MHHC Chapter 136

Suspicion

The command jolted Lena back to herself—she had been crumpled on the floor, shaking uncontrollably—and she acted with a roughness that was almost shocking.

She shoved Adelheid into the carriage with both hands, forceful as a dockworker.

Then she scrambled in after her with startling speed, pulling the door shut with frantic, urgent hands.

"The people outside, and Hazel—"

"Shh! Stay still. There's nothing we can do out there. Not getting hurt is the best we can manage. Staying put right now is actually helping."

In the darkness, Lena's trembling hands found Adelheid's arm and gripped it again, harder than before.

"His Grace ordered me to keep you safe. If you go out, I go with you. And I—" A pause, raw and shaking. "I'll die."

Each time Lena pressed closer, the frantic beat of her pulse and the rush of her breath washed over Adelheid in waves—thick, hot, alive. The warmth of a living body.

Was it that? The feeling of another person's heat?

The face of the soldier who had been run through at the throat surfaced before her with unbearable clarity—his face contorted in agony, eyes white with pain.

The monster's fingers, hooked like blades, reaching toward her.

'It was as though it recognized me.'

The memory of that gleaming black gaze locking with hers was the kind of thing she wanted to scour from her mind entirely. Those eyes had stared at her with such desperate, seeking intensity. What had they been? Had it been looking for her—had it been looking for her from the very beginning?

Once the doubt took root, impossible thoughts began to multiply, each one dragging the next in its wake.

"Your Grace... please don't leave me behind..."

Lena, grown anxious at Adelheid's silence, wrapped both arms around her waist and held tight. Adelheid held her back, and forced the fear and the suspicion down—forced it into some dark, locked compartment she did not have the courage to open.

"Re-form the defensive line!"

"AHHH!"

"Don't let them take the supplies!"

"Guard the wagons!"

The chaos outside was building, not abating. Perhaps it was the loss of sight—perhaps the darkness of the carriage made it worse—but the last things she had seen played on and on behind her eyes without mercy.

The moment the spear had flown. The moment that dead soldier had fallen with his eyes rolling white. The moment the monster's arm was severed and hot blood had sprayed across her face.

The memory of that foul, hot blood made her whole body shudder with revulsion.

'Is Hazel all right? And Valentin—he's not the sort to be easily brought down, but...'

Adelheid kept casting anxious glances toward the carriage door, straining every nerve toward the fragmented sounds filtering in from outside.

Each time something broke, or shattered, or was crushed in the distance, her grip on Lena tightened.

The sounds outside began to diminish—slowly, then noticeably—perhaps twenty minutes after the fighting had started. The bone-chilling ring of weapons clashing against weapons, the howling of the monsters: both had grown sparse.

By her reckoning, the battle was nearly over.

That was when she heard it—footsteps approaching the carriage, close and deliberate. Adelheid held Lena still and held her breath, drawing every fragment of power she could summon to the surface.

She had herself poised, ready to strike at an instant's notice, when the carriage door was wrenched open—torn back as though by a giant's hand.

"Your Grace. Are you unharmed?"

Adelheid flinched against the sudden flood of light.

It was not a monster. It was a human face, intact and familiar—Donovan's voice. Adelheid felt a depth of relief loosen something in her chest as she recognized him, and managed to ask:

"Is—is it over? All of it?"

"Yes. The battle itself wasn't large, but the ambush caught several soldiers off guard—there are wounded. Could you see to them now, if you're able?"

"Of course."

She gathered her things in haste and climbed out of the carriage.

The overwhelming relief—that she had something to do now, something she could actually accomplish—was greater than almost anything else she felt.

Adelheid kept her gaze firmly away from the mounded corpses of the monsters piled to one side, and ran toward where the wounded had been gathered.

Most of the injuries were relatively minor—cuts and punctures from the monsters' hard, chitinous shells—but several were grave.

They lay in a row on wooden carts.

One man clutched his crushed lower abdomen and moaned. Another's broken arm had driven bone through skin. A third's belly had been torn open, blood and viscera seeping through his fingers.

The sight of it hit her like a physical blow. Nausea lurched up reflexively.

"Ugh—"

And in that moment, Adelheid understood fully what she had never quite grasped until now: how shallow her preparation had been. How foolish she had been to think that the medical knowledge she had acquired was adequate for this.

The wounds she would face in the battles ahead would be nothing like the scrapes and cuts she had treated before.

The smell of blood rose from the dying men—blood, and beneath it, something sharper, more wretched. The smell of human bodies broken past repair.

As their ragged, feverish breath hit her, her hands began to tremble in involuntary spasms. 'Can someone like me actually do this? What if I try, and I only make it worse—'

'I can't.'

She took a step back. You can't do this. You'll ruin everything. The words were already climbing her throat.

