They passed two other patients, a girl with her leg propped up and splinted with straight sticks, and a middle-aged man drowsily laying back and chewing on something grass-like. Frederick was pale, but breathing, eyes closed as if just asleep. “He’s doing a bit better,” Neoma told them. “The shelves here are amazing, if the healer is a bit—” She narrowed her eyes at the form coming down the stairs. An older man dressed in dark robes gave them all a contemptuous look before heading to the young girl and beginning to take off her splint. “Well, he doesn’t like elven healing, I suppose.”
Elayne asked Rosalind to help Neoma and Bix get cleaned up and some food. They were reluctant to leave, but Elayne assured them she would be fine. As they passed the girl on the way out, Neoma tugged on her toe and gave her a wink while the healer was busy measuring out a yellow concoction. The little girl watched her go, then bent the formerly stiff leg with a smile, though the healer insisted she stay still.
Passing them on the stairs was a healing assistant who came over to Frederick with a bowl of water and clean bandages, but Elayne took them, demanding to be shown exactly what to do. Beneath the bandages over his chest was a sticky substance packed around the wound. This was pried off, leaving his skin red and angry, but needing to be scrubbed clean. Below, the wound was closed now, but the skin was torn and raw. She poured an orange liquid over the area that foamed when it hit, and she imagined would have made him wince were he awake. Then they reapplied the packing substance and new, clean bandages. Elayne committed every movement to memory.
When the assistant left, she took a cloth and rubbed the rest of his chest to clean off the blood that dried there. She was careful and meticulous to get it all, emptying and refilling the bowl twice so that she could also clean his face and hands. All the while, his chest rose and fell with steady but slow breaths, his limbs heavy with lifelessness, but his skin warm.
With the bandages changed, the dirt gone, and nothing left to busy herself with, Elayne sat on the stool at the table side. She looked at his face—really looked at it—and was unable to hold back the tears any longer. In great, heaving sobs they came, and she buried her face in her hands to silence herself from the other sleeping patients in the room.
“Freddie, I’m so sorry,” she whispered between her fingers. “I shouldn’t have gotten so mad at you. You’re not a showoff or an idiot.” She wiped at her face and sniffed, reigning herself in. “Most of the time you’re not anyway.” He remained unmoving, his eyes closed. Elayne hesitated then slipped her hands around his, cupping his fingers in her own. “Please don’t die, okay? I’m asking you nicely, so you can’t.”
She felt his fingers move, if only slightly, and she squeezed his hand again.
Elayne nodded off on the stool a number of times before leaning against the wall by his table and sleeping off the night. When she thought he stirred the next day, Elayne woke and jumped upwards, banging her head on a shelf so that its contents rattled dangerously. But the sound had only been the healer inspecting Frederick’s wound, muttering about aether being used to play at being a god.
Rosalind came soon after the healer cleared out, Violet and Belladonna trailing behind to visit the young patient with the formerly broken—and miraculously healed in a quarter of the time—leg. Rosalind brought breakfast, and the two sat quietly beside Frederick’s sleeping form munching on warmed oats and dried fruits.
“I’m sorry you had to come back here,” Elayne said quietly, nudging her friend’s shoulder with her own.
Rosalind smiled, her mouth full of oats. “It’s not all so bad.” Across the room, her sister Violet cheered when she saw the girl step down off the table and take a few steps. Belladonna clapped for the two then ushered them toward the stairs, but she stopped at the foot and watched them go. “I missed them.”
Belladonna checked the stairwell, then turned back to the room, dipping her head down and walking with a purpose toward them. Elayne recognized that walk. She’d done that walk. Belladonna was up to something.
“Rosie?” she said, barely above a whisper. “Duchess? Sorry, I just wanted to…um, well I wondered…did you need help?”
“Help?” Rosalind looked at Elayne with wide eyes as if she should have known the answer. “With Fred, or…?”
“Oh, no. Um.” Belladonna’s eyes flickered over the knight’s body and she frowned. “I mean, did you, um, come here for the, uh…”—she came around the table and leaned in close to the two—“Were you looking for the wizard?”
