Ink and Bone

There was blood. It was spreading fast.

‘Jess!’ He hadn’t realised that he’d fallen until Morgan’s hands were slapping his cheeks. ‘Jess, wake up – someone! He’s bleeding!’

‘I’m fine,’ Jess mumbled. He was aware that he wasn’t, really. His head felt oddly stuffed, and he just wanted to rest. Close his eyes. As he grew warmer, the blood flowed faster, and took the pain away with it.

He was flat on his back now, with no sense of transition, and there were faces leaning towards him. They looked strange. Thomas looked very strange, all out of proportion, and Jess wanted to laugh but he couldn’t quite manage it. Wolfe was next to him, too, and barking orders that made no sense, something about a surgeon. Someone needed a surgeon.

He blinked, and it was night. The lights were low, the heater still casting warmth. He was tucked onto a camp bed, wrapped in a thick pile of blankets, and when he clumsily tried to move, pain paralysed him. He managed to lift up the covers with his left hand. He was almost bare beneath it, and a glaring white bandage wrapped tightly from his waist and up onto his ribs. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Right. I remember.’

His head fell back against the pillow, and he heard someone stir nearby. It was Thomas, who sat up and leant forward. ‘Stay still,’ his friend said. ‘Someone stabbed you. The only thing that kept you alive was the cold, Wolfe said.’

‘I know,’ Jess said. He felt oddly disco

‘Dario is jealous. He only got bandages. You have narcotics.’

‘It doesn’t feel like wi

‘You’re our worst.’ Thomas’s face shut down. ‘The worst who lived. You saw Portero?’

‘I remember.’ Jess thought he’d never forget it. Any of it. Not Portero’s killing, not the run for the gate, not the child in his arms that he’d had to give up. ‘You heard anything about my cousin?’

‘Nothing. They’re still fighting inside the city. Not many have managed to make it. Dario thinks the Welsh will declare victory soon and spare the survivors; they have made their point to the English king. They could have killed everyone.’

Glain wasn’t far away, and now she sat up, too. ‘Not like English hands aren’t bloody,’ she said. ‘This started with the slaughter of the Welsh during the Glyndŵr uprising. Men, women, children … cut down by the tens of thousands.’

‘So killing each other is—’

‘Stop,’ Jess said wearily. ‘It doesn’t matter why, or who, or how long it’s been going on. We’re the Library. Left our countries behind, remember? Neutral. Where’s Wolfe?’

‘Off with the Welsh general.’

‘And Morgan?’

‘I’m here.’ He turned his head, and saw Morgan, on a bed a few down. ‘You frightened us. What were you thinking, not telling anyone you’d been stabbed?’

‘I didn’t know I had been,’ he said. ‘It didn’t hurt at the time.’

She shook her head and stared up at the dark, fluttering fabric of the tent above their heads. He couldn’t see much of her expression. What he could looked angry.

‘I told her to rest,’ Thomas said. ‘She hit me when I told her to leave you alone.’

‘I just wanted to see how he was doing. You were in my way,’ she said. ‘And you’re too big to go around.’

‘She has a point,’ Jess said. He wanted to laugh, but he knew it would be too painful. The impulse faded quickly. ‘So we survived.’

Thomas patted Jess on the shoulder, too hard. ‘Go back to sleep, English. Wolfe said we can rest a while before we leave. He wants to be sure you can make the trip safely first.’

Oh God, Jess hadn’t thought so far ahead, but yes, there was a long, uncomfortable drive ahead across bad roads to Aylesbury, and then he’d have to face the trauma of Translation again … and how they were expected to do that wounded, and remembering what had happened to Izumi and Guillaume, he didn’t know.

‘What about the books?’ he asked. ‘Did we get them out?’

Now Khalila sat up, too. She winced a little as she did, but waved Dario’s helping hand away. ‘Most survived. Dario might have bled on the ones in his pack.’

‘It wasn’t my blood.’

‘I will grant you the possibility and state instead that Dario’s books were bloodstained.’

‘That’s better. I wouldn’t want you to think I was so careless. Not like this one, getting his liver sliced for no good reason.’ Dario’s voice wasn’t nearly as harsh as his words, and Jess raised his head a little to look at him. In the low lights, it was hard to tell the other boy’s expression, but Jess saw the slight inclination of Dario’s head. From him, it was as good as a bow. ‘Remember, losing one pint of blood’s an accident. Losing two is carelessness.’

Jess extended his right hand. It hurt, but he managed to hold it up, and after a moment, Dario got to his feet and walked over to grasp it. ‘We’re still not friends,’ Jess said. ‘Thank God.’

‘Imagine my relief.’ Dario went back to his bunk – limped to it, actually. He wasn’t in the best shape of his life, either. None of them were.

Thomas must have been thinking on the same lines, as he watched Dario’s painful steps. ‘What will they tell our families about this?’

‘Doesn’t matter,’ Khalila said, and pulled the blankets closer. ‘My father will never let me go on, after this.’

‘Wolfe won’t tell him anything. It’s not in the Library’s interest to be honest,’ Jess said.

‘Being stabbed has made you cynical,’ she said. ‘And you used to be such an optimist.’

‘Bite your tongue,’ Jess said. He was fighting to keep his eyes open, and he badly wanted to drift off again, away from the pain.

In a moment, despite the angry, burning ache in his side, the drugs dropped him gently as a feather down into the dark.

It was two more boring days of lying still, with one of the Welsh surgeons poking and prodding him three or four times a day, though not very sympathetically. He requested an interim personal journal, which the Medica station had at hand; for the first time, he genuinely missed having his old journal, the familiar feel and smell of it, the thickness of its pages. This new one felt flimsy and unsatisfying, but he wrote it all down anyway, all the insanity and anguish of Oxford.

Words didn’t cover it, he felt, but he did his best.

The others, one by one, were allowed to roam free; not Jess. The news came to him through bulletins delivered by various friends – Thomas, most often, but also Khalila, Dario, Morgan, even Glain. (And he wasn’t sure when he’d begun to think of Glain as a friend, but perhaps it had been the moment that they’d lost Portero, and he’d realised that all their petty grievances meant so little.)

Oxford had been devastated, according to Thomas; the death toll was staggering. The Welsh had declared a general truce and allowed the survivors to stream out of the ruins to flee as refugees for a full day after the escape of Wolfe’s party and the initial attack, but after that, there’d been no mercy given.

No way to know if Morgan’s father was among the survivors.

Thomas spared him the details of what the city looked like now, and Jess was glad not to know. He didn’t want to think about it, any of it. When he shut his eyes, he saw the woman shoving her baby into his arms. None of it made sense to him, and trying to make it fit together inside made him feel worse.

He asked after Frederick, but there was no news of his cousin, either. The death inside the city meant that if he hadn’t managed to escape, there was almost no chance his body would be identified; the Welsh were bound to shovel the corpses into mass graves and be done with it. No, he’d only get news of Frederick if that flash criminal had managed to escape.

Morgan stuck close to the tent, though she was allowed to roam freely; he wondered if Wolfe had given her orders to watch him. Except for trips out to collect food and to the privies, she sat on her camp bed and read – from an original book, one that she must have kept out of the cache they’d rescued. Jess was restless and frustrated, and she turned her pages at a pace that Jess could only envy while he scribbled down more detail in the journal. It still felt stiff and awkward in his hands, and he didn’t like the pen they’d given him. It dragged too slowly on the paper.