Chapter 27 – — Professor Nestor, Lecture Notes
Chapter Twenty-Seven
“The hands remember what the mind has tried to forget. Sometimes this is mercy. Sometimes it is the worst kind of cruelty.”
— Professor Nestor, Lecture Notes
I pull my cloak on and meet Draven across the nave.
He’s at the window, his palm flat against the cold glass, his head tilted in that way that means he’s listening to something I can’t hear yet.
It’s early, so early there’s barely any light.
Neither of us bothers going upstairs to talk to the seamkeeper.
We both know he’s good for nothing but observing.
Noctis paces behind us. I reach for the backpack and throw it over my shoulder.
“Shit,” Draven says, it under his breath, his eyes locked on something through the snow.
I hurry to the window beside him.
“What is it?”
“That kid’s father is out there with an axe. There’s a couple of other men with him.”
I squint into the gray. The square is mostly empty.
Most of the houses are dark, shutters closed tight, the bell tolling slow above us.
But near the second-closest cottage, I can make out three shapes against the snow, moving in a loose ring, weapons drawn.
The man in the middle is recognizable even at this distance by the breadth of his shoulders. Tomas’s father.
“They must be trained to defend the village.”
“These people would be better off barricading their front doors and waiting for the twisted creatures to pass.” Draven stalks to the second window, his eyes scanning the rooftops. “Out there, they’re just getting picked off.”
That must be why the village is so deserted. These people don’t have any real help. One of the other men has a dagger out. The third has a bow drawn and is sweeping it slowly across the dark sky. They keep looking up. Something is up there that I can’t see.
The bell tolls again, and I wince.
The man with the bow lifts the weapon higher, and then something whips against the dark above the rooftops, a shape too big to be a bird and too fast to be anything that should be in the sky.
It folds, collapsing in on itself in midair and becoming a sharper shape, dropping toward the men in the square so fast that my breath stops in my chest.
“Oh fuck!”
I’m running before I’ve given it much thought.
I’m out the door and into the cold. Snow swirls thick across the square. My boots sink into the powder up to the shin. The dark thing is dropping out of the sky toward Tomas’s father, and there’s nothing I can do but run.
It strikes him before I’m halfway across the square.
I see it for one second, wings spread wide, longer than a man is tall, the membrane between them stretched so thin I can see the gray of the sky through it. A body that shouldn’t be that long. A tail whipping in a long boneless curl that ends in something hooked. And the head is upside down.
Holy hell. The fucking head is upside down. The beak is opening at me from below, and inside the beak is a tongue, long and ribbed.
Then it’s on him.
The strike knocks Tomas’s father onto his stomach in the snow. The creature lifts off in the same motion and disappears back into the snowfall above the rooftops, wings beating with the sound of the wind.
The other two men shout. The bowman wheels around firing into the sky, and the arrow goes nowhere. The man with the dagger drops into a crouch over Tomas’s father, his eyes everywhere at once.
“Godsdamnit, Rose.”
Draven passes me before I’ve registered him, blade out, his other hand raised toward the sky in a gesture I don’t understand.
Noctis bolts past me on my left. He skids to a stop near the men, snarls once at the sky, and then hurls himself into the tree line beyond the cottage.
I’m at Tomas’s father in three more strides. I drop to my knees in the snow beside him.
It’s so bad.
His coat is ripped from shoulder blade to hip in three long parallel tears.
The blood is steaming in the snow around him in pulses, which means his heart is still pumping, and the cuts are deep enough that I can see something pale underneath.
Bone, maybe rib, I can’t tell yet and don’t have time.
He’s wheezing, face down, one cheek pressed into the snow, and there is a noxious smell coming off the wound.
The spineback’s spines were in the wound. I remember learning about this creature in Professor Nestor’s class. Translucent wings, covered in barbed spines, and they hunt in pairs.
Fuck.
I can see the barbed spines that broke off in the parted muscle, three or four shards each the length of my finger, and around each shard the skin has started to do something I do not have a word for. A faint blue-black ring is spreading outward from each piece of bone…corruption.
I reach for his shoulder to move him.
“Don’t,” he gasps into the snow, and the sound of his own voice makes him cry out from the pain.
“I know. I’m sorry. I have to look. Can you hear me? Stay with me. Where’s Tomas?”
“I told him to stay inside with his mother.” His voice is gravel. “Heard the bell. Came out to…to draw it off the houses.”
