“Clear the beds, clear the beds!” a deep voice shouted from the infirmary door just as I’d sat down to dose an older gentleman with something to ease his gout. “We need every bed not already taken by the injured freed.”
Appius—who had been graduated from the beginners class into infirmary duty because of his exceptional skill, and because of the infirmary’s need—was tending a pregnant woman across the aisle from me. He glanced up to me as if asking what to do, then we both stood and glanced to the doorway.
Like a river bursting through a dam, the infirmary doors flew wide open and a stream of people who looked like they’d been mauled by wild animals were dragged in. There were over a dozen of them, older men and young, and several women among them.
“What happened here?” Magister Marcellus, the magister in charge of the infirmary that evening, demanded. He walked toward the doorway with his arms spread wide as if he could hold back the tide himself.
“There’s been another riot,” One of the men near the front said. He was bleeding from the head, but he seemed more concerned about the nearly lifeless younger man he carried. At a glance, I could see that man had a sword wound to his arm and was in danger of bleeding out. “The palace is under attack right now.”
My first thought was of Mara. I hadn’t seen her after supper. She’d been called back to the palace several times in the last week, though she wouldn’t say why. If she was there now, I couldn’t imagine what might happen to her.
“Get these men to open beds,” Magister Marcellus ordered, taking charge the way it needed to be taken. “Appius, fetch as many of the intermediate and advanced students as you can and send them here at once. Conrad, Leander, Darius, treat what you can as fast as you can.”
I didn’t hear the rest of Magister Marcellus’s orders from there. I launched into action, as did Leander and Darius. We surged toward the door, directing the wounded who were being brought in faster than I could keep track of them toward beds, bits of floor, and tables.
It was like the aftermath of the Battle of the Coronation all over again. I could practically feel Dushka’s energy surging through me as I took charge, reacting from experience to divide the patients who had a chance from those who were already too far gone to be helped. The other student healers sensed at once that I had knowledge of this sort of thing, and they rushed to do what I said.
I didn’t have time to enjoy that or to gloat. We were up to our elbows in blood in no time. Almost all of my focus was on stopping bleeding and cleaning wounds to prevent infection before applying bandages that I hoped would be enough to save lives.
“We thought we’d lured enough of the palace guards away to make an attack,” I overheard one may say as I fought to save the life of his friend. “But there were more inside the palace, soldiers that must have been brought in recently. They weren’t in the plan.”
I glanced up briefly, eyes wide, then went back to work. That was all I needed to grasp that an attack of some sort had been planned for a while, behind closed doors and in the shadows. The streets of Royersford had been quiet for almost two months, but things hadn’t been quiet in backrooms and cellars.
We worked well into the night, then those of us who had started out the day already on a shift in the infirmary were replaced by new students. I was relieved beyond telling when Mara rushed in around midnight with the new group.
“Thank God you weren’t at the palace,” I said, so overcome that I hugged her before she could sidestep me.
It was a sign of how tense things were that she hugged me back.
“I was supposed to be there,” she said, her face pale and her eyes wide even before she’d started treating any of the grievous wounds of the people all around us. “I’d been ordered to the palace again, but I ignored the summons to finish some extra classwork.”
“I never thought I’d say this,” Leander said, dark circles of exhaustion under his eyes, “but thank God for classwork.”
“The riot failed,” Mara told us quickly as she moved to grab a healer’s apron from one of the hooks on the wall, “and now the soldiers are out in the streets, slaughtering anyone they think might have been involved. Magister Titus ordered the college gates shut an hour ago.”
“I’m surprised he opened them at all after dark,” I said. The college gates had been closed and locked at dusk every day for the past two months, but word from some of the injured I’d been treating was that Magister Titus had opened them for the first influx of wounded.
“If the king finds out we’ve been treating revolutionaries, there will be hell to pay for the entire college,” Mara said before marching into the sea of groaning, crying, screaming wounded.
A chill shot through me as Leander, Darius, and I left the infirmary and headed straight to the bathhouse to wash off the blood. The college was one of a few institutions in Royersford that had enjoyed a special, neutral status through all the troubles in the fall and early part of winter. I wondered if those days were gone now and what it meant for the rest of us.
I went to bed that night imagining that the college would be invaded in the morning and those of us who had dared to treat wounded rioters—or revolutionaries, as Mara had called them—would be executed.
I woke up to silence and the calm of a fresh snowfall that had blanketed everything in four inches of white. The only sign that something was terribly wrong was that classes were canceled that day so that every set of hands could be sent to the infirmary to assist there.
The infirmary was different on that second day. No new injuries or maladies had come in, and after about fifteen minutes of checking on the people who had arrived the night before, I discovered that Magister Titus hadn’t opened the gates in the morning.
I also discovered that there were lines of people waiting outside the gates, bleeding and dying and begging to be let in for treatment.
“We have to let them in,” an advanced student, who was slightly older than the rest of us, named Elias, argued with Magister Titus and Magister Flaccus when they came by the infirmary to check on the situation. “We have a duty to care for those people. We cannot let them die in the street.”
“There’s nothing we can do for them,” Magister Titus said with a heavy sigh.
I shouldn’t have gotten involved. I needed to make myself as small as possible. But I couldn’t help but step up to Elias’s side to say, “Didn’t you tell me, Magister Flaccus, that our first and only duty is to heal, regardless of who needs healing?”
Magister Flaccus’s eyes flared, then narrowed, as he turned to me. “We have a duty to stay alive,” he snapped. “And the king has ordered anyone involved in the riot and anyone who helped them to be put to death without a trial.”
I flinched at that information, a chill shooting down my spine. So that was it, then. The Old Realm was now a dictatorship ruled over by a merciless tyrant. I’d known we were headed that way for months, but it was chilling to be standing where I was, now that time had come.