107

[From 103, 109]

[107]

My feet beat on the ground, blood pounds in my ears, but there is also the thump of boots behind me. I try to separate the sound, to tell how close it is without turning around.

Trees thin and the small wood gives way to scrubby grass and sagebrush. They are low, and I leap over them rather than dodge around. From the noise behind me, I’d guess that he crashes straight through.

I ignore the stretch of a stitch in my side. I try to breathe. My face is a grimace as I push myself to go faster.

And then smack. I’m falling; I can’t breathe. His weight smashes my face to the ground. Something hurts; everything hurts; I can’t tell what. I twist, kick. His arms are around my waist, pulling me upright.

“Stop. Just stop!” he roars. “You have to help me. Kestrel, it’s me, Barry, from EI.”

“Let go,” I mean it to be loud, but it comes out as half cough. Still, he lets me loose, and I crawl a few steps away. As I turn to look at him, I taste the blood, gingerly prod my lip with my tongue to see how deep the cut is. Deep enough, but my teeth didn’t go all the way through. I spit blood on the grass.

The light from his lumicube is in my eyes, too bright in the darkness. At least he was telling the truth. “Barry, what is going on?”

“Come back with me. You have to, I need your help. Someone was hurt. Really hurt.”

This is a bad dream. It can’t be real. I can’t make it seem real. I should be in my room studying or sleeping. And yet I find myself following him back to where flames still licks at the trunks of a couple of trees. Fortunately there are few cottonwoods and mostly green willows.

Another young man, a dark shadow comes toward us. I tense, ready to run again if I need to.

“Grant,” Barry says, “where is he?”

As he nears the glow, I can tell that Grant isn’t in great shape either. He is holding his arm, which doesn’t look right. There is a shiny spot on his coat sleeve that could be wet.

Grant nods his head toward a low tent. “Over there. Yarrow’s with him.”

We walk over, and I see that the the tent is just a tarp draped over a tiny frame, low to the ground.

“Yarrow,” Barry calls softly. “Can you come out for a second?”

A tall, thin girl crawls backward out of the tent. She reaches out her fingers toward Barry and then turns her head toward the tent.

“Bad?” Barry asks.

Her eyes never leave him. One curt nod. There is something about the lack of emotion on her thin face that frightens me.

“Let Kestrel see what she can do,” Barry says. “Can you get bandages, water, whatever he needs?”

She glances once at me,  then nods again and walks away.

“Go ahead,” Barry tells me, gesturing toward the tent.

“Barry, what do you expect me to do?”

“Just get in there, and then we’ll talk,” he says. Seeing what is in that tent is about the last thing that I want to do right now, but the tone in his voice is not a good one to argue with. I hesitate, but I already know that he can run faster than I can.

There is only enough room for the hurt man and me kneeling next to him. Barry crouches in the doorway, holding a lumilamp. It casts shadows from below that mix with the ones on his lumicube and make him look ugly and evil rather than just worried. He raises the lamp a little so that I can appreciate the red spreading over the lower part of the man’s shirt, and spreads across the top of his pants. The cloth is ripped on his hip, ragged edges that might be cloth, might be skin, or both. I wonder if I will throw up or pass out, but I am strangely calm. The tarp rubs against my back, and I wish it would stop.

“So what do we do?” Barry asks.

“What do you mean? I don’t know.” But he looks at me like I should be a part of this.

“Kestrel.” His face looks green-gray, and I wonder if it’s just the light. “Look at him. I know that you know about magic. Your grandmother does all that herb stuff. If you don’t know what to do, he’s going to die.”

I assume that he means that I’m good at school magic, because there is no way that he can know about the practical kind, the forbidden kind. And yet, why would he be so determined to get me here. I look down. Either way, I don’t know what to do. I have no idea what to do. “Barry,” I start. “It’s not the same thing. Magic is energy, not medicine.” I’m about to lose it. I’m breathing too fast. I can feel the texture of the cloth under my hands as they rest on my knees. I avoid looking at him again, but I can’t stop hearing his breathing, his little moan of pain.

“Energy? Then give him some. I don’t know. Try something. I can’t even sew him up, and if I just wrap a bandage around that, he’s going to die. I know it’s not enough. So do something.” He grabs my arm and gets close to my face. “Get creative, but do something. He can’t die. Not tonight.”

And maybe I’m scared or inspired, or maybe I just don’t want his death to be my fault. I swallow and reach over to him, gently lifting his shirt. I ask Barry for a knife, and I carefully cut through the waistband and shove my gagging back down into somewhere deep inside of me where it won’t bother me tonight, not right now--though I know I’ll have to pay for it later.

Whatever it was that cut him didn’t just slice a red stripe in his hip; it ripped part of it out. I can tell that much since a big chunk of muscle is just gone, and the skin is ragged around the edges. Even if my grandmother had taught me how to use the special curved needle and the black thread that she uses, I still wouldn’t be able to make the ends meet.

My hands are shaking, but I reach out and place two fingers on the wound. I close my eyes and feel a spark. I can still see it on the inside of my eyelids, real or imagined, I don’t know. I’ve never used magic for more than lights, for fires, for moving small things. Not like this.

