Chapter
One
Capt. Fieran Laesornysh lay strapped to a stretcher as the train rattled its way across the Escarlish countryside.
All around him, men moaned and cried out. Stretchers were attached to the walls of the train car in stacks three high. He couldn’t see how far to each side of him the stretchers ran, but they must fill the train car from one side to the other. Or nearly so. A few of the spaces across the way from him were empty.
But Pip sat on the floor at his side, holding his hand. Throughout the whole trip as he slept and woke and slept again, she’d been there.
Fieran tried his best to keep his grip on her hand gentle, despite the ache spreading through him. It wasn’t up to pain level, much less intense agony just yet, but it would get there before too long. Especially with all this jostling.
But the dangers of morphine use were better understood now than they had been years ago. The elven healers would do their best to make sure he didn’t become addicted, but he’d rather he didn’t rely on it more than necessary.
A nurse halted next to Fieran’s tier, checking on the two men on stretchers above him. Both of them seemed to still beunconscious so the nurse moved on to Fieran. She checked his pulse. “How is your pain?”
“Manageable.” Fieran squashed the temptation to let his magic flood through his veins. As much as his magic might fortify him, it would also burn through the last of the morphine and healing magic all the faster. Not to mention make it that much harder for the elf healer in Aldon to banish the pain.
The nurse pressed her mouth into a tight line as she jotted a note on a clipboard. “Then if you can manage, we are almost to Aldon. It would be best to wait on any more medication until an elven healer has seen you.”
As he’d suspected.
Fieran nodded, doing his best not to wince as he breathed through the growing pain.
The nurse turned to Pip. “Miss, since we’re nearing Aldon, I’m going to have to ask you to step back into the passenger car. You’ll be disembarking separately from the wounded.”
Pip nodded and gave Fieran’s hand a squeeze. “I’ll stop at the hospital when I can.”
Then she was pulling her fingers free and pushing to her feet. She gave him one last pat on the shoulder before she disappeared from his view, her footsteps echoing on the wooden floor of the train car.
He shouldn’t feel such a sense of loss. He’d see her again. He wasn’t sure when, but he would.
Yet it was hard to let her go after holding her hand so tightly for the past few hours. Far harder with so much still unresolved between them. They hadn’t had a moment alone since he’d crashed to continue their interrupted conversation.
And that interrupted kiss.
A stab of guilt joined the pain flaring through him. After everything that had happened, how could he dwell on thoughts of kissing? Merrik had lost his leg because of Fieran’s mistakes.
If Fieran’s propeller hadn’t broken, then he wouldn’t have crashed. Then Merrik wouldn’t have crashed.
After all that, how dare Fieran think about romance?
He wrapped the fingers of his good hand around the pair of swords that lay next to him on the stretcher. A poor substitute for the warmth of her hand but better than nothing.
The train shuddered, giving a whistle as it came into the station.
A few of the others woke at the noise and the change in motion, filling the train car with even more noise as they asked the nurses for water, cried out in pain, or asked where they were and what was going on.
Once the train settled into a halt, men and women wearing basic green coveralls climbed onto the train and began unhooking stretchers from the wall before carrying them out onto the platform.
Fieran could do nothing but tap his fingers as he waited his turn. He wasn’t used to being this helpless. Right now, he couldn’t walk off this train. He couldn’t even lift his legs, splinted as they both were all the way to his waist to keep his broken bones from shifting. One of his arms was pinned in a splint as well, leaving him with one limb he could move.
At least he had all four limbs. Unlike Merrik.
That sourness churned in his stomach again, and he had to restrain his magic from leaping to his fingertips.
Two of the volunteers finally reached him, jostling him as they unhooked his stretcher from the brackets on the wall. They carried him down the aisle of the train car, then worked their way out the small door set in the side that was barely wider than the stretcher.
As he was carried onto the platform, he had to squint at the sunlight slanting through the glass arching over the station. The noise of incoming and departing trains reverberated through thespace, punctuated with the hubbub of bustling people, talking and laughing as they went.
