Contributing my humble hand to the noble investiture of procedurally ungripweeding the forest hills was an honest, rewarding, and well-paying travail. Even better, I still had all my legs and my tail too, for whatever that was worth. I’d recovered a modicum of my dignity. And the apothecary felt such a comfortable place, I’d volunteered to hop down and grab some anodyne lozenges after Grove’s small elemancy accident. Sterling herself was… nice enough. Nice enough.

  On the third gripweed delivery, a heavily loaded handcart was waiting just behind the door. Boxes and bottles stacked heartily. Cacophonous rummaging from the back room. “Doing a home visit for a behemoth?” I asked as I lumped my full, still-squirming kit bag onto the counter.

  “One moment!” came the reply. I waited. Arm on the counter. Poked the bag. It poked back. The assistant emerged, arms full, hauling it to the handcart and very meticulously sorting it all onto the stack.

  “If it’s easier, I can just take the usual fifteen square. Saves you the trouble.”

  An anxious face looked back at me. “Oh, no, no, I’ll weigh it on our scales. It’s respectful to your work.”

  “I’m cool with whatever.” I waved a hand easily. That was what cool people did, right? “I know what my work is worth.”

  When he finished, he scurried over, ushered my delivery into the back, then returned and dropped an extra two squares onto the fifteen. “Thank you for the help as always.”

  “No worries, Robin,” I said, and it was only when he squeaked like he’d got snapped by a rat trap that I realised my slip.

  “Who told you that?!”

  Honesty, honesty… “When I was in here during the week getting lozenges for a friend, Sterling mentioned you. Spoke very highly of you.”

  Golden eyes pierced me from under his white cloak hood. “...What did she say? Tell me everything.” He said it like a threat and I took it seriously.

  I stood a little straighter, tried to shake off the slip. Forced my voice down to a cooler octave than the one it normally found a home in. “So she told me how grateful she was for the gripweed, how it was such a blasted nightmare to obtain, and how she’d heard a couple decent adventurers had been devoured by it in the last year alone. Stuff I already knew, naturally, but I appreciated it anyway. Followed it by saying she’d found a respect for the Foresters over the last year after you started working here. How she was initially resistant to take you on, but you’ve really helped bring her around. Said you’ve been a remarkably conscientious worker and she trusts the place will be in safe hands when she takes her retirement. And actually, she didn’t say ‘Foresters’; she said ‘you people’ in a honey-coated tone, tilting her head at me, but I think I inferred it right. I imagine she’s said it the same way to you once or twice.”

  “Oh. Right. Okay.” The assistant wrung the fingers of one hand with the fist of the other. “I’m not sure about that.”

  “I think that was all.”

  “I don’t like how openly she says things sometimes.”

  “If it helps,” I said in the lightest tone, “everything she said about you was in only the best of terms. I didn’t know you felt that way. Even about your name?” He nodded. “Shame, Robin’s a nice name. Mine’s Morrigan. So we’re on equal terms now.”

  He pulled a corner of his hood back, revealing an ear. Same tone of skin on that too, but it sure wasn’t Clearlander. “Did you say Morgan?”

  I had an answer. Then I had a better one. “Yeah, Morgan.”

  “Okay. Cool. Uh… Oh!” He cursed and scampered off to the back room again. “I forgot! I need to get this done before I close up!”

  The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

  “Want a hand? What are you even doing?”

  He returned with a lidded wicker hamper. “Put this on the cart somewhere, please. Safely.”

  I found a hook and hung it, then headed back. My curiosity got the better of me and I rounded the counter, sticking my head into the room beyond. An entire library of medicine hid through the doorway, a maze of shelving and standing units and storage baskets filled with cups and jugs and vials, and a row of surfaces at the back adorned with plant matter, shells, and what could be bones, all in various states of dissection. A huge blackboard with a cryptic menu of symbols and tally strikes. Robin reached up, brushing some marks off, taking great care over their precise erasure. “Is that for stock-keeping?” I asked.

