The tent flap slammed open with the force of his shoulder. He was through the gap before the canvas could settle, his arms full of her, his chiton already plastered to his chest with her blood.
It drenched the wool of Odrian’s cloak, dripping from his elbows, smeared across her cheek where he tried to cradle her head.
He laid her down on his own bedroll, and his breath punched out of him at the sight of her in the lamplight. Pale. Wrong. The gash along her ribs was a wet, grinning mouth beneath the ruin of her tunic, pulsing crimson with every shallow, hitching breath. Her temple was swelling, purple-black, matted with blood that looked black in the dim light.
“Pressure,” he snarled. Not at Dionys. At his own hands as he tore off the ruined cloak and wadded it against her side. “I need… linen, water, anything… now—”
His eyes caught Dionys’s across the space. He had Stella pinned to his chest, the girl’s face turned toward Odrian and Alessia, and he watched her expression crumble. Watched her see the blood and recognize whose it was.
“Stella—” Odrian’s voice cracked. He pressed harder against Alessia’s ribs, feeling the wet warmth push back against his palm, and he leaned down close to her ear. “Stay here. You listen to me, Thief. You open your eyes right now, or I’ll have Dionys sew you to the bedroll, I swear to Athena—”
Alessia’s eyelashes fluttered, but she didn’t wake. She murmured something as her breath hitched.
Stella went rigid in Dionys’s arms, every muscle locking as the copper scent hit her, heavy and wrong. Her dark eyes fixed on Alessia’s pale face, on the black-red stain spreading beneath Odrian’s pressing hands, her small chest hitching with a sound that wasn’t quite a scream.
“Too much,” she whimpered, clutching Lieutenant Pebble so tight the jagged edges cut crescents into her palm. “That’s…that’s overflowing. You can’t sew that it’s… it’s everywhere…”
She thrashed, sudden and violent, a wildcat in a child’s body, kicking against Dionys’s chest. “Put me down! I need to—I have to hold her hand! She can’t find the mountain if nobody’s holding her hand!”
She broke free, or Dionys let her slip, and hit the ground running, stumbling on fever-weak legs. She skidded to her knees beside the bedroll, the impact jarring a sob from her throat, and stared at the blood soaking the wool. Her hand fluttered out, hovering over Alessia’s slack fingers, afraid to touch.
Afraid not to.
She shoved Lieutenant Pebble toward Odrian’s blood-slick hands with desperate, shaking force. “Here! Take it! It’s for fighting the dark! Make her take it, make her hold it! Please, she needs it to climb back up—”
Her words dissolved into hysterical hiccups as she grabbed Alessia’s limp hand with both of hers, pressing her feverish forehead against her mother’s cold knuckles.
“Mama? Mama, wake up. You have to wake up. You promised you’d drink the potion with me. Don’t leave me in the dark. Don’t leave me with the crabs.”
She looked up at Dionys, her face streaked with snot and tears, her voice dropping into a broken whisper. “Fix her. You have to. I’ll give you all my rocks. I’ll give you General Stonebelly. Just please don’t let her glow go out.”
Before Dionys could answer the tent flap erupted inward. Askarion filled the opening like a thundercloud, leather apron already tied, grey braid whipping behind him, field kit slung across his chest, bone needles and glass vials clattering together.
“Out of the way, you mewling infants,” he snarled, his voice rough as gravel rolling down a slope. He didn’t wait for permission, didn’t bow. He shoved past Odrian with a shoulder broadened by decades of hauling wounded men from battlefields. “Yes, yes, your Majesty is very heroic, now move before you drown her in your incompetence.”
He dropped to his knees beside the bedroll with a grunt that suggested his own joints were held together by spite and linen wraps. His hands hovered over Alessia with the precision of a sculptor assessing marble.
They didn’t shake. They never did.
“Gut wound.” He ripped the blood-soaked wad of cloak from Odrian’s hands in one motion, peeling back the ruined tunic to expose the gash along her rib. “Shallow, thank the gods. Missed her liver by a finger’s width. But she’s bled out three cups already, maybe four.”
He probed the edges of the wound with two fingers, ignoring the fresh welling of blood, his eyes narrowing at the rib beneath. Then his other hand was in her hair, rough and swift, parting the matted locks to inspect the temple injury. His thumb brushed the swelling, pressing once against the skull, and he grunted.
“Concussion. Bad one. No depression in the bone, so her brain isn’t leaking out her ears yet.” He looked up at Odrian with eyes like flint. “But she will be if you keep kneeling there like a shocked calf. Boiling water. Now. And you—” He jabbed a finger at Dionys without looking, his attention already back on Alessia’s pale face. “Hold that child quiet. If she screams while I’m stitching, I’ll stitch her lips together.”
He reached into his kit and withdrew a curved bone needle already threaded with gut, and a small clay vial of something that smelled sharp and chemical. He uncorked it with his teeth.
