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Yu got up from the bench. For a moment, he braced.

Pretend you know nothing.

Pretend you suspect nothing.

He needed just enough loyalty to seem useful. Just enough dullness to seem harmless.

With that, he pushed through the door.

Heat and noise slammed into him at once. After the cold of the walkway, the air felt stuffy, almost too heavy to breathe. The smells were thick; fire, wet fur, damp wool, and the rich tang of boiled meat drifting in from the kitchen.

Voices drifted towards him as well. Deltington was blocking the space between the kitchen door and the stairs, addressing the anxious krynn in his calm, unhurried tone.

"If you're not trained in anything of use," he said, "I'd ask you to stay here. Reception desk is there. Please come and show your papers."

The beastkin hesitated.

So did Yu.

He lingered by the garderobe, wriggling himself out of his sodden coat. The fabric clung to him, heavy and stiff. He wrestled it onto a hook and then rubbed at his face and neck with one of the towels from the adjacent shelf. His wings felt numb and clumsy as he worked some warmth back into them.

The guild entrance was built for two kinds of visitors: the dangerous and the half-frozen. The narrow corridor leading from the outer platform into the common room was almost suffocating, but beyond it, the space widened into an oversised garderobe: rows of hooks for dripping coats, trays to catch meltwater from boots and gear, thick mats with various brushes to scrape off snow and grime, and even two weapon stands. The shelves held stacks of clean towels, with a second rack for the wet and used. For some reason, there was also what Yu believed to be a metal mailbox.

Yu had cleaned all of this earlier today.

He had also spent hours on the floor.

You would not know.

The two travellers, as thoroughly they had cared for their injured, had not taken the time to use the towels or brushes for themselves. The stone was streaked with slush and mud, and there were puddles forming around the cracks everywhere. Tracing the grime, Yu gathered that Deltington had led the borman straight to the stairs, but intercepted the krynn before he could follow.

So in short, the garderobe itself had stayed clean. Everything else was a mess.

Well, fuck you too.

The thought shot to the surface, despite everything. Somehow, with Yu, the impulse to shit on others always managed to jump the mental queue all the way to the front, even with a million questions and his life on the line.

He was not the only one with questions. As his tension eased and his awareness expanded, he noticed the stares. The guests that were gathered around the tables and fireplace had all turned toward him. Harrow waved eagerly, urging him over. Yu was not ready for level of attention and really, really needed food, and so, before he had thought it through, he slipped past the tables and pushed through the swinging doors into the kitchen hallway. Tirran had said that he should assist Bubs.

The door on the left stood slightly ajar, pale light spilling through the crack.

Yu padded closer, but halted when he heard Bubs.

"What's to be done?" His voice drifted out. "I was told something's broken?"

"She is break. He is weak," came the low rumble of the borman.

Yu hated how bormen talked. The thought was just there, immediately. He pushed it down for another.

So he did not go up the stairs?

Yu tilted his head and peered past the door. There was another hallway, though shorter, and then a second door at the end. It stood open a talon's width.

Yu slipped into the hallway and leaned toward the gap in the second door —

And stopped cold.

The shaman was there.

She was the first thing he saw. For this frozen moment, she was all he saw.

Then, slowly, he pushed against the door, and the room opened up to him.

It was not a kitchen addition, nor a storage nook as he had assumed. Instead, Yu found himself staring into what must be a medical room, or rather, a sick bay. As with the whole guild, the walls were hewn straight from the mountain. They were lined with shelving carved directly into the stone, occasionally interrupted by neat rows of iron-braced cabinets and open racks that held tools both familiar and strange. Yu had seen somewhat similar things at Tria's care facilities, though he could neither name them nor describe their purpose.

The educated eye would recognise bone drills, splints for setting jaws and limbs, and iron hooks for drawing back flesh during surgery. Leather straps hung coiled beside tourniquet belts fitted with wooden windlasses to tighten them. Cautery irons, their tips darkened from countless heatings, lay on a stone tray next to slender probes for exploring wounds, and lengths of smoked sinew for binding fractures.

Earthen jars and wooden boxes held dried poultices, powders, and herbal compresses, while other vials were stored submerged in clear bowls of shredded ice that glinted dully in the dim light of the orbs overhead. Elegant metal boxes held syringes made of horn and brass, intended for both irrigation and injection. Bigger boxes stored layers of folded linen bandages covered in malraw and crushed fusalis, while carefully distinguished rows of untreated cloth sat stacked near the door. The air was thick with the scent of tinctures, layered over the strong smell of various herbs and potent spirits; the guild's pungent arsenal against frostbite, rot, and poison.

And amidst it all stood the shaman.

And the borman.

And Bubs, whom Yu had been told to assist.

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Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

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Silently, Yu stepped across the threshold. His talon felt heavy on the stone. The thick air clung to his throat.

The three figures were gathered between five cots lined against the far wall. The cots were skeletal things, frames of hammered iron with joints blackened from fire. No two were alike. All were different sizes, one narrow and long, another wide, squat and more than a metre off the ground. At first, Yu thought them the mismatched fabrications of necessity, then he understood that they were built for bodies of various shape.

The injured travellers lay in the two smallest ones in the middle. Bubs stood perched on a low stool between them, while the shaman sat on a chair on the outside of the right-wing bed, further away from Yu than the borman, who stood crouched on the outside of the left bed.

The borman bent low over the cod. His paws moved awkwardly as he worked the towels off the tairan figure. His sheer size made every movement clumsy. His claws were far too large for the gentleness he attempted on a being not half his size. The tairan looked impossibly fragile under his bulk.

Bubs, by contrast, had just finished unwrapping the beastkin on the other cot. This figure was even smaller. Lighter. Limp in the wrong way. Slim and soft where there should be muscle, slack where there should be tension. Not like a humanoid child, yet not with pronounced beastkin proportions either. Something in between; a body not resolved into one shape or the other.

