He took a slow, deep breath to steady himself, forcing his eyes away from the wounded to those with him. They all wore their misery plain on their face, but he saw more than just that. They were not just sad for those who had suffered—they were exhausted. And none more so than Matt. The boy looked done in, looked little better, in truth, than those poor souls writhing on their bloody sheets, as if he might collapse at any moment. And while Cutter did not like seeing such pain on those strangers, seeing it on the boy wounded him, touched him in a way nothing else could. The lad was exhausted, had little left to give—and Cutter understood, for a trip through the Black Woods, at the best of times, felt as if it stripped away pieces of a man’s soul, and their circumstances had been far from the best. The boy needed rest, real rest, a quiet place to lay his head without the dark shadows of the Black Wood’s trees looming over him, without the specter of his own village’s destruction or Ferrimore’s slaughter in his mind.
Unfortunately, Cutter could not give him that, no matter how much he might wish to, but he could, at least, make sure the boy had a chance to rest, however fitful that rest might be, however plagued by dreams of blood and death. “Come on,” he growled. “Let’s go find this innkeeper.”
Another angry look from Maeve, and an expression on the boy’s face that was a mixture of hurt and anger, but that was alright. Let him be hurt, let him be angry, just let him be alive. Cutter turned and led them into the inn.
The common room of the inn had been turned into a makeshift healer’s tent. Tables which, in happier times, would have held the ales of men and women. In such a small village, those who would have normally set at the tables would have all known each other. Perhaps they would have laughed and drank as they told interesting stories and more interesting lies about the week’s events. Now, though, no one laughed, and the tables did not hold ales. Cutter was surprised to see that they held more wounded, these also tended to by people who, judging by the quiet desperation on their faces, had no idea what they were doing.
Nearly two dozen wounded at least, most of them badly. The beast within him stirred once more in its fitful slumber, not waking, not yet, but close. Too close. The Fey did not usually leave wounded, for their victims served another, darker purpose than just as corpses to them, and they were not often wasteful. Neither would they ever be stalled in one of their attacks by villagers with pitchforks and shovels and a three-foot wall as their only defense. Which meant that this had been intentional. The ruined village, the wounded suffering and dying, all of it was, for Shadelaresh, a message, one meant for Cutter and him alone, one that was impossible to ignore.
The room was in chaos, with people hurrying this way and that, some carrying water or cloth strips cut into makeshift bandages, some seeming only to hurry for the sake of hurrying, their minds too broken from the night’s madness and the day’s following spectacle to focus on what they meant to do. Cutter understood that, too, the madness that overtook a person when their world had been turned upside down, and they were faced with not just their own mortality, but the fact that the living were all not just made to suffer death, but often to suffer a terrible, agonizing death.
There were others, though, who did not walk with purpose or without, who only stood, unmoving. They gathered in dazed clumps, not speaking to each other, only standing as if they were puppets whose master had foregone their strings, abandoning them. The only person who seemed to have any real idea of what to do was an old woman with a hunched back and one withered hand who moved about the room, seeming to be everywhere at once, and despite her frail appearance, she carried with her a strength of personality, of will that was obvious. Obvious, too, to those at whom she barked orders in a voice that did not waver or quiver with fragility or sadness, but one which was resolute, one which was focused not on the dying but on the living, on doing what needed to be done.
Here, then, was their leader. Even as he watched, the woman paused at the huddled groups of those too stunned to do anything but stand there, saying words too low for Cutter to hear. Some of those in such groups, upon hearing her, seemed to blink as if waking from a dream, then set about doing those things that needed to be done.
Not all of them, but enough to bring some order back to the chaos, an order that was threatened every moment by the despair lying thick like fog in the room. Cutter watched with appreciation as the woman shouted orders, noted the sometimes sullen—and quickly covered—stares of those she directed before they inevitably set about the tasks she’d set them. He wondered if they thought her cold, callous, immune by some lack of humanity to the devastation around her. Probably they did. That was a thing Cutter understood, just as he understood that they were lucky to have her.
He had stood among such devastation countless times in his life, far more than any right-minded man should, and in such times he had discovered that it was often the most unlikely of people, shy clerks and elderly grandmothers, who rose out of the chaos as champions of order. In normal
