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I slowly raised my head to stare at him. “How?”
“We can soak the branches in a brew to keep them alive and make them malleable,” he said excitedly. “Then we make tiny wounds in the ends of them for the spores—”
I paled. “Wait. Spores?”
He nodded. “Fungal spores. The fungi will join your tissue to the wood, which means you’ll be able to—”
“You want to give me a fungus arm?” I said, horrified at the thought.
Gillie laughed. “Yes. Exactly. Fungi and wood. Alive. Moveable. Like you were never missing an arm in the first place.”
Horror and excitement warred inside me. “Moveable?”
He nodded again. “If I get it all right, the fungi will latch on to your nervous system and—”
“Maybe… maybe don’t give me the details,” I said faintly, then licked my lips as I stared between them. “How is that possible? That’s not—surely that’s not how mushrooms act or something they can do?”
“Not normally.” Gillie gave me a wide, sharp-toothed grin. “But I can make mushrooms do whatever I want.”
Nua rolled his eyes at that, which made me want to smile. And then I did. Hesitantly at first, until I was grinning for the first time in… I didn’t even know how long.
I looked back down at the drawing. “Do you think you can do it, Gillie?”
“It might take me a couple of tries, but yes,” he said confidently, then leaned forward to clap me on the shoulder. “Let’s build you a new arm, Ash.”
My grin widened, and they both returned it with big smiles of their own. Nua wrapped his arms around Gillie’s and tipped his head onto his shoulder, his long green hair shifting in a curtain.
“What can I do to help?” I asked eagerly, reaching forward to pull the notebook closer.
Gillie chuckled. “You don’t need to do anything, lad. It’s all in hand.”
Nua straightened, glancing between us nervously. “What about the…”
After a second, Gillie’s smile dropped. “Oh. Yes.”
He looked at me seriously, making my gut tighten with nervous fear.
“If you want this, Ash, we will have to reopen the wound.” He gestured at my stump, hidden beneath my shirt sleeve. “We need to connect it to tissue. Your muscles and nerves.”
My breath caught, and I looked down at my stump. “Oh.”
“If you’d prefer, I can just make you a prosthesis. We don’t have to do this.” He gestured at the notebook.
I licked my lips. “No, I… I’d like the living arm. So we would have to… cut off a bit more?”
“Just a tiny bit,” he said quickly. “To get rid of the scar tissue and make it an open wound again. That’s why we hadn’t told you yet—we were trying to work out if there was a way to do it without having to… do that.”
I swallowed, dragging my eyes from my stump to the drawing in the notebook. My gut clenched with longing. I wanted my arm back. I wanted to be able to go and get my stuff from my cottage and be confident that I could kill the Carlin and her sons when I was able.
And I didn’t want to give them the satisfaction of seeing what Balor had done to me before I killed them. I was sure he would get in one last smirk about the fact that he’d maimed me, even if he was moments from death.
I nodded and looked up at Gillie and Nua. “I want to do it.”