It took Yu a long moment to realise what he was seeing. It was a selder. One of the slim, long-limbed mountain wanderers that came and went across the Albweiss ridges west of the Barnstream Harbour Guild. People desperately sought to hire their kind as guides for the Snowtrail. Yu had never seen a young one, a selder without horns. This one's features, too, were disarmingly clean, without any discernible signs of age or hardship. It was the ears that gave it away nonetheless, even from the distance. They were enormous, expressive even in unconsciousness, their inner flesh of a light pink and frayed from the wind. His or her eyelids twitched faintly, but did not open.

He is weak, the borman had said. So it is a He.

Yu was not good at telling beastkin apart. He could not with the bormen and borminna. He was not even sure with the krynn traveller, even though he had seen both males and females on his way to Emery Thurm. With selders, he had never had the occasion to look closely, and he had never bothered enough to learn anything about them.

With fast and precise movements, Bubs folded the towels and tucked them around the selder's body; under his head, along his neck, and down the length of his sides. Then he pivoted neatly on the stool, turned his back to the selder, and addressed the tairan, who was still in the borman's clumsy care.

"Let me," Bubs said, not even looking up, as he pushed the borman's massive arms aside with a small, firm gesture.

Well, the borman obviously let himself be pushed, but still, the sight made Yu's stomach knot. He had been taught, repeatedly and harshly, to keep a five-step distance to any borman. And that was if he was in public, with other people watching. He knew that a borman could crush a full-grown fina's head with one paw, yet here this giant stood and allowed a tiny, wobbly mianid to direct him. He was right opposite Bubs, shifting back and forth from the bed with his paws hovering awkwardly. Yu realised that he wanted to help but did not know how. It was a disturbing realisation. It was unheard of; a borman caring for a tairan, yet Yu had no other interpretations for his behaviour.

"Step back. You're blocking the light," Bubs showed no intimidation whatsoever. There was no fear in his voice, only focus.

The borman's restless paws halted right above Bubs' head.

A moment passed.

Then, slowly, reluctantly, the borman stepped away.

As he moved, the floating orbs overhead brightened. Shadows retreated with his bulk, peeling back from the cot toward the walls. The shaman's shadow was already there, clustered in a dark corona behind her chair. It was broken by shimmering motes of light. They came from her cloak. As the light caught the edges of the semi-translucent cloth, it was scattered into eerily mesmerising specks of colour that were caught by the stone. They seemed to shift more and more, the longer Yu stared.

„Bring that stool. Behind you," Bubs ordered. "Put it next to you."

Yu tore his gaze from the shaman, back onto Bubs and the borman, who now padded around the outermost bed behind him. He fetched the stool from there, brought it back and set it down on the tairan's left side, next to where he had just started and now stood again.

Meanwhile, Bubs unwound the last of the wrappings from the tairan's limp form and opened the thick white coat. He did not remove it from beneath him or her, only peeled it back far enough to work — From her. She is break, the borman had said.

Yu stood unmoving, caught between watching and wanting. He desperately needed food. Should he just … go? Slip out and get a bowl? For himself? By himself? It must still be all there, right there, in the big pots.

But no. Better not move without permission. It was better to wait for some sort of acknowledgment, some invitation to speak, or just for the right moment to interrupt.

And then it came.

Bubs stepped down from the stool between the beds and onto the one the borman had placed on the tairan's left side. As he walked around the bed's foot end, there was a moment, a flicker, where the mianid's eyes lifted and glanced in Yu's direction.

There it was.

The moment was there.

And then it was gone.

And Yu had done nothing.

On the new stool, with his back now turned to Yu, Bubs began unwrapping the layered bands of cloth coiled tight around the tairan's right leg, above her trousers. The limb beneath was twisted, badly. The angle was wrong. Cloth and frayed cord had secured a crude makeshift splint cobbled together from thin metal rods — tent poles, by the look of them. Bubs removed them one by one. His spindly fingers worked fast, unfastening the bindings and taking out the rods with a precision that showed great caution yet left no time wasted, while simultaneously slipping fresh towels beneath the leg for support.

As the splint came apart, Yu realised with a fresh wave of unease that it had only been a means for surface stabilisation. Beneath the torn trouser fabric there were more bindings. A proper splint.

And then Yu saw it.

One of the rods jutting from the wrappings, the one Bubs left untouched, was not metal. It was white. It was not a rod.

It was bone.

It was an open fracture, with the bone protruding through the knee, which was all torn flesh and smeared bandage.

Yu's stomach lurched. He forced his gaze upward, to the face. By the look of the tairan's build and features, it was a young female, by Yu's estimation still a few years away from adulthood.

Bubs moved with what felt like controlled urgency. He stepped off the stool and pulled open a side drawer. From there he retrieved both a metal tray and a pair of shears; long blades with narrow, curved tips. He turned around, placed the tray on the bed and set his foot back on the stool —

A massive paw slammed across the cot, barring his way.

"You do what?" The borman's voice was low and heavy now, thick with suspicion.

"Get your paw out of my way," Bubs demanded. He had not flinched.

Yu, on the other wing, was all the way back at the door, and had counted thrice that it was seven steps between him and the borman.

"The leg needs access," Bubs said. "Can't move it. So I cut."

"No!" the borman roared. "You cut leg, no!"

Yu flinched at the first word, and froze with the second. With the last, he wondered just how it was possible that a borman cared so much for a tairan.

"Don't shout," Bubs said coldly. "I cut her clothing."

For a moment, the borman's paw lingered, then he pulled his arm back.

With that, Bubs stepped up, set the shears against the torn fabric and began slicing up the seam of the girl's trouser leg.

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