17

Eric guides me to the corridor that runs down the side of the staircase. My landing spot is slick with the green sludge.

His hand releases me and he sidesteps around the bile to reach my abandoned backpack.

He leaves behind the pencils and erasers that fell out.

I watch them blister in the bile.

Headmaster Braun has his pentacle firm in his hand. He holds his palms flat against the air, and his mouth moves in a murmur of incantations. His brow is furrowed in concentration—and the bile starts to bubble.

The staircase is quickly festering with the old cheese stink, and I hear a retch or two from the onlookers.

The bubbles raise higher, then pop into green vapours.

Eric offers me his hand. His schooled expression is a mask that covers the softness of his eyes. If I look long enough, I will see the pity.

I don’t want to see it, so I rest my wrist on his palm and let him steer me up the staircase, through the clearing trails of sticky wood and a burnt rug.

I don’t look back at them.

But I have little doubt that if I did, they would be watching me. Both Dray and Oliver. I can picture the simmering rage in their glares.

I keep my back to them and leave behind the foyer.

I’m not first to arrive at the infirmary.

Students who were struck by the wave on the upper corridor, they had enough foresight to get themselves to one of these sickbeds before the blisters could even form.

I wasted time on the Snakes—and I don’t regret it.

My weight sags on Eric with each hobbled step closer to the nearest available bed.

He deposits me on the mattress, gentle, and draws back a step. Teacher hat on today, not a fellow student.

I flop onto the bed—and wait.

Eric turns a glance around the sickbeds, as though he assesses the apparent health of the students on them. Some are slumped, others are fussing over their reddened legs and arms, a particularly pretty boy is inspecting his crimson cheek in a handheld mirror. Most of them are without warts.

Got the salves and balms in time.

I am not so lucky.

The witchdoctor advances on me, snapping a pair of large metal scissors menacingly.

My teeth bare in a grimace as, without a word, she pinches the torn and melted fabric of my tights. She starts to cut them off, revealing the sores and the burn-scar ripples of my pale legs. White, branded, hot and angry.

It’s not very pretty and I’m glad that Eric has turned his back to give me some privacy.

He sets my bag down on the sidetable, then wanders over to the other sickbeds, pausing to question other students.

He isn’t wearing his robes today. But when Headmaster Braun called for his assistance, his attendance, he slipped into the role with ease.

It’s an odd thing to see a student also have the part of teacher. There’s an edge to it that whispers mask, mask, mask , as though I am watching him play pretend, and it’s a bit cringe, I think, but I throw the thought from my mind before it can take root.

Eric doesn’t return to my sickbed.

He just casts a look back at me. It lingers a moment, runs down my blistered legs to my red, bleeding feet, then he leaves the infirmary.

I’m glad for it.

I sink into the pillows and brace myself as the witchdoctor sets out jarred balms on the metal trolley.

She massages an ointment into my flesh. The warts and blisters pop under the pressure of her fingertips—and the smell is too close to the bile itself.

A sickly moan hums through me.

I turn my cheek to her, to the green puss that oozes from my sores, and I bury my face in my hooked arms.

It goes on a while. Longer than she tends to the other students, and so I suspect a little favourable treatment here. I don’t doubt that Father has paid her some gold to take extra care of me.

Is there anything money can’t buy?

Freedom .

The answer comes too swiftly. It is firm in my mind.

I roll over onto my front, and Witchdoctor Urma starts kneading the balms all over my calves, down the soles of my feet, anywhere with even a streak of angry red skin.

My cheek is smushed against the pillow.

I watch a hunched, limping silhouette draw closer—moving for the bed next to mine, the curtains parted, and a clear sight. Clear enough that, once the silhouette moves into my line of sight, I let a scoff jerk me.

James, holding his gut, a sickly shade to his sweaty face.

James slowly sets himself down on the neighbouring bed, as though his bones scream with his movements. But I myself have the burns, the pain of the flesh, and moving isn’t a trigger. It’s just there, searing at me, constant, parasites eating me from the outside-in.

No doubt in my mind, James saw an opportunity to get time off from classes, or just to keep away from the other students, and threw himself into a puddle of bile.

I wouldn’t put it past him.

I watch as he sinks into the pillow with a pitiful groan.

His face is a twisted grimace as he pushes his glasses up his oily nose.

I reach for the curtain beside my bed. The tips of my fingers pinch the cheap, plastic-like material, and I shake it, loud. Sounds like a shower curtain.

It draws in his self-wallowing frown.

“Where’s Courtney?” I ask.

Urma’s fingers leave my balmed flesh, and don’t return.

I hear the clatter behind me, the metal trolley being moved, then she rolls it over to James’s bedside.

The look she shoots him is narrowed and wicked. Bet she’s sick of the sight of him.

“On her way,” he mumbles, then his words cut off with a wince as Witchdoctor Urma lifts a pair of scissors. “She stopped in at the bathroom.”

I’m glad for her that peeing is wildly more important than coming to check on my—and James’s—health. The order of the priorities is notable.

Or maybe that bitter mood of mine is just lingering.

I loosen a breath and turn my face. It drags along the pillow, suffocated for a moment, then I face the other bed, the empty one.

If James is offended that I have silenced our chat, cut him out like that, he doesn’t speak on it. He’s too busy wincing and murmuring ‘ ow, ow, ow ’ over and over as the witchdoctor works on him.

I leave him be.

And I let the ointments soak into my flesh and sink me into a deep slumber.