The Book of Maladies Boxset

by D. K. Holmberg

  To demonstrate, Thoren planted his staff into the hard-packed earth and flipped up, balancing briefly at the peak before dropping back down. He did it again, this time, spinning in a lazy circle, suspended high over her head as he did.

  Sam was reminded of how Elaine had used the staff to flip over her, but what Thoren was demonstrating was somehow a little different.

  “You have to be careful with this technique, as you are placed in a precarious position with it, but it can be advantageous.”

  Sam jabbed her canal staff into the ground and flipped up, attempting to hold her position.

  Her momentum carried her up and over, leaving her to tumble to the ground, her breath forced from her lungs as she hit the hard ground. She got up slowly and tried again. This time when she flipped, she tried to hold her balance, trying to maintain a connection to the position and managed to remain in place for a heartbeat at most. It might’ve been even less, but she had succeeded.

  “Good. That is something you need to practice. It’s all a part of balance. If you manage to succeed in acquiring a sense of balance, you can use it to your advantage.” He kicked his legs up and suspended himself vertically, his head facing down, and bounced on the end of his staff.

  Sam would not have expected the staff to support his weight in such a way, and it flexed slightly, but not nearly as much as she thought it would. He hopped again, and when the staff came down, it flexed, and as it straightened, Thoren flipped up, pulling his staff from the ground and swinging toward her.

  Sam had barely a chance to react. She brought her staff up, protecting her head moments before his staff would have collided with her skull.

  She flipped the ends of her staff, catching him on the wrist, and he grinned at her.

  “Good. Always remain alert.”

  “It seems to me that balancing like you’re trying to demonstrate would put me in a difficult situation. If someone hits the staff while I’m suspended like that, wouldn’t I fall?”

  “Everything comes back to needing to maintain awareness of your surroundings. You need to keep your eyes open, observe everything, and anticipate ways you may need to react. Once you manage that, you will be truly difficult to stop.” He tapped his staff on the ground, a gesture that Sam had discovered meant the lesson was over and bowed at the waist toward her. “You should practice. We will meet again tomorrow.”

  Thoren left her alone in the practice yard. Sam attempted the flipping several more times, but each time, she managed to hold herself upright for only a moment, never much longer than that. She wasn’t certain if that meant progress, or if she should simply abandon her attempts. She’d found that when something didn’t connect for her, a technique that she struggled to master, leaving it for a while would often give her a chance to let her mind approach it differently. Maybe this was one of those times.

  It was also possible that she simply needed rest. She was exhausted from working with Thoren, and her body ached from dozens of injuries, most of which would take time to heal. How would she fare if she had augmentations?

  Yet she understood the need to master fighting without the benefit of being augmented. They had variable durations, depending on the ratio of blood used by both Scribe and Kaver, as well as the technique used in recording the planned augmentation. Thankfully, Alec was nothing if not diligent in how detailed he was with his documentation, recording the amounts of blood they used, and making diligent notes about the various ways they had tried to use it.

  After a few more attempts to improve on the technique Thoren had shown her, she broke down her staff and tucked it away.

  She glanced up at the sky, noting the position of the sun. It was still early in the day. Days like today, she had few other responsibilities. She no longer had to want for food, clothing, or her overall safety, not as she once had. The princess had assigned her various tasks, but most of them revolved around learning to fight, and there were precious few that involved her using her mind, or trying to master the other skills of a Kaver, though Sam wasn’t exactly sure what they were. Maybe they didn’t involve her in such studies because they didn’t think much of her capacity.

  More than anything, she wanted to see Alec. They had been separated for long enough. Since running into Elaine days ago, she hadn’t seen her again, either. Sam suspected she left the city once again, getting the sense that she did so frequently, which was probably part of the reason that years had passed without Sam gaining her attention.

  She grabbed her cloak from where she’d hung it near the entrance to the yard and slung it over her shoulders. She departed the palace grounds, reaching the bridge and nodding to the soldiers monitoring it, before getting waved through. As she always did, she contemplated simply jumping the canal. That might be more enjoyable to do, giving her a chance to flex her skills with the staff, but taking the bridge was a more surefire way of remaining dry and not drawing anyone’s attention.

  The Forlain section adjacent to the palace was comprised entirely of highborns. It was a section with countless massive estates. Sam had always avoided it in the past because when traveling through this part of the city, it was difficult to avoid notice. Now, she had the proper paperwork that made getting between the sections quite easy.

  Sam hurried along the street, heading toward the next section of the city, and decided she wanted to jump the canal. Marin had demonstrated jumping the canals with minimal run up, and had done so without any augmentation, a skill that she thought she should work on, as well. It was not always straightforward for her, and usually she required more of a run before she could leap, but Marin had done it with only a single step. If she was to confront Marin, she would have to learn to mimic what the woman was capable of. Then again, if it were up to Elaine, they wouldn’t allow her the chance to confront Marin.

