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But I was a healer, and there wasn’t time for me to think about myself. Not when dozens and dozens of soldiers were crying and dying in the meadow between Aktau and the mouth of the mountains.
I worked with single-minded focus, even after I ran out of supplies. Runners kept bringing more bandages to us. I didn’t know who they were, but they kept coming.
After the sun set, they brought torches along with flasks of water and bread to fuel us healers so that we could keep going. There was no way we would be able to save even a fraction of the men around us.
The wounds turned more gruesome and more difficult to heal as we neared the pass, where more soldiers were being dragged down from the ruined mountain pass. I could tell they were the ones who had been trapped under the rocks. Or, at least, the lucky ones who someone had managed to pull free.
“Augustus!”
I didn’t know how much time had passed before I heard Lucius’s high-pitched cry, then saw him running through clusters of moaning, bleeding soldiers. He was in such a hurry that he tripped at one point, then got up without glancing away from the pair of men—of boys, really—who he’d been heading toward.
“Augustus, no! No!”
I didn’t need to have a clear view to know what had happened.
I left the man I’d just finished bandaging and cut through the line of soldiers to reach Lucius. I already knew what I’d see when I came to a stop beside where Lucius had crouched. He had clutched a young man to him, a man who resembled him closely, a man covered in blood. One of Augustus’s legs was mangled beyond recognition, a mere pulp of meat and bone.
“Lucius?” a voice that sounded like a child’s asked, wavering and faint.
“I’m here, Gus, I’m here,” Lucius wailed, rocking as he held his brother.
I had just enough of a view in the torchlight to see a flickering smile pass over the young man’s face, to see him reach up as his brother held him, then to see his hand fall, his head flop to the side, and the light go out of his eyes. I’d seen men die before, but for some reason, watching that boy whose life had barely begun, a boy I didn’t even know, whose brother I disliked at the best of times, give up his life right in front of me was too much.
“No!” I shouted, as though Augustus had been my brother and not Lucius’s. “No!”
I sank to my knees and pulled Lucius into my arms. He still held Augustus, so for a moment, that single, dark moment in a field of torchlight and pain, it was just the three of us.
A keening cry escaped from my lungs, growing louder as I clung to Lucius, comforting him and needing comfort myself. I don’t know why, but it all collapsed in on me in that moment, the cruel treatment of my childhood, the Dying Winter and the disaster it had brought, the horror of the Battle of the Coronation and its aftermath, and now the destruction of my only route home. It all coalesced into that one point, and I could do nothing but roar at the injustice of death and the chasm between me and my life as it should have been.
I was only vaguely aware of Lucius letting go of Augustus and grasping me tightly, sobbing as he clung to me. I didn’t like him, but he was my housemate, and he didn’t deserve the loss that he’d just suffered.
No one deserved it. All around me, young men and old, men that shouldn’t have been taken from their homes, jobs, and fields to pay the broken price of a king’s ego and a General’s duplicity, lay dying. I doubted any of the victims had ever seen the king—or General Rufus, for that matter—up close, but here they were, giving their lives for a fruitless cause when what they really should have been doing was living and growing, creating things and keeping humanity alive for another generation.
That was the evil that the Old Realm had descended into. That was the vision that Magnus was fighting so hard against. Everything around me was exactly what Magnus was fighting so hard to prevent. The consequences of this day and the days before—because the mountain pass must have been destroyed days ago, even though the pain and the dying had dragged out cruelly—would reverberate through the Old Realm for years to come.
I was only vaguely aware when someone came to lead me and Lucius away. I wasn’t entirely certain where we were taken. Tents had been set up, but in the dark, I couldn’t tell if they were near the town or closer to the mountain pass. Lucius and I were each handed food and drink, then led to cots and told to rest.
I fell asleep out of pure exhaustion and didn’t dream. When I woke, it was light out, but the drone of men in pain and others shouting orders was the same as it had been when I nodded off.
I pushed myself up and checked the cot next to me, but Lucius was gone. There didn’t seem to be anything to do but get up, find some food and water, then to head back out into the sea of misery that surrounded the tent.
As the day wore on, I was given a better picture of what was going on and what had happened. It was as the soldiers I’d treated told me. The new army, led by General Orpheus, had gone into the mountains with the intent of seeking out General Rufus and his army and fighting them. The orders were to bring back whoever they could, but to kill General Rufus and anyone who tried to remain loyal to him.
The details were still patchy, but apparently General Rufus’s most loyal men had expected this and had possibly been told the new army was coming in advance. Speculation was that they’d planned to destroy the mountain pass for some time, because they were ready to blow up or burn the bridges along the mountain pass and to cause avalanches that would bury the pass in boulders.
General Rufus had waited and watched, coaxing the new army to spread out in the land between the bridges. When the new army was as scattered as possible, the bridges were exploded, the avalanches were started, and the new army had been obliterated. The survivors and those who could be dragged out of the rubble had been trickling back to Aktau for a week.
Almost none of the soldiers that had been carried back down from the mountain in the last two days were still alive. And at some point in the night, the efforts to send healers out among the camping soldiers had turned into an effort to carry off the corpses and to bury them in mass graves in the shadow of the mountains.
“You did everything you could,” Magister Flaccus told our group of healers near dusk on that second day, as we sat around together, eating a meal that had been specially prepared for us by the grateful, and frightened, townspeople of Aktau. “Internal wounds are nearly impossible to heal,” Magister Flaccus went on. “Most require surgery, but even then, once a body is opened, the chances of fatal infection are difficult to overcome. I am proud of each and every one of you for what you’ve done here today, and when we return to the college, I will recommend that all of you be advanced to the next level of the course. You’ve proven yourselves and earned your place in the advanced class.”
I could tell some of our group were pleased by the praise, or at least as pleased as they could be. I couldn’t have cared less. Being a healer wasn’t about taking some fancy, Old Realm class. It was about experience, blood on your hands. It was about holding a dying man’s hand and apologizing because there was nothing you could do for him, even though you were his last hope. It was watching brothers in arms weep over their fallen friends and telling them grief was nothing to be ashamed of.
I hung my head as we all sat silently around the campfires in the area that had been prepared for us. I kept seeing Lefric’s face in place of the too-young soldiers who had had the life crushed out of them and had died slowly. I saw Orel in the battalion leaders who had watched too many of the men under their command die in a single instant. I felt all of my friends around me, like they had been that horrible night in Gravlock. I wanted to hug my friends and tell them how much I loved them, that I really thought of them as my brothers.
But I didn’t know if I would ever see them again.
“What are you crying about?” one of the other students who had made the trip, Kletus, snapped at me as he rubbed Lucius’s back on the bench across from me toward the end of the second day. “You aren’t the one whose brother died. You didn’t watch your grandfather go off to war when he should have been at home enjoying his twilight years. You’re just a stupid frontier boy.”
