Chaos and silence waited inside. A crowd gathered around the piece of heavy machinery used to weave the fabric for their uniforms. There was a soldier stuck beneath its metal teeth and tangled threads, writhing in pain on his side. The machine, now jammed, continued moving uncontrollably, the man's right arm caught in its noose. Two supervisors and a machinist stood on chairs attempting to stop the contraption while a career solider in full regalia dropped to the floor. He brandished a blue knife, the medals on his uniform clanking against the wood while he crawled underneath the weft to cut the man free. When it was over, the fabric was scarlet; the threads covered with the gnarly tatters of flayed skin.
"Don't just stand there," the intact soldier shouted, medals clanging against the floor. "Someone help me move him!"
The women around Briar were still. When the soldier growled again, another one shoved them. Briar's instincts kicked in. As a group of people began to move over to the man, she cried out.
"Don't move him!"
"She's right," the machinist said as the last gear stopped turning. "Moving him could make it worse. We need to get a medic."
The soldier with the blue knife was hyperventilating, while the other bled out. "We have no doctor here - they're all at the front lines! We have to do something or he'll die! Please, he's my brother."
"Aurora's a doctor," a weaver mistakenly announced.
One of the overseers pushed Briar forth, slapping her bottom as a farmer does a mule. She broke into a cold sweat, quivering from the blow. Then, she felt a presence. It was strange and foreboding, but not all terrible to her. She heard a sharp cry – not from the injured man or his brother – but from the one who had touched her. That was she became possessed by determination – all but that moment becoming a blur in her peripheral vision. A blur that blinded everyone in the room to the offender's hand shriveling into a callused, spiky claw.
"She's no doctor," the overseer shook, "she's a witch."
The overseer's shriveling hand spasmed under an invisible weight, turning to molten rock in his view. He began moaning, short of breath, not a soul in the crowd able to see what was happening. A comrade pulled him aside, smelling whisky on his breath, and called for those not preoccupied with the injured man to remove this one from the room.
"You've been downing the bottle today," the comrade exclaimed, seeing nothing but the convulsing of a drunken man.
"I'm not drunk," the man continued shaking. A thousand blood-ants scaled his arm. "For the sake of the Magistrate, someone help me!"
One of the room's presiding officers came and struck the man in the face, dragging him outside. "Can you not see that there's a man here much worse off than you?" He screeched, "show some respect, you drunken mongrel!"
"Let him die," Briar heard Innis whisper. "Let him die like our sons and daughters!"
The declaration was picked up by Officer Haggs. He pulled a baton from his belt and hit Innis in the legs. Briar fell to the ground with her, trance broken. Innis was so fragile, she was certain that the blow had the potential to break bone.
"This was no accident! He dies and you all die! Mercy for none!" He took the grandmother by the arm and started dragging her outside with the perceived drunkard.
"Wait!" Briar shouted. "Don't hurt her! Please. I'll help."
"You," the burly man growled, letting go of Innis's arm. "You're the runner. How about we trade places with Granny?"
Just as the burly man grabbed Briar, Blue Knife pointed at her.
"Stop!" he exclaimed in an instant. "You – the little redhead. You're a sort of doctor. Can you help him?"
"I can try," Briar shook, the tremble evident in her voice. "I'm - I'm a healer."
"It's useless, Bricken. She's a bloody waif. Can't even talk without shaking and you expect her to -"
"Silence, Haggs!" Blue Knife exclaimed, now named. "You may have watch over these women, but as a soldier you're under my orders. Leave her alone and let her speak. Come here."
"Yes, Commander." Haggs replied. Before she fully left his grasp, he made sure to whisper one last thing in her ear. "Save him, and you get to live."
Briar was in action, already delegating assistants to fetch her bandages and herbs and to call the county physician. She examined the man's right forearm, a series of deep cuts forming gaping wounds from elbow to fingertip.
Pressure, she told herself, tearing the fabric from her apron and pressing down on the deep gouges in his skin. She fashioned a tourniquet from some scraps and a short wooden dowel. It wasn't working. It soon became apparent that his blood was too thin to stop its flow. The man began slipping.
"Your brother – his bleeding won't slow," Briar heaved, losing hope. The officer was pale and sweating, raising his voice in rushed and breathy currents.
"His blood – its thin – our mother said he can't clot like the rest of us," Bricken was shivering now. She ordered him to be turned around and wrapped in a blanket. Best not have two tragedies today.
Briar searched her mind for an answer, but couldn't produce it from within. She looked around the room, her eyes drawn to a yellow flower in the window. It was a large, drooping Tear of Cassandra. Then, it came to her. She became aware of the rash, raw and burning, on her sternum. Wolf's tooth.
It might kill him. Then again, so would bleeding to death. She'd heard of her mother using Tear of Cassandra to dilute herbs with high toxicity. Since this one seemed to be past its prime, she knew that the water in the vase was full of its essence. Just a single petal from the wolf's tooth might do it...
"Quick! Fetch me the flower in that vase and a bottle of whisky."
Innis reached for both with trembling hands. The moment they were in Briar's grasp, she took the flower and crushed it. She threw it into the vase water and mixed it with a quarter ment of whisky. Then, she took the most potent buds from where she'd hidden them in her shirt. She plucked a single petal from it and placed it in the water. It dissolved on contact with the concoction. She then drenched the man's wounds in it, twisting the tourniquet tighter.
As if by magic, the bleeding began to stop. To avoid any more accidents, Briar took the wolf's tooth flowers and wrapped them in a scrap of leather, ordering one of her aides to carefully throw them outside. She tended to her patient. The man was still limp, but his heart was beating.
"He will need a replacement of blood," Briar told the crowd. "But, the bleeding has stopped for now."
One of the other machinists, standing by the telephone for the ordeal, made an announcement. "The county physician will be here in thirty minutes. If we can keep him alive that long, doc says he'll graft blood from the brother to revive him."
The awake brother, still shaking and wrapped in wool, turned around in astonishment. The only words he could form were a silent, weakly mouthed: "Thank you."