Chapter 27 – — Professor Nestor, Lecture Notes #2
The dagger in my hand is too small for this, but there’s no time for anything else.
I plant my feet over Tomas’s father, bring the blade up, and scream.
The spineback adjusts at the last second. It veers. Its claws miss me by inches, and I feel the wind off its wing in my hair. My dagger snags on something as it passes overhead. The blade skips off bone, catches, then tears through membrane.
The spineback hits the snow ten feet from us with a sound like a falling tree.
It shrieks again and flails. One of its wings is half open and won’t fold.
Draven is on his feet in one motion, his blade out.
“Stay with him.”
He charges.
The spineback is already trying to take off again, flapping its undamaged wing and shrieking, the damaged wing dragging in the snow.
Draven crosses the distance, and the spineback turns its head toward him, the upside-down beak opening, the long ribbed tongue lashing out, and Draven sidesteps it cleanly and brings his blade up under its upside down head.
The blade goes in, all the way to the hilt.
The spineback shrieks, then the sound cuts off, and the body collapses.
Draven yanks the blade out and turns, scanning the sky.
“Draven.”
“I know.”
“It’s still up there.”
“I know.”
He takes one step toward me. That’s when the second spineback drops out of the snowy sky.
It dives at Tomas’s father.
I see it a half second before it’s on us, and I lunge across the body in the snow, my arms going up over Tomas’s father’s head, my own face turning into the curve of my arm, and as I push forward, my boot catches on something hard buried under the powder.
My ankle rolls.
A bolt of pain shoots up my leg, and I scream and fall over Tomas’s father. The spineback’s claws come down where I just was, and the wind of its wings hits me. I cover my head with both arms and brace.
The strike doesn’t come.
I hear Draven move. The spineback shrieks above me, close, and then Draven is there, his blade driving into the creature’s chest. I feel the impact through the ground. The spineback flails. Draven shoves the blade in deeper.
Behind him, a third spineback drops out of the sky.
I see it through the gap of my arms. It’s coming at his back.
“Draven!”
He’s already pivoting but can’t turn fast enough.
The spineback’s claws rake across his wing in one long downward pass, the bone spines catching, and Draven makes a guttural sound torn from somewhere deep in his chest.
He twists the blade out of the second spineback, lets it fall, and drives the same blade up through the chest of the third spineback as it tries to climb back into the air. The point of the blade comes out the spineback’s back. Both of them are dead.
The bodies hit the snow.
Draven is breathing hard, his wings trembling, his shoulders heaving. Then he turns to look over his own shoulder at his wing.
He can’t see it from that angle.
I push off Tomas’s father and try to stand.
My ankle gives.
I yelp and go back down on my hip in the snow, gripping my leg, biting down on the pain. Draven strides toward me.
He drops into a crouch and yanks the pack open.
“Rose.”
He pulls a scalpel out of the pack and pushes it into my hand. His fingers wrap around mine and the blade, and he holds on for a beat longer than he needs to.
“You have to cut the corruption out.” His eyes meet mine. “If you don’t get all the rot, my wing won’t heal. Do you hear me?”
I hear him.
Fuck, I hear him, and I look at the scalpel in my hand and feel my fingers start to shake.
I haven’t been able to cut since my father died, and now Draven is on his knees in front of me with corruption spreading up his wing, asking me to do the one thing my hands have refused to do for over a year.
“Draven,” I say, already feeling defeated.
Nella’s wing.
Black veins under the membrane. Her eyes. The bone saw I couldn’t lift. The way her face went still when the spreading reached her chest.
My father’s chest. The last look in my father’s eyes before he passed.
“I know what you’re going to say.” Draven’s fighting to stay calm. “I’m asking you anyway.”
The bell tolls above us, and I want to curse it. The twisted creatures are dead. I’m tired of hearing it.
The snow keeps falling.
I look down at the scalpel in my hand and up at his wing where the dark is already starting to spread, blue-black blooming around each torn place where the spines went through. I know I have to cut it out fast, or he will be just like Nella. If it has any chance at healing quickly, I need to cut.
My hands are shaking so hard I can barely keep hold of the scalpel.
He turns and gives me his back, and I see the full damage. It’s not as bad as Tomas’s father’s. It isn’t good either.
There are only two barbed spines.
I grab them and pull them out fast, tossing them into the snow.
Draven doesn’t make a sound.
I stare at the black veins spreading around the two gashes in his wing.
My hand won’t move.
Every time I cut, people die. Every time I don’t cut, people die.
My father with his hand on my hand. Nella with her eyes still open looking at the ceiling.
The way no one looks at me the same after…
I can pretend I am still a healer, because I am in school, but I am not a healer anymore.
I am a girl with shaking hands who watches people die.
I’m going to pass out. I’m going to pass out on the man I’m supposed to be saving. I can hear my own breathing and cannot make it slow down.
The scalpel is so heavy.
It feels like I’m in the clinic. I’m at the table. My father is looking at me and waiting for me to —
“Rose.”
I flinch.
Draven’s voice is sharp.
I drag my eyes up.
He has turned his head and is looking at me over his shoulder. His eyes are red at the edges, brighter than before, and his jaw is set in a way that is not patient.
“I don’t have time for this.”
“Draven, I —”
“Cut.”
“I can’t.”
“You godsdamn well can! Pick up your hand. Put the blade against my wing. Cut.”
“Draven, you don’t understand—”
“I understand fine,” he says through his teeth.
“I understand that I just killed three twisted creatures for you, I understand that I am bleeding corruption out of a wing I cannot reach, and I understand you are about to let me die because some part of you is still holding on to some past trauma, but I am here now and need you to cut.”
I feel dampness on my cheeks. I didn’t know I was crying.
“I can’t —”
“Maelis, look at me.”
I look.
His eyes are red, and his face is gray under it, and there is sweat at his temples, and he and I both know he’ll never fly again if I don’t do something and fast.
“If I die in this snow because you couldn’t cut, I am going to be very disappointed in you.”
I laugh despite being a sobbing mess.
“That’s not—”
“Cut, Rose.”
My hand is still shaking. The scalpel is still heavy. My breathing is still too fast.
But there is something underneath the panic.
I want him to be okay.
I want him to live. I want him to fly, and the wanting is louder than the panic.
I lift the blade.
I touch the tip to the membrane inside the spreading dark.
My hand shakes. The blade slips. A bead of red wells where it shouldn’t, in healthy tissue, and I jerk back like I’ve burned myself.
“Fuck,” I sob. “Draven, my hands won’t —”
I feel a small weight on my shoulder and look over.
Poppy appears for the first time since last night without me noticing. She is climbing carefully down my arm, her tiny hands gripping my sleeve, her dark eyes fixed on mine.
She reaches the back of my hand.
She steps down and stands on her back legs, stretching her arms up until her tiny paws are over my fingers where they grip the scalpel.
They are so warm.
Something inside me goes quiet.
Poppy’s tiny hands push mine closer to Draven’s wing, and I focus on her warm paws. Her hands are on my hands the way my father’s hands were on my hands, and somewhere inside the panic, something my father taught me a long time ago surfaces. “Steady hands, Maelis.”
I lower the blade.
The scalpel finds the edge of the corruption.
My hand stops shaking.
I cut.