Chapter Two #2
He nodded, turned on his heel, and purposefully walked out through the main entrance, ignoring everyone around him.
A fellow soldier grabbed him by the arm and shouted something at him, but he shrugged him off and continued on his way as if his life depended on it.
Maybe it did. Seraphina didn’t know how the thrall relic compelled the mind, how it bent it into obedience, what horrors the magic carved into the victim’s consciousness.
Idris stared at her like he’d done that first time they’d sat together under the linden tree. With suspicion.
“You give soldiers orders and they follow them,” he said. “Seraphina, what are you doing here?”
“I’m on your side.”
She started walking, and after a few seconds, she heard him follow. But he wasn’t done asking questions.
“You were part of the resistance,” he said. “Did you… But you’d never.”
“Defect? I did. I defected to the High Harvester.”
She bit the inside of her lip and prayed Idris would believe the lie and spare her having to use the thrall relic on him. She didn’t know if she could do it. No, she could. Even as she thought about it, she felt the pull of the bone. It wanted to be used. She didn’t want to do it.
When she’d realized she’d used it on Rune without meaning to, she’d sworn she’d never do that to him again. But then… The ledger, the list of parts that made up his body… She hadn’t had a choice.
Was truth more important than a promise made?
“All this time, I thought you were dead, when in fact you were…”
“Don’t. You’re not one to judge.”
Idris held up his hands.
“When did you join the Harvester?” she asked, trying to direct the conversation away from her person.
“A year and a half ago. Once you were gone, there was nothing left for me at the academy. I asked to be sent to the front where I thought I could make a difference, but all I was doing was patching men up, so they’d go back out and get themselves killed anyway.
Meanwhile, I was forbidden from performing dissections and studying the effects of the apex and greater relics the Harvester’s army used on the battlefield.
They called me ghoul and corpse-tender, and my own patients didn’t want to be treated by me.
How can we win when we turn our backs on science and shun the few ones who are willing to look beyond magic and superstition?
As if I’d do it if it weren’t necessary! ”
She could hear the hurt in his voice.
“So yes, I joined the High Harvester because at least he gives us, naturalists, the freedom to study the human body as we see fit, and orders his soldiers to let us do our jobs.”
“They still call you a ghoul,” Seraphina said.
“But they let me treat them. They aren’t scared of me, and even as they spit on my boots, they patiently wait for me to clean their wounds and stitch them up.”
Seraphina huffed, wanting to say more but stopping herself. If her lie was to stand, she needed to be careful with what she said.
“Where’s the medical tent?”
“This way.”
She allowed him to take the lead again, and they moved swiftly between tents, carts, and horses.
“If you defected,” said Idris, “then what about Matteo? Where is he?”
Seraphina wrapped her arms around herself, feeling Matteo’s journal press against her ribs.
“He didn’t make it.”
Idris nodded, and the rest of the way, they walked in silence.
Naturally, her friend had resented Matteo when Seraphina had become enamored with him and began excusing herself from their study sessions more often than not.
Then Matteo had returned her interest, and she’d started cutting their lunches and philosophical debates short, then stopped having lunch with Idris altogether.
Idris had never complained, never held it against her, but Seraphina had known.
She’d been a horrible friend. Fortunately, by that time, Idris was busier than ever, having become a fully-fledged surgeon, and that alleviated some of her guilt.
Now they were together again, the two of them against the world, and the first thing Seraphina had done was lie to him.
“Here.”
Idris pulled open the tent flap and Seraphina stepped in.
Inside, the air was packed with the smell of blood, vinegar, and the smoke from a brazier glowing in the corner.
The canvas walls let in a diffused light that made the shadows dancing in Seraphina’s vision look grey and sluggish, as if they were moving underwater.
She sensed the shape of a long wooden table in the center of the tent, with leather straps hanging loose at either end.
Along the walls were four cots, only one of them occupied.
Bandages and lint sat folded in a basket by the entrance.
A second table along the side wall held instruments laid out on a cloth.
Inside a wooden box, there were bottles and jars whose contents she could only guess.
Vinegar? Laudanum? More brandy, maybe, which Idris only used to disinfect wounds.
Beside the instruments, Seraphina noticed an impressive number of medical lattices.
