Page 59 of The Light Between Worlds

“Philippa! Philippa, it’s Georgie. Wake up.”

I roll out of bed, pull on a dressing gown, and am out the door before my roommate, Millie, can ask what the matter is. Georgie stands in the shadowy hallway, wringing her hands.

“Ev got up in the night and you know she hasn’t been herself lately. I thought she might be ill, so when she didn’t come back I went to check on her, but she won’t let me into the bathroom and I think there’s something wrong.”

Inside, my blood freezes and my stomach fills with frightened wings. “Georgie, it’ll be alright. I’m sure she’s just had a stomach upset or something of the sort. You’re so kind, looking out for her, butI’ll take care of it now.”

Despite the way my pulse is racing, the words come out measured and reasonable. Slowly, the panicked light leaves Georgie’s eyes. She nods and returns to the bedroom she and Ev share, shutting the door behind her. Only then do I turn and fly down the hall to the bathroom at the end.

“Evelyn.” Her name comes out soft as a moth’s wing. “Evelyn, are you alright?”

I reach for the doorknob and find it locked. Pulling a hairpin from my dressing gown pocket, I fiddle with the lock, poking at its inner workings in the half-light and hardly breathing until I hear a telltale click. By then, my hands shake so badly the doorknob rattles as I push into the bathroom and shut the door behind me.

White moonlight pours through the single window, washing over Evelyn and silvering the blood on her hands, her legs, her underclothes, the nightgown hitched up around her waist. Beside her, abandoned on the tile floor, metal gleams wickedly.

“Evie.” I take her face in my hands and she stares at me with blank eyes. “Evie, darling, where’s the blood coming from? Evie, what did you do?”

“I don’t know who I am anymore, Philippa.” Evelyn’s voice is thin as a thread, hardly loud enough for me to hear. “I don’t look the way I’m supposed to. I don’t feel the way I should. I had a scar—”

Evelyn’s hand goes to her side, to the place where she’d caught herself on a long nail in the cowshed outside Palace Beautiful, years and worlds ago. I see it then, beneath her blood-slick fingers—a ragged gash that stretches from the curve of her waist to her navel, the twin of the wound she bore in the Woodlands.

I pull her hand away because fresh blood still seeps from the cut. Then I drape my dressing gown around her and pull her close.

“Evelyn,” I whisper, hating myself even as I speak. “We’ve got to get into the castle so I can patch you up. It’s just across the courtyard. Can you walk?”

Her eyes shine. “If you help me, Philippa.”

We flit through the dark, down the stairs and to the main floor of the dormitory, where I find the nurse’s stuffy office blessedly unlocked. I haven’t the patience for hairpins again.

Inside, I switch on the electric light and blink in the sudden glare. Evelyn lays herself obediently down on the bare mattress that serves the nurse for an examining table. I rummage through drawers and cupboards, acutely aware that each moment means more of my sister’s blood lost. Though I don’t think she’s hurt herself seriously, an endless litany runs through my head—I hate I hate I hate this, I just want the night to end.

Finally I come up with catgut and a needle.

“Ev,” I mumble as I bite off the thread. “I’m going to stitch you up. It’ll hurt, just like it did at home. But I’m here, same as I was then.”

“Of course you are.” Ev’s face is beatific. “And when we go back, we’ll be together, too.”

Dampening a cloth, I sponge the blood from Evelyn’s wound. Nothing can be done about her nightgown and underthings—they’ll have to be hidden and then burned, some night when I’m able to get away unnoticed. Threading the needle, I take a shallow breath and fight against the heat that spreads across the back of my neck. I can’t be sick, not now, there isn’t time.

Ev winces at the first prick of the needle, her smile strained but still firmly in place. Twenty-four stitches I put in, hands rock-steady and fighting nausea all the while, but my sister should heal cleanly, and have only a fine scar.

I’ve lost count of the number of people I’ve sewn back together, on the battlefield or in the infirmary at Palace Beautiful. This is by far the most dreadful the work has ever been.

When I’ve finished, I bandage the injury. I make Ev swear not to show it to anyone, to hide it as best she can. I’m not sure how much of what I say gets through to her, but I have to try. If anyone were to find out—well. I’d die before I let my sister be sent to one of the places they claim are hospitals for girls with troubles like hers.

I tuck Evelyn back into bed, wearing my nightgown. Hers still waits in the nurse’s office, and under my dressing gown I’m naked as the day I was born. But I haven’t time to fetch new nightclothes.

I hurry back downstairs and scrub every trace of Ev’s blood from the nurse’s office. I flip the mattress so the rust-red patch she left on it won’t show. I bundle the cloths I used to wash her in the nightgown, and steal fresh ones for the bathroom upstairs.

By the time I’ve cleaned the tiles and hidden the evidence of Evelyn’s lapse, the moon has set and birds sing sleepily in the trees. Morning is well on its way, and there’s no point taking out fresh nightclothes. I pull on my school things and fall wearily into bed for a few moments’ sleep.

I see Ev at breakfast, where she sits talking and laughing with a few girls from her year. There’s a spark in her eyes that hasn’t been there for months, and I wish I was glad to see it.

Instead, I’m raw and heart-sore, but one of my own friends slides into the empty space beside me. “Long night, Philippa? Out with a St. Joseph’s boy, or was it a townie this time?”

I flash her a smile so bright it dazzles, a trick of the light that’s never failed to hide any darkness in me. “You know I never kiss and tell.”

Evelyn leaves the refectory, light-footed and alone, walking with a Woodlander’s silent steps.