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“Where…what…” Merrik tried to get his sluggish brain to work. Where was he? All he could see were white curtains and white sheets.

“You are in the hospital.” Dacha’s hand squeezed his shoulder. “Do you remember the crash?”

The crash. Fieran.

“Fieran. Is he alive?” Merrik cast about, but he couldn’t see past the curtains pulled around his bed. Where was Fieran? Was he lying in the next bed in this hospital?

Or was he lying dead in some morgue, waiting for his body to be returned home?

He couldn’t be dead. After everything they’d survived in this war, a crash like that couldn’t have killed him. Could it?

“Yes, he is alive.” The hard lines of Dacha’s face deepened rather than easing. “He has been badly injured, but he will recover.”

“I need to go to him.” Merrik gripped the sheets, struggling to push himself onto an elbow. When he tried to swing his legs off the bed, agony shot through him, so sharp that he hissed and fell back on his pillow.

Something wasn’t right. His legs didn’t feel like they should.

Dacha pressed his other hand on Merrik’s chest, gently holding him down. “Easy, sason. Do not try to get up.”

“Dacha…my legs…” Merrik tried to peer down at himself, but his dacha’s arm was blocking his view.

“When you crashed, both of your feet and lower legs were badly pinned and crushed.” Dacha’s voice choked, a strain etching deep into the angles of his face. “The healers saved your left foot as best they could, but your right foot…there was no saving it, sason.”

What was his dacha saying? No saving it? What did that mean? He could still feel the ache in his right calf from the bullet wound.

Merrik managed to twist his head enough to see his feet. His left foot was outlined by the sheet, as it should be, but his right foot…

His right foot wasn’t there. The sheet draped onto the bed, flat and empty, outlining the way his leg ended just a few inches below his knee.

No. No, this wasn’t real. He was still asleep. This was just a nightmare.

But a nightmare from which he didn’t wake.

His dacha hugged him—a full human hug, not the more reserved elven shoulder clasp—before the orderlies carried his stretcher down the hospital’s hallways and lift before they set him on the ground in the shade, just one more wounded warrior in a long line of warriors waiting to be brought to the trains headed to either Aldon or Estyra, the capital cities of the human kingdom of Escarland and elven kingdom of Tarenhiel.

More orderlies carried another stretcher between the rows before setting it down next to Merrik.

Fieran lay on the stretcher, his red hair bright against his pale face. Bruises showed darkly blue-black along his jaw and his forehead.

He was alive. Something within Merrik eased, as if he could finally take in a decent breath for the first time in days. His friend was still alive. That hadn’t been a lie everyone was telling him just to avoid burdening him with more.

But then he took in the shape of both of Fieran’s feet beneath the sheet, and a surge of heat replaced the relief.

Fieran still had both feet. Once again, Fieran had charged into something reckless, and Merrik was the one left paying the price for it.

“Merrik?” Fieran’s voice grated against Merrik’s skin.

He couldn’t bring himself to acknowledge the question. He couldn’t even look at his best friend.

“I tried to see you yesterday, but everyone refused to carry me here.”

Not that Merrik would have wanted to see Fieran the day before.

A hint of his usual grin on his face, Fieran held out his hand between their stretchers. “We’ll fly again, Merrik. We⁠—”

That heat surged, through him, a flame too hot, too consuming, to tamp down any longer. Merrik had lost his leg. This wasn’t something he was just going to get over.

“Don’t. Don’t say another word.” Merrik glared at Fieran, his teeth gritted. “I can’t take any of your blithering optimism.”