Wait—sparks? I force myself to notice what is happening rather than hyperfocusing on the foal. The qílín’s skin is heating up, becoming searingly hot, and no, oh no…
I think we’re on the cusp of another surge.
“Briggs,” I hiss, my arm still buried inside the mare. “She’s getting really hot. I think that maybe…there’s another surge coming.”
Harrisford utters an expletive beneath his breath. “We’ll need to hurry, in that case. If the surge happens with the foal inside, it’ll kill it—”
“I know that!” I’m panicking now. Even without a surge, we’d only have maybe thirty minutes, tops. Butwitha surge? Maybe this was a bad idea. Maybe I’ve…overcommitted. “You do it! You’ll be quicker—”
Harrisford moves beside me, resting a hand on the qílín’s rump. “No. You’re already in there. You can do it, trust me. Just take a deep breath and do as I say.”
I blink, and tears blur my vision. “Please take over—”
“Chan!” Harrisford’s composure is fraying. With his ungloved hand, he grabs my chin and turns my face to look at him. “Just listen to me, all right? You will be fine. Just do. As. I. Say.”
I nod, my forehead clammy with sweat, and blink my tears away. “Okay.” I take a deep, steadying breath, and steel myself. “Tell me what to do.” Under normal circumstances, I’d never let Harrisford Briggs boss me around. But this isn’t a normal circumstance.
“You need to push the foal back toward the uterus to begin with, to give yourself more room to work. But be careful. You don’t want to do any damage.”
I heave, trying to shift the foal, and eventually I feel it move. “It’s there, it’s there.” The birth canal is getting worryingly hot. “Now what?”
“Can you reach its head? If you can hook your fingers around its jaw, or even a nostril, you’ll be able to ease the head forward.”
I grope around, rising onto tiptoes, pushing my arm in as far as it can possibly go. Finally, I feel the foal’s head. It takes some maneuvering, but eventually I’m able to grab hold of its lower jaw and gently ease it around.
It’s difficult at first, but once it reaches a critical point, the head swings around quickly. “It’s forward!” I’m almost crying again, though this time it’s with relief.
I feel Harrisford’s hand touch my lower back, just fleetingly, before it’s gone. “Good job,” he says. “Now you just need to pull its front legs—”
And then I’m pulling, and I’m pulling, and the qílín is becoming scaldingly hot, and then two little feet are poking out of her back end, and Harrisford and I both take a leg each and we’re pulling and pulling and then finally—
The foal slides out, Harrisford supporting it, and lands in a crumpled little heap upon the straw.
I stagger backward, panting, then brace my hands on both knees. The qílín is starting to let off more sparks, and in a moment she’ll go up in flames.
It’s fortunate that qílíns are fire-resistant, I think, but then I realize—
“The foal!” I scream. But Harrisford came to the conclusion even more quickly than I did.
“Get down!” he bellows, barreling into me and knocking me to the ground. The next moment he’s already thrown himself over me and the newborn, shielding us both with his body.
I shiver beneath him, covering my head with both hands, while the qílín’s flames flare before slowly flickering out.
And then we’re both climbing to our feet, Harrisford backing away, the qílín taking a few shaky steps closer to her newborn foal.
She nudges it with her nose. It doesn’t move. My pulse stutters and my stomach begins tying itself in knots. Were we too late? Perhaps the foal died, suffocated during birth. Or maybe we didn’t pull it in time and itdidget hit with the surge.
Both Harrisford and I hold our breaths. The seconds tick by so slowly, and everything is oddly silent, like the few moments before a thunderstorm when all the sound is sucked away. Each thump of my heart is almost painful in my chest.
But suddenly, the foal puts its little head up, and its mother starts licking it clean, and I let out a huge, grateful sigh. Tonight, we’ve managed to mitigate disaster—for this mother and foal, at least.
For the first time in forever, our marks don’t matter. Who’s coming first in class rankings doesn’t matter.
And, so—for the first time in forever—neither Harrisford nor I even bother to check our straps.
21
Harrisford
