by J. S. Fields
“Magda?” I asked more testily than I meant to.
Magda closed her eyes and rubbed at her cheeks. It was Sameer who answered.
“Time to listen, woodcutter. Alchemist. Whatever you are. Lead to gold is transmutation. So if you transform a rock, it’s alchemy, but if you transform, say, a prince to a frog, that’s magic? A philosopher’s stone is alchemy, but a healing spell is magic. So…the difference is rocks, basically. Alchemy uses rocks for magic.”
I bit my lower lip and refused to meet Sameer’s eyes. His words burned in my ears and rattled around my head. I swallowed, my throat sore from the cold.
“It’s not the same,” I returned. I heard the hitch in my voice. Saw how my arms started to tremble as I stared at the blasphemous wooden amulet near my foot. “Woodcutting isn’t the same as carpentry or cooperage, though they may look like it on the surface.”
Sameer threw up his hands. “They use the same damn material, Sorin! Gods, think about what you’re saying! How do you not have a more intuitive understanding of this?”
Wood wasn’t magic, damn it! I shook my head, my insides squirming.
“You’re wrong.”
Magda touched my hand.
“He’s wrong! Isn’t he?”
“You were always so determined about the distinction, but, Sorin…both witches and alchemists were penalized by Iana when she took the kingdom.” Magda’s words were warm but apologetic. “They’re the two unbound guilds. Their paths and histories are intertwined. Witches alone could not make an amulet like this, or rather, they could if they broadened their scope a bit. Witches and alchemists have always worked together. They’re two sides of the same leaf, like carpentry and cooperage. They’re the same line, just different places on it.”
“Magic isn’t alchemy.” I whispered it because I could barely form words. If alchemy drew on the same principles, the same elements as magic, then there was no alchemy at all, and I would not accept that there was…magic and slightly more rule-based magic. What was it that I did with my bone oil and my fungi if not alchemy?
Go home. Gohomegohomegohome. Witch-alchemist. Go home.
Something inside me broke.
I could shake off the cancelled alchemical fair. I could mourn Master Rahad and know that I had been good enough, at least, for him, and that if I could impress the royal alchemist, there were other masters out there who would take me on too. But I could not rationalize participation in…magic.
I’d pushed away woodcutting, and my family, and my birthright, to define myself into a trade that I loathed. How long had I fought against other people’s semantics, only to have fallen into my own?
The ice shifted under my feet. A sound like breaking glass shattered the air. I heard Sameer yell, felt Magda tie a rope around my waist and order me to run, but their voices seemed surreal. Where was there to go? What was there to run to? I was no alchemist, nor witch or woodcutter, not man or woman, not guilded, and not skilled enough to be a trader in any profession.
“Sorin!” Magda yelled.
I was nothing.
“Sorin, please!”
The ground opened up at my feet.
Nineteen: Stone
The ice beneath me gave a final, deafening whine. Just under my feet was a crack that had been well encased beneath the top layer of ice. It now squealed upward, sifting rock and snow, and creating hairline fractures. I slid to the left on wobbling legs, Magda pulling me in by the rope. The fissure hit the surface, cleaving the ground in two. Sameer tried to jump, to reach us before he was caught on the other side, his ice axe held out like a javelin.
The glacier was too fast, and Sameer’s jump too short.
His axe caught the edge of the crack and implanted with a sharp crunch, but it was the hollower, rounded sound of his head hitting ice that reverberated across the glacier. The rope around Magda’s waist pulled her forward, and she landed on her wrists. I scrambled to find a brace—some outcropping, some large rock—as Sameer’s unconscious form slid into the widening crevasse. Magda caught herself just before the edge, her fingers pulling at the ice, but there was so little slack between us that she brought me down with her.
The ice near the crevasse shuddered and crunched. Another fissure formed due north, separating us in one quick, fluid motion from the nearby lake and its thermal vents. The cold slammed into me, and I coughed from deep in my throat as I fell to my stomach. The dry air burned and the wind tore at my eyes.
“Brace!” Magda called up to me.
