CHAPTER NINE
He had a notion she would be halfway back to her cottage by now, abandoning the entire quest. Instead, he found her stalking back and forth among the trees like a wounded beast, trying to calm herself.
Without a word, he rolled up his sleeve and pulled out his pen.
She wouldn’t accept his help in his apartment; said he couldn’t help her.
Perhaps he couldn’t. What plagued her may be mental, beyond his magic’s reach.
Or, a strange illness he knew nothing about.
Or a strange, incomprehensible magic.
But a botched spell, he could fix.
When she saw him, she turned abruptly away. “I brought you along to keep me safe from the likes of them,” she growled. “Not throw me into their open jaws.”
“Let me help you,” he said.
She stopped stalking, her shoulders raised to her ears. Her voice was uncharacteristically timid. “I don’t think you can.”
“I can,” he said, piercing the skin of his arm, knowing if his blood was already drawn, she wouldn’t refuse it. “And if I can’t, I can try.”
He was right. After a moment, she turned to face him.
“My teeth are coming loose.” She no longer growled. Her speech was still oddly slurred, and her voice wavered pitifully. “And my tongue–” She winced.
“I’ll have to see,” he said gently, clicking the nib into place. “So I know how to fix it.”
Closing her eyes, she lowered her hand bravely. “Don’t tell me,” she said, her eyes screwed shut. “I don’t want to know.”
He successfully hid his startled gasp by clearing his throat. He hoped.
“It isn’t so bad,” he lied, shivering as the tongue curled back into her mouth. “Won’t be a moment.”
The spell had turned her tongue black indeed, and unnaturally long, like a bat’s or a bird’s. Stretched out as it was, he imagined it hurt.
She kept her eyes closed and grimaced. “The spell. Will I have to drink it?”
“There are other ways,” he assured her.
He withdrew a slip of paper and his drawing board.
Balancing it on his knee, he began penning a paraglyph to restore her mouth to its usual shape.
He pictured it clearly before he began; the curve of her russet lips, the subtle jut of her chin.
He remembered the diagrams of the human mouth he studied at Sangfeder, a diagram he had call to return to frequently – straightened and whitened teeth were a favorite, and lucrative, commission.
Then he scrawled. Carefully, so as not to do worse damage than Sabina already had. Quickly, because he still was not certain her tongue would not rot and fall out of her mouth, like her teeth were threatening to, and because his blood would clot in the heat if he didn’t.
He had seen many botched spells in training. Whatever Sabina had done to the spell she cast on Anya, he had never seen the like. Something bothered him about it, another itch he couldn’t scratch.
Anya had opened her eyes and watched his drawing with fascination.
Though he’d done this countless times, under the audience of countless eyes, Anya’s attention left him oddly self-conscious.
Especially as he removed his gloves, revealing the king’s mark on his palm, to cup the completed spell, so as not to dirty a petri dish.
Her attention fixed on his lips as he blew onto it, then on the spell as his breath transformed it into sparkling ruby grains.
“A bit of water,” he explained as he pulled out a vial.
With his thumb, he uncorked it, then moistened the glittering dust in his palm, forming a thick paste, mixing it with his forefinger.
He dipped his first two fingers into it and scooped up some of the spell, then held them aloft, waiting for her nod of assent.
When she did – with only a slight hesitation, closing her eyes – he stroked his magic-covered fingers along her jaw.
As his fingers met her skin, she inhaled sharply – from the cold water, he assumed.
Then, as he streaked the other side of her face, she sighed softly with relief.
The dark red magic seeped into her skin, disappearing as it did its work.
He let his fingers linger on her jaw, tracing her upper gum softly with his thumb, feeling for the spell’s success.
Her eyes shot open. He tensed, afraid he had hurt her.
But it was not pain he saw in her eyes, or cold. It almost seemed – no, that was absurd. Surprise. Merely surprise.
Quickly, he pulled his fingers away. There was still another spell to pen.
He scooped the remainder of the spell from his hand with a leaf, then cleaned his palm with grain alcohol. The last of the spell seeped into the earth, disappearing as it had on Anya’s cheek.
“I’m sorry about them,” he said, busying himself with a paraglyph to fix her tongue before the blood in the pen’s chamber congealed.
This one was far less complicated, and he knew it by heart – Sabina had played this prank before.
