Kingdom of Mirrors and Roses

by A. W. Cross

  Charles and Philippe stumbled into the room, dragging a half-unconscious Duncan with them.

  “Lift him up and put him on the table,” I ordered them.

  With the help of Richard, the three of them lifted Duncan onto the table, and I pulled him closer to my side so that he was lying in the middle of the table. Blood was gushing from the wounds on his leg.

  “Get Clarice,” I told Philippe. “She’s in my Father’s workshop. I need her help.”

  Philippe nodded and ran outside. All the frivolity of earlier had disappeared from his features: he looked serious, worried, almost panicked. Charles looked similar; he kept on shaking his head as if he couldn’t believe what happened. Gerard appeared the most in shock.

  “Tell me about this,” I asked the remaining three Hunters. “Blight attack? Or did he fall or get injured some other way?” I grabbed the knife and cut open whatever fabric remained from the pant leg of Duncan’s trousers.

  “Blight attack.” It was Richard who replied. “They came out of nowhere. Five of them. We’d been following animal tracks—or so we thought. But we were further in the forest than we’ve ever been before, in territory we didn’t know…” Richard took a deep breath. “He stood no chance. They were on him in seconds, tearing at him…His leg got the worst of it.”

  Amélie came in with a bucket of water, which she put down next to me. All joyfulness had evaporated from her features, and she looked a thousand years old.

  I grabbed a cloth and dipped it in the water, then used it to clean Duncan’s wounds. Even though he wasn’t exactly my favorite person in the world, I wouldn’t wish this upon my worst enemy. He cringed as the water stung against his wounds and sweat dripped from his forehead. When the worst of the blood was wiped away, I further inspected the wound.

  It was bad. Very bad.

  The door burst open and Clarice and Father stumbled in, both of them looking as panicked as I felt. I hoped I was doing a better job of not showing my panic, because by now I wanted to scream at the top of my lungs, but that wouldn’t help Duncan one bit.

  “Get a clean cloth, make it wet, and dip his forehead,” I told Amélie. “We need to keep his temperature down;”

  Clarice moved to the other side of the table and looked at the torn-up leg. “Bottle three,” she said without hesitation, and moved to the cabinet where we kept a few of our potion bottles. We tried to prepare as many of these beforehand as we could, but with the limited number of herbs we had access to, it wasn’t easy. Bottle three contained a potion that could slow down possible infections, but looking at the state of Duncan’s legs, I doubted it would be enough.

  He had several deep, gushing wounds, two of them so deep the bone poked through. Even worse than the flesh wounds were the black veins already sprouting from them and spreading rapidly. “Look.” I pointed at the black crisscross pattern, which I wanted Clarice to see as well.

  “It’s…” She blinked, as if she couldn’t believe her eyes.

  “It’s spreading. Right in front of our eyes.” Philippe stood next to Clarice. All the blood had drained from his face, and the sadness etched in his features was almost impossible to look at.

  “We have to cut off his leg.” I shook my head. “There’s no other way to save his life. If we don’t, it’ll just spread faster and faster.”

  “Do it,” Richard said without hesitation.

  Duncan was in no position to give his opinion. He kept falling in and out of consciousness, sometimes lifting his head a little, only for it to drop back down on the table a second later.

  “Father, get his family,” I said. “If he doesn’t make it…”

  Father, already looking slightly squeamish—he’d never been a fan of seeing blood, not even back when Mother acted as the town doctor—seemed relieved he could leave. He nodded and dashed out of the room.

  “You keep the cloth wet, and keep dipping his forehead,” I told Amélie.

  “You three,” I said to Charles, Philippe and Gerard, “keep his torso down. Richard, you hold his leg.”

  The guys moved into position. Philippe and Charles each held down one of Duncan’s arms with one hand and held his chest down with their other hand. Gérard held on to his friend’s shoulders, pushing him down.

