Cerise and Mykhal barely had time to talk the way they had before joining the caravan. She wasn't quite to the point of complaining, per se, but she was missing her friend, and hoping for some time to just pal around together again.
He, sadly, was just as busy as she was, and often at different times. The caravan stopped a few fingers before high noon and a few fingers after to let the oxen recover their Stamina. After purchasing Daisy, Cerise had the task of caring for her at these breaks so her mother could dress the kills the guards brought back.
Mykhal's enthusiasm for hunting had spread, and Miss Sanyel had decided that if the guards wanted to barter their kills to the caravan, she would pay for Cerise's mother to dismantle the corpses for whatever reagents they could salvage, and the leather or hides that could be preserved for sale.
Her father helped Cerise when his own crafting allowed, but a lot of the [Wagoneers] were enjoying having the services of a skilled [Carpenter] available to them on the road, and one that did not charge them a "caravaneer's tax". Cerise asked what that was, and got an amused, frustrated shrug from Tamrin.
"Caravans mean merchants, and ones passing through. Folks we don't see on the regular, they're happy enough to charge a Master's price for a Novice's work, or claim a job that takes an hour will take much longer, and charge us to hurry it up. In all honesty, it's more of a way to gouge strangers. Caravaneers just get it a bit more consistently. It's why we form cooperatives and consortiums. Having people who stay in one place, Factors they're called, handling the trading means people are less likely to consider us strangers."
It was an interesting idea, and one that resonated with some of the odd fragments of memory Cerise gained when she leveled. She had a sense, though, that the consortiums of the world she so hazily remembered had grown to a size where it was simpler to just charge one price, without regard to the residency of the person making the purchase.
Cerise's skills were making modest advances, and a few nights after their stop in Hosthelholm and the sale of the eggs, she lay in her blankets, on the edge of sleep. She had her profile open to look over any new unlocks she may have gained throughout the day. When she was busy doing things, Cerise sometimes didn't notice the Voice of the World speaking to her, so reviewing her profile at night became something of a habit.
Some skills were arguably better than others. Pain Block, for instance, could do everything Dull Pain did, but better. She needed to work on how to graduate the amount of pain she blocked because when using Greater Cleanse to flush out infections, for instance, she had to be careful not to scour the flesh too harshly. By the same token, the process was painful, and worse for the beasts who did not understand why she had to lance some of the faster swelling boils.
As she thought on that particular topic, her profile open, and her focus partly on the Surgery skill, Cerise came to a minor epiphany. If Surgery meant cutting into someone to more effectively apply her skills, as she had been doing with following the treatment recommendations from Diagnose with the boil-fly blisters several of the oxen and caravaneers had developed, well, wasn't that surgery?
[Surgery] learned! Comprehension assessed at Beginner-2.
"Eh! Wha-? What?" She squawked, spluttering at the notice.
"What is it?" Her mother asked, grumbling sleepily on the other side of the tent.
After several starts and stops, Cerise said, "I just learned the Surgery skill and I don't know why! And it started at Beginner-2!"
"You had a breakthrough. Good for you. Now go to sleep," her mother groused.
Cerise could not just go to sleep, but she did shut up. She fussed at why she got the skill now. She had wondered when she lanced the first few boils if that was Surgery, so if it had to do with linking one with the other, she should learned the skill then, but she didn't.
Was it time for the idea to sink in? A hidden prerequisite? A moment of focused contemplation? The closeness of the World's Voice while she viewed her profile? Cerise didn't know, nor did she have any ideas on how she, right now, could test any of those theories.
----------------------------------------
Cerise was slow to wake in the morning, thanks to the poor sleep her churning mind inflicted upon her, which left her feeling rushed through the breaking of camp. Staves practice with the guards saw her healing her own bruises afterward as her weariness made her stumble into strikes she should have been able to dodge. Running laps with Mykhal at least helped her to feel awake enough to accept the day.
The caravan had pulled off the road for the first break when a group of armored riders came up the road. It was not an uncommon sight. The Hirsels of most domains sponsored guards or guard companies to maintain the safety of the trade roads. What was uncommon where the wounded among them.
One of the lead [Scouts] for the Hirsel's men hailed them, and spoke with guard sergeant Gohren. The guard sergeant sent one of the nearby caravan guards to get Cerise, who had been giving Daisy a quick groom. She turned over the brush to her father and followed Kip.
