She nodded. “Clean the knife first,” she said, her whole body rigid, her feet arching with pain and the thought of more to come.

It didn’t make much sense to clean the knife when her leg was already festering, but I didn’t want to add insult to injury, and being clean was almost never a bad thing.

I took out my knife. “I’ll put it in the fire.”

Which I did, all of us quiet while the flames burned it clean.

Then Cate turned her face to the wall, tucked her little doll up between her shoulder and her ear, and waited for us to begin.

I handed the knife to Larkin. I could have done the cutting. I thought I could have done the cutting. But she had told him to do it, not me, and I confess that I was happy to let him do it. And not happy at the same time.

Larkin held the knife over the wound for a long moment, blinking and breathing hard, and then he made the cut with one hard, slow sweep, Cate jerking only a little, groaning only a little, the blood sweeping down as if Larkin had pulled a set of long red curtains across her leg.

When we pulled apart the edges of the wound, we could see that the infection had worked its way down into her muscle but not too far. I hoped not too far.

I took the honey jar from my pack and went out into the clearing, unscrewed the lid, tipped it quickly off, and waited, at a safe distance, for the trapped bees to fly away. When they did, I took the jar back inside.

Then, while Larkin held the wound open, I squeezed the comb like a wax sponge until the wound was full of honey. Then we pushed the wound closed with our fingers, the honey oozing up and gluing the seam mostly shut. For bandages, I cut the sleeves from my shirt—which my father had made for me with his own hands, which I hated to ruin, which I chose to ruin—and used them to bind up the wound, to keep it closed.

Oddly, it was only after we had finished, after the part that was hardest for someone awake, that Cate fainted. It was as if she had managed to be strong while she had to be strong but gave in to weakness as soon as she could.

And I felt much the same as we finished our work and finally sat down on the floor to rest.

Chapter Thirty

“We’ll keep them, just in case, though they’ll turn to flies soon,” Larkin said, peering into the maggot jar at the terrible little nurses in their white uniforms. How odd that creatures so mixed up with mess could be so clean and tidy. “We can always get more if we need them later on.”