Willow slowly came to in the back of the rolling wagon. It must have been daytime outside because she could see Leopold’s drawn face above her looking out through the drawn backing. She tried to turn her head to see what he was watching, and he startled at her attempt.

“Willow,” he said as if he were surprised she was awake. “Don’t move.”

She blinked twice then tried to roll her eyes. They were foggy at first, like she’d been asleep for a long time.

“What—” she began to ask, and tried to sit up.

“No, stay down. You have to stay down, at least for now,” he said, then leaned his head out of the back of the wagon.

“Bryan!”

The wagons slowed as Willow was still trying to sort through her jumbled memories. The last thing she recalled was going to sleep in the wagon circle. Then Bryan. He said it was just a tremor…

The clanking of thin metal plate announced their guard’s arrival at the back of the wagon. He leaned in and looked down at her.

“Aren’t I special,” she croaked. “Stopping the whole train for little old me.”

The way Bryan looked at her, the concern on his face, brought back another memory. Him slack-jawed against the wagon-wheel. The deathworm rearing up over Leopold.

Willow gasped and tried to pull her arms up, but they were tied down and pain exploded from her wrists as she pulled at the restraints. She screamed.

“Stop, just stop moving,” Bryan pleaded, jumping into the wagon and leaning down over her. He rummaged in a pack at his side and passed a little black nugget over to Leopold.

“Mix this with water, quickly. The pain will soon overwhelm her.”

“Oh gods,” Willow moaned. The pain in her wrists was excruciating, far beyond the pain of the restraints against her arms. They had tied her to the bench of the wagon—she realized it was to keep her from rolling off during transit.

“Shh, it’ll be alright soon,” Bryan said, and inspected where she only imagined her hands would be beyond her vision. The memory of gore and bone came back to her and she moaned again.

“My hands,” she cried. “My hands.”

Then, a thought came to her, and it was so small in the enormity of what was happening that she couldn’t help but fixate on it.

“I’ll never be able to do magic now,” she said, and couldn’t help but chuckle. “That’s the end of my illustrious career.”

“Not yet it isn’t,” Bryan said, accepting a wooden mug from Leopold. He held the mug to Willow’s lips. It smelled strongly floral, a familiar scent. She’d only smelled it before when her mother mixed the concoction to give patients at their deathbeds.

“No! I’m not going to die,” she said, and tried to struggle against the bonds again, but the pain flared and made her light-headed. It was getting worse.

“It’s for the pain,” Bryan said, his voice smooth and even. Willow stopped, looked into his eyes, and saw that same thing she’d sensed before. It was as if he was a father comforting a child.

“I’m afraid,” she whispered. He nodded.

“We’re almost to Durum now. We’re already in the warded tunnel. Once we get there, you’re going to the best mage I can buy. You’re going to get your hands back. Thank the gods everything stayed together, or I don’t know what we would’ve done. This is to help you sleep, to keep the pain away.”

She looked mistrustfully at the mug, then at Leopold. There was fear in his eyes, and he worked his jaw a couple times before sound came out.

“I saw the warbeast,” he stammered. “But it wasn’t nearly as scary as the deathworm.”

Somehow that admission loosened something within her, and Willow let out a held breath. She accepted the foul drink and shut her eyes as sleep overtook her.

🜛

When she next awoke, Willow found herself in a soft white bed. Things came fuzzy at first, and her body hurt in the way that she associated with sleeping late through long winter mornings. She wondered how long she’d been out.

There was a quiet bustle going on around her—soft footsteps on stone—and she blinked to clear the fog from her eyes. She almost rose her hand to rub her face, but felt a thick padding covering the end of her arm and the memory of what she saw right after the deathworm attack asserted itself again.

Where was she? What had Bryan said? Taking her to a mage? She looked left and saw another bed, right and there was another bed too. The place reminded her of her mother’s small resting-chamber where she let patients lie if they needed to recuperate overnight. Except that this was much cleaner and larger than her mother’s chamber, which had only held four beds—plenty for their small village.

