Evelyn

I went down on my knees beside him in the wet grass and put two fingers to his throat.

There. Fast and thin and uneven, a moth against glass. But there.

His eyes were shut. His face in the moonlight was the colour of candle wax. His lips had gone grey at the edges. The shoulder of his shirt was gone, torn away in three long rents that ran from the top of his shoulder down across his chest. Under them the skin was laid open in three matching lines. They were bleeding, but slowly, the dark welling up and spilling over and welling again. They could wait. I made myself see that they could wait.

The arm could not.

He had thrown it up across his face and it lay now where it had fallen, flung out on the grass beside him with the palm turned up. Below the elbow it was not the shape of an arm any longer. The sleeve had been torn off it. There was a deep ragged wound across the inside of the forearm, the flesh torn rather than cut. In the middle of it lay something pale that I knew was bone. Blood came out of it in pulses. Each pulse was a little weaker than the one before. I could have timed his heart by it.

I had seen a man bleed like that once, at the Prince Alfred. A carter, crushed against a wall by his own dray. He had been dead before the surgeon got his coat off.

“No,” I said aloud, to nobody. “No. Not you.”

Something caught at my sleeve. Nan had followed me. She was crouched at my side with both hands knotted in the wool of my sleeve. She was still screaming, though the sound had gone hoarse and broken, more a kind of sobbing shout with no words in it. She was hanging off my arm with her whole weight.

“Nan. Nan, let go of my arm.”

She didn’t hear me. Or she heard me and could not do it. I tried to pull free and she came with me, clinging. I could not use that hand.

I worked with the other one.

The torn shirt was still half on him. I took the sleeve of it that had been ripped away, a long strip of linen black and sodden at one end. I wound it round his arm above the elbow, twice, high up where the muscle was thickest. I knotted it one-handed with my teeth. Then I pushed my wand through the knot and turned it. Once. Twice. Leander made a sound in his throat, a low animal sound of protest. His whole body flinched. I held his arm down with my knee and turned it a third time until the linen bit into the skin.

The pulsing slowed. It did not stop.

I looked at my watch. It was pinned to my waistcoat where Madam Blainey had told me to wear it. I had to wrench my head down to see the face of it in the moonlight. Twenty-two minutes to ten. A tourniquet is a debt. You write down when you took it out. Sooner or later you must pay it back.

Then I put my wand to the wound itself.

I knew a charm for stanching. Every first year who has ever had a nosebleed in the hospital wing has had it done to them; it is the smallest, simplest healing spell there is. I had cast it a hundred times. I had never cast it with my hands shaking and the sea still roaring in my ears.

The power was there. It had not gone back where it belonged. I had opened the door to throw the wolf and now I could not get it shut again. It pressed up against the inside of my wand hand, eager, enormous, wanting to be let out. If I let it out into his arm, I did not know what it would do. Close the wound. Close the veins. Stop his heart as you might stop a clock by holding the pendulum.

I made the charm small. I made it as small as I knew how, as small as the spell a second year would cast. I fed it out through my wand a thread at a time, as you pay out a fishing line. I felt it take. I felt the bleeding check under it and slow, and I kept it there. It was the hardest piece of magic I had ever done. It would not have healed a cut finger.

It held. It would not hold for long.

I needed the box.

The box was in my trunk at the foot of my bed in Ravenclaw Tower, a mile away and four hundred feet up, with five phials of dittany and a vial of Blood-Replenishing Potion and three envelopes of powdered silver weighed out by Penhallow’s own hand. I could see it as clearly as if it were in front of me: the brass corners, the scratch on the lid, the card tucked under the strap. Thursday. Four o’clock.

I didn’t stop to be careful. There was no time to be careful. I lifted my wand off his arm for the space of a breath, pointed it back up the hill at the castle and called.

“Accio healer’s box!”

It went out of me like a rope going over the side of a ship with the anchor on the end of it. I felt it go. I felt it run out and out and out, up through the trees and over the grounds and up the side of the castle. I felt the power go with it, all that pressing tide I had been fighting with, pouring after it through the opening I had given it. It was almost a relief. Somewhere far above, faint as a dropped pin, I thought I heard glass break.

Then I put my wand back on his arm and fed the stanching charm out again a thread at a time, and waited.

It does not come at once, a Summoning over that distance. Nothing does. I knelt in the grass with my knee on his arm and my wand on the wound and Nan hanging from my other sleeve. I counted his breaths. I counted the seconds between them. They were too long.

