As the Thane said these words, Doc took a good look at the faces of the seated Merchants, and was baffled by the petulant obstinance that seemed so pervasive. After several moments of this, he found himself badly wanting to leave this place, these people, their inbred bigotry and arrogance and stupidity. Instead, he was soon called upon to tend to the wounded. In a strange way he found solace in the infirmary, a place, almost a world in itself, where people and their conduct made sense.
In the following weeks, only a handful of refugees arrived at the gate. They did not seem reassured by Mirrindale’s solidity, but rather gazed suspiciously at the city’s fortifications, as though finding them untrustworthy. To make matters worse, small groups of mounted soldiers began to return, moving down the road at a slow walk, seemingly reluctant to enter the city. Though pressed for news, they said little, and kept to themselves.
Doc was told to expect wagons bearing wounded sometime soon. The young Elf soldier who told him this, said it in such a way as touched a deep sense of foreboding in the old man, and groaning inwardly, he thought, Why do I know this is going to be bad?
Vries, who was standing nearby, caught his look, and Doc saw unmistakeably in his eyes that the elderly Elven Healer was thinking much the same thing. He seemed, too, to be looking to Doc for some kind of reassurance. Doc well knew that Vries felt himself inadequate to the task ahead, but Doc worried that the task might very well be of a sort that no mortal human being was able to deal with, that Vries and those like him, who knew what was going on and was going to happen, were desperate for the unattainable.