Twig

by wildbow

  “Square,” Ferres said. She laughed, and it was the kind of laugh someone with broken ribs managed. Her ribs weren’t broken, but she limited herself to the gentlest, lightest of sounds of amusement, as if anything else would level her.

  Lillian didn’t flinch and didn’t comment on the laughter.

  “At least hereabouts, when we’re teaching the very young children about Academy work, and we check the numbers or check their stitching we ask if it’s square,” Ferres said. “That does take me back to when I first learned, and when I taught the youngest students.”

  “How do you make that leap from being a child, working with children, to carving them up for the amusement of others.”

  “Stand,” Junior instructed, before Ferres replied. He held the sheet that was draped over Ferres to protect the woman’s modesty, his fingers holding the corners at a point between her shoulderblades, the top of the sheet passing under her armpits and just over the tops of breasts that should not belong to a woman of Ferres’ age.

  Ferres dropped her feet to the tiled floor and stood, first with support, and then without. “Was that what you were doing, Doctor Garey? You set up that target for me to take my shot at?”

  “Something like that,” Lillian said.

  “Right knee, it doesn’t feel steady when I put my weight on it,” Ferres said. As she said it, one of our Doctors who had been working with Junior and Lillian made a face, alarm and guilt. His work, then.

  “Brace it,” Lillian said.

  “Brace?” Junior asked.

  “There’s no time for more surgery,” Lillian said.

  She had less of an idea where things were, so she remained by the table with Ferres and I while everyone else found what was needed. Mary and I stood near the door, keeping an eye out.

  Junior held the sheet, periodically switching the hand he held it with, as his arm grew tired. Ferres could have taken the sheet from him had she wanted, but she was declining to. She was more the experiment than the doctor, barely clothed, freshly worked on, still with smears of antiseptics and blood here and there.

  “There weren’t many young ladies in the Academy when I joined,” Ferres said. “We were few and far between. Many of us corresponded, simply to reach out to others that, we hoped, would understand the trials and tribulations.”

  “Are you trying to draw common ground, Professor Ferres?” Lillian asked. “Because I’ve seen and talked to some of the children you experimented on. Some of them are so disturbed at what they experienced beneath your scalpel that they don’t want to get surgery to fix it.”

  “I could say something in response to that about how good art persists,” Ferres said.

  “Careful,” I spoke, jumping in.

  It served to break up the conversation. Both Lillian and Ferres looked at me.

  “Is that directed at me or her?” Lillian asked.

  “Both of you. I’m saying it to Ferres because she’s baiting you, and I’m saying it to you because she’s baiting you.”

  “It’s fine,” Lillian said. “Like I said, you want to find common ground, Professor? It’s a long, long way to travel if you want me to reach that point.”

  “No,” Ferres said. “I wouldn’t presume common ground. You and I don’t have much in common. I would say—”

  “Careful,” I cut in, almost reflexively.

  Ferres stopped.

  “She didn’t say anything,” Junior said.

  Lillian, meanwhile, was quiet.

  “Her body language,” I said. “She might as well have been drawing her fist back, ready to sock Lillian, for all of her tells. Except it wasn’t a fist. It was words.”

  “I was only going to say that Lillian shares a great deal in common with you and your Lambs, Sylvester,” Ferres said.

  You were going to put it in much worse words than that, and you probably planned to draw parallels between Lillian’s lack of concern for your comfort and my treatment of you.

  The other young doctors and students arrived with the straps, rods, and screws that formed the brace. Ferres moved the sheet away from her one leg so they had room to work, and Lillian backed off, joining Mary and me.

  “Hitting home?” I asked.

  “What?” Lillian asked.

  “You reacted to Ferres. I could see it in how you approached the work. You were gentler at the start, but you got more… ruthlessly efficient as the work continued.”

  I left out the part where I really liked seeing Lillian working efficiently, lost in her work. Probably more than was healthy, as a matter of fact.

