One Day

They returned from the temple to find another woman crouched beside the ditch, rinsing blood from a bandage in a mud-brown puddle.

Maeril reached her first.

“Don’t.”

The woman snatched the cloth to her chest.

Maeril lowered her voice. “That water is worse than what is already on the bandage.”

Fear sharpened the woman’s face into anger. “What else am I meant to use? Prayers?”

“Clean water,” Kargun said. “We will bring it.”

Kargun turned toward the camp. “If you have no fever and can walk to the eastern reserve and back without help, stand up. No children. Bring every bucket that does not leak,” he shouted.

No one moved.

Kargun planted his shovel between his boots and rested both hands on the handle. “The water will not come because you need it. Get up and carry it.”

They got up.

He chose the carriers himself, sending back the fevered, the unsteady, and every child who tried to remain in line.

“At the well, you wait your turn. Anyone who pushes past a townsperson answers to me.”

Maeril watched Kargun glare a bucket line into existence.

“The first bucket comes here,” he told the woman.

Kargun pulled his shovel from the mud and led them up the slope toward Beregost.

“Oh,” Maeril murmured.

Rishi followed her gaze.

“He is very inconvenient,” she said. “I am becoming attached.”

“I noticed.”

Rishi listened past Maeril’s voice to wet coughing, a child’s cry too weak to carry, and the broken rhythm of fevered breath. All across the camp, pain bent people in on themselves.

Maeril turned toward the coughing. “Well, Monk. Time to use those hands.”

Rishi nodded and went among the tents.

Maeril watched Rishi disappear between two sagging tents, then turned from the sick to the ground beneath them.

She planted her staff in the mud and touched two fingers to one of the feathers tied beneath its crown.

Pale wings unfolded from empty air. An ash-grey hawk took shape between them and settled on her staff, hooked talons closing around the wood. Daylight showed faintly through its body.

“Up,” Maeril said.

The hawk climbed through the smoke.

Maeril borrowed its sight as it rose above the camp.

Through the hawk’s eye, the old ditch cut down the slope toward open scrub beyond the camp. The runoff should have followed it. Instead, foul water pooled at the lower edge, stopped by a boundary no eye could see.

Maeril tightened one hand around her staff and studied the ditch at her feet. She spoke the words that let magic show its seams.

The ordinary colors of the camp thinned. A dull band rose from the mud, circling the tents. Where it crossed the old ditch, black water pressed against it and could go no farther.

Maeril followed the band to the bottom of the slope. She scraped mud aside with the end of her staff until an iron head emerged, no wider than two fingers. Pale lines curled around it, closed toward the tents and open toward the road. She crouched to read the marks.

The hawk descended and settled on her staff.

“I called this stupidity,” she said.

She touched the staff’s end to the water. A dark ripple ran toward the boundary, stopped, and returned. The marks held without a flicker.

Maeril looked up the road toward Beregost.

“They knew exactly which side they were protecting.”

The ward was not failing. It was doing exactly what it had been told.

She pushed her sleeves back and knelt beside the iron pin. Mud soaked through the cloth at her knees. When she drew a little magic through her staff, the pale line tightened beneath her fingers. The water bulged against it.

Maeril eased the pressure back. The hawk shifted its talons on the wood.

“No. Break it all, and this goes wherever it can.” She glanced down the choked ditch. “You saw the way out. We need to dig it clear first.”

She set two fingers against the mark again, holding the water back while she loosened a narrow stretch of the ward.

“A gate, then. And it stays shut until I say.”

For the next few hours, she worked along the buried line, clearing mud from the iron pins and returning to the lowest one. Each time she tried to widen the opening, the old spell pulled it closed. She held it a little longer, fed magic through her staff, and worked until the new shape stayed where she put it.

Across the camp, Rishi moved from tent to tent.

In one, a little girl’s breath rattled beneath his palm. Her mother gripped the child’s ankle as if touch alone could hold her there.

Rishi could not clear the sickness from her lungs. He could only ease what fever, fluid, and panic had tightened and give the small body room to breathe.

