The mud in the ditch soaked through the knees of Fen’s homespun breeches with a cold, greasy clamp, but he barely noticed the chill. He had learned his trade in the crowded infirmaries of the timber camps along the Grey River, where a healer who hesitated over wet mud usually spent the next twenty minutes closing a dead man’s eyes.
He set his wooden tray on a flat piece of dry shale beside the recruit’s head.
“Easy, friend,” Fen said. His voice was soft, even, and quiet, pitched low enough that only the wounded soldier could hear it over the dry rasp of the wind. “My name is Fen. I am going to take these brambles off your wrists. Keep your head on the grass and breathe through your teeth.”
Soldier Joss turned his sweat-streaked face toward him. The boy’s eyes were bloodshot and glazed with pain, his pupils dilated into wide black rings. “It’s inside my fingers,” Joss muttered, his teeth chattering against each other. “The wood... it feels like it’s growing into my marrow.”
“It is not growing into your marrow,” Fen said, his fingers already working with practiced, delicate speed. “It is a surface puncture with sympathetic vascular swelling. Cold water and clean linen will have the heat out of it before sundown.”