"Miss Cerise, this is Warrick, a forerunner for Hirsel Treborant's Highway Patrol. He asked about [Healers] among us. Mister Warrick, Miss Cerise is newly classed and under age, but she has a skill that helps her to treat wounds that exceed most Novices' capabilities." Gohren's introduction felt like high praise, but Cerise was more worried about why the forerunner was asking for [Healers].
"You have wounded?" She asked.
Warrick's jaw twitched, but he nodded. "Aye, ran into a surprise goblin migration. We have a handful tied to their saddles, and most the rest of us are wounded. Fortuna smiled on me and so I'm riding scout."
Cerise frowned. "But you've got a slow bleed in your skull! If you rest, you will heal, but only with at least a night's sleep for your natural health regeneration. Elsewise, you're risking a concussive aneurysm!"
He blinked at her. "A what?" He asked.
"When you bleed and the blood clots, only inside your skull, cutting off the pathways your blood normally flows through your brain. Depending how bad it gets, you might end up crippled or dead." Cerise was frowning at the man, full of [Healer's] wrath.
He paled, then glared. "And how much will your healing cost?"
"Nothing because if we have that many wounded heading our way I cannot spare the mana on something that simple rest will fix," Cerise snapped. "Now, is there some phrase one of our guards could use to relay that we're readying for treating your wounded, a token? Because I mean rest!"
Gohren frowned at Cerise's tone, but she did not care. He was good at reading people, though, so all he said was, "It is not our place to order the Hirsel's men, Miss Cerise, no matter how our classes drive us."
Turning to Warrick, he said, "When it comes to healing, Miss Cerise has proven herself quite dependable. I will confirm with our caravan master, but our consortium has a contract to supply the Hirsel's [Alchemists]. If we have useful healing reagents, Miss Sanyel will know, and the price will have already been negotiated beforehand. All we will need is your commanding officer's signature on a receipt of goods.
"Should you heed Miss Cerise's diagnosis, I can send a guard pair to your company."
Warrick declined and returned to the way he had come quickly after.
Cerise went with Gohren to inform Miss Sanyel. She needed to know what the caravan would be willing to provide in aid to the highway patrollers.
The Quartermaster turned out to be a low level [Alchemist]. It had been his first class, but he enjoyed traveling more than being stuck at a lab, and had wrangled his way into the Nykimopia Consortium as a fact checker and field reagent appraiser.
With Miss Sanyel's permission, he enlisted Cerise's mother to help him begin mixing up some quick -- and thus minor -- healing potions.
Cerise and her father started setting up a treatment area away enough from the caravan that the beasts would not be a bother to the incoming patients. That involved taking their cook pot and a fist's worth of salt, adding water, and boiling to start making saltwater. She appropriated the new cook pot her mother had recently bought, but had yet to treat for cooking, and set to making Numbing Salve from mashed Calm Root leaves, Dullard's Friend stalks, and Weeping Ma'alas bark. Some powdered oats thickened the salve to a thin paste without lessening the efficacy of the numbing agents.
This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.
The battered patrollers arrived before she had a chance to do more.
Cerise swept into them with barely any heed to rank, and let her aura guide her. However, before she could lose herself to the needs of the ailing, a voice from her phantom prior life brought her up short.
She looked and spotted the most important seeming person amongst the patrollers. She strode up to the man with the shiniest armor and a bound arm, and asked, "Are you the commander?"
His eyes narrowed at her tone, but he said, "I am."
Cerise pointed to the men strapped to their horses. "I have limited Pools. If I start with them, I can bring them to the level of damage the rest of your patrollers are at, and switch to bandaging and bone setting for the rest. Or I can get most of your men to the point a good nights rest will see them hale again, and stabilize the worst injured for transport to a better [Healer], or at least one with more time to treat them. What do you need?"
He arched a brow. "I need my men hale," he said. "But that unconscious man is our troop's [Healer]. Get him conscious first, then treat the rest."
Cerise nodded. "Yes, Sir," she said, deciding if he was not a knight, flattering him with the assumption would not be a bad thing.