“I’ll try!” I had no gloves, and the ice around me was sheer and speckled with stones. They might not be enough, but I didn’t have any other option. My fingers and nose stung as I pulled rocks and small boulders from the snow, praying I could find one large enough to hold us all. There was one larger rock here, wedged well into the ice, but it had a smooth surface and barely protruded from the ice.
“Sorin, hurry!” I heard Magda clawing at the ice, and a low groan from beneath me that meant the edge of the crevasse was soon to expand again.
“Is there anything down near you?” I looked back over my shoulder and instantly regretted it. All I saw was deep blue ice and Magda’s terror. Tears gathered in my eyes. She had managed to scrape out divots in the ice big enough for the first parts of her fingers, but her lower torso dangled from the precipice.
“My foot is on Sameer’s axe, but it’s not enough. You’ve got to find something more stable. I can’t hold his weight much longer, and I’m too far down to pull myself, and him, up.”
“I’ll keep looking. Just hold on.”
I slapped at my clothes as I desperately tried to find something to anchor with. Sameer could fall down that crevasse, for all I cared after our last argument, but I would not let Magda die. But my pigments—those stupid, worthless, magical pigments—were no good here. They couldn’t bind to water, much less ice, and even if they could, none of them formed anything akin to a rope. What else…?
My palm contacted my foraging knife at the same time I heard Magda unsheathe hers. I pulled a knee under myself and drove the blade into the powder and, finally, into the ice. A clang-crunch from behind told me Magda had done the same. I grabbed the handle of my blade just as the rope went tight about my waist. It felt like my heart jumped into my throat. My knees slid out from under me, and I fell, belly first, onto the glacier.
Magda yelled up at me, the wind tossing her words so they sounded scattered and distant. “Axe is broken! The metal head is still wedged in. My knife is in a little higher. If you slide right just a bit, you can use it as leverage for your foot.”
“Okay!”
I used my knees and belly to slither to the right until my boot found the handle. Tears leaked from my eyes at the strain, and my nose ran from the cold. The knife brace helped, but the strain on my hips shot sharp jabs through my thighs. I’d dislocate or break apart if I didn’t get Sameer and Magda over the edge soon.
I heard Magda’s feet kicking the inside of the crevasse, searching for a hold. Gods, we couldn’t die here. Not like this! If only there was a larger brace! The knives would only bear the weight so long. Mine was already bending under the strain. What else could I do? Alchemy? Magic? I had only the tiniest amounts of the yellow and red pigment left. The green would be of no use. I couldn’t poison a glacier. The yellow—the golden mango—had the most potential, but what would be worth binding, except maybe…
The rocks. Of course.
“Can you pull up a little, Magda?” I called back against the wind. “I need a bit of slack. Just for a moment.”
Magda grunted, and I heard the sound of scraping, scrabbling ice. It was enough. The pull on my hips eased, and I snaked one hand from the bending knife to pull the yellow pouch loose. The leather belt, cracked and old, broke apart as I yanked the pouch from it. I crammed frozen fingers into the pouch opening, not caring if it got on me, and pushed the gathering apart. Only a light powder of granules remained, there was so little left. Nevertheless, I flipped the
pouch inside out and rubbed it over the rocks. Hoping, praying to the gods of Sorpsi, there was enough left.
You’re going to die out here. You should have gone home.
“Shut up!” I yelled at the words tickling across the wind. The bits of yellow coalesced. Two rocks joined with a film, then three, then four. I rubbed the pouch furiously over the remainder until a hole came through the leather. The pile fused together to the base rock lodged into the glacier, but so, too, did my hand.
I both praised and cursed my recklessness. My skin wasn’t enough to pull us up, and the knife wasn’t enough either. I needed another rope!
“Sorin?” Magda’s voice squeaked with pain. “Please tell me you are done? I can’t hold anymore.”
There wasn’t time to think. If we slid down, better all together. I let go of the knife and screamed as the skin of my hand bore the weight. I slid for a moment on the ice, knocking the remains of my pouches and my belt down toward Magda, and the crevasse, and death. For a fleeting moment, I mourned the pigments, but they were magic, and I’d be a woodcutter before I’d be a witch. Let the glacier have them, instead of us.
