Page 134 of Bone Year

“Maelis, look at me.”

I look.

His eyes are red, and his face is gray under it, and there is sweat at his temples, and he and I both know he’ll never fly again if I don’t do something and fast.

“If I die in this snow because you couldn’t cut, I am going to be very disappointed in you.”

I laugh despite being a sobbing mess.

“That’s not⁠—”

“Cut, Rose.”

My hand is still shaking. The scalpel is still heavy. My breathing is still too fast.

But there is something underneath the panic.

I want him to be okay.

I want him to live. I want him to fly, and the wanting is louder than the panic.

I lift the blade.

I touch the tip to the membrane inside the spreading dark.

My hand shakes. The blade slips. A bead of red wells where it shouldn’t, in healthy tissue, and I jerk back like I’ve burned myself.

“Fuck,” I sob. “Draven, my hands won’t —”

I feel a small weight on my shoulder and look over.

Poppy appears for the first time since last night without me noticing. She is climbing carefully down my arm, her tiny hands gripping my sleeve, her dark eyes fixed on mine.

She reaches the back of my hand.

She steps down and stands on her back legs, stretching her arms up until her tiny paws are over my fingers where they grip the scalpel.

They are so warm.

Something inside me goes quiet.

Poppy’s tiny hands push mine closer to Draven’s wing, and I focus on her warm paws. Her hands are on my hands the way my father’s hands were on my hands, and somewhere inside the panic, something my father taught me a long time ago surfaces. “Steady hands, Maelis.”

I lower the blade.

The scalpel finds the edge of the corruption.

My hand stops shaking.

I cut.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

“We tell our worst truths to the people who have just kept us alive. There is no other moment that earns it.”

— Veilguard Field Manual, margin note, author unknown

The day passed in pieces.