“Wizard?” Rosalind sat back, and the volume of her voice made Belladonna cringe.
Her sister held her hands up to her mouth and gently shushed her. “Nobody’s supposed to know!”
Elayne had never really met a wizard before, though one had come to Heulux when she was little. They were largely solitary creatures, human mostly, and they seemed to just do whatever they wanted which was, to her and most everyone else in Yavarid, sort of mind-boggling. One didn’t just do whatever one wanted, unless one were a wizard, of course.
Belladonna looked at Elayne and bit her lip. “It’s just that you have that parchment with the wizardcraft on it, so I thought maybe that’s why you came.”
Elayne had nearly forgotten. She fished the page from the neckline of her dress and opened it. “You mean this?” Holding it up, she pointed to the illegible symbols. “You can read this?”
“Oh, no, no, no.” Belladonna shook her head violently, her face going red and blotchy. “But I know someone who can.”
***
For the second time, Elayne wore a strange set of clothes and followed Rosalind beyond a castle’s walls, only now they were led not by a knight, but by the meek daughter of the local count. If nothing else, Elayne was thrilled to be out of that pink monstrosity. Less ostentatious, the serving girls still wore pristine, if simple shift dresses in muted colors, and Belladonna had a small stock on them deep in the bottom of a chest beside her bed. Belladonna also knew exactly when the guards changed and how to slip through the gates by carrying an empty basket from the kitchen for gathering wild berries.
“You’re good at this,” Elayne told her as Belladonna pulled off her bonnet and stuffed it and the basket under an opportune bush when they were beyond sight of the gates.
“Oh.” Belladonna kept her head down and smoothed her long, auburn hair over her shoulder. “Thank you.”
“Hey, wait a minute.” Rosalind narrowed her eyes at her sister. “How often do you sneak out of the castle to see this wizard?”
Belladonna murmured something about “not much” and hurried ahead of them, leading them off the path to the market and into the woods. The trees were different than on the mountain, thicker and dropping huge, five-pointed leaves. They were tall and thick, and the wind rattled them like flipping through the pages of an old book. This forest was old, not unlike the Trizian Wood though Elayne knew it wasn’t quite the same. The aether here had a spark to it, jumping from leaf to leaf. She wished for a moment they’d brought Neoma or even Gramps, but she was happier that they were watching over Frederick if a little uneasy that they’d promised Belladonna they wouldn’t say what exactly they were doing.
“So how’d you find this wizard, Bella?” Rosalind asked, awkwardly hiking up her dress to step over fallen branches.
“We just sort of met when I was on a walk,” the girl mused, blinking up into the trees for a moment before turning them off in another direction. She moved swiftly and quietly through the wood, finally something she seemed comfortable doing.
Rosalind grunted. “Well, you know you need to be careful. Those things that attacked our friend are out here.”
Belladonna said it wasn’t far, but Elayne knew it would only take an instant for one of those dark elves to cut all three of them down. Even if Rosalind had her staff, she’d be no match for the dagger-wielding shadow. Yet Elayne felt a lightness here. She knew she should be concerned with whatever might attack them, but she just wasn’t. And further, she knew that untr
aceable feeling of being watched that was creeping behind every bush should make her hair stand on end, but instead she felt a sort of comfort from it.
After about an hour of Rosalind quizzing Belladonna, and the younger sister giving the vaguest answers possible, they came to a stop before a large tree. “Here we are.”
Elayne glanced up at the thick canopy above them where Belladonna was peering.
“Bella, this is a tree, not a wizard.” Her sister almost seemed relieved.
Belladonna gave her a look over her shoulder. “In the tree.” She rapped on the trunk three times with her knuckles and waited.
The leaves rustled, then shook fully until the entire trunk was vibrating. The bark splintered with a loud crack, and as if it were mechanical, spun around inside itself to reveal a set of steps set into the hollow. Without hesitation, Belladonna stepped in, and with quick glances at one another, Elayne and Rosalind followed.
