She's All Thaumaturgy

by A. K. Caggiano

  The elf hesitated. She was hiding behind Rosalind who was hiding behind Bix. “You want me…to heal the troll?”

  “I mean,”—Elayne shrugged—“It’s hurt.”

  “It almost squashed me!”

  Elayne stomped over to the elf and grabbed her. “It probably just wanted to play.”

  Frederick watched as a protesting Gramps was handed off to Rosalind and the women approached the flailing troll. Elayne was speaking to it in a hushed tone, and when it swiped at her, he pulled his sword again.

  “Stop it!” Elayne was firm, standing her ground, and the troll hiccuped and dropped its arm. “There’s no need for all that! There, now, we’re going to help you.” She gestured to Neoma who forced on a smile and let herself be guided up to the troll. With eyes that shifted back to the troll’s great opened mouth and jagged, yellow teeth then back to her own hands, she placed them where Frederick’s sword had sliced into the creature’s leg. It wailed at her touch, and she pulled back, but Elayne quieted them both, and the elf went to work.

  Frederick had seen plenty of elven healing techniques. The crown employed several in the castle, though they rarely stooped to mending cuts and bruises, especially those sustained in sparring, but he’d always been intrigued by them. Legosen had explained that they manipulated the aether inside the body—something every living thing had—and, as he understood it, told it to right itself. When he asked if elves could tell aether to wrong itself, Legosen had given him a long, stoic look then asked why anyone would want to do that.

  The cut was barely visible when Neoma finished, and the troll was grinning—actually grinning—when she raised her hands and declared, “All done!”

  “All done!” Elayne repeated, clapping with a smile, and all three trolls mimicked them, their hands coming together and the sound shaking the trees, their voices almost forming the words.

  Frederick rubbed his forehead. Sure, they’d nearly been killed, but this was fine. He’d just saved all their lives at great peril to his own, and those trolls would have cut him down without a second thought, but no, of course, let’s clap and cheer all together now. Elayne glanced back at him then, dirt smeared across her cheek, dust in her hair, and a bruise forming on her arm, but she was smiling. He felt his face soften. If nothing else, that was certainly compassionate, and that was one less thing they’d have to work on if they ever made it back to the castle.

  A shuffling in the brush nearby caught their attention then, and they all took a step back when they saw it. The trees themselves seemed to part for the creature that dragged itself from the forest. A troll, this one massive and long-limbed, with none of the roundness of the other three but the same craggy teeth and thick, pointed claws loomed over them all.

  “Oh, mama.” Rosalind blinked up at the creature, the size more accurate to Frederick’s memory of the one-bite decapitator. He hovered a hand at his hilt, but Elayne was quick to stay him with a gentle touch to his arm.

  They stood still at the mouth to the cave, the mother troll considering the scene. One of the babies ran to her and wrapped its arms around her leg, babbling, perhaps in their language, perhaps saying nothing at all. She stared down the group for an eternity in that second and then motioned to the other two, and all four lumbered off into the forest.

  CHAPTER 18

  In the deep dark beginning of everything, there was only a chasm, a bottomless gorge, out of which the first Beings were spawned, or perhaps spawned Themselves—we weren’t there, so how do we know? We do profess to know, however, nine sounds which occurred during the spawning: Aa’h, Ea’h, M’ye, Oh’oa, U’ah, Sh’ey, Va’ye, Fa’te, and W’ey. These have become the exalted names of the gods of Maw which has been unanimously celebrated as they are the first sounds uttered into existence, but the names mostly occurred because They haven’t told us what They’d actually like to be called.

  - from Onomatopoetic Praise, Clyve Bingly, pub. 1246 PA

  “Aren’t elves supposed to, like, heal things?” Tavaris squinted at Melorya from across the table.

  The elf sighed even heavier than usual. “Elves can manipulate the bodies of living beings, so yes, we can heal, but that doesn’t mean that’s what we’re supposed to do.” She was right, of course, but it was a funny way of saying it. “Now, pay attention.”