  Clarice had grabbed bottle three from the kitchen cabinet and pulled out Mother’s old medicine bag from the shelf underneath. She put it on the counter behind us, opened it and lifted the handsaw from the bag. She poured half a gallon of potion three’s contents over the handsaw and then handed me the object of terror.

  I took a deep breath. I didn’t have time to even analyze how to best cut off the leg. For now, the black veins were situated below the knee only—if I cut it off right above the knee, there where the leg held mostly fat (as opposed to the knee, where there was a lot of bone, too) then I could save the rest of his leg, but I had to be fast.

  Gritting my teeth, I leaned forward and put the handsaw in position. Clarice put her hands on both sides of Duncan’s leg, one under his knee and one above it, stretching the flesh so that I could cut in a straight line—or as straight as possible. I didn’t even have time to pray before I started cutting in the flesh.

  Duncan screamed in agony and lifted half his torso before the combined efforts of Charles, Philippe and Gerard could pull him back down.

  “Hold him still!” I screamed while I desperately tried to cut in a straight line.

  The effort was enormous, each strike with the handsaw caused Duncan to scream or to faint again, and I had to use all my strength to cut through the flesh, and then through the bone. Duncan’s wails were the stuff of nightmares, and they would probably haunt me forever.

  The procedure seemed to take an eternity, and Duncan fainted halfway through without waking up again. The sweat dripping from my forehead could’ve filled an entire well, but adrenaline pushed me forward and caused me to keep on sawing, to keep on moving that instrument of torture until the leg was removed, and the black veins couldn’t spread any further.

  Once the procedure was done, Clarice and I tied up the wound in cloths drenched in copious amounts of potion three to avoid infections.

  While we were doing so, the front door opened, and Duncan’s brother and mother appeared.

  “Duncan!” his mother, Anna, cried out, while she flew toward him, her face marked with grief and panic.

  George looked a lot calmer, but equally as upset. He had never been the same since he lost his hand, and to have his brother go through something similar must bring back a lot of bad memories for him.

  I felt as old as the world itself. I’d cut through bone before—I had removed George’s hand to stop the Blight from devouring him, but that was the only time I had done it. Thankfully, it wasn’t your standard type of operation here. After George’s operation, I had been so exhausted that I’d slept for three days straight, and I felt the same now. At the moment itself, it was the adrenaline that had kept me going, but now that had worn off, exhaustion rolled over me.

  “Anne,” I said, addressing Duncan’s mother. “I’m sorry. We had no choice. We had to cut off his leg, or the infection would’ve spread, and if it reached his heart he would’ve died.”

  “My son…” She leaned over him, enveloping him with her own body as she hugged him. “My poor, poor son!” she wailed.

  “Come on, let’s get some air.” Clarice gestured for Amélie and the other Hunters to get out of the room and go outside. Probably best, because Charles looked ready to throw up, and Philippe’s face was so pale he looked like a three-day-old corpse. I probably didn’t look any better; I certainly didn’t feel any better.

  When they left, I turned to Anne. She was still crying over her son’s limb form. “I still have to check if he has no other wounds,” I told her. “The Blight had already infected his leg, but now we’ve cut it off, it shouldn’t be able to spread anymore. We need to keep a close eye on the wound though, make sure it doesn’t get infected.”

  “My boy, my
poor boy…” Anne let go of Duncan and studied him. “No, no, no. His leg…”

  Another round of crying hysterically started, and George wrapped an arm around her, hugging his mother.

  “How will he walk?” she asked in a shrill voice. “How… He…” She started crying even worse now, large sobs with short, panicked breaths in between. “I need air, I can’t breathe.” She pushed George out of the way and hurried outside.

  It broke my heart to see a person like this, so hurt, so devastated. No doubt Duncan would feel the same way when he woke up. If he woke up, because the operation had obviously taken its toll.

  I leaned closer to him, inspecting his face; he was still breathing, but faintly. I pushed the fabric of his shirt aside, checking for any other wounds, and then my own breathing stopped, my heart skipping a beat.

