by Gail Dayton
Szabo’s pet conjurer—the only other person with any magical talent in the camp—had only a few spells, could call up only the newest, weakest of spirits. Even Szabo held him in contempt, while he indulged the man’s vices to keep him conjuring for the rebel band. The man feared Amanusa and her herbs. They avoided each other for the most part.
After a time, Amanusa took the last stitch and cut the thread. She spread her wound ointment over the stitched injury and bandaged it. With Miruna’s help, Amanusa got Costel turned again. She poured some of the magic-boosted spirits in the entry wound, murmuring the spell-words under her breath, in English as Jax had told them to her. This one took only a few stitches to close. Amanusa left Miruna to finish the cleaning and bandaging.
Walking out of the hospital shelter, Amanusa twisted from side to side, trying to ease some of the ache in her back.
“So?” Szabo popped out of nowhere, intending to startle, like he always did. It was his favorite game, sneaking up on people and making them jump. All the outlaws loved the game. For men with such violence and brutality in them, sometimes they behaved more like cruel children. She hated it, as she did everything else about this place.
This time, Amanusa won the game. She didn’t jump. She shrugged. “He’s still alive. Time will tell.”
“If he dies—”
She dared to interrupt him. “He was likely dead the minute that bullet hit him in the belly, even if I had been here waiting for you. If he lives, it’s my doing. But if he dies, Szabo, it’s your fault. Yours for taking him out to get shot.”
Szabo lifted his hand to strike. Amanusa didn’t flinch. The outlaw chief wasn’t as brutal as he liked to pretend. He never participated in his men’s drunken revels and once—once, he had apologized to her. But he’d never stopped them either. She blamed him as much as she did the others.
“Do you want me to look at that arm?” She met his gaze evenly, and after a moment he dropped his raised fist.
“The leg bothers me more.” He limped to a stump in front of the fire pit and sat heavily.
“What did you do to it?” Amanusa knelt and waited for him to pull his trouser leg up and his stocking down. She wouldn’t touch any of the men more than necessary.
“I did nothing to it. It was that God-be-cursed—” He broke off to shout. “Gavril! Get that monster thing from the city. Maybe our witch will know what it is. God knows, our conjurer has no idea.”
Amanusa wasn’t anyone’s witch. But she could be a sorceress if she wanted. She frowned at Szabo’s leg. “Are you saying a monster bit you?”
“Bit? No. It stabbed me,” he growled.
The calf was swollen and red, inflamed around an evil-looking wound. One entry, more like a puncture than a bite. Amanusa sighed. “And what did you do for it? Did you even use the ointment I left you?”
“I’m not an infant,” the man growled, looking away.
“No. You’re a man and therefore an idiot.” Amanusa pressed hard on the wound, expelling the corruption the fool had let develop. She didn’t at all mind hurting him.
Szabo grunted and jerked against the pain. He never bellowed, like some of his so-manly followers did. “Speaking of idiots, where is yours?”
She tipped her head toward the hospital shelter. “In there. He’s—he has falling fits. He’s sleeping one off.” She wiped her hands on her bloody apron and stood. “I’m going to have to open this to get all that nastiness out. And you are going to use the ointment and stay off it for a few days.”
“All right, all right,” Szabo grumbled. “Damned nuisance.”
“If you’d done what I told you when you got it, I wouldn’t have to do this.”
“You should have been here to tend it.”
Amanusa gave him a hard look. “If I’d been here—if you made me stay here—I’d have taken it off at the knee, no one the wiser. You should know better than to threaten me, old man.”
“How can a woman be so hard?” He shook his head. “I don’t understand why you are so stubborn about this.”
Amanusa stared at him until he looked up, met her gaze. “Yes,” she said. “You do.”
He flushed and looked away. “The others don’t mind it. Not so much.”
“Did you ever ask them?” Amanusa waited, but got no response. “I didn’t think so.”
A harsh clanking sound of metal on metal fractured the moment and Szabo turned away, seeming grateful for the interruption. Gavril, another one of Szabo’s old comrades, Amanusa’s old enemies, carried a strange object in his hands.