  Tavaris looked down to the parchment she tapped. He’d been writing the same thing over and over again, at least it looked the same to him, but she insisted it was wrong. If this was magic, it was Maw’s most boring. Lazily he picked up the quill and began scratching out the symbols yet again.

  Melorya growled, slapping a hand down and making him jump. “No. Do it right. You must learn to do this properly if you’re going to assist your father this time.”

  Tavaris bristled. He did not want to do that. “I do not want to do that.”

  She looked like she might yell, but then reigned herself in, blinking lavender eyes away. “I know.”

  The softness of her voice made him place the quill back on the table, flexing the fingers of his hand. The veins that were ever-darkening there had grown. “Whenever Dad makes me mess with the nexus,” he said quietly, “it gets worse.”

  Melorya’s skin had never changed, but then she’d never actually touched the basin. She wouldn’t look at him even as he stared hard at her.

  “I haven’t read about the nexus doing this to other elves.” He gestured with his elbow to the cases of books that lined the walls though they were not stuffed full. He felt like he’d been through every one of them at least twice and knew everything there was to know up until whatever started happening about a hundred years ago.

  Melorya took a breath and flipped a page without really looking at it in her own book. “I’m here for arcana, not history.” She glared at him for a second. “Or biology.”

  “But the crossbloods,” he went on, “It happens to them too. So you would think somebody would have written about it.”

  She was still doing her best to only half listen to him.

  “I just think maybe Dad’s doing something wrong.”

  Melorya snapped the book shut, her light eyes flashing at him. “Under no circumstances are you to say that to your father.”

  Tavaris leaned back from the table, wide-eyed. She yelled at him all the time, but not like this. “I just thought—”

  “You think too much,” she said, tapping the parchment again. “And you practice too little.”

  Tavaris pouted. “What about the crystal?”

  “What about it?”

  “It could do this for me.” He smiled widely: it was a very simple answer.

  “It could do many things,” she grumbled. “It could strip you of your aether where you stand or turn your little pet into a colossal dragon of old. But we don’t have it.”

  Of course. He huffed and hung his head. That would be real magic, not more of this tracing-to-memorize nonsense. Then he had an idea. “You wanna see some real magic?” Before she could say no, he scooted his chair close to her and set his fingers in the air before both of them. With all of his focus and an expert flick of his wrist, he cut through the air with two fingers and created a deep fissure.

  Melorya made a shocked sound beside him, but he didn’t stop, urging the little creatures out from the slice in existence itself. Two of the bug-like beings scurried out with great effort and suspended themselves in the air. “Go on, show her,” he said.

  The creatures started to spin a web with silvery strings attached to nothing but pulled taut. An image began to form, the colors of the strings shifting, and in an instant there was a small portrait before them.

  “Where did you learn this?” she whispered.

  “Oh, uh, well…” He searched his mind for an excuse. Last time I ran away just sounded so childish. “An elf in the market. Isn’t it great?”

  He hadn’t heard the sound of heavy boots on the library’s stone floor, he was too enraptured by the sight, but his father’s baritone made him jump to a
ttention. “What on Maw is this?”

  Tavaris beamed at his father over his shoulder. “Isn’t it neat? The Trizians, I don’t know, sort of cast it out through the aether. It’s like a book with drawings of faces…but not.”

  Melorya was an ashy white, completely silent, her mouth hanging open. Alaion leaned between the two, his eyes lingering over the portrait of an elven woman that was more décolletage than facade. “Trizian trash,” he sniffed.

  “But they’re elves.” Tavaris ran his fingers over the silky strings and they shifted, revealing different portraits and fanciful scrawling beneath them. “It’s really complex magic, but we can only look at it from here. I can’t make any.”

  “To what end?” Alaion’s face barely changed, but his voice was sharper. “This is a waste of exceptional talent. It all seems so…human.”

  Tavaris sighed, “Yeah, maybe.”

  Melorya had shut her mouth and was sitting up very straight, making quite the effort to not look at either one of them. Whatever she thought about it, she certainly wasn’t going to say.

