The strange rumors grew louder outside the tent, but inside the medical tent, everything remained the same.
Stretchers were pushed in without pause, and there was never enough blood.
Boiled water cooled in no time, and clean cloth ran out before half a day had passed.
Ruan Hesse spent the hours past noon stitching two lacerations,
pressing closed the chest of an infantryman whose ribs were exposed,
and reopening a shoulder where an arrowhead still remained.
His hands did not slow, but his eyes grew heavier and heavier.
After releasing the pulse of a patient beside him, Bern Dalt said quietly,
“Switch out. Your eyes are going unfocused.”
Ruan pretended not to hear and tried to move on to the next stretcher.
Sera outright caught him by the wrist.
“If that needle goes in wrong now, the patient will be ruined, and so will your hand.”
“I’m still fine.”
“You’ve said that more than ten times today.”
Bern said nothing more.
Instead, the sound of him setting the forceps down on the table was enough to convey his meaning.
Ruan reluctantly took a step back.
Only then did he realize that his fingertips were trembling faintly.
It was a tremor so slight that others might not notice it, but to anyone who had held a needle for long, it was impossible to hide.
Just then, a faint groan drifted from the stretcher at the very back of the tent.
Sera turned her head first.
“I think that one woke up.”
Ruan lifted his gaze as well.
At the very back lay the critically wounded patient who had been carried in the night before, almost like a corpse.
Even after the shattered armor had been removed and bandages wrapped around her, the depth of her wounds was clear at a glance.
A sword wound that had grazed below her neck.
A long gash tearing across her right side.
A cut that continued down to her thigh.
If even one of them had been deep enough, her body would have died.
The woman slowly opened her eyes.
Her pupils wavered briefly after the light, then soon swept over her surroundings.
Past the tent ceiling and the lamp, the stretchers and the bloodstained floor, the place they finally stopped was Ruan.
Her eyes were far too clear for a patient.
They were the eyes of someone who already knew where she was and what she needed to confirm first.
Ruan stepped closer and said,
“Don’t move. Your side will split open again.”
Instead of answering, the woman checked her own body first.
She inspected her bandaged shoulder, side, thigh, and finally even her fingertips.
The way she confirmed her senses was so familiar that even Sera clicked her tongue softly.
“She wakes up and the first thing she does is check where she’s been stitched.”
The woman opened her mouth.
Her throat was hoarse, but her pronunciation was clear.
“Was it you who saved me?”
Ruan looked at her for a moment, then answered calmly.
“The military medical unit saved you.”
“Who?”
“Me and Medical Officer Bern.”
Behind him, Bern snorted.
“Don’t lie. All I did was hold things down.”
Sera glanced between the two of them and lifted the corners of her mouth.
Ruan pretended not to hear and took the woman’s pulse.
Her consciousness was clear, but her body was still in danger.
In particular, the stitches in her side could tear open again if she twisted even once.
“If your fever rises, we may have to open it again. Don’t talk today. Rest.”
At that, the woman let out a breath that sounded like a laugh.
“So I didn’t die.”
“Not yet.”
At that short answer, the woman’s expression wavered for an instant.
It was the face of someone who had expected that answer, yet found it sounded different when heard aloud.
She murmured very softly,
“It wasn’t luck.”
Before Ruan could ask what she meant, the strength left her body.
As though the tension she had barely held on to while conscious had gone out all at once, her head tilted to the side.
Sera flinched, but Ruan immediately checked her eyelids and breathing, then shook his head.
“She fainted. She still has a pulse.”
Bern examined the wound again.
After a long silence, he lifted the edge of the bandage and said in a low voice,
“Do you remember this wound?”
He remembered.
Last night, the moment Bern saw this woman, he had almost taken his hands off her.
Considering how narrowly the wound had missed her lung and the amount of blood she had already lost,
it was an injury difficult to survive by realistic treatment alone.
Ruan knew that too.
That was why, in the quietest moment before dawn, he had placed his hand on her one last time.
He also knew why the inside of his temples now throbbed like needles.
Bern continued,
“It wasn’t the sort of thing you could explain with luck.”
Sera asked,
“What wasn’t?”
Bern pointed to the suture line on her side.
“Here. Judging by the way it was torn, it should have split open just from breathing.”
Sera fell silent for a moment, then looked back at Ruan.
There was no playfulness on her face.
Ruan did not avoid her gaze as he said,
“There are lucky days.”
“Today, the messenger and this person both seem to be very lucky.”
At those words, Ruan’s hand stopped for the briefest instant.
Sera saw the tremor, but she did not ask further.
What mattered now was not suspicion, but the patient.
Outside, the sound of another stretcher came again.
An orderly hurriedly pulled back the entrance.