Made of a dark metal with a dull charcoal-gray sheen, it consisted of a melon-sized sphere suspended between two six-spoked stars, rather like rimless wheels. A pair of jointed telescoping arms dangled awkwardly from the center ball. The pointed one—sharp and edged, like a knife—still had rust-brown flakes of dried blood clinging to it.
“That thing stabbed you?” Amanusa quelled the horror whispering down her spine. “What is it?”
“You don’t know?”
She could feel Szabo’s suspicious gaze on her, but couldn’t tear her attention from the—the thing in Gavril’s hands. The shudder escaped her control. Even dead—inanimate, broken—it oozed wrong from every surface, contained wrong beneath that smooth-sheened skin. “I’ve never seen anything like it. Never imagined something like this could exist. Is it a windup toy?”
“We haven’t found a key for winding, or a place to put a key. And if it is a toy, someone has a twisted sense of fun. It stabbed me.”
How was that different from the cruel games his outlaws played?
Amanusa shook off her bitterness to focus on the machine. “What did it do? Tell me what happened.”
“It rolled down the street on those spokes,” Szabo said. “Coming from the mines and the smelter near Nasdvar. You know where I mean.”
She nodded. She’d never seen it, but others had told her, women whose men had gone to work in the mines, women who came to her for medicines to heal their men after they returned. The very air surrounding the place seemed to leach the life from anyone who ventured near. She wasn’t surprised a place as wrong as that could produce something like this.
“It—it saw me. I swear it saw me, and this—” Szabo picked up the jointed limb without the knife and waggled it at Amanusa. Its tip was hollow. “This came squirting out of it and… it sniffed at me. I kicked it. Knocked it clear across the street, but before I could make the corner, it came rolling back, flying at me. Just before it reached me, this other thing—the sharp arm—came out of it and it stabbed me.
“So I kicked it again. Harder. It hit the side of the building and it died. I killed it.” Szabo sounded just as satisfied over killing a machine as he did when he killed a man, an “enemy of the revolution.”
Amanusa shuddered, this time at the pleasure in Szabo’s voice. That was as wrong as the metal insect.
“Here. Take it.” The outlaw chief plucked the thing from Gavril’s hands and dumped it into Amanusa’s before she could react. It felt as wrong as it looked, and she fought sudden, bitter nausea.
“Take it with you,” Szabo said. “See if you can figure out what it is, how it works. Maybe we can use it against the government, eh?”
The machine was cold, colder than it ought to be, even if it had been kept in shadow, and slightly oily to the touch. And while heavy, it wasn’t as heavy as it looked. The ball was probably hollow. Amanusa propped it against her stomach to take her hand away and wipe off the clinging, greasy feel, but that felt worse, threatened to steal her breath as well as empty her stomach. She let go of the central ball, holding it by two of the spokes, which helped.
She didn’t want the thing, but better she had it than Szabo did. The metal bug might be dead, but it could still suck the life, the humanity out of those near it. These men had little enough humanity left them as it was.
Amanusa didn’t know how she knew the machine could do such a thing, but she had no doubt of it. Perhaps her certainty wa
s part of whatever made her a potential sorceress. Perhaps she had a sense of magic, like a sense of smell. Whatever this contraption was, it was not magic. It was… It was anti-magic. So, did that mean the place where it came from was too? Yet another whisper of horror scurried through her.
Szabo cleared his throat and she startled. She didn’t have time to puzzle it all out now. Maybe Jax would know what it was.
“Let me go put this away.” She hoisted the heavy machine, braced another spoke against her sleeve-covered forearm. “I’ll get my supplies and be right back to take care of that leg. Then I’ll look at your shoulder and treat the rest of your men.”
At the hospital shelter, Amanusa propped the metal bug against one of the support poles—no one would make off with the nasty thing—and washed her hands enough times that the oily, awful feel went away. She checked on Costel, sleeping peacefully under Miruna’s watchful eye, and on Jax. He seemed just as peaceful.
