Page 31 of The Verdant Cage
I shake my head.We can’t leave her alone!
But Eero won’t release me. I’m trying to silently wriggle free and watch Wendy at the same time. She’s rummaging around in her basket, searching for the best apple for Jarek. My heart breaks at her innocence.
When she holds it up, it is indeed a perfect red globe. I’m reminded of an ancient fairy tale. I’m trying to remember how the story goes when Jarek moves, faster than a breath. One second his mother-of-pearl-handled knife is at his waist, and the next it’s glinting in the afternoon sun as he slices off Wendy’s finger.
The child screams in agony and drops the apple, blood gushing from her hand and drenching the parched soil.
My legs give out, my struggle with Eero forgotten.
“An eye for an eye, rulebreaker.” Jarek’s voice is unsettlingly soft. “You will tell everybody that you were stealing from the Valley and that’s why you lost your finger. They’ll see what it looks like to break the rules.”
Jarek wipes his knife on his cloak before leaping onto his horse to ride away. Leo follows, the two Guardians cantering off toward the horse stables.
It happened so fast that my brain hasn’t yet made sense of it.
Jarek mutilated a child.
Eero releases me, his face slack with shock. “I was just trying to protect the others back at the caves.”
It’s good he let me go, because now that there’s an injury, an army couldn’t hold me back. My body’s in motion, not waiting for my senses to catch up. Wendy’s cries are a torment to my ears.
“Wait until you no longer see us to leave the forest in case they return,” I whisper-yell to the two Glassworker children still hiding. They jump. They didn’t know I was here, but they’re smart enough to stay put.
“Come,” I say, when I reach Wendy. I wrap her severed finger in an oak leaf and tuck it into my pocket, glancing the direction Jarek and Leo rode off in. “If we hurry, my aunt can save it.”
Her eyes are cracked eggs in the ashen pan of her face. “I’m sorry,” she gasps, “I’m sorry we took the apples. The three of us were playing and found a tree over by the flax field, just inside the woods. We shouldn’t have gone in, but everyone’s been so hungry. We were bringing them to the Bakers to make tarts,” she whimpers. “I wasn’t stealing.”
“I believe you,” I say fiercely.
What have we come to in the Valley, cutting the fingers off children? I untie the apron from her waist, using its string to make a tourniquet and its cloth to stanch the blood.
As I do, a single thought rolls through my brain.
Maybe Jarek’s the one who should be Harvested.
I recoil at the violence of it, but my anger scarcely cools. I may not be able to inflict equal horror upon him, but there is one thing I could do to make him blessedly uncomfortable. I spare a half second to pocket a small apple and a strip of slippery elm bark before propping the girl up and leading her toward my former home.
.
Aunt Florence stands at the stove preparing lunch when I charge in with Wendy. I sit the child at the kitchen table and offer up her severed finger.
“I can’t stay,” I say, but I ache to.
“Opium tincture, then go,” she orders.
In an emergency, an Apothecary doesn’t waste time with needless questions. Aunt Florence’s eyes are focused behind her thick glasses as she surveys Wendy’s wound. My field tourniquet has stanched the worst of the bleeding. The whimpering girl appears miserable but detached. She’ll come back to her body when Aunt Florence cleans the site. While not as precise a stitcher as me, she’s good. She’ll be able to save the finger.
Still. It’s hard to leave. I hand her the tincture. “I can prepare hot water.”
“I’ve got some boiling for porridge, as luck would have it.” Aunt Florence takes the finger to the sink to clean it. “And you’ll be punished for practicing your old trade, so go.”
And there it is. I’m not an Apothecary anymore, nor am I a Guardian yet.
I feel dangerous in this liminal space.
.
I’m out of breath when I reach the village square, pausing only to yell through the Baker window that there are apples on the ground near the flax fields. I charge into the Tzu cottage and find it drab, unwelcoming, and empty.
