They Left the Healer to Die Below, So I Came Back Up With the Monster's Heart novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: My Own Rite

Liesbet walks into the guild hall in the middle of her own death rite, puts the glowing heart in front of the archer who took her lamp, and the Guildmaster orders her healer's cord burned.

"Whose hand was it?" I asked.

Joris didn't answer.

He looked at the guild hall across the square, where they were still singing for me.

"Go home," he said. "Wrap the hand. Come back when you've thought about what to say."

"My brother's in there," I said.

I kept my grey hand out of my pocket and walked across the square.

The hall was full.

The guild hall of Aldenbrug holds two hundred hunters on a quiet night, and it wasn't quiet.

At the far end the long fire burned in its pit below the Gold table.

The healers from the House stood along the wall in their grey coats, singing.

Griet Wouters stood nearest the fire with a white cord across her hands.

She had taught me everything I knew since I was fifteen, and she was crying behind her spectacles.

The House sends a new cord to burn for every healer who doesn't come back up.

That one was mine.

Sander stood beside her with his spear, his head bowed.

"She followed us as far as she could," he was saying. "I want everyone to know that."

The archer stood behind him and nodded.

Daan sat on the front bench with a bandage around his head and his face in his hands.

I walked up the middle of the hall.

The singing stopped one voice at a time, from the back to the front.

Sander turned around last.

His mouth opened and stayed open.

Daan looked up.

He came off the bench so fast he knocked it over, and then he had me off my feet in the middle of the hall.

"You're dead," he said into my hair. "He said you were dead."

"He was hoping," I said.

Daan set me down, and his eyes went to my hand.

"Liesbet, what happened to your hand?"

"Later."

I walked past Sander to the table where the archer stood.

I set the warden's heart down in front of her.

It lit her face from underneath, white and blue.

"You took my lamp," I said.

The hall went so quiet I could hear the fire.

Sander found his voice first.

"Liesbet, thank the Deep. We tried to get to you, the whole roof was coming down."

"It came down on my leg," I said. "You looked at it."

"Two hundred people heard your report, Sander," someone called from the benches. "You said the warden took her."

"It nearly did," Sander said, and smiled at the room. "And the party brought up its heart. That's what matters."

The archer reached across the table for the heart.

"Party's heart," she said.

I put my left hand on her wrist.

I didn't push anything.

I only closed my grey fingers around her arm.

She screamed and went down on her knees on the floor of the guild hall.

"Don't," she begged. "Please, Raes, don't, I'm sorry, I didn't mean it, don't."

She was shaking so hard her blue beads rattled.

I looked down at her, and then I let go.

"I only mend people," I said.

Somebody laughed on the back benches, and then a lot of people did.

The archer crawled back behind Sander's legs with her face burning.

"How?" a hunter shouted. "How does a healer kill a warden?"

"Look at the heart," said an old Steel near the front. "There's not a spear hole in it."

Every face in the hall turned to me.

"It was on top of me," I said. "So I took it apart."

The door behind the Gold table opened.

Everyone stood up, so I knew who it was before I saw him.

Hendrik Coppens had been Guildmaster of Aldenbrug for thirty years.

He was sixty-four and looked forty-five, tall and lean, with dark hair that had never gone grey.

He was the only hunter in the guild without a single scar, and the city called him the Unbroken.

He came down the steps from the dais with his bare left hand flat on his chest and a black glove on his right.

That was his salute, the one every child in Aldenbrug copied in the street.

He stopped in front of me and looked at my hand for a long time.

"Liesbet Raes," he said.

His voice was warm and reasonable.

"Tell me what you did on the seventh floor."

"I put my hand on the warden and pushed the mending the other way," I said. "It came apart."

"You took a living thing apart with your hand."

"Yes."

Coppens nodded slowly.

He turned to the old woman in white who sat at the end of the healers' row.

The Mother of the Healers' House was seventy and had never smiled at me once.

"Mother," he said. "What does the oath say?"

"Never harm the living," she said.

"Then she has broken it."

Coppens looked at the cord across Griet's hands, and then at the one on my shoulder.

"A healer who kills is no healer," he said. "Griet, take her cord and burn it. The rite can finish."

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