Someone padded by, dressed all in white, and Willow fought to catch sight of the person’s face, but she had trouble focusing. Looking up she saw a great vaulted ceiling. Daylight streamed in through arched windows at her back, which gave the place a heavenly sort of glow. She supposed if she were in actual heaven her hands would be fixed.

Her hands. She looked down and saw two bulbous wrappings where her hands should be, easily four or five times the size of the normal appendage. They’d done something to her hands and wrapped them afterward. She’d have to wait until she could flag down one of the scurrying nurses before she’d find out what.

Just as her eyesight was resolving, a familiar face walked out of the misty aisle in front of her.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

“Leopold,” she asked, and laid back down on the pillow. “What are you doing here?”

“You’re awake,” he said, and smiled. “Bryan told me to stay with you until you awoke. I got hungry though. It looks like I failed at my duty.”

Willow grunted and tried to scoot up against her headboard. Leopold quickly set down his wooden tray on the chair beside her bed and waved his arms around her hands, as if thinking to help her and then realizing too late that there was no good place to grab on. It was almost amusing.

“I can get it,” Willow said, and shimmied back until her head was propped up against the hard wooden board. Leopold seemed to decide that she had it, and replaced himself in the chair with the food.

“Here, I suppose I should share,” he said. He held out a sliced roll piled with sliced meat of some kind, which smelled absolutely delicious. Willow realized then that she was ravenous, but she waggled her wrapped hands in the air.

“Thanks, but if you want to share you’re going to have to feed me.”

“Um, uh,” Leopold stammered. “Do you… are you okay with that?”

Willow shrugged. “I’ve been fed before. This isn’t the first time I’ve been bedridden.”

Leopold scooted closer and held the roll as she took animal-like bites out of it, chewing quickly before stomaching each and going in for another. In less than a minute the entire roll was gone, and she was looking for seconds.

“You wouldn’t happen to have another—”

“By the seventh lord, what did you just feed her,” a woman’s voice cut Willow off, and she turned to see one of the white-clad nurses standing at the foot of the bed. The woman was wearing a headdress with white fabric wings extending to either side and a white full-length gown. Her own mother had only worn a white apron while attending to her patients.

“J-just a roll. Some meat—”

“She’s to be on liquid exclusively,” the nurse admonished, and Leopold paled. He shrank back in the chair as the nurse moved up the side of the bed to stand over Willow.

“Up already I see.”

“I’m so hungry,” Willow said, and hoped she could ameliorate some of Leopold’s guilt.

“I’ll have a bowl of broth sent over straight away,” she said, but Willow doubted if broth alone would fill the sucking void of her stomach. She was counting on Leopold to secret her another stacked roll at the first opportunity.

“Now,” she said, and her voice took on a much softer tone that Willow recognized as what her mother called ‘bedside manner.’ “How are you feeling, dear?”

“Fine. I feel fine, I guess,” she said. “My head’s a little fuzzy, and my vision is blurry.”

“That’ll be the aftereffects of the anesthesia,” the nurse said. “You were under for quite a while while the surgeons rebuilt your hands. Magically suspending consciousness for that long takes a while to come back from.”

Willow sighed in amazement; Bryan hadn’t been lying. How in the hell he’d afforded to get her treated by mages, she couldn’t imagine. And if this place was any indication—

“Miss, where am I,” she asked.

“You are at the Sisters of Mercy hospital, sidebound to the Arcanum.”

So it was true, they’d really made it. She was in Durum.

“My pain,” she said, and flexed her elbow. “It’s gone too.”

“Pain?”

“I have chronic pain in my muscles,” she said. “I can’t feel it anymore.”

“If it’s chronic, then I’m afraid it will eventually return,” the nurse said. “Many of my colleagues thought you were severely malnourished when you arrived, and several wanted to start you on emergency supplementation straight away, but your guard convinced them out of it. I couldn’t quite believe him myself, but he was quite… insistent.”

