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I sigh. It's better than cooking, at least.
I follow her out into the dusk, into the mouth of a cave and through a series of passages until we get to the large cavern where we keep our most valuable supplies.
"This might take a while," Mistress Lawson says.
We spend most of the evening and into the night counting just how many medicines, bandages, compresses, bed linens, ethers, tourniquets, diagnostic bands, blood pressure straps, stethoscopes, gowns, water purification tablets, splints, cotton swabs, clamps, Jeffers root pills, adhesives, and everything else we have, sorting them out into smaller piles and spreading them across the supply cavern, right up the lip of the main tu
I wipe cold sweat from my forehead. "Shouldn't we be stacking these up already?"
"Not just yet," Mistress Lawson says. She looks around at the neat piles of everything we've done. She rubs her hands together, a worried frown creasing her face. "I hope it's enough."
"Enough for what?" I follow her with my eyes as she goes from pile to pile. "Enough for what, Mistress Lawson?"
She looks up at me, biting her lip. "How much of your healing do you remember?"
I stare at her for a second, suspicions rising and rising, then I take off ru
Which is deserted.
"Don't be angry," Mistress Lawson says after I've searched every cabin.
I stand there, stupidly, hands on my hips, staring around at the empty camp. Having found a distraction for me, Mistress Coyle left, along with all the other mistresses except for Mistress Lawson. Thea and the apprentices are gone, too.
And everyone else. Every cart, horse, and ox. And Lee.
Wilf's gone, too, though Jane is here, the only other one who stayed behind. Tonight's the night. Tonight's the night it happens.
"You know why she couldn't take you," Mistress Lawson says.
"She doesn't trust me," I say. "None of you do."
"That's neither here nor there right now," she says, her voice taking on that stern mistress tone I've grown to hate. "What matters is that when they come back, we're going to need all the healing hands we can get."
I'm about to argue but I see how much she's still wringing her hands, how worried her face looks, how much is going on beneath the surface.
And then she says, "If any of them make it back at all."
There's nothing left to do but wait. Jane makes us coffee, and we sit in the increasing cold, watching the path out of the woods, watching to see who returns down it.
"Frost," Jane says, digging her toe across the small breath of ice frozen on a stone near her foot.
"We should have done it earlier," Mistress Lawson says into her cup, face over the rising steam. "We should have done it before the weather turned."
"Done what?" I ask.
"Rescue," Jane says simply. "Wilf tole me when he was leavin."
"Rescue of who?" I say, though of course it can only be - We hear rocks fall on the path. We're already on our feet when Magnus comes barreling over the hill. "Hurry!" he's shouting. "Come on!"
Mistress Lawson grabs some of the most urgent of the medical supplies and starts ru
We're halfway up when they start to come out of the forest.
On the backs of carts, across the shoulders of others, on stretchers, on horseback, with more people pouring down the path behind them and more cresting the hill behind them.
All the ones who needed rescuing.
The prisoners locked away by the Mayor and his army.
And the state of them-
"Oh, m'Gawd," Jane says, quietly, next to me, both of us stopped, stu
The next hours are a blur, as we rush to bring the wounded into camp, though some of them are hurt so bad we have to treat them where they are. I'm ordered from one healer to another and another, racing from wound to wound, ru
"They've been beaten," I say.
"And starved," Mistress Lawson says angrily, setting up a fluid injection into the arm of a woman we've carried into the cave. "And tortured." The woman is just one of a growing number that threatens never to stop. Most of them too shocked to speak, staring at you in the most horrible silence or keening at you without words, burn scars on their arms and faces, old wounds left untreated, the sunken eyes of women who haven't eaten for days and days and days.
"He did this," I say to myself. "He did this."
"Hold it together, my girl," Mistress Lawson says. We rush back outside, arms full of bandages that don't begin to cover what's needed. Mistress Braithwaite waves me over with a frantic hand. She tears the bandages from me, furiously wrapping up the leg of a woman screaming beneath her. "Jeffers root!" Mistress Braithwaite snaps.
"I didn't bring any," I say.
"Then bloody well get some!"
I go back to the cave, twisting around healers and apprentices and fake soldiers crouched over patients everywhere, up the hillsides, on backs of carts, everywhere. It's not just women injured either. I see male prisoners, also starved, also beaten. I see people from the camp wounded in the fighting, including Wilf with a burn bandage up the side of his face, though he's still helping carry patients on stretchers into the camp.
I run into the cave, grab more bandages and Jeffers root, and run back to the gully for the dozenth time. I cross the open ground and look up the path, where a few more people are still arriving.
I stop a second and check the new faces before ru
Mistress Coyle hasn't returned yet.
Neither has Lee.
***
"He was right in the thick of it," Mistress Nadari says, as I help her get a freshly drugged woman to her feet. "Like he was looking for someone."
"His mother and sister," I say, taking the woman's weight against me.
"We didn't get everyone," Mistress Nadari says. "There was a whole other building where the bomb didn't go off-"
"Siobhan!" we hear someone shout in the distance.
I turn, my heart racing a lot faster and bigger than I expect, a smile breaking my cheeks. "He's found them!"
But you can see right away it's not true.
"Siobhan?" Lee is coming down the path from the forest, the arm and shoulder of his uniform blackened, his face covered in soot, his eyes looking everywhere, this way and that through all the people in the gully as he walks through them. "Mum?"
"Go," Mistress Nadari says to me. "See if he's hurt."
I let the woman lean onto Mistress Nadari and I run toward Lee, ignoring the other mistresses calling my name.
"Lee!" I call.
"Viola?" he says, seeing me. "Are they here? Do you know if they're here?"
"Are you hurt?" I reach him, taking the blackened sleeve and looking at his hands. "You're burned."
"There were fires," he says, and I look into his eyes. He's looking at me but he's not seeing me, he's seeing what he saw at the prisons, he's seeing the fires and what was behind them, he's seeing the prisoners they found, maybe he's seeing guards he had to kill.