His nosebleed had stopped, so Amanusa took a moment to clean his face and bundle a clean rag under his head to get it off the bloody ground. Then she collected her biggest jar of wound salve and the other tools of her trade and went back out to conduct her open-air surgery.
———
Jax still hadn’t awakened by the time night fell. It would have worried Amanusa more, if he hadn’t slept so long the last time Yvaine spoke with his voice. Miruna stubbornly refused to leave Costel’s side. Amanusa didn’t blame her. The camp wasn’t safe without a protector. The hospital shelter protected Miruna now—none of the men dared break its neutrality.
Szabo had ordered Amanusa’s tent set up. Part of her bargain was a tent to herself while she was here. Szabo ordered everyone to leave it, and her, alone, but she was her own protection more than he was. She had been since she’d made everyone so ill with her herbs and won her bargain. That had been six years ago. They were beginning to forget.
It was late. She wanted to retire to her tent. To hide in it. But she couldn’t leave Jax lying at the edge of the hospital shelter. He might roll out. Or someone could decide “the edge” wasn’t actually “in.” Or—
Amanusa sighed. She had to be honest, at least with herself. She didn’t want to leave Jax where he lay because she felt safer when he was near. Even if he was unconscious. She eyed the distance to the small tent set up near the tree line behind the shelter. Not much more than the distance she’d dragged him into her cabin. She could do this. It wouldn’t hurt him any worse than he already was.
Crow gave his opinion from his perch atop the hospital arbor. He obviously agreed with her. Smiling at her fanciful thoughts, Amanusa rolled Jax onto his back so she could catch both hands and drag him. To her surprise, he mumbled something, then blinked as if trying to open his eyes.
“Jax, can you wake up?” Amanusa was careful to speak in Romanian, too aware of the curious girl watching. “You have to get up now. Just for a moment. You can’t sleep here.”
His eyes closed and opened again before they focused on her, but he turned to push at the ground, struggling to stand. Amanusa had to help him. He staggered and reeled like a drunk in a three-day stupor, but she got him to her tent. Bending to get him through the door flap ended with him collapsed on the ground, but he was inside.
Amanusa went back to the shelter for one of the canvas sheets they used to make stretchers. She laid it on the ground inside her tent and rolled Jax onto it. He would stay warmer with a layer between himself and the heat-stealing earth. She tucked his blanket-cloak more closely around him and retreated to the cot.
“Thank you.” Jax spoke clearly and in English.
She thought about looking to see who might be near, might have heard, but she was too tired to care.
“For what?” she said in Romanian. But Jax didn’t answer.
After a moment, she spoke again, in English. “You’re welcome.”
She took off her boots, unfastened the top few buttons of her dress, and lay down fully clothed, prepared for her usual sleepless night. She never slept well in the camp. It was too full of memories. And fear.
———
Amanusa jerked awake in the black dark of deepest night. Her tent was empty. She was alone. “Jax?” she whispered softly, too afraid to make much sound.
She sat up, reaching blindly into the dark, fighting back the part of herself that wanted to panic. Jax was bound to her. He could not leave. But could he betray her? If she died, wouldn’t that set him free?
Someone was moving outside her tent. “Jax?” she dared to whisper a little louder.
“Here.” The low sound of his voice sent more relief than it should have rocketing through her. “Come. Give me a hand with this.”
“With what?” Amanusa strained to see through the blackness inside the tent, hunting for her shoes with cold toes.
“Protection.” Jax ducked inside, darkness against the light. Even at the quarter-moon, it was lighter outside than in. He moved across the tight space to the cot where she still sat.
“Take my hand,” he said. “I haven’t done this spell in so long, I don’t trust myself to get it right. I don’t know if I have the magic for it. But you do.”
Amanusa groped in midair for his hand and it closed, warm and callused, around her fingers.
“Come.” He tugged gently and she followed him outside the tent, pausing only to grab a blanket from her cot for a cloak.
