Elaina had thought that the sudden rush of arousal she’d experienced with Royce at breakfast would make it nearly impossible for her to get any sleep. That had been her experience in the past, anyway. But this time, that wasn’t the case. Instead, fighting her way through fiends and sneaking past ghosts had left her exhausted enough that once she laid down in her bedroll, she was fast asleep.

If she dreamed, she didn’t remember any of it, waking several hours later feeling as though she had only just laid down. Around her tent, she could hear several men moving their tents and their gear. She would have to get up and do the same, she supposed, but when she attempted to move, she felt a wave of painful protest move up and down her whole body. Now that she’d rested and time had passed, her body seemed to have the good sense to give her a report as to all the damage it had suffered.

“Uhgnn..” Elaina groaned, rolling over slowly to whimper a little into the bedroll, “I should be dead.”

Every few minutes, the swordmage told herself it was time to get up. She had to get on with her day and move her things to where they were now making camp, and every few minutes, she remained where she was, completely motionless. After what was probably half an hour of this back and forth in her head, Elaina was finally able to pry herself from her bedroll and get going. It took her three times longer to get everything done. Every move she made caused some sort of protest from her body or a new ache and pain that she was discovering for the first time.

Horses had been brought up to help move things up to the bailey, and one of the workers had brought Elaina’s to her. She thanked him before he was on his way, and she could trek up the mountain path without having to haul everything alone. Judging by how painful the walk was alone, she couldn’t have imagined doing it with multiple packs on her back and her armor.

Inside the bailey, there was no sign of the bodies she had seen scattered about that morning. Even some of the debris in the bailey long before they arrived had been cleared in favor of forming a proper camp. This incarnation of the camp was much better organized than the first, with clean rows of tents going as far as she could see. She stopped to speak with a guard to see where she was supposed to set up. Elaina was surprised to hear that a space had been reserved for her somewhere close to the landgraf’s tent, and men were waiting to set up for her.

Sure enough, when she arrived at the spot, a couple of workers were ready and eager to unload the horse and set up her tent. Elaina wasn’t sure how it was possible, but the tent looked much roomier and more presentable after they had set it up, even though they’d used all the exact same materials. Perhaps she wasn’t as adept with this sort of thing as she’d originally thought. Had people been walking by her tent all this time, wondering why she was curled up in a dilapidated lean-to of a tent compared to theirs? It was an irritating thought that she had to dismiss quickly before it ended up sticking with her as one of those things she thought of years down the road for no reason, right before she fell asleep.

With her time freed up by the workers setting her tent up for her, she decided there was no reason left for her to avoid going to the healer’s tent. It was situated on the soldiers’ side of the camp, which wasn’t far from her relatively central location near the landgraf’s tent. When she arrived, several soldiers were laid out on blankets and canvas out front of the tent, most of them recovering from minor wounds. Some were eating, and others were playing cards with one another. Inside the tent was another story, however.

Those who had suffered much more severe wounds had been placed carefully on cots they’d brought along and those hastily constructed on the spot. Whatever brief optimism she’d felt about the state of the men outside of the tent swiftly left her at the sight of those inside. The soldiers here had suffered life-threatening wounds, incredible burns, or lost limbs. Some had bandages wrapped around their heads, with the fate of their eyes or faces unknown. Yet, despite being referred to as the healer’s tent, they had few on hand capable of actual magical healing. Royce was essentially it; she had spent much of her power in the battle itself, or so she had heard.

On the far side of the tent, Royce sat cross-legged behind a crate that served as an improvised desk. A medic knelt across from her, speaking quietly as the two sorted through a list of men on the mend and those who had passed. The witch looked up as Elaina approached, a faint smile gracing her lips. Even when tired and stressed, Royce’s face had a distinct mischievously inviting quality.

“There she is,” Royce declared with a wave of her hand, “The hero of the day!”

“Hero?” Elaina scoffed, “Hardly. It was a quest for bathwater, basically.”

The medic gave an amused snort as Royce waved off Elaina’s modesty, “Resius has been telling everyone of your heroics in the cistern.”

“He has?” Elaina glanced around quickly, “He’s alright?”

“Alright is a relative term,” Royce explained, standing up and motioning for her to have a seat on an empty cot, “But he’ll recover. I wanted to keep him in here, but the man is stubborn and insisted on hobbling his ass out of here about an hour ago.”

Elaina sat down on the cot and let out a long sigh. That sounded like Resius, alright. If he had the means to move, he would move, and no one could make him stay put. But hearing that he was well enough to be moving did come as a slight relief to her, despite the circumstances of it.

“Top off,” Royce smirked, making a slight motion with one finger. Elaina stared back at her in silence, arching a suspicious brow. “Entirely for healing purposes, I swear.”

Elaina reached down to the bottom of her tunic before pulling it up over her head in one swift motion, setting it to one side before shaking out her ginger locks. Royce’s eyes gleamed briefly before she repeated the motion with the one finger, “Bra too.”

