Chapter 19
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The crackling of the hearth and the comforting scent of woodsmoke roused me. Groaning, I became aware of a dull ache in my right shoulder and a weight on my chest.
A moment later, whiskers tickled my cheek.
When I didn’t immediately respond, a furred head butted into my chin. “Ugh,” I grunted, forcing my eyes open.
Sawyer’s shining amber gaze met mine, ears pricking in relief and delight. Then he launched off my chest and burrowed into the crook of my neck on my uninjured side, his tail curling around my throat.
I was in the bed Grandmother had grown, bundled up to my neck in quilts, and someone had changed me into a simple camisole. A compression bandage wrapped around my shoulder so thickly it was like they had strapped a cantaloupe to the joint. The hearth room was dark, save for what light the fires provided. It was green, meaning it was doing spell work, and tiny threads of its power traveled around me in glittering loops that began and ended with the flames.
I’d never seen it do that before.
“Hey, little cat,” I murmured, wiggling a hand free to stroke him.
“You stupid witch,” he growled, simultaneously snuggling closer and arching into my kneading fingers. “Tangling with a silver mallaithe.”
“The last thing Meadow needs right now is beratement,” Aunt Peony scolded him, coming in from the kitchen.
Sawyer just flattened his ears against his skull and hissed at her. But he didn’t swat at her, and that was something.
“Oh hush up. Forsythia! Your daughter’s awake,” Aunt Peony called over her shoulder as she sat down near my head. She had deep hollows under her eyes that I’d never seen there before. “Drink this, dear. Before your mother comes in here and crushes you with a hug.”
Footfalls crashing through the house sounded like a stampeding rhinoceros, and Mom appeared in the hearth room doorway a moment later. From the way her springy curls stuck up in a staticky halo around her head and from the pattern of the den throw pillow imprinted her face, I’d said she’d just gotten up from a nap. She certainly looked exhausted. Drained.
“Mom?” I croaked.
Forsythia Hawthorne didn’t crush me. Instead she fell on her knees beside the bed and held the hand of my injured arm in both of hers and cried into the quilts. A moment later, Aunt Hyacinth appeared, clapping her hands once with joyous relief.
“I’m alright, Mom.” I think . Other than the ache in my shoulder and the slightly sour aftertaste of Aunt Peony’s potion fouling my mouth, I was okay.
She didn’t say anything, just cried, and it was Aunt Hyacinth who explained, “You lost a lot of blood, Meadow. A-and not just that. That silver mallaithe… It was mutated somehow. It had venom in its roots. You were in a bad way when they brought you back. Your mother drained herself dry using every spell she could think of to get it out of your system. Your aunt Peony did nearly the same with her potions. You grandmother had to use your amazonite pendant to help them burn it out of you.”
From what Aunt Hyacinth had just described, “you were in a bad way” didn’t even begin to cover the extent of my injuries. I shuddered. Those spells and potions they’d used had to be even more powerful and potent than the ones I’d learned if they could bring someone back from the brink of death. I shuddered again.
Aunt Hyacinth’s mouth quirked up. “As you can see, though, it worked.”
“They had help, you know,” Sawyer said sourly.
He didn’t have the chance to hiss or swipe his claws before Aunt Hyacinth leaned forward and gave him a brisk pat on the head.
“You?” I asked him.
“Well, yeah,” Sawyer grumbled. “We’re family, right? I can lend a bit of magic here and there without being bonded. You’re welcome.”
“Come away,” Aunt Hyacinth told my exhausted mother, taking hold of her shoulders and pulling her upright. “Meadow’ll be right as rain. Go take a shower and put yourself to bed. Busy day tomorrow.”
Mom gave my hand another squeeze before she let her cousin guide her back through the kitchen and hallway and up the stairs. It was when I heard the clear creaking of the steps that I realized how quiet the farmhouse was.
“Aunt Peony?” I called to her in the kitchen. “Where is everyone?”
“Hunting,” she replied wearily, her stocking feet thumping on the old floorboards as she returned to the hearth room, a tray in her hands. “Made your favorite. Wonton soup.”
She set it on my workstation shelf before shooing Sawyer off me so she could help me sit up. The little tomcat assisted by worming himself behind me, bracing his rear paws against the headboard, and shoving my back with his front paws. He mercifully remembered to keep them velveted. Aunt Peony swirled the throw blanket from the den over my shoulders, bunching it up against the nape of my neck so it wouldn’t slip off.
“Ugh,” I groaned again, a little alarmed at the fatigue that overtook me from the simple act of sitting up. I had a good view out of the western windows now, and my spine straightened dramatically when I saw how dark it was. “What time is it?”
“Never you mind that,” Aunt Peony said, flattening the quilts across my lap so the tray wouldn’t tip and spill. “Eat your soup. Heal. I’ll be back with some tea.”
As I lifted the spoon and took a sip of the aromatic broth, Sawyer padded back around and tested the threads of hearth magic that still looped around me with a swat of his paw. The light of the glittering thread didn’t break, continuing to move in a lazy circle around me and winking like fireflies. Then he sat, tucking his tail up tight, and said quietly,
“I didn’t find much in the Grimalkin University library.” His ears drooped. “Plenty of entries about individual magical beasts and other creatures, sure. We don’t have much about the fae, either, just a little about their courts and such. Five High Courts and countless Lesser Courts that have fiefdoms within the larger territories. Each is governed by a high fae lord or lady, and while they might have certain beasts that symbolize their courts, they are not true masters of them. Except…”
My spoon paused halfway to my mouth, the fat wonton jiggling as my hand shook with anticipation. “Except?”