He did not correct her, and Cerise went to the other [Healer]. She followed the prompting of her newly gained Surgery skill, having the man brought down from his horse and laid out. Greater Cleanse prepared her needle and the site of the bruising around his ear. She lanced the bruise, using the saline water as her reagent for the Greater Cleanse to flush the dangerous buildup of blood on this other [Healers] brain. When she had done as much as her Surgery skill made her capable of, she forced her Heal Wounds skill to take all from her Stamina Pool. That she could more easily recover. She did not attempt to Heal any other of his wounds.
Instead, she instructed one of the patrollers assisting her to notify her if he had not roused after a count of one thousand. Then she moved on to the most injured patroller she could restore to good health. By the time she finished, she had not been called over yet, so she moved on to the next patroller, and on to the next one after that.
Cerise was as parsimonious with her Pools as she could manage, but she needed to rest after the fifth patroller. By then, her mother was bringing over the healing potion that the Quartermaster had made. Curious, Cerise appraised it.
Minor Healing Potion
Grade: Common
More of an intuition of what the potion would do than any true knowledge came through, but it was enough for her skills to adapt. Cerise pointed out the patrollers who would benefit most from the potion without a [Healer] directing its application.
She also took a freshly cleansed water bag and filled it with the potion, staggering up to go rest by applying the potion to those who did not need her to use her surgical needle for the application. Then she returned to the patrollers [Healer]. He was talking, his words slurred and slow, with the commander.
"Beg pardon, Sir, Mister [Healer]. We've got potion now to aid recovery, so I can do more to help with Mister [Healer's] concussion. Should I come back? Or proceed?"
"Proceed," the commander said.
Cerise's Greater Cleanse casting raised wrinkles of surprise on both men's foreheads, and her application of Pain Block turned the [Healer's] face goofy.
"Hold still," she muttered, lancing more problem spots to apply the potion. Her Stamina had recovered enough by then for Cerise to draw on that Pool to apply another Heal Wounds to the patrol's [Healer].
Looking to the commander, she said, "He'll be slurring his words for another day or so, and it will probably be an hour or three before he can stand with help. His confusion should start to ease in a few minutes, but he probably has lost some memories. Some will return as he recovers, and others may simply be gone. It does not feel like his class or skills have been harmed."
"Warrick said you're a Novice. Are you waiting for Intermediate rank to select your Initiate class?" the commander asked.
Cerise frowned at his arm, distracted by things her Triage Aura was telling her. Moving at the behest of her skills, she maneuvered him to sit and began undoing his sling and armor. "I need to get to your shoulder to apply the healing potion where it will do you any good," she said. "How do I get the shoulder and back pieces off?"
"Heral!" The commander bellowed, startling Cerise.
A somewhat less shiny young man close to Cerise in age ran up. "Yes, Sir Fenrick?"
"Get me out of the top of my armor for Miss [Healer]," he ordered.
Cerise cast a distracted glance over the boy Heral. He was one of the ones her mother had treated with potion, and it was working through his injuries already. He had just some bruising and pulled muscles that were already mending.
Her Triage Aura acknowledged, she caught the knight saying, "Skills riding you?"
"Hm?" She asked.
"Show respect!" Heral snapped.
The commander-knight, Sir Fenrick, waved the boy down. "She's a [Healer] with wounded above her skill rank around her. It is not disrespect, Heral. Not yet. Miss Cerise, can you focus on what I'm saying?"
She frowned. "My apologies, Sir, but I am tracking who I can heal, which changes as my mother applies the potion and my Pools drain and refill. It is very distracting, and all the wounded, well it's hard, Sir."
Heral at least had not paused in the complicated task of undoing the correct buckles in the right order to get the rune-scribed metal bits off his commander.
Cerise could not use the Numbing Salve on the site of her needle surgery without Greater Cleanse removing the paste, but it was being used on the more colorful bruises her mother was treating. That meant Cerise was using her Pain Block skill to ease poking holes down to the worst of the internal injuries.
"You said your mother is one of the people applying the potions? You are not from a House?" The commander asked.
Cerise used Diagnose on the commander, but she found no sign of mental impairment. "Why would you ask that? Sir?"
"You're casting spells," he said.
Cerise shook her head. "I'm just using skills. Spells, aren't those all about chants and making runes in the air and all that?"
"Perhaps," the commander agreed.
"Hold your arm out," she instructed, her tone distracted.
