Of all that host of guests, only a handful remained calm, working white-lipped and grim-faced, as Kero worked, trying to snatch a few more lives back from Lady Death.

One iron-spined woman patted Kero’s shoulder absently as she hurried by, eyes already fixed on the armsman laid out on the floor beyond the girl. With a start of surprise, Kero recognized the granite-faced matriarch of the Dunwythie family, a woman who’d never even nodded in Kero’s direction before this.

Not that it mattered. Nothing mattered, except to stop the blood, ease the pain, straighten the broken limbs. There wasn’t a whole, unwounded man-at-arms in the keep; there wasn’t an unwounded male except those few menservants who’d fled to the kitchen.

Anyone who had resisted had been killed out of hand. There were young boys and women numbered among the dead and wounded—some of the dead still clutching the makeshift weaponry with which they had fought back.

Kero had long since passed beyond mere numbness into a kind of stupor. Her hands, bloodied to the elbow, continued to work without her conscious direction; her legs, aching and weary, carried her stumbling from one body to the next. Nothing broke the spell of insensibility holding her—until the sound of her own name caught her attention. Then she felt someone shaking her and looked up as reality intruded into the void where her mind had gone. Those hands had pulled her reluctantly back to the here and now.

She blinked; two of Dierna’s cousins were tugging at her arms, one on either side, weeping, and babbling at her. She couldn’t make out what they wanted, they were absolutely incoherent with hysteria. They pulled her toward the dais where the high table had been, sobbing, but before they had dragged her more than a few steps, she heard a young male voice she knew as well as her own raised in shrill curses.

She pulled loose from them and half ran, half staggered, toward the little knot of people clustered about one particular body.

The voice cursed again, then howled, just as she reached them and pulled someone—Cook—away from the figure stretched out on the floor.

It was her brother Lordan, young face twisted with pain, eyes staring without sense in them, ranting and wailing as Wendar bound up a terrible wound in his side.

The Seneschal looked up as Kero dropped to her knees beside him, and then looked back to his work. “It’s not a gut-stab,” he said, around clenched teeth. “It missed the stomach and the lungs, Kelles only knows how. But whether he’ll live—that I can’t tell you. Without a Healer—”

He didn’t have to finish the sentence. Kero knew very well what his chances were without the help of magic or a Healer’s touch. The wound itself probably wouldn’t kill him, but blood loss and infection might very well.

There was nothing she could do for him that Wendar hadn’t already taken care of. She felt oddly helpless, angry at her own helplessness, wanting to do something and knowing there was nothing productive to be done. She got slowly to her feet to hover just on the edge of the little group, trying to think of anything that might increase Lordan’s chances.