Tiny Raven

The man on the table wouldn’t stop moving.

Not thrashing, he was too weak for that, but enough. Enough to make the blade slip.

Enough to turn a clean cut into something worse.

“Hold his shoulders down,” Patrian said, keeping his voice low and steady, the kind of calm that made men think what was happening was routine, even when the blood pooled faster than it should. “Not tight enough to bruise. Just enough to keep him from flinching when I cut.”

Alessia shifted her grip, one hand bracing the man’s shoulder, the other pressing down against his forearm. His skin was slick with sweat, his muscles twitching under her hands.

“I am,” she said.

“Your grip’s good,” Patrian said, not looking up from the wound, the needle flashing between his fingers. “Surprisingly good for someone who spent the morning grinding willow bark until her fingers went numb.”

“This is the easy part,” Alessia said flatly. “You’re the one sewing him back together.”

“Tell that to the needle,” Patrian said, not looking up. His hands were steady as he pulled the thread through. “Stitching is just weaving. Holding is where the battle is.”

“Holding is easy when the alternative is watching them bleed out,” Alessia muttered, adjusting her grip as the patient whimpered, his head thrashing against the straw-filled mat. “Keeping them held, that’s where the skill is.”

Alessia pressed down a fraction harder, feeling the grind of bone beneath muscle, her own bad ankle throbbing sympathetically where she had it braced against the table leg. The position strained her still-healing shoulder, but she didn’t shift.

Didn’t let the pain show in her hands.

“You’re almost through,” she told the patient, keeping her voice low and even. The same tone she’d used with Stella after her nightmares.

Her fingers were cramping, the willow bark grinding from dawn left her joints stiff, and now they were locked around the stranger’s shoulder, pressing bone against wood while Patrian worked. She could feel the man’s pulse rabbit-fast against her thumb, the same tempo Stella’s had that morning when she left her, standing too straight in the training yard, trying not to look at the empty space where Alessia should have been.

She glanced down at the wound. Ragged, deep, the kind of thing that killed slowly if it wasn’t closed right. Patrian’s needle flashed, steady as a heartbeat, and Alessia thought about the other kind of holding. 

The kind where she gripped her daughter’s hand before dawn and hoped she felt it through the whole day.

“The keeping,” Patrian agreed, pulling the thread taught with a steady hand, “is where most people break.”

He tied off the knot with a flick of his wrist, snipping the catgut with a small bronze blade, and finally looked up at her. The dark circles under her eyes had deepened since the day before, and there was a tremor in her shoulders that had nothing to do with the patient’s thrashing.

“You hold well,” he said, his voice dropping to the gravelly register he usually reserved for coaxing terrified children into letting him clean their scrapes. “Better than most apprentices. Your hands know where the bone is. They know how to grip without crushing.”

He pressed a wad of linen against the sutured wound, nodding for Alessia to maintain pressure while he reached for the bandages. His fingers brushed hers as he took over, just a brief grounding contact.

“But holding empty air,” he continued, winding the cloth with practiced efficiency, “that’s the part that wears the joints thin. That’s the part that cramps.”

He glanced toward the tent flap, where the morning light was cutting sharp shadows across the packed earth.

“Aurelis is with her. And the others.” It wasn’t quite reassurance, just a fact laid out like a scalpel on a clean cloth. “They’re holding the weight so you can keep your hands steady here.”

He secured the bandage with a pin, his touch light as he checked the patient’s pulse.

“You don’t have to grind your fingers to bone, Alessia. The willow bark will still be there when your hands stop shaking.”

Alessia didn’t look up at him. Her eyes stayed fixed on the patient’s bandaged wound, tracking the slow seep of blood through linen as her hands finally released their hold. The joints popped one by one when she flexed her fingers, sharp, protesting sounds that seemed too loud in the quiet tent.

“My hands stop shaking when she’s where I can see her,” Alessia said, her voice rough, scraped raw from holding back screams. She wiped her palms on her chiton, leaving dark smears of sweat and someone else’s blood across the worn fabric. “Until then, grinding them to bone seems like a fair trade.”

She shifted her weight to reach for the mortar and her ankle screamed, the new skin pulling tight where the shackle used to sit, a bright lance of pain that shot up her calf. She ignored it, curling her fingers around the stone pestle instead, feeling the familiar grit, the weight of it anchoring her to the earth.

