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The evening after a battle the bards will sing about, Ilya kneels behind a bush, nose scrunched at his own vomit. Everything from his mouth to his diaphragm burns. Dr. Satrinava rubs his back, their other hand holding his hair away from his nape. It hasn’t tumbled around his neck since he was a toddler. They tie it back, then reach for the knife at their hip.
He flinches away from the blade. They hold up their palm.
“A haircut can wait,” they say.
Stupid, stupid Ilya, they must think. Begged them to teach him amputations, but can’t even handle a trim.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Mazelinka used to tell stories where she swung onto an enemy ship, a saber between her teeth. After tying up a greedy lord, she’d carry chests of gold back to Nevivon, where the children skipped around her and cheered.
She never said anything about soldiers whose eyes turned bright red, their veins glowing the same color before they shriveled away. A dented helmet rolling across cracked ground. A head going slack in his hands.
Quietly, he follows Nazali to an unattended campfire. He sits while they retrieve a waterskin and a cloth. They wet the cloth before having him rinse his mouth. Non-alcoholic, all his stomach can handle, though they’ve let him sneak sips from their flask before. He pretends he has them as fooled as the officer he first enlisted with. He’s tall enough to lie about his age, tall enough that nobody looks twice at his presence on the battlefield.
Nothing fools Nazali. After a sip, they always take back the flask.
He hunches as they join him on the log. It feels wrong to tower over his mentor, but he had another growth spurt when Mazelinka first started mixing his special medicine. She wouldn’t teach him how to brew it, any more than she’d explain her soup, but she gave him a scrap of paper with Nazali’s name, a pouch full of coins, and passage to the next port.
“Tell me, who’s waiting for you at home?” Nazali asks.
He describes Pasha and Lilinka. Halfway through the other grandmas, he returns to Pasha, his throat tight. At the dock, he’d pried her from around his middle with the promise of souvenirs. The battlefield isn’t full of treasure. In the last town, the only ribbon he found sat smudged in the dirt, and he didn’t dare remove it from its resting place.
He hasn’t even written to Lilinka. During his rare free time, he can’t think of anything to say that won’t darken the page.
Nazali takes a swig from their flask. “When my youngest sister was, oh, up to my knee, she’d only accept the weirdest gifts and stories. Anything too mundane bored her.” They replace the cork. “You’d probably get along.”
“I’m sure we would,” he says. It’s strange to think of Nazali somewhere besides a disaster zone, stranger to think of them in lavish halls, surrounded by other princesses.
“The point is, little sisters can handle more than you think.”
The fire wavers. If he went home, would Pasha still be on that dock, ready to tackle him? After everything he’s touched, could he still pull her in and drag his knuckles across her mop of hair?
“So, Ilya. Our deal aside, what made you want to be a doctor?”
He talks about wanting to help people, and Nazali watches impassively, no doubt waiting for a better response. One that explains why he didn’t just go to medical school and settle down in a nice city, where he could tend to people’s coughs.
“There was a shipwreck. I was little—Pasha was littler, though Lishka was bigger than me, and…”
He face-plants over his own words like he does over tree roots. He’s only told this as a bedtime story, lively and sanitized, for Pasha to cling to with tiny fingers.
“I could only save Pasha.”
His quiet voice drops into the crackling fire. Nazali passes him the waterskin again before retrieving their flask.
“There’ve been more than a ship full of people I couldn’t save. It’s best to focus on what you can, even if it’s just the person in front of you,” Nazali says.
Lishka had been in front of him. Pasha had been even closer, gripping his shirt with a kitten’s claws, wailing in his ear.
He thinks of the war reaching that far and almost voids his empty stomach. He can’t let it, he has to stop it, he can’t—
He can’t stop anything. He’s just a doctor’s apprentice, a child whose hands shake.
“Dr. Satrinava? Why did you take me on?”
Surely they regret it, now that they’ve wasted time babysitting him. Now that he’s burned their dinner and misplaced the medicines and dropped an armload of bandages in the mud.
“You barged in and offered to work for your treatments. Are you bowing out of our agreement?” they ask.
“No!”
They already taught him to mix his medicine, but he still needs surgery. He crosses his arms. Nazali makes him take off his chest binding before bed, and all the times when his lungs threaten to explode. Though even Nazali couldn’t prepare for the time Ilya ran into a burning village and almost passed out from the smoke.
“It just seems like you’d want an apprentice who’s not always, uh, improvising,” he says.
Nazali cocks their head. “Is that who’s in front of me?”
“Um, no?”
“There you go. Besides, I like a little improvisation.”
He loosens his hold on himself. “Thanks, Mom.”
“Anytime, Son.”
Son. He glows like the cinders at the edge of the fire and sits up straighter. Catching their smirk, he registers his own words and deflates.
“I didn’t mean, I just, uh—”
“Are you planning to stutter at me all night, young man, or you going to bed?”
“Aye aye, Doctor!”
Ilya jerks up, wobbling before heading to his tent.