“This will hurt her. She’ll buck. Someone hold her legs—gently, you oxen, she’s not a pig for slaughter.”
The tent flap lifted again with a soft rustle. Patrian ducked inside, field kit balanced against his hip, and he took the scene in with one sweeping glance.
As bad as the runners said.
“Askarion,” he murmured, his voice pitched low to cut through the panic without adding to it. “If you threaten to stitch a child’s lips together one more time, I’ll tell Aurelis you’ve been bullying war-orphans again. You know how he gets.”
He crossed to Stella in two strides, dropping to his knees so he was eye level with her. Not towering, not commanding, just present. His hands were empty, palm up, showing her the old needle-cuts on his fingertips.
“Stella, isn’t it?” he kept his gaze on hers, steady, letting her see that he wasn’t afraid of the blood or her fury. “I’m Patrian. I heal people. And I need you to do something brave for me.”
He nodded toward Alessia’s limp hand, still clutched in Stella’s grip. “Keep holding her fingers. Not tight enough to break, just enough that she feels you. Can you do that?”
He glanced up at Askarion, catching his eye with a look that said I’ve got the child, you’ve got the body. Work fast. Then, softer, to Stella, “She’s still here, Stella. Help her stay.”
He reached into his kit, slow and deliberate, and withdrew a small vial of honeyed poppy syrup. “You drink this—it tastes like sunshine, I promise—and you hold her hand, and you tell her about General Stonebelly’s latest tactical victory.”
He looked toward Odrian, a flash of dry humor in his brown eyes despite the horror around them. “Your Majesty, you’re hovering. Either assist Askarion by pressing there,” he pointed to a spot near the wound, “or fetch the boiling water he’s bellowing about. Choose quickly, she’s losing ground while we stand around playing statues.”
He turned to Askarion, positioning himself to brace Alessia’s shoulders, ready to hold her when the suturing began. “I’ll keep her head steady. You close the ribs. Try not to curse so loudly; the child’s already terrified enough without learning your full vocabulary.”
“Aurelis can kiss my wrinkled ass,” Askarion grunted, already threading gut through the bone needle. “And you can stop flapping your pretty lips and hold her head steady, Physician, before I demonstrate exactly how creative I can get with my vocabulary on your ear.”
He didn’t look up. The blood’s rhythm was wrong, too fast, too eager to leave her body. He slapped Odrian’s hand away from the wound, not unkindly, just efficient, and pressed his own palm hard against the gush, feeling for the rib beneath the slick mess.
“Here,” he snapped at the Otharan king, jabbing his elbow toward the water skin Patrian brought. “Pour. Wash the grit out before I sew dirt into her liver. And you—” he turned to Dionys, who still had Stella half-pinned. “—shift your weight to her hips. She’ll buck when the needle hits bone, and if she twists while I’m suturing, I’ll nip her lung. Then we’re burying her at dawn.”
He waited for the water’s sting then probed the gap with his thumb. Shallow, yes, but ragged. Torn by bronze, not cut clean. He hitched a breath, muttering something filthy in old Thesari about the idiot sentry who did this, and drove the needle in.
─ ·⋆˚☆˖°· ─
The world swam back into focus in fragments. Blurred shadows, the smell of copper and bitter herbs, a crushing weight against her ribs that throbbed in sickening time with her heartbeat.
She tried to sit up, but the tent tilted violently, and she collapsed back with a wet gasp.
“St’lla?” The name comes out mangled, her tongue thick and clumsy, tasting of copper. “Where’s… where’s m’daughter?”
She blinked, trying to clear her double vision. Panic spiked in her chest as she noticed the two men nearby were strangers with healer’s hands and unreadable faces. Not Odrian. Not Dionys.
“Who… Who’re you?” she slurred, eyes darting between them. Her hand flailed, searching for something solid, finding only sticky warmth. Her blood, drying on the bedroll. “I had… had th’ medicine. From th’ healer. For St’lla… th’ glow’s goin’ out…”
She struggled to push herself up on her elbows, but the room spun, her head and ribs screaming in protest. A white-hot lance of pain behind her eyes that made her retch.
“Did I… did I get it? Th’ clay jar? Please… please tell me I didn’ drop it… she needs… needs t’drink it…”
Her gaze locked onto Patrian, younger, with gentler eyes, and she grabbed at his sleeve with desperate, blood-sticky fingers. “D’you have th’… th’ potion? I promis’d her… nose-touch promis’d… I’d bring it back…”
Odrian presses his palm hard against her shoulder, pinning her gently but firmly to the bedroll.
“Stop.” The word comes out ragged, stripped of theater. “Stop moving. Stop apologizing, stop trying to climb out of your own skin to check on her, She’s right there, and she’s breathing, and if you tear these stitches, I swear by Athena and all her owls, I will personally strap you to this bedroll and feed you broth like an infant until you heal properly.”
