by Amy Little
The liquid, inside the cup, looked clear just like water, without any orange or red tint. The pinches of herbs sank to the bottom.
Annika used the dagger to stir them around.
“Nothing’s happening,” said Zak, peering over her shoulder.
“Give her space!” said Cara. Then, to Annika, “He was like that when I was practicing, trying to figure out how I did what I did.”
“The curse of the non-magically minded amongst us,” said Zak. “Eternal curiosity.”
Annika blocked out their voices and focused on the liquid. Although the water was undisturbed she could sense wild, violent energy surge from somewhere and concentrate in the cup. Life-giving energy flowed out of it. Annika extended the cup to Cara.
“All of it?” Cara asked.
Annika nodded.
Cara drank it to the last drop.
Annika closed her eyes, feeling the energy flow from the lake to her and then to Cara. The flow was stronger than anything she had ever felt. After a few minutes, her energy almost spent, Annika opened her eyes.
Cara looked transformed. The pale color of Cara’s skin was replaced by a healthy glow.
Annika sat back with a tired sigh as Cara moved her arms, walked forward a little, then tried a little hop.
“I haven’t felt this well in years!” Cara exclaimed.
Annika closed her eyes and felt her way along the strands of healing power, found the correct place to sever them and after she did so tied a little knot with the power so the healing strands remained with Cara, let the power go. “It will continue to heal for eight hours. The initial boost in energy will be replaced by a desire to sleep. This will happen in about six or seven hours. You will sleep deeply, as long as it takes for your body and mind to rest and heal. Then, when you wake, you will find your health restored.”
“That gives me time to return to my chamber,” said Cara. “Thanks, sis!” Cara squeezed Annika in a hug that took Annika’s breath away. “Thank you. I’ll never be able to repay you.”
“Actually, there is something,” said Annika, cautiously. “I will do what I can to help you. But I want to do that from outside the castle. I don’t want to remain living at this castle, that seems to be permeated by the snakes.”
Cara started to shake her head. “You’ll be in even more danger outside!”
Annika hurriedly continued, “You are my sister, and I love you. I wouldn’t have believed it this morning, but yes, I do love you. Yet I have my own path. My path is different to the one you want to take. You were always one for civic duty and righting wrongs. I want to do things my way.”
“I understand, but—“
“Let her,” said Zak decisively. “The snake people will believe you have had a falling out. That will help.”
Annika felt a flush of gratitude towards him.
Cara looked thoughtful. “And your safety, sister?”
“The snakes fear the Memory Beasts. I can stay near the sacred market, where the Memory Beasts are.”
“I will speak to father,” Cara said dubiously. “I will let him know we have had an irreparable falling out and one of us must leave the castle. All the same, the moment you perceive the slightest threat to you, I want you to return. Do we agree?”
Filled with overwhelming joy, Annika hugged her sister tightly and kissed her on the forehead.
Cara seemed obviously pleased, although she tried to not show it. “In the meantime, don’t do too much magic. The snakes can feel when the power is drawn. Don’t draw the snake people’s attention to yourself.”
“I will check up on her.” Zak offered. “To make sure.”
“You will not!” Annika exclaimed. For some reason, the gratitude she had felt at his supporting her and now his words made her feel awkward and flushed.
She busied herself with packing away the cup and the herbs, and tying up her satchel.
It was best not to acknowledge how much she wanted and needed him.
For some reason, Zak seemed to rush back to the tunnel.
Annika followed him, turning around a few times to look back at Cara.
Cara was moving away along the stony beach. Her steps were steady and purposeful now.
Annika felt satisfaction at having given healing to her sister. She also felt something inside tug at her. Something warm, and kind, and sad. Annika wondered when she will be able to speak to her heart to heart again.
“She’ll use a different tunnel,” said Zak, misinterpreting her glances. “She knows the way better than I. It will lead to the storeroom section of the castle.”
“Is it safe for her to return alone?”
“She will use her magic to light a candle,” said Zak.
“Yet she’s not well.”
“The incline for her will not be as steep as for us. Besides, obstinacy seems to run in your family. Just try and offer your help to her.”
Annika felt a ripple somewhere at the edge of her consciousness. It was like feeling someone or something tug lightly at the edge of a very large bedspread under which she was covered. It was how she knew that Cara had used magic.
Annika turned in time to see Cara, who had stopped near the stone wall a hundred or so meters away, hold a small flicker of light in her hand. Then Cara vanished inside the tunnel.
“And how will you light the candle, dragon-in-training?” Annika asked Zak, looking around for the candle that Zak had placed by the tunnel entrance.
“Your dagger, please,” said Zak.
Annika made a skeptical grimace and extended the dagger to him.
The dagger glimmered in Zak’s hands, then its blade came alight. Zak looked satisfied. “Not bad! I thought it might work!”
“What?” said Annika, not comprehending.
“Why bother with a candle, when we have this?”
With the dagger blazing in Zak’s hand, they went inside the narrow, dark passage. The dagger illuminated Zak’s face. It was handsome, hard, and at the same time boyishly excited about the magic dagger.