The staircase spiraled up, cramped and dark, but Rosalind managed to thwack her head only once. In the light that filtered down, Elayne could see Belladonna’s feet eventually step out onto a platform. When she popped her head up over the edge, there was a room laid out around her. The trunk continued upward at its center, and the platform spread out in clean, flat boards, only broken in two places where rogue branches grew up and through the flooring, across the room, and out through the walls.
“Hello, Bell,” a voice called from the other side of the trunk.
Elayne stepped clear of the winding stairs and looked for the voice’s owner but was instead dazzled by the objects all around. Seeing stones glittered from all over the windowless room, casting a rainbow on the walls and floor. Jars hung, no—hovered here and there, and odd objects littered the shelves and counters in what one might call an organized mess. She was so overwhelmed, she didn’t even notice the figure that had come up to them until it was already in their faces. “Hello, Bell’s friends.”
She was short, Elayne could see right over her head, and her eyes were small and dark, sweeping over all of them as a smile curled on the edge of her lips.
“Cassia.” Belladonna’s voice rose, louder than it had been in the forest. “This is my sister, Rosie.”
“The one at Yavarid Castle?” She grinned, tiny wrinkles at the corners of her mouth and eyes revealing her to be older than she first appeared.
“She’s not going back, so don’t even think about it,” Belladonna snapped uncharacteristically, and the woman called Cassia pouted. “And this is Elayne, the Duchess of Heulux.”
Cassia’s eyes widened, her hands on her hips. “Well,” she chuckled, “no shit?”
Elayne looked from Belladonna to Cassia. “Ah, yes. I mean, technically, but the place is—”
“—surrounded in an evil miasma and usurped by dark elven kind. I know. Tried to travel through when I came over from Midvale. Impossible.” She put up her hands and shook her head. “I thought your family was dead?”
“Uh, they are.” Elayne swallowed.
“But you survived. Good job.” She gave Elayne a bop on the nose with her finger. “I like this one, Bell. What did you want me to do with her?” She crossed the room to a table set up against the wall where a mess of jars were stacked around and on top of one another.
“Excuse me.” Rosalind stood a little taller, crossing her arms. “Bella says you’re a wizard, but—”
“—I don’t look like one. Right.” Cassia switched the places of two of the jars. “Let’s get all that nonsense out of the way. I don’t have a staff or a big pointy hat, and I’m not that old. Oh, and no beard or dangly bits neither.” She gestured to her crotch. “A fair few folk have had a lot of other names for me over the years—that’s one of the reasons I left Midvale—but I can assure you: I am most definitely a wizard.”
The only wizard Elayne had ever seen indeed had all of those attributes. He had come to Heulux to consult with her aunt. Her mother’s sister had an unparalleled penchant for the aether, and she was always looking to broaden her horizons. Unfortunately, her aunt also had an unparalleled temper, and the wizard hadn’t stayed long.
Rosalind tipped her head to one side. “Oh.” She uncrossed her arms and tugged at her own short hair. “Okay, I trust her. El?”
Elayne pulled out the parchment. “Well, it’s not exactly something we need you to do but to read.”
Cassia took the page in both hands and held it close to her face, squinting. She made a little, thoughtful noise in the back of her throat and looked back up at them. “You need to bind somebody?”
“I don’t know what that means,” Elayne said carefully as she felt a heat against her skin where the thaumat stone lay.
Cassia shook the parchment. “That’s what this is. A bind.” She crossed the room, ducking under the branch that broke it up and went to the far shelf. “Mighty powerful too. Would take someone with immense skill to pull it off, but it needs to be rewritten.”
“Rewritten?”
The wizard plucked down a small, leather-bound book and a sprig of some dried plant from a jar beside it. She settled down at a desk and bade them over to her. “Yup. This is real specific and will only work for one person. And I reckon it already did. See here?” She pointed to one of the symbols in the first row. “That’s real unique. A name most likely.” She held the sprig like a quill and when she pressed it to the blank page inside her book, it wrote. As she copied the first line, the ink glowed a brilliant green, but when she tried to copy the specific symbol she’d pointed out, it did nothing.
