Every time dawn approached, the boy's breathing would stop as if his very life were about to end.
From the stretcher in the corner, shallow, ragged breaths barely continued.
The cloth wrapped beneath his ribs last night fluttered faintly with each inhalation.
It was far too precarious a movement to serve as proof of life.
Ruan Hesse counted the intervals between those breaths and rubbed the back of his hand, damp with distilled spirits.
The sensation in his fingertips, chilled through the long night, had grown dull, but when he gripped a needle, it still did not tremble.
It could not tremble.
The rain had stopped, but the medical tent remained damp.
Water dripped sporadically from the canvas overhead, and the straw on the floor was pressed down by mud and blood, settling into blackness.
In this place, the only thing he could trust was the movement of his hands.
He was not entirely among the living.
Still, he had survived the night.
Across from him lay Lieutenant Matthias, whose abdomen had been stitched up the night before.
His fever had risen and his cheeks were flushed, but his pulse was much clearer than it had been last night.
Sera, pushing back wet hair as she examined his condition, spoke softly.
"They both held on."
Ruan nodded briefly.
"It's too soon to be at ease. Keep watching the boy's breathing. For Matthias, change the water immediately if his fever rises."
Sera rummaged through the supplies chest and sighed.
"We have water to change, but no cloth to change with. I used it all up overnight."
"Make some, even if you have to tear them."
"This place feels more like a tailor's workshop than a field hospital."
Ruan didn't reply.
He examined Matthias's abdomen again.
The sutures were barely holding. Had the wound twisted even slightly more, it would have burst.
The place where he had reached in and tied off by hand at the end of the previous night was still holding for now.
Just then, the sound of a suppressed argument came from near the tent entrance.
"You can't. If you get up now, it will tear open again."
"I must go."
"You cannot."
Ruan lifted his head.
A man in a damp military overcoat was gripping the end of a stretcher, half-risen.
His pale face had split lips.
A bandage still stained with blood was wrapped around his left shoulder.
It was a wound stitched in the middle of the night.
His name was Hein.
He had said he was a messenger.
Sera clicked her tongue.
"That man was groaning all night long. Why is he acting like this?"
Ruan walked over.
"Lie down."
Hein shook his head, teeth clenched.
"If I don't go now, it will be too late."
"If your wound opens again, you won't survive even here."
"I still must go. It is an order that must be sent to the Left Flank Hill."
At those words, the air inside the tent shifted for a moment.
Left Flank Hill.
It was the place where the road, collapsed overnight from the rain, would first become a problem.
One of the orderlies pushing a stretcher stopped in his tracks.
Sera set down the cloth in her hands.
Ruan looked into Hein's eyes.
His focus wavered, but his mind was clear.
Such eyes were difficult to persuade.
They were the eyes of a man enduring not by the strength of his body, but by the single task he had to accomplish.
"Someone to go in your place?"
Hein started to speak, caught his breath for a moment, and then spoke in a low voice.
"The two who came in with me last night are dead. I am the only one who knows the way."
It was no lie. Ruan remembered.
Beneath a flag wet with rain, three men had come in at once, and two of them had gone cold before anyone could lay a hand on them.
Only this single messenger had survived.
Bern approached from behind.
"We can't send him. In that condition, he won't last half a shichen on horseback."
Hein spoke as if grinding his teeth.
"Half a shichen is enough."
"What's enough is the time it will take you to die."
"If the order is delayed, more will die."
A brief silence fell.
Ruan unwrapped Hein's shoulder bandage and examined the wound again.
The wound itself was not fatal.
The problem was that he had lost too much blood, and his fever hadn't broken properly overnight.
Even a slight overexertion would turn his vision white.
And yet his eyes did not waver.
Ruan swallowed a curse inwardly.
He knew this kind of person.
They went even knowing their own body couldn't endure.
And usually, they were found collapsed.
By then, it was truly too late.
He reached his hand out to Sera.
"Leather strap."
"Are you really sending him?"
"Leather strap."
Sera reluctantly handed over a waist strap.
Ruan wrapped it tightly just below the wound to minimize movement.
He rewrapped the bandage so that pain wouldn't spread as much when Hein inhaled.
He added cloth to support the shoulder and back, and tucked a small medicine bottle into Hein's waistband.
Hein asked with a dazed expression.
"Why..."
"If you feel yourself collapsing on the horse, bite that bottle first. It will hold your consciousness for a moment."
"Does that mean I may go?"
Ruan spoke coldly.
"It means come back alive."
Hein's throat tightened with emotion.
At that moment, the noble knight Edwin, who had been watching over Matthias, strode over.
Unlike last night, he did not shout. Instead, he looked at Hein's condition once and spoke immediately.
"I'll give him my horse."
Sera looked up in surprise.
It was no common thing for a knight-captain to give his warhorse to a messenger.
Edwin asked Ruan briefly.
