Vessels of the Stain

Screaming into the Dawn

 They awoke in the half light of morning, and one of them was screaming.  They sat up, blinking in their beds and looked to see who was missing.  Lilah was the first to see that Tristan's bed was empty.  Her feet, no longer noiseless, drummed across the floor as she hurried for the door.  Hurried out to find him. Bare feet hit the floorboards behind her then as first one stood, and then another.  Breath fogged the air before their faces.  The woodstove had gone out and the kerosene heater had run dry of fuel.

"What happened?" Lee whispered to Adelind, but she could only shake her head.

One by one, they followed Lilah out of the room.  Emory pulled socks up over his strange feet, his toes looking pink, and his face drawn.  His jaw clenched as he stood, but he did not hesitate to follow Lilah.  Adelind buttoned a cardigan with fingers that trembled with cold, and perhaps with worry.  She shivered and went wide eyed after the others. Lee followed them into the hallway, still only in her nightgown.  Cold gnawed its way inside her thin gown, and under her bandages.  Muscles tightened in her chest and back.  The screaming stopped.

Lee turned back to the dormitory.  She dragged a blanket from her bed, then knelt before the woodstove.  Her hands built a fire for her, without her thought.  It flickered into life before her and she sat with the door to the firebox open, watching it.  A little golden light in the grey room.  A little light, but no heat seemed willing to come from her.  Her back began to cramp in the chill.  She wanted to go back to her bed.

Instead her fingers found the bandages wound around her chest.  Tristan had put them there.  Tristan who had been screaming into the dawn.  He had been the only one to follow her away from the fire.  Perhaps she hadn't deserved to be followed, not after how she had shoved Adelind.  She could have been hurt, but Lee had pushed her away anyway.  She knew she ought to go down, to see if she could help him in some way.  But she sat there still and fed little splinters of wood into the fire.  It no longer needed them, but she did it anyway.  Wasted their supply of kindling just to find a bit of comfort. Tristan probably didn't need her either.

A sharper pain ran through her wound and she looked down to find the fingers of her left hand upon it. They rubbed at the wound through the bandages and her gown, pressed into it.  Nerves set free on the surface of her skin rose to wrap themselves around her fingers. Embrace enough for that morning, perhaps. Pain ran up her throat and into her mind.  In that moment, she was full of it, and of the fire before her.  She had the spreading twinge of the wound in her chest and the growing glow of the fire.  In that moment, that was all she needed.  An unexpected peace had come to sit with her.  Lee didn't mind that it was made of pain and beauty in equal measure.

When Emory came to put his head into the room, he saw her staring transfixed into the fire.  Her gaze seemed not empty, but turned inward.  Drops of blood soaked through her bandages and she rubbed them into her gown.  It was, he thought, a start.  A picture of what they sought, at least.  He almost wanted to turn away. 

"Tristan will be fine," he said instead.  And Lee turned a blinking face to him, uncomprehending for an instant before the peace fell away and she rose on numbed feet to stand before him.  

"And you are bleeding."