“Whoa.” Rosalind leaned close to the page. “How’d you do that?”
“I told you, I’m a wizard.” Cassia winked at her. “But wizardcraft is very personal. We can read one another’s writing, but not the made-up stuff and the names. That’s just gibberish to others, so it can’t be imbued with any magic. See, I think this second line is about your nexus, so—yup!” She successfully completed the line and every symbol pulsed green. “If I’d gotten it wrong we’d have no lights, no aether, no nothing. Just squiggles. But this last line just talks about rocks. Which rocks though? No idea!”
Elayne squinted down at the parchment over her shoulder. Cassia was pointing to the symbol in the third row, the one she’d known was wrong when Bard gave her the parchment. “Try thaumat stone.”
Cassia arched a brow. She turned back to the parchment and started copying out the line of symbols, altering the one that was wrong. They each glowed the same emerald green. She sat back from the desk and held up her book. “Oh, ho! That looks like it!”
Elayne slipped the crystal out from her neckline, eyeing the dark veins running through it and the cloudiness that swirled within. She had the distinct feeling it was looking back. She swallowed. “Does that mean…someone’s in here?”
The wizard twisted around in her seat, her eyes level with the necklace. She peered at it closely with one eye then grit her teeth. “Yeah, it sort of looks like that, huh?”
CHAPTER 26
To ensure a sturdy seam, a tight backstitch will do quite nicely, easily measured against your linen if the weave is even enough. When complete, the seam should handle the toughest of branches and the friskiest of hands. If these directions are followed and you still experience a torn sleeve or a ripped bodice, then I would beg to differ that you followed them at all.
- from Seamstress’ed, Byrnadette Bannyr, Pub 1420 PA
Elayne took the page Cassia had ripped from her book carefully, feeling the weight of it anew. “Won’t do anything,” the wizard reminded her, “Unless you got a wizard of your own to finish the who in there and to cast it.”
“You wouldn’t want to come with us, would you?” Rosalind was grinning like a cat.
“Oh, honey, last time I got mixed up with that sort of magic I had to flee the country. It was a big mess, and frankly I don’t know what Maw has in store even further east. For now, I am staying right here. But, best of luck to you and your little quest.”
Elayne blew out a
long breath. Even if a wizard were to join them, she wasn’t sure what good a binding spell would do. It had already done whatever damage was intended.
“There is one more thing, though.” Cassia was pressing her fingertips together in front of her face and peering up at Elayne. “Girls, could you two wait for us downstairs?”
After some light protesting, Belladonna managed to drag Rosalind down through the tree trunk. Alone with the wizard, Elayne watched as Cassia circled her twice, then came to stand before her again.
“You got a lot of…chaotic energy going on.” Cassia wiggled her fingers as she palpated the space on either side of Elayne’s head with her hands.
“Uh, well, yeah.” There was no point in trying to deny it, though Elayne didn’t like the sound of that word—chaotic—it reminded her too much of Alaion.
“I’d like to sort it out,” she said, plucking at the air around her and shaking her hands as if she were casting things away, “but I’m not sure I can.”
“Oh?” Elayne liked the sound of that even less.
Cassia put a hand directly onto Elayne’s forehead, and the girl nearly pulled away, but the wizard began chanting, and she held still. The words Cassia said were in a language she’d never heard, dissimilar to Bridgetongue, Elven, or even Dwarvish. There was heat in Cassia’s hand, and she’d squeezed her eyes shut, flailing her free hand through the air. This wasn’t like any other spell Elayne had seen, but then she’d never seen a wizard cast a spell before.
Then, it was over. Cassia pulled her hand back and gave her a satisfied smirk.
“Done?” she asked.
“Do you feel better?” Cassia’s little hands were on her hips as she beamed back at her.
She's All Thaumaturgy Page 21
