Crimson Veil

Chapter Three — First Blood

Eve’s pov

I heard the attack before I understood what I was hearing.

It started as something distant — a sound that didn't belong to the stronghold's usual rhythms, sharp and irregular where everything here was measured and deliberate. I was in the ward with Theron, preparing the evening supply inventory, when the first bell sounded. Not the watch bell. Something faster, more urgent, with the quality of a sound that meant move.

Theron was already reaching for his field kit before the second strike. "Skirmish alert," he said, with the flat calm of someone who had heard this bell many times before. "Near the eastern perimeter. They'll bring casualties within the quarter hour." He looked at me. "Can you handle field intake?"

"Yes," I said, because I had trained for this.

I had not trained for this.

~ ~ ~

They came in waves.

The first group arrived in ones and twos — walking wounded, men pressing cloth to cuts and holding splinted limbs against their chests with the careful stillness of people trying not to jostle what was already broken. I moved through them with my kit, triaging by severity the way Theron had taught me, keeping my hands steady and my voice even and my gift locked down hard behind everything I had.

It was the second group that was different.

They came through the ward doors in a cluster, moving fast, and I realized within seconds that this was not the orderly aftermath of a training accident. These were soldiers who had been in a real fight. The injuries had a different character — less predictable, more violent, carrying the particular kind of damage that came from another person trying to cause it.

I was working on a deep gash along a soldier's thigh — my hands inside the wound, trying to assess whether the bleeding was arterial — when the commotion happened near the door.

I didn't look up immediately. I couldn't.

But I heard it. The particular silence that fell, the way the ambient noise of the ward dropped several degrees in the space of a breath.

"Keep pressure here," I told the soldier under my hands, pressing his own palm against the cloth I'd packed into the wound. "Don't move."

I turned.

Adam Voss had come through the ward door with three of his men and a fourth over his shoulder.

He was carrying a soldier twice the size of an average man the way someone else might carry a coat. The man over his shoulder was unconscious, bleeding from a wound at his side that had soaked through his uniform in a dark spreading stain. Adam crossed the ward toward the nearest open bed with the same economical stride I had come to associate with him — no wasted movement, no drama, just direction and forward motion.

He laid the man down with a care that was somehow startling given the scale of everything else about him. Set him down like something that mattered.

Then he straightened and looked at me.

There was blood on his hands. Some of it, I registered with a cold feeling in my stomach, was probably his — there was a cut along his forearm that had been bleeding long enough to dry at the edges, and the way he held his left side, just slightly, told me he'd taken something to the ribs.

He didn't mention any of it.

"Kael," he said, indicating the man he'd just laid down. "Side wound. He went down hard."

"I see it." I was already moving to the bed, pulling the uniform away from the injury with practiced hands. "How long ago?"

"Forty minutes, maybe."

"Why didn't you bring him sooner?"

"We were still in the field."

I didn't answer that. There was no point — what was done was done, and Kael was my patient now. I assessed the wound quickly, efficiently, running through everything Theron had taught me and everything the Academy had given me before that. It was serious but survivable if I worked fast.

"I need the ward clear of anyone who isn't being treated," I said, without looking up. "That includes you."

A pause. I felt the quality of it — the specific texture of someone deciding whether to comply with a direct instruction they hadn't expected to receive.

"Clear the ward," Adam said, behind me.

The room shifted. Footsteps, the quiet sounds of soldiers moving toward the door.

I worked.

~ ~ ~

Kael's wound took forty minutes to fully address. By the time I tied the last suture and set the proper dressing, my hands ached and there was blood I didn't want to identify on my forearms. I stepped back, assessed his color, his breathing, the quality of his pulse.

He would live.

I exhaled slowly and turned around.

The ward was quieter now. Theron and the other healers had their own patients occupied. Near the far wall, Adam stood with Caine — that was the smaller man's name, I had learned by now — speaking in a low voice. He had allowed one of the junior healers to bandage the cut on his forearm, but only the forearm. The way he was still holding his left side told me the ribs hadn't been addressed.

I crossed the ward toward him.

He saw me coming and the conversation with Caine paused.

"Your ribs," I said.

"Bruised."

"You can't diagnose your own ribs."

Something moved in his expression — not quite amusement, but something in that neighborhood. "I've had bruised ribs before."

"Then you know they need to be checked properly." I indicated the nearest empty bed with a tilt of my head. "Sit."

Another pause. Caine, I noticed peripherally, had become extremely interested in something across the room.

Adam sat.

I worked quickly and clinically, the way I always did — keeping the professional distance that made things easier for everyone. I pressed carefully along his left side, assessing for the sharp intake of breath or the subtle muscle tension that would tell me something was genuinely broken rather than merely damaged. He stayed very still throughout, which was either discipline or stubbornness and possibly both.

"Two cracked," I said. "Nothing fully broken. You'll need to take it easier for—"

"No," he said.

I looked up. He was watching me with those dark, level eyes.

"You'll re-injure them," I said.

"Probably." He said it with the same flat practicality he brought to everything, as though the matter were already closed and I simply hadn't received the message yet.

I held his gaze for a moment. He held mine back without difficulty.

"Fine," I said. "Then you'll be back in here and it will take twice as long to heal and I'll tell you the same thing again." I began wrapping the binding around his ribs with efficient hands. "And you'll say no again, and we'll repeat this until your body decides the argument for you."

"Probably," he said again.

He was impossible. I tied off the binding and stepped back.

And then it happened.

I reached across him for the medical tape on the supply tray — a standard motion, the kind I'd made a hundred times that afternoon — and my hand brushed his arm.

I felt it the way I always felt it. That rush of contact, the automatic opening, the flood of someone else's experience into the channels that were supposed to be mine.

But this was not what I expected.

There was physical pain, yes — I felt the ribs, the arm, all of it, sharper than even I had guessed — but that wasn't what stopped me. What stopped me was the rest of it. The emotional register underneath the physical, the part that was supposed to be buried beneath all that stillness and economy and careful blankness.

Something old. Something that had been sitting in the dark for a long time and had learned to be very quiet about it.

Grief, maybe. Or the particular shape of loneliness that came from being someone that everyone around you feared too much to actually know.

I pulled my hand back.

He was looking at me.

I didn't know what showed on my face. I tried very hard to keep it still, but I had been caught off guard and my control had slipped and I could feel that it had slipped.

"Don't," he said.

One word. Quiet, final, the kind of word that had a wall behind it.

I straightened. Set the medical tape down. "I'm finished," I said, and kept my voice even. "You should rest if you can."

He didn't answer.

I walked back to the center of the ward without looking back, and spent the rest of the shift telling myself that the shaking in my hands was just the aftermath of a long and difficult evening.

It was not entirely convincing.