109? 112?

“There was an accident.”
“An accident?”

He nods.

“In the woods?”

“And what were you and a friend doing in the woods?”

Barry looks uncomfortable. I wait. He squirms a little. “Camping,” he says finally.

“With EI in the morning?”

He nods. I think his cheeks have turned a little bit pink, but it’s hard to tell in the dim light.

“And you know that we’re doing Exam reviews tomorrow?”

He nods again.

“So does this sound as bad a plan to you as it does to me?” I ask dryly.

“Listen, Kestrel, call me an idiot all you want. I had a good reason for being in the woods tonight.  But things...went wrong. And now he’s hurt, and I need you to come.”

“Can you bring him here?” I counter.

He shakes his head.  “Please, Kestrel,” he begs. “We have to go now.”

“Who is this guy?”

“You don’t know him.” And I can tell from his face that he realizes how ridiculous this all sounds. A friend that I haven’t met who is close enough for him to go out all night with in the middle of the week? It doesn’t add up. I have no idea what he’s hiding, but it’s got to be pretty big, and there is no way that I’m going to get involved.

“Look Barry, I’ll get you all the supplies you need. But I’d be stupid to go off into the woods in the middle of the night with some guy I don’t even know. I don’t know what’s wrong, and I don’t think that I could help. You need a doctor, not me”

“Kestrel, I do need you. I need your magic.”

I freeze. “What?”

“Kestrel, I know that you’re good at magic.”

I’m about to tell him that just knowing what we learn at school isn’t enough to do practical magic, but he doesn’t give me the chance.

“I haven’t seen you myself, but I know someone who has. I don’t think that anything short of magic will save my friend’s life. It’s either you, right now, or he dies.”

“Barry, I don’t know what you think you saw...” I begin, but my words die at the hard look in his eyes and the tip of his head. He really does know. “Who was watching me?” It comes out as a half-strangled whisper.

“Another one of my friends. It was an accident, really, but he says he saw you in the goat shed a couple of weeks ago. He said that your hands were glowing orange and then blue.”

My grandmother has a phrase she says sometimes about someone walking over her grave. That’s how I feel. How could someone have seen me? I don’t know which time, but if there was someone looking, he very well could have seen me in the goat shed with my hands glowing. It’s just that I thought I had been more careful than that.

“Barry,” I tell him, “I don’t know what your friend said he saw, but regardless, I don’t know how to heal anyone by magic.” That sounded good. The first part of the sentence is technically true, and the second part really is true. The question now is what his friends will do with that knowledge if I don’t come. “You seem to have a lot of new friends lately,” I tell him, trying to think of something to change the subject. It works. Actually, it works a little too well. His face turns white.

“They’re just...just cousins on my mom’s side of the family. There’s a family reunion. An they’re visiting. You know how it is. And you don’t know any of them, but they’ve been my cousins for a long time. So, will you come?”

Now I’m the one to raise an eyebrow and fold my arms. “Barry, I want to believe you, but this is too much. If I can help without doing anything stupid, I will. Do you want to come call a doctor? Eleanor is probably on the switchboard tonight, but if you yell loudly enough, you can almost always wake her up. We had to call the doctor last summer for Feldspar’s collar bone.”

“No,” he says immediately, holding out his hands. “No, a doctor will be too late. Don’t tell anyone. I’ll just...I’ll just go find someone on the way back to him.” He seems to think about what he said and adds, “In fact, one of the other guys did go for the doctor, but I thought you would be faster to come and help. So It’s taken care of, don’t worry about it.”

He looks upset, really upset. It almost changes my mind, but I can’t get over how dumb I would be to go off with a guy I only kind of know to go save a supposedly hurt friend that I’ve never met.  Assuming that I wasn’t kidnapped and killed by Outliers, my parents would kill me. My parents are the kind who find out things like that.

“My mom has some medicines,” I say. “I don’t even know what he needs, but I know where she keeps the jars to bring down fever, to stop bleeding, to ease pain. I can get those for you.”

He nods. “Thanks. I guess I shouldn’t have expected more.”

I rush to the workroom and find the right bottles. I also grab my mother’s first aid kit that she keeps ready there. I bring it to Barry.

“I’m sorry Barry.”

“Please come.”

I feel guilty, but there is a little part of me that stays logical. How easy would it be to sound this desperate if it were some kind of trick, some kind of bad situation? Too easy.

“I can go get my parents. My mom can come. Really, she’s the one you want if it’s that serious. I don’t actually know anything.”

He looks panicked. “No, Kestrel you can’t wake up your mom. You can’t tell anyone.”

“Why?” I ask. I’m kind of scared now, but I’m trying to make a joke out of it. “It’s not like you’ve got a band of Outliers in the woods or anything, right?”

“I’ve got to go.” He takes the basket from me and turns. “You won’t change your mind?”

I shake my head. This is just too wrong.

He nods and begins to run off in the darkness. The moon is pretty bright, so he doesn’t use a lumicube.  It would only cast shadows and keep his eyes from adjusting to the darkness at the speed he is going.

