongue.
“It’s the Glorious Revolution, you little shit,” she muttered, “and it’s a good thing I’m not in it anymore, isn’t it?”
“True,” Meret hummed. “Otherwise, I wouldn’t be able to treat you.”
“Yeah, lucky fucking me,” Sindra grumbled. “I wouldn’t mind a couple of alchemics our cadre medics used to have, though. A hit of those and I could fight all night.”
“I am but a humble apothecary, madam,” he replied. “And while herbs and bandages take longer, they heal just as good.”
Sindra sighed as she winced and hauled herself to her feet, her prosthesis creaking as she did. “You’re just lucky that it’s a choice between keeping you around and keeping soldiers around. If it were a choice between a smart-mouthed apothecary who couldn’t heal for shit and, say, a Hornbrow who hadn’t eaten in days, I’d slather myself in sauce and pry its jaws open myself.”
He agreed, but kept it to himself.
Littlebarrow had been fortunate enough to escape most of the battles between the Revolution and its inveterate foes, the Imperium, which had raged through the rest of the Valley. The wilderness surrounding it had seen battle, he had been told, and there was the incident with farmer Renson’s barn that was turned into kindling by stray cannon fire. But by and large, the two nations kept their fighting focused on the cities and resources. A township like Littlebarrow was worthy only of a few scuffles between Revolutionary cadres and Imperial mages.
One such scuffle had deposited Sindra here two years ago. After a savage battle that saw her grievously wounded after bringing down an Imperial Graspmage, she had been left for dead by both her comrades and her foes. The people of the township had taken her in, nursed her back to health, and begged her to put her sword and strength to the defense of their township, which she, in possession of a generous heart that nonetheless burned relentlessly for justice, reluctantly agreed to.
At least, that’s the way Sindra told it.
Meret suspected the true story was perhaps less dramatic, but he let her have her stories. It was true enough that she had the injuries that came from defending the town against the occasional monster that came wandering out of the woods or outlaws that came searching for an easy hit. But if the war ever came back to this part of the Valley, a middle-aged woman with a sword wouldn’t do much to stop it.
Hell, neither would a hundred.
He’d been to the rest of the Valley. He’d seen the tanks smashed into the earth by magic, their crews buried alive inside them. He’d seen the towns and cities reduced to blackened skeletons by cannon fire. He’d seen the big graveyards and the little graveyards and the places where they just hadn’t bothered to bury the bodies and had left the bird-gnawed bones to rot where they lay.
It hadn’t put him off. After all, the wounds inflicted by that terrible war were the whole reason he had come to the Valley once the Imperium claimed victory and started settling it again. But part of him wondered if the reason he hadn’t lingered so long in Littlebarrow was because, deep down, he knew that he’d never come close to mending even a fraction of those wounds.
“I can’t pay you, you know.”
He snapped out of his reverie to see Sindra leaning over the small table—an accompaniment to the small chair, small cabinet, and small bed that were the only furnishings of her small house. Though she stared at her hands, he could see the shame on her face all the same.
“It’s not like Terassus here,” she said softly. “We don’t have rich people. I know you’ve done more for this town than we deserve, but…”
She couldn’t bring herself to finish the sentence. He couldn’t bring himself to press her.
Wounds, he’d learned, came in two kinds. If you were lucky, you got to treat the broken bones, the split-open heads, the horrible burns—wounds that herbs and bandages and sutures could fix. If you weren’t, you had to treat the wounds like the kind Sindra had, like the kind all soldiers had.
The war had left them all over the Valley: soldiers who woke each night seeing the faces of their best friends melting off their skulls, soldiers who were visited by the ghosts of people they’d strangled to death, soldiers who had seen all the fire and blood and bodies that had heaped up across the Valley and simply lay down and didn’t see a reason to get back up.
Sindra was a strong woman. If half her stories were true, one of the strongest the Revolution had seen. She had been a sword of the Revolution. But she had been left behind. Too broken to be used by her comrades.
How did you fix a sword that couldn’t kill?
Meret didn’t know. He only knew what his master had taught him: how to keep wounds from getting infected and how to set broken bones, and one important cure that almost never failed.