“I don’t know,” I say, my stomach sinking. “But there’s gonna be hell to pay.”
Mayor Ledger runs a tired hand over his face as we hear sirens and soldiers shouting down in the city below. He’s shaking his head. “I don’t know what they think they’re accomp–”
Five huge explosions, one right after the other, shaking the tower so much that me and Mayor Ledger are thrown to the floor and a bunch of our windows shatter, busting inwards, covering us in shards and powdery glass.
We see the sky light up.
The sky to the west.
A cloud of fire and smoke shooting so high above the prisons it’s like a giant’s flinging it there.
Mayor Ledger is breathing heavy beside me.
“They’ve done it,” he says, gasping. “They’ve really done it.”
They’ve really done it, I think.
They’ve started their war.
And I can’t help it–
I can’t help but think it–
Is she coming for me?
{VIOLA}
“I need your help,” Mistress Lawson says, standing in the doorway of the kitchen.
I hold up my hands, covered in flour. “I’m kind of in the middle of–”
“Mistress Coyle specifically asked me to fetch you.”
I frown. I don’t like the word fetch. “Then who’s going to finish these loaves for tomorrow? Lee’s out getting firewood–”
“Mistress Coyle said you had experience in medical supplies,” Mistress Lawson interrupts. “We’ve brought a lot more in and the girl I have now is hopeless at sorting them out.”
I sigh. It’s better than cooking, at least.
I follow her out into the dusk, into the mouth of a cave and through a series of passages until we get to the large cavern where we keep our most valuable supplies.
“This might take a while,” Mistress Lawson says.
We spend most of the evening and into the night counting just how many medicines, bandages, compresses, bed linens, ethers, tourniquets, diagnostic bands, blood pressure straps, stethoscopes, gowns, water purification tablets, splints, cotton swabs, clamps, Jeffers root pills, adhesives, and everything else we have, sorting them out into smaller piles and spreading them across the supply cavern, right up the lip of the main tunnel.
I wipe cold sweat from my forehead. “Shouldn’t we be stacking these up already?”
“Not just yet,” Mistress Lawson says. She looks around at the neat piles of everything we’ve done. She rubs her hands together, a worried frown creasing her face. “I hope it’s enough.”
“Enough for what?” I follow her with my eyes as she goes from pile to pile. “Enough for what, Mistress Lawson?”
She looks up at me, biting her lip. “How much of your healing do you remember?”
I stare at her for a second, suspicions rising and rising, then I take off running out of the cavern. “Wait!” she calls after me, but I’m already out into the central tunnel, running out of the main mouth of the cave and shooting into the camp.
Which is deserted.
“Don’t be angry,” Mistress Lawson says after I’ve searched every cabin.
I stand there, stupidly, hands on my hips, staring around at the empty camp. Having found a distraction for me, Mistress Coyle left, along with all the other mistresses except for Mistress Lawson. Thea and the apprentices are gone, too.
And everyone else. Every cart, horse and ox.
And Lee.
Wilf’s gone, too, though Jane is here, the only other one who stayed behind.
Tonight’s the night.
Tonight’s the night it happens.
“You know why she couldn’t take you,” Mistress Lawson says.
“She doesn’t trust me,” I say. “None of you do.”
“That’s neither here nor there right now,” she says, her voice taking on that stern mistress tone I’ve grown to hate. “What matters is that when they come back, we’re going to need all the healing hands we can get.”
I’m about to argue but I see how much she’s still wringing her hands, how worried her face looks, how much is going on beneath the surface.
And then she says, “If any of them make it back at all.”
There’s nothing left to do but wait. Jane makes us coffee, and we sit in the increasing cold, watching the path out of the woods, watching to see who returns down it.
“Frost,” Jane says, digging her toe across the small breath of ice frozen on a stone near her foot.
“We should have done it earlier,” Mistress Lawson says into her cup, face over the rising steam. “We should have done it before the weather turned.”
“Done what?” I ask.
“Rescue,” Jane says simply. “Wilf tole me when he was leavin.”
“Rescue of who?” I say, though of course it can only be–
We hear rocks fall on the path. We’re already on our feet when Magnus comes barrelling over the hill. “Hurry!” he’s shouting. “Come on!”
Mistress Lawson grabs some of the most urgent of the medical supplies and starts running after him up the path. Jane and I do the same.
We’re halfway up when they start to come out of the forest.
On the backs of carts, across the shoulders of others, on stretchers, on horseback, with more people pouring down the path behind them and more cresting the hill behind them.
All the ones who needed rescuing.
The prisoners locked away by the Mayor and his army.
And the state of them–
“Oh, m’Gawd,” Jane says, quietly, next to me, both of us stopped, stunned.
Oh, my God.
The next hours are a blur, as we rush to bring the wounded into camp, though some of them are hurt so bad we have to treat them where they are. I’m ordered from one healer to another and another, racing from wound to wound, running back for more supplies, going so fast it’s only after a while that I start to realize that most of the wounds being treated aren’t from fighting.
“They’ve been beaten,” I say.
“And starved,” Mistress Lawson says angrily, setting up a fluid injection into the arm of a woman we’ve carried into the cave. “And tortured.”
The woman is just one of a growing number that threatens never to stop. Most of them too shocked to speak, staring at you in the most horrible silence or keening at you without words, burn scars on their arms and faces, old wounds left untreated, the sunken eyes of women who haven’t eaten for days and days and days.