For the first time during morning rounds, there were more faces enduring than faces on the verge of death.
The archer whose breathing had been ragged all night had a slightly lower fever, and the infantryman whose thigh had been stitched was clearer-headed than the day before.
Matthias still had no strength, but at least he was no longer swallowing screams with a face drenched in cold sweat.
Even after the rain stopped, a damp smell always lingered inside the tent.
The scents of wet cloth and blood, boiled herbs, and cooling bodies mingled together, pressing down on the morning air.
Luan Hesse went first to the section for fever patients.
Sera said as she changed the water bucket,
“What we separated out yesterday seems to be working, doesn’t it?”
Luan answered briefly, his fingers still on a pulse.
“We don’t know yet. We need to watch for another day.”
“That means you were half right.”
Luan did not answer.
Instead, he checked the two new wounds.
One was a supply soldier with a shallow tear on his arm, and the other was a messenger with a cut across the back of his hand.
Neither was urgent.
The problem was not urgent wounds, but what sort of faces those wounds would have when their owners lay back down two days later.
He looked toward the bucket used for washing wounds and said to an assistant soldier,
“Don’t touch the stretcher with that hand. Wash first.”
The assistant soldier reflexively pulled his hand back.
Since yesterday, there had been no more arguing.
Everyone had seen a feverish face at least once, and smelled the stench of rot at least once.
Orte was organizing the record board in a corner of the tent.
The army monk had not left even after the night passed.
He was not only someone who wrote down the names of the newly dead; when morning came, he also wrote down the names of the living.
Names, units, the places they had been wounded, and even who had last carried them in on a stretcher.
At first, Luan had found it bothersome, but at some point he realized that with that record board, patients did not simply flow past as numbers.
Karen had moved to sit near the tent entrance.
Her body was not fully recovered.
Thick bandages were still wrapped around her side, and if she stood too long, her breath grew short.
Even so, since that morning, she had spent more time looking toward the door than at the stretchers.
As if her body had decided before she did where she ought to stand.
Seeing that, Sera remarked bluntly,
“Looks like you really mean to be the gatekeeper now.”
Without turning her gaze, Karen answered,
“I tried it yesterday. It suited me.”
“Not the patient’s spot?”
“That too. And the spot in front of it.”
Luan pretended not to hear the conversation and changed a bandage.
Karen was the type who lingered all the more stubbornly the more he pretended not to notice her.
It was better not to engage.
Just then, a small stir spread outside.
It was not the sound of a stretcher.
Nor was it a scream.
It was the voice of someone carrying news, though whether good or bad could not be told.
A sentry lifted the entrance flap and said,
“A message from the scouts on the left hill.”
Luan wiped his hands and raised his head.
“Is it a patient?”
“No, sir. It’s about the archer who left here a few days ago. Ramon.”
He remembered the name.
He was the marksman whose shoulder had been stitched, the one Luan had told not to use that arm for at least several days.
The sentry continued with a strangely excited face.
“An enemy scout leader took a detour, and they say he hit him with his last arrow. Thanks to that, three men survived.”
Sera immediately frowned.
“I told him not to use that arm, and he drew a bow?”
Luan thought the same.
Whether he should be pleased or angry was the first thing that became muddled.
Three who had survived.
Ramon’s arm, which must have opened again.
The two were tied to the same line.
Outside the tent entrance, someone muttered in a low voice,
“Wasn’t that archer wearing a dying man’s face a few days ago?”
“So if that youngest doctor gets his hands on you, maybe you really do get back up.”
Sera shot a glare toward the entrance at once.
But it was already too late.
Words were lighter than tent ropes; once they shook, no hand could catch them.
Luan closed his needle case and said shortly,
“When Ramon comes, I’ll check his arm first.”
Sera clicked her tongue.
“If he comes?”
“Men like that come. To thank you first.”
“I hope his arm falls off before that. Just the arm that doesn’t listen.”
It sounded like a joke, but Sera’s eyes were not smiling.
Orte stopped his pen over the record board, then began moving it again.
“Rumors spread faster than records.”
“Records are correct.”
“I know. It’s just that being correct doesn’t always win.”
Luan did not answer.
Then Sera, while organizing the herb box, suddenly stopped her hand.
“Wait.”
Luan was about to pull his hands from the water bucket when he froze.
Sera had stepped too close and lifted his bangs.
“What are you doing?”
“Stay still for a moment.”
All playfulness vanished from Sera’s expression.
Karen also turned to look.
Orte quietly raised his eyes while holding the record board.
Sera said in a low voice,
“This… there are more than before.”
Luan did not ask what she meant.
He already knew.
The white strands starting from the inside of his temple were not just one.
Every time he washed, he had sensed it faintly in the reflection on the surface of water instead of a mirror.
Sera carefully lifted a strand of hair with her fingertips.