"Can this man really be sent?"
Ruan looked at Hein for a moment and answered.
"He'll endure. But if he falls even once along the way, it's over."
Edwin nodded without a word.
"So be it."
He went outside, shouting to his guard.
"Lower the saddle. The calmest one. And clear the way."
In an instant, the outside of the tent became busy.
Hein tried to get down from the stretcher and swayed. Ruan caught his arm.
He was as light as skin and bones.
Even with that brief support, the messenger clenched his teeth and held his breath.
"If you fall, I cannot send you again."
"I will not fall."
"I am sending you because I believe those words."
For the first time, Hein looked directly at Ruan.
A military physician steeped in blood and dirt all night long.
Haggard shadows under his eyes, and among his bangs a single thin strand of white was mixed in.
But strangely, his hands alone were calm.
The messenger spoke low, biting his lip.
"I thought you were dead."
Ruan answered, releasing him.
"Not yet."
Hein seemed about to say something more at that, but ultimately swallowed it.
Instead, he bent at the waist and bowed his head briefly.
For a greeting from a messenger to a military physician, it was far too deep.
Sera muttered quietly.
"Here we go again."
Ruan pretended not to hear.
When he stepped outside, the dawn fog had not yet lifted.
Military boot prints and horse hoof prints tangled together on the muddy road.
A black horse provided by Knight Edwin was waiting.
Its saddle was lowered and its baggage almost completely removed.
The moment Hein took the reins, he closed his eyes briefly. His shoulder trembled as if pain were surging through it.
Ruan didn't miss that opening and pressed on his bandage one last time.
"Return immediately after delivering the order. Don't fight. Don't play the hero."
Hein let out a laugh mixed with a hollow breath.
"What would a messenger fight?"
"On the battlefield, that's how everyone dies."
Hein said no more.
He barely mounted the horse.
He nearly lost his balance once, but Edwin's guard steadied the saddle.
When the horse reared up, the messenger's face went pale.
Still, he didn't fall.
Edwin spoke in a low voice.
"Go."
Hein gripped the reins and disappeared into the fog.
The soldiers gathered in front of the tent watched his back in silence.
It was the sight of a messenger who had been dying on a stretcher the previous night heading back toward the front lines with the dawn.
Some froze with mouths agape,
and some unknowingly made a gesture like the sign of the cross.
Sera sighed beside him.
"This is how rumors start."
Ruan turned back.
"Bandages come before rumors."
He entered the tent as if nothing had happened.
The very next patient was a combat engineer with a ruptured left thigh.
After opening the wound and checking inside the bruise, he picked up the needle.
His hands moved again at their familiar speed.
Whether someone returned alive outside or someone collapsed,
inside this tent now, there was more flesh that needed immediate stitching.
It was around the time when one would lose track of how much time had passed.
With the sound of hooves from outside, a messenger came rushing in as if sliding.
With a dirt-covered face, panting, he sought out Ruan first, not Bern or Sera.
"The Left Flank Hill hasn't fallen."
All eyes in the tent focused on him at once.
The messenger poured out words in an excited voice.
"The order arrived in time and they turned the troops. They say they were stopped just before crossing the bridge. They said if it had been a single step late, the flank would have been opened."
Someone beside a stretcher gulped.
Sera slowly turned to look at Ruan.
Bern set down the forceps in his hand without a word.
Ruan merely blinked for a moment.
"So that messenger..."
"He rolled off his horse as soon as he arrived. But he's alive."
The air inside the tent trembled strangely.
Someone muttered very low.
"They say even dead messengers are put back on their feet and sent out."
Another couldn't even laugh at that, only closing his mouth.
Ruan cut in coldly.
"Stop with the useless talk and bring the next patient."
But it was already too late.
The messenger who had just entered began to talk again, unable to contain his excitement.
"Everyone was saying it. If the messenger sent from here this morning hadn't come, the flank would have been torn apart. They say a dead man came back riding."
Sera pressed between her brows.
"Now the truly strange words will start coming out."
Ruan didn't answer.
He picked up the needle again.
But this time, all the eyes in the tent were entirely different from before.
They were not eyes watching hands that simply stitched wounds.
They were eyes watching hands that grasped a breath thought to be at its end and sent it back to the battlefield.
Outside, the words were already beginning to spread.
That a messenger who had died and returned to life at dawn had ridden cutting through the fog.
That the place he reached had not fallen.
And that the one who sent him was the youngest military physician of the blood-smelling medical tent.
Ruan examined the next wound without knowing such words.
Flesh torn by blades always parted in the same way.
Blood always flowed hot.
Whether it was the face of a dying man or the breath barely holding on, to him they were always just one thing before his eyes.
But the world outside the tent had already begun to see things differently.
That saving one person and sending him off had saved the front line.
Therefore those hands were not merely hands that stitched wounds.
The first legend was born very quietly between the reek of blood and the muddy water.