"I'm not asking you to cure them completely. Just keep them alive. Until we rendezvous with the advance team at Nassau Castle."

"H-how far is the castle—"

"Half a day's journey. Perhaps less. We'll move at full speed once the wounded are stabilized. We can't afford more monsters catching the scent of blood."

Donovan pushed the sweat-damp, dirt-matted hair from his face with the restless motion of a man fighting impatience.

"Be quick. His Grace is already ahead, clearing the road."

The faces of the wounded men were already ashen—the color of men who have resigned themselves to dying. Left as they were, every last one of them would be dead before Nassau Castle came into view.

Adelheid pressed her lips together and forced her heart back into order.

She didn't know whether she could do this. Whether she could manage it at all. But until they reached the advance team, she was the only healer this expedition had.

Which meant there was only one choice, whether she wanted it or not.

"Lena."

She made her decision, and reached out to take Lena's trembling wrist in a firm grip. She opened her bag and pressed two bundles into Lena's hands.

"Distribute these to the wounded. Anyone who's lost too much blood—have them chew the roots in this pouch. For staunching wounds: grind this herb down and press it to the injury, then wrap it with clean bandages."

"I can't—I can't do that... I can't, I can't..."

Lena had seen the bodies, and the shock of it had hollowed her out entirely.

Adelheid squeezed Lena's hand once, firm and deliberate, then let go and turned to Donovan.

"Assign a few soldiers to help Lena. If she needs to rest, let her. And bring me as many clean bandages as you can find."

"Understood."

While Donovan hurried off, Adelheid drew a breath down to the bottom of her lungs and moved to the most critically wounded man first.

He was clutching his open abdomen with both hands, the wound gaping wide enough to show what lay beneath. Each time Adelheid reached toward him, his breathing fractured into something close to a death rattle.

She spent precious time persuading him to move his hands. Then she cut his clothing away with a careful blade.

She drew a clean cloth from her bag and began to wipe away the blood around the wound, drawing her healing power upward at the same time.

A light erupted from her body—blue-white, fierce, nearly white at its core.

"Hah—"

The wounded man gasped and seized her by the shoulder with the grip of a drowning man. The pressure was enormous—she felt as though her shoulder might crack beneath his fingers.

Adelheid kept drawing the power up through the pain. The wound, which had been welling with blood in slow, sickening pulses, began to close.

Severed muscle knit itself back together. The surface tissue began to regenerate, imperfect but present.

At some point the man lost consciousness—unable to bear the pain of regeneration any longer.

It was, she supposed, a mercy. He would wake to find things mended.

Adelheid pressed the back of her hand against her forehead, wiping the sweat away as she caught her breath. Donovan had returned already with a pile of bandages.

"Pack the wound with... ground styptic herb first... then wrap it firmly..."

She gave precise instructions even through her labored breathing. He moved quickly, following her words: grinding the herb, applying it to the wound, winding bandages in tight, careful loops around the man's torso.

Adelheid checked his work, then moved immediately to the next patient.

And so it went. Each time she repeated the process—cutting clothing away with the blade, cleaning blood from the wound—her hands grew steadier and more certain.

She roused men who had lost consciousness. She pushed past her own limits, drawing healing power as though wringing it from stone, and attended to every person before her.

The more she examined the wounds, the more disturbing they became. The monsters had struck for human weak points with eerie, deliberate precision. And they had used bladed weapons—the same as humans.

The most difficult injuries were the broken bones.

She could manage organ damage and torn muscle—that, she could flood with healing power and eventually mend—but there was nothing she could do alone about shattered or displaced bones. Setting a fracture by herself was beyond anything she had been taught. She had seen it in drawings, in the herbalist's room, and nowhere else.

"Allow me."

Donovan saw her faltering and stepped in without a word, positioning himself with the calm competence of long practice and setting the displaced bone with sure, expert hands.

When he was certain it had seated properly, he looked back at her and nodded.

Adelheid summoned every last reserve she had left. This was the final patient—she intended to wring herself out entirely.

She forced her concentration inward until her skull rang with the effort, driving the healing power higher and higher.

The brighter the light that poured from her body, the faster the tissue closed. The knowledge that she was helping—genuinely helping, that these men would live who otherwise would not—pushed her past what she thought she could bear.

Just a little more. Only a little more.

She crossed one final threshold—and the world tilted.

Adelheid pitched forward in a sudden, helpless collapse, the edges of her consciousness dimming to gray.

Blood poured from her nose all at once, drip-drip-drip, splashing dark against the ground.

"Adele. Please."

Someone caught her by the shoulders before she hit the earth and pulled her close.

Through the blurring of her fading awareness, Adelheid thought his face looked as though it might break apart at any moment—contorted into the expression of someone fighting, very hard, not to weep.