Threading the Needle

by Joshua Palmatier

  She wanted to be studying the stone stellae in the interior chamber with Cory, the Wielders, and a few of the others from the University. Everyone in the Hollow had come to see the formation, even Paul, intrigued by how old it must be and how it had been buried and left undiscovered for so long. For most, the initial awe had died quickly. Bryce and the Dogs returned to training within the day, the rest drifted away over the next week. Sophia had kept everyone busy with preparations for the move to the caverns, including Morrell.

  She turned back to join the line of people bringing in barrels and sacks from the wagons waiting just outside the cave entrances. But before she’d gone ten steps, she felt a shift in the air, as if someone had grabbed it and pulled.

  She halted. No one else in the chamber had reacted, but the animals suddenly quieted. A single sheep baaed as if in question—

  And then all of the livestock panicked. The goats raced to one edge of their pen and back, the younger ones kicking and lashing out with their hooves. The sheep rushed to the back wall, pressing up against each other, bleating as if they sensed a wolf nearby. The loose chickens took flight, those still trapped in their crates flapping and shrieking. Even the cows bawled in fear.

  Everyone from the Hollow stopped and stared. “What in hells?”

  Then the quake hit.

  It wasn’t a mild tremor, like what the refugees had experienced while fleeing Erenthrall after the Shattering. The ground lurched upward, throwing Morrell to her hands and knees, skin scraped raw and bloody on the stone floor. As she gasped in shock, rocks and pebbles pelted her back, dust and silt sifting down onto her neck. She cringed, shoulders hunched, as somewhere nearby in the stone tunnels something cracked, the sound overriding the deep-seated roar of the protesting earth and the terrified screams and shouts from the rest of the Hollowers in the chamber. The sounds were so chaotic—animals, people, the grinding earth—that she couldn’t pick out any one voice. Instead, she cowered closer to the floor and prayed that the ceiling held, visions of being trapped in her cell in the Amber Tower immediately after the Shattering flooding her senses. Her breath seized in her chest, and for a horrifying moment she couldn’t draw air, convinced she had never escaped that pitch-black room, that Kara had never found her and her father and released her.

  The floor lurched again and she cried out. A chunk of the ceiling gave way, stone crashing to the floor within arm’s reach, splintering and throwing shards up on impact. She scrambled sideways, coming up hard against the edge of the goats’ pen. She clutched at the wood as if it would save her, a goat battering itself against the wood right next to her, then scanned the room. Men and women from the Hollow were scattering in all directions, seeking safety, as more and more stone fell from above. On the far side of the chamber, the sun shone out beyond the cavern’s entrance, obscured occasionally by sheets of dust and silt. Nearby, a woman lay motionless, face turned toward Morrell, eyes blank as a pool of blood spread beneath her head. As the ground lurched a third time, less powerfully than the first two, the stacks of feed gave way, the grain crashing to the floor to Morrell’s right. Men and women alike were hunched around the edges of the stalls and pens and the sides of the cavern, but as the third quake’s rumble faded, the village’s blacksmith staggered into the center of the room. “Everyone out! Now!”

  He grabbed the woman next to him, pulled her up from where she hunkered as close to the floor as possible, and shoved her toward the opening. He did the same to two others, but by then everyone in the chamber was stumbling toward the entrance, and those who’d been outside were yelling for everyone to get out.

  Morrell hauled herself to her feet using the pen’s siding, drawing in a ragged breath that instantly turned into hacking coughs as she sucked in the dust and sediment that filled the chamber. Eyes tearing, she started toward the blurred light of the entrance, the silhouettes of people ahead of her blocking out the light. She paused to check for the fallen woman’s pulse, although Morrell knew she was already dead, then continued, but as she passed the tunnel that led toward the deeper chambers, she heard distant, frantic barking.

  Who would have a dog down here in the caves?

  Then her eyes widened in recognition. “Max. Cory!”

