Page 80 of Fly to Fury
Fieran looked around, but no one else came forward. Where was Pip? Surely she’d come to say farewell. He couldn’t remember saying anything that would have pushed her away so badly that she wouldn’t come. But he’d been so dazed the past day and a half that there was no knowing exactly what he might have said.
Had something happened to her? He’d just seen her yesterday, and there hadn’t been any battles in the meantime.
But the last time he hadn’t seen someone, he’d learned Merrik was wounded. That thought twisted deeper until pain spiked from the tension in his muscles.
The orderlies stepped between a cordon of MPs and into the shadow of the hospital building, their pace slowing. They set Fieran’s stretcher down at the end of a row of other similar stretchers, each holding a wounded man or woman.
And on the stretcher beside Fieran…
“Merrik?” Fieran hadn’t meant for his friend’s name to come out as a question.
Merrik stared at the sky, his long chestnut hair spilling over the edge of the stretcher. His skin was as pale as thesheet drawn up over him. As Fieran spoke, the muscle at the corner of Merrik’s jaw knotted, as if he was gritting his teeth. But that was the only acknowledgment that he’d even heard Fieran.
“I tried to see you yesterday, but everyone refused to carry me here.” Fieran waited, but there still wasn’t any response from Merrik besides that flexing muscle in his jaw.
Had Merrik lost his hearing too?
Fieran held out his hand into the space between their stretchers. “We’ll fly again, Merrik. We—”
“Don’t.” Merrik turned to Fieran, his brown eyes blazing with something Fieran had never seen directed at him by Merrik before.
Anger.
“Don’t say another word,” Merrik snarled between gritted teeth. “I can’t take any of your blithering optimism.”
Fieran sucked in a breath, those words a harder blow than any he’d yet endured. “I’m sorry. I—”
“Not another word.” Merrik ground out the words before he turned his face away from Fieran, his shoulders shifting as if he wanted to turn his back to him.
For long moments, Fieran couldn’t move, his hand just frozen there in the empty space between their stretchers.
Merrik had never struck out at him like that before.
Fieran let his gaze flick down, first toward the outline of his own feet beneath the white sheet that covered him, then to Merrik’s stretcher, where the sheet draped down and flattened far too soon where Merrik’s right foot should have been.
All Fieran’s fault.
He withdrew his hand back to his own stretcher and turned his face away as well, his chest as hollow and empty as the sky arching far above.
Soon, a line of trucks rumbled along the road and halted before the hospital. Orderlies picked their way between the rows, carting off the injured on stretchers and loading them on the trucks.
A pair of them neared Fieran and Merrik as they checked the tags dangling from the end of each stretcher.
One checked the tag on Merrik’s stretcher before he motioned. “Here’s another one bound for Estyra.”
The two orderlies picked up Merrik’s stretcher and carried him toward a waiting truck.
He never glanced back.
As soon as the first line of trucks left, a second line pulled up before the hospital. The orderlies set to work again, loading the wounded into the vehicles.
As orderlies lifted his stretcher, Fieran tried to peer around one last time. A crowd had gathered beyond the cordon of guards, and he could pick out his uncles, his aunt, his flyboys, and even Dacha standing at the front of the crowd as if such things didn’t make him edgy.
Still no Pip.
The orderlies slid Fieran’s stretcher along the floor of the truck’s bed. Two other stretchers had already been secured to brackets along each of the raised sides, and the bottom of one stretcher was only a few inches above Fieran’s face.
More orderlies slid another man and stretcher along the other side, then a third man and stretcher was added on the floor, leaving only a space wide enough for one more stretcher beside Fieran.