The threadlike white strands mixed among the black hair were clear.
There was not just one.
There were not very many, but there were enough that it was hard to dismiss them as coincidence.
“It must be because I haven’t slept.”
When Luan said it indifferently, Sera snapped back at once.
“You’re still trying to brush it off with that excuse?”
“Some people are like this.”
“In just a few days?”
Karen said nothing.
Instead, she looked at those white strands for far too long.
As if she were counting them.
Feeling that gaze, Luan deliberately pushed Sera’s hand away.
“I have patients to see.”
“Right now, it looks like I ought to be seeing your hair.”
“I need to look at wounds, not hair.”
Sera still looked displeased, but she did not press further.
Inside the medical tent, what was truly urgent was always somewhere else.
But she had not simply let it pass.
She looked at Luan once more, then muttered softly,
“Strange.”
As if taking up those words, Karen said quietly,
“I think so too.”
Luan did not respond.
He simply walked toward the next stretcher.
If he did not move, those gazes felt as though they would only grow longer.
By afternoon, Ramon’s name had already spread to other sections.
He had become not merely an archer who had lived, but a marksman who had returned, pierced the enemy, and survived again.
Naturally, words about whose hands had set him back on the battlefield clung to the tale as well.
“The army surgeon with white mixed in his hair.”
“They say he even raised a dead messenger and sent him back.”
“This time, he brought an archer back to his feet too.”
Whenever Luan heard such words, he pretended not to.
But the soldiers’ eyes were changing little by little.
They were no longer merely eyes waiting for treatment.
They were eyes weighed down by the hope that, when it came to it, they might return alive.
Faith that was too great was always dangerous.
That evening, Luan went to recheck the wound of a new infantryman lying in the outermost section.
The infantryman was not badly hurt, yet as soon as Luan came over, he swallowed for no reason.
“What is it?”
After hesitating, the infantryman asked,
“Um… if someone passes through your hands, do they all get back up again, sir?”
Luan’s hand stopped.
“Who said that?”
“No, it’s just, everyone…”
From the other side, Sera immediately snapped,
“Then instead of thinking you won’t die, take your medicine properly. It isn’t the surgeon’s hands that need to hold out first, it’s that head of yours.”
The infantryman flushed and shut his mouth.
Luan could not deny those words outright.
Because he now knew that the more he denied it, the more strangely some people believed.
Behind him, Orte said quietly,
“If you want to break the rumor, you’ll have to keep showing them how to survive first.”
Luan asked shortly,
“What do you mean?”
“That the thing saving people isn’t a miracle, but hands and water and time and records.”
Luan did not answer.
But the fact that all evening he made the assistant soldiers memorize the order of hand-washing again,
that he reorganized the fever patient section once more, and divided the positions of the water buckets anew,
might perhaps have been because of those words.
When night had fully settled, Sera changed the last water bucket and stood before Luan once more.
“What I said was strange still stands.”
“What does?”
Sera jerked her chin toward his temple.
“The white strands. There are definitely more.”
Karen said nothing.
Yet that silence was heavier than Sera’s interrogation.
Since the day before, whenever she looked at Luan’s hair, her expression hardly changed.
That made it all the more distinct.
The face of someone who could not be certain of anything, yet remembered it in connection with something else.
In the end, Luan only shrugged.
“Everyone ages quickly on a battlefield.”
Sera sighed.
“I don’t believe that anymore either.”
“It doesn’t matter if you don’t.”
“It matters to me.”
After those words, a brief silence fell.
Sera said nothing more.
Instead, she picked up a piece of boiled cloth and tossed it toward Luan.
“At least wipe your face. Looking at you now, you’re the one who seems like a patient.”
Luan wiped his face with the damp cloth.
Along with the red stains, some of the fatigue was cleared away.
But the ache deep inside his temple did not disappear.
Outside, a sentry gave a short signal for the change of watch.
Inside the tent, things had grown somewhat quieter, but the words that had spread during the day were probably still circling between the army tents even now.
The army surgeon with white mixed in his hair. Hands that raised the dead back to their feet.
Luan did not like those words.
It was not merely that he disliked them; they kept stabbing at something inside him.
What he held on to was not the dead.
He only held on to that very brief gap just before death, to the final point that had not yet been severed.
And yet people blurred that boundary far too easily.
Orte closed the record board and said,
“Nameless rumors grow larger and larger.”
“Then should we give them a name?”
“At least they become less distorted.”
Luan chewed over those words, then turned toward the next patient’s stretcher.
In the end, even today, that was all he could do.
Change the water, wash the wounds, check the fevers, leave behind names, and pass the living on to tomorrow.
Behind him, Sera muttered softly,
“Those words are going to get someone killed tomorrow.”
Luan pretended not to hear.
But the rumor that had slipped out of the tent was already moving faster than any stretcher.