  Tavaris scrunched up his nose as he idly slid a finger across the portraits to reveal a few more. “There’s even a human in this one. Well, a half-human, I guess.”

  Alaion tutted, and moved to turn, but then stopped. He leaned closer, much closer this time, and scanned the set of portraits. There were two, side-by-side, and they were of the same girl, though she looked drastically different—monstrous in one and beautiful in the other, as the weaved words below suggested: From total fail to all hail! We couldn’t let any dirty spells or rotten words hold her back. Now half-sister El is off to save the day.

  “Afore and hind.” Alaion growled out the last words that were hanging in the air. “Curse breaker.”

  Tavaris could feel it before it happened, and it hurt. Alaion threw an arm out and swiped through the portraits, breaking through the magic and causing the little creatures to scurry away. Then his hand came around and grabbed the boy by his collar, yanking him up to his feet.

  Tavaris’s heart shot up into his throat as the chair clattered away behind him and the parchment scattered across the floor as he flailed. He locked eyes with his father, inches from his snarling face. He couldn’t look away from the anger that was building there despite being terrified of what would come next.

  But then, his grip loosened. Tavaris felt for the table behind him as his father released him, steadying himself on shaking knees so that he wouldn’t see.

  “Melorya,” said Alaion as he wrapped his hands back behind his back. “See that the boy knows the spell by tomorrow.”

  When he finally whisked out of the room, Tavaris remembered to breathe. He looked after where his father went, listening for the footsteps to fall away completely before moving. Then he collected the parchment, righted his chair, and sunk down into it, unable to look at his teacher.

  Melorya cleared her throat, smoothing out the pages of her book. “If you kept your head down a little more, things would be a lot easier for you.”

  Tavaris bit his lip, his face hot as he stared hard at the table.

  “Your little friends might stop disappearing too.” She sighed. “Now, look, try it this way.”

  He took up the quill again, shifting to see what she was doing, then grunted. “Wait, what?” He snapped his head up to look at her.

  “What?” she asked flatly, then rolled her eyes. “Oh, that little ginger human. I saw you talking to her in the courtyard. So did your father.”

  “Maysie?” Tavaris’s heart pounded harder than it had even moments earlier. He’d been so careful.

  She blinked up at him, annoyed still, then her face softened. “If that was her name, yes.”

  Tavaris hadn’t seen her for a day or so, but humans were always so busy—they had a lot less time on Maw, so they were always trying to get more done—so he’d thought nothing of it. His face fell. “Did he…did he send her to Hallowmarch?”

  Melorya hesitated, then sighed. “Yes. To Hallowmarch. Now, come on, the spell. You need to know it.”

  He gripped the quill tighter than he needed, grinding his teeth. “Why? What’s the point? He can do it himself.”

  “I know,” Melorya told him, sympathy creeping into her voice. “But he wants you to do it this time. And what Alaion wants, Alaion gets.”

  Tavaris watched her focus back on the book and dip her own quill in the inkwell that had managed to stay upright. “That’s not true,” he whispered.

  She glared over at him.

  “If it were,” he said carefully, “You’d be married to him.”

  Melorya couldn’t hide the shock from her face but made a valiant attempt. She licked her lips and smirked. “And I’d be your stepmother, which I can’t imagine you would ever want.”

  “No way,” he said perhaps too quickly, making her huff, but he still eyed her wearily. “But he wants you to be. And don’t you want to be queen?”

  “Your father isn’t a king,” she mumbled then shook her head. “And I’m not interested in being my sister’s replacement. Not that it’s any of your business what I want.”

  “You don’t like him.” Tavaris said more matter-of-factly, sitting back away from the table. He watched her face as she chewed a lip then caught herself. Her frown had receded, but he could tell she was still unhappy, just in a different way.

  “I used to,” she said so quietly he could barely hear, then she placed the book down carefully on the table and drummed her fingers on it. “I used to.”

