Page 4

"Infection?" Ermin asks, peering over his shoulder.

"Not yet, but it will be if we don't clean it properly." Indrie takes a cloth from the basin and wrings it out. He begins flushing the wound, working in careful strokes from the center outward, watching the water run pink and then clear. "The original stitching wasn't bad. Whoever did this knew what they were doing, they just didn't have the tools or the time to do it right."

"Should I get more suturing thread?"

"I think I have enough, but can you get the comfrey poultice from the second shelf? The one you mixed last week."

Ermin goes. Indrie works in the quiet, cleaning and assessing. The man's breathing has evened out, which is a good sign. His color is still poor, but the pulse at his throat is stronger than it was on the mountain track, and the bleeding has slowed now that he's horizontal and still.

He takes his time restitching the wound. The skin is tender and overworked, but it has to be done, and Indrie feels sympathetic about it all the same. His stitches are small and even, because he's always felt that if you're going to do something then you should give it your best. Eskil once called his handiwork masterful. It's a considerable compliment coming from Eskil, and it had very nearly made Indrie fumble the needle. He works the full length of the cut, pulling the edges of skin together gently, tying off each stitch with steady hands.

Ermin returns with the poultice and stands beside him, watching closely. Indrie knows without looking that the boy is mentally rehearsing every step. Ermin has come so far in the months since Indrie took him on. His hands are steadier and his instincts are sharper. He asks the right questions more often than the wrong ones, and he has stopped panicking when things go wrong, which is a necessary step for anyone intending to work on human bodies.

Indrie ties off the last stitch and applies the poultice, a thick layer of comfrey and honey and dried yarrow. He wraps clean linen over it in tight even strips.

"Can you help me move him?" Indrie asks.

Ermin gives him a look. "To where? The table's fine."

"He's not sleeping on a wooden table, Ermin."

"Where else is he going to go? We don't have anywhere else to put him."

Indrie gestures toward the back room. "My bed is perfectly fine."

It is perfectly fine, but he hasn't slept in it a single night since he was startled out of it by a man breaking into his clinic in the middle of the night. His belongings have been migrating to the keep one piece at a time. The bed has become more of a place to store extra blankets than anything else. No one has mentioned this, whether because Indrie has been extremely subtle about his relocation or by the grace of nobody wanting to question who is staying in the king's chambers. He's desperately grateful either way.

Ermin opens his mouth, looks at the size of the man on the table, looks at Indrie, who is full of conviction but severely lacking in stature, and says, "You're joking."

"I am not."

"He weighs twice what you do."

"Then you'll have to carry twice as much as I do," Indrie tells him. "That seems fair. Didn't you tell me you'd been in a shield wall?"

Ermin mutters something under his breath that isn't quite insubordinate and gets his arms under the man's shoulders. Indrie takes the legs, which is optimistic given the length of them. They shuffle sideways toward the back room in a series of lurching steps that threaten to put all three of them on the floor for a second time.

"Doorframe," Ermin warns.

"Yes, I'm trying to avoid it."

"His head is going to hit the doorframe, Indrie."

"Can you lower your end?"

"If I lower my end any further I'm going to be on the ground."

"Then bend your knees."

"I am bending my knees. I'm practically sitting."

Indrie bites down on a laugh. He adjusts his grip on the man's calves and kicks the door open with his heel. They get through without clipping anything, which feels disproportionately triumphant for the act of moving an unconscious person ten feet. They settle him on the bed and Indrie pulls the blanket up to his waist, leaving the bandaged chest exposed so the air can reach it. The man's face is slack in unconsciousness and his brow is smooth. He looks younger than Indrie initially thought. Mid twenties, perhaps.

Ermin stands beside the bed catching his breath. He looks at the man with an expression that has softened from wariness into something more complicated, and Indrie can see it happening. Ermin's protective instincts are colliding with his compassion. There are still enough warrior instincts in him to be angry about the Wolfe clan, and enough of a healer's empathy to see a man hurting and not want to leave him that way. The tension between those two things is visible in the set of his mouth.

"He does look rough," Ermin admits quietly.

"He rode a long way to get here," Indrie says. "It would be very strange to seek out a fight while bleeding out from a chest wound."