  “There’s a time limit,” Lillian said. “I felt the pressure of the clock.”

  “Okay,” I said. You’re still not the best of liars.

  She looked my way, and then sighed.

  “She could’ve done so much good with her status and position,” Lillian said.

  “Yup,” I said.

  “And I can’t help but wonder, if I didn’t have the Lambs, would that have happened? I walked a different path than most students. I—I saw more of the end result, really. I think Duncan was on that path. The climb, reaching that point where you’ve climbed the mountain, you look down, and… everyone that gave you the reasons at the beginning is very distant and very small.”

  “I think you have a good heart,” Mary said. Her gaze was fixated on Ferres. The brace was in place, supporting the knee, keeping everything aligned, and the screws were being tightened, with Ferres only grimacing slightly at the tightness of it. A strap around the lower thigh, one around the upper calf, and rods and hinges held everything in place. “I don’t think you would have become like her.”

  “I appreciate that thought,” Lillian said. She didn’t sound wholly convinced.

  “Makes me think about Fray,” I said. “Who might have sent our guest upstairs. Did her fall mean that she was forced to come to terms with the people at the foot of the mountain?”

  “Is that a rhetorical question?” Lillian asked.

  “Not in the slightest,” I said. “Fray’s always been a tricky person for me to wrap my head around. In my head—”

  I stopped.

  “In your head?” Lillian prodded. She touched my upper arm. “I don’t want to pry, but I want to know what’s going on.”

  “She never made sense to me. It was as if I couldn’t see her from the right angle, she was always fractured and I couldn’t pull it together, exactly. She was meant to communicate something.”

  “I’m not sure I can picture it,” she said.

  “For what it’s worth,” Mary said. “I didn’t get the impression Fray was humbled.”

  I nodded.

  The word ‘humbled’ struck a chord in me. Maybe it was my recent experience, maybe it was that we were having this quiet conversation while Ferres stood with only a sheet protecting her modesty, her body stained, students wiping the stains away, with attention primarily given to the extremities and the parts clothing wouldn’t cover. Her chin was high, and for all I could tell, she hadn’t been properly humbled, not by shitting herself in a bathtub or losing her hands, not by words she had heard or spoken.

  Broken, yes. I could remember her writhing on the floor, screaming the words that she might have thought would provoke me to finish her off. I could see the look on her face even now, the look of someone only a few strides from… how had she put it? The end of her story.

  But not humbled.

  “It’s a good word, humbled,” I said. “And I think I agree.”

  “She was a person with a mission,” Mary said. “I understood that. I didn’t understand what the mission was, but I understood that.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “That sums it up well.”

  Ferres was being dressed now. The male doctors and students looked very out of their element in the process, Ferres wasn’t contributing much, with her hands being newly mended and her body somewhat inflexible. That left much of the task to the only young lady present who wasn’t a Lamb. Junior was at least riggin
g the voltaic organ to a series of straps. Ferres’ dress was voluminous enough to hide it, so long as it hung to one side or behind her buttocks, and would also serve to hide the brace at her knee.

  Lillian seemed to decide something, and broke away, going to help dress the Headmistress of Hackthorn.

  I watched Ferres, trying to study her. I knew she was dangerous. She’d been broken, and we were piecing her together, and every step seemed to give her twice the strength she’d had. I knew we had leverage in the form of Betty, but that had been called sharply into question when Ferres had provoked me, screaming those words at me as she struggled, with Betty in plain view.

  “She and Percy would have made a good pair,” Mary said.

  “Fray or our headmistress here?”

  “The headmistress.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  I felt a little validated that Mary had been analyzing our enemy as well. Eyes on her from another angle.

  “Do me a favor?” I asked. “Come with?”

  “I was going to stay with Lillian, in case the Professor here tried something,” Mary said.

  My eyes moved across the room. I found the Infante amid the small crowd. Lillian was giving orders now, instructing doctors in that quiet, damaged voice of hers, much as she’d done during the surgery.

