Chapter 28 – — Veilguard Field Manual, margin note, author unknown #2
He looks at me for a long moment. The moonlight is doing something to his eyes. The gold has gone warm. He’s so tired. I have never seen him this tired. And I think, watching him, that I am the only person in this entire kingdom he has told any version of this story to in a long, long time.
He drops his eyes and sets the bottle back on the nightstand without taking another drink.
“Tell me, Rose,” he says. “Why couldn’t you cut before today?”
He has done me the courtesy of changing the subject, but the subject has not actually changed at all. He has given me his worst thing tonight. And he is asking me in the gentlest way I have ever heard him ask anything for mine.
I pull my knees up to my chest and look at the wall.
There are so many things I don’t want to think about, so many things I have spent the better part of a year trying not to think about, so many nights in bed at Ashwell promising myself that tomorrow would be different.
I take a breath. “You’re not the only one who’s taken a life.”
He waits with that patient stillness that has unnerved me since the day I met him, and somehow tonight it doesn’t unnerve me at all. I start to tell him about Charlie.
“My father was the only healer in Ironfen, had been since before I was born. He had a clinic on the ground floor of our home. People came at all hours, he treated them downstairs, and most nights he’d come up the stairs covered in someone else’s blood and wash off in the basin before he came to dinner.
I worked with him in the clinic from the time I could cut bandages.
I was his apprentice, and I was going to be his partner, taking over for him when he got too old to stand at the table. That was the plan.
“A little over a year ago, we were finishing up a procedure after dark. A man from the next village had been brought in with an abscess in his thigh, and we’d opened him up, drained it, packed it, and sent him home in the wagon his wife had brought him in.
The procedure went fine. We were the only two left in the clinic, and the floor needed cleaning before we shut down for the night. ”
I lean over him and take the bottle from the nightstand and sip.
“There was a lot of blood on the floor, as usual after a procedure. Most nights we cleaned as we went, but the man had been bad enough that we hadn’t gotten to it.
I told him I’d handle the floor. He’d been on his feet for hours.
He sat down on the stool by the cabinet and started cleaning the instruments, and I went into the back for the mop and the bucket. ”
The vivid images of that night return to me.
“He stood up to put the last of the instruments back. He had three of the long forceps in his hand, the kind we used for deep retraction in larger procedures. I’d put the wet mop down on the floor in front of where he was standing, and I hadn’t warned him because I assumed he’d seen me put it there.
The floor was wet. He stepped where I’d mopped, and his foot went out from under him. ”
Draven goes still.
“I was facing the cabinet. I heard him slip and fall. The metal hit the floor, and then I heard a sound from him I’d never heard him make in my life.
When I turned around, he was on his side on the floor, and one of the forceps had gone into him, below the right ribs, at an angle up into his abdomen.
The handle was sticking out. He was holding it with one hand, like he was trying to keep it still. ”
I start to feel my pulse in my ears.
“It had gone in, up to the handle. He was already going pale and I was in shock like how is this happening? This freak accident.”
I take the bottle back and drink and keep it this time.
“He told me to help get him on the table. He told me to get under his shoulders and drag him, and somehow I did. I got him onto the surgical table, but the forceps were still in him. The blood ran off the edge of the table and onto the floor I’d mopped, and the sound of it hitting in steady drops was the loudest thing in the room for a long time. ”
I try to breathe normally.
“He talked me through the setup first. He had me wash my hands. He had me get out the suture kit and the lamp and the silk and the saline, and he told me to lay out everything I might need. I did it in the wrong order, and he corrected me. His voice stayed calm the whole time. He was already going gray, and his lips were going the color lips go when someone’s bleeding out, and his voice was still so calm.
He told me he was proud of me. He told me I was going to be all right. He was calm for the both of us.”
I shake my head.
“He told me what he thought had happened to him on the inside. He said the forceps had probably gone through the peritoneum and either nicked the liver or one of the vessels around it. He said the most likely source of the bleeding was a branch of the hepatic artery or one of the portal vessels feeding into it. He told me the procedure I was going to need to do, and he made me say it back to him before I started.”
I drink.
“He told me to extend the incision around the entry point so I could see what the forceps were touching.
I had to follow the tract of the forceps with my eyes and not my hand, because my hand would go where my eyes told it to.
He picked up the scalpel and put it in my hand and folded my fingers around it himself, because I was already shaking too hard to hold it on my own.
“I tried to extend the incision but couldn’t.
My hands wouldn’t stop shaking. I cut once badly, and the wound bled harder than it had been before, and he told me to stop and breathe.
He told me I had to do this for him. He told me I knew how.
He told me he’d taught me how. He kept saying my name over and over. ”
I have to wait before I can keep going.