"Two hundred stones here, three hundred there—you'll bankrupt us," he teased Lyan. Yet his eyes lingered on a field medic binding a child's ankle with strips torn from her own apron.
"Strange," he said a moment later, voice quieter. "How fast folk remember life. Like war was a fever dream." He nudged a broken door aside so a pair of nurses could push a stretcher through.
They came upon a schoolhouse—walls pockmarked, roof half-collapsed. Once it had rung bells at dawn to summon children for loyalty chants to the Serpent Throne. Now those bells lay twisted on the ground, serving bowls ladling stew for the wounded. The hallways echoed with coughs, not anthems. A dozen pallet beds lined the cracked flagstones, their occupants swathed in linen dark with antiseptic herbs.
