The Last Changeling (14 page)

SNAIL MANAGES SOMEHOW

S
nail didn't see the first arrow or the second, and the first sign she had that the whole evening had changed irrevocably was when she stumbled over a dead Seelie soldier. He was not much older than Aspen, for he hadn't a hint of a beard or the faintest bit of hair on his upper lip. She still didn't understand what was happening until moments later when another soldier fell dead at her feet. Then the screaming began.

Her first thought was of Aspen, then of baby Og, and she turned to run for the wagon. The crowd swept her up and she knew immediately that she wouldn't make it.

The woods!
she thought, but they looked impossibly far away.
Well, if I can't run . . .
She drew her knife and looked for someone to fight.

There was no one, just panic and screaming and arrows appearing from the darkness. A girl no older than she stumbled and hit the ground with the sound of a sack of grain being slammed into the dirt. An arrow stuck out of her calf like a serving fork in a solstice hen. Suddenly, Snail felt all doubt fall away.

She threw herself next to the fallen girl, guarding her from the fleeing crowd with her body. The girl was screaming in pain, but the sound was lost among the panicked shouts of the crowd.

However, dealing with screaming women was the
first
thing you learned as a midwife's apprentice.

Snail turned the girl over onto her back, grabbing her leg, and in almost the same motion, knelt on the leg, holding it firm. Unable to sit up, the girl slapped at Snail ineffectually till Snail hissed at her, “Hold still!”

The arrow had gone through the meat of the calf; the bone looked untouched. She slit the girl's leggings, then tore the fabric off in strips.

I'll need those in a moment.

The tip of the arrow was poking out the other side of the girl's leg, but hadn't broken the skin yet. Snail thought briefly about warning the girl what was going to happen next, but didn't think that would help anything.

Grabbing the feathered end of the arrow, she shoved it harshly further into the calf so that the barbed tip sliced through the skin on the far side, and new blood gushed from the wound. She felt the girl struggle, but Snail had her leg secured.

And the leg is all that matters right now.

Snail gave little thought to what she must do, and just did it. Gone was the midwife's creed: Anticipate, alleviate, and then await. She'd no time for any of that. Do and do and do was her creed now, and worry later about what she'd done or if she'd done enough.

She grabbed the arrow below the tip, careful not to cut herself—hoping it hadn't been dipped in poison—and snapped the tip off. Then she pulled the whole thing back out the way it had gone in, swiftly and smoothly, ignoring the foul names the girl was calling her.

“I'm a trained doctor,” she fibbed, but it was like a rag in the girl's mouth, stoppering her insults for the moment.

Grabbing the strips of cloth she'd cut from the leggings, Snail wadded each into the wide punctures in the girl's leg, then tied them tight in place with the rest. Only then did she release her.

The girl glared at her, but her leg was too swollen and bruised for her to move.

“Someone will help you up after a bit,” Snail told her. “But at least you are losing no more blood. That's what could have killed you.”

And still might
, she thought. When women died giving birth it was often due simply to the blood loss. It was one of the first lessons Mistress Softhands had taught. But infection was just as deadly. And she had no herbs to help the girl with that.

A big man in a farmer's tunic was stumbling through the crowd, his nose askew and a brutal gash across the top of his thigh. Blood was waterfalling down his leg. She wasn't sure how he was able to walk with that wound but knew he wouldn't be doing it for much longer—or ever again—if it didn't get tended to soon.

She held up her arms to stop him, but he shook his head and pointed toward the trees. She nodded and followed behind him as he bulled his way through the hordes of people.

The amount of blood seemed to work as a charm, parting the crowd. The farmer collapsed just before the treeline, but there were suddenly hands there to drag him into cover.

Snail cut his pants away from the wound and went to work. At least the farmer didn't curse her, only grunted once or twice. Though like the girl, he gave Snail no thanks for her help. But Snail had been enough times in a birth chamber to know that thanks came only after fear and exhaustion had time to walk out of the room, after the patient was assured of life.

More wounded arrived, some stumbling on their own, some carried. They all came to Snail as if pulled there magically. She examined their wounds, treated those that she could. The others she left to the compassion of the fey gods.

The fey gods, as she knew well, were not always kind.

At one point a woman pressed a needle and thread into her hand, and someone else dried the sweat from her forehead. She realized she had helpers—men who found supplies at her asking, women who dealt with the smaller hurts. She sewed and cut and sweated and at some point she noticed that her own fingers bled from a hundred pin-sticks.

Her shoulders felt like boulders; her back had a permanent ache that ran from one side to the other. But she ignored her own pain as she ignored those wounded who weren't going to die without help, and went back to work. The time seemed to concentrate down to each wound.

After she'd worked on a dozen, two dozen, five dozen . . . maybe even a hundred patients—she'd lost count long ago—the sound of clashing blades and crashing magicks grew dangerously close to her wooded spot. But she had a vein pinched between her fingers, and if she looked away before she closed it, the mother of four lying before her would die in front of her children.

That's
not
going to happen!
she promised herself as she stitched the vein and bandaged the wound and no one stuck a sword through her.

Suddenly, there were no more wounded. The woods were dark and relatively quiet, the sounds of war and battle reduced to the whimpering and crying of aftermath.

Either all the Unseelie folk were dead—which was highly unlikely—or they were regrouping elsewhere. Snail stood creakily and looked out into the field where battle had interrupted the play. Bodies were scattered over the trampled grass, most clearly dead, some maybe just dying.

She'd come back and tend them later, but first she had to get to the wagon. She was worried about Aspen. She was worried about Huldra and Og.