I still had the knife beneath my foot, and Magda’s partial brace, but the pain that shot through my arm made me wonder if the yellow had penetrated farther than my skin and filmed to the bone. With my free hand, I pulled the knife from the ice, slit the side of my shirt and the ties of my binding. The cloth unraveled quickly with my torso so stretched. I sank the knife into the ice near my waist, then wrapped the end of my binding three times around the rock closest to me and the rest around as much of my arm as I could.
“Magda! I’m pulling up! Try to climb the wall if you can.” Tears froze to my face. I dug torn nails into the rocks and pulled against the cotton. My joints cracked. I heard a ripping sound near my right hand, the one bound to the rock, and looked away. It was so cold the pain there had turned to a dull throb. There was no blood, but that didn’t mean much. I pulled and shimmied, bringing my knee to the knife near my hip and pushing off there. The rope tore at my hips even through the leather, but I was moving forward, which meant Magda was too.
“I’ve got it!” Her triumphant call was broken by a fit of coughing. Hers or mine, I didn’t know. The wind howled now against us, and in it, I swore I heard something scream my name. But all I could do was keep trying to pull myself forward, eyes tightly clenched against the pain and the cold, praying Magda could do the rest.
“I’ve got the knife. Sorin, hold on!”
I heard scraping, then cursing, then finally, the rope eased. I gasped in relief and got to my knees, unwinding my arm as I did so.
“Sameer?”
“Yes.” Magda’s face was a mask of pain as her bloody fingers sank my knife next to hers on the ice. She put one foot on each, squatted and braced, and began to pull the rope that held Sameer dangling below.
I didn’t know what to do, so I held back. It hurt to move. It hurt to breathe. My right hand was stuck fast to the rocks; if she slipped, my skin would be our only remaining safety.
But Magda didn’t slip. She was a master smith, and although she grunted and coughed as she pulled, and although her blood stained the rope a bright red, Sameer did appear over the edge. He didn’t hit his head as I imagined he would. He blinked and fumbled instead, grabbing the ledge as it came near and drawing his legs up to safety. Alive, and ready to argue with me again the second his wits came back, no doubt.
Magda pulled him all the way to the rock cluster. The rope went slack, and I slumped to the ice and bit back another scream, managing a whimper instead. My hips ached. My shoulder and elbow felt out of joint and seared in pain. My palm… I looked. It was still firmly connected to the rocks, no blood in sight. But the stabbing pinpricks in my hand told me a different story lay under the skin. The pigment had bound to muscle, at least partially.
Magda shook, from the stress on her arms likely, and her fingernails were torn and bleeding. Sameer, on the other hand, looked stunned but mostly unscathed. He sat up slowly. It was first to his elbows, then, with a groan, to his rear. He still blinked at us and the ice, but he was focusing for longer intervals.
“Sameer?” Magda put a hand on his shoulder.
“I’m all right. I just need a minute.” He gingerly prodded the back of his head and winced at the contact. “Thank you. Both.” He looked down at my hand, then the rock. “Your magical alchemy comes with a pretty high cost.”
I stared at him indignantly as Magda helped him to stand. My belt was gone. My pouches were gone. I could live without a hand. I couldn’t live without a future. He could at least have had the decency to mourn with me, even if it was magic.
“Next time, I’ll just let you fall,” I muttered.
I expected a cold retort, or a glare, or maybe even a handful of pebbles at my face. Instead, Sameer looked at me, and my hand slimed in yellow to the rock, and offered a small smile. “Whatever it is you did, it’s nice to see you’re not horrible at everything. Maybe Amada wasn’t completely vapid.”
There was no place inside me for anger to burn. I rested my head on the ice and groaned.
“Could we just deal with our lingering problem?” Magda asked as she rubbed clean snow into her wounds.
Sameer recovered my knife, handed it to me, then, after a moment of thought, took the amulet from where it teetered on the edge of the crevasse and slid it into my pocket. “For you to study. Later. I know you like that sort of thing.”
“Sure. Later. Have to deal with this first,” I said with a dry laugh.
