The Dragon Nimbus Novels: Volume II

trooper stared at row after row of wounded men awaiting the attention of the healers. Myri grabbed his sleeve, yanking him away from the paralysis of bewilderment. His close-cropped hair that would fit neatly under a helmet identified him as a common soldier, not an officer or noble. He needed something to do.
    “Hot water, lots of hot water. And bandages. Set your comrades to tearing up cloth—clean shirts and undergarments,” she ordered him.
    Desperate to relieve the pain all around her, Myri slapped the young man’s face. “Do it. Now!” He shook himself free of whatever trance his mind had settled into.
    “Yes, ma’am.” His hand moved upward. Almost a salute, not quite a tug of his forelock. “Lots of hot water and bandages,” he repeated.
    “And get some of your friends to start washing these men. I can’t heal them if I can’t find their wounds beneath the mud and the blood.” The patients would feel better for the attention until she had time to deal with them.
    The young man dashed off.
    “Younger than I am,” Myri whispered. “But I can’t call him a boy. Not after what he’s lived through in this battle.” She moved into the tent.
    Three gray-clad healers, two men and a woman, moved among the moaning men. The woman wore an apron to protect her healer’s robe from dried blood and gore. She’d pushed the loose sleeves of her robe to her shoulders and secured them with black ribbons.
    Fatigue lined the faces of all three healers. They wore their hair cut short for convenience. Sweat dulled their faces and hair colors to a uniform dark gray. Clearly the healers had worked since the battle began. How long?
    Myri began her work in the corner farthest from the healers. What use her defying the guiding voices if she were evicted as an untrained meddler before she began? Magretha had fostered her to an acknowledged magician, she might be one of these healers. But without that formal training she might resign herself to always being a mere witchwoman—maligned and feared by superstitious mundanes, regarded as incompetent by the trained healers.
    A head wound on her left needed little more than a touch to remove the pressure and wake the man from deep unconsciousness. She sent him on his way with a fierce headache and orders to remain quiet a day or two.
    She treated broken legs, gashes, and other nonmortal wounds. Those patients walked away and freed space for some of those waiting outside. Myri pulled a handful of dried nuts and berries from her pack to restore the energy she’d spent. Her stomach wouldn’t tolerate the taste of meat in this bloody environment. She craved the nutrients in meat, though. If only she had some cheese.
    Behind her, Amaranth prowled the shadows, seeking those who needed Myri the most.
    His plaintive mew called her to the center of the tent.
    Already two of the healers and a red-robed magician—she guessed he was a priest from the color he wore—stood over an unconscious man with his right arm dangling from a sliver of bone and tendril of white ligament. Magic hovered in the air around the healers who worked to save a life. Still the soldier’s lifeblood pumped out of him.
    Heedless of the censure that might come from the priest, Myri obeyed the persistent demands of her talent.
    A Song of sweet healing sprang to her lips as a bundle of special herbs and moss came to her hand from her pack. She shouldered aside the older of the gray healers who stood helplessly at the patient’s head.
    Breathe in, hold, breathe out, hold. Her head cleared and magic simmered within her. A second deep breath and hold. Power tingled in her fingertips, focused and ready to fulfill its promise of healing.
    “Hold his arm in place,” she whispered to the female healer. She nodded, too tired and numb to do anything but obey.
    “Magic isn’t enough for a wound this severe,” the elder of the two male healers countermanded. “The only way to save the arm is to stitch the blood vessels and the layers of muscle. But ’twill take too much time. We must amputate and cauterize to stop the bleeding.”
    “Please, let me try,” Myri begged even as she made a poultice of her herbs in a bucket of clean water at the patient’s feet.
    “Ye’ll not save him. I sense his spirit passing into the void already,” the priest grabbed her hands in his own. Gnarled, scarred hands, meticulously clean, even under the neatly trimmed fingernails. A crescent scar that could have come from human