The stage was still open to the field, and the curtains—while still hanging—were frayed and a bit scorched. She forced her stiff legs to clamber up onto the stage and checked the twins' room first, where Aspen stayed. There was no one in there except the strange, animated rug.

Instead of showing its teeth, the rug moaned piteously, obviously frightened by the thunderous noises that had only so recently ceased. The dog boy at the castle had once told her how he hated thunder because all his hounds would try to hide underneath him.

Tentatively, she put out her hand.

“There, there,” she said as one would with a hound or a horse. “There, there.” The bowser wrapped itself around her legs. It was soft and somewhat cuddly.

“There, there,” she said a third time, keeping her voice low and soothing, not wanting the fey creature to even think about biting.

As if the third time was the charm, the bowser gave a little shudder, a soft sigh, then uncurled itself and lay back down on the floor. She reached over to give it a quick pat and felt it sigh under her touch.

Giving the bowser one last pat, one last
There, there
, Snail went back out onto stage. Crossing it quickly she burst into Odds's office without knocking. It, too, was empty. Once onstage again, she looked out onto the battlefield, trying to make out individuals among the bodies, fearful she would see someone she knew.

There was something over to the right, hard to make out at first in the gloaming. Something large, something lying on the ground, something . . .

She felt her heart skip. Her eyes filled with tears.

“Huldra!” she breathed the name, and ran to the edge of the stage, leapt off.

It was only when she was halfway there that she realized she hadn't seen baby Og in the wagon either.

And this was no place for a baby,
any
baby. Certainly not for a troll child she'd just delivered days earlier.

The thought of her newborn charge out here on a battlefield hurried Snail along, and she quickly came in sight of Huldra's feet, then legs, then body, then—thankfully—her head, which was turned away, looking over the misty mountains.

Huldra lay on her stomach, baby Og strapped to her back, where he snored noisily each time he removed his gigantic thumb from his gigantic mouth.

“Huldra!” Snail called aloud. “Can you get up?” The ground around the troll was a bog, wet and rank. Snail put a hand down into the quagmire, brought it to her nose, sniffed blood not mud.

“Alas,” Dagmarra said, stepping around from the other side of the hill that was Huldra's head, “she cannot. The wound is in her heart. She waters the ground with her blood.”

Snail suddenly noticed that Dagmarra was weeping silently, great globules of tears tracing down her cheeks into her beard.

“She isn't . . .” Snail hesitated before saying more.

“Not dead,” Dagmarra said. “At any rate, not yet. But I doubt even the professor can save her.”

Nor,
Snail thought miserably,
can we turn her over so I can see if the wound can be staunched.
But, by the size of the blood bog around the troll, Snail knew that such an endeavor would only hurt Huldra, not save her. And Mistress Softhands always said that sometimes the greatest kindness was to let the patient go.

“No!” Snail said, not sure if she was agreeing or disagreeing with Dagmarra. “The rest?” she asked fearfully.

“They were fine last I saw. Your prince . . .” Dagmarra paused and looked thoughtful for a moment. “He fought well.”

He's not
my
prince,
she thought, but didn't say it. Nothing mattered at this moment but Huldra. And Og.

She prepared her most sensible midwife-trained voice. She could still hear Mistress Softhands saying, “No hysterics in the birthing room. And that is especially true for the midwives! No matter what happens, you maintain calm.”

“Why can't the professor save her?” Snail asked.

Dagmarra sniffled. “She took too many arrows to the belly and heart, and some, I fear, may have been tipped with poison.”

Snail shook her head. “I've never heard of the Unseelie
archers
using poison,” she said, forgetting that just earlier that had been a worry to her. “It would be considered . . .” She thought hard to find the right phrase. Finally ended with “unsporting.”

“War isn't sport,” Dagmarra said.

“It is to the Border Lords. Could the Seelie soldiers . . .”

“Never, it's considered unhealthy.”

“But . . .” And then Snail remembered the poison on Jack Daw's dagger, the dagger that he'd put in the ogre dungeon master's back, the one she'd used by accident on the carnivorous merman.

“If there's poison, I know who might have had a hand in this,” Snail said. “But if Huldra is truly dying, we have to take Og from her in case she turns over on him.” She doubted Huldra had any such strength left, though there were plenty of stories of trolls doing amazing feats when dying.

“I doubt she has the power left to turn, poor mite,” Dagmarra said, stating Snail's thoughts aloud, just as the troll started to shudder.

Huldra groaned and said in a thunderous sigh, “Remember . . . promise me . . .”

Dagmarra hastened back to her head and Snail could hear Dagmarra saying, “I'll honor what I promised, my dear friend. Dinna fash, dinna fash yerself. He will be told, he will give you all honor, he will be
my
boy as well as yours.”

There was another loud sigh, like a great wind puzzling through a forest. And with a final shudder, Huldra was still.

Snail untied Og from his mother's back, wrapping him securely in the plaid diaper. She knew what Dagmarra must have promised. But wondered how a dwarf could possibly raise a baby troll.

She was rocking Og in her arms and still thinking this when Dagmarra came back around Huldra's mountain of a body, and held out her hands for the baby.

“Are you sure?” Snail said.

“I'm stronger than I look,” Dagmarra said. “And a promise to a friend makes me stronger still.”

Snail handed Og to her, and Dagmarra didn't even flinch when the heavy child was in her arms. She looked down at the baby, who was still asleep. “Mama Two loves you,” she said. “Your uncles will love you, as well.”