Mouse held Sir Hugo’s head cradled in her lap as the wagon bounced over the road toward the hilltop keep.

  “Please do not die,” she whispered through a torrent of tears that flowed quietly down her cheeks. She looked down at the man who lay across her lap, matted swirls of brown hair clinging to his pale, damp face.

  “Please,” she begged in a voice soft and desperate, “please do not die.”

  But the knight could not hear her; he was somewhere else, a place no one could reach him, a place where life and death joined hands, each weighing their claim to his fragile existence.

  The cab tilted from side to side as the wagon climbed the narrow winding streets of Hallovie, the guardsman kneeling beside Sir Hugo cursing under his breath as he pressed a wad of cloth into open gash beneath the man’s arm.

  “Why won’t you stop bleeding, you bastard?” he murmured in anguished frustration as the knight, on the fringes of consciousness drew short, shallow breaths.

  Mouse bit her lip as tears continued to roll down her cheeks. Her skirts, painted with the knight’s blood, clung wetly to her legs.

  What they had left behind them on the road just east of Hallovie, Mouse could not say.

  She had sprung from the carriage and run to the knight the very moment he had fallen, lifting his head in her arms and pressing the fabric of her skirts into his wound to try and stop the bleeding. His visor was raised, though Mouse did not remember lifting it, and he had looked up at her, an expression of surprise in his wide brown eyes, as though he himself had no idea how he had ended up in the middle of the road, lying in a puddle of crushed mallows and his own blood.

  Mouse had no notion of any danger to herself, even as the guardsmen fell upon Sir Hugo’s assailants. And in truth, it did not occur to her that she might fear for anything apart from the man’s life, the man whose light brown eyes searched hers for answers, even if he could not form the words to ask.

  But that was before the pain had set in, and the shock. The amount of blood pouring from Sir Hugo’s side was monstrous, and if he was not tended to by a surgeon at once, he would die. But this was not the battlefield, and there was no surgeon among them, not even a barber.

  Mouse had looked up in desperation, the scuffle of feet and clash of steel around her drowning out her cries for help.

  She kept her arms wrapped around the knight, her fingers laced together beneath his arm as she held the balled up linen of her skirts into the place the where spear had punctured his flesh. She closed her eyes and prayed for strength, the muscles in her back squeezing together tightly the way they did every time she drew the bow.

  Finally, after what had felt like an eternity but had probably been no more than a minute or two at most, Cedric had come with another of the guard and lifted Sir Hugo into a wagon, whereupon they turned at once for Hallovie.

  A rider was sent ahead, Cedric told them, to warn of their arrival and have the surgeon prepare to receive the man.

  No sooner had they arrived at the step of the keep then the guardsman jumped from the wagon and, taking Sir Hugo beneath the arms, conveyed him, with the help of the coachman, into an antechamber near the front of the hall where the surgeon awaited them.

  The antechamber was dark, too dark for a surgery. The only light, apart from a pair of braziers and a row of candles, came from an east-facing window and the fire that had been lit in the hearth.

  The surgeon, a small, balding man with thoughtful features and smooth if slightly drooping skin, looked the knight over, no doubt already estimating his chances of survival.

  “Keep the pressure,” he said, “but remove the plate.”

  Mouse hurried to help in the removal of the knight's bevor and pauldron, her fingers trembling as she undid the leather stays that held his breastplate in place.

  “No mail?" the surgeon asked, eyeing the injured man as he was eased onto the table.

  The guardsman shook his head.

  “We saw no need for it,” he said, grunting with effort as he lifted the knight's legs onto the table, “coming on the highway from Pothes Mar as we were.”

  The surgeon rubbed his chin, motioning for the apprentice to cut away the gambeson.

  Mouse watched as the young man with sharp features and dark, cropped hair, worked his blade quickly through the thick layers of fabric around the knight’s shoulder before fetching a bottle of wine from the cabinet.

  “Wine comes later,” the surgeon said as he rolled up his sleeves, “after the wound has been closed." He licked his lips and carefully began to peel away the blood-soaked dressing beneath the knight's arm. "Nothing inside, I take it,” he said to the guardsman, who shook his head in reply.

  Sir Hugo’s chest rose and fell quickly as he sucked in shallow gasps of air.

  “More light,” the surgeon ordered, and the apprentice at once brought a candle.

  “Following an assessment of the wounded region,” the surgeon said instructively to the apprentice, "I shall now apply a ligature.”

  “A ligature?” echoed the apprentice. “You will not cauterize the wound? Renau usually—”

  Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  “Renau is a barber,” the surgeon sneered, “and not a very good one at that.” He glanced up at Sir Hugo’s pale face before squinting back at the wound. “More light,” he said, licking his lips as he stuck his fingers into the gash beneath the knight’s arm.

  The knight thrashed, a cry of pain bursting from his lips.

  “Hold him!” the surgeon ordered the guardsman. “Unless you’d rather he die here and now from loss of blood.” The guardsman heeded him, pinning down Sir Hugo's right shoulder while the coachman held his legs.

  “I’ve stopped the artery with a thumb,” the surgeon said, raising his voice over the knight’s fretful moans. “Slows the bleeding until it’s been tied. In this case, we’ve no time for vinegar or other such nonsense; we’ll go directly to the ligature. Catgut,” he said, holding out a palm as he awaited a length of sinew.

  Mouse watched the surgeon’s long, delicate fingers disappear into the gash in Sir Hugo’s side as the knight groaned and gurgled in agony. She felt her stomach roil and pressed an arm over her mouth against the bile rising in her throat.

  The linens that had been placed beneath the knight’s left shoulder were already soaked through with blood, the excess of which dripped steadily from the corner of the fabric onto the floor of the antechamber.

