Page 34 of The Second Death of Locke
Grey blinked, hesitating before she caught herself. “Yes,” she said after a moment. “I’ll make you a solution when we get back to the fire.”
She let go of Sela’s shoulder and pulled the coat back up, then worked through the rest of her injuries carefully, applying antiseptic salve and a new dressing to the wound on her shin, rebandaging the broken skin on the knuckles of one hand. Sela was quiet the whole time, her heart too fast in her chest.
“Done,” Grey said, sitting back on her heels.
Sela’s head snapped up. She was on guard, tense, and probably for good reason. Grey had, after all, threatened to kill her.
Something was shifting inside of her, something she didn’t like at all and would not acknowledge to Kier or any of the others. Sela’s eyeswere wide and blue, her chin sharp, her face round and young. The severe cut of her hair did nothing to make her appear any older—if anything, she looked like a girl in need of protection.
Grey sighed. She untied the restraints and moved the girl’s arm carefully, refashioning the rope into a sling. She could hold a grudge with the best of them, but cruelty didn’t suit her.
“Do not give me any reason to distrust you,” she said, annoyed with herself. “You’ll be tied right back up again before you can blink.”
“Understood,” Sela said, her voice very small.
Grey nodded and hauled the girl back up. At camp, Eron had finished cooking the beige abomination and was spooning it into a line of collapsible bowls. Grey stopped to mix some of Leonie’s pain-reducing solution with water and handed it to Sela. After, she took the bowl she was given with a quick nod and thanks, then settled against a tree at the edge of camp with her food, the magelight and the stack of Leonie’s notes on all of their previous injuries. If she was to be the team medic, it was good for her to be informed.
It only took her two mouthfuls to decide that making Eron the cook was a terrible idea, but it was too late to change things now. Grey leaned back, setting her bowl aside for now, listening to the nighttime sounds of the forest: the rustling of small animals in the ferns and brush, a creek babbling nearby. Against her tree, the air smelled of autumn: leaves decaying into rich soil, and the barest bite of winter on the wind.
The others chatted idly in soft tones while they ate: Eron and Brit compared notes on previous assignments; Ola held a one-sided conversation with the silent girl about a pastry shop in Grislar. Kier was off on the perimeter watch, tethered to Grey but not pulling any magic since they’d switched with Brit and Ola for Sela’s cuffs, the connection dormant but still comforting.
She flipped through Leonie’s notes. There was nothing dramatic: Eron had suffered a concussion three months before, so he had an alert for further head wounds. Ola’s left arm had been nearly cleaved off in a previous assignment and the muscle still ached sometimes; Grey made a note to apply a heat compress when they reached the next town. Brit had also had a concussion five months ago, a brokenankle two assignments ago, and recurring but treatable kidney stones due to a run-in with an internal mage on the frontline near Nestria. Then there was Kier: a patchwork of so many injuries over the years that she’d lost count. There was no point in reading them: she knew them all by memory.
She went back to the girl’s papers, searching for Leonie’s report about healed injuries. It was short, perfunctory: none. Nothing. No sign of previous injury. Not even an interesting scar. Sela certainly hadn’t been fighting before: that empty injury report would be nigh impossible if she had. And Leonie was thorough—she’d even noted Kier’s eyebrow scar, even though that had been acquired in childhood.
Grey chewed on her lip, flicking back to another page: Leonie’s notes on Sela’s general well-being. She ran her finger over the writing, careful not to smudge the ink. She read the line again,Missing third molar, no sign of surgery, and her tongue immediately traced the place where her own back molars had come in—and been removed—only a couple of years before. Further down, Leonie noted that she’d employed help from a bone mage to make sure nothing had been broken. There, she’d written,Humeral head unfused, and included a diagram.
It stirred a memory within Grey, of one of her worst days as a healer. She had been called out of her bed and taken to a back room in the fortress full of tables laid with bones. There, the lead healer of the camp had asked for her help: they’d found the remains in a village nearby, the flesh picked away by scavengers. It was her job to determine how many of the bones belonged to children, make an assessment of the sex of the assorted bodies and find any other nuances in the remains, in the hopes that relatives could be informed. They had worked for hours trying to line the bodies up, Grey’s mind clouded with the progression of bones and how they grew in the body until she could barely think of anything else.
She sat now staring at nothing until her eyes went dry with strain. She stared until someone nudged her on the shoulder and she looked up to find Eron standing over her.
“You should finish eating,” he said kindly. “Do you want to join the ca— Kier on the first watch?”
She fussed with the papers, putting them in order before she buried them at the bottom of her kit. “Yeah, I have to be awake if he’s on watch—can’t siphon without me and all,” she said. Eron probably knew quite a bit about mages and wells, but not being one himself, she wasn’t sure how aware he was of the technicalities. It was true that a normal mage couldn’t draw on their well if they were sleeping, but with Kier bound to her, that left another loophole. She got up, knees popping, and took the med kit back to her bedroll.
The others had finished their food and were settling in for the night. Grey should’ve made more of an effort to talk, to get to know them—but this wasn’t a mission for friendship.
They’d arranged their bedrolls in a haphazard formation with Sela at the center. The girl was already down, lying on her uninjured shoulder, eyes closed but not asleep. Brit and Ola were on either side of her, angled in, with Eron at her head.
“Everyone feeling okay before I head off on watch?” Grey asked. She kept her head low as she searched her pack, coming up with the stub of a pencil and a ragged notebook she’d purchased in a mountain village three assignments ago.
“Mmph,” Brit muttered, burying their face in the jumble of a coat they were using as a pillow.
“Would love a cup of tea,” Ola said, one arm thrown over her face to block out what little glow emanated from the dimming magelight.
“Fuck off,” Grey said kindly. She pressed her hand on the magelight to take the power back into herself, evaporating the glow, then set off toward the perimeter, where Kier lurked, pausing on the edge of camp to scribble.
She found him perched on a stump, worrying at the hilt of a knife as he stared into the darkness. She slipped him a mug of gruel and the note she’d written. “I’ll take care of the other side,” she said. “Sharp pull when you need me. Pass and switch whenever.”
Kier winced around his first sip of stodgy porridge. She should’ve watered it down. “God. Three weeks of this?”
“Two if we’re lucky.”
“We won’t be.” They never were.
“It’s your fault,” Grey muttered, “for allowing them to treat it as aquest.”
Kier cast her a wounded look. “If it gives them the morale to survive? I’m not taking it back.”
