Marcus Valorian's Arc

Chapter 2 of 5

The beast was gone, but the ground told the cost. Two boys lay in the dirt, clawed and bleeding. A third pressed a torn sleeve to his own arm and shook. The line that had held now sagged apart. Marcus saw their eyes drift toward the dark, then back to the wounded. Fear spread faster than any wound. If he did not stop the bleeding, the pack would find them broken before it ever arrived. "Chen," Marcus said. "With me." Chen still gripped his shield. An hour ago he had refused every order. Now he dropped the shield and followed without a word. Marcus knelt by the worst boy. A gash ran deep across his thigh. Blood pumped in slow pulses. "Press here," Marcus told Chen. "Hard. Don't let up." Chen jammed both hands down. The boy screamed. Chen's jaw clenched, but he did not pull back. "I've got him," he said. "I've got him." Marcus needed a dressing that would hold. Cloth alone would soak through. He remembered the ferns near the bear-carved lodge at the camp's edge, the ones with dark, iron-colored fronds and tough, woody stems. The older soldiers chewed the stems to slow bleeding. He ran to the lodge, tore a handful free, and ran back. He crushed the stems between two stones and packed the pulp into the wound. He bound it tight with strips cut from a cloak. The pulsing slowed. The boy's breathing steadied. "The next one," Marcus said. They moved down the line together. Chen held pressure while Marcus packed and bound each wound. The other conscripts watched, frozen, waiting to bolt. Chen looked up at them, his hands red to the wrist. "Don't just stand there," he snapped. "Water. Cloth. Move." And they moved. A boy ran for water. Two more tore up their own cloaks for bandages. The panic that had gripped them turned into work. Hands that had shaken now held wounds shut. By the time the last dressing was tied, all three wounded were breathing. None had bled out. The boys who had wanted to run now crowded close, checking on the ones they had carried. Something had shifted. They were no longer twenty strangers behind a wall. They had kept each other alive. Marcus wiped his hands on his knees. Chen sat back on his heels, staring at his stained palms. "You held them together," Marcus said. "You held them together," Chen said. "I just yelled." "That's half of it." Chen almost smiled. Then his eyes went to the dark beyond the wall, and the smile died. A sound carried across the field. Not one beast this time. Many. Low growls, spread wide, circling from three sides at once. The wounded were saved. But the pack had found them, and it had not come to test the wall. It had come to break it.