"Claws. Deep on the first two. The third took impact to the ribs." She moves to give me room. "The fourth is waiting. I haven't reached him."
I go to the fourth without being asked. He's a dark elf, broad through the shoulder, a scar already mapped across his jaw from something older than tonight.
I crouch. "Let me see."
He reluctantly lifts his hand from his arm. The wound is deep, the tissue around it already darkening in a way that tells me something transferred through the claw.
"It's not just the cut," I hesitate. "Something transferred." I open my satchel, find the cloth packet of powdered blackwood moss, and look at him. "This is going to pull. You can brace or you can not. Either way works."
He braces. I pack the wound and watch him not flinch. Nyssara is binding the first, and I move to the second. This one is worse. Three claw marks slash across the chest beneath torn armor, deep enough to expose muscle.
I lay out what I need. Nyssara's supplies are good — better than what I have — and I reach for the stitch needle without asking because there isn't time to ask.
"Elowen." Nyssara's voice is even. "The one on the left first. He's losing more than he looks."
I shift without argument. She's right. This one has a wound that's smaller at the surface but tracked deeper into the side. I get two fingers against the edge of it and feel the pulse of the bleed, and I pack it with my whole hand, firm and sustained, and hold there.
"Talk to me," I tell him.
He looks at me sideways. "About what."
"Anything. Keeps you from going somewhere else."
He talks about the forest. About the patrol route. When I finally feel the bleed slow, I exchange the packing for a compressand begin the closure. Nyssara finishes her suture and appears at my shoulder.
"You use the two-layer technique," she comments.
"The surface pull holds better." I tie the first stitch. "But you have to match the tension or you get scarring."
"Where did you learn that?"
"A water-damaged journal and a lot of trial and error." I move to the next. "The journal was missing half the pages. I had to guess the rest."
She's quiet for a moment. "You guessed correctly."
We work far longer than necessary, and at some point the room narrows to the next wound, the next stitch, the next problem to solve.
They've all stopped watching me with distrust somewhere between the second and third hour. I don't register when. I just notice, eventually, that the ones who are well enough to sit up have stopped looking at me like an anomaly and started looking at me like someone they are in a room with.
The one whose arm I packed — the one with the jaw scar — says, when I check the binding a second time: "Tighter than Nyssara does it."
"Nyssara is gentler than I am."
"It's better tighter."
Around the fourth hour, I hear the voices. Nyssara has gone to retrieve more linen from the floor above. The guards who can sleep are sleeping. I'm cleaning instruments at the stone shelf, methodical, working through the sequence by memory.
The voices come from the corridor. Two of them, both dark elf. A door between us and them is mostly closed, and they don't know I'm here.
"—a human woman in the east quarters. Under his protection. For how long."
"Until he tires of the novelty, presumably."
A short silence.
"The eastern lords are already talking. It looks like a weakness."
"It is a weakness. Whatever he claims otherwise."