  Like the surgery, and much like the practice was in field medicine, Lillian was figuring out what took the highest priority. She had things to learn in bending the small team of doctors to her will, but it wasn’t an insurmountable obstacle, by the looks of it. She knew how to work with a team. It was a question of adapting that knowledge to a new team.

  The Infante stood in the midst of it. As if it was all at his behest. He claimed the scene and he took my attention. He placed himself close to Lillian, and in that, he indirectly threatened her.

  “I don’t trust myself alone,” I said. “But I trust Lillian. Ferres isn’t in a position to do anything that isn’t very subtle, and Lillian has some experience with subtle.”

  Mary frowned. Anyone else might have chewed a lip, tapped a finger or a foot. Mary, instead, remained very still, her fingers moving idly around a blade without a handle.

  “If that’s a problem, maybe you could step out and find Jessie? I’ll wait here with Lillian in the meantime.”

  “I’ll come with,” Mary said.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  We gestured at Lillian as we made our exit.

  A quick check confirmed that Emmett was the one keeping an eye on upstairs.

  For all the darkness and the quiet of the surgery theater, the expressions, gestures, instructions both unspoken and uttered in near-whispers by way of Lillian’s lips, the sunlight streamed through the windows and illuminated everything. Footsteps and conversations made everything feel alive, buzzing with activity and controlled chaos.

  I walked up the stairs and peeked, looking past where Emmett was staying more out of sight, watching proceedings.

  It was a stark contrast to the rest of the Academy. There were crowds of students, but they were seated, eating. The foot traffic was minimal, everything was posed. The guests stood apart, mostly women and young ladies in uniforms different from the Hackthorn standard, but with a few elderly gentlemen among them.

  The young lady who was sitting near the man I took to be the Headmaster of Dame Cicely’s was familiar, but I couldn’t place her. If others hadn’t alerted me then it wasn’t too important, probably.

  Probably.

  I tried to think back to that series of events. The headmaster, Edmund Frost, had his name been? I hadn’t been reminded recently enough. Who had he been tied to?

  “Going okay?” I asked Emmett.

  He gave me a one-shoulder shrug.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  Professor Edmund had come with an escort. The creations stood, lined up against the wall. Men, all of them, their skin a shiny black, their faces lost in a morass of chitin. Each stood lopsided, and they matched one another in the slants of their bodies, each of them pulled to one side by a matching growth of bone, great scythes that served as their weapons. Silver had been inlaid into each scythe, decorating them. They wore pants and no boots.

  When one reacted to a stimulus, they all reacted. Someone moved too close, and a head turned, jerking to face the trespassing student, and fourteen other heads turned a half-second later.

  I could very easily imagine that squadron killing a hundred or two hundred of our rebels and students before being put down. All it would take was an order.

  But they were still, Edmund Frost was at his table with his tea, sitting in one of the comfortable seats that had been brought from elsewhere. He leaned forward, both hands around his cup of tea, talking earnestly with Duncan. His voice didn’t reach me at the top of the stairwell.

  My ‘father’ was a distance away, talking to others, though they seemed disinterested.

  Ashton sat a short distance away, on a bench at another table just a few feet from Duncan, his back to Duncan’s. He was hard to recognize, as his hair had been painted black. Shoe polish, if I had to guess, or something Duncan carried with him.

  Frost looked to be engaged enough. The wheels had been greased, and he had Duncan’s full attention.

  My concern lay with Frost’s companions. The young lady looked restless, the faculty, friends, and senior students who had joined Frost for this journey appeared much the same. I worried my ‘father’ was doing more harm than good, at this stage. By being there, he was doing something to draw attention to the fact that faculty were very much absent.

  There was only so much Ashton could do. Frost might be more complacent, his thoughts occupied and his defenses down, but the thoughts of his entourage weren’t being occupied. Some, I noted, a very small few, had migrated to different points in the hall, possibly to get away from my ‘father’, the boorish drunk aristocrat.

