Naamah's Blessing

their wits, and whom Septimus and I hadn’t been able to aid in time. All five had plunged into battle bare-headed or with unbuckled helmets that had come loose in the fray. The war-clubs of the Cloud People may have been crude weapons, but they were capable of wielding them with deadly force on unprotected flesh.
    Bao, kneeling beside a groaning warrior with a broken arm, glanced up at our arrival. “Moirin. You didn’t listen to me, did you?”
    It occurred to me that if Bao wasn’t so skilled at keeping his opponents out of reach, it could well be him lying among the dead with a crushed skull. “No, I did not.” I pointed toward the picket-line. “Which is the reason we still have pack-horses, and Temilotzin is standing guard over the traitor Pochotl. Now, tell me what to do.”
    “Pochotl, eh?” He sounded tired.
    I nodded. “He’s safe enough for now. Tell me how I can help.”
    “And me,” Septimus added.
    Bao gathered himself. “I need the sharpest blade you can find. We’re going to have to cut off his brigandine. And branches, as straight as you can find. I’ll need to splint his arm once I get it set.”
    “I’ll help.” Denis de Toluard limped into the circle of firelight, nursing a bruised thigh. “I understand a bit, at least in theory. Raphael used to discuss his practice with me.”
    “Good,” Bao said with curt approval.
    The aftermath of battle is a terrible thing. In some ways, thiswas not the worst I had known. The scale of devastation wrought on human flesh by the weapons of the Divine Thunder in Ch’in was almost more than the mind could encompass.
    But this time,
I
was responsible.
    And we were deep in hostile, unfamiliar territory. Our victory was tenuous at best, and the road ahead of us long and hard. The dead would be buried far from home. There was no respite for the wounded, no safe haven where they could heal.
    I found the sharpest knife in the camp—one of Balthasar Shahrizai’s well-honed daggers. I held Arnaud Latrelle’s good hand and hummed one of Sister Gemma’s healing Eisandine tunes to the best of my ability while Bao sawed relentlessly at the suede arm of his brigandine with Balthasar’s dagger.
    He was a young one, Arnaud Latrelle, younger than me. “Guess I should have taken the time to put on chain-mail?” he gasped.
    I stroked his sweat-damp brow. “Next time, aye, that would be a good idea.”
    He choked back a scream of pain when Bao and Denis maneuvered the broken bones of his forearm into place, lashing them firm with strips of torn cloth and straight pine-branches Septimus Rousse had procured from a nearby copse.
    There were others.
    I checked the dilated pupils of two men struck hard on the steel helm by the war-clubs of the Cloud People, soothing them while they retched and vomited.
    I comforted another with a broken clavicle, who bit his lip and writhed with agony as Bao eased his chain-mail shirt over his head, Denis holding his legs to keep him as still as possible while Bao wrapped him in makeshift bandages to stabilize the break.
    All in all, it was a long night.
    Dawn broke over the plain, finding us all weary and exhausted. Brice and some of the others had shifted the corpses of the slain Cloud People warriors some distance from the camp. Our own dead had been arranged in a somber row.
    “Should we…?” Balthasar gestured uncertainly at them.
    “Bury them?” Bao gave a tired nod. “We can’t leave them for scavengers.”
    “What of their weapons and armor?” Balthasar looked ill. “No one wants them to fall into enemy hands, but we can’t afford the extra weight.”
    “No.” Bao pressed the heels of his hands against his closed eyes. “And if we bury them in armor…” He dropped his hands and glanced across the empty plain toward the Cloud People settlement atop the mountain. It looked quiet and peaceful from a distance, but appearances were deceiving.
    “They very well might dig them up,” Balthasar finished the thought for him.
    “Take the armor downstream and throw it in the river,” I suggested. “It’s deep and fast enough in places that they’d be hard-pressed to retrieve it if they even thought to look there.”
    Bao gave me a grateful look. “And the water will rust them in time. Well thought, Moirin.”
    Accordingly, Balthasar recruited one team to set about the grim business of stripping the dead of whatever armor they’d managed to don in their haste and gathering those pieces they hadn’t, and