  She backed up two steps and lunged forward, leaping at the last possible second, stabbing her staff into the middle of the canal and flipping up and over the water. She teetered on the edge, nearly falling in, but caught herself and pulled the staff free.

  Her heart pounded heavily in her chest as she collected herself. She didn’t need to jump the canals, so why was she risking it? She had no desire to end up in the water, and no desire to face the damned eels, bloodthirsty things that they were, regardless of what the physicker claimed.

  Yet there was a certain thrill in jumping the canals, one that she didn’t get from anything else that she did.

  She continued along the waterfront, heading toward the university section. She could see it from where she was now, barely two sections over, which meant two more canals to jump. At the next one, she challenged herself by taking only a single step and pushed off with even more force than she had before.

  She landed barely a foot within the shoreline.

  Sam grinned to herself and hurried on, racing toward the university. She was determined to see Alec tonight and determined to do so dry. The next canal—the one with the university on the other side of it—was one of the widest in the city. Strangely, according to the map that she had in her head, the university was situated toward the center of the city, rather than closer to the palace as would otherwise make sense. The canal around the palace was wide, but not nearly as wide as what was found around the university.

  She’d attempted to jump this before and failed. And she’d attempted to jump it with augmentation and succeeded. Did she risk it now?

  If she did and failed, she would have to go to Alec sopping wet. She suspected even with her papers that the university would not grant her access. The alternative was taking her papers to the guards, but that meant admitting that she needed her access, that she needed the connection that she now had to the princess. That meant that she had truly allowed herself to become highborn.

  Lowborns didn’t use papers to travel between sections—certainly not to the university section. They were forced to travel at specific times and given only very specific access.

  Sam stared at the canal, watching
the eddying current. There were only a few things that made the current move like that.

  She shivered. How could others claim there were no eels in the canal? Sam had felt them. And she had no interest in joining the eels or becoming their snack, but she wanted to see Alec, which meant that she would have to use the stupid bridge and the papers that the princess supplied to her.

  Sam marched along the bridge, reaching into her cloak for the documents that she’d been given. She swore under her breath, hating that it came to this, hating that she had come to this, but recognizing that what she did was necessary if she wanted to see her Scribe. How else could she do it?

  The guards blocking entrance to the university section glanced at her, taking in her cloak and the staff barely hidden beneath it. The staff was not new, but the cloak was, so different from the one she’d long ago taken from Marin that seemed to shed the shadows. This one bore the crest of the royal family. In the light, the crest glittered, taking on an undulating sort of pattern. Maybe the guards wouldn’t even ask her for the papers.

  The nearest guard, a man with a wide face and a neatly trimmed beard, watched her through slitted eyes. He held his hand out, saying nothing to her, and took her documents without a word. He scanned them before holding them back out and waving her through.

  She entered the university grounds and hurried forward, trying to ignore the same feeling she had every time she used her new-found connections—the feeling that left her feeling like a fraud.

  In the distance, she caught sight of a familiar form. Alec? She almost called out to him before catching herself.

  He was walking with another woman. She had deep brown hair and the straight back and fine clothes of a highborn. She looked up at him familiarly, and Alec smiled at her, the grin on his face more open and welcoming than any he’d had for Sam in quite some time.

  What was she doing?

  She shouldn’t feel guilty and shouldn’t feel jealous of Alec having friends at the university, but she couldn’t help that she did. It wasn’t that he was only supposed to have her as a friend, but here she’d been working and training, feeling isolated at the palace, while he was busy making friends, and possibly more, within the university.

  She watched for a while longer before she turned away, ignoring the moisture on her cheek that was not a tear as she headed back across the bridge.

  14

  Foxglove Toxicity

  Alec awoke with a pounding headache. He was lying on the cot and realized that he was in the hospital, other beds all around him with injured people. A woman with a medium length gray jacket made rounds nearby and stopped at cot after cot before reaching his.

  “Good. You’re awake.”

  Alec took a deep breath. “What happened?” he asked. His mouth felt thick, and his tongue dry. His head pounded, almost like he had had too much to drink.

  “A training accident, from what Master Carl tells me,” the junior physicker said.

  “I only took a pinch.”

  “Indeed. Only a pinch. But was your pinch greater than your body can tolerate?”

  He felt like an idiot. “How many others ended up here?” he asked. It had to be more than just Alec, didn’t it? He couldn’t have been the only person to have mistakenly over ingested the foxglove.

  “Only you. It happens from time to time with the foxglove lesson, but it is rare. You’re lucky you woke up.”

  “Lucky?”

  The physicker shrugged. “Some don’t.”

  Alec tried to sit up and realized that he wasn’t wearing anything beneath the sheets. Could he have died during the training? Why would Master Carl have let them try it were that the case?

  “Where are my belongings?” He cared less about his clothes than he did about his books and the journals that he kept. Those were his most valuable possessions within the university.

  “Everything you had is beneath the cot,” the woman said.

  “Can I return to my studies?”

