The Captain's War

Chapter One: Aftermath

Wen Halwise was constantly receiving strays.

She supposed that it came with the territory when you were a healer in a village full of people who mostly knew how to kill and skin things. She had quite the collection: a fine old hunting hound who the villagers claimed was unlucky because of the unusual whiteness of his eyes, a tomcat without a left hindleg, a donkey of the shaggy mountain kind that no one would take in after it learnt to open gates and untie knots, a doe goat that was known to break a buck's ribs if he tried to mate her. She had taken each one in when it was brought to her (or came to her on its own, in the case of the tomcat), and she had found a use for each one where no one else could. The hound chased away interloping foxes with unparalleled vigor and delight. He was big and loud, too, which was beneficial to an old woman living alone on the edge of town. The tomcat kept her warm at night and could still move quick enough to scare a mouse if one got into the kitchen. The donkey, although impossible to contain, stayed nearby of her own accord and happily carried Wen's herbs and medicines for her when she called on patients in their homes. The goat produced the occasional bucket of good-quality milk despite having been bred for meat, and kept the donkey company, and ate down the weeds behind the house so that Wen hardly ever found ticks on herself when she was out working in the garden.

She got stray people, too, of course. The villagers brought her one now and again, and now and again one turned up of their own accord. Such was the case with her assistant, Jai, and her nephew, Moroka. Jai had arrived in the village two seasons past after months alone in the wilderness, underweight, exhausted, and coughing up nasty green spittle. Wen fixed the coughing problem, although she couldn't get the boy to eat properly and she had yet to see him rest for more than a handful of hours at a time. But despite that, and despite his perpetual state of jumpy bewilderment, she had made a decent assistant out of him. He did quite well as long as nothing startled him (and lately it seemed fewer and fewer things could frighten him enough to distract him from his work). Moroka had come just weeks before Jai on a cart full of mail coming up from the southern city-states. It had been years since Wen had seen her nephew. He had grown tall and less gap-toothed. She recognized him right away, though, and within a day she learned that he was personable, good with fishing nets, quite good with a hammer, and exceptionally lazy. This last quality was the reason his parents had sent him north to stay with Wen. Wen had a reputation for teaching people to make themselves useful.

The third stray person came one wind-wild spring afternoon as Wen was carefully going over her month's earnings and spendings, calculating favors and barters in her thick leather account book at the long table in the back of the workroom. Jai was sitting by the front door stripping willow bark from a limb and Roka was down at the bottom of the garden fixing a fence, or so Wen assumed- she hadn't heard his hammer blows in some time.

"Someone's coming up the walk," said Jai, glancing up from his willow limb and out the front window. Out in the garden, the hound began to bellow. The beast never barked. He found other ways to put up a racket.

"A patient, do you think?" asked Wen, reaching up to tie back her red-gray hair.

Jai glanced out the window again. "No doubt. It's two men supporting someone between them. I'll go put fresh linens on the guest bed." He stood, set the knife aside, and hurried off into the depths of the house in search of blankets. Wen put her book down and shook her head. This was poor timing indeed. She went to the door and opened it, leaning on the frame and watching the two young men and their burden approach the house. She recognized them. They came from the family of smithing folk who lived on the other side of town, one of the few local families who, like Wen, did not make a living by skinning things. The woman they carried between them Wen had never seen before. She was doing something that vaguely approximated walking, but her head was lolling and she had the distinct look of someone on the verge of passing out.