Ember panted, her hands planted in front of her and sweat dripping from her forehead. She watched the droplets splatter into the dirt, coming in and out of focus. Horrifically, she realized that she could sense the tomahawk-wielder’s body heat dissipating as he faded from a living being to a corpse.
Her chest heaved as she tried to catch her breath, and then she was emptying the contents of her stomach between her hands.
“Ember! Ember!!” someone yelled, and she looked up with watery eyes. Jisu was watching her from across the clearing, her expression a mixture of relief and trepidation.
“Jisu,” Ember managed, pulling herself unsteadily to her feet. “Are you…?”
The panther shook her head, her lips pursed. “I’m okay if I don’t move. The prongs are keeping me from losing too much blood.”
“Ophelia is coming,” Ember remembered, wiping her eyes with her bloody sleeve. “Give me your flare.”
Jisu pulled the tube from her pocket and Ember added it to her own, pulling the releases in quick succession. Two red lines arched through the sky, and she slumped against the tree, spent.
“Ember,” Jisu started to say. “That-”
“Not now,” she said darkly, avoiding looking at the man, who was still in the throws of death. “Please.”
There was a rustling behind them, and Daniel emerged, tearful and bloody. Even in her exhaustion, Ember saw how he stood away from her, as though she was someone to be feared.
In Ember’s mind, the time they spent waiting together was an eternity. The sound of movement through the underbrush alerted them to another presence, and Ember heaved herself into a standing position, worried the archer had come back.
And in a way, he had. His hair was clutched in Ophelia’s fist as she ran into the clearing, his pale and lifeless head lolling to one side and a red, foot-long bristle sprouting from his neck. The fireworm dropped the body as soon as she caught sight of the students, running toward them with outstretched hands and making no effort to hide her tears.
She took in the bear trap, then touched Jisu’s face, leaving behind red fingerprints. “Don’t worry, we-”
The panther shook her head, gripping Ophelia’s forearms as if the instructor was the one who needed steadying. Wordlessly, she pointed with her chin to the other side of the clearing.
Ophelia turned to look, and Ember saw the despair flit across her face. She made a noise, halfway between a keen and a sob, but it cut off abruptly as she squeezed her eyes shut. “There’s… there’s nothing we can do for them, but we can get you both to safety. The other TAs are right behind me.”
She pulled out a switchblade, using it to turn the bolts keeping Jisu’s bear trap connected to the chains. While she worked, Ember kept watch over the disfigured human, who was still alive but unable to stand on his own.
As the adrenaline of the fight abated, Ember saw the scene clearly for the first time. Unimaginably, amid birdsong and new spring sprouts was the resting place of two Linnaeans and four humans. Clothes, dropped weapons, and chunks of flesh were scattered in the dirt and hanging from nearby branches. A vulture had already come to perch nearby, shuffling his wings in anticipation.
But the worst was the tomahawk-wielder, upon which Ember’s venom had left undeniable marks. As she looked at his body, black with internal bleeding and bloated like a long-dead lake animal, the possibilities came to mind unbidden: venom-coated arrows, drawn-out torture, pit traps lined with poisoned spikes.
Her hands shook. She had rendered the last remaining human blind, so he couldn’t recount what had happened under questioning, and Ophelia’s team would be likely to mistake her venom for the fireworm’s—but if Corax saw the body he would know exactly what had occurred. Her eyes flitted around, suddenly desperate to hide the evidence, and landed upon Ophelia. But how can I ask this of her?
She paused for only a second. If anyone could cover up what had happened, it would be someone with venom of her own. “Ophelia,” she hissed, leaning close to the fireworm’s ear. “I’m sorry, but no one can know I killed him. Please.”
Ophelia turned her head just enough to regard Ember in her peripherals. “Okay. I can do that, at least.”
***
The hours after the confrontation would forever have a feeling of unreality to Ember. She remembered them only in snatches: TAs, medics, and guards flooding the clearing; the long hike back to camp, supported on someone’s arm; Jisu across the shoulders of a guard, the bear trap still awkwardly clamped over her leg; the jostling ride on elk-back to the infirmary.
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She was bedridden for three long days. On the first, the medics stripped off her ruined clothes and dabbed her skin clean, the stark white cotton cloths taking on the color of mud. They bandaged her ribs and splinted her ankle, though she refused to let them near her mouth.