She gave the witch a pointed glare but couldn’t maintain the facade of being indignant for long. There was no harm in letting Royce get a little peak while she did her job. Elaina removed the undergarment and set it on her tunic, sitting bare-chested yet again. At least this time, she wasn’t in an overtly public setting. It was just Royce and the medic that was assisting her. The young man had a much more professional approach than the witch did by far.

Despite her exotic amethyst eyes moving over her body with unabashed hunger, the witch was capable of multi-tasking at least and began her examination. Elaina’s body was in worse shape than she had realized. Much of the open wounds and burns she had accumulated over the last several days were closed and healing thanks to the potion, but her flesh was still a mottled mess of multicolored bruising. Royce pressed her fingers in a few different places, checking the state of her bones, not just in her torso but along her arms and legs as well. When the witch’s hand wandered up her inner thigh, Elaina caught it quickly, holding it in place.

Elaina cleared her throat, “Everything there is fine, I assure you.”

A little surprised at her sudden defensiveness, Royce relented, deciding not to press her luck with the woman that had been relatively open to her attentions up to this point. “Well, the damage isn’t as bad as I thought, but it’s still not great.”

“But you can fix it, right?” she glanced over her shoulder to the other seriously wounded soldiers, aware that Royce’s hands were straying suspiciously close to her breasts as she did.

“Yes, I have a few potions and tinctures that should take care of you,” she said, pulling her hands back as Elaina turned to face her again, “Unfortunately, I have to save the big stuff for the men here. I don’t specialize in healing, so using that kind of magic takes a lot out of me. This is effectively a line while I recover my energy.”

Elaina nodded in understanding, watching the medic go to a chest near the crate desk and rummage through it. “You brewed these potions yourself?”

“I did!” Royce said with a prideful smirk, “I had plenty of time to make preparations for the delve, so every day, I’d reserve a little of my energy for brewing up some potions and stocking up.”

“But we’re almost out,” the medic said as he retrieved a couple of bottles and vials, examining the labels before returning a couple.

“But we’re almost out,” Royce repeated, “I didn’t anticipate this many casualties this early on, to be honest.”

The medic handed three vials over to Royce before closing the chest up. Royce looked them over quickly to double-check his selection and then held them up to show Elaina one at a time, “This one will be for all that surface damage, scrapes, burns, and the like.”

She held up the second one, “This one will be for the bruising and deep tissue damage from being tossed around, falling, or whatever else you’ve been doing.”

Finally, she held up the third, which had an amber color with a bit of sparkle, “This one is going to be for the bones and the weakness inflicted by the sarglagon. It atrophies the muscles and joints to make it difficult to move. You’d normally recover with time, but we need every able-bodied fighter we can get right now.”

“What about them?” Elaina gestured vaguely to some of the other men with more severe wounds than her own, “Shouldn’t we give these to them.”

“It doesn’t work that way,” Royce explained, “these are measured responses. I don’t want to give you more than you need, but I also don’t want to give them less than they need. Incremental healing for serious injuries can do more harm than good, causing the tissue to close up in places I might not want. They need more powerful magic for tissue regeneration straight from the tap.”

Royce gave a little slap to her chest just in case there was any doubt as to who or what the tap in this metaphor was, causing her barely concealed breasts to jiggle ever so slightly. Elaina chuckled softly and nodded, “Alright, is there an order I have to drink them in then?”

“No, not in this instance,” Royce assured her as she handed the vials over. Elaina wasted no time popping the stoppers and throwing back each vial one after another. Not one of them had a decent flavor. Where Lenuta had taken special care to make hers easy to swallow with a lot of extra punch, Royce evidently didn’t give much thought to flavor. Either that or she liked the taste of whatever this was, and no one else had the heart to tell her how nasty it was. It was like a sweetness was buried in the formula somewhere, but it sat deep beneath layers of bitter and musty.

When the third of the vials was consumed, Elaina closed her eyes and let the feeling of her body mending overtake her. All three at once was quite the experience. It wasn’t quite as painful as being wounded in reverse, but it wasn’t something she could easily ignore. She sucked air in through her teeth as she swore she could hear a low crunching of bone in her side. When the pain finally began to ebb, she opened her eyes to see that the medic had moved on to check on the others while Royce had remained there to gawk.

“Yes, that’s much better,” the witch said with a satisfied look on her face, eyes savoring the sight of Elaina’s half-nudity in its healed state. “Now all that’s left is a bath, and you’ll be right as rain.”

“I’ll probably get one later, let everyone else have a turn first,” Elaina said, dodging the suggestion a little bit. The baths were very open and very public. With the soldiers, she doubted that they had not seen each other naked before. It was the nature of living this close to one another for so long. But she couldn’t bring herself to strip down with them and have to explain the quirk of her anatomy. So far, she had done alright in remaining on their good side. She didn’t want them to think differently of her for her...mutation.

Elaina leaned back on her hands, propping herself up, and pushed her chest out with a bashful smirk, “Get a good long look, pervert.”

Royce laughed, but it wasn’t a joke. Elaina was feeling a little bold now that she was recovered, now that she didn’t have all the errant aches and pains forming a constant background noise in her body and mind. It didn’t mean she was ready to mount the woman, but giving her a cheeky little show wasn’t a problem. It felt nice to have a moment even as silly as this one amid all the terrible, disgusting dealings with fiends and battle. It was perhaps a little juvenile, flaunting her tits for someone like this, but it was gratifying to be admired like this, even if just for a moment.