He propped the girl against a rolled blanket, settled his own breath, and let warmth move through his hand.

Her chest hitched. Then she drew a deeper breath.

Not a whole one. A better one.

Her mother covered her mouth.

“This buys time,” Rishi said. “It is not a cure. Keep her head raised. Move her uphill when the carriers come, and boil every drop she drinks.”

The woman nodded too quickly. Rishi repeated the instructions until she could say them back.

Then he went to the next tent.

At the bottom of the ditch, Maeril pressed two fingers to the new mark and gave it a word to remember.

“Release.”

The gate took the word in a single pale flash and held.

The foul water still pressed against the boundary. Once the trench was ready, the same word would let it through.

Maeril straightened slowly, one hand braced on her staff. The hawk spread its wings to keep its balance, then lifted into the air.

By late afternoon, the last carriers had returned from the eastern reserve. Maeril followed the ward’s lower edge to where Rishi and Kargun were cutting a new trench down the slope beneath the gate she had made.

Kargun saw her watching and held out his shovel.

“I am a wizard.”

“Yes.”

“I have a staff.”

“Yes.”

“I have delicate scholarly wrists.”

“No.”

She took the shovel and dug with them.

When the trench reached open scrub, Maeril returned to the lowest iron pin and touched her staff to the gate.

“Release.”

Black water pushed through the opening and ran down the new channel.

By the end of the day, Dawnmaster Halver came down from the temple. Mud marked the hem of his worn vestments before he reached the rise.

He stopped there.

Buckets of clean water stood among the tents. Pots steamed over the fires, and the sick lay in a rough crescent on higher ground where the wind could reach them. At the lower edge of the camp, black runoff followed the new trench down the slope instead of pooling around the tents.

The camp remained crowded, smoky, and full of need.

But clean water came in, and foul water ran out.

Halver followed the trench to where Kargun stood with Rishi and Maeril, his shovel over one shoulder and his armor packed with drying mud.

“You changed its shape,” Halver said.

Kargun looked back over the camp. “It is a start.”

“It is more than we had this morning,” Halver said.

Rishi looked back toward the tents. “I can take the first watch.”

“No,” Kargun said.

Rishi turned.

Kargun lowered the shovel from his shoulder and planted it beside his boot. “You have both done a day’s work and more. Go into town. Eat. Sleep behind walls.”

“There is more to do,” Rishi said.

“There will always be more to do.”

Maeril made a small, disgusted sound. “I hate when he is right.”

Kargun pointed at her. “You too.”

“I did not volunteer.”

“You were gathering breath.”

“I was about to say something dramatic.”

“If you fall, I will carry you too. I am already behind.”

Maeril’s laugh came out cracked and helpless. She pressed her fingers to her eyes.

“Fine. We go. But I’d better not see anyone tamper with my wards.”

“I will be large nearby.”

“Acceptable.”

Rishi was watching the tents again.

Kargun’s voice softened. “Morning. If you mean to return, return able to stand.”

At last, Rishi nodded. “Morning.”

Kargun shouldered the shovel and turned back toward the camp.

Rishi and Maeril entered Beregost beneath the first stars. They found an inn away from the road, washed until the basin water turned brown twice, and ate bread, cheese, and hot soup without tasting much of it.

In their room, Maeril stayed awake long enough to draw a charcoal line across a scrap of paper.

“Drain here,” she murmured. “If the well opens again, two bucket lines. Less fighting.”

Her head dipped. Rishi caught the charcoal before it rolled off the table.

She blinked at him. “I was not asleep.”

“No.”

“I was considering hydrology.”

“With your eyes closed.”

“Advanced method.”

He folded the paper and tucked it away. Then he helped her stand. She leaned against him without pretending she had meant to.

“Tomorrow,” she said.

“Tomorrow.”

They lay together in the narrow bed with the smell of smoke, mud, and boiled water still caught in their hair.

Beyond Beregost’s walls, the camp breathed a little easier, watched by low fires and an orc with a shovel who had asked for more hands and received them.