  Tavaris opened his mouth, then closed it again. He almost told her the truth, but instead his shoulders drooped, and he leaned forward to go over the spell once more, as if none of it had happened at all. As if he hadn’t almost said, Me too.

  CHAPTER 19

  Gramps announced he knew the way onward, insisting he could see now that they were free of the mines despite the interior of the pipe being, presumably, just the same as it had ever been. They were still within the dwarven range albeit in a deeply wooded plateau, the harbor city where Gramps was sure they would find pirates to be paid with gods knew what gold, a far enough off destination to not be concerned about for now. Elayne offered to carry his pipe when she saw how frustrated Neoma looked at what would be the third time he tried telling them about the time he went on a diplomatic mission north of Apos’phia to meet with the giant clans.

  Elayne fell back from the others, making sure to ooh and aah at the most important bits of story and even gasp when he revealed the clan chieftain to actually be two vulkits—whatever those were—atop one another’s shoulders dressed in a floor-length fur. “And that reminds me of this other time—”

  “Gramps,” she cut in before he could move on to something new, “I was actually hoping you could tell me a little more about, well,”—she cleared her throat and lowered her voice—“The thing I showed you.”

  “Dear, you’ll have to be more specific. I’ve seen a lot of things in my life.”

  Elayne sighed, spreading her fingers in front of the bottle. “The magic I did to the plant that…that killed it.”

  “Ah, yes.” His voice went quiet, and somehow the dent in the pipe took on a puzzled look. “I haven’t seen it in many years, that magic.”

  “You said it was a big mistake.” She swallowed, measuring her steps to stay far enough behind the others so they could not hear.

  “Well, we didn’t know at the time what would happen when a human mage and an elf bore a child. You know it’s rare enough for an elf and a human to bare offspring at all, not that the trying isn’t fun!” He chuckled in the pipe and Elayne made a face she hoped he couldn’t see. “I was much younger then, yes. And exactly the right bits of aether came together in a being much like yourself. The child was crossblooded, and the others called him that like it was a bad thing, but I knew he was special.”

  “He could do the same thing I can?”

  “Sure could.” Gramps’s voice swelled with pride. “No one had seen anything like Idr
is. It started with simple things, manipulations like the mages do, then it grew into manipulating living creatures. He could control the aether in a different way, grabbing onto it and doing whatever he pleased. Said he could talk to it. Said he talked directly to the nexus in Apos’phia, in fact.”

  Elayne squeezed a hand into a tight fist. “That doesn’t sound like what I do. I can barely stop it and start it. I don’t have control over anything.”

  “Oh, but you do,” Gramps said, “It just takes courage to command that kind of power.”

  She’d frozen at the sight of the trolls and had only been able to gather herself when Frederick calmed her down. She’d cowered before the Trizians, fearing what their wrath for her failure might be. She’d even been afraid to leave Yavarid Castle at all despite her misery there. How she would find courage for something like this, she had no idea.

  “You’re smart,” Gramps said as if he could see her thoughts projected like the message of a dinky, “But you’re hesitant because you know, just like Idris knew, how terrible it can be.”

  Elayne shivered. He was right, but she didn’t want to hear that out loud.

  “You will have to face it eventually. If you’re to meet Alaion, there will be no other way. He is trying to manipulate the nexus, but he doesn’t really have the ability, so he’s turned it dark. He’ll want you to finish his work, mark my words, but you will have to find it within yourself to overcome that urge. And it won’t be easy.” He spoke like he’d seen it before, and Elayne feared he had.

  “You’ll want to,” Gramps went on, his voice a little darker, a little colder, “You’ll think they deserve the horrors you could bring down upon them for what they did, and maybe they do, but you can’t. Do you understand?”

  Elayne wasn’t sure she did understand. What would she want to do exactly? And to whom?

  “You can’t!” Gramps shouted. “Do you understand?”

  “Yes!” she said quickly, and even though it was a lie, she felt like a child compelled to answer by an angry, disappointed parent, “I understand!”