Concern was etched on Olive's face, and a deep sadness at the man's sorrow and regret over his wife. But there was a firmness in her expression, too, and she did not seem nearly as shaken by the bloody, gory mess of the injury as one might expect from a young lady. The violent reality of war had touched her on many occasions and, in other circumstances, she had chosen Erwin's unspoken option. But now they would not need to make such a crude choice. With a determined look, Olive shook her head.
"No, not a surgeon," she responded, her green eyes leading Erwin's to where Silas was already crouched next to the injured man. As Erwin had spoken to Olive, Silas had already set to work cutting away the man's trousers from the crushed and bloody leg with a long, bone-handled knife. He tapped a green-gray ash out of his pipe into his hands and, spitting on them, rubbed it into a thin paste, which he spread over the worst of the bleeding.
"Olive," he called her back, his eyes not leaving his work and his voice still eerily calm, but now with a steady focus and underlying urgency, "I need two young rowan beams. I saw a tree on the far side of the clearing."
Silas passed her the long knife and Olive sprang off in the direction he'd indicated with a newfound energy. Before Olive came back, the little black mouse appeared by Silas' side with two companions. Each mouse carried a ball of a different kind of moss. Taking the moss from each, Silas thanked them and whispered something else, and the mice scurried hurriedly away. Counterintuitively, Silas removed now Erwin's ersatz tourniquet. Where the blood might have been expected to surge out after this, it only seeped slowly into the green-gray paste the mage had applied there, making a dark ooze. Silas tore up the mosses into small pieces and, taking a handful of nearby mud, made a thick paste which he slathered over the man's open wounds. At first nothing happened, but when Silas breathed a fine, shining powder he'd produced from a small pouch, the thick muddy paste began to glow softly silver green. When the glow subsided, what was left was not untouched skin exactly. It looked more like the bark of a beech tree. It was stiffer than normal skin and the color was a pallid green-gray, but there would be no more blood lost.
The other seven mages watched on in nervous anticipation, their eyes wide. Whatever the common rumors in Connlaoth might be, most of them did not know how to effectively use their magic. When could they have learned? From whom? The older ones had been taught, like everyone else in Connlaoth, that using magic was the greatest sin and most had been taken from their families and raised by the Church. The children had only been raised in war. Many of them feared, as Olive did, that if they used their magic, they would quickly lose control of it. So seeing Silas work in this calm, practiced, steady way was a wonder.
Olive returned with two mottled silver beams of rowan. They were longer than the man's leg and did not look sturdy enough to make a reliable brace out of. Silas took the young tree beams and the knife and deftly cut off the clusters of small red berries, handing them back to Olive, and stripped the bark off one side of each beam. When that was done, he took the half the berries back from Olive and crushed them against the stripped side of the beams, staining them red. He then crushed the rest in his hands and spread the red juice over the man's leg, staining it the same color. When he held the beams to either side of the man's leg, at first nothing happened. Silas closed his eyes, breathing in and out, whispering something that Olive couldn't understand. Not, she thought, a human language. And the rowan responded. Slowly at first, new shoots emerged from the rowan wood, stretching over the man's leg, then once it had begun, it started to spread rapidly, like a living, ravenous tree devouring the man. At a change in Silas' whispered mutterings, though, the sudden growth ceased and when Silas placed his hands on the leg, the wood began to subside, shrink inwards until what was left, to anyone's eyes, was only a leg. A leg of wood.
Silas let out a slow, shaky exhale, nearly spent himself. Just then the first little black mouse appeared again on his shoulder with a mouth full of teaberry, its smooth, dark green leaves and bright red berries shining dully in the moonlight. "Thank you," Silas said as he took the little bundle. The mouse stayed there to watch, whiskers twitching curiously, as Silas tore a few of the fragrant leaves and placed them gently between the man's lips.
The man stirred slowly, then woke with a start. The scream that had been on his lips when he'd lose consciousness cried out now, but Silas put a hand on his shoulder and the man stopped, looking at Silas with wide, frightened eyes. "Flex your leg," Silas instructed gently. At first the man looked like he didn't understand, then he looked in shock down at his leg.... At what had been his leg, and now looked like something between a leg and a tree. But, cautiously, he did as he was told. And the man's foot flexed, then his knee jerked. With a few more tries, it appeared as though the man were controlling it almost as normal. "Good," Silas nodded. "It will always be a bit stiff, but it will carry you. Let's get you to your feet. We need to keep moving."
