Well, obviously shipping them off to a necromancer of course, why else would I have seventeen half-dead men bandaged up in my cart. Who knows, maybe I’m here to steal stuff so I just so happened to find the seventeen most grievously injured people here and dumped them on my cart. My eye twitched subtly. “Explain yourself this instance before this man pierces your chest with an arrow!”
Know what, I’m not even going to dignify that with a response. You piece it together, a bunch of bloody bandages and medicine containers all over the place, I wonder what I was doing. “You heard him, SPEAK,” the man holding the bow growled.
“Five… four…. three… two… one…” With one quick motion, the man expertly nailed me in the chest. I gave him an unamused look before pretending to topple over. I heard the girl gasp as my body met dirt and saw her look over at the man in shock, “I was just trying to threaten him, I didn’t actually mean shoot the guy!”
“What, it's non-lethal, and don’t you know how to heal? Besides, no one is going to miss some scumbag who collects corpses.”
I gave the man another unamused look, not that he could notice underneath my mask. The girl at this point dropped all her previous efforts to conceal her identity. With a huff, she pulled back her hood. “Do you know how hard it is to heal a half an inch thick arrow wound? How much effort that would take, especially in the chest?!” I can second that, I’ve been dealing with arrow wounds all day.
I noted with interest that the girl's face was red and covered in sweat, high fever. She also stopped trying so hard to hide her injuries allowing me to see her left arm hanging limply to her side. I could hear her breathing was quick and labored. A man looking through the back suddenly called out, “We may have a problem, I think we just shot a physician.”
A grown came from the bowman, “Couldn’t you have found that out earlier.”
The girl grimaced as she looked at my downed form before coming over to inspect the wound. “Dammit TBD, I told you your impatience would screw us over one day!” A soldier bordering the bowman growled. “One more instance like this and you’ll get fifty lashes. He could have been invaluable to help our…” he glanced at me before continuing, “benefactor.”
“Quickly, someone light a torch, and you two, help me get this man on the cart,” the girl commanded.
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
I was quickly lifted with my own stretcher and placed down by the man I had just worked on. How the tables have turned. The girl had to be helped up on the cart while the men began to try to get the horses moving. With a helper holding a torch overhead she brought her hands to the arrow and closed her eyes in concentration. Magic slowly slipped into my wound, magic that I gave false feedback to. It’s kind of suspicious when a seemingly fine living man has enough internal injuries and scarring to kill a thousand men three times over.
With a groan from the expenditure, the girl wavered before placing both hands on the arrow and pulling. Which, not surprisingly considering her state, barely moved the arrow. She told the man holding the torch to help her and that finally got it out. Before my nonexistent blood could poor out, she placed one of my towels on the wound and applied pressure. She once again sent magic into the injured area and tried her best to mend the flesh together, and after a bit, she deemed that I would live.
I considered it for a bit and deemed her skill in healing magic to be the best usage of magic so far in this backwards world. Still, she needed to work on anatomy, a lot of nerves and blood vessels were missed. I got up and brushed the dirt off my robe while the girl watched with mouth agape. I brushed aside the soldiers that were trying desperately to get the horses moving and continued on my path. I didn’t much care about getting shot but it's not like they left me for dead, so I brushed it off. Plus, I had patients I needed to transport, I couldn’t waste time on a petty squabble.
The soldiers could not find a good enough reason to commandeer my makeshift ambulance and the girl was passed out in the back from overexertion, so they could only follow me in hopes to find something helpful at my destination. The horses had apparent night vision after their abrupt resurrection, allowing them to navigate through the fields of fallen men easily, it was to the point that I barely had to do a thing. The cool night was only disturbed by small gusts of chilly wind, it was a beautiful night if I say so myself.
Since I was reluctant to take off my mask, I couldn’t celebrate the night with a cigar, so I popped some mint leaf in my mouth instead. The plant was a mild sedative to my kind and my mouth soon went pleasantly numb. It only took another ten minutes before a decent size field of tents could be seen. I was certainly not expecting my apprentice to get this much done. She probably had some help. I came to a stop at the centermost tent and began unloading the half-dead patients. Inside the tents laid makeshift beds of straw and fabric, which I placed them on. Soon my tag-a-longs took charge and began helping, significantly speeding things up. On a chair by the tent flap sat my student, long asleep from exhaustion. Not that I blame her though. Picking out the most heavily injured man, I moved him to a table in the center and got to work. Willfully ignoring the soldiers who awkwardly stood around.