  Some, I realized, might already have wandered off to visit other parts of the Academy. Our work in hiding damage and setting the stage elsewhere would be tested, if that were the case.

  Even if there was nothing blatant, if we let Frost go and the people who’d accompanied him collected their thoughts enough to articulate just what had felt hollow or wrong about Hackthorn, then he might report to others elsewhere.

  “Walk with me,” I said, taking Mary’s hand.

  The moment she realized where I was taking her, she reached up. Her ribbons came undone, and a moment later, her hair was in a different sort of order, not quite tied up.

  We walked onto the floor of the dining hall, perpendicular to the table with Frost and the others.

  “Gesturing,” I said, speaking as much to make it look like we were an organic part of things as much as to communicate to Mary. My free hand moved, giving instructions to others. First to Duncan, then to Ashton, and to my ‘father’.

  In order: Raise the stage slow, soon; loosen the hold; go away.

  Nobody shouted. We made our way to the staircase on the opposite end of the dining hall, and I led us in a wider circle, just so we could glance back the way we’d come.

  Nobody else at that table was staring or looking concerned.

  For that to happen, they would have had to see our faces, made a connection. Ashton, I hoped, was dulling the edges of their focus.

  But Ashton would let up. My ‘father’ would leave. For the next few minutes, Duncan would scale up the talk and talk big.

  If we played this wrong, then it would backfire. I’d just asked the heat to be turned up, this pot would boil, and given a chance, it would boil over.

  But the tension and restlessness concerned me. We were out of time.

  We headed back down the stairs. Back to Lab One.

  This was the moment. Ferres had her stage.

  Ferres and Lillian were making their way out of the surgical theater. Ferres was dressed, her makeup done. She wore a long dress that billowed a little at the waist, and a long, exaggerated, fashionable lab coat, the kind worn to sp
ecial events where a lab coat wouldn’t do but where her status had to be established. I could imagine she might’ve worn it to a wedding for an aristocrat in her area, perhaps.

  Her hair was perhaps underdone, but there wasn’t much to be done about that.

  Simpler would be better.

  Jessie emerged from the stables. She had the Wolf with her. The Big Bad Wolf, the Black Wolf, the wolf that was a theme through a hundred tales, almost elephantine in size, its fur not wholly fur, but instead something sculpted, to twist and curl in aesthetically pleasing ways.

  “Just the Wolf?” I asked.

  “Everything else is injured. The Wolf is too, but the fur hides it.”

  I nodded.

  The situation was so precariously balanced. Frost, the students, the veneer of the Academy.

  Ferres held all of the power.

  I was acting on the premise that her pride in her art was greater than her pride, and seeing her be pieced together and find her composure as quickly as she had was concerning me. She stood tall in a way that I wasn’t sure she’d managed since I’d first captured her.

  Sure, she’d stood at her normal height and posture and she’d managed to appear normal to her students while acting out her ordinary days, but it wasn’t about that.

  I turned my attention to Red.

  Half deer, half rabbit, all prey, but she’d reversed that role. I’d done everything I could to reverse the role. For just the briefest span, she’d been one of the chief figures in power. She’d had all she could ask for, not that she’d asked for more than companionship, drink, and revenge.

  Past tense.

  I watched her turn her head, looking at the Wolf.

  Her attention shifted. Her eyes were empty of light and passion as she looked at Ferres, as if she could kill the woman right then and there, with scarcely a blink.

  “She can feel pain?” Red asked.

  “Yes,” Lillian said.

  Red nodded, digesting that.

  The Lambs present were glancing at me. Waiting for me to step in. This was a dimension of the dance, the social interplay, the roles. When I was able to imagine the Lambs, I could finish their sentences. I knew who would jump in to speak on a subject, and the kinds of things they would say.