  She ducked into the tunnel and headed deeper. The path was littered with debris, and she quailed when a minor tremor shook the ground, but forged ahead immediately after. Shouts echoed up from below, urgent and frightened. Within twenty paces she ran across Paul, unconscious. A quick search found a knobby bump on his forehead, just within the hairline. The skin wasn’t broken. As she prodded its outer edges, Paul flinched and pulled away, one hand rising to ward Morrell off. He blinked in the half-light from the few remaining lanterns. “Morrell?”

  She reached down and grabbed his arm. “You were struck in the head. It might be a concussion.” He didn’t resist her efforts to get him to his feet. “You need to see Logan. Can you make it out yourself?”

  Paul steadied himself against the tunnel’s wall, one hand raised toward the lump on his head. He hesitated as he heard the frantic calls coming from deeper inside the cavern, then waved a hand for her to continue. “I’ll be fine. Go and see if you can help. I’ll send others down if I can. But be careful! We don’t know if there will be any aftershocks.”

  Morrell slipped past him. She passed two others holding each other up as they stumbled out from below. Neither of them said anything. The ground shook twice more, sending more silt down from above, but the majority of the dust had begun to settle, making breathing easier. Only a third of the lanterns that lined the tunnel remained lit, but it was enough for Morrell to see the corridor ahead.

  As she approached the side entrance to the cavern that contained the stellae, the barking became louder. Max leaped out of the opening in the side of the wall, his frantic bark escalating as he saw her. He raced toward her, hopping back and forth, then darted back toward the entrance, turning back to see if she was following. “I’m coming, I’m coming.” She picked through the stones littering the tunnel’s floor. There were more of them here. But then they’d known this part of the cavern wasn’t as stable as the rest.

  Slipping through the side entrance, she halted at the top of the scree of stone that led down to the floor and the stone monuments. Part of the cavern’s roof had collapsed, near the wall with the ancient paintings and writing. Ten people were clustered around the rockfall, half of them tossing smaller stones or rolling boulders aside, where Cory sat on the floor. Two were holding Cory upright, his legs splayed out before him, one of them trapped beneath the fall. His face was twisted in pain, although he wasn’t screaming. The other three were wringing their hands and fretting to one side, calling out orders.

  In the center of the room, between the stone stellae, white ley light spouted up from the stone floor like a miniature fountain, splashing onto the stone and running down the stellae and across the floor like water, then submerging again beneath the rock before it reached the outer ring of stone plinths.

  Max charged back up the scree, yapping wildly and breaking Morrell’s momentary paralysis. She scrambled down to the floor, skirting the outside of the room as she trotted toward Cory and those trying to help him. As she approached, she realized most of those shifting rock or holding him up were the remaining Wielders in the Hollow and some of the University students.

  But then Morrell’s attention was caught by Cory, the contorted angle of his right leg, and how nothing from the calf down could be seen, caught beneath a boulder at least twice the size of Morrell herself.

  She halted ten paces away, Max racing forward to place his paws on Cory’s chest and lick his face. The small dog turned to look at Morrell, tongue lolling, eyes expectant. He was no longer barking, as if his job were finished.

  “Morrell!” Raven, the senior Wielder now that Kara and Artras were gone, stepped up to her side and grabbed her arm, tugging her forward. “Morrell, you have t
o help us. We can’t get the boulder off his leg. It’s too large.”

  Morrell resisted. She didn’t want to see how badly Cory’s leg was crushed, didn’t want to see the blood, the splintered bones. She didn’t care what miracles everyone in the Hollow thought she could do now; there must be some wounds that even she couldn’t heal.

  “What do you think I can do?”

  Raven’s eyes narrowed. “You’re a healer. You do whatever you can!”

  Not allowing Morrell to protest further, she dragged her forward, flinging her to the stone near Cory’s legs. Morrell caught herself with her already bloodied hands, but bit back her anger when she caught the sheer anguish in Cory’s eyes.

  She straightened, wiping the dirt from her hands on her thighs. The calm she had often seen settle over Logan in front of the most serious wounds brought before him—a calm she had often thought cold and distant and unfeeling—enfolded her, like a shawl.