  “You may return, but I would caution you to not exert yourself too much. Foxglove can linger in the bloodstream. You will find that there will be some strange side effects.”

  Alec looked over at the physicker. He decided to ask her the question that had come to mind when he was in the session with Master Carl. “Why does it seem to last longer with some than others?”

  The woman shrugged. “Foxglove is unpredictable. That is what makes it dangerous for so many. With some, the effect is short-lived.”

  “Like most of my class?”

  “Yes. Most will have some effect. They’ll notice that their heart slows, and they may even pass out, but in others, the effect lingers. We have not been able to determine what predisposes one person to such effect over another.”

  “What is it that would keep someone in a perpetual slumber?”

  The woman grinned. “Stories of men using foxglove to fake their own death are nothing more than that. Stories.”

  “But Master Carl had a man in our room who he claimed was suffering from foxglove poisoning.”

  Her brow furrowed for a moment. Then she shrugged. “It’s possible that Master Carl does have someone like that. If he does, I can’t say that I know anything about it. It’s something that he might have kept to the masters.”

  Alec realized that he wasn’t going to get anything else from her, and waited for her to depart before reaching beneath the cot and grabbing his belongings. As she promised, everything of his remained there. There were his books, and thankfully, his journals. He grabbed his clothes and began to dress quickly, not wanting to be left in a state of undress were someone else to appear.

  He started out of the hospital ward, leaning on an occasional cot for support. It was difficult for him. As she claimed, he was weaker than he realized.

  Alec made his way out into the hallway and toward his room. All he wanted was rest. He hoped he could be granted that, though worried that perhaps he wouldn’t awaken if he did fall asleep.

  Staggering down the hall, he finally reached his room. Once inside, he fell onto his bed and simply lay there, his mind racing. Why had he been affected this way? There was little doubt in his mind that Matthias, and probably some of the other students, would give him a hard time about what had happened. They’d probably taunt him about it.

  As he lay on his bed, staring up at the smooth ceiling, he tried to think about foxglove. Something troubled him about it. The physicker in the hospital hadn’t realized that Master Carl had someone who had been poisoned by foxglove. It could simply be that Carl was more senior than she was at the university, but he wondered if maybe there was something more to it. Were they concealing something from Alec?

  There was a knock, and Alec sat up, looking at the door. Who would come to his room?

  He managed to stand but doing so was difficult and required strength that he didn’t have yet.

  He pulled the door open, and Beckah stood on the other side, wearing a deep blue robe, the belt cinched around her waist. Her expression softened, and she let out a relieved sigh when she saw him. “I went to check on you in the hospital, but you weren’t there. They told me you were released.”

  “I’ll be fine,” he said.

  “Fine?” Beckah asked. “You nearly died.”

  “And it’s something I’m sure others will be talking about,” Alec said.

  “Only because they’re worried about you.”

  He turned back to look at her. “Worried about me? I think that’s an overstatement. They might be interested in what happened, and they might have questions about why I can’t even handle a little foxglove, but…” Alec sighed.

  “You were right,” she said. “We should have been monitoring how much we were administering to everyone. The dose was different. What was a pinch for you was not the same as a pinch for me.”

  Alec hadn’t even thought he’d taken a full pinch. He’d torn a strip along the edge of the leaf, which shouldn’t have been enough to incapacitate him, certainly not when
Beckah had taken a similar-sized sample and had done reasonably well.

  “I don’t think it matters,” he said.

  “Alec—”

  He shook his head and cut her off. “Listen. I was wrong. I got too hung up on feeling like something was… unusual, and I made a claim I shouldn’t have.”

  “You’re still worried about that?” she asked.

  “I don’t think anyone else is going to let me live that one down.”

  She shrugged. “You’re not from the same section of the city as most of us. People’s beliefs are different elsewhere in the city.”

  Alec closed his eyes, resisting the urge to contradict her. It had nothing to do with which section of the city he was from. Had he been asked even just several months ago what could have caused the state of the man they’d seen in the lecture hall, he never would have leaped to the possibility of some magical cause. That was because of his time with Sam.

  Yet there were magical things in the world. Alec had seen firsthand the way that different powers could manifest, using something as simple as his own blood to write on paper.

  No, it had nothing to do with his beliefs, and more to do with what he’d experienced. But he couldn’t speak of it to anyone. He had to keep that concealed, otherwise Sam and Elaine, and the other Kavers who studied in the palace would be in danger. Alec didn’t want to be responsible for that.

  “What’s bothering you?” Beckah asked.

  “I’m bothered by the fact that I made a fool of myself.”

  “How did you make a fool of yourself? You offered an answer.”

  “An answer that Master Carl thought was ridiculous.”

  “He’s not the only one who thought it was ridiculous,” she said. She smiled, and Alec couldn’t help but smile along with her. The easiest thing for him to do would be to tell her and admit what he was capable of doing, but he didn’t dare do that without having Sam’s permission, because they were really a team. It was not his decision, but their decision.