They were folded neatly, and her fingers twitched with the need to touch them, run over the patterns to find out what they were.
Two nurses were attending to the man on the occupied cot. He was sitting upright, his head tipped back, a wad of linen pressed against his nose. One of them held his shoulders steady while the other spoke to him hurriedly.
“Hold still, will you? It’s already set. You only need to keep the cloth there until the bleeding stops.”
The man made an angry sound.
Both women looked up when they heard Idris and Seraphina come in. Their eyes widened, but Idris took charge, stepping up to the patient to inspect his nose.
“What happened here?”
“He got trampled in the commotion,” one of the nurses said. “Broke his nose.”
“Nothing too dire,” Idris said. “You can go now,” he told the man.
No one protested. The soldier was more than happy to put distance between himself and the man he surely called a ghoul, and the nurses had better things to do, like cleaning the blood he’d sprayed everywhere, and washing their hands.
Idris grabbed a bucket and gently placed the bundle that contained her eyes inside. Seraphina guessed it must’ve been filled with snow, which Idris packed lightly around the cloth. When snow and ice were available, nurses and doctors made sure to have them handy.
“We can do it here,” he said. “Now. It’s better to not wait.”
“No.” Seraphina stepped closer to him, keeping the relic trained on the shadows of the two nurses that were moving about. “Not here.”
“Sera–”
“Send them away, pack what you need–”
She was interrupted by the soldier who was in her thrall, who’d once again found her, and once again, didn’t have Rune with him.
He burst into the tent, panting, struggling to catch his breath.
He was covered in mud up to his knees, which she registered because the women immediately started scolding him.
“I couldn’t find him,” he wailed. “I’m sorry, I tried, I’m sorry… Please, please don’t…” He didn’t know what he was begging for. “Just… please.”
Seraphina could swear she felt the relic vibrate in her pocket – a small shudder of satisfaction at the man’s misery. She gritted her teeth and reminded herself for the hundredth time since she’d come into its possession that the more one used an apex relic, the worse it got.
“It’s fine,” she said, keeping her tone neutral.
On the inside, she was screaming. Where was he? It was all her fault. Stupid. Selfish. Shrew. She’d betrayed him, abandoned him, lost him.
“Tell me what you know.”
The soldier swallowed hard, his throat clicking. “There was a woman. They ran away together. They were seen…” He coughed. “They were seen near the northern wall. But I don’t know… I don’t know if it was him, because the others are talking about a revenant, and you never said…”
“It was him.”
She felt a shift in the air. The nurses stopped what they were doing, and next to her, Idris froze, not a muscle moving as he processed what this piece of information meant. He hadn’t asked who she was looking for. Now he would.
“Describe the woman,” Seraphina demanded.
“I didn’t see her with my own eyes, but the others say she was short of stature, with black hair and with a… like a… um…” He started gesticulating wildly, pointing at his own forehead. “Cut short here, across. Straight, like a line. The way the French wear it. Or the children.”
His description was far from eloquent, but it did the job.
Seraphina could imagine Briar with her fine, black hair tied in a high pony at the back and cropped straight above her arched eyebrows.
With her brown eyes, three flecks of gold in her left one.
She’d never seen her, but she knew her. She’d run her hands over her friend’s features in their shared room at Saint Vivia’s Convent, learning the curve of her thin lips and the slight bump on the bridge of her nose.
Briar had told Seraphina what she looked like, down to the number of freckles on her cheeks and the mole above her upper lip that she hated.
“She was limping, too, like she was hurt. I don’t know… I don’t know if that helps. And the revenant had no eyes, indeed.”
Seraphina heard Idris swallow hard beside her. She counted to five. She would’ve loved to count to ten, but there was no time for such indulgence. She turned to Idris, and in a level voice said:
“Please, pack what you need. We must leave. Now.”
“Seraphina…”
She reached out and took his hand in hers. Her fingers wrapped around his, feeling how smooth and clean they were, how they never trembled, no matter the battles he fought inside. The hands of a surgeon.
She tilted her head so Saint Vivia’s relic was trained on his face. His eyes met the place where hers should’ve been, where they were going to be once he reattached them. He parted his lips, and Seraphina parted hers, waiting for him to speak first.
In her pocket, the vomer bone vibrated in anticipation of a wrong answer.