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What she’s doing can’t be called healing.
It’s far too late for that; the wound is too deep, too broad, too deliberate, and there’s far too much blood on the slab already. It’s a miracle the body was still alive, at all, when her desperate search ended, at the bottom of a pit in the blackness inside a long-dead skull. But at the same time, it shouldn’t surprise her at all, because her beloved isn’t a witch, and isn’t fragile in the way Asteria’s kind so often are.
So she grasped that shaking, gasping form, and began a desperate race against the natural order of things. What she’s doing can’t be called healing, no; at this point it’s tug-of-war, magic against magic, her sigils biting hard and holding the soul because that’s all she can do alone. The guilds will be no help, she knows, and each glance at the wound makes her stomach turn over, but she holds on anyway because sometimes that’s all there is.
Part of her still wants to believe this was done in anger; that this was a furious impulse, blood-clouded rage. She knows that’s what her beloved would want. But no; the wound isn’t a gash, it’s an incision, long and wide and carved with hands far, far too delicate for a crime of passion. The perpetrator wanted something specific, and peering down into the space where a stolen rib should be, Asteria has a sickening idea of what that something was.
But, two can play at that game. What she’s doing can’t be called healing, no, it’s closer to necromancy, the kind of thing that even in this wild and woolly world gets frowns and hushed whispers from respectable folk. But Asteria wants to be respected, not respectable, and her family know how to play with things that others won’t touch.
Transference of life has been her craft from the day she first held a whittling knife; give it the right form, the right intent, and the right timber to take it, and the land itself will fill in the blanks. There’s far more power there than most people realise, a weight to playing god with wood, and she knows far too well that the would-have-been murderer knows that too.
So she stands, grim and steady, over her beloved’s pallid form, and counts out her plan again. Wings flap anxiously around her head, as crimson as the blood on the slab, but she ignores the anxious twittering. What she’s doing can’t be called healing, but it’s close enough to cover some of the same ground; salve on the wound, staunch the flow, ready the sigils for binding and hold the soul with everything you have.
“That’s it,” she says finally, wiping her forehead, dark skin pricking with sweat. Her companion acknowledges with another twitter, and lands cautiously at her beloved’s side. Brown eyes peer out from a black-flared face, and red feathers ruffle with worry, and for a moment, Asteria isn’t sure she can do this.
What she’s doing can’t be called healing; it’s deeper, older magic, equivalent exchange, and both of them know what’s up for the offering, how much value must be taken. She can’t make the sacrifice; she isn’t the one imbued with strong, ancient magic, but she can’t ask that little, fragile cardinal to make it either. If it was her, she would take the knife in a heartbeat, for herself and her beloved and their unborn child, but it isn’t.
The bird seems to understand; he chirps softly, and hops up onto the shivering, clinging body, right to the rim of the wound, and stares down Asteria with intent. They’ve been over this, more than once; neither can do it without the other, and both want it, for the sake of the body on the slab. So she takes a deep breath, and takes up her whittling knife, and swings it clean and high.
It’s over in a moment. What she’s doing can’t be called wounding, no; it’s still wood, still carving, still what she’s always done, but still she winces as she puts the bird’s left eye out, and leaves a scar right down across the lid. From the wound comes ichor, glowing blue, and it falls down slowly, agonisingly into the wound, and onto the severed stump of the missing rib.
And for a moment, nothing happens; for one long moment, Asteria is afraid, she’s come too late and burned her last chance and hurt her only friend for naught. But then there’s a glow, and a quiet crackling of new-grown bone, and in a moment she trips all of her sigils and knits the surface closed and holds her breath.
What they’ve done can’t be called healing, but nobody else would know that now. Least of all the one who first took a knife to her beloved, the monster, who scorned his own sister for being such and for cavorting with Asteria’s kind as if his own was superior. He’s tried this too, she knows, but he’s already pushed it too far; one eye for a rib will keep her beloved whole for at least as long as Asteria makes it, if the times are kind; but too much lifeblood breeds dependence, and that’s a road one has already fallen down.
And sure enough, as Asteria quiets her thoughts and sets her whittling knife down, the body, no, the woman, her wife, gasps suddenly, as her soul takes back its rightful place. And one Clawthorne witch embraces another, no longer grim and steady, tears brimming for how close in the balance things came. And a little bird settles down between them, with one eye sealed shut, and chirps quietly in relief.
In time, an emperor will pretend to mourn a brother he never had, and fight to fix what cannot and should not be fixed; a pair of witch-women will settle far into the mountains of the Knee, and the Clawthorne line will blossom from their cabin; and a cardinal palisman will watch over another line, false-grown and bent to ill-fitting shape, until such a time as another can be spared. But tonight, there are tears and kisses and hope, because what they have done cannot be called healing, but yet, there is no grave to fill.