  “Move aside.” The University student who knelt next to her scrambled out of her way, and she shifted down closer to the boulder, steeling herself for what she’d see. But the pent-up breath she didn’t realize she’d drawn exploded outward in relief as she noticed that the boulder hadn’t completely crushed Cory’s foot. There was a slight indentation in the stone, and the boulder had collapsed on top of other debris, keeping it somewhat elevated off the floor.

  It was clearly pressing down on Cory’s leg, though. The calf was twisted to one side, Cory on his hip to lessen the pain. His struggles had scraped the skin deep enough that blood coated the stone, pooling on the ground beneath. The amount of blood was small, but as Morrell leaned over and tried to peer into the crevice beneath the stone she realized that she couldn’t see how badly damaged his ankle or foot was.

  “How bad is it?” Raven crouched down on Cory’s other side.

  “Can you feel your foot, Cory? Wriggle your toes?”

  “Yes. I think. It’s started to go numb.”

  “The stone’s cutting off circulation. But I can’t tell if the foot has been crushed or if it can be salvaged, not without moving the stone.”

  “We’ve already tried. It’s too large. We can’t even get it to budge.” Raven waved a hand over Cory’s leg. “Can’t you do something? Fix it somehow?”

  “It doesn’t work that way.”

  Raven grabbed her by the shoulders. “I know, I know. But do something. For Kara’s sake.”

  Kara had saved her from the Amber Tower, had saved them all from the quickening of the distortion in Erenthrall. And the Wielder loved Cory. Everyone knew that. It would destroy her if she came back from Erenthrall to find Cory missing a leg or dead. If Morrell could stop it—

  But how?

  Cory had sunk back against the two students supporting him. As she watched, his eyelids fluttered, as if he were fighting unconsciousness, but then he gave in and slumped forward, the two students catching him.

  Morrell shook off Raven’s hold and dropped her hands to Cory’s leg. She closed her eyes and tried to focus, tried to pull the tingling sensation she’d felt with both Claye and Harper into her fingertips.

  “It’s just a leg. Thigh, knee, kneecap, calf. Just like Harper.” She’d worked from Cory’s thigh down across the knee to the calf, squeezing the muscle, feeling the tension in the tendons, even through the cloth of Cory’s breeches. As she neared the calf, where the stone held the leg tight, the flesh grew swollen, already bruised, but she still didn’t feel the prickling sensation in her fingers that had accompanied her healing of Claye or Harper. “Swelling here, possible bruising. Nothing broken. The bone is still intact. But nothing’s happening. Why isn’t anything happening? Why can’t I make it wor—?”

  A surge of power shot down her arm into her fingers when her hand encountered blood. Her eyes snapped open as those around her gasped and began to whisper to one another. Morrell felt a few of them drawing back as if in fear, but she ignored them. Auroral light wove around her fingers, a pale blue streaked with yellow. It was barely visible, but it was there.

  “Why did it start now? Why not earlier?”

  “It started when you hit the blood.”

  Morrell shifted her hands further over the bloody portion of Cory’s clothes and the auroral lights strengthened. “Rip his breeches down near his calf. I need to touch his skin, not his clothes.”

  Raven didn’t hesitate, grabbing the breeches where they’d been torn by Cory’s struggles and ripping the fabric. It tore up to his knee, Raven pulling back bloody hands as Morrell wrapped hers around Cory’s calf above the worst part of the wound.

  The reaction was instant. The auroral lights strengthened, flooding outward from her fingers and up along the stone in waves. As with Claye and Harper, she merged with the prickling sensation, closing her eyes as she visualized sinew and muscle and bone. She traveled down Cory’s calf, beneath the stone, into his ankle and foot, flowing through it all as if she were Cory’s own blood. She felt the stressed flesh, the broken skin, the compression on the bones as the rock pressed down with its immense weight. After the initial shock, she relaxed into the sensation, realized she had also merged with the boulder, the stones holding it up, and the granite of the floor beneath. The connection wasn’t as intense as it was with Cory’s flesh and blood, but it was there.

  And as with Claye and Harper, she could sense what was wrong.

  “Cory’s foot has been compressed. None of the bones are broken. Everything’s just been squeezed together. All of it’s bruised. And the muscles are damaged. Some of the tendons are torn, especially in his ankle. His foot’s been twisted too far to one side.”

