He ran the diagnostic on all five.
None of them were in immediate danger. All of them needed care. The physical injuries were the part he could read clearly — and he began moving through them quietly, the healing mana threading in one at a time, closing what could be closed. But the physical damage was not the worst of what the diagnostic was showing him.
It was the eyes.
He had not been trained as a doctor in his previous life, but he had seen a particular quality in their faces - an extreme and sustained trauma. Each women in front of him had it. Not the temporary look of shock — the deeper one, the hollowed quality of people who had been used in ways that took something from them that bruises and cuts did not account for. The light in their eyes was low. Not gone, not entirely, but low in the way that a fire went low when it had been burning in bad conditions for too long.
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He felt anger seep into his mind as he thought of what they had to endure by being those sick men's playthings. He put his parallel minds to work.
He had two problems running simultaneously — the diagnostic on five people and the assessment of the camp around him — but he split off a third channel for this specific question: what can I actually do. Not what should be done in an ideal world, what could he do right now with what he had. He had what sometimes felt like god-like power - what can he do with each type of magic he's come to master?
The healing affinity covered physical restoration. He had been expanding its applications for two years, pushing the boundaries of what the base affinity supported by understanding the underlying mechanism rather than just the surface spell. Plus his pre-existing knowledge of basic anatomy and how the human body worked helped him further his healing affinity.
Regeneration worked by reading a baseline and moving the body back toward it. He had used it for cuts, for the lung infection, for the accumulated magical depletion that had knocked Saya unconscious in the forest.
The baseline reading was the key. The spell found the body's own memory of its previous state and used that memory as the target.
He had never pushed the baseline back further than the immediate injury. But there was no theoretical reason it had to stop there. The body held older memories than the last wound. If he could read deeply enough and push the target back far enough —
He built the construct in about four minutes, which was fast for something he had never attempted. He checked it three times because he was putting this inside a person and anything that went inside a person got the full treatment. The principle was sound. The depth of the baseline target was the variable, and he set it with care: back to before they were brought here. The body's own memory of what it had been.
He was going to rebuild their virtue and purity. Or at the very least completely remove the last few weeks of trauma - as if it never happened, atleast physically.
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He looked at the five women.
'I need to tell you what I'm about to do,' he said, 'and I need your permission before I do it.'
They looked at him. Adrie's eyes were the sharpest. The mother had her daughter's hand. The two youngest were watching him with the particular quality of people who had learned to be very careful about what they agreed to.
'The healing I've been doing closes the surface damage. This is different. There is a spell I can cast that will restore your bodies to exactly how they were before you were brought here. Not just the injuries — everything.' He kept his voice steady and factual because that was what was needed right now. 'It will make it so that it never physically happened, the physical trauma undone. At the very least it can take back what was taken from you in that way. If you want it.'
The hollow was very quiet.
Adrie looked at him for a long moment.
'Will it hurt?'
'No, I promise,'
Then she nodded once, with the quality she brought to everything — direct, decided.
One by one the others nodded.
He cast it carefully, one at a time, reading each baseline before he pushed his mana in, watching the diagnostic confirm the restoration as it moved through each person. It was the most delicate healing work he had ever done. He did not rush it.
When it was done all five of them were still for a moment, analysing their own bodies and processing the specific sensation of a body that remembered itself again.
The mother pressed her hand to her own face and wept. The daughter made a sound that was not quite crying. Adrie sat very still with her eyes closed and when she opened them the quality he had seen in them had shifted, not gone but different — the fire no longer so low.
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He waited.
Then he said: 'There is one more thing I can offer. I have a spell that can take the memories of what happened here and remove them. Not all memory of the event — you would remember being taken, being held, being frightened. But what was done to you during it would be gone. You would wake up tomorrow knowing you were captured by bandits and rescued before the worst of it happened.' He paused. 'It's your choice. All of you, individually. I won't cast it unless you ask me to.'
The silence this time was different — private, the kind that happens when people are deciding something real.
The mother spoke first after looking at her daughter with tears of hope streaming down her cheeks. Please do it on my daughter. Make her forget.
Adrie spoke next. 'I want to remember. I want to be able to describe what I saw to the sheriff. I want to know what happened so I can know it won't happen again without my expecting it.' She looked at the others. 'But I don't speak for anyone else here.'