He leaned in closer, his forehead nearly touching hers, his voice dropping to a fierce, trembling whisper that only she could hear.
“You don’t owe me anything. Not coin, not thread, not your life spilled out in the dirt because some scared sentry with a spear couldn’t tell a desperate mother from a spy. The only thing you owe me is stillness. Rest. Let yourself be held together for once.”
His thumb brushed the hollow of her throat, feeling her pulse flutter wild and bird-fast against his skin. “And my cloak?” He barked a wet, humorless laugh. “It’s wool, Thief. It washes. Or it burns. I don’t care. I care that you’re still breathing, that you came back with a shattered jar and a cracked skull and still tried to crawl to her. That’s the only currency that matters here.”
He pulled back just enough to meet her eyes, forcing her to see him past the concussion and the pain.
“Stella’s safe. You kept your promise. Now let me keep mine. Let me guard your flank while you heal. Just… just stay, Alessia. Please.”
Patrian moved with the river-calm he had perfected over years of battlefield triage, one hand pressed firmly against Alessia’s shoulder to keep her from trying to rise again. His other hand caught her wandering wrist, feeling the pulse there.
Too fast, thready, but steady enough for now.
“Stay down, brave mother,” he murmured, voice low and level, cutting through the slur of her panic. “You’re concussed, bleeding, and currently leaking Dionys’s excellent sutures onto what is, admittedly, a very expensive wool rug. So unless you’d like me to sedate you with poppy milk—which will make you sleep for six hours and miss Stella waking up—you’ll lie still and listen.”
He reached for a fresh linen pad, pressing it against the fresh seep of blood at her side with practiced efficiency, his fingers checking the tension of Askarion’s stitches as he worked.
“I’m Patrian. I gave your daughter the honey-syrup. Her fever broke, she’s breathing easy. The jar breaking didn’t kill her, but you getting gutted like a fish did nearly kill you, so let’s focus.”
He leaned in, brown eyes steady and warm, catching her glassy gaze and holding it. “You kept your promise. She drank. She’s safe. Now you stop apologizing for bleeding on royalty and let me look at your eyes. Follow my finger. No, don’t nod, just look.”
He held up a blood-stained finger, moving it slowly side to side, watching for the tracking, for the dilation, for any sign of the brain bleed they’d all been dreading.
The tent tilted. Sideways, upside-down, snapping back to something resembling upright with a lurch that made her stomach heave. She swallowed hard, tasting copper and bile, and forced her eyes to track Patrian’s finger.
Left. Right. Left again.
It hurt to focus, like squinting into blinding sunlight, but she did it because they keep asking things of her and she can barely remember her own name.
Stella’s safe.
The words echo, hollow and precious, but guilt gnaws sharper than the needle in her ribs. Safe because strangers stepped in where she failed. Because she broke the jar, fell in the dirt, bled out while Stella waited alone.
“The cloak,” she mumbled again, because her tongue wouldn’t obey anything more complicated and the wool was soft and it smelled like Odrian. Sea salt and camp smoke and something warm she couldn’t name. And she ruined it. “S’blue. Like… like the sky in her sto- stories. Little Star’s sky. Didn’ mean t’…”
Askarion’s hand slapped her shoulder, not kind but there, and Alessia flinched before relaxing into the grounding of it.
He was angry. They were all angry, or worried, or both, and Alessia couldn’t parse which, couldn’t do anything but lie there leaking and apologizing for things that weren’t sorry-worthy.
“Jus’…dizzy,” she slurred again, even though they had already established that and she’s repeating herself. “Thought I could get back…”
Her hand fluttered toward the empty space where Stella should be, where Alessia needs her to be, where she can feel her pulse against her palm and know she’s real. “Wanna see… wanna hold…”
The words dissolved into something incoherent even to Alessia. She turned her head, looking past the way the tent spun, and found Dionys in the corner, Stella a warm weight against his chest, her dark curls rumpled with sleep. She was breathing. Alessia could see the rise and fall, even doubled in her vision. Even blurred around the edges.
“Nose-touch,” she whispered, more to herself than anyone, the vow she made in the dark before the world went sideways. “Promis’d. Kept it. She kep’ hers too… m’brave girl…”
Her eyes fluttered closed, too heavy to hold open, but she fought it. Fought the pull of poppy milk they were threatening, fought the dark mountain looming in her periphery where Little Star was still climbing, still reaching for a sky she couldn’t see.
Odrian’s hand was on her jaw again, warm and solid, and she leaned into it without meaning to, too tired for pride.
“Sorcerers,” she mumbled, lips barely shaping the words, a broken laugh catching wet in her chest. “Two of ‘em. Fancy. Thieves don’ rate… two Sorcerers…”
The darkness rose like tide water and she let it take her. Trusting, for once, that the wall would hold without her pressed against it.
Tiny Raven 