“Aurelis teaches her to strike,” she continued. She didn’t look at him as she ground the bark in slow, deliberate circles. The motion steadied her, giving her hands something to do that wasn’t clutching at empty air. “You teach me to hold wounds closed. Everyone has their holding.”

The pestle ground to a halt. Her throat tightened around the words she shouldn’t say, the ones that taste like panic.

“She’s the only thing I’ve ever held that mattered.”

She shook her head sharply, returning to the grinding with renewed force. Almost violent, the stone scraped loudly against the bowl. “So I’ll grind. Until my hands bleed. Until I can hold her again. Because the alternative is standing still, and that’s when the walls close in. That’s when I remember what it felt like.”

“Then grind,” Patrian said softly, not reaching to stop her, or to tell her to gentle the stone. “But grind knowing the walls here have doors, and the chains her—” he tapped the edge of the mortar with one finger, “—don’t hold. You are in the tent, not a cell. The bark is medicine, not punishment.”

He crouched beside her, ignoring the ache in his own knees, and placed his hand over hers on the pestle. Just enough to steady the rhythm.

“You think you’re holding strangers because you’ve lost the one thing that matters,” he murmured, his voice pitched low enough that the sleeping patient wouldn’t stir. “But you’re not empty-handed. You’re holding the place she’ll need when she comes back bruised. You’re building the strength to lift her.”

He released her hand and reached for a clean rag, dipping it in the water basin and wringing it out with methodical precision. “Aurelis is holding her now. He’s an insufferable bastard, but he’s immovable. And the others…” He pressed the cool cloth into her palm, closing her fingers around it. “They won’t let her fall.”

He nodded toward the bandaged man on the table, breathing steady now, pale and alive. “You kept him breathing so I could close the wound. That’s not distraction. That’s practice. For when she comes back bleeding, so you’ll know exactly how hard to press.”

He sat back on his heels, looking at her with eyes that had seen two many soldiers break and rebuild. “So grind. Scream into the stone if you need to. But don’t call it waiting. Call if making ready.”

He stood, turning away to give her privacy.

“Your shoulder is shaking,” he observed, back to the clinician once more. “You’ve been leaning on that bad ankle for six hours. Dionys will blame me if you limp more tomorrow than you did today.”

He jerked his chin toward the basin of water at the tent’s edge, then toward the flap where the afternoon light was slanting long and golden. “Wash up. You’re done here. And stop counting the hours. She’s with Aurelis. She’s safer than we are.”

“I’ll limp however I please,” Alessia muttered even as she bit back a hiss as her ankle protested her shift in weight. She placed the mortar down and rolled her own shoulders, wincing at the crack of stiff joints.

Her hands were shaking from holding on too tight, for too long, to too many things that wanted to slip away.

“And Aurelis is many things, but he’s not… soft. She’s tired. She needs—”

She stopped, swallowed. Because she needs me felt too raw, too desperate, and she had already shown enough weakness for one afternoon.

“She needs five minutes where she isn’t one,” she finished instead as she dried her hands on a scrap of linen that had seen better days. She tested her weight on her bad ankle and found it holding, barely, and forced a smirk that felt more like a grimace.

“And if Dionys wants to blame someone for my limp, he can take it up with the bastard who welded a shackle to my bone.”

She reached for her belt pouch, checking instinctively for the weight of the small stone Stella had pressed into her palm that morning, the one she carried like a talisman, and nodded toward the tent flap. “I’m going. Don’t stitch anyone interesting until tomorrow.”

“Your limping is your business,” Patrian said, not looking up from cleaning his instruments in the basin. “But if you collapse before you reach the tent, I’ll have to stitch you next. And I don’t enjoy wasting thread on pride.”

He set aside the bone needle, wiped his hands on his apron, and reached for the small clay jar on the shelf behind him.

The strong salve, for deep tissue pain that outlasted the initial injury.

“For the ankle,” he said, tossing it underhand toward her. It landed in her palm with a soft thud. “Apply it before you sleep. It’ll make the morning manageable, if you insist on being vertical again by dawn.”

“I’m not the one who insists,” Alessia muttered with a glance toward where the clerk stood watching. But she slid the clay jar into her belt pouch for later. “I’ll use it.”

“I know,” Patrian said.

He returned to his instruments, not offering more.

He added, without looking up, “She’s strong. The child. Stronger than you’re giving her credit for.”

A pause. A needle set aside, clean, laid in its place.

“Stronger than her mother was, at that age. Not an insult, an observation.”