“Medical Officer. You need to see this one first.”
Ruan was about to turn when a very small sound stopped his steps.
The woman who had just lost consciousness again had let something slip past her unclosed lips.
“…I’ll remember.”
It was so quiet that neither Sera nor Bern seemed to hear it.
Only Ruan had been close enough.
When he looked back, the woman had already sunk completely under.
It was unclear whether what he had just heard had even been real.
And yet, strangely, that one phrase remained in his ear.
Not gratitude, not an oath, but words that would surely return as something else someday.
Sera asked,
“What is it? Why did you stop?”
“Nothing.”
“How many times have you said that today?”
Ruan did not answer and picked up the needle again.
The next patient was a spearman with a deep cut at the nape of his neck.
Stop the bleeding first, check whether he was still breathing, then stitch him up and watch for fever.
It was the same order as always.
His hands moved again at their familiar speed, but a corner of his mind remained on the stretcher at the very back.
The unidentified, gravely wounded knight.
A body whose survival itself could not be explained.
And the eyes that had sought him out the moment they opened.
Toward evening, Ruan went once more to the stretcher at the very back.
This time, even Sera did not make a joke.
Under the lamplight, the grain of the wounds was even clearer.
The suture line on her side was still dangerously taut, and a deep bruise had spread below her shoulder.
Even so, her fever had gone down a little.
It was a stubbornly tenacious body.
He changed the damp cloth laid over her and used his fingertips to check the breathing sounds near her lung again.
Amid the rough friction, her breathing continued without breaking.
It was unmistakably the sound of a living body.
Even unconscious, Karen’s fingers twitched from time to time.
As if someone were aiming at her throat, or as if she were someone unwilling to let go of a sword hilt.
Sera asked in a small voice,
“Do you think she’s a knight?”
“Judging by her hands, yes.”
“Does she seem like a noble too?”
Ruan briefly recalled the mark he had glimpsed on the inside of her wrist.
There had been a symbol showing darkly beneath the cloth.
He had not seen its shape properly. It might have been a crest, or an old brand.
He soon set the thought aside.
“Knowing won’t do us any good.”
Sera nodded.
“That’s true. Patients with complicated identities usually only bring troublesome things with them.”
Bern approached from behind them.
The shadow of one empty sleeve swayed long in the lamplight.
He looked down at Karen, then said to Ruan,
“When that woman wakes up, she’ll ask again. Who saved her.”
“Then I’ll give the same answer.”
“I told you, those aren’t eyes that will let that answer pass.”
Instead of replying, Ruan folded the cloth and put it into the water bucket.
Bern said nothing more, but that silence lingered all the longer.
He did not look as if he were interrogating Ruan, but rather like someone who had already seen and was pretending not to know.
That was more exhausting.
Ruan looked down at his fingertips once.
They were hands that, until just moments ago, had held together someone’s split flesh and bursting blood.
And yet, why those hands had created a life that could not be explained—
he wanted to ask that more than anyone.
But on the battlefield, the next patient always came before answers.
So it was easier to pretend not to know.
In the distance, someone swallowed another scream.
Sera opened the lid of the pot where new needles were being boiled,
and Bern headed silently toward the next stretcher.
Only Karen lay quietly in the place at the very back, her eyes closed again,
as though she still had not missed a single sound in that tent.
Just before night settled completely, Karen opened her eyes once more.
This time, her gaze was not hazy.
She looked in turn over the tent ceiling and the lamp, the needles and medicine bottles on the table, and the other patients groaning in the distance, before her gaze eventually stopped on Ruan again.
“Is this the frontline medical unit?”
“Yes.”
“Quieter than I expected.”
Sera laughed as if dumbfounded.
“You wouldn’t have said that if you’d come during the day.”
Karen did not answer that. Instead, she asked slowly,
“How long did I sleep?”
“About a day and a half.”
“Then I suppose I died and came back.”
“More or less.”
Karen closed her mouth for a moment.
At the end of that short silence, she looked at Ruan again.
“I have a good memory. Favors, debts, faces—I don’t easily forget them.”
He could not explain why those words sounded ominous.
Ruan deliberately chose an indifferent voice.
“Then remember how to rest first. If you try to get up again today, we really will have to open you up again.”
This time, Karen did not argue.
But she did not look away until just before she closed her eyes.
As though she meant to engrave the face of the person who had said those words before the words themselves.
Only then did Ruan turn away.
Outside the tent, a cold wind seeped in,
and inside, the scents of blood and medicinal herbs mingled in the air.
As he walked toward the next patient, he told himself,
That woman would leave soon.
Once her wounds healed, she would return to her own battlefield.
The strange gaze from today would end there.
And yet, strangely, he did not feel that would happen at all.