Our Fractured Souls | Kaz Brekker

[16]

16

Nina

In the cramped little surgeon's cabin, Nina tried to put Viktorya's body back together, but she hadn't been trained for this kind of work.

For the first two years of their education in Ravka's capital, all Grisha Corporalki studied together, took the same classes, performed the same autopsies. But then their training diverged. Healers learned the intricate working of healing wounds, while Heartrenders became soldiers - experts at doing damage, not undoing it. It was a very different way of thinking about what was essentially the same power.

But the living asked more of you than the dead. A killing stroke took decision, clarity of intent. Healing was slow, deliberate, a rhythm that required thoughtful study of each small choice. The jobs she'd done for Kaz over the last year helped, and in a way so had her work carefully altering moods and tailoring faces at the White Rose.

But looking down at sweet Viktorya, Nina wished her own school training hadn't been so abbreviated. The Ravkan civil war had erupted when she was still a student at the Little Palace, and she and her classmates had been forced to go into hiding. That was the same time Viktorya and her parents vanished without a trace.

When the fighting had ceased and the dust settled, King Nikolai had been anxious to get the few remaining Grisha soldiers trained and in the field. So Nina had spent only six months in advanced classes before she'd been sent out on her first mission.

At the time, she'd been thrilled. Now, she would have been grateful for even another week of school.

Viktorya was lithe, streamlined in all the right places, mostly corded muscle and fine bones, built like an assassin or an acrobat. The knife had entered beneath her left arm. It had been a very close thing. Just a little deeper and the blade would have pierced the apex of her heart.

Nina knew if she simply sealed Viktorya's skin the way she had with Wylan, the girl would just continue to bleed internally, so she'd tried to stop the bleeding from the inside out. She thought she'd managed it well enough, but Viktorya had lost a lot of blood, and Nina had no idea what to do about that.

She'd heard some healers could match one person's blood to another's, but if it was done incorrectly, it was as good as poisoning the patient. The process was far beyond her.

She finished closing the wound, then covered Viktorya in a light wool blanket. For now, all Nina could do was monitor her pulse and breathing. As she settled Viktorya's arms beneath the blanket, Nina saw the scarred flesh on the inside of her forearm. She brushed her thumb gently over the bumps and ridges.

It must have been the sweet roll tattoo of the House of Confections. Whoever had removed it had done an ugly job of it.

Curious, Nina pushed up Viktorya's other sleeve. The skin there on her upper bicep was clear and unmarked. Had Viktorya not taken on the crow and cup tattoo, carried by any member of the Dregs? Alliances shifted this way and that in the Barrel, but your gang was your family, the only protection that mattered.

Nina herself bore two tattoos. The one on her left forearm was for the House of the White Rose. The one that counted was on her right; a crow trying to drink from a near empty goblet. It told the world she belonged to the Dregs, that to trifle with her was to cull their vengeance.

Nina was puzzled the more she looked at Viktorya's unmarred milky smooth skin. She carefully twisted the girl's arm around and gasped softly, seeing a different line of twisted, scarred flesh marking the back of her bicep. But Nina could still vaguely make out the shape of the feral cat curled in the crown, the Dime Lions.