Havoc's Daughters

Chapter 2 - Caidrin: Day 1 (part I) under house arrest

Caidrin Alzarin, Grand Duchess and niece to Cumbera’s king, pressed a once-white linen rag to the jagged tear in the man’s arm. He was the last of the latest wagon of wounded soldiers brought to the hospice that had, until a fortnight ago, been her family home. The wound had seemed a small one, but now she could see that it was deep and had continued to bleed despite having been gained nearly a watch ago. His face looked like water-stained parchment, pale under the tan, and the back of his shirt and trews were sodden with red, like the linen. Add to that his shallow, rapid breaths and a pulse fluttering like a frightened bird, and Caidrin felt the hollow certainty she was too late.

Her patient’s back arched, and two more of the peasant volunteers serving as orderlies hurried over to assist the two already holding him down.

“No,” Caidrin demurred. “It’s –”

But he began a series of slow, jerky kicks at that point, and when she looked down into his staring brown eyes she could see smoky blue tinting the bottomless black of his pupils. She lifted the rag from his arm. It had stopped bleeding, but Caidrin took no comfort from this. She spread the blood-stained rag over the vacant face. His leg spasmed weakly, a couple more times, but it was over.

“Go ahead and take him out,” she told the volunteers, keeping her voice soft but devoid of the pain and exhaustion that threatened to overwhelm her. Four rows of pallets stretched the length of the ward that had previously been the dining hall, each pallet possessed of a pair of watching eyes. There was no disguising that the man was dead, but the rest needed her to be strong.

She held her bloody hands over a bowl, and a solemn young maid poured a careful stream of water from a pitcher; just enough to lather with strong lye soap and rinse, no more. They had no water to spare, and even the bowl of bloody water would be poured, in turn, into a bucket of ash. Draining through, drip by drip, it would turn into lye and be used to sterilize bandages in a kettle over one of the courtyard fires.

      Holding her hands out to air-dry, Caidrin considered her chapped and reddened fingers. The lye leached her skin of its natural oils, but prevented her spreading infection from one patient to the next. She’d have to rub her hands with lanolin again tonight, and sleep with them tucked into a clean pair of stockings. 

Vaness approached. Her face, wrinkled as a chestnut, was schooled to calm. But she’d been trained in healing at the convent, one of Caidrin’s mentors, and wouldn’t come for help for anything trivial.

“What is it?” Caidrin asked, already heading down the path between booted feet, careful not to let her clean hands brush anything. 

Vaness fell in at her side, doubling back. “It’s your cousin’s man,” she replied, her usually ascerbic voice merely dry. 

No!

      But she didn’t hurry. Seeing the healers confident leant confidence to those who needed it to heal, and rushing would do no good. But her fears were confirmed when Vaness lead her to the fever ward.

      Fever was the enemy. 

      Caidrin followed Vaness and the ward-mistress to the far end of the room. Everywhere she turned, flushed faces and glassy eyes gave evidence she was losing the war.

      At the last pallet, Vaness paused beside a warrior wearing scout’s motley and Cumbera’s red and black badge. Cousin Blade had brought in several of his men, in the dark hours before dawn two days previous, that’d been injured in a raid across the river the evening before. Caidrin didn’t have to ask why he’d come to her. The cousins didn’t have to like each other to know their duty.