“Karnonos.”
The name sounded very familiar, and incomplete, like it belonged to a phrase, though I couldn’t place it. Thistle thorns, my head was still spinning from the fight with and the venom of the mallaithe. Maybe it was dehydration. I sucked down some more soup, hoping the hot broth would clear away the mental cobwebs.
My attention quickly returned to the striped tomcat as his white whiskers drooped in addition to his ears. “That was just the Gaulish spelling. There was a Gaelic translation, but I’d just found the entry when I felt you get attacked. I-I came to you instead of reading the article.”
There was a gentle clink as I set down the spoon so I could rub his ears back into their upright position. “It’s okay. You can go back—”
He shook his head. “That’s the thing. I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Ame and I are under investigation.” He hunched into a ball then, his misery compounding. “Fanga Longclaw—the president of the university—found out that Ame lied about your identity. A-and that I was eventually complicit. The Hawthornes are kind of… not blacklisted per se, but Fanga’s not in the business of bonding any familiars to them. Not after what happened between Fern and Ame. Plus they’re questioning my recent activities here in Redbud. You know that spell I cast in the woods?”
Spell didn’t even begin to cover it. It’d been a detonation.
“Apparently it’s against every University law imaginable for an unbound familiar to use such magic.” His striped face wrinkled sourly. “It puts me at risk, so they say, as well as every other familiar student at the university. It could make us a target for magic hunters. So… I escaped the library before they could catch me. If I go back, they’re going to hold me until Fanga can decide a verdict. The same goes for Ame.”
“I’m so sorry, Sawyer.”
When he sniffled, I moved my tray aside and pulled the crying cat into my lap. I knew it’d never been his life’s pursuit to become a familiar, but I also knew he’d thoroughly enjoyed his classes and learning what he was truly capable of as a magical talking cat. There had been a community there for him too, though he hadn’t taken much advantage of it. But I knew he had friends, or at least friendly acquaintances, including Brandi’s old toad, Cletus.
As I stroked his fur, all of which had grown back since his fight with the fiáin and its singeing when he removed my parasite bracelet, I asked quietly, “Do we have to be worried about someone coming here to collect you or Ame?”
“Grimalkin University’s not like that. It’s more like excommunication. Plus they all know what kind of wards are around this farmhouse.” He chuckled humorously at that last. “Ame’s going to lie low at Shari’s for a day or two. To ‘assess the situation’ she told me.”
Then Sawyer left my lap to nestle against my side, tucking his front paws under his chest in the classic “cat loaf” position. “You should eat.”
“Here’s the tea,” Aunt Peony said presently, coming in with a steaming cup of oolong. She settled it on my tray and then picked up the hand of my injured arm and began a series of tests, tapping the ends of my fingers, experimenting with my degree of bearable rotation in the shoulder joint, all the while I was trying to eat without spilling my soup. “You’re healing marvelously well. Now that you’re awake and getting some food in you, your own magic can finish the process. Nasty business that venom was.”
At her words, I examined my magical core and found the oak tree’s leaves rustling happily in an unseen breeze. Its canopy, trunk, and far-extending roots were no longer blinding to look at, but they still shone with a dazzling luminescence. I wondered, not for the first time, if my magic would ever return to the seed it had once been. Did it need to?
“Oh, and don’t forget to recharge your amazonite pendant,” Aunt Peony added. “When you’re all better, of course.”
The amazonite pendant! I kicked myself for not thinking about using it during the heat of battle. I’d relied on it so heavily when I’d worn the parasite ring and bracelet, but now that my magic was no longer curbed, I’d barely given it another thought. I hadn’t needed to. Well, it sure would’ve proven useful against that mallaithe. It could’ve fortified my shield so I’d never been injured.
A Hawthorne uses every weapon at their disposal, no matter how small , Dad’s voice reminded me. I’d taken his instruction to heart during that training session, blinding Otter with a fistful of grass before swiping his legs out. He’d be disappointed in me for not remembering the lesson.
“Aunt Peony?”
“Yes, dear?”
“Where’s my foraging bag? Can I have it, please?” I was going to refamiliarize myself with all my resources, not just my weapons.
She disappeared into the dining room for a moment before returning with the brown canvas bag. Then she took my empty bowl, and as I lifted the bag to dump its contents onto the tray, a sharpness in my shoulder made me hiss.
First things first, I supposed.
Now that I had some energy back, as well as conscious thought, the oak tree of my magic shimmered to a brilliant glow. Like all magic, healing had to be directed. For little scrapes and bruises, a command wasn’t needed, but for something like this, the magic had to be instructed. It was kind of like the body in that way, sacrificing fingers and toes to frostbite if it meant keeping the bulk of it alive.
As it eagerly poured itself into my shoulder, the sharpness vanished, then the ache. The hearth seemed to know what I was about because the glittering loops of its own healing magic winked out. Sawyer helped me remove the bandage with his claws and teeth and gave my scarless flesh an experimental lick with his rough tongue.
“That tickles!”
“You’ll want to shower or something. You taste like yarrow and fermented funk.”
“Thanks,” I said dryly.
He’d just settled back down on the quilts by my bent knee, his front feet propped up on the edges of the tray, when the floorboards trembled with a warning pulse. Aunt Peony craned her head into the hearth room to examine the flames, but they were their healthy green, flaring orange once to toll the loss of another hour. The hearth pulsed again, and she murmured, “They must be back. Thank the Green Mother.”