Heral glared at her, and Cerise might have cared at some other point, but that was not this point. She repeated her localized Greater Cleanse, Pain Block, and Surgery in the muscle just under Sir Fenrick's arm, and then to a couple spots around his ribs.
Once the pinpick wounds were closed, she said, "If you're still sore after Block Pain wears off in a minute, Mama can put some Numb Salve on the sore spots."
Then she stood, swayed, and sat again. Heral was looking between Cerise and his commander as if he was seeing something that utterly confounded him.
"Miss [Healer], how old are you?" The commander asked.
"Thirteen," she answered.
"And when did you receive your class?" Sir Fenrick asked.
"Start of the hot season."
"What level are you?"
Cerise was too tired to react to the rudeness of that question, simply stating, "Eight."
"How are you sustaining the expenditures of your Pools?" The commander asked.
"Arcane Healing let's me use Stamina for Mana."
"How close are you to mana exhaustion?" The patroller's [Healer] asked, his words barely intelligible.
"I'm resting my Stamina a lot, and Mana is only down to half. Hard to keep Stamina over a third, though," she answered. Then she looked over the [Healer]. "How are you doing? Triage Aura isn't as specific as Diagnose, but the prognosis is showing good odds of recovery with adequate rest."
"I feel like I got run over by a goblin horde on their way to a faerie den. I'm not in any shape to start Triaging anyone. You have the aura? What Hall did you train in?"
Cerise shook her head. "Just constant scanning while pinging enough to stay under my mana recovery rate. I don't know about any halls. Our village was killed while Mykhal and I were getting our classes, and there were people going through, cursing our cyr while they cut the throats of our neighbors. This was up on the border with the draycons. Our cyr failed to uphold a lord's covenant, so we decided to head to Velton's new dungeon.
"We've been walking south pretty much since classing up, and the number of people in the flatlands is just ... I don't know, but it's a lot."
Heral's frown grew fierce in his jaw jutted out. "So you just left? What about your duty to your liege?"
Cerise blinked at the boy. "We're Freeman. Why should we give our labor to a noble that cannot keep the covenant? Why would we enrich someone who cannot protect us? We kept our part of the covenant. When he broke faith with us, he ceased to be our liege."
"You're a peasant! How could you know what your liege was or was not doing to protect you?" Heral snapped.
"I witnessed men slitting the throat of my best friend's father. Results speak loudest. The covenant between Freeman and Nobles does not say how a noble keeps a Freeman and his family safe, only that the noble do so. Even still, breaches can be forgiven if the noble is more effective than not, and the liens and levies laid upon us still let us prosper as Fortuna moves her favor over us. The man who was our liege failed that duty, twice over for Mykhal, and gave us no reason to forgive his failure."
She held up a forestalling hand, finishing with, "Do not mistake me for speaking ill of all nobles. These lands are well-managed, and you are proof your liege takes his duties up with the somberness due the Freeman's covenant. The cyr we left did not."
With an obvious afterthought, Cerise tacked on, "And even under the best of lords, it is a Freeman's right to leave for where he thinks to prosper. We. Are. Not. Slaves."
Before Heral could continue chastising Cerise, the commander said, "My sympathies for your grief. It would seem there are more troubles with our border nobles then we in the more settled parts of Druerjan had thought, what with Wendynhelm of Kelm the [Profaner] and --. Was he the cyr you left?"
Cerise's body flushed cold and then hot with shock to hear her former liege's name and that title. [Profaners] desecrated the holy places and brought down the wrath of the gods. They were monsters in human skin, leaving devastation in their wake.
"What did he do? Was it the blessings he forced people to mouth? Or the holy places he abandoned to the monsters? Did he actually--? No. No, not even he--! But, [Profaner]? It must have happened after we left. There was talk he wanted to make all Freeman into serfs, but nothing about him going so far as to anger the gods!"
Heral suddenly looked like he wanted to take back every word he had said in defense of a liege's prerogatives.
The commander said, "All that was said in Court was that he broke the covenant that limits dungeons within Druerjan. The last word from the capital was that the king is still seeking to establish a new covenant. Fortunately, the dungeons already here have not made any changes that we can see, but we don't know where new dungeons will appear, or what dangers they will present. How the elves can abide the wild dungeons of the archipelagoes baffles me.
"As for Wendynhelm, he was stripped of his nobility, and his arlthane was charged with bringing back his head."