Annika could feel herself falling for him, more and more. She forced herself to look away, then when that did not stop the fluttering in her chest, tried to find the worst that she could think of Zak. After a few minutes, she alighted on the thought that he must have rushed to the tunnel so that he could try out the dagger.
With a frown, Annika had to admit to herself that this thought did not detract much from his appeal.
Giving up, she instead forced herself to try and remember the turns and branches of the tunnel so that she could find her way to the lake again, but one tunnel seemed much like another, and she soon lost track.
The floor dropped and then rose, dropped and rose again.
She walked as though in a haze. Once, she closed her eyes and then found herself nudging Zak’s back with her nose.
He stood before branching tunnels, deciding on which turn to take. She thought to ask him what would happen if he took a wrong turn, but then he started off again and she rushed after him.
Soon, she was drooping with exhaustion. She would not slow. Her thoughts flitted by, vaguely. She could rest once they had left the tunnel. Then she would be able to leave the Tiger castle. She could start her life in Karrum. And most importantly, she had her sister back again. Her sister had never stopped loving her, nor had her father. That was important.
“What’s the matter?” said Zak.
“Nothing,” said Annika. She found herself laughing and crying, silently, although she was not sure if that was from the joy and sadness or the exhaustion. “Let’s keep walking.”
The floor was covered in fine gravel in parts, and their feet crunched them with a pleasant, rustling sound.
She had her family and her healing, Annika said to herself, listening to the crunching sound. She did not need anything else.
She kept her eyes trained on the gravel before her, refusing to look up at Zak.
With everything she was blessed to have, she could not let herself think that
she also needed him.
Chapter Six
At the end of another long day, Annika slowly returned to her lodgings at the center of the old city of Karrum. She wondered if her efforts to start a practice selling herbs and potions would be futile. She brushed the thought aside, reminding herself that she had moved out of the castle only three weeks earlier. She needed to give herself more time.
The day after Annika had returned from the Dragon’s Mouth, a castellan sent her a messenger. The messenger, a boy apprenticed to a local tailor, told her that men to accompany her would wait at the gates at midday. She was free to leave.
The boy’s high pitched words stayed with her for all of that morning as she packed.
The escort was four burly men, who grimly waited at the main castle gate.
She dismissed them as soon as they were inside the city. She told them she will not be needing them. With them, she would draw more attention.
They grudgingly agreed, especially after she sweetened the dismissal with a gold coin for each.
What she did not say was that instead of them, she would have preferred to see her sister and father come to say farewell to her. She had not seen either of them.
She did not dwell at this absence of a goodbye. Her hopes were now solely focused on starting her practice. She dreamed of healing and seeing her patients get well, and, in some of her more heady dreams, even of her being recognized for the work she did with gratitude and love.
But that was not all that she had dwelled on.
Zak visited her thoughts more often than she would have liked. She veered between seeing him as a danger and a temptation. She was not convinced by either. Nor was she sure what interpretation she preferred.
His reputation was one of the reasons for her being hesitant. She pictured all the girls who were reputed to have thrown themselves at him. She knew most of them – aristocratic beauties who were on a lookout for a good match. Annika would not be yet another one of Zak’s conquest.
And she also feared the feelings that he stirred inside her. These feelings threatened the only logical decision she could have taken, which was to avoid him. She could not call him to mind without recalling his hands on her body, his lips on hers, and the passions that he aroused. It was as though he uncovered a wellspring of want and need inside her that she did not know existed. That scared her.
She was not ready for that, she said to herself, whenever thoughts of Zak forced their way into her mind. She did not want to enquire too deeply what “that” may be.
That evening, street corners, people with sour faces and in soggy clothing, and braying donkeys blurred into one grey mess. The streets that led to the inn at which she stayed were flooded from the recent rains. Annika pulled a hood over her head and narrowly avoided slipping on a wet pavement stone. The weather had been unseasonably warm. Corpses of rats floated alongside discarded bones, bits of wood, and sewerage. There had been more and more dead rats in recent days.
Annika hurried while hoping desperately not to slip and land in the mud.
The high fence that surrounded the inn loomed ahead.
With a sigh of relief, Annika hopped through the open gate and then turned right to walk past the stables to her room. She wanted to change the wet clothes before she caught a cold.
From under the eaves of the stables, a man stepped out in front of her. He blocked her path.
Annika screwed up her eyes up at him with a mixture of annoyance and fear.
The man smiled at her.
Through the fog of tiredness, she blankly thought the smile looked familiar. Then she saw the man’s face. “Zak!”
“It’s only been a few weeks, but it seemed you already had trouble remembering,” he said amiably.
“No… why....” she said, on the back foot, and hating it. “Hold on a moment….”
“That’s okay, it’s not the first time a beautiful woman has paid me no mind.”
His smile was so devastatingly handsome that Annika felt herself lose the thread of what she was about to say.
Zak took her by the elbow and led her forward.
She shook his hand off. “What are you doing?”
“Walking you inside the inn. Unless you wish to converse in the rain?”