After receiving the news that the others would be okay, she slept straight through the second day. By the third, someone must have decided that she was recovered enough for questioning because her bedside was a revolving door of medical experts, city officials, and captains of the guard. She recounted the events honestly, only omitting her killing of the tomahawk-wielder. When she asked, they would never tell her what had happened in the aftermath—not if the disfigured man had confessed the humans’ purpose in Linnaean territory, nor how the city was reacting to the news—and though Ember half-expected to see Corax, who would at least have enough respect for her to entertain her questions, the crow never made an appearance.
After the mayor himself stopped in to talk to them, Jisu shouted from across the infirmary that enough was enough and they knew where to find her, thank you very much. As the panther gathered up her things, shrugging off the hovering hands of the staff, Ember took the chance to mutter her thanks and excuse herself to the reptile dormitory.
In her room, she sunk into a blissful silence that she knew couldn’t last. She scrubbed herself raw in the cold water from the tap, though it didn’t ease the sense that she was wearing someone else’s skin. There was a knock at the door—Marcus, most likely—but she kept quiet until the footsteps faded down the hall.
The infirmary had washed the uniform she’d worn for the exam and given it back to her, though it was little more than a bloodstained rag. She laid it out on the bedspread and looked it over inch by inch as if she could differentiate human blood from Linnaean.
She had refused to be parted from her knife, and it resisted when she pulled it from its sheath, stuck to the sides with grime. Swallowing, she held it up to the light. Blood had dried into the grooves, and for the first time, a new pattern was distinguishable at the blade’s base: two looping letters, forming the initials GW.
***
Gunther may not have been well-liked, but his funeral was overflowing with Mendelians. They filled the little white fold-out chairs; stood in the shadows beneath the boughs, sheltering from the May sun; climbed the trees and looked over the gathering from above. An unseen violinist was playing a slow and sweet melody, and everything was swathed in green, the Linnaean’s color of mourning.
Ember arrived in a broad-brimmed hat and a high-collared shirt, the open invitation clutched in her hand, retrieved from where one of the reptiles had pushed it under her door that morning. Even the short walk had left her feeling winded, and her ankle ached from where she’d shoved it—splint and all—into her boot.
She picked her way through the crowd, raising her head to find someplace secluded to sit. “Ember!” someone said, and she turned her head with a sinking feeling. It was the flying squirrel from Hickory’s class, whose name she couldn’t quite remember.
Ember nodded in acknowledgment, trying to extract herself, but the squirrel’s claws closed around her shoulder in a way that might have been intended to be comforting. “Are you okay?” she asked in a whisper-yell. “I heard you were also part of Instructor Ophelia’s exam!”
Ember grimaced, shaking her shoulder from the squirrel’s grasp as if her hand were a particularly troublesome fly. Already, heads were turning in their direction. “No, that’s not-” she started to say, and then the squirrel was edged out of the way by Naz’s much smaller body.
“This way,” the pisces said, and she and Carn bracketed Ember, leading her to a spot under an oak tree outside of the main gathering.
When Ember had regained her wits, she looked at her best friends—Carn with his soft red fur and his tail squishing anxiously; Naz with her fan-like fins half-extended and a little frown on her face, her hand hovering like she wanted to touch Ember—and she didn’t know what to say.
Carn opened his arms and she gave a little nod, and then they were both holding her, hands ghosting over skin as if she was made of glass. “I didn’t know you knew Gunther,” she mumbled rather stupidly.
Naz pulled back, her brows drawing together. “Gunther?” Carn gestured at the crowd pointedly, and her eyes widened with realization. “No, Ember, god no. We heard that something went wrong with your exam, and we’ve been going to the infirmary every day since, but they wouldn’t let visitors in. This morning they said you’d discharged yourself” —her mouth pursed with disapproval— “so we went to the reptile dorm, but you weren’t there either. The snake told us you might be here. So we’re here for you—of course we’re here for you.”
Ember took an unsteady breath, feeling on the verge of tears. “How much do you know?”
“Only what Mayor Richardson announced: that your class encountered human mercenaries outside of the city walls, a student and a TA were killed, and all the humans were dealt with.”
It was a little jarring to hear the incident which she still could not consider without abject horror boiled down to a single sentence. “An apt summary,” she said dryly.
“You fought them, didn’t you?” Carn asked, his voice soft.
“Yes,” she admitted.
“Naturally,” he sighed, running a hand over his face. “How are you feeling?”
“It was bad,” she said, her gaze sliding away from theirs. “Very bad.” Her friends looked at her with wide eyes, as if her admission made it a thousand times worse. “I’ll tell you everything tonight, I promise.”
Naz’s hand rested on hers, her expression open and earnest. “You don’t have to. We’re just grateful that you’re okay.”
“It’s all right,” Ember said, feeling a weight lifted from her shoulders. “I want to.”