But strange as the affliction was, he worried whether his spell would have any effect at all.
He may have to repeat it several times and must be sparing with his blood.
“It was meant to punish me more than you,” he continued. “They’ve run dry of tricks to toy with me, and you were the shiniest new object. They don’t mean to be cruel. They just… can’t help it. Tongue, please.”
She opened her mouth wide, and he did his best not to flinch at her bizarre appendage.
Anya did flinch as he sprinkled a bit of the powder onto her waiting tongue. Almost instantly, it shrank back to its usual shape and color, a lovely cherry red.
“Foul,” she said, spitting onto the ground. Then added, bashfully, if that were possible, “Thank you.”
Rather than answer, he nodded, pulling out a glass bottle of water he kept to clean out his pen.
After this, he would need to refill it, and soon.
Keeping a clean pen was essential. He’d seen no streams nearby, but he was sure the others had brought barrels of distilled water along with them; he’d have to use theirs.
For a long while, Anya watched him work in silence, drawing the water into the pen as he did his blood, then ejecting it into the dirt, over and over until the water coming out of the pen ran crystal clear.
Anya broke the silence. “I meant what I said back there. All they do is play. In the city, everything’s a game. Playing for your seat at the head of the table, or any seat at all.”
Sy said nothing, pulling a soft cloth from his kit to clean and dry the gold nib. His wrist ached; a sure sign he had been pressing too hard. He would need to check the nib for splaying.
“People like them think no one else exists. We’re all just shadows in the glow of their light. We don’t exist until they need us. We serve our purpose, their purpose. Then we disappear completely until their need shines a light upon us once more.”
A shadow to others’ light. A duller color, a complement. Life itself a game, a never-ending, brutal game, where loss meant empty suffering, and the prize was the penalty of playing.
That was how Anya saw her life, saw herself. Saw him. She a shadow, and he a cruel, indifferent light. No – she’d said we. She was trying to tell him something, to let him into a place he didn’t want to be. A dark place, where shadows lived. A place he’d escaped. Was escaping.
He was not a shadow. He would not be a shadow.
“I don’t believe we have as much in common as you suppose.” He capped his pen.
A sharp, bitter laugh escaped her. “No. No, perhaps not.”
Her laughter irritated him. “For example, only one of us is a missing heiress.”
“No.” The scornful arrogance had evaporated. “Not anymore.”
Something in her certainty unnerved him. “You could surely have reclaimed your lands once you came of age. Now.”
“If I tried, the king would have me arrested on the spot for twenty years of poaching,” she said.
At his surprised expression, she laughed again.
“What, you think the benevolent ruler grants us the use of his forest freely? No, the city’s gentleman hunters may hunt on their estates, or pay the crown handsomely to come to the country with their hounds and their horses, but most who live here could never hope to afford the tax.
Feeding ourselves, clothing ourselves, taking barely a drop of all this,” she said, throwing an arm toward the endless sea of trees, “is stealing from the crown. Fuck, so is housing ourselves. Johanna’s home – my home – is built on the king’s land without a permit.
I believe I would even need a permit for my fucking chickens. ”
“I…was unaware,” he admitted. Neither was he aware of the tax, nor of the king’s reach, that grasping paw extending far beyond his palace, extracting all it could, showering the streets – the streets visible from the palace windows, at least – with gold.
“No one who lives out here cares a lick about poaching, because for us, it isn’t.
She never said, but I think it’s why Johanna settled here in the first place.
Whether they believe the tales or not, more than a few foresters have gone missing, and it’s big and dark and not worth the risk, so they hardly ever set foot this way.
” She lifted a dismissive shoulder, then folded her arms over her chest. “You asked before why anyone would live here. Well, there you have it.”
“The last place for a hunter to make a living without being forced to give it all away,” he concluded. And the living she made wasn’t much of one. But it was hers.
Green eyes unreadable, she glanced at him, then back at the trees.
“Rest assured, if I crawled up to his majesty’s throne begging for a title someone else claimed long ago, someone with prison keys would take exception to my living arrangements.
But don’t worry.” Despite her words, her voice carried no note of reassurance.
“Since this is the king’s special request, I’m sure all we do on his behalf will be forgiven. ”
Yes, he was counting on that.