  No, it couldn’t be…

  “What is it?” George moved to next to me.

  I grabbed the sides of Duncan’s shirt and ripped it further open, revealing his chest, and hoping that what I had seen was just a trick of light.

  It wasn’t.

  The black line I’d spotted was real, and it was connected in a crisscrossed pattern to other similar nerves sprouting from a wound near Duncan’s lungs. Black veins that were steadily spreading, finding their way to his heart.

  A noise next to me startled me—it was George who grabbed the kitchen table for support.

  Duncan was dead the moment he received this wound. I could cut out the flesh, but the infection ran below that, and there was no way I could stop it from spreading to his heart. This wasn’t a limb you could remove—cutting off Duncan’s leg had been for naught, the pain he’d had to endure would’ve served no purpose.

  “My brother…” George’s whimpers were even more heartbreaking than his mother’s. He turned to me, forcing me to look at him. “Is there nothing you can do? Nothing?” he asked, all the sadness of the world reflected in his gaze. “Not even with your magic?”

  I wanted him to tell him no. I should’ve told him no.

  But I looked down at my mechanical arm, remembered the way the metal plates crossed my shoulder and travelled all the way to my heart, and despite myself, despite never even wanting to consider it, I knew I should give him the option, at least. Despite the cost, it wasn’t up to me to decide whether George wanted to pay it or not—it should be his choice, not mine.

  I took a deep breath, and despite my brain yelling at me not to do it, I listened to my heart, and told him, “There is one thing.”

  10

  “I’ll do it,” George said after I’d explained him the one thing I knew that could possibly save Duncan’s life.

  “You understand that it will kill you?” I asked him. “You will sacrifice your life for his. And I’m not even sure if it’ll work. I’ve never done the spell myself. The only time I saw it done…” I looked down at my chest, at the metal plates poking out from underneath my dress.

  “He’s my little brother,” George said as if that explained everything. “If there’s the slightest chance to save his life, then I have to do it. No matter the cost.”

  I licked my lips, trembling from being so nervous. I should’ve never even suggested it: I was unfamiliar with the procedure, and the cost was too high. But if my sister was hurt like this… If there was a chance to save her, even if it meant I would have to die…

  I would want that chance, at least. That option. The option my Mother took, when she sacrificed herself so I could live.

  Struggling to hold myself together, I gestured at Duncan’s lifeless body, at the veins growing rapidly in all directions. “We don’t have much time. You should tell your mother what you’re planning to do.”

  “She’d stop me.” George swallowed hard. “She wouldn’t want me to take the chance. But Duncan is her baby, the youngest. She won’t be able to live without him.”

  I looked back and forth between Duncan’s lifeless body, and the door leading to outside. When peeking through the window, I saw the others gathered outside, trying to comfort Anne.

  “Barricade the door,” I told George, while I rushed toward the window, and slammed the shutters shut.

  No one should see this, no one.

  “Cut his shirt loose, and yours too. And get me a clean knife, pour some of that potion on it,” I ordered him as I gestured at the remnants of potion three. “I need my mother’s grimoire.”

  I raced up the stairs to grab the last grimoire my mother had ever kept. The ancient tone was at least a thousand pages long and contained mostly harmless spells focusing on herbs and potions, except for the more advanced spells in the back of the book.

  I’d never tried them before. The most complicated spell I had tried so far had been to breathe life into one of my father’s automatons—a spell located in the middle part of the book, nowhere near as complicated as this one.

  But this spell was different.

  From the moment I’d seen it in the grimoire, which I’d only inherited after Mother’s death, I had memorized it by heart. It was the last spell I had ever seen my Mother do: and like with all witches’ spells, if the grimoire was to be believed, it only appeared in the grimoire after Mother had performed it for the first and only time.

  A spell of death. A spell of life.

