Asha Gould's Arc

Chapter 2 of 3

Asha read the letter twice, then burned it in the lamp. The heir was worse. His fever had climbed. The rival family's second wanted her at his bedside within three days, and had listed what he needed from her bag: two ampoules of the broad antifever, the clotting foam, the last patch of skin-graft mesh. She had exactly that much. She had been saving it for him. She closed the medsatchel and set it under the cot. The purple leather caught the lamp, its silver clasps warm to the touch. Two weeks at the family camp. Three days to slip east. She could do it. She did not get a full hour. A shout came from the shelter across the yard — the flat-topped one built of funguswood, where triage waited. Boots pounded the packed dirt. Asha grabbed the bag and ran. Inside, two of her cousins were laying a fighter on the table. He was one of theirs. Shrapnel had opened his thigh from knee to hip. The femoral was nicked, not cut. He was pale and going gray. On the floor beside him someone had dropped a child's plush deer, lavender fur soaked dark at one hoof — his daughter's, she guessed. He had been carrying it. Her cousin looked up. "Do what you can." Asha opened the satchel. She saw the ampoules. She saw the foam. She saw the mesh. She saw the heir dying three kilometers east on a fever she had promised to break. She knew the arithmetic before she finished the thought. The man on the table would bleed out in twelve minutes. The heir would last three days on someone else's worse hands. One patient was in front of her. One was not. She used the foam on the femoral. She used both ampoules to hold the fever the wound would bring. She laid the mesh over the open thigh and sealed it. Her hands did not shake this time. She watched the color come back into his mouth. When he was breathing even, she stepped outside. The yard smelled of woodsmoke and iron. She set the empty satchel on a crate and pressed her palms flat against the funguswood wall until her arms stopped wanting to swing. A potted plant sat by the shelter door, indigo, four small open mouths among its leaves. Someone's idea of decoration. It looked like it was screaming. She understood. She had nothing left to bring the heir. Not the antifever. Not the foam. Not the mesh. The letter had named exactly what she'd just spent. She picked up the plush deer from where it had fallen and set it on the crate beside the empty bag. Then she went back inside to watch her patient breathe, and to decide what she would say when the courier came again.