In the early hours of the morning, before the sun had even given a hint that it might appear, Yarpa moved slowly from bed to bed, checking on the status of those who had suffered worst from the attacks in the palace the week before.

It had been a point of pride for Yarpa, youngest of her siblings, that she had taken up her grandmother’s trade. She had plenty of older siblings to take up her father’s trade; though “being minor royalty” didn’t feel like a trade as much as possibly a way to avoid taking up any real trade, to Yarpa’s thinking. And while her father might, were he willing to talk to her again, that the family’s diversified holdings needed strict and assiduous management.

At least two of her older brothers would be glad to tell her that same thing, if she had any intentions of asking them. Having heard the best and most complete of those same lectures from her father since she had been little more than a toddler, Yarpa Kaule, Apprentice Doctor with the Royal Leech Hall and under the tutelage of her grandmother, wore her red robes and red shoes with pride.

One by one, she and her fellow students working the night shift in the Leech Hall moved among the beds twice a night, checking the bandages and looking for signs of infection. The details were important here, and Yarpa was good at the details of her trade.

She was horrible when confronted by anyone in a position of authority, and suffered from stumbling, stammering, halting speech and a plummeting sense of self worth. Though, when left to her own devices, Yarpa was calm, collected, and competent. At least, that’s how she saw herself. Some others saw her that way, as well.

She might have been surprised to learn her grandmother, Doctor Veda Kaule, thought of Yarpa as a competent and driven student.

Most of those who had the Talent lacked the ability to heal Tarpa had. And she had dedicated her life going forward to honing that gift. Most of those called “Talents” could just throw around power and shift energy from one place to another. It was flashy, it could be terrifying. She knew her own vaunted grandmother was a minor Talent for whom years of training had earned her the not so impressive ability to light candles, and occasionally shock people into unconsciousness. But, Yarpa had the rare gifts that let her directly influence the body.

She couldn’t, and would probably never, throw lightning; but she could help people to heal.

Slightly. It was difficult in the extreme, and much of her lessons had been with the very elderly Master Koburn. One of the first lessons she had been made to learn was that Healing Talents could not simply command a person to health with an effort of Will, and a flexing of their Talent. They had to understand how the body was supposed to fit together to put it to rights correctly. Also, Healing Talents could push past their limits just as easily as any mage, and suffer from asologee, either becoming a mindless, shambling thing, or dying outright as they burnt their mind and body to cinders.

The course of study, and years of training laid out before her daunted Yarpa occasionally. Some days she would wake up just wishing she could go back to her family’s estates, and learn bookkeeping and whatever else it was her siblings were learning of the family’s trade.

Other days, like yesterday, she awoke with singular purpose and the driving hunger to become what her grandmother had told her she COULD someday be.

A Healing Mage.

It was a good dream.

Finally, when she had checked on the condition of the last of the sleeping bodies in the West Wing, she moved on to the East Wing, walking across to the opposite side of the Leech Hall. Those in the East Wing had fewer broken bones, and more lacerations. Most of the patients usually quartered in the South Wing were subjects of disease and congenital conditions, those suffering from afflictions from the time they were born.

There was, technically, no North Wing. There was a central hall, which housed doctors’ offices, and the administrator’s office. The Central Chamber of the Hall also held the front door, which led into the main corridor of the first sub floor of the Palace. There was a rear door in the West Wing, which led down to the sub level of the kitchens, and with a sharp turn in another branch of the hallway, the rear mews of the palace.

As she crossed from West to East Wings, Yarpa nodded to two other apprentices attending to their own late night and early morning duties. Faioni looked bright eyed and enthusiastic as she carried a basket filled with fresh bandages and a small pot of numb-bind, so she was probably just within the first hour of her early morning routine. Perkin, however, looked like Yarpa herself felt, as he trudged along with several empty cups on a tray and was most likely in the final hour of his shift, and probably praying to Rhoona for his bed.

As she wandered to the back, furthest set of beds in the East Wing, Yarpa looked forward to seeing Donchaminar… or Master Sergeant Donchaminar Kammick Nit’Sammish of the Cloven Peaks’ Clan, Medalled Hero of the Y’Sek Campaign, as he was so titled by none other than King Myrl himself. Though only when he needed to make a point, it seemed. Usually the king, and his two closest advisors, just called him Sergeant Donchaminar, or just Sergeant.

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Yarpa had heard her grandmother call him “Donk” to his face just the other day, and she had been scandalized. But the huge Orcish man had just given Granny Veda a tired smile, and held one finger up to his lips to shush the aged Maestra Doctor.

He might have even chuffed out a small laugh as he exhaled heavily before drifting off to sleep as one of the more potent pain relieving potions took hold of his giant form, but Yarpa didn’t know the chef well enough to be certain. It could have just been an exhausted, stuttered sigh.

The giant Orcish man was kind.

