‘Iola?’ he asked, moving his swollen lips with difficulty. ‘How come you’re—’

‘What a question!’ she interrupted him at once. ‘You’d better tell me how you’ve ended up here!’

‘We’ve brought our commander… Voivode Bronibor… He’s wounded—’

‘You’re also wounded. Show me that hand. O goddess! But you’ll bleed to death, lad!’

Jarre looked at her, and Iola suddenly began to doubt whether he could see her.

‘It’s a battle,’ said the boy, teeth chattering slightly. ‘You must stand like a wall… Steady in the line. The lightly wounded are to carry the heavily wounded to the field hospital. It’s an order.’

‘Show me your hand.’

Jarre howled briefly, his clenching teeth snapping in a wild staccato. Iola frowned.

‘Oh my, it looks dreadful… Oh, dear, Jarre, Jarre… You’ll see, Mother Nenneke will be angry… Come with me.’

She watched him blanch when he saw it. When he smelled the stench hanging beneath the roof of the tent. He staggered. She held him up. She saw him looking at the bloodied table. At the man lying there. At the surgeon, a small halfling, who suddenly leaped up, stamped his feet, cursed foully and threw a scalpel on the ground.

‘Dammit! Fuck it! Why? Why is it like this? Why does it have to be like this?’

No one replied to the question.

‘Who was it?’

‘Voivode Bronibor,’ explained Jarre in a feeble voice, looking straight ahead with his empty gaze. ‘Our commander… We stood firm in the line. It was an order. Like a wall. And they killed Melfi…’

‘Mr Rusty,’ Iola asked. ‘This boy’s a friend of mine… He’s wounded…’

‘He’s on his feet,’ the surgeon assessed coldly. ‘And here there’s a dying man waiting for a trepanation. There’s no room here for any sentimental connections…’

At that moment Jarre–with excellent timing–fainted dramatically and fell down on the dirt floor. The halfling snorted.

‘Oh, very well, on the table with him,’ he commanded. ‘Oho, a nicely smashed arm. I wonder what’s holding it on. His sleeve, I think? Tourniquet, Iola! Tightly! And don’t you dare cry! Shani, give me a saw.’

The saw dug into the bone above the crushed elbow joint with a hideous crunching. Jarre came to and bellowed. Horribly, but briefly. For when the bone gave way he immediately fainted again.

And thus the might of Nilfgaard was reduced to dust on the Brenna battlefields, and an end was put to the march of the Empire northwards. Either by being killed or taken captive the Empire lost four and forty thousand men at the Battle of Brenna. The flower of the knighthood and the élite cavalry fell. Leaders of the stature of Menno Coehoorn, Braibant, de Mellis-Stoke, van Lo, Tyrconnel, Eggebracht and others whose names have not survived in our archives, fell, were taken prisoner or disappeared without trace.