Chapter 951: Heila’s Gambit (Part Two)
The forest itself was too far away for her to draw on, but there were still small stands of trees in hollows between the hills where streams flowed into shallow ponds that had frozen over in the bitter cold of Hauke’s snowstorm. Those trees were young, many of them less than a dozen years old, but they were enough for Heila to do something with, even if it wasn’t as much as she wished.
"Through nature’s heart and healer’s grace,
Let soothing waters find their place,
Let healing waters wash away
The wounds of war’s savagery,
Till every soldier is free from pain,
Beneath this sweet and gentle rain."
To Diarmuid’s ears, and even to the acolytes standing with him, the demon witch’s words sounded as sweet and reverent as any prayer and the power those words conjured was as gentle and mild as the morning sun’s light on their faces.
All along the walls and across the entire plaza, pale, silvery-green drops of rain formed beneath the clear night sky, falling to the earth in a soft, gentle drizzle. Where the raindrops splashed on wounded men, they felt the pain of their injuries fading away. Even more astonishingly, the wounds themselves showed visible signs of healing.
"My leg," an astonished archer said as he felt the throbbing, pulsing pain of the wound fading away as his flesh seemed to move and twitch until the head of an arrow and the broken bit of shaft attached to it was pushed free of the wound. There was still a deep cut where the arrow had been, and it was tender when he prodded it, but that was all! "Holy Lord of Light, it really is a miracle," he whispered as he basked in the healing raindrops that swept away the pain.
Not five paces away, one of the Golden Eyed skirmishers snarled at the foolish human who gave credit to their savage god even when it was clear that Lady Heila had chosen to heal the wounds of friend and foe alike. He didn’t know if it was because she had no way to exclude the humans from her healing or because she genuinely wished to spare their lives, but he was hardly important enough to question the decisions of a witch.
"Not your god, fool," the lupine skirmisher snarled, speaking in a thickly accented version of the king’s common tongue. "Witch’s healing. Stronger than your god."
"No but, that can’t be," the archer said as he scrambled back a full two paces further away from the demon he’d thought was dead after it took a spear thrust to the abdomen that penetrated from the front of its stomach all the way through the back of its light armor. "Witches are evil creatures who know nothing but slaughter," he mumbled as he felt the smooth, barely tender edges of his wound. "They couldn’t do this..."
Similar scenes played out across the plaza as soldiers who had crumpled under the weight of their injuries finally found relief from the most unlikely of paces. Even Sir Tommin’s anguished sobs lost a bit of their intensity as the pain of his wounds no longer tormented him, leaving him trapped only in the dark emptiness of his blindness and shattered faith.
Even for a witch like Heila, it would be impossible to fully heal every injured soldier with a single spell, even if she had been standing at the heart of a willow grove that was hundreds of years old. There were too many men, too many wounds, and even if she had all the power in the world to draw upon, she could only touch so many injuries at once before the pain of it all overwhelmed her.
Already, the feeling of connecting to hundreds of soldiers at once, human and Eldritch alike, was enough to drive her to her knees. For every wound she soothed, from the tiniest cut to shattered bones and severed limbs, she experienced the pain of...
"RRRRRRRRAAAAAAA!" Heila cried as the pain of wound after wound, layered one on top of another, tormented her diminutive body, but she refused to give in or release her ritual before she had accomplished what she set out to do.
While fully healing the injured would have been impossible, she knew very well that simply surviving the initial injury and the first day or two of healing was the greatest challenge that lay ahead of these soldiers. So while she couldn’t heal the wounds entirely, she stopped bleeding, purged the beginnings of infection, and mended flesh as much as the body could have with two full days of rest.
It wasn’t perfect, but to the men who were suffering at the brink of death, and to the countless more who were in too much pain to stand, it was every bit as miraculous as what Diarmuid had done for the injured acolyte and on a far greater scale.
"Quickly," Hugo commanded a nearby soldier as he stepped forward to offer his support to Heila, who staggered under the strain of her ritual. "Have your men drag the injured to safety, make space to receive any man who throws down his weapons," he said as he cradled the diminutive witch in his arms.
"Hmm," Heila murmured softly as she pushed back from Hugo’s support. "Sister Isabell was right about you, Hugo," she said with a faint smile while she regathered her strength. "You’re a good man when you aren’t suffering under Owain’s thumb."
"You’re in command," she told the startled lord as she returned her wand to the belt at her waist and drew the white, gleaming blade of Snowfang in its place. "Someone has to stop Loman," she said as she gazed toward the distant tower and the shining light of Loman’s Bow of Stars.
"And if Dame Sybyll catches him first," she added as she looked at the departing figure of the Crimson Knight, who had dashed for the side streets almost as soon as the final templar fell, pausing only long enough to retrieve her giant axe and helm. "If she gets to Loman before I can capture him, then I’m afraid there won’t be anything left of him to take prisoner..."