  Magic that should not be tampered with, under no circumstances. A thousand panicking thoughts raced through my mind while I darted back down the stairs. What if the others came in mid-spell and tried to stop me? What if George and Duncan both died, because the spell failed? Was it fair to let George sacrifice his life for his brother knowing that I might not even be capable of performing the spell?

  The memories of the day my Mother had performed this spell resurfaced. I had been in Duncan’s spot—except I was not lying on the kitchen table, but in my parents’ bedroom upstairs, dying. No matter how well she’d treated my wounds, the infection would not stop spreading.

  While I helped George take off his shirt and ordered him to sit down on a chair next to the table Duncan was lying on, I remembered Mother’s face right before she said goodbye to me. The tears streaming down her beautiful face, her rosy cheeks turning porcelain pale while she told me to take care of my sisters.

  I had seen her done magic before, on countless occasions. The entire town knew she was a Sorceress—she was the last Sorceress who had enhanced the magic of the Wall with her own. My sisters and I would do the same, once we turned of age—magic as advanced as that took a toll, and according to what Mother had said, we should not try it before we were strong enough.

  What would she think about me performing death magic? No doubt she’d warn me not to do it, that it could be a lot more harmful than whatever spell we needed to revitalize the Wall.

  But what good was having magic if it was not used to help people?

  I opened up the grimoire to the correct page, the very last one, and took a deep breath while I clenched the knife in my head.

  “Are you ready?” I asked George. “You can still say no. There’s no dishonor in that. Your brother would understand.”

  “I’m ready,” was all he said.

  I looked down to the ground and tried to find the rhythm. I reached into the hollow emptiness inside me while I listened to my heartbeat, calming it down until it was in line with everything around me. With the buzzing voices from Philippe and the others outside—how long would it take them to realize I’d locked them out? Not that long, I supposed—and the faint, barely audible heartbeat of Duncan. For a while, I waited until all of it was synchronized, until I found that perfect balance from which I could wield my magic.

  I felt it surge through me, all that raw power that was unused, ready for the taking. The power that was as ancient as the world itself, the power that had saved my life. My heart, what was left of it, beat so hard in my chest I feared it could jump out.

  Almost involuntarily, I threw my head back, and my eyes rolled backward. I no longer felt like myself—that power, that raw strength
, took control of me, controlling me more than I could control it.

  Maybe I had reached too deep. Maybe I had taken too much.

  I’d never used magic this powerful before.

  First, I created a barrier around us, conjuring up a wall that protected Duncan, George and I from the rest of the world. In case the others managed to break through the physical barriers we’d used to block them out, the magic would keep them from disrupting the ritual.

  “Commutatione vitae,” I said in a voice that barely sounded like my own. I had tapped into a magic so deep, so powerful, that I felt like I was more than one person at once; I was stronger than one person should be, almost as if I wielded the magic of an entire coven. Or more accurately, the magic was wielding me.

  My heart started to burn in my chest, a pain so excruciating that if the power had not kept me standing up, I probably would’ve collapsed.

  “Sanguis cordis, cor ad cor,” I continued, reading from the grimoire, although I didn’t really need the text—the words were hidden within me, in the part of me that acted as a vessel for this tremendous power, connected to everything around me in a way I scarcely understood. The magic was using me, but I couldn’t stop it, even if I wanted to.

  It terrified me. The small spells I’d done before had been nothing like this—I’d never talked with a different voice before, never felt this controlled before, but there was nothing worse than cutting off a ritual in the middle of starting one, every Sorcerer knew that.

  Someone banged against the door, and I heard voices, but I couldn’t make out what they said. My magic bubble around George, Duncan and I was intact, and the rest of the world existed in another plane, somewhere else. The noises were warped, unclear.

  I clenched my fingers around the knife and leaned over Duncan. The pain in my chest became unbearable, almost like a warning.

  I hesitated for a second. No longer because I was afraid I would mess up the spell, but simply because I was surprised I could even do it.

  All magic comes at a price, and I felt in that moment that the price for this, a price for a ritual of death, would be enormous.