The smell of boiling vinegar could not mask the sweet, heavy stench of arterial blood on hot pine boards.
Jon Hale kept both hands planted above Cael’s pelvic rim, his weight thrown forward across the knight’s hips until his wrists burned. Beneath his calloused palms, the pulse thudded like a tripped trip-hammer—fast, thin, and irregular, the rhythm of a heart pumping against empty vessels. Every time Cael inhaled, a shudder rippled through the knight’s chest, lifting the golden seal against the linen straps of his drawers. The metal was dull now, its bright filigree clouded by gray scale, the color of cold hearth brass.
“Don’t ease the pressure, Jon,” Elin said, her voice dropping into the quiet monotone she used when setting compound fractures. “If you let the rim slip even half an inch, the artery will draw back under the inguinal ligament. If it retracts into the belly, I cannot reach it with the bone needle, and he will be dead before the kettle boils off.”
“I have him,” Jon muttered through clenched teeth. His boots were slipping on the lime-dusted flagstones where spilled tallow had mixed with water. “Take the stitch, Elin.”
Elin worked with the mechanical precision of an apothecary who had seen forty summers of gangrene and reaper’s cuts. She did not wipe the sweat from her forehead, letting it run down the bridge of her nose to drip harmlessly onto her leather apron. In her right hand she held the curved needle, three inches of…
