JANE Snake's Arc

Chapter 7 of 8

Jane carried the medical tools up to the house and laid them across the kitchen table. The brothers followed with the rest—the pelt, the amber rose, three more leather cases of equipment Nathan had found wedged behind a stone panel in the alcove's second chamber. Nathan opened the last case and pulled out a scalpel with gold inlay along its handle. The blade caught the morning light through the window. Jane picked it up and tested the edge against her thumb—still sharp after forty years. J.F. had maintained her tools the way someone maintains what keeps them alive. The brothers watched Jane handle each instrument, naming what it was for and how J.F. would have used it based on the wear patterns. One brother asked if Jane would teach them to use the bone saw. She said yes, but first they'd learn why you reached for it and when you didn't. By midday they'd cleared the front room and set up the first teaching space. Jane sent one brother to find students—anyone who'd lost someone to injury or fever and wanted to learn how to stop it happening again. The other brother helped Nathan build a stone monument outside using blocks from the collapsed temple wall. They set J.F.'s carved rose in amber at its center, marking the ground where the teaching would happen. When the first brother returned with five people, Jane stood them in a circle around the monument and held up the scalpel. She told them J.F.'s story—how a woman with no church blessing and no council approval had saved more lives than any physician in the territory. Then she asked who wanted to learn the same way J.F. had learned, by doing the work that needed doing. All five raised their hands. Jane handed the scalpel to the nearest student and told her to feel its weight. The council could debate credentials and the church could claim authority, but the hospital had just opened with six students, two teachers, and forty years of proven knowledge. She'd start with wound care tonight and move to field surgery by week's end. Nathan squeezed her shoulder as the students passed the scalpel between them, each one testing how it sat in their grip. The teaching hospital existed now, built on land the council didn't control and knowledge the church couldn't erase.