Chapter 839: Hero’s Tears
Broken Sword put on Hero’s protective socks, lifted her into the wheelchair, and helped her wash and eat. Amy, their next-door neighbor, woke not long after, and the three of them left together for the hospital — Amy filling the space between them with easy chatter that kept the quiet from becoming too heavy. Hero barely spoke during the walk. Her hands were still in her lap. Her eyes moved, taking in the streets, but she seemed to be looking at something farther away than the street.
Amy was constitutionally incapable of worry. Even during the flight to the Kingdom of Dawn — even in those cold, uncertain weeks — she had found reasons to smile. Broken Sword had always envied that. She didn’t envy it less today.
They arrived at the hospital courtyard just before nine. Wendy was waiting at the entrance.
Not only Wendy.
Scroll. Anna. Leaf. Mystery Moon. Lily. The courtyard held nearly the whole of the Witch Union, standing in the pale morning light, waiting.
Broken Sword felt the warmth hit her somewhere behind the sternum. Her eyes went sharp and tight in a way she hadn’t expected. Behind her, she felt the wheelchair tremble slightly — Hero’s hands.
“His Majesty and Marquess Spear have been waiting for you in the medical room,” Wendy said, touching Hero’s hair with the easy tenderness she had for everyone. “Don’t worry. You’ll have your freedom back soon.”
“His Majesty?” Broken Sword looked up. “Roland came himself?”
“Who else?” Mystery Moon threw her hands up. “Only His Majesty can make Lily put down her microscope and her disgusting worms.”
“Don’t talk nonsense!” Lily made a grab for Mystery Moon’s face.
The three of them laughed — Hero too, or almost — and the knot of tension in the courtyard loosened a fraction.
Wendy shook her head, patient. “Let’s not keep His Majesty waiting.”
Broken Sword wheeled Hero into the medical room. She saluted the king and the Marquess, then lifted Hero carefully onto the bed.
Hero had her hand on the sleeping herb. She was about to take it.
Then Annie arrived, slightly breathless, and took Hero’s hand in both of hers — just as she had during every hard moment on the long flight east.
“I’ll be here when you wake up.”
The effect was immediate and undeniable. Broken Sword watched the tension drain from Hero’s shoulders, the subtle bracing of her jaw release. Whatever steadying she had been doing alone, Annie’s presence made unnecessary.
On that flight to the Kingdom of Dawn, it had been Annie who had kept them alive — finding food, managing the cold, navigating terrain that none of the other three had been equipped for. They had all come to regard her as the backbone of their small group. If Annie was there, problems had solutions. That belief had become load-bearing, and it held even now.
Shortly after Hero swallowed the herb, she slept.
“Let’s begin,” Wendy said.
Broken Sword nodded, closed her eyes—
—and the world went dark.
Not dark like a room with no light. Dark like the space between heartbeats: a void with no edges, no sound, nothing to push against. It lasted only a moment. Then the room returned, viewed through different eyes.
Through Nana’s eyes.
The experience of transformation was always startling: she could see herself as a short, thin blade — a willow-leaf dagger, the green light of Leaf’s magic flowing along the steel like something alive. His Majesty had suggested this particular form and given it a name: scalpel. He had said waving a longsword over the bed was impractical and somewhat unsettling. She had to admit he was right.
A surge of power rolled through her — Leaf’s magic, channeled through Spear Passi’s connection, flooding in all at once. Her sense of fullness made her hum. Only Nana heard it, but Nana glanced down at the blade with the patient acknowledgment of long practice.
“Still uncomfortable?”
“Better than before,” Broken Sword said — or the part of her that remained conscious said, aware that the weapon had no lungs, no voice, and yet the words existed somehow. “Don’t hold back. Use me as you need.”
She had experienced this combination before. Leaf’s magic had a quality of moisture and vitality, like roots working slowly through deep soil; once she had adapted to it, the discomfort was manageable. Anna’s Blackfire was different — hard, cold, sharp as a steel needle pressed into the marrow. Anna’s magic capacity on top of that made the combination barely endurable, even for the seconds it had to last. For that reason, very few witches chose to work with Anna in this role.
She had come to believe, in the mysterious way that magic disclosed character, that this said something accurate about Anna — though Anna herself was warm, approachable, not remotely cruel. The magic and the person did not quite match. It was something she still hadn’t reconciled.
Anna moved to the foot of the bed. Her fingertip traced a dark, thin line just above the end of Hero’s shortened leg, wrapping it like a cord. It was Blackfire — and Broken Sword could feel through Nana’s grip what that filament could do: melt iron, split stone, reduce steel to vapor. Held like this, constrained to the width of a finger, it felt like an icy thread.
The line vanished. Broken Sword understood: it had shrunk to a point, and in the shrinking — too precise, too flat to bleed at first — it had passed cleanly through skin, vessel, and bone. A circle of red appeared, slowly, at the cut. The excised slice of skin and tissue was barely a finger’s thickness.
Nana was already moving. She stripped the epidermis back, drove her healing into the wound, and the work began.
Broken Sword had watched this many times. She watched it now through Nana’s eyes, from inside the blade, and it was still strange to see: the red rawness of exposed tissue advancing forward under old skin, new pink skin pushing out behind it, the two magic supplies — hers and Leaf’s, braided through Spear’s connection — burning down at a rate she could measure by how her awareness thinned.
Half an hour.
Then Nana’s strength gave out entirely. She let the scalpel fall and caught the edge of the bed with both hands, forehead damp, her breaths uneven.
Broken Sword’s return to her own body was graceless — a sudden reinhabitation of a frame that ached from crown to sole, as though every internal organ had been used as fuel. She was upright, barely. She refused Wendy’s suggestion to rest in the adjacent room.
She wanted to be here when Hero woke.
The sleeping fern’s hold lifted slowly. Hero surfaced by degrees, consciousness arriving before her eyes opened.
“How do you feel?” Wendy helped her sit, one arm behind her shoulders. “Can you feel them?”
Hero shook her head — not in answer but the way you shake off sleep — then opened her eyes fully and looked down at her own feet.
Where there had been stumps with ugly scars, there were now feet.
No one breathed.
For a long moment, Hero only stared. The medical room was completely silent.
Then one slender toe moved.
Broken Sword thought she had imagined it. She blinked.
The toe moved again. Then it bent — stiff, the way a hinge sounds when it hasn’t moved in years — and slowly, with visible effort, curled.
The rest of the toes followed.
Broken Sword’s chest flooded with something that had no name. She wanted to shout. She was forming the shout when she saw it: two tears running down Hero’s face.
She had never — not once, in all the worst months, through the cutting and the healing and the sleeping herb and the waking to do it again — seen Hero cry.
“Than—” Hero’s throat closed the moment she opened her mouth. She swallowed. Tried again. Couldn’t manage more than the beginning of the word.
She didn’t need to finish it. Everyone in the room understood.
Annie leaned in. And Hero, without another word, buried herself in Annie’s arms and wept.