Chapter 513: Children of Flesh and Shade (3)
"Two hundred stones here, three hundred there—you’ll bankrupt us," he teased Lyan. Yet his eyes lingered on a field medic binding a child’s ankle with strips torn from her own apron.
"Strange," he said a moment later, voice quieter. "How fast folk remember life. Like war was a fever dream." He nudged a broken door aside so a pair of nurses could push a stretcher through.
They came upon a schoolhouse—walls pockmarked, roof half-collapsed. Once it had rung bells at dawn to summon children for loyalty chants to the Serpent Throne. Now those bells lay twisted on the ground, serving bowls ladling stew for the wounded. The hallways echoed with coughs, not anthems. A dozen pallet beds lined the cracked flagstones, their occupants swathed in linen dark with antiseptic herbs.
Erich swung down first, shoulders rolling under the thin tunic. He produced a water skin and crouched by a limping old man waiting his turn at the healers’ triage. "Easy, grand-sage," the prince said with a grin too gentle for politics. He tipped water slowly, wiping dribbles from the man’s chin. The old fellow blinked, eyes filmy, then broke into a gap-toothed smile.
"Thought you’d be taller," he rasped.
Arnold snorted. "He gets that a lot."
Lyan chuckled beneath his breath, though the sound snagged on his next inhale when he saw a healer pressing cloth to a soldier’s side—Serpent livery hastily stripped, the man too feverish to care. Lyan recognized him: one of the conscripts who had surrendered at the north gate, barely nineteen, eyes the color of spring leaves. An Astellian bandage now wrapped the wound where an Astellian bolt had struck. The war had ended for him in confusion and blood; it might not end at all.
Beyond the triage pallets, a noblewoman swept ash from the marble steps of her tenement—her silk gown ragged, but posture unbroken. When she noticed the approaching riders, she paused. With hands that still trembled, she lifted a single apple from a chipped silver tray and offered it to Erich as though presenting a crown jewel. He bowed, took the fruit, then passed it into the waiting hands of a little girl who clutched a splintered doll. The girl’s eyes widened; she curtsied, the motion awkward around scraped knees.
They walked their horses the rest of the block, reins looped over forearms. Slag still cooled in gutters where Alchemist grenades had burst. Each step crunched glass and bone fragments too small to separate. Lyan’s gaze remained vigilant, noting every unstable façade, every hiss of escaping mana from cracked sigil lamps. His mind overlaid routes for supply carts, safe wells for water stations, proximity of still-standing granaries. Strategy never slept.