I turned back toward the house, not sure where to go, what use I might be. If fighting came here, perhaps I could weave a defensive net of charm over the troops, as I had done in the collapsing ballroom at Midwinter. Or perhaps—I swallowed. The curse magic flung at the Royalist navy cannon had produced death and destruction exponentially greater than what I had envisioned or, I thought, actually cast. The chain reaction of an exploding cannon on shipboard was, perhaps, a unique circumstance. Or perhaps not.
The cold dew seeped through the seams of my shoes. There was no going back now—if this camp was attacked, I would have to do what I could. And that would mean learning, as I experimented with life and death, what utilized my talents most efficiently.
It was a far cry from stitching charmed gowns in my atelier.
“If you’ve nowhere better to be,” Hamish said, ducking under the doorway of his tent, “I’ve some port somewhere.”
“Should you be drinking before—” I stopped myself.
“Before my kind of work, seems appropriate.” His smile was grim. “But it’s a cold night. A drop of something is sustaining.”
He made it sound like health advice, so I accepted. He had a small table in the corner of the tent, set with a pair of battered pewter candlesticks and a green glass bottle shaped like an onion. He fished a pair of thick-stemmed glasses from his personal trunk and poured a few fingers of tawny port into each.
“I thought you said a drop!” I laughed.
“It’s port, not whiskey,” he countered. “Now you tell me—how do I expect these charms of yours to work?”
“They’ll better a man’s chances,” I replied. “It’s not fail-safe. Not a magic spell that heals someone or anything like that.”
“Figured that would be too good to be true,” he said. “So I do my usual butchering and your bit just… gives me a boost, is that it?”
“Exactly.”
“You were a seamstress before, is that right?” He waved his half-empty glass. “A seamstress and, what have you, sorceress.”
“Yes, I was a seamstress. And what have you.”
“Quite the change to this. At least I’m still in my line of work—was a barber surgeon in Havensport.” He had the look of a professional—he could have just as easily been my neighbor in Galitha City, the gruff but capable barber surgeon a street over from my old shop who could pull a tooth before the patient had finished opening his mouth. “You could probably learn to stitch wounds, you know.”
“I thought you didn’t need any more help.” The port was warming my chest and settling my stomach.
“Ha! I hadn’t considered your qualifications.” He pressed his lips together. “I’m not a proud man. I’m not one of the noble’s physicians, riding on a reputation. I hung out my shingle, I earned my pay. Never made enough to put on airs about it. If you think you can do anything else here, you’re welcome to stay. I don’t know your trade, but it seems it might be you can do more than work a little magic into bandages.” He tapped his empty glass on the table. “And if you don’t want to, I don’t fault you. If there’s a true battle out there, this place will be hell for a while.”
I took a steadying sip of the port. I had seen the face of men’s brutality imposed on other men in Galitha City twice already, at Midwinter and under Niko’s command. It still wove a knot of nausea in my stomach, but if I could do anything to help, I had some obligation. “If I’m needed elsewhere, I’ll have to go,” I finally said.
“Fair enough. I wouldn’t press your services on the wounded when those still fighting might need it more.”
A tall blond surgeon’s mate thrust his head through the door. “They’re coming back,” he said.
“What happened?” I asked. “Did we push them back, is Hazelwhite still ours? Were the horse—”
“I don’t know anything but that we pushed them back.” He hesitated. “It wasn’t a large troop of horse, or infantry after them, and they pulled back without much resistance. As though they were testing us and found us a tougher fight than they anticipated.”
“After the Serafan curse,” I said. Hamish raised an eyebrow. “It makes sense. They were testing our strength, seeing if they could overpower us easily, after the curse.”
“Didn’t work,” Hamish replied with a snort.
The wounded arrived shortly after, and I kept myself out of the way, pressed against mildewed canvas that leaked dew at the seams. Most of the wounded weren’t bad off. Nurses and mates cleaned and bandaged wounds outside while the more serious injuries were brought in to Hamish.
Even those weren’t what I had feared, at least not at first. Hamish stitched a slash wound from a saber while the poor First Regiment corporal averted his eyes and bit his lip. I pushed health charms into the thread Hamish used, the stitches themselves charmed to stave off infection. Then I wove a cloud of charm magic around him, calm and healing and a bright white light that I sensed was purest charm, and let it settle on him. Of course, I couldn’t tell if it made any difference; I couldn’t set a twin of the man next to him with an identical wound. Still, he seemed more hale than I would expect after seeing the glint of the curved needle the surgeon used.
I settled into my spot in the corner, unnoticed by the men brought in needing stiches and, for one swearing sergeant, a broken arm set. I laced golden charm magic around all of them; it wouldn’t last, not long. Not as long as the bandages or the sinews stitching their wounds shut. Yet it seemed to help; the sergeant stopped cursing shortly after I settled the charm on him.
Then a loud commotion broke out from outside and a man, wan as death, was carried in on a stretcher. Hamish roughly helped the sergeant to his feet, pushing him outside to the care of the nurses in a neighboring tent. His operating table cleared, he directed the man to be set down.
I caught my breath. He had been shot in the abdomen, the wound seeping blood and his shifting body revealing things I was sure I wasn’t supposed to be able to see. He was pale, nearly gray, and his eyes lacked focus. Yet I could tell, looking closer, that he was young. Probably sixteen, seventeen.
And he wore the silver-braid-trimmed blue uniform of a Royalist army officer.
“Well, then,” Hamish murmured as he peeled layers of blood-soaked wool and linen away from the wound. The fibers had shredded and torn, and I wondered how much of the young officer’s waistcoat and shirt Hamish had left inside him. The thought nearly made me gag, so I pushed my mind back into work, into the repetitive and nearly meditative motions of drawing charm magic and laying it around the wounded man.
Hamish didn’t seem to treat the man any differently on account of which uniform he wore; he examined the wound, prodding it despite the man’s strangled cries of pain, even bending down to sniff it.
“Too bad.” He sighed, lowering his voice to near-gentle tones. I wasn’t sure that the young man could even hear, let alone understand, the surgeon, but he spoke as though only to him. “There’s no point digging round for the musket ball that caught you. If you’ll be a good lad and take a dram, it will ease the pain.”
Hamish gruffly ordered the mate nearest him to fetch a bottle—an oily-looking amber tincture. He considered a gill cup and poured out a larger glass instead, one of the port glasses filled not quite halfway. “Help with his head,” he barked, and the mate obliged.