The moon’s light bathed the world in a faint silver gleam, deepening the shadows under the nearby trees. It lit up Jax’s face enough that Amanusa knew her pale blond hair had to be almost glowing. She pulled the gray blanket up over her head to hide it. Jax led her around the tent to a tangle of briars a few paces away and thrust his hand deep into their midst.
“What are you doing?” Amanusa grabbed his arm, pulled back his hand, now bleeding from a half-dozen scratches.
“Magic. My blood is enough for this. We don’t need to bleed you. Walk with me. Gather in the magic.” He raked the deepest scratch over a branch of the briars, smearing his blood along it. “East.”
He led her in a circle around the tent, pausing at the south, the west, the north, to wipe his bloody hand on the grass, or a tree trunk, or a stone. Amanusa tried to gather magic, but had no idea what she was doing.
Finally he led her back to the entrance where he wiped away the last of the blood with a handkerchief and washed his hands in the basin Szabo always had set up outside her tent. One of the little amenities, like the cot, he kept hoping might tempt her to return. The deliberately ignorant fool.
“Do you feel the magic?” Jax murmured, urging her back into the tent.
Amanusa wasn’t sure. She felt… something. Something she’d felt before, when she made the charms. Something right. Real, true, like the night itself had come to life. “I-I think so.”
“Good. A smear of blood at the four directions, or in the four corners of a room, can be used for protection. I probably used more than necessary, but it’s hard to control the amount when using briars to part the skin.” He took both her hands in his. “Now, these are the words—”
“Wait.” Amanusa squeezed his fingers. “I don’t want Yvaine again. It’s too hard on you. I want you conscious.”
“This is magic I know.” Jax squeezed gently back. “There was a time I cast this all on my own, without the sorceress to help. I only ask help now because it has been so long. These are the words.” He wouldn’t let her delay any longer. “By the mark of my body, I bind—”
“But it’s not my body,” Amanusa interrupted again, not ready yet for real blood magic. It felt strange, intimate somehow, standing in the dark so close to a man, his hands holding both of hers. She didn’t like it.
And she did. His hands were warm. Comforting. His presence felt safe. Why? She ought to fear him. “It’s your blood,” she said, still trying to stall.
“My body is yours, Sorceress. I am blood servant to the blood sorceress. I am part of you. An extra arm.” He shook her slightly. “Finish
the spell. Can’t you feel it gathering?”
She did. She could sense it now. Magic rose outside her tent. Power she could almost breathe in, almost grasp in her hands. Before, she’d known only faint, misty whispers trailing across her fingers, not smothering blankets of power like this.
“Finish it,” Jax whispered. “Before it turns.”
She could feel the power struggle against… something, and knew she had to bring it under control. The magic wasn’t evil, but like fire, if it escaped, it could destroy much.
“By the mark of my body—” Amanusa felt the magic shiver at the sound of her voice.
“I bind protection around this place,” Jax said.
Amanusa repeated the words and the magic danced, swirling in a happy pattern around the tent.
“By the blood of my blood, no harm shall come against me or mine, and peace shall dwell within this place.”
As she spoke the last word, the magic pattern pulled tight and solid, the woven strands locking together. It left a faint shimmer in the air that Amanusa could just sense. A shimmer that promised safety.
She let go of Jax’s hands and shivered. He touched her cheek. “You’re freezing. Here—”
He urged her to sit on her cot, wrapping the other blanket around her shoulders. He tugged her unbuttoned shoes off as he knelt, and warmed her icy feet in their sleep-twisted stockings, sandwiching them between his hands and his muscular thighs. “Better?”
“Warmer,” she admitted through teeth that no longer wanted quite so badly to chatter. She didn’t know whether her shaking was due to the cold, or to the magic she’d just worked. Or to the man. It felt too strange to be cosseted this way. Too strange to be touching a man like this and not be afraid. She sat there, huddled in blankets with her feet on a man’s thighs and wondered what to do next.
“I am sorry about your blanket.” Jax rubbed her feet, apparently without thought.