Willow nodded against the headboard. “I’ve always been this way. Wasted.” The nurse nodded back.

“My hands. What about… my hands?”

“Well, the operation was a complete success. All of the missing skin, muscle, and tendon was successfully regrown and grafted onto your bones. Honestly, I’ve never seen such an injury before in my life. One of the surgeons said they’d once seen something similar on a dead body after fighting a manticore, but never on a living person. How did it happen, if I may ask?”

At this, Willow had to think hard, which elicited a minor headache. The edges of events were fuzzy and difficult to trace back, but she caught the start of the memory.

“The caravan was attacked in the night by a deathworm,” she said. “I think I… I hit it. With my cane.”

The nurse nodded, as if expecting her to continue.

“That’s it,” Willow said. “I don’t remember anything else. I hit it, and when I looked my hands were ruined. I think I passed out after that.”

A flicker of distrust flashed across the nurse’s face, but she quickly regained her neutral manner.

“Well, however it happened—”

“My cane,” Willow said, and turned to Leopold. “Did you get my cane?”

Leopold shook his head. “By the time I remembered it we were already in the warded tunnel. It’s probably still back there with the carcass.”

“Ugh,” Willow groaned, and pushed back into the pillows which so deliciously cradled her shoulders. “Fuck.”

“Language,” the nurse said. “I’m sure I can scrounge up something from the old supplies. Something you can use when you leave, until you get another one.”

“Thanks,” Willow said, but still smarted at the loss. Her father had that cane commissioned especially for her, and its loss stung. Especially since she was so far away from home, and all alone for the first time in her life.

“You better rest now,” the nurse said. “The broth will be here soon, and then later today we’ll take off the bandages. I expect you’ll be discharged tonight.”

“Great,” Willow said. Suddenly, she realized she had nowhere to stay in the city, and little chance of finding a place before night fell.

“Great.”

🜛

Bryan visited later that day. Leopold had stayed with her, true to his word, and Bryan surprised her by going down on one knee and gently touching her bandaged hand.

“Willow,” he said. “You saved us. Everyone in that caravan owes their life to you.”

“I wouldn’t call it saving so much,” Willow said, highly uncomfortable with the level of reverence Bryan was showing her. “I smacked that thing with a stick. And then I threw up, then passed out. Not so heroic.”

“Even so,” he said. “Whatever you need, anything you need, don’t hesitate to call on me. Because of you I was able to see my wife and son again. That is a debt not easily repaid.”

So he did have children. She was right all along.

“I don’t have any place to stay tonight,” she said. “And they’re not letting me out until it’ll be too late to find anything. You wouldn’t happen to know—”

“You’ll stay with us, at my house,” Bryan said.

“Oh no, that’s too much,” Willow said, embarrassed.

“I insist,” Bryan said, and his tone said that was the end of the matter. As grateful as he seemed, he also seemed to be the kind of person who was used to getting his way. She supposed that was a useful trait to have in a caravan guard.

“Alright, well,” she trailed off, and Bryan smiled and rose to leave.

“I have some other business to attend to, but we’ll have dinner ready for you to eat whenever you arrive. I’ll give good Leopold here the directions.”

“Wait,” Willow said, as a sudden thought sent adrenaline flooding through her system. “Wait.”

He turned back and regarded her, almost amusedly.

“I don’t have enough money for this, not nearly enough. I don’t know how much it cost, to get my hands back, but I saw them before I passed out. I don’t have nearly enough. Will they keep me here until I repay the debt?”

“No,” he said. “It’s already taken care of.”

“Taken care of?”

Bryan nodded. “Being a caravan guard, especially to young mages going to the city for the first time, has its benefits. I have quite a few favors to call in, and I was happy to call them in for you. Rest now, Willow, and arrive hungry. We’ll have a feast you’ll not soon forget.”