She looked at him sideways, unwilling to give him more attention than that. He was wearing a black, hooded robe with the pommel of the sword at his hip shining dully before him. His face had a healthy, pink glow. His eyes sparkled. His teeth flashed. He stood at ease, as though the droplets of rain that were becoming mixed with pellets of hail were an inconvenience not worthy of his concern.
The weeks since their last meeting seemed to agree with Zak.
Annika thought with irritation he looked the very picture of health. Clearly, he hadn’t missed her very much at all; certainly not enough to forego his comforts.
Perhaps he had a woman somewhere, who cooked and fed and clothed him. Made him happy.
The thought set Annika’s teeth on edge. “I dare say that you have more to lose,” she said. “I am already soaked.”
Zak could not stop his eyes from drinking in Annika, taking in, as though for the first time, her strong, firm shoulders, the slender, straight neck that spoke of an unbending will, and supple arms that were bared above the elbow by her damp, rolled-up sleeves, and that were made for caressing. He wanted to take her in his hands and kiss her, all of her that he could see, and more….
It took him more effort than he would have imagined to stop himself. “Then we can speak here.”
Annika tossed her wet hair with irritation. “I’ve nothing to say to you.” She quickly walked to the entrance to the guest wing.
The doorman gave Annika a glum nod and miserably swung the heavy green doors open. “He with you miss?”
Annika slipped him a coin as she walked by. “No. He’s staying here.”
The man grabbed the coin with gratitude, but it failed to cheer him. “Hold on, you,” the man said to Zak, and then, stopped speaking, sizing up Zak’s height, dress, and weapons. “Uh… the miss said….”
“Have a drink for our health,” said Zak, and slipped the man a coin that glinted gold in the flash of light.
The man pocketed it with a torn look.
“Very generous of you,” Annika observed as she walked the corridor, resigned to have Zak beside her.
“They live on tips.”
“Yet the inn’s owner won’t allow him to ask the lodgers to tip him,” said Annika, looking at Zak sideways. “What’s this, Prince Zak’s not as knowledgeable about the world as I thought!”
Zak guffawed, the pleasure that he had found in her remark clear on his open face.
Annika, for a reason she could not describe, blushed. “It wasn’t that amusing, what I said,” she mumbled.
The entry hallway was vast. The windows were spaced at infrequent intervals, as a result of which the inside of the hallway was dark and cold like a cellar. Along the walls burned enormous tallow candles.
Zak took her by the elbow and stopped her beside a nook that was lit by a large chandelier. “Is your healing practice doing well?”
Annika placed her satchel on the floor beside her. The leather had been treated by wax, but there was no certainty that the rain did not ruin her herbs. She felt inside it. The contents were dry.
She sighed with relief, and turned her mind to Zak’s question. “Yes. Very well,” she replied, a stock response.
“I am pleased to hear that, Annika,” said Zak.
Zak’s genuine tone prompted Annika to blurt out the truth: “So well, in fact, that the woman from whom I rented a stall at the market, where I sold my herbs, has turned me out this morning. Apparently healing is feared in Karrum.”
“The preachers,” said Zak, with distaste. “They say they hate magic, yet they meddle in it themselves.”
“Do they also hate the flowers that grow in a forest glade?” Annika hotly returned. “Or sunlight, or clean air? Like magic, all these th
ings are natural!”
“Only the magic,” he said. “Those they accuse of using it, they burn. Your landlady was right to be afraid.”
Annika tried not to shudder, for the first time realizing the extent of the danger she had been in. “How things have changed!”
Zak nodded thoughtfully. “Did you not know that? Perhaps I should have warned you earlier. People are scared. Strange things are happening….” His voice tapered off as he watched her unselfconsciously slide the topmost tunic over her head.
Annika felt flustered removing any of her clothing, even the outer layer, in front of him. But she told herself she will not stand in wet clothes. Nor was she comfortable going up to her room with him.
Zak cleared his dry throat. He tried not to look at the outlines of her body in the thin under-tunic she wore. The under-tunic was white, and clung to Annika’s slender body. Zak took off his mantle and put it over her shoulders. “You’ll freeze to an icicle if you’re not careful.”
Annika, surprised by the gesture, but grateful for the warm mantle, did not resist.
Zak forced himself to take eyes off her. “What will you do next?”
“That’s one of the minor details I will need to worked out,” she said, trying to keep her voice casual. She used a dry cloth from her bag to squeeze her hair dry. “Alongside how to help my sister defeat the snakes, how to set up a healing practice while avoiding the preachers’ attention, and how to keep myself under a roof and fed once my store of gold coins runs out. Which it soon will.” After she finished saying this she paused, feeling, not for the first time, a sense of powerlessness given the task before her.
“Well?” he prompted.
She shrugged heavily. “I’ll seek another place to sell my potions,” she simply said. “When the herbs run out, I will travel to riverlands and bring more back. If I keep a low profile, the preachers won’t bother me. That’s the plan.”
As she spoke, her eyes lingered on his defined cheekbones, powerful chin. He looked vital, filled with strength. The weight of the thick mantle on her shoulders made her realize just how tired she was. She had missed him, she needed him…
