A barrage of hammering shook me out of my sleep. I jolted out of the bed, feeling the rush of adrenaline as I nearly tripped over the entangled blanket. My eyes struggled to adjust to the subdued lighting.

The sporadic banging from the front of the house grew louder, causing my bedroom windows to rattle with each powerful thud. It was almost as though a fist had been replaced with a boot. I opened my door to find Nik standing in the hallway, his eyes still heavy with sleep like mine.

“Who the fuck is that?” I said, keeping my voice hushed.

With a shrug, Nik moved closer to the front of the house.

“Wait.” I stretched out a hand, though it was just a silhouetted blur in the darkness. “Maybe whoever it is will leave.”

“Let me just see who it is, and I’ll send them on their way.” Nik yawned and walked toward the front door before I had another chance to object. He had always been too trusting, and tonight was probably going to be the night we would pay for it.

I snatched my sword from beside my dresser and followed behind him. “It has to be nearly midnight.” A swipe of my hand knocked the sleep from my eyes. “No one decent makes house calls after dusk. Just leave it alone.”

Nik halted in the dimly lit parlor, bathed in the silver glow of the moon seeping through the kitchen windows. The faint light stressed the weariness etched in the shadows beneath his eyes. “Would you rather them continue knocking and wake the whole village up?”

“Maybe then they’ll become someone else’s problem. Wait—” I turned an ear toward the door. “See? I told you they’d lea—”

Another round of banging. Muffled shouts absorbed into the oak front door.

Nik let out a heavy sigh and threw up his hands in defeat, closing the distance between him and the nuisance. I gripped my sword tighter as he unlatched the lock. Once he opened the door, the pounding stopped and moonlight flooded in.

“Please! I need help!” A young woman, no older than us, stood on our doorstep. Tendrils of curly, golden-brown hair escaped from beneath the shadow of her cloak's hood. My eyes darted to the telltale signs of dirt and blood marring the pristine white of her robe—her priestess's robe.

I hadn’t seen a Daluyan in almost five years. Hadn’t been in a temple in twice that long. Daluyans were notoriously seen as a passive, dutiful people, and yet, this one was well on her way to kicking down our door tonight.

A strange pressure filled my head as I stepped closer and used my sword to gesture toward her clothing. “What happened?” A demand, not a question. She whirled around and pointed to a waiting horse. Even in the dark shadows of the property, I saw something draped over it.

“She’s injured,” the woman said.

I jutted my chin toward the west. “Healer’s down the road.”

Her face tightened. “I tried them already. No one answered the door.” She spoke each word through her teeth with forced restraint.

My lips pulled to the side. “Probably for good rea—”

“Maqui.” Nik whacked the back of his hand against my chest. “Help me help them.” Also, a demand. Not a question. He shoved me away from the doorway and leapt over the two-stepped stoop, his bare feet landing in the sodden grass.

I dragged a hand down my face. Too trusting. Abandoning my sword—and against my better judgment—I hurried outside, following closely behind the priestess. Her horse spooked as we sprinted toward it, but with a couple of gentle strokes along its neck, it calmed enough for us to get the woman down.

As Nik carried her, I couldn’t help but notice the tacky sheen of blood covering her nightgown or listless response from her body. Damp, dark hair was sprawled every which way across her face. If not for the slight contraction of her ribcage, I would’ve thought she was dead already. The priestess kept her eyes on the woman, occasionally lifting them to glance at me. I avoided her gaze. Avoided the way her eyes echoed my thoughts.

There might not be any hope of saving her.

Still, we brought them inside.

Nik shifted to hold the woman’s weight within his arms while I cleared off the table in the parlor. I nodded behind the priestess. “Light some lamps.”

She quickly did as I asked.

After Nik lowered the bleeding girl onto the tabletop, the priestess nervously groomed the mess of strands from the woman’s face. I grabbed the quilt from the couch and rolled it up to slip underneath her head.

Even in the muted glow of the room, the evidence of the blood loss was significant. The lower half of the woman’s pale nightclothes bore a maroon stain, a vivid contrast to the rest of her attire. A jagged hole in the fabric just above her groin caught my eye. I peered closer and hooked my fingers into the hole, stretching the fabric until the threads ripped. Blood slowly pulsed from the wound.

I pressed my palm to the gash, hoping to cut off the flow, but even then, blood seeped between my fingers. Sparing a glance at the Daluyan woman, I asked, “Was she stabbed?”

She flinched. “I think—I don’t know. I found her this way.”