The third woman — the merchant's employee, older, who had barely spoken — nodded without looking up. "I want to forget,' she said quietly.'
He looked at the last two. The youngest ones.
One of them, the girl on the left, shook her head slowly. She had not spoken at all since they opened the cage. She was perhaps thirteen, with short brown hair that ended at her shoulders and hazel eyes that were too old for her face. She had been watching everything with the quality of someone cataloguing it all very carefully, as if understanding exactly what had happened was the only thing she had left to hold onto.
She shook her head again when he looked at her. No.
The girl beside her looked between them and said: 'Yes. Please.'
He cast the memory spell on the few who agreed, one at a time, the same care he brought to every construct that went into a person. He had built it that afternoon in ten minutes while the others were gathering the women's names, and he had verified it twice, and it worked cleanly — a targeted removal, the specific period of the captivity, the worst of what was inside it. Leaving the frame: taken, held, rescued. Removing what the frame had contained.
When he was done the four of them had a slightly unfocused quality for a moment, the brief disorientation of a timeline that had a gap in it where the worst hours had been. Then they settled.
He turned to the girl who had said no.
She was looking at her own hands. The healing and the restoration had done their work - plus an additional clean spell carefully and quietly cast by Lyra on each girl to remove the filt from their bodies — the physical evidence of what had been done to her was gone, and she seemed to be sitting with this fact and not fully knowing what to do with it.
'What's your name?' he said.
She looked up. The hazel eyes were wet but she was not crying yet. She was holding it with both hands.
'Maren,' she said. Her voice was steady in the way of someone who had decided to be steady because the alternative was something she couldn't afford.
'Where are you from, Maren?'
A long pause.
'I was traveling with my father and my uncle,' she said. 'We were going to visit my mother's sister in Calmere. The bandits stopped us on the road.' She stopped. Started again. 'My father and uncle tried to stop them. They didn't — they couldn't.' She looked at her hands again. 'They kept me because I was young.'
The hollow was very quiet.
'Is there family in Calmere? Your mother's sister?'
'I don't know her well. I met her twice. She might not want — I'm not sure she — ' She stopped.
He let the silence be.
Then something shifted in her face. The thing she had been holding with both hands gave way a little, and she slid from the low stool where she had been sitting to the ground in front of him, not falling but going deliberately, onto her knees, and she put her head down.
'You gave me back something I thought was gone,' she said. Her voice broke on it but she kept going. 'You didn't have to do any of this. None of you did. You saw us from the air and you came down and you — ' She stopped. 'I have nothing. I have no one now. But I have my hands and I have however many years I have and I swear to you — I don't care if it sounds like nothing coming from someone like me right now — I swear to you that I will spend them in service to you if you'll have me. Whatever you need. Whatever I can do. For as long as I'm alive.'
She had her face tipped down and her shoulders were shaking.
Arthur crouched in front of her.
He did not immediately tell her to stand up or that she didn't have to do that or any of the other things that were also true. He let her finish. He let the vow be said completely, because she needed to say it completely and because dismissing it in the middle of it would be dismissing her.
When she was still he said, quietly:
'I'm seven years old.'
She looked up at him. The hazel eyes were red.
'I know, I saw you in the woods before you rescued us,' she said. 'I don't care.'
He looked at her for a moment. He thought about what she had come from and what she was going toward and the specific situation of a thirteen-year-old girl with no family, alone in a town she barely knew, who had just watched four people choose to forget the last few weeks and had chosen not to. She can't survive on her own with winter fast approaching.
He thought: I cannot fix what happened. I already did what could be done about the physical part. The rest of it is time and safety and something resembling a future.
'Can you cook?' he said.
She blinked. 'Yes.'
'Can you learn things if someone teaches you?'
'Yes.'
'Then I'll talk to my parents.' He straightened up. 'Stand up, Maren. You don't have to be on your knees for this conversation.'
She stood up slowly. She was about Clara's height, which he noted with the part of his mind that was always noting things and filing them.
'This isn't a yes,' he said. 'It's a maybe while I figure out what yes would look like. You understand the difference?'
'Yes,' she said.
Her eyes had something in them now that had not been there ten minutes ago. Not quite the light he had wished back — that would take longer than a single afternoon. But the beginning of it, or the possibility of it.
He turned and went back to the others.