I shut the door quickly. Lock it. Bolt it. But I watch out the window even though I can’t see anything. Is someone really dying? Should I have gone with him? Or am I alive right now because I didn’t follow him?

It occurs to me that regardless of whether or not he’s telling the truth, I should go get my parents. And not in the morning. Now. I know that Barry told me not to, but I also know that he’s not being exactly honest with me, which definitely voids all obligations of honor where telling parents is involved.

I head up the stairs to my parents’ room. Rousing them takes a minute, especially my father, who sleeps as hard as he works. For one moment I stop, looking at his large, calloused hands. I look at my hands. Do I already have the hands of a farmer’s daughter? The skin is smooth, but underneath you can see veins, tendons. They are not rough yet, but they are strong. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or not.

“Dad,” I say. “Dad?”

He grunts incoherently.

“Dad I think I need your help.”

The message registers at last. Suddenly he is awake, up. So is my mother. “What is it?”

“You know Barry Hawkins?”

My father’s face is cloudy, cautious. He doesn’t know where this is going, but he can’t think of any good ending to me waking him up an hour after he went to sleep to tell him about Barry Hawkins.

“He was just here. He wanted me to go help him in the woods; he says that he has a hurt friend there.”

“You didn’t go with him did you?”

I look at him. He must not be completely awake yet.

“I mean of course you didn’t. You’re here.” He rubs his half-bald head with one hand. “Is he still here?

“No, but I thought I should tell you because he said that I don’t know his friend. And they were camping when there’s EI tomorrow. It’s not just a regular day either; it’s a review for the Exam. It just seems kind of strange, so I thought I should tell you.”

My mother puts her hand on my arm. “And you were wondering if he might be mixed up with Outliers?”

I nod.

“If there are Outliers here,” my father says, “that is important.” He smiles at me. “Thanks for telling me.”

In just a few minutes, my mother has called what seems like half our zone. My father has dressed and gulped some warmed-over coffee. Warming the coffee was my job, and he is in such a hurry that he doesn’t notice that his cup is steaming hot unlike the lukewarm stuff in the pot on the stove. The wood fire is burning, but it takes a while for a fire to gain momentum, and when no one was in the kitchen to see, I warmed his cup myself. I’m getting more efficient, so that my hands hardly glow at all when I’m focused on heating something. But I still consider it as practice rather than a good solution because my hands feel like they have been toasted afterward, and it makes me tired.

Even more tired, that is. I should have just gone to bed instead of trying to stay up late studying. Then Barry wouldn’t have found a light, and whatever happens to some guy in the woods wouldn’t be my fault. I pull my blanket tighter around me and press up against the warming cast iron stove. Is it really my fault? Was Barry telling the truth? What if he was? How could I go with him? I think again about running off into the darkness with a guy that I don’t know very well to save the life of someone I’ve never even met? What could I have done? Barry should have let me get my mother. She would have brought her bag of medicines. She knows how to stitch a wound and lower a fever.
Barry said that his friend was hurt. Will I ever know how? What if they ran into bears or wolves? Or was there a fight? Or maybe they were cutting firewood and the ax slipped. My mind races on, imagining one horror after another. What would it be like to be alone in the dark, waiting for Barry to come back, not knowing if he would bring help or not?

“Hey,” my mother says, her slippers flapping against the floor as she comes in. “Is there any way you could get some sleep? It’s an important day tomorrow.”

I shake my head. We both know that there is no way I’ll get to sleep for a while.

“You want to talk about it?”
“Mom, is there some guy dying out there? Is it my fault?”

“Kestrel, listen to me. First of all, I really doubt that this mysterious dying friend exists, but even if he does, you have to let people be responsible for their own choices. If he was fatally hurt, then he must have been doing something wrong. As much as you would want to help people, sometimes you can’t save them from the consequences of their own choices.”

“So it’s okay to just let him die?”

“I”m not saying that. But think about it. The whole thing is so absurd from start to finish. I don’t know what Barry was thinking. I do not want you to feel guilty for making the right choice. Even if Barry was telling the truth, and even if you had gone with him, what could you have done? What in the entire Archipelago made him think that you could keep someone from dying. You’re not a doctor.  He was either lying or he panicked, either way, you certainly did the right thing by getting us. Leave it to your father. He’ll sort it out.”

I almost ask her if she really believes what she just said or if she’s trying to make me feel better, but I don’t ask. I don’t want to know. The truth is, that I don’t know what’s true any more. Someone had to have been watching me. Maybe more than one someone. And maybe those people really were in the woods tonight.

And my mom does have a point about whether or not I could have helped, but she doesn’t know the truth, because she doesn’t know anything about my magic. Until tonight I would have thought that healing someone by magic was impossible too, but now I’m beginning to wonder. The more that I replay Barry’s words in my head to prove them wrong, the more my arguments fall apart. It wouldn’t have occurred to me to try, but now I think it just might be possible. Which means that everything my mother just told me is wrong.