Ice Country(71)
Well, Mads pretty much jumps into gear after that, yelling for all her healers to come to the front immediately and stop helping the drunks with bruised knees and even more bruised egos. At least ten women come out, all wearing less-than-clean aprons—which I expect at one time were as white as snow, but which are now a yellowish-reddish-brown—about one per each one of us, although those of us with minor injuries refuse treatment until Wes and Hightower and Circ and Abe are taken care of.
They usher us beyond the desk, through a door, and into a large room, full of beds. As it turns out, the place isn’t even close to “full up”, as Maddy said, and nearly every bed is empty. There are only two fellas being treated, each with similar looking head wounds that look suspiciously like what you might expect a gash from a shattered bottle over the head to look like. The way they’re glaring at each other, I suspect they hit each other at about exactly the same time. Well, Maddy tells them to get the chill out, and they do, pushing and shoving each other the whole way.
The rest of us get a bed. Hightower gets three, two side by side to accommodate his width, and one sideways along the bottom for his length. His feet still stick off the end. He wiggles his toes and grunts. The three healers that surround him are scratching their heads and wondering aloud at how they’re going to treat his many wounds. I also hear them say something about whether Tower might be descended from the Yags.
Abe’s in a bed of his own, yelling orders and curses at the two healers that look scared to be treating him.
Siena opts out of her bed, standing by Circ’s side, holding his hand, saying something that makes him laugh and then wince when one of the healers does something to his injured leg.
Feve skips the bed, too, standing by the door, his eyes dark, as if the king himself might come through. Mountain Heart help Goff if he does.
Buff, now naked from the waist up, sits next to Wilde, chattering away as a healer looks at a dark and mottled bruise that covers half his abdomen. She looks amused, but her eyes keep flicking around at the others, like she’s concerned for them too, while another healer bandages her head.
Skye and I stand across the foot of the last bed, where Wes lies twitching in a fitful sleep. Every few minutes he moans.
“How’d this happen?” Maddy asks, breaking her own number one rule: don’t ask questions. But this is a night for rule-breaking.
“I don’t know,” I say. “One minute he was there, fighting alongside us, and the next he was missing. And when we found him he was like this. Did you see anything, Skye?”
Skye shakes her head and Maddy stares at her for a good, long while, so long that Skye flashes her a warning frown. “I’m sorry,” Maddy says. “I’ve just never seen anyone from…”
“From fire country,” Skye finishes. “Well, truth be told, until a few days past, most of us ain’t never seen any of yer kind either.”
“Please, Mads. Can you just focus on my brother?” I plead.
The other two healers are using small knives to cut away Wes’s shirt. At least their instruments look clean and rust-free, I think.
When they peel away the fabric, I feel a shockwave of fear lock my bones up tight. There’s so much blood that we can’t even see the wound. Despite the snow, which is red and melting, the blood’s pouring outta him like a bubbling spring, soaking his pants and the bed and the healers’ hands, which are dabbing at his stomach with thick cloths that fill up with blood in an instant.
“Pressure!” Maddy says and one of the healers starts pushing on his gut with both hands, while Maddy and the other healer finish cleaning up the blood. “We need more hands!” she says, and one of the healers who was helping Buff rushes over. “Get anesthetic, pain killers, a sewing kit, and more freezin’ cloths,” she orders. “The good stuff. Only the good stuff,” she adds.
The healer runs to a cabinet and flings the door open, scattering vials of liquids, which shatter like crystal on the floor, spilling their contents. She ignores the broken glass, rummages through the box, gathers the desired items and brings them back over, setting them on a table next to the bed.
When Maddy says “More hands!” again, Feve wanders over.
“I can help,” he says.
“You know about healing?” Maddy asks.
“Yes. I have herbs,” he says. “They’ll help with infection and pain.”
“Whatever you’ve got, we’ll take it,” she says.
Feve reaches inside his thick coat and extracts a small sachet.
At the same time, the assistant healer grabs the cloths and helps to wipe away the blood, while Maddy uncorks a vial of a clear liquid, tilts my brother’s head, and forces it down his throat. He chokes, gasps, but she holds his head back, pinches his nose, and the liquid goes down. Then she opens another glass bottle, selects a needle and thread from a small box, and wedges herself between two of the other three healers.