  “Can you heal him?”

  Morrell opened her eyes to look at the Wielder. Her connection to Cory’s leg and the stone surrounding it lessened, but didn’t break. “Not while the boulder is still on top of it.”

  “Then we have to move the boulder. Somehow.” Raven lurched to her feet, using the boulder for support. “You three, get on either side of Cory and Morrell. The rest of you, fan out around them. I don’t care if you think you’re too weak, we need everyone we can get. All we have to do is lift it enough so that I can pull him free.”

  The others moved into position, someone brushing up against Morrell’s back. She closed her eyes again, focused. The circulation had been cut off for long enough that parts of Cory’s foot were dying. She felt it as a shadow, settling over the skin and beginning to seep into the muscle and tissue beneath.

  “Hurry.”

  “On my mark, everyone push as hard as you can. One, two, three, mark!”

  Feet scraped against the stone floor as everyone on either side of Morrell grunted with effort. Through the stone, Morrell felt them shoving back and upward, trying to force the boulder to roll. But it was too large, its bottom too flat.

  “Again! One, two, three, mark!”

  They all shoved again. Morrell mentally pushed hard at the stone surrounding Cory’s leg, where it touched his foot.

  “It moved! I felt it move!”

  “One more time! One, two, three, mark!”

  Morrell shoved as hard as she could through the strange prickling that spread from her hands through Cory to the stone around her. Something shifted, and then Cory’s leg jerked beneath her hands as Raven hauled Cory free. Morrell lost contact with his leg, the auroral light around her hands flickering and dying. Everyone who’d been pushing against the stone released it, but it didn’t seem to move at all as they did so. Morrell reached forward and wrapped her hands around Cory’s calf again, connected with the wound, and began repairing it as best she could. As with Claye and Harper, she knew what was wrong, could sense how the flesh and muscle had been twisted out of true and where it should be if it were healthy and whole. Her hands grew warm, the skin beneath her touch shifting and re-forming in a way that sent shivers up her spine, but she didn’t pull away. She worked from his knee d
ownward, the worst damage at the ankle. The only time she spoke was to ask someone to tear away Cory’s lower pant leg and to remove his shoe. Raven did so without a word, everyone around them silent.

  And then it was done.

  Morrell drew her hands away slowly and opened her eyes. Weariness washed through her entire body. She let her hands flop into her lap. Cory’s foot was sheathed in blood, skin scraped off down to muscle in some spots, but it was no longer wrenched around at an unnatural angle nor flattened. Its entire length was a livid purplish-black from bruising, but Morrell knew that would fade with time. Besides, she didn’t have the strength to heal it. Her entire body was drained. She could barely hold herself upright.

  “That’s the best I can do.”

  Raven knelt down beside her, rubbing her back. “You did fine. You did better than fine.”

  More people had shown up, standing back and watching silently. Behind her, someone whispered, “I don’t think we moved the rock at all. I didn’t feel it move. And look here. The hole’s bigger, where his foot was. Isn’t it?”

  No one answered, and Morrell was too weary to care. Raven pulled her into a hug, rocked her back and forth, rested her chin on the top of Morrell’s head. Someone ordered Cory to be taken up to Logan’s cottage using one of the carts, the chamber suddenly full of activity as people began to vacate. Morrell let the sounds wash over her until finally Raven pulled back, still holding her shoulders.

  “You did a great thing, Morrell. You should be proud.”

  “I am. I’m just tired.”

  “I’ll get you back to your cottage. You can rest and Janis can take care of you.”

  Raven helped her stand, and they shuffled over to where the others were lifting Cory by the shoulders and legs and carrying him up the scree and out into the corridor. Raven and Morrell trailed behind them, Max trotting back and forth between his master and Morrell. The small dog occasionally licked Cory’s dangling hand, as if coaxing him to wake up. The corridor was already jammed with people going back and forth, assessing the damage or starting to clean it up. The chamber housing the animals where Morrell had been when the quake struck swarmed with people, Paul at the center calling out orders.