Chapter Fourteen #2
Nine nodded and raised his golden eyes to fix on her blue ones.
She kept her word, using the thrall relic to keep herself and Idris safe during the surgery, adding no other command or condition.
If Nine wanted to walk away, he could. She realized this and how high of a risk it was.
They’d gone through so much to get him. They could lose him in seconds, and if she were to be honest with herself, after all he’d confessed, she didn’t think she had it in her to stop him.
The mill stood twenty paces from the house, on the bank of a fast-running stream that wasn’t fully frozen.
The current kept a narrow channel of dark water moving through the ice.
It was larger than the miller’s house, two stories tall, with a steep shingled roof.
The wheel on its flank was iron-bound wood, about twelve feet across. It hadn’t turned in a while.
Seraphina wrapped her arms around herself, tucking her chin against the wind.
Idris had his hand at her elbow to keep her from buckling.
She was swaying slightly as she walked, but she refused to stay in the house while he operated.
He might need her. Nine had gone ahead with the medicine chest balanced on his shoulder.
They stepped through the main door and found themselves on the milling floor. The space was large, maybe twenty feet by thirty, and in the center of it, there were two great millstones that sat one atop the other. Above the stones, a heavy iron chain hung from a beam, ending in a hook.
“This table will do,” Nine declared, brushing his hand over a heavy plank workbench that had been built to handle sacks of grain and flour. “It will hold me.”
Idris nodded.
“Move it toward the center, so I have space to walk around it.”
He sat Seraphina in a chair, tucked a blanket around her shivering frame, then started laying candles in strategic places.
With Saint Vivia’s relic dangling from the cord around his neck, he didn’t need them.
They were for Seraphina’s sake, though he’d made sure she was far enough from the operating table that she wouldn’t see the entire gore of the procedure.
He unpacked the medicine chest and laid out the tools he needed – scalpel, a catlin knife, bone saw and bone forceps, raspatory, a chisel and mallet, hooks, two other types of forceps, sponges and cloths.
He sent Nine to fill a bucket with water.
“Last chance,” he told Seraphina. “You don’t have to be here.”
“I do. Even if I’m not physically involved, we’re doing this together.”
Once everything was set up, Nine removed his tunic and lay on the table, eyes fixed on the cavernous ceiling. He held his legs straight and his arms at his sides. There was no point in restraining him, so Idris didn’t bother.
“Please close your eyes,” he told the revenant. “I’d rather…”
“Not stare into them as you cut me,” Nine finished for him.
With a smile, he closed his eyes.
Idris shook his head as he washed his hands. He couldn’t believe he was doing this. God in Heaven, the man was breathing!
He placed the scalpel at the hollow of the throat and drew it down in one steady line, over the breastbone, all the way to the soft spot below the ribs. The skin parted. He set the scalpel aside, took up the catlin, and pressed the blade through the tissue until the edge met bone.
Nine didn’t make a sound, didn’t even flinch. Idris looked up at him. He had his eyes closed, his face almost serene. He wondered where he’d gone, if he was imagining himself someplace else to block out the excruciating pain he was in.
That was when he saw that the skin at the top of the cut was closing. On its own. The wound he’d made only a minute ago was already sealing itself, the edges drawing together, pink and raw. By the time Idris’s gaze ran down the line, half of it had knit shut.
He clenched his jaw and started over. He would have to move fast, then.
He cut the line a second time, drove a hook into one edge and a second hook into the other, and hauled them apart so the flesh would not close again.
The breastbone had to come out. He cut along the right side of it, where the ribs met the bone, then along the left, slicing through the cartilage in quick strokes, because it was already hardening and fusing under the blade.
The raspatory went in beneath the loosened bone.
He leaned on it until the breastbone lifted, worked a hook into the gap, and pried the whole plate up and back.
At last, the chest lay open. Idris straightened up and wiped an arm over his sweaty brow, realizing too late he was smearing more blood onto himself.
The flesh kept creeping in at the edges, and the bone pushed against the hook, trying to settle back into place, so Idris took a deep breath, wedged it wide, and held it there.
Beneath it sat the sac that held the heart.
He cut it with a scalpel, his movements quick and precise, and folded it aside.
He leaned in to look at the revenant’s heart.
Idris froze.
His breath caught, and he found he couldn’t move a muscle, couldn’t blink. His mind tried to process what he was seeing but kept coming up short.
“What’s wrong?” Seraphina asked.
At the sound of her voice, Nine opened his eyes and stared up at Idris’s face.
“What’s in there, master surgeon?”
“Your heart.” Idris swallowed heavily. “Seraphina, come here.”
She slipped from under the blanket and approached the operating table. She had a splitting headache, every time she breathed, her chest rattled, and her vision was fuzzy and unreliable. She looked inside Nine’s chest, but it was simply too dark. She took a candle and held it close.
“I… I didn’t know this was possible,” was all she could utter.
The revenant’s golden eyes moved from Seraphina to Idris standing on both sides of the table, heads bent over his open chest cavity.
They were looking at a latticed heart.