That meant a lot to Yarpa. It meant a lot to many of the other Apprentices, too. Not many people were polite to apprentices, unless they wanted something from them. But the few times Yarpa had overseen the rewinding of new bandages on the head of the palace’s kitchens, he had been pleasant, if somber, and very helpful to those of the students and apprentices who worked around him, trying to get the most coverage from bandages made for humans… so, made for someone a quarter of his size. The man was patient and spoke softly to each of them, expressing gratitude.

It was a rare treat to have such a high ranking patient also be so… kind.

Standing at the foot of the three beds that had been pushed together to hold the large form of the palace chef, Yarpa used her keen sense of observation and critical thinking skills to come to the simple conclusion that her patient was not, in fact, in his bed.

…Or… in his three beds... She mentally amended.

Sighing to herself, Yarpa turned her head slowly to look more closely at the other beds in the East Wing.

There were eighty-seven other beds in this wing. All of them being currently occupied. The attack on the palace the previous week had taken a huge toll on the staff and the guards and soldiers. Several visitors to the palace had also fallen. Either to injury, or to that final rest.

Unconsciously, Yarpa spun out a quick, oft said prayer for the Dead, to the Gods Orranat, Khuan, and to the Goddess, Maighdeann nam Flùraichean. She had not been raised in a particularly religious family, but her time as a student of the Leech Hall had taught her to work to save those she could, and to pray for those who she could not.

Finally her eyes picked an odd, lumpy formation from the gloom near one of the farthest beds, with a small curtain that separated it from view of most of the other beds in the hall.

Walking down the aisle to the semi-enclosed bed, she saw now, by the light of her small lantern, that the hulking chef sat on the floor next to the bed of a strange, unresponsive woman that had been brought into the Leech Hall the day of the attack by Master Elbana, and the cavalry officer… Voit? Vollar? Voooogull…? Yarpa had to shake herself, as her thoughts were starting to wander in her fatigue.

The woman had been alive, but suffering malnutrition, starvations, dehydration, and physical abuses of a range of types that had made Yarpa cringe as she had taken notes for her grandmother and the former head of the Hall, Doctor Frake, who had suddenly retired to his estates, way off in the Duchy of South Wall.

As she approached the shadowy figure of the seated behemoth, he turned his eyes to her, and he waved to her with his massive left hand. His right hand held a small spoon, which looked ridiculous in his enormous hand, and he was slowly feeding the emaciated woman from a tiny bowl of boiled oats.

The woman’s deeply sunken eyes were open, if barely, and looked worse now, with life behind them then they had earlier in the day when Maestra Alia, the new head of the Hall, had been doing rounds with the students and apprentices and had pulled back the woman’s eyelids to check for reactions.

There had been none then, which had made the Maestra shake her head. The body breathed, the heart beat, though slowly, but the mind? The soul? Yarpa hadn’t been willing to guess the woman would ever recover.

But now she was very slowly, sloppily and oddly mechanically, eating porridge.

“She had been crying.” The chef said in his deep, soft voice. Smiling slightly around the tusk-like teeth that jutted up and out from his bottom lip. “The sound woke me up from a nice dream. So I made my way over, and tried to see if there was anything I might do to help. This is the only thing that has worked so far.”

The large left hand took up a rag from his crossed legs that extended under her bed. With great care, he wiped the small dribbles of spilled oats from around her mouth, before he brought another spoon of food forward to her open and waiting mouth.

Her eyes never left the path of the spoon, following it without moving her head or neck beyond the opening of her mouth in anticipation. Her focus on the food was eerie to Yarpa, but the apprentice immediately took up the woman’s wrist to count her heart beats.

“Has she said anything to you? Since you began feeding her?” She asked.

“No.” His brow furrowed in concern. It reminded Yarpa of the looks her father gave his children when they were ill, or injured. (Or making wildly unlikely life choices.)

“She was crying. And as I spoke to her. She made burbling noises. I gave her a little water. She looked very surprised when the water hit her tongue. Confused.” The large man’s accent spoke to Yarpa of the mountains of the Northwestern region of the Kingdom. But he still spoke slowly, carefully, and softly. It was as though he was trying to not scare a small animal.

And that was, Yarpa realized, just what he was doing. She wasn’t sure if the “small animal” was herself, or the unknown woman he was slowly feeding, however.

As he continued to feed her, Yarpa checked on the woman’s various sores and injuries. She considered it a minor miracle none of them had festered before she had been brought into the Hall, and now Yarpa Kaule would be damned if she allowed it to happen within these walls.

Hearing the steps of someone in the Hall behind her approach, she took a gamble.

“”Faoini?”

The steps stopped, and a happy voice answered, questioning. “Yar…?”

“Our unnamed guest has awakened. Could you please go tell Doctor Phaidic?”

“Oh!” The high strung young Ghorma woman turned and ran toward the offices in the central Hall, looking for the Doctor who had drawn the night shifts all this month.

The quick, pattering sound of her red shoes on the polished stones of the floor made a strident counterpoint to the woman’s heartbeat pulsing up Yarpa’s fingers where she held the thin, sticklike wrist.

This was worrying.