Changing the World: All-New Tales of Valdemar

Shia unwrapped the hasty field bandages and held Lieutenant Fellan’s arm tightly, trying to keep from jarring his newly realigned shoulder as she attempted to match up the shattered bones of his forearm. “You seem to have had the worst of it of all the group,” she murmured. He had already bitten his lip to bleeding on the ride back to the town, and her liquor-laced herbal concoction for pain had barely started to take the edge off.

“Don’t know how they do it,” he muttered hazily. “They dance around the town when there’s traders, then slink off into nowhere. Traders’re coming ’round less, too. If’n we can’t stop ’em, it’ll be a thin winter. Cap’n Dara’s good, but she’s only one.” He grunted as Shia made a last shift of his wrist, then settled to a drugged sleep as the herbs deepened their effects. Letting his arm rest on the splint on the low table beside them, Shia closed her hands lightly over the break, trying to sense if anything still was out of place beneath the skin. Her fingers tingled slightly, feeling the heat of injury spreading up from his flesh, and she held her hand there for a longer moment, as though she could force the angry heat to subside and the bone to knit together.

Binding the lieutenant’s arm securely to the slats of her splint, Shia glanced over to where she could see the captain standing and talking to Calli and one of the other injured guardsman. Lord Corus had sent his approval for Dara’s field promotion to captain as soon as he had learned of the first attack, but as they had suspected, Torhold had not been able to spare any militia to pursue the bandits. Even Torhold’s Healer had only given a half-day’s visit to check on Breyburn’s injured. He had come a day or two after the first attack, glanced at the dead who were about to be buried, briefly examined those who were not yet back to their activities, then returned to Torhold, saying only, “The girl’s mother must have had good skills to teach her that well, for all that no one knew where she’d come from.”

Accepting that they were on their own, the townsfolk had resolutely taken matters into their own hands. Dara had taken any and all volunteers from the townsfolk or the shepherd and small farm families outside the town, training up some to join the town guard, others to simply learn how to stay alive if the bandits came back into the town. And come back they had, though none of their raids had the impact of the first. Rather, they picked away at the town and the trader caravans, making trade sporadic and shattering the cycles of the town’s summer. The season was half over, but it felt as though it had barely begun, for few of the townsfolk had been able to work as they usually did.

Captain Dara held out her arm to Shia, wincing just the slightest bit as she dabbed the sharp cleansing ointment over the edges of the wound. “It’s been months now, and we can’t find the bastard,” she said. “That’s what bothers me. He runs aground as soon as we get close. We’ve picked off his band and found most of his hidey- holes, enough that I don’t think he’ll be back soon, but he keeps slinking off. Bad enough that they’ve been coming back all summer, but if he has time now to go back to wherever he came from and find more men, he’ll be back as soon as the rains are done next spring.”

Shia sighed as she put down the cleansing pad and reached for her bowl. “Lieutenant Fellan is right. You’re only one. You need to take more care for yourself until Lord Corus can approve your new militia. No one else has the training, experience, or personality to lead the guard. Torhold can’t spare anyone now, any more than they could when Captain Nolan was killed in the first raid.”

“My young men—and the two girls—are doing well enough, especially since Fellan’s arm healed up so quick and he was able to help with the training again. They did well enough to take on an ex- merc bandit who thought to control the trade routes down from the quarry and the tin mines. We’ve stopped him for this year, at least.” Despite her frustration, the new captain’s satisfaction with her troop was palpable.

Holding the edges of the wound together, Shia applied her poultice and started wrapping bandages, her fingers tracing along the length of the wound beneath the fabric, feeling the heat from the angry gash. An absent part of her attention drifted down to the injured flesh, almost willing the healing to happen. She didn’t notice the startled way the captain’s eyes flicked up to her, so absorbed was she in considering the importance of Captain Dara’s success or failure. If they had indeed done enough damage to the surprisingly well-organized bandits to keep them from attacking for the last moon of the summer, the harvest and preparations for winter and the spring rains could go back to normal. Or normal enough to make do.