  “Hold him fast, gentlemen,” the surgeon warned as the knight’s body writhed beneath him.

  Mouse kept her arm pressed over her mouth, the smell of blood thick in her nostrils.

  “Give us a hand, then,” the guardsman called to her, nodding his head toward the table. Mouse quickly obeyed, crossing the room and putting all her weight onto the knight, even as she felt his hand seize her, his fingers digging into her arm.

  Once the ligature had been tied, the surgeon stood back, frowning.

  “A cautery indeed,” he said with a sigh, wiping his bloodied hands on his surcoat and sending the young apprentice to fetch the splinter from the hearth.

  The tip of the splinter glowed red as the surgeon bent over his patient. “This is very like to be worst part,” he said to the guardsman before he began. “Your friend here is certain to feel it, and I daresay he won’t care much for the sensation.” He looked across the table at Mouse. “Take the young woman out of here,” he said with a jerk of his head.

  But Mouse shook her head in protest, pulling away from the tall dark-haired apprentice who took her by the shoulders.

  “No,” she said. “Please, I want to help.” She bit her lip, praying that her tears would not begin anew and betray her weakness.

  The surgeon considered her a moment, his eyes drifting to her arm where Sir Hugo's fingers still gripped her.

  “Very well,” he said, “but I’ll have no fainting spells or hysterics.”

  Mouse nodded, swallowing down the fear that tightened around her throat.

  What happened next, she would not soon forget. The cautery was, as the surgeon had warned, the worst of it, the smell of singed flesh choking the air and the knight’s cries of pain filling the small room. Following this, the surgeon had closed the wound with a length of catgut and a silver needle, his most prized possession, which he claimed would help stay a fever. Mouse hoped that he was right but said a silent prayer nonetheless, in case the needle was not enough.

  Mouse had been sent away before the final stitch could be tied, as the wine was still heating on the hearth, on the premise that she herself was looking rather too pale. By the time she left the room, there were marks on her arm from where the knight’s fingers had dug into her sleeve, and her cheeks were streaked with silent tears.

  There was some solace to be had in the fact that the man's lungs had remained unpunctured, as the surgeon had observed to them, and that his plate had stopped the spear from running clear through his shoulder and up into his neck. But still, to see a man in such suffering, especially a man as noble and decent as Sir Hugo, was a terrible thing, and one which Mouse hoped never to repeat.

  “Take some rest, my lady,” the apprentice said, leading Mouse into the hallway. “One of the maids can find you a bath, I’m sure, and somewhere you might lie down.”

  Mouse shook her head.

  “I thank you,” she said, “but I should rather stay and see if Sir Hugo—” she paused, unable to finish the thought. “To see that Sir Hugo is well," she said.

  “Do as you like,” the apprentice said, "but you might at least wish to change your clothes.”

  Mouse looked down at her skirts as the apprentice disappeared back into the surgery. They were wet through with Sir Hugo’s blood, and her bodice, too, was marked with streaks of dark red.

  She looked at her hands, turning them over. Blood covered them front and back, working itself underneath her fingernails and drying in the cracks of her skin. She had seen men wounded before, their bones splintered and bodies broken, taking a lance in the joust or a mace in the melee. But she had never before held a man in her arms as he danced between life and death and felt him slowly begin to slip away.

  She felt herself begin to tremble with a renewed sense of dread, as if for a time, however brief, she had forgotten the horror of what had happened.

  “Alright, Mouse?” she heard someone say. She looked up to see Bo coming down the hallway toward her.

  Mouse shook her head, her chin quivering, as a new torrent of tears began to spill down her cheeks.

  “Come on, then,” the guardsman said gently, catching her under the arms and helping her to a window ledge a few feet away.

  Mouse felt a wave of sadness and helplessness wash over, not unlike what she had felt when Jasper had been taken, as she sat staring down into her lap, looking at her bloodied hands as she sat quietly beside the guardsman.

  “Hugo’s been through worse, you know,” Bo said in a low voice somewhat lacking in its usual levity. “It’ll take more than a hack-made spear and some Caldiffan sod to kill him.”

  Mouse’s head was hung low, but she lifted it now, blinking at the guardsman.

  “That man,” she said in a kind of vacant surprise, “he is from Caldiff?”

  The guardsman nodded.

  “Was, more like,” he said. “Not that it matters.”

  Mouse drew her brow together. She tried to think back to the men who had assailed the knight, to try and puzzle out what it had been about them that had struck her as so odd. But every time she did so, all she could see in her mind’s eye was the knight falling from his horse, landing on the road in a pile of crushed flowers as the earth drank up his blood.

  An involuntary shiver ran through her.

  “Tell you what,” said Bo, nudging himself closer to Mouse. “Why don’t you close your eyes for a spell, and I’ll let you know the very minute the surgeon comes to give us the good word. That is, if Hugo doesn’t insist on coming himself.”

  Mouse looked at the guardsman in his arming jacket, studying the freckles that dotted the skin beneath his eyes. His expression was soft, his grey eyes steady and reassuring, even if there was a concealed look of worry in them.

  She might have asked what had happened at the protest after they had left, what had become of Agatha and the boy, Bertram. But she felt herself buckling under a sudden wave of exhaustion, the overwhelm of it all pressing down on her like a weight. Maybe Bo had the right of it, she thought as her shoulders began to sag and her body slumped toward him. Maybe she should just close her eyes for a few moments.

  “There, now,” Bo said, his voice little more than a whisper as Mouse allowed her head to fall onto his shoulder and her eyes drift shut. Her breath began to slow, even as her body jerked, resisting sleep. “It’s alright, Mouse,” the guardsman said softly, taking her hand in his and squeezing it tightly. “Everything’s alright.”