“Alright, you need to go before I get too distracted,” Royce admitted, making motions with her hand to shoo her away, “Free the cot up for someone who needs it, would you?”

“I suppose this wouldn’t be sturdy enough anyway,” Elaina noted as she put her clothes back on.

The witch halted mid-step to look back at her, “Sturdy enough for what?”

Elaina smirked as she arched a brow at her wordlessly. It took only a second for the witch to get what she was implying. She returned Elaina’s smirk with a little roll of her eyes before returning to her task. Perhaps, Elaina thought, it wouldn’t hurt to be a little flirtier like that in the future.

The rest of her day until dinner was filled with various menial tasks, assisting workers and soldiers with their duties and preparations. Not only did it help her to familiarize herself with the layout of the camp but also the people within it. There was a prevailing sense of exhaustion among the soldiers and the workers alike, nearly all of which had lost someone close to them in the last few battles that they had been in. Each was doing a fair job of soldiering on, but Elaina could see the edges beginning to fray in them. The victories came at such heavy costs that it seemed doubtful they could continue.

Reports from scouts that had been sent into the keep came back with no sign of ghosts, which struck Elaina as strange until she remembered the other channels the water had flowed into besides the baths. The water hadn’t only been purified; it had been blessed. If it ran through internal channels throughout the castle, the rank-and-file ghosts would be hard-pressed to manifest or have any influence around their power. She wasn’t sure how long that would last, but considering the level of power that Resius had put out with his ritual, she didn’t think it was something she would have to worry about just yet.

Just to be safe, Elaina shared this information with the landgraf back in her tent. Elsebeth agreed with her conclusion, deciding that blessed waters flowing through Willowridge was the most likely explanation. It also meant that the grip that any remaining fiends and undead had on the castle would weaken, and many would seek to flee to avoid direct contact with the deadly waters. To be on the safe side, Elsebeth wasn’t going to authorize anyone to stay inside just yet, though, until additional research could be done. If Resius made a swift enough recovery in the coming days, it would probably be him that either signed off on the keeps use or to caution against it.

It wasn’t until that night at dinner that she saw Resius again. Instead of taking their meals in the mess tent as they had for breakfast, many of the soldiers in the camp had gathered around campfires to keep warm while they ate. Trevik had provided them all with a hearty stew that assisted the fires in keeping the chill of the evening at bay while also being a meal that stuck to their ribs.

“You look ridiculous,” Elaina commented to Resius across the fire. His healing was far from complete, his skin a patchwork of healed skin and burns. He had a few tufts of hair hanging from the top of his head, but most of it looked like someone had gotten to him with a razor, and it was just beginning to grow back in.

“This the thanks I get for obliterating that sarglagon for you?” Resius said, feigning a bit of indignity.

“Oh, maybe if you had stuck around a little longer in the healer’s tent, you’d be in better shape, huh?” Elaina countered as she ate a spoonful of the stew, “Royce said you took off against her advice.”

Resius waved a hand dismissively as some of the others around the fire chuckled. He’d essentially brought this on himself, but they wouldn’t give him a hard time when he had given them a wealth of clean blessed water in a place where it was sorely needed.

“Is all that shite he’s been slinging all day true, then?” Herrog leaned forward on his knees from his spot on an old log.

“Uh, I don’t know what he’s been saying,” Elaina admitted, “I’ve been a little too busy. Not all of us have the luxury of lounging about and convalescing all day.”

Herrog’s face was stunned as he looked down at his bandaged leg and then over at Resius, who still had a good deal of bandages wrapped around his body. When his gaze returned to her, she could no longer maintain the mask of seriousness and broke down into laughter. He followed immediately after with extended deep guffaws of his own.

“He’s been telling everyone that the two of you killed a sarglagon living in the cistern,” Kitch said from the side of the fire opposite Herrog. Her whiskers twitched a little, but Elaina didn’t know the kyrsahn well enough to be able to say what that meant.

“Well, actually, what he’s been saying,” Trevik interrupted from his perch atop a nearby crate, “Is that you held off a sarglagon with a salt shaker while topless.”

Elaina blinked a few times and shrugged slightly, “That’s... not entirely inaccurate, I suppose. But it’s not like I didn’t have help or even an actual weapon.”

“Salt?” Kitch asked with a curious tilt of her head.

“Oh, yeah, I was reaching for something else and grabbed that instead,” Elaina chuckled a little nervously, “I figure if I get salt in my eye, it hurts like hell, but if you’ve got four eyes and your slimy like a snail....”

Elaina spread her hands in surrender to the laughter that grew around the fire now, “I mean, it makes sense, right? I just grabbed the salt and was like, bwaaah!” she imitated furiously working a salt shaker, despite it not actually having been that way. The laughter grew, which brought a smile to Elaina’s face. It brought a smile to everyone’s face. Particularly Resius, who watched her from across the fire with a peaceful look on his face for the first time since she’d met him.