“You did well.” I’m reaching into my pack already. My hands have started to shake but are still moving.
Above us, somewhere I cannot see, something shrieks.
The bell tolls again, and Draven drops to his knees next to me.
“Rose, package the wound. We need to move.”
I shake my head. That’s not what our training is. Packaging is for clean cuts.
“There are barbed spines in the wound.” My voice is low so the men don’t hear. “Corruption is already visible.”
Draven goes still. He takes one slow breath, nods once, and takes the pack from me. He shoves one of his daggers into my hand.
“Cover my back.”
I nod, in disbelief he’s trusting me with watching his back. I’m even more thankful he didn’t tell me to cut the corruption out myself, because we both know how that would have gone. I whirl around and search the snow and the rooftops for the spineback.
“Do you know how many there are?” I shout over the wind at the two men.
The bearded one with the bow shifts his weapon. “I’ve only seen two.”
His eyes are tracking the sky. Then they snap past me, and I watch them go wide.
He isn’t looking at the sky anymore.
I flip around.
A twisted polar bear is coming toward us across the snow.
Easily over a thousand pounds, it pauses ten yards out and lifts its snout into the air, taking long deep inhales, like it’s trying to figure out what kind of meal we’ll make.
Its ears are too long. Something black is oozing from the corners of its eyes and running down its face in slow streaks, staining the matted white fur in long dark tears.
The eyes themselves are bright red, and it’s looking at us like it wants to find out what’s underneath our skin.
“Draven.” I reach behind me without taking my eyes off the bear, my hand finding his shoulder.
I don’t know if this is one of those times when you keep eye contact or one of those times when you don’t.
We haven’t covered twisted polar bears in class.
If they’re anything like normal polar bears, this one definitely wants to know what’s inside us and probably wants us for breakfast on top of it.
“Kind of busy, Rose.”
I grab the top of his half up bun and yank his head sideways so he’s looking at the bear.
“Oh.”
Behind us, the two men break and run for the nearest cottage.
I don’t know whether to call them cowards or smart. They left their friend face down in the snow.
The bear lowers its head. Its red eyes lock onto mine. It charges.
I have no time to react. I plant my feet in the snow and bring the dagger up in front of me, and Draven gets to his feet beside me. His wings burst out of his back in a flash of darkness so fast I feel the air pull around us.
He sweeps his other arm forward.
Shadows pour out of his palm.
I can’t look at the bear anymore. I’m staring at him, awestruck, as hundreds of small dark shapes peel out of his hand into the air around him.
Hundreds of bats. Shadow stretched into wings and body and teeth.
They condense in a wave above his head and pour past my shoulder in one long, shrieking cloud.
I whip around.
The bear is already trying to flee.
It’s halfway turned, plowing back toward the tree line, hundreds of small shadow shapes digging into its back and shoulders and face. Black tears run down its fur. Black wings cling to its head and rip at its eyes. It bellows and crashes through the snow into the trees.
A black streak shoots past me at ground level.
Noctis hits the bear’s flank in a leap, his jaws frothing, and locks down on something with his teeth.
The bear is swallowed by darkness as it disappears deeper into the forest. Wolf and shadows and bear and snow, gone.
“Maelis.”
I turn at the sound of my name. Draven glares at me.
“Cover me, or he’s going to die.”
I nod.
He drops back to his knees beside Tomas’s father.
He’s already pulled the spines out of the wound.
Long dark slivers lie in a pile in the snow next to him, four of them, five.
He’s cutting away corrupted tissue with quick, efficient strokes like he’s done this before.
He has a small pouch open in his other hand, and he’s pressing powder into the open cuts, one after another, sealing the bleeding without stitches, because there isn’t time for stitches.
Tomas’s father has gone limp under his hands, passed out I think from the pain, I hope.
I turn my back on them and face the storm.
I can still see the dark shape moving in the trees. The shadow bats are dispersing now, returning to nothing the way they came from nothing. Noctis’s tail flicks once where I can see it through the gaps in the trunks and then goes still.
The bear is not coming back.
Then I hear a shriek.
It comes out of the snow above the rooftops, and I look up. The spineback is already in its dive.
It folds in on itself in midair and drops at us like a thrown stone, wings collapsing in toward its body, tail whipping behind it, the upside-down beak opening as it falls.