Sameer stared at the yellow mess of the rocks. “Can we dissolve it somehow?”
I looked up at my hand. Yellow film seeped around the edges of my palm. When I pulled against it, I felt a sharp ache, dulled, no doubt, by the cold. It wasn’t to the bone at least. I could have dissolved it using bone oil distillate, but that was in short supply on a glacier. Reluctantly, I handed Magda my knife. “Only one way. I don’t know how much muscle you’ll have to remove.”
“What?” She looked at me, horrified.
I shrugged. The air was frigid. The pain in my heart cut far worse than my hand.
“It’ll mean a good scar.” Sameer tapped my shoulder, and though his words were tight, I heard the attempt at empathy. “Wood people like scars.”
“Something to look forward to.” I nodded at Magda’s hands, which were well marked from the smithy. “Guilders always have great hands. I do have some catching up to do.”
“Sorin!”
“Please, Magda. Just do it, while my hand is still cold.”
“But—”
“Sameer, hold me down.”
Sameer wrapped his arms around me in a bear hug. From his pocket, he brought a thick piece of jerky and pushed it into my mouth. I bit down. “I am an ass,” he whispered into my ear. “You’re an ass. Amada’s an ass. Must be a family thing. You might make a decent alchemist if you can get over the magic part. Or you could just take the parts you like and do something else entirely. It’s not like you haven’t done that before. Sorry for pounding you to the dirt when we were kids.”
“You’d make a gwate woofcuffer,” I said through the jerky.
“I doubt Amada would be all right with that.”
I grimaced as the wind gusted against my cheeks. “Can’t argue. I’f only one handf.”
Louder, Sameer said, “Magda, you’d better do this soon, or Sorin will lose the arm from frostbite.”
Magda got to her knees. Her hands were steady, but I could see her jagged puffs of breath as she gripped her knife. “Are you sure?”
“Do it.”
She still looked ill, but she nodded and kissed me lightly on the cheek. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered into my ear, just before she plunged her knife into my palm.
Twenty: Aqua vitae
I trembled as we walked, even with Magda next to me. My hand tingled more than hurt, but I’d already bled through my binding, which now covered my right hand. The pigment had only gon
e to the topmost muscle, part of which we’d left on the rock. I could still make a fist, though it took a lot of cursing to do so. If I didn’t get an infection, I’d likely only lose some range of motion. Sameer had offered no words, but I could see on his face that he knew what such an injury meant. Even an alchemist was of little use with only one working hand.
Go home before you lose another hand. Your pigments are gone. You are useless. Go home go home go home.
The voice in the wind was relentless, but the tingling in my hand helped drown it out as our sad procession continued. My unbound breasts swished against the cotton of my shirt, chafing my nipples. That pain was no more significant than any other, but it was the thought of entering Celtis without my binding that blanketed my thoughts and swamped me with a convulsive desire to peel myself from my skin. Here on the ice, with two people who had maybe used up all their awkward questions, it wasn’t such a problem. But each step brought us closer to Puget, and closer to assumptions that would cut my heart from my chest.
The thermal vents turned south again, and we followed as the ground morphed from sheer ice back to dirty snowcaps and, finally, a mix of pebbles and snow. Even with the added traction, Sameer was more circumspect, constantly scanning the ground and the horizon. Magda, too, kept her eyes forward, but her hands clutched at her bright cloak, pulling the wool tight around her shoulders. Occasionally, I thought I saw another human figure in the distance, but when Magda and Sameer said nothing, I stayed silent. Who knew what was the witch, or the magic of the glacier, or a pain-fueled mirage?
Instead, I tried to focus on Magda. I looked over at her when my thoughts allowed, searching for some distraction from the pain—a conversation, or a smile even. With her wrapped cloak, she was suddenly the blue of the ice around us, with sections of her black hair chasing the wind.
“Magda?” The words were sticky in my mouth and congealed with pain. “Talk to me? Not about the crevasse.”
Leave Magda. She will be safer without you.
Magda returned a tight smile, tempered no doubt by her own injuries. I refused to acknowledge the wind words.
