The rest of us get a bed. Hightower gets three, two side by side to accommodate his width, and one sideways along the bottom for his length. His feet still stick off the end. He wiggles his toes and grunts. The three healers that surround him are scratching their heads and wondering aloud at how they’re going to treat his many wounds. I also hear them say something about whether Tower might be descended from the Yags.
Abe’s in a bed of his own, yelling orders and curses at the two healers that look scared to be treating him.
Siena opts out of her bed, standing by Circ’s side, holding his hand, saying something that makes him laugh and then wince when one of the healers does something to his injured leg.
Feve skips the bed, too, standing by the door, his eyes dark, as if the king himself might come through. Mountain Heart help Goff if he does.
Buff, now naked from the waist up, sits next to Wilde, chattering away as a healer looks at a dark and mottled bruise that covers half his abdomen. She looks amused, but her eyes keep flicking around at the others, like she’s concerned for them too, while another healer bandages her head.
Skye and I stand across the foot of the last bed, where Wes lies twitching in a fitful sleep. Every few minutes he moans.
“How’d this happen?” Maddy asks, breaking her own number one rule: don’t ask questions. But this is a night for rule-breaking.
“I don’t know,” I say. “One minute he was there, fighting alongside us, and the next he was missing. And when we found him he was like this. Did you see anything, Skye?”
Skye shakes her head and Maddy stares at her for a good, long while, so long that Skye flashes her a warning frown. “I’m sorry,” Maddy says. “I’ve just never seen anyone from…”
“From fire country,” Skye finishes. “Well, truth be told, until a few days past, most of us ain’t never seen any of yer kind either.”
“Please, Mads. Can you just focus on my brother?” I plead.
The other two healers are using small knives to cut away Wes’s shirt. At least their instruments look clean and rust-free, I think.
When they peel away the fabric, I feel a shockwave of fear lock my bones up tight. There’s so much blood that we can’t even see the wound. Despite the snow, which is red and melting, the blood’s pouring outta him like a bubbling spring, soaking his pants and the bed and the healers’ hands, which are dabbing at his stomach with thick cloths that fill up with blood in an instant.
“Pressure!” Maddy says and one of the healers starts pushing on his gut with both hands, while Maddy and the other healer finish cleaning up the blood. “We need more hands!” she says, and one of the healers who was helping Buff rushes over. “Get anesthetic, pain killers, a sewing kit, and more freezin’ cloths,” she orders. “The good stuff. Only the good stuff,” she adds.
The healer runs to a cabinet and flings the door open, scattering vials of liquids, which shatter like crystal on the floor, spilling their contents. She ignores the broken glass, rummages through the box, gathers the desired items and brings them back over, setting them on a table next to the bed.
When Maddy says “More hands!” again, Feve wanders over.
“I can help,” he says.
“You know about healing?” Maddy asks.
“Yes. I have herbs,” he says. “They’ll help with infection and pain.”
“Whatever you’ve got, we’ll take it,” she says.
Feve reaches inside his thick coat and extracts a small sachet.
At the same time, the assistant healer grabs the cloths and helps to wipe away the blood, while Maddy uncorks a vial of a clear liquid, tilts my brother’s head, and forces it down his throat. He chokes, gasps, but she holds his head back, pinches his nose, and the liquid goes down. Then she opens another glass bottle, selects a needle and thread from a small box, and wedges herself between two of the other three healers.
“Herbs,” Maddy says.
Feve pours out the contents of a small skin, sprinkling black and green flecks onto my brother’s torn skin. Are they magic from fire country?
“Would you shut up!” Maddy says sharply in my direction. “He can’t hear you anyway.”
It’s only then that I realize that I’m rubbing Wes’s leg, saying, “It’s gonna be okay, it’s gonna be okay,” over and over again, even while I’m watching them try to save him. I stop, noticing that Skye’s not across the table anymore, but next to me, a hand on my back, looking up at me.
“Yer right,” she says. “It’s gonna be okay.”
Chapter Twenny-Seven
But neither Skye nor I was right. We never were. Nothing is okay. Nothing will ever be okay.
Wes died that night from an axe wound to the stomach. They worked on him for three, four hours, dabbing away the blood and stitching him up, both stuff on the inside and the skin on the outside. By the end of it my legs were shaking and I could barely feel Skye’s hand on my back, her other hand gripping mine.
The blood was gone. He was whole again. And then he took his last breath.
I collapsed, fighting all the way to the floor even with Skye trying to hold me up. She lay down with me, curled up, her arm around me, holding me, as I sobbed and shook.
Sobbed and shook.
Now I’m all cried out, torn and broken on the bed that Buff and Feve carried me to. Skye’s never left my side, not once, but even her caring can’t bring my brother back. I didn’t even get to say goodbye.
And it was my plan—my stupid freezin’ dimwitted plan that caused it.
So my head’s down, my face pressed flat against the bed, as tight and low as I can make it. I tried to get lower twice, attempting to throw myself off the bed and onto the floor, but Skye wouldn’t let me. She held me up, her strength like a rock, bearing all the weight of my body and my grief in her arms. Then she rolled me back on, where I am now.
A few of the others, those able to walk—Buff, Siena, Circ with Siena’s help, Wilde—have come over to offer me words of sorrow, how they wish it hadn’t happened, how they’re sorry. But none of that’ll make things right, or bring Wes back.
I wish for more tears, a whole lake of them, enough to make the sum of my sorrow worthy of my brother, of the man that he was. But try as I might, I can’t squeeze one more out, my eyes burning with salt and fatigue and despair.
When Skye pushes onto the bed and right up next to me, I finally sleep.
Chapter Twenny-Eight
I need to take a break from my brain, but every time I try to push my thoughts away, they come roaring back all the harder, pushing against my skull like they’re trying to burst out, flying away on wings of sadness and winds of ache.
I’ve been awake for at least an hour, but I haven’t moved, haven’t opened my eyes. I don’t want anyone to know I’m awake, because I can’t take their sorrys and regrets any more than I can take the awful memories that my brain is spinning around.
Jolie needs you.
Wes is dead.
Jolie’s not.
Wes is.
Jolie.
Oh Jolie, Jolie—are you there? Are you really in the palace or did I dream up Goff holding you high on the wall?
With questions lingering still in my mind, I open my eyes to the sound of voices. Abe’s, harsh and definitive, rises above the others.
“You can do what you want, but I fer one ain’t goin’ back to that place,” he says. “Hightower neither. King Goff’ll roast us alive.”
Skye, Siena, Circ, Wilde, and Feve stand in a semicircle, watching the argument.
“They’ve got Dazz’s sister,” Buff says. “He’s just lost his brother, if we can…if we can only get her…”