#Chapter 49: Council Room

Evelyn The scent of blood still clung to everything. I’d scrubbed myself raw, and still, the smell lingered in my nose. I wondered if I would ever feel clean of it again. It didn’t matter how many days had passed since Jesse and his rogues had torn through our lines. No amount of bathing, salves, or layered fragrances would cleanse the scent from my skin, and it continued to layer the air days after the bodies had been removed. The fighting had ended long ago, but the work in the medical tents hadn’t stopped. If anything, it had grown more extensive and exhausting. Just as I had never seen a battle quite at the scale of this latest rogue attack, I also couldn’t remember ever seeing so many wounded come to me wailing and bleeding. The adrenaline had faded from these soldiers, leaving them weak and utterly at my mercy. Now there was just pain with a sense of permanence. And they all came to me and the rest of the medical team because we were supposed to be the ones who solv