  He jumped as he turned. “In a way. Please don’t mention this to anyone.”

  “I… didn’t know it was a secret.”

  “Oh, spirits. I shouldn’t have said that then.” I let him continue what he was doing, eyes meandering around the spectacle of the treasure room back here. “Please don’t say anything.”

  “To who?”

  “Anyone. At least not yet.”

  “About what? I don’t even know what you’re doing.”

  If anything, he looked a little smaller under the white coat. “I, uh… I can’t keep walking past those tents in Franzi’s Square without doing something,” he said solemnly.

  “What’s going on in Franzi’s Square?” I asked and then added: “What is Franzi’s Square?”

  “That’s where they’ve been putting the tents.”

  I was quickly running out of spare question marks. “Which tents?”

  “Where they’re putting all those they sent down the Stridden, back from the war.”

  *

  I didn’t ask more while he finished his work. I couldn’t. Couldn’t find any words amid the sheer blazing weight of the impact. Harvestmoon was barely over and already they were sending bodies back. No. Wait. Robin was piling up medicines to take to them. Not bodies. They were sending people back. I bit the inside of my cheek, dreading thinking what sort of state they’d be in. Recognisable? Doubtful. Wrapped in bandages? Half of the parts missing and the other half… I bit harder and a metallic tang filled my mouth. Finally.

  “I didn’t see any nurses yet,” came Robin’s voice, “but I’m going to leave the cart in the tents on my way home. Now she’s old, Sterling has me manage the stocks, so she won’t ever know – and, and I think she’d be in favour of it regardless. So please don’t say anything about any of this.”

  “Hold on. Why do you have to be so sneaky about this anyway?”

  “Giving them medicines?” He blinked. “Who do you think is paying for the treatments?”

  My mind flashed to Oldfield, the way he’d dragged anyone upright onwards, and the way he’d left the injured to the soil. The same way the Foresters sang the glories and sagas of the war heroes, and the way the war-wounded hobbled unmentioned and unregarded around the towns. Living ghosts, they were. The same way I’d spread word of my brother getting injured and taken away by the raiders on Dreadfall at the end of the last war, and not a soul had even suggested gathering a search party. And how my parents in turn had launched their own search party to the depths of our taverns’ heartiest grog barrels and not returned since. “No one,” I mumbled. “They left the injured to the fucking soil. That’s exactly what we do.”

  “I know,” Robin said softly. He looked a little up at me, and in the light of the store room, I could see all of his face for the first time. His skin a gentle aqua green, mottled a little, a silvery patch around one eye – earnest eyes that sparkled with gold, like the promise of a better life. His white cowl still over his head, yet under it a full face that was… handsome, in his own way.

  “Then I wanna tell you you’re safe by me, and I think you’re right to do what you’re doing,” I said, still aching from the shock, inside cheek still bleeding. “We can’t leave them to their fate. Not to the soil.”

  “So I’m going to spend tomorrow there. I don’t know what I can do but it’s more than nothing.”

  “I’m coming with you,” my mouth replied before my mind caught up, but from how bright Robin’s face glowed, I couldn’t change it now without breaking his heart. My brother was still in my thoughts but now it was real, now it was now. Not history. Now it was Omen in those tents – or not him: he’d be the only one guaranteed safety. But it was Sunder, or the Hammersmith daughter, or the other girl I’d shared the wagon with. And everyone else on the rest of the wagon trains on every day of the March to Glory week. Now it was everyone of my generation I’d seen in the markets, in the town hall assemblies, and gone on gathering trips with. Everyone I’d shared the mandatory training classes with – or more accurately, everyone I’d tried to shirk from the mandatory training classes with.

  It could be any Foresters, it could be any Clearlanders lunatic enough to sign on voluntarily, but in my mind, everyone I knew was in those tents. Vick’s warning to take at least one day off echoed in my head, but it was more of a suggestion, really, wasn’t it? Anyone would say this was far more important than taking a day off.

  “Are you sure?” he asked.

  “I couldn’t stand myself if I didn’t.”