“Aye, I’ve noticed that.” Leudast sounded as sardonic as he could. “Common soldiers get next to nothing, officers get as little as you think you can get away with giving. Fetch me that paper. I do need to write to Marshal Rathar.”
He knew he was being unfair. The healers were desperately overworked men. But he’d told a good-sized chunk of truth, too. A man who wasn’t important or well-connected-often the same thing-or whose wound wasn’t either as easy as possible to treat or in some way interesting got short shrift.
Once upon a time, Leudast had been a man without connections. He wasn’t any more, though, and he intended to keep hitting the healers over the head with such importance as he had till they did what he wanted.
They knew it, too. Glaring, their spokesman said, “You wish us to give you preferential treatment.” He might have been a Gyongyosian accusing Leudast of wanting him to eat goat.
“That’s right,” Leudast said cheerfully. “You do it all the time. I want you to do it for me.”
They put their heads together yet again. When they separated, the man who did the talking said, “You realize this may cause you some considerable pain?”
Leudast shrugged. The healers blinked. They didn’t know what to think of a man whom pain didn’t horrify, which only went to prove they’d never been up to the front. He said, “How much pain do you think you’ll get once I tell the marshal you wouldn’t treat me even after I asked you to?”
They winced. Leudast didn’t think he’d prove able to do much to them, but they didn’t have to know that. Plainly, they didn’t feel like taking chances. In their shoes, Leudast wouldn’t have felt like taking any, either. “Let us review your case,” said the one who spoke for them. “If we find some sorcerous therapy that might help you, we shall apply it tomorrow.”
“I hope you do,” Leudast said, which seemed to him wiser than, You’d cursed well better.
Then he had another day of waiting flat on his back. He would sooner have been in a trench waiting to start an attack, which proved how bored he was. Either that or it does prove I’ve lost my mind, he thought.
The next morning, the healers appeared with a wheeled chair and a couple of muscular attendants who manhandled Leudast into it. Other wounded soldiers stared curiously at him as they took him off. The healers had a tent of their own, well away from the wounded they attended. It was almost alarmingly quiet in there.
“What are you going to do to me?” Leudast asked, wondering if browbeating them had been such a good idea after all.
Before any of them answered, their attendants hauled Leudast out of the wheeled chair and propped him up on a table. Then the mages draped his leg-all of it except the area of the wound-with gauze made from a glistening fabric he had never seen before.
“What are you going to do?” he asked again.
“Treat your leg-or rather, the wounded portion of it, and no other- thus the insulating cloth,” a healer told him, which left him no wiser. Then the fellow condescended to explain: “We are going to age the flesh that has been blazed, so that, being a month older than the rest of you, it will also have already healed.”
“That’s wonderful!” Leudast exclaimed. “I didn’t know you could do such things.”
“You will not enjoy it so much while it is happening,” the healer replied. “Also, once the month has passed, you would be very wise to have the sorcery reversed. I will give you a letter authorizing the reversal. Hold on to it and do not forget to have the second sorcery done.”
“All right,” Leudast said. “But why?”
The look the healer gave him was anything but cheery. “Because if you fail to have it done, if you should forget, that flesh will die a month before the rest of you-and I promise you, it will make your last month alive much less pleasant than it would have been otherwise.”
Leudast thought about that. He gulped. “Oh,” he said in a small voice.
“We begin,” the healer declared. He and his colleagues started to chant. Burning heat coursed through Leudast’s wound. He gasped and tried to jerk away. The attendants grabbed him, making sure he couldn’t move. “This is what you asked for,” the healer told him. “This is what you get.”
And you’ll enjoy every moment of giving it to me, won’t you? Leudast thought. But he refused to give the healer the satisfaction of knowing he understood that. In a voice as steady as he could make it, he said, “Get on with it, then.” The healer eyed him and nodded in reluctant approval.
Before long, Leudast was panting and trying not to curse or scream. The healers hadn’t told him he would feel all the pain of a month’s worth of healing, distilled down into the few minutes the sorcery took. He clenched his fists. The smaller hurts of nails digging into palms and of biting down hard on the inside of his lower lip helped distract-a little-from the torment in his leg.
Then, suddenly, that torment eased. Leudast let out a long, astonished sigh of relief. The healer said, “You were brave. We do few such procedures where the patient does not cry out.”
“I believe it.” Leudast sounded shaky, even to himself. But the gnawing pain in his leg had eased. That was what he’d wanted. “Can I put my weight on it?”