Puncture wounds were the worst. A person could survive having their arm cut off, but a stab wound to the gut? There was no way to tell how serious those kinds of injuries were. I turned toward Nik. “Grab some cloths from the shop, yeah? Any bandages you find, too.”

He nodded, then disappeared through the side door, returning shortly after with an armful of clean rags and bandages. Carefully, he dumped them onto the table beside the woman and replaced my hands with a balled-up cloth. A grimace pulled his lips tight as he applied enough pressure that should have helped staunch the blood loss, and yet…

He dropped each soaked rag onto the floor with a wet thud, quickly replacing it with a fresh one in an unyielding rhythm.

“This isn’t working,” the priestess said, her voice trembling with frustration.

I stood there with slick hands, staring at Nik as he approached the last couple of cloths. The priestess moved around to the end of the table and bent over her friend. She cupped the sides of the woman’s face as their foreheads touched, her lips moving with words that were only meant for them.

I tore my gaze away from the woman dying on my dining table and searched my thoughts for a solution. Kicking down the healer’s door myself was becoming much more appealing. I’d never mended much more than a broken arm, let alone a deep laceration. I repaired weapons, not people, and most of my repairs involved fire—

A spark resembling optimism flourished as a memory surged through me. Fire—that was how a life was spared after an arm had been severed.
“We need to burn the wound.”

The others snapped their heads in my direction as I briskly dried my hands against my pants and dashed towards the kitchen. With a thud, my knees hit the floor, and I grabbed a couple of logs from the nearby stack, swiftly placing them inside the hearth. Within moments, a vibrant fire crackled to life.

The metal poker hung on a hook beside me, and I snatched it down, causing the other tools to clang against the stone wall. I laid the poker’s tip into the flames.

“You think that will work?” Tearstains slashed through the dried, smudged blood on the priestess’s cheeks.

Nik reached for the last rag. “It has to.”

To the priestess, I said, “There’s a leather strap on the shelf over there. Grab it and put it between her teeth.” Then to both of them, “Be ready to hold her down.”

I heated the metal until it was hot, but not so hot that it glowed red. With the poker in hand, I returned to the table and stood opposite of Nik. Once he lifted the final saturated cloth, I looked at the wounded woman before me. Her face was relaxed, her eyes closed, her mind unconscious from the blood loss.

Once Nik and the priestess were in position, I pressed the searing poker against the wound. In an instant, the woman's azure eyes shot open, the leather strap slipping to the floor as her anguished cry drowned out the sizzle of her burning flesh. With an uncontrollable thrash, her body challenged Nik and the priestess's attempts at restraint, prompting me to swiftly remove the poker from her skin. She clawed at me in her frenzy.

“Fuck! Hold her down!”

The priestess flattened the woman’s shoulders while Nik held her lower legs against the table. She continued to flail in her desperation. Despite the woman’s incoherent cries, I pinned her thighs down with my arm and finished pressing the poker to the wound in short bursts. Soon, the bleeding stopped. So did her screams.

Her body went motionless on the table. Nik released his hold, then circled to hover an ear over her mouth. He waited for a moment.
“She’s still breathing,” he said, looking at the priestess. “Just unconscious again.”

The priestess blinked, light brown eyes glassy with tears. “And the bleeding’s stopped?”

I nodded. “Come see.”

She stepped around the table to get a better look. Charred marks covered the spot where the puncture had been, and the surrounding skin was an angry red from inflammation. The priestess reached as though to touch the skin, but stopped short. “Do you have any salves?” she asked Nik.

He brushed a clean part of his wrist across his forehead to clear the stray hairs from his eyes. “Think so. I’ll check the shop’s kit.” On his way back toward the side door, he paused at the kitchen’s wash basin. After a quick scrub of his hands, he plucked a small towel from a shelf and plunged it into the water as well. He wrung it out and returned to the priestess, handing it to her.

“For her face.”

The corner of her mouth tilted upward in a sad grin. “Thank you.”

He traded the same expression and gave a subtle nod before retreating inside the shop. She watched him for a moment, even after he was no longer in her line of sight.

“You said you’d found her like this,” I said, interrupting her gawking. “Found her where?”

The soft eyes the priestess had for Nik narrowed on me, lingering for just a moment before sliding to her friend. She deflated again at the sight below her. At the blood and grime making the woman’s face near-indistinguishable. At the mangled body of slack limbs sprawled on the table.
“She would’ve probably died, if it wasn’t for you,” she murmured.

Oh, I see. So we’re changing the subject. I pressed my lips together, silencing what I knew would be an unhelpful remark.

Maybe the priestess was an optimist.

Maybe she was an idiot.

But one thing was certain—death was still a possibility tonight.