An hour ago he had been laughing at me across the duelling platform with his hair in his eyes. Less than an hour ago I had kissed him. I had stood against a wall with my fist in his shirt and thought about gloves and stones and a notice in the Times, as if any of that mattered, as if there were all the time in the world to decide what I wanted. Now I knelt in his blood and the only thing I wanted was the next breath, and then the one after it. I had not known that wanting could be made so small and so enormous at the same time.

Penhallow had asked me what I was afraid of. I knew now. I had been wrong about all of it.

“Leander.” I said it close to his ear. “Leander, wake up. Stay with me.”

Nothing. Then his eyelids moved.

“Leander. Look at me.”

He opened his eyes. They were black in the moonlight, all pupil. For a moment they did not see me. Then they did.

“Evie,” he said. His voice was nothing, a breath with a word in it. “Is she—”

“She’s here. She’s safe. You’re hurt. Lie still.”

He did not lie still. He turned his head on the grass, slowly, to look down along his own body to where his arm lay under my knee. I saw him see it. I saw his face change.

“It bit me,” he said.

“Lie still.”

“Evie, it bit me. I felt its—” His breath caught. “I felt its teeth.”

I didn’t answer. I couldn’t, not yet. I kept the charm going and looked up the hill.

Nan had heard. She had stopped screaming at last. In the silence I could hear her breathing, ragged and huge. Then she let go of my sleeve all at once and threw herself across him.

“He’s dead,” she sobbed. “He’s dead, he’s dead, it killed him—”

“He is not dead—”

She had his shirt in both fists. She was pulling at him, shaking him as a child shakes someone awake in the morning. His bad arm jerked under my knee. He cried out, a terrible sound, and the stanching charm slipped off the wound like a hand off a wet rail. Blood welled up dark and fast over the edge of the tourniquet.

Something was crashing through the trees above us.

I heard it come. It came down the slope through the branches like a thrown stone, breaking twigs, tearing through holly, much faster than anything I had ever summoned in my life. It burst out of the dark at the edge of the clearing and struck the grass beside me and split open. The lid came off. The contents went everywhere. A roll of lint unspooled white across the grass. Phials rolled.

I snatched up the first dittany phial I saw. I had it uncorked and over the wound before I knew I had moved.

Nan’s flailing hand caught my wrist.

The phial went out of my fingers. I saw it turn over in the air, the dittany inside it catching the moonlight. I caught it a hand’s breadth above the ground with a quickness that had nothing to do with my own body and everything to do with the fox. I had it upright before more than a drop was lost.

I turned on Nan. I did not think. I did not measure. I did not hold anything back.

“Somnus!”

It was the gentlest sleeping charm I knew, the one Madam Blainey used on the first years who could not sleep for homesickness in their first week. It should have settled her softly as a cat, in a minute or two. It hit her like a fist. She stopped in the middle of a sob, mouth still open, and simply folded down across Leander’s legs. She lay there.

The silence was worse than the screaming.

I set the phial down in the grass with great care and put my fingers to the side of her neck.

Her pulse was there. It was slow. It was too slow, far too slow, far too deep, a great heavy beat with a long pause after it, like a sleeper drugged. Her breathing had the same long slowness to it. She did not stir when I lifted her eyelid. She did not stir when I said her name.

I had done that. I had done it to an eleven-year-old girl in a pale pinafore who had come into the Forest to see the mooncalves dance.

I knelt there with my fingers on her throat and felt something go cold in the middle of me. For one long moment I could not move at all. Then I heard Leander breathe beside me, short and wet. I could save one of them now. I could not save both. The one I could save was not the one I had hurt.

She would sleep. I told myself she would sleep and nothing worse. I had no time to find out whether it was true. I’m sorry, I thought at her, at the small closed face in the grass. I’m sorry. I’ll come back for you.

I took my fingers away from her throat. I eased her off his legs onto the grass, on her side, with her head on the roll of lint so that she would not choke. Then I turned back to him.

The silver went in first. I tore open one of Penhallow’s envelopes with my teeth and shook the powder into the wound, all of it, the whole weighed measure, across the broken flesh and down into the punctures where the teeth had gone in. It hissed. It smoked faintly where it touched, a thin grey smoke that smelled of hot metal. He arched up off the grass with a cry that went through me. I held him. I put my whole weight on his shoulder and held him while it burned.