“You may,” the healer replied, precise as a schoolmaster. “I hope you can-that was why we performed the sorcery.”
“Well, let’s find out.” Leudast swung down off the table. One of the attendants who’d hauled him up onto it reached out to steady him. He waved the man away. The leg wasn’t perfect, but it would do. He could use it. He nodded to the healers. “Thanks. I’m ready to go back into the line.”
“We shall fill out the necessary papers,” one of them said. Another very carefully peeled the shining cloth from Leudast’s leg. The healer who was doing the talking went on, “Make sure you have this sorcery reversed in a month’s time. As I said, if you forget, your last month will be nothing but torment to you.”
“I understand,” Leudast said, and he did. The mere idea of knowing a month ahead of time that he would be dead… He shuddered. Even war against the Algarvians seemed clean next to that. And he was suddenly more eager than ever to get back to the field. If he died in battle, at least it would be over fast-he hoped.
Merkela glared at Skarnu and at the underground fighter who called himself “Tytuvenai” after the town where he was based. She said, “I don’t think you ought to be talking with the Algarvians. I think you ought to be blazing them.”
“Oh, we’ll do some of that even yet,” “Tytuvenai” said lightly. He winked at Skarnu. “Eh, ‘Pavilosta’?”
“Aye, no doubt,” Skarnu answered. He glanced over to Merkela. “Like it or not, we have to talk with them now.”
“Give me one good reason,” she snapped.
“They hold the towns. They hold the roads. If they want to, they can start slaughtering Valmierans the same way they’ve been slaughtering the Kaunians from Forthweg,” Skarnu said. “They can do it any time they please.
Merkela winced. Reluctantly, she nodded. “There is that.”
“Aye, there is,” “Tytuvenai” agreed. “If we want to have a kingdom left when this cursed war finally ends, we have to walk a little softer than we might like right now. And so…” He nudged Skarnu. “We’d better get moving.”
“Right,” Skarnu said without any great enthusiasm. Whether he recognized the need or not, he wasn’t thrilled at the idea of talking with the Algarvians, either. But he kissed Merkela and went out to the horses “Tytuvenai” had waiting outside the farmhouse. As he mounted and rode off, he grumbled, “Why don’t the people up in the north handle this themselves?”
“They do,” “Tytuvenai” answered. “But we have to do our part, too.” As usual, he was cheerfully cynical: “You can’t expect those fellows up there to count on their fingers and get the same answer twice running.” Skarnu laughed, though he was sure the northern Valmierans said the same thing about him and “Tytuvenai” and the other irregulars here in the south.
He and his comrade rode for about three hours. Skarnu’s backside started to hurt; he wasn’t used to so much equestrianism. By the way “Tytuvenai” started grunting every so often, Skarnu suspected he was feeling it, too.
After a while, “Tytuvenai” grunted again, this time in relief. “We’re supposed to meet the redheads in that apple orchard ahead. I’ve got a flag of truce in the saddlebag here. Demon of a thing to have to use with the Algarvians, isn’t it?”
“It’s war,” Skarnu answered with a shrug. “There’s nothing dishonorable about it.” But he was trying to convince himself as much as “Tytuvenai.”
They tied their horses to a couple of the apple trees. Skarnu didn’t fancy going into the orchard armed with nothing more than a white flag on a little pole. If the Algarvians grab us, they’ll be sorry, he thought. They’ve got to know they ‘II be sorry… don’t they?
A tall man in his later middle years stepped out from between a couple of trees. He, too, carried a flag of truce. “Good day, gentlemen,” he said in fluent if accented Valmieran, and gave the two irregulars a courteous bow. “I have the honor to be Colonel Lurcanio, administrator of Priekule under Grand Duke Ivone. And you are…?”
“Tytuvenai,” “Tytuvenai” said.
“Pavilosta,” Skarnu said. He eyed Lurcanio. Till now, he’d had only one brief look at the redhead who was his sister’s lover. He hoped Lurcanio wouldn’t recall the name of the hamlet he used as a sobriquet.
No such luck. Lurcanio’s cat-green eyes kindled. He bowed again, this time to Skarnu alone. “So pleased to meet you at last. We have… an acquaintance in common.”
“I know,” Skarnu said, and said no more.
“You may be interested to learn she is expecting a child,” Lurcanio remarked.
“Is she?” Skarnu said tonelessly. But that wasn’t quite enough. And so, loathing Krasta, he asked the question he had to ask: “Yours?”