"Both Hands and a Held Breath"

Tom set his weight on the captain's shoulders and decided, for now, to believe her.

The hunter above was her bargain. Marrow, here, under this curved needle, was Tom's. A man could only mind one fight at a time, and the one in front of him had a face he loved.

"Ready," he said.

Mama Yves did not waste a word. She drew the packed cloth from the wound and the splinter showed itself fully for the first time — longer than Tom had let himself believe, the wood gone dark and slick. She closed her free hand around it the way a woman closes her hand around a thorn she means to pull from a child.

"Now, Mr. Pell. Hold him as if you loved him, because you will hurt him as if you hated him."

She pulled.

Marrow woke screaming. The sound came up out of him from somewhere below speech, and his body bowed like a sprung plank, and Tom threw his whole self across the captain's chest and pinned him to the sailcloth with his forearms and his weight and the begging in his own throat. "Easy — easy, sir, it's Pell, it's only Pell —" The captain's heels drummed the cot. His fist caught Tom across the ear hard enough to ring it. Tom held.

The splinter came free. Mama Yves laid it on the stone — a foot of red wood — and was already pressing a folded cloth to the welling dark, already threading the wound with that calm, terrible patience.

Marrow sagged. The fight ran out of him all at once and left him shivering and small.

And in the new silence, the trapdoor at the passage's far end thudded — once — under a heavy, deliberate weight from above.