Page 12 of Remmen

For a second nobody moved. Just me on the road with my kit, one regular-sized human standing between two enormous men and a history I didn’t understand. I had no idea what I meant to do about any of it. Then Remmen threw the truck into gear, following behind as Rauf led me to this Mestyn on foot.

The ranch sat in a low fold past the ridge, its buildings hunched down out of the wind. Bulls everywhere, half a dozen, big even by the standards I’d started getting used to. Every one of them went rigid when we came over the rise. Ready to bolt or ready to swing, and I couldn’t tell which. Maybe both at once.

Rauf was waving them off before the truck fully stopped behind us.

Mestyn was on the grass behind the nearest building.

I’ve seen ugly things. Mining runs on old machines and worse rules, and I once kept a man chatting about his kids while his arm sat six feet from the rest of him. I don’t stop for much.

I stopped a half second for Mestyn.

His shirt was gone to red rags and the whole front of him was black and wet, the grass under him drinking it down. For a second my brain wouldn’t sort the shape of what I was looking at.

He was breathing. That was the only part I needed.

I went down on my knees in the blood.

“Hey. I’m Anne.” I had the kit open and the cleanest dressings I owned into my fists. “I’m going to help you. But you’ve got to stay with me. Can you do that?”

His eyes swam toward my voice and didn’t land on anything.

“Clean cloth. Anything. Now.” I packed the dressing down into the worst of it and put my weight behind it, and Mestyn made a sound low and broken in his chest. “I know. Hate me later. You’ve got my permission.”

A wad of cloth landed in my hands. I doubled the dressing and leaned in harder.

I observed the wounds while my hands worked, because I couldn’t help it. Four gashes, deep, dragged parallel across his belly and up into his ribs. A bite taken clean out of the meat of his side. I’d spent half the drive thinking about the size of a minotaur’s mouth. This was bigger than that.

I kept it to myself. The man on the grass didn’t need my running commentary, and the ring of men over me needed it even less.

“Stay with me. Eyes on me, not your stomach. What’s your name?”

“He knows his own—” one of them started.

“I know he knows it. I want to hear him say it.” His pupils were slow but they were tracking. “Name.”

“Mestyn,” he ground out.

“Good. Beautiful. Keep it up.” I found Rauf in the ring of faces above me. “You. Down here. Hands where mine are, and press like you mean it. Harder than feels kind. You can’t hurt him worse than he already is.”

He folded down and put his hands where I put them.

“Get something flat to lay him on. We need to put him in the truck bed, flat, and nobody folds him. Anybody drops him, they answer to me.” Which was not the most professional line I’d ever handed a yard full of men who could snap me over one knee.

They moved anyway.

It took every one of them to get him up without bending him in half, Rauf holding the pressure, the rest under his head and his shoulders and his hips and his legs. We got him into the bed without dropping him and without killing him. Best I’d hoped for.

I climbed up after and got my weight back over the wound. Blood welled warm between my fingers.

I braced and turned to shout it through to the cab.

“Remmen, drive! This man needs a doctor or he’s going to die.”

CHAPTER 5

REMMEN

I thought that if I wasn’t watching her, Anne might bite her nails. She stared at the door separating the sitting area from Otho’s surgery room and snapped her gaze away. It landed on Korfas, who was leaning against the wall with his own arms crossed.