“I already told you that you can’t keep showing up here,” Tresha whispered to the air, blinking back tears, struggling to keep her hands from shaking as she threw together a salve from what little remained of their supplies. “For once would you listen to me?”
Andren and Esyin had volunteered to help. They were behind her, trying to help staunch the blood pouring from too many wounds.
There were too many injuries, too many people on the brink of death, more being brought in even hours after the battle had ended. Even someone in Lenesse’s condition only warranted a junior healer; the resources of the healers were spread distressingly thin. Under normal conditions, both Andren and Esyin should definitely be getting examined, but they were still mobile, still functional—their wounds were lower priority.
Scrubbing tears from her face with her sleeve, Tresha turned back to Lenesse with an amount of salve that seemed too little, too insignificant in the face of this. But it would have to do. Somehow.
She shouldered Esyin aside. “Could you start cleaning the needles? I’m going to need them for stitches.”
Esyin’s face was blank, more lost than she had seen him since he was a kid.
She pointed Andren to the wound on her shoulder, taking over to start cleaning the gash in Lenesse’s stomach. “Esyin, that means to burn them and wipe them off with one of the clothes in the corner. Those are the clean ones.”
Lenesse’s skin was scorching to the touch. Fever had already set in, and so had infection. Angry red streaks surrounded the swellings, mud and dirt still caked around them.
Part of Tresha hissed at her that, as a healer, she had a duty to others as well. She couldn’t afford to struggle this hard for a lost cause, not when so many other lives were at stake. She was being selfish, simply because she knew this person and not others.
A much larger part blocked that out, thinking of all the times Lenesse should have been dead before this point. She would never forgive herself if she didn’t at least try.