“You didn’t know me at five,” Alessia quipped with a small smile. “But you’re not wrong.”

She sighed.

“I just wish she didn’t have to be.”

“None of us wished for this,” Patrian said, setting a cleaned scalpel aside with a soft click against the wooden tray. “But wishes don’t bind wounds.” They don’t stop spears. They don’t keep wolves from the doors.”

He turned from the basin, drying his hands on a length of linen, and met her eyes. Tired, defensive, furious with a world that demanded too much from a child.

“She is strong because she must be,” he continued, his voice low. “Because you made her so. Not the training—the knowing. She knows you’ll come back. That keeps her sharper than any blade Aurelis can forge.”

He tossed the rag aside and turned back to his work.

“Use the salve. If you collapse, you can’t hold her when she needs it.”

The tent fell silent save for the drip of water into the basin, pink with the afternoon’s labor.

“Go,” Patrian said. “Before the light fails and you break your neck limping in the dark.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Alessia muttered, testing her weight on her bad ankle one more time. “Don’t wait up, Patch. I’ve got a date with a five-year-old general and a rock named Pebblepants.”

She touched the bulge in her belt pouch where the stone sat, warm from her body heat, and some of the tightness in her chest unclenched. Enough to breathe.

“Thanks,” she said, gruff, quick, before he could make a thing of it, and ducked out of the tent flap into the slanting gold of late afternoon, limping hard into the dust, but moving.

─ ·⋆˚☆˖°· ─

Stella was pretending to be asleep when Alessia limped in, but her eyelids were too heavy to fake it properly. They fluttered open the second time the tent flap whispered closed behind her.

She was curled on her side, facing the doorway, with Queen Dottie tucked under her chin and her wooden dagger clutched in her hand beneath the blanket.

“Mama,” she mumbled, her voice rough and sticky with sleep. She tried to sit up, but her arms were filled with sand, so she just reached out one hand instead, fingers grasping the air between them.

Alessia moved toward Stella. Limping, although she tries to hide it, dragging her foot just a little, the way she did when the shackle was still on. She sank down onto the bedroll with a sigh that sounded like she’d been holding her breath since dawn.

“Hey, Starlight,” she whispered, her hand finding Stella’s hair, her fingers gentle as they worked through the tangles.

Stella pressed her face into her lap before she could get her sandals off, breathing in the smell of blood nad herbs and the soap Patrian made her use.

“You’re late,” she murmured into the rought linen of Alessia’s chiton, her voice muffled. “The sun went down a long time ago. I counted.”

Her hand found Alessia’s and she laced their fingers together, squeezing tight. Her palm was rough with new blisters from the wooden dagger, skin rubbed raw against the hilt during drills. She hid it against Alessia’s leg so she wouldn’t see. So she wouldn’t worry.

“I was stitching a man’s shoulder,” Alessia said softly, her thumb rubbing circles on the back of Stella’s hand. “He was scared, I had to hold him still.”

Stella pressed her lips against Alessia’s knee, feeling the rough weave of her chiton against her cheek.

“Did he scream?” she whispered. “When you sewed him?”

She swallowed before continuing.

“I held still for Aurelis today,” she said, her voice getting smaller. “He said my body is a blade and I have to rest it when it’s dull. But I didn’t want to be dull. I wanted to be sharp for you.”

Her hand hurts, but she kept it pressed against Alessia’s leg where she wouldn’t see the palm. If she saw, she’d know Stella was working too hard.

She’d worry.

Stella looked up, squinting in the dim light, and saw the way she was holding her shoulder. The one with the stab wound.

The one Dionys fixed.

“You’re limping,” she said, her voice cracking. “More than yesterday. Did the bad people hurt you again? Did the guard—”

She stopped because the guard was outside, and she knew she wasn’t supposed ot know that.

“No, Starlight,” Alessia murmured as she smoothed the wild curls back from Stella’s forehead with a hand that was still trembling slightly. “Nobody hurt me. I was just standing too long. Old wounds get cranky when you don’t rest them.”

She shifted her weight, biting the inside of her cheek to keep from hissing as the angry flesh of her ankle screamed in protest. She gathered Stella up, pulling her into her lap despite the pain that lanced up her side.

She was heavy now, solid with muscle and grit, but she fit against Alessia’s chest the same way she did when she was tiny. Her head tucked under her chin like a puzzle sliding home.

