Mad Honey

Chapter Eight

"Do I know how to fucking what?" Cat stares at me like I dropped my skirts and started dancing nude.

"We don't have time for this. Cat, Em, Lena, do any of you know how to cauterize a wound?" 

"Why can't I just stitch it shut! You know I can do that, I can stop the bleeding in twenty minutes!" I shake my head. 

"No! No that won't work! A boar speared him and-"

"Wait a boar?" Emme interjects.

"I'll explain it later, but a wild animal impaled him and if we stitch it all the bacteria is going to get trapped in there and not die and he's going to bleed out in maybe ten minutes. One of us needs to cauterize it and burn all the bacterium out. Lena, get my knife and stick it in the fire, the big flat one, Cat-" 

"On it!" She knows me so well.

"Em, help me pour the liquor on the wound and then hold him down." We all spring into action. I've dealt with bad wounds before, but always with better medicines. One of the matrons confiscated all of my elixirs and is forcing me to make new ones as my final exam, but she could have picked a better time! All we have now to numb the pain is the alcohol. As I grab the bottle, Em runs over to Fillip and flips him onto his stomach, ties his hands to the top bedposts. I rip the blood-soaked cloth from his injured leg up to his thigh, tear it off and unbuckle the belt from above his knee. A red gush falls suddenly, splashing over my hands. The hole looks worse than I remembered, it's visible down to the bone and the skin is torn up like ground turkey. Em slides over the bed and sits on his back, holding him down. I pour about half of the bottle left onto his leg, see the liquid run on brown and come out red and black. Cat runs over.                                               

"The knife is hot enough now, but I don't think I can do it!" I don't blame her, I don't know if I can either.

"That's alright, you can hold him down with Em. Lena!" She turns to me, still holding the knife above the burning hearth. "Lena do you think you can do this? If not, that's fine but you need to say so!" 

"I can do it." 

"Are yo-"

"Yes. Hold him." I grab his thigh, Cat gets his foot, Lena walks over. Before I can even ask what she's doing, the red-hot knife is pressed onto his skin. The whole room fills with the putrid scent of burning skin. Cat turns away and Lena closes her eyes. The boy is shaking and spasming and shuddering under our grips, but hasn't woken up. The smell is making me light-headed, and the flesh around the knife is bubbling like pancake batter. 

"That's enough Lena!" She yanks it off his leg, whirls and throws it on the brick hearth, then runs and vomits out the open window. Cat jerks her grip off of his foot and turns. Em just stares. The bleeding's stopped I think, hard to see under the bright red burn marks all over his legs. I release a breath and look around the door. Right at the face of Madame Dufort. 

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"After Madame Dufort saw the boy on the bed, she got Cat to run for Madame Tremblet, the medicines teacher. She got the boy to her lab, gave him proper medicines and some pain salves, and Madame Dufort dragged the four of us to her offices. We were questioned for about an hour until Madame had come to the conclusion that we had done everything right." I tell Leo. That's not fully true, the other girls were released after an hour and Madame kept me behind to have me go over every single detail the story again. She then asked me to go back, and examine the orange grove where I saw the glint of light, to take one of the girls with me in case the boar went back.

Lena and I, in matching clean white frocks walked back to the orange grove. Lena is the youngest out of the four of us, the smallest at less than 150 centimetres tall. She's very quiet, doesn't often speak, but is the most joyful person I've ever met. Her silence makes up for the purple room, purple cloak, and purple silk scarves and curtains she lives in. We are in white now, our morning gowns still soaked with blood. 

"Why you?" She startles me with unprompted words.

"What do you mean?"

"You said someone was watching, why you? Your window?" That's a good question. I don't like not having the answers, so I simply shrug. 

We both are crouching in the bushes now, a little from the orange tree I had climbed. Nothing looks too strange. I remember Fillip had been facing my window from over here so turn and look behind us. Something is gleaming in the dirt. Lena's fingers reach it before mine, but she holds it up to me. It's glass. Curved, like ice frozen on the top of an orange. 

"Do you recognize it?" Lena shakes her head. It looks odd, out of place. I run my hands over the thing, feeling it scrape against my fingertips. The edges aren't glass like the rest of it. They look like brass, or copper almost. Little indentations on the edge, divets like a sliding lock. I hold it up to my eye, slowly, and peer through. The leaves on the trees magnify themselves by ten. I toss the glass to Lena, who mimics me.

"It's a magnifying glass." She shakes her head at me.

"No. You couldn't have seen the lens through these bushes, they're thick. All the shining light would have been blocked out. It's a telescope lens, so there's a telescope near here." We both swivel to face my window. I creep towards the shrubs directly in front of me, and peer through. Yes. There's a large wooden cylinder, tapering at the end. I can here more lenses shaking inside it. Someone's been watching us.

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"The boy woke up twenty two hours later, the next day. After he was feeling better, Emme and I got permission to take him down to the dungeons. She's quite intimidating, and the boy was scared. Within twenty minutes he cracked, told us an older boy had payed him a large sum of money, very large to watch the school from those bushes for the past five days, watch the grounds but also look through my and Cat's window. The little boy was a street urchin, nearly homeless and didn't know why the older boy had told him to look through that window or why he was watching the school. He never learned the older boy's name, but he met him every night to retell what had happened during the day. The boy collapsed into a dead faint after telling us that and slept for two more days. They'll fix him up, give him some food to take back home. Now the boy hadn't met with his 'employer' the night after he got skewered, so I went to the meeting place the next night, and saw a boy about my age. I trailed him back to a hotel, where I watched him enter your rooms. I hope you know that you have the near death of a little boy on your hands." Leo shakes his head.

"I didn't mean for Ben to get hurt! How would I have known there would be a boar?"

"Ben?" Leo shuts his mouth. So the kid gave us a fake name, that's odd.

 "Leo why were you watching the academy?" What I really want to ask is why were you watching my rooms?

"Isn't it obvious? There's long been a rumor of your school training female assassins, or murderers, or spies. I paid a kid a few francs to watch the school." 

"You're lying Leo. There's a male school of espionage a few kilometres away, you were clearly trained there. The tactics used to resist my questions is similar to the one they teach. There's something you aren't telling me. I think you're on assignment. I think you're a below-average student at your academy and you wanted to raise your grades so you're spying on us. I just don't know why! Ugh!" I slam my hands down on the counter. He's still not giving up answers.

"You think I'm a below-average student?" He grins up at me. I'm pissed now.

"Yes."

"Huh. Well, we will see about that."

"What's that supposed to mean?" I ask. All he does is grin.