They Left the Healer to Die Below, So I Came Back Up With the Monster's Heart novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: No Cord

With her cord in the fire Liesbet claims the heart under the guild's oldest law, takes her first rank in front of the man who left her, and the Healers' House cuts her and anyone who follows her off.

Griet came to me slowly.

She put the spare white cord down on the table beside the heart.

Then she reached up and unpinned the real one from my shoulder.

Her fingers brushed my neck.

A healer's bare hand always feels warm to another healer, like a cup straight off the stove.

Nobody else in the world can feel it, and I had known Griet's warmth since I was fifteen.

"Griet," I whispered. "He can't do this."

"He can do what he likes," she whispered back. "He always has."

She folded the cord in her small hands.

"I mended that man once," she said, so low only I could hear it.

"He was twenty-two and out cold on the Mouth's steps. He's never let one of us touch him since."

She turned and dropped my cord into the fire.

It curled up black at the edges and then it was gone.

The healers along the wall finished the song, because that was the rite.

I stood there and listened to them sing me dead.

When it was over, Sander stepped forward with his spear.

"Then that settles it," he said to the Gold table.

"She's no healer, so she's a member of my party like any other. The party leader claims the heart."

"Your party," I said.

"My party."

"Clerk," I said. "Bring the roll."

The guild clerk was an old man who never looked up from his books.

He looked up now.

He brought the big roll book down from the dais and opened it on the table beside the heart.

Every party's members were written in it, every name in ink.

Mine had a line through it.

"Raes, L., healer, lost on seven," the clerk read. "Struck at midnight, at the leader's word."

"You struck me off your roll before I was cold," I said to Sander. "I'm not in your party."

I looked up at the words carved in stone above the hall doors.

Every hunter in Aldenbrug walked under them every day.

"Whoever carries a warden's heart up the Mouth's steps is a hunter of the guild," I read out loud.

"That law is two hundred years old," the Guildmaster said from the dais. "And healers hold no rank. That law is mine."

"You just told the whole hall I'm no healer," I said. "You watched Griet burn the cord."

Somebody on the benches whistled.

Coppens looked at me for a long moment with his hand on his chest.

He didn't look angry, only interested.

"The party wounded it," Sander said. "Everyone saw the spear in it, and the arrows."

"Nobody saw anything," I said. "You took the lamp."

Daan stood up from the front bench.

He was swaying a little under the bandage, but he stood.

"Sander ran before it was loose," my brother said. "I was trying to lift the stone off her. He hit me so I'd stop."

Sander's face went red under his beard.

"The boy took a knock on the head."

"Yes," Daan said. "From you."

The hall murmured, low and ugly.

"The Gold table will decide," Coppens said.

The six Golds sat in a row on the dais behind him.

Three of them raised a hand for Sander's party.

Joris Declercq raised his for me, and so did two more.

"Three and three," the clerk said. "The Chair decides."

Every face in the hall turned to the Guildmaster.

Coppens came down the dais steps and picked up the warden's heart.

He weighed it in his gloved hand.

"The law is the law," he said.

"A heart ranks a hunter one rung at a time, so she is Iron. The price of the heart is hers."

He set the heart back in front of me.

Then he took the iron cord the clerk handed him and pinned it to my shoulder himself.

"Welcome to the guild, hunter," he said warmly.

The hall erupted.

Half of them were cheering and half of them were shouting at Sander, who had walked in a Steel expecting to walk out a Silver.

Sander didn't look at me.

He walked out through the side door with the archer behind him, and nobody stopped to let him pass.

Daan unpinned the little brass party badge from his collar, the one with Sander's mark on it.

He set it on the table next to the heart.

"I'm in my sister's party," he said.

"I don't have a party," I said.

"You do now. It's got two people in it."

I laughed for the first time since the seventh floor.

At the end of the healers' row, the Mother of the House stood up.

The healers along the wall stopped talking at once.

"The House has one more thing to say," she said.

She looked at me.

"No healer in Aldenbrug will mend you, or anyone who goes down the Mouth with you," she said.

"And any healer who follows you will lose her cord."

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