“The man didn’t scream,” she whispered into Stella’s hair, smelling dust and sweat and child. “He was brave. Like you.”

Her fingers found Stella’s hand and turned it palm-up, tracing the new blisters with a touch as light as moth wings. She didn’t comment on them.

She didn’t need to.

“You were sharp today,” Alessia said softly, pressing a kiss to Stella’s temple, feeling her heartbeat flutter against her ribs. “But even the best blades need their sheaths. Aurelis is right. Rest is part of the fight. You can’t pour water from an empty jug, Starlight. Not even for me.”

Stella curled closer, fitting herself into the space between Alessia’s hip and the bedroll, her wooden dagger still clutched in her other hand because she couldn’t let go yet, not even for sleep.

“Mama?” she breathed, her eyes burning. “Is it okay if I’m not sharp tomorrow? Just… just for a little bit? Just until breakfast?”

She didn’t say the rest.

She didn’t say I trained with Dionys and I’m so tired I see spots, and Aurelis almost caught me sleeping on watch, and I’m scared I’ll mess up and they’ll stop letting us see each other.

She just pressed her face into Alessia’s side and breathed.

“Please don’t go back to the sewing tomorrow,” she whispered. “Stay here. Just hide with me. Like the crabs do, under the sand.”

Alessia didn’t answer right away.

“Hey,” she whispered, her voice cracking on the single syllable. She shifted Stella, tucking her head under her chin, wrapping her arms around her shoulders until she could feel her heartbeat against her ribs. Her ankle screamed, white-hot fire lancing up her calf. She ignored it.

“You listen to me, Starlight. You can be dull tomorrow. You can be soft. You can sleep until noon and snore and drool on my shoulder, and nobody, nobody, gets to call you anything but rested.”

She pressed her face into Stella’s hair.

“I can’t stay,” she admitted, the words ripping out raw and honest. “I wish I could. I’d burrow under the blanket with you and Queen Dottie and we’d be crabs. Just crabs in the dark. But if I don’t go back, Nomaros wins. And I’m not letting him think he can wash his hands of us by keeping me busy.”

She pulled back just enough to look at her, to cup her cheek with her hand, her thumb brushing the tear tracks she could feel but not see.

“But I’ll hide with you tonight,” she whispered. “All night. I’ll be the sand over your shell. And when the sun comes up and I have to go be a healer, you remember I’m coming back, I’m coming back. That’s the only rule that matters.”

She pulled the blanket up over them both, creating a cave of wool and darkness where it was just them, their breath, the steady beat of two hearts in sync.

“Sleep now, General,” Alessia murmured against her temple. “I’ve got the watch.”

“Kay,” Stella whispered, the word jumbled against Alessia’s neck.

Her fingers found the hilt of her wooden dagger under the blanket, and she relaxed her grip, just a little. Just enough to let the blood back into her knuckles.

She was supposed to be the guard tonight. She said she would be.

But Alessia’s arms are iron around her, and her heart was a steady drum against Stella’s ear, and her eyelids were heavy with sleep.

“Mama?” she mumbled, her tongue thick and clumsy.

“Yeah, Starlight?”

“Tomorrow…” she swallowed, fighting the pull of the dark. “Tomorrow I’ll be sharp again. Promise. I’ll look first, then move. Fast… like smoke.”

“I know you will,” Alessia said. She pressed her lips to Stella’s forehead, warm and firm.

“And Mama?”

“Mm?”

“I’m not a weapon.” The words slipped out, small and scared, a secret she’d been holding in her chest ever since Aurelis called her a blade. “I’m a… I’m a person, right? Even when I’m sharp?”

Alessia’s arms tightened until Stella could barely breathe.

“You’re my daughter,” she whispered, fierce and soft all at once. “First. Always. Before anything else.”

“Just yours,” Stella mumbled, her voice already drifting, swallowed by the wool-dark cave they’d made. She pressed her nose harder against Alessia’s collarbone and finally let her fingers go slack around the dagger hilt. It dropped against Alessia’s hip, harmless and heavy, as her hand found her wrist instead, wrapping around the bone like an anchor.

“Not a weapon,” she whispered into Alessia’s neck, the words slurring together. “Just Stella. Your Stella.”

Her eyes fell shut. The dark rose up warm and tide-strong, pulling Stella under where there were no guards. Just Alessia’s heartbeat thumping steady against her ear like a promise.

“Love you,” she breathed.

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