Then the dittany. I tipped the phial over the arm and let it run.

Green smoke rose up off the wound. Under it the edges of the torn flesh stirred and drew in and began to knit, slowly, unwillingly, as dittany works on a cursed wound: not closing it, not healing it, only persuading it towards being a wound that might one day close. The bleeding slowed. It slowed further. It stopped.

I uncorked the second phial and did the shoulder. The third went on his chest. The fourth I poured into his mouth along with the Blood-Replenishing Potion, holding his head up on my arm. He choked and coughed and swallowed it. The fifth I put in my pocket.

When it was done I looked at the arm by moonlight.

It did not look like a bite. That was the first thing I thought. I was ashamed of how fast I thought it. It looked like what it was: an arm that had been in the jaws of something huge and shaken, the skin torn and dragged and laid open in long ragged furrows, the marks of the teeth lost in the wreck of it. Half closed now, green-edged with dittany and grey with silver. Under all that, unless you knew to look, unless you were looking hard indeed, there was nothing to say it had been teeth and not claws.

Nobody else had seen it before I closed it. Nobody but me.

Nobody but him.

He was looking at me. His eyes were clearer now. The potion was working; I could see the colour starting to come back into his lips. But his face had the look I had seen on patients on the ward when the surgeon has been and gone and they have been told, the look of someone standing at the edge of something high.

“Evie,” he said. “It bit me.”

“Leander.”

“I know what it was. I know what night it is.” He tried to lift the arm and could not. “I know what that means. You know what it means. It bit me.”

They would take him away. That was what it meant. The school would have to tell the Ministry. Word would get out from there, as word always did, slowly and then all at once, until every door he knocked on had already heard. They would tell his family. His family would be told what to do with him. Professor Weasley would sit him down in her office and be kind. He would be Head Boy for perhaps a fortnight more, until the letters came from parents. Everything he was going to be, the Auror training and the career and all of it, would close up behind him like water.

And nobody in the world knew except the two of us.

I leaned down over him in the grass. I put one hand flat on his chest, over his heart, where I had put it against the cloister wall. I put my forehead down against his. His skin was cold and wet. His breath was on my mouth.

“Look at me,” I said.

He looked at me. We were so close that I could see nothing but his eyes.

“It clawed you,” I said.

“Evie—”

“It clawed you. Across the shoulder, and across the chest, and when you put your arm up it clawed you there too. That is what happened. That is what I saw. Say it.”

“It bit—”

“I saw it. I was there. It clawed you.” I pressed my forehead harder against his. My voice was quiet and steady. I did not recognise it. “Say it, Lee.”

I had never called him that before. The steadiness went out of my voice on the next word, and I let it go.

“Please.”

He shut his eyes. For a long moment he said nothing at all. I could feel his heart under my palm, fast and hard. I could feel him deciding.

Then he opened his eyes and looked at me. Something went out of his face. Not the fear. The fear stayed. But something that had been fighting me stopped fighting.

“It clawed me,” he said.

“Again.”

“It clawed me.”

“Good.” It went out of me like a stone dropped into deep water, and I felt it go all the way down. “That’s what you’ll tell them. That’s all you’ll tell anyone. Leave the rest to me.”

He didn’t answer. His good hand came up off the grass and found my wrist, and held it.

I lifted my head.

There was light in the trees. It was coming down the slope by the path I had taken, bobbing and swinging, a lantern held high. I heard someone pushing through the holly. A woman’s voice, sharp with breath, calling my name.

“Miss White! Miss White!”

“Here,” I called. My voice cracked on it. I tried again. “Here! Professor, we’re here!”

The light came out of the trees and stopped.

Professor Weasley stood at the edge of the clearing with her lantern up and her wand out and her hair half down her back. She looked at the trampled grass and the scattered lint. She looked at the small grey shape asleep on its side, and the broken healer’s box, and Leander on his back in the blood with his shirt torn off him. She looked at me, kneeling beside him with my hands still on his arm and my sleeves red to the elbow.

“Merlin,” she said. Then, in a different voice, crossing the grass towards us: “Miss White. What happened here?”

I had lied to Professor Weasley once already this term. It had been a small lie and it had been easier than I liked. This one was not small.

I looked up at her over Leander’s body and told it anyway.

“A werewolf,” I said. “It clawed him.”