I have just a bit of an idea. If I could apply the principle of Wertenhouser’s Theory to his muscles, maybe they could move close enough together that I could at least slow the bleeding. Maybe I could find the blood vessels and close them. As I start to think in terms of mathmagics rather than blood, I can calm my breathing. I can see the small tubes that are letting so much blood free. I don’t know how, but I can see them, not see really, but feel in my mind the shape of them. I can feel the pulse, but maybe that’s just a guess or what I would expect to be there.

The trick now now is to tell them what to do. That’s the problem with mathmagics in general is not harnessing the energy, but focusing it for a specific purpose. That’s what they use machines for--and as I debate with myself, more of his blood soaks into the grass beneath us.

“Close,” I tell his veins. My fingers tingle, but nothing much happens. I feel an alertness, though, as if his body is listening. “Ciro,” I try in Galliun. And the tingling spreads. “Ciro,” I say again, this time louder, willing energy to move from my center and down into my hands. “Ciro.” I feel the veins begin to tremble, and the open edges press together. The bleeding slows to a drip. I breath out. I open my eyes. The raw meat that was once his leg is still there, but the rubbery little tubes that look like straws or balloons gone wrong have pinched themselves shut. I lift my bloody hands, not knowing where to put them.

I look at Barry. He looks at me. Neither of us dares to hope. We don’t say anything aloud, but there, in the middle of the night, over what would surely have been a dead man, we say everything with just our eyes.

And then I am aware of his breathing. I am waiting for it.

It doesn’t come.

I turn to look at him, look back at Barry.

“Sage,” he says. “Sage wake up.” He tries to scramble into the tent, but there just isn’t room. He grips my shoulder. “What’s wrong?”

And then we hear a shallow breath, a whisper. Not deep enough, not long enough. Just a thin sputter.

I look at Sage’s white face. “Too much blood,” I guess. But I know that it’s a good guess.

“So now what?” he demands. “Can’t you...make some more or something?”

“I”m not a magician,” I remind him. “And even they don’t make blood. Do you think that people would die if magic could save them?”

Barry’s fingers tighten, pinch into my shoulder. “I don’t want him to die--he is my friend, but tonight his life means a lot more than that. If you don’t heal him, it won’t just be him who dies. You stopped the bleeding, there has to be something else you can do.”

“Barry, you’ve read the same books I have. You know that there isn’t anything else. What can I do? I can tell you about energy transfer ratio, not blood. There’s no spell for making blood.” But even as I say it, I can see the connection. I don’t know how to make blood, but his body does. I stare at Barry for a several seconds before I realize that he’s shouting at me, some of tirade about saving lives and a noble cause. I don’t care. Right now, I don’t want this man to die.

I push my hands back into the wound. I close my eyes and think, “I need to see you. Marrow. I need the marrow...” My voice dies out. I don’t have the courage to sound that ridiculous aloud. Not with Barry there watching. What if it doesn’t work?

“He stopped breathing!” Barry yells, which doesn’t help me at all.

What I need is a way to talk to Slade’s marrow--which is admittedly a really strange thing to do--to connect to the inside of his body without thinking about how stupid and impossible it is because then it really will be impossible. And I need it to work, regardless of how stupid it is.

Barry is still shouting. I reach one red hand toward him, press a five-fingered stain across his mouth. “Shut up,” I say very softly.

And then I remember other words, words he can’t possibly know. They were more like a secret, or a remembrance, a gift from my grandmother. I could use her help now. She isn’t here. No one who can help me is here, but I have her words.

Gweler I say, pushing magic into the word as I press my hands on him.

And there they are, the long bones in his legs, above and below the knee. I don’t know what bones look like, not really, but I know the shape of his bones, know how to find the marrow inside of them.

Gwella I tell them. Gwella. I hope it’s the right word. I know so few. But they seem to understand, and red seeps into being. A little, so little. He’s too weak.

I bite the inside of my lip and feel something tighten inside of me.

Gwella I say again, only this time, instead of pushing something out, in front of me, I bring myself with the word. I flow into the marrow of his bones and stretch my fingers out through it, reaching as much of the hollow that I can.

I fill the emptiness of his hip with myself, stretching out my arms, bending my back to cover the hole, to negate the void. I don’t know how it works. If I stop to think about myself, I know that I am there, here, kneeling next to him, head bent. But then the work slows, and I have to forget about myself again, about what is real and possible and just do what needs to be done.

There comes a point when I open my eyes and wonder what is happening because my hands are still red, but they rest on pink skin. Raw, but whole.

And I turn to look at the lumilamp, but I see it as if from a long way off, down a dark tunnel. And I think that there is something about that that isn’t quite right. And I try to talk to...to the, the him there, but I can’t think of the words, and it’s darker, and my--isn’t; I’m not quite right.

“Kestrel.”

I wish that someone would stop saying my name; it’s too loud.

“Kestrel.” I want to not hear it, to not hear ringing around in my head, and my eyes don’t want to open, because it’s black, and I’m tired, and I want the voice to go away. I just want to sleep.

[200]
Continue on to Chapter 2.
http://kestrelbook.blogspot.com/2012/08/200_22.html