The Gembound: The Price of Keeping Chapter 112: Volume 4: Chapter 103 – The Weight of Names

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Volume 4: Chapter 103 – The Weight of Names Chapter 103 – The Weight of Names Bruno’s shoulders sagged in a way Yara hadn’t seen since the march north, not from his injury, not from exhaustion, but from a heaviness that lived deeper than muscle. He reached beneath his dented breastplate and pulled out a scrap of parchment, its edges curled, smudged with sweat and soot. “I did the numbers,” he said. Of course, he had. “Give them to me,” Yara said. He didn’t. He unfolded the paper instead, jaw clenching as though he were bracing against a blow. His eyes moved down the list, each line another weight. “Eighty-nine dead since Aramore,” Bruno began. “Counting regulars, Enhanced, and the ones who fell under the city tonight.” The number hit Yara like a hammer in the ribs. She said nothing. “Twelve in the assault on the walls and the palace,” Bruno continued. “Four in the cistern, fighting that thing that shouldn’t have existed. The rest… from Aramore, Saltwhistle, the march north, all the little skirmishes the histories won’t bother recording.” Yara exhaled, slow and silent. Bruno didn’t look up. “Wounded: thirty-four bad enough that Renn and Gayle will be working past sunrise.” A pause. “Most will live. Won’t all fight again. Some… might not see tomorrow.” His voice frayed on the last word. Yara followed his gaze to the eastern wall of the courtyard. Renn and Gayle had set up a field hospital beneath the burned archway. Canvas stretched between scorched pillars. Cots lined the ground in tight, miserable rows. A brazier smoked in the corner, its heat barely enough to keep the cold morning air from settling into open wounds. Renn moved between cots like a man walking on burning coals, his hands glowing faint red from overuse, fever-sweat running down his temples. Every touch of his bond to the injured hit him back twice as hard. Pain in, healing out. Again and again. Gayle worked differently. Not fast, not frantic like Renn. But steady, unsettlingly steady for a man who had been old enough to creak not long ago. His young hands moved with the certainty of eighty years’ practice, muscle memory reborn in flesh that no longer trembled. His breath was even. His back straight. His eyes were sharper than anyone remembered. He murmured under his breath as he worked part prayer, part instruction, part reassurance. “Stay with me now… good, that’s it… breathe through the pain… the body remembers how to mend…” A glow pulsed faintly beneath his palms when he touched torn flesh, not the violent green of Yara’s power, nor the hungry golden - green of Harry’s, but a gentler, steadier radiance. The healing draughts he had carried in life were gone now, consumed into him , made part of what he was. He closed wounds with that glow. Stilled fever. Pulled soldiers back from shock with quiet authority earned over decades. When bones needed setting, he used the strength of his new limbs, young, powerful, capable, and the technique of someone who had set bones in barns and battlefields long before Yara had been born. A regular whispered as Gayle passed: “Is he a priest or a surgeon?” “Both,” another answered softly. “And something more now.” Most of the wounded were stabilized. But not all. Two soldiers lay at the far end, their chests rising shallowly and unevenly. One barely more than a boy gut wound seeping steadily, every breath a choked gasp. Another, older gray in the beard and shoulders, slumped, lungs punctured, breaths wet and gurgling. A third, an Enhanced woman, burned nearly black from collarbone to hip, stared upward as if deciding whether fighting to stay in her own skin was still worth it. Yara moved toward them quietly. Gayle rose when he saw her. His young face looked wrong, weighed down by eighty years of memory behind twenty-year-old eyes. “These three…” he began softly. He didn’t have to finish. Yara knelt beside the younger soldier first. He blinked at her. Barely old enough to shave, and already dying. She laid a hand on his forearm. “