Drone
He woke to Brogan sponging sweat off his forehead.
“You don’t have to—” Victor started, opening his eyes.
“Don’t tell me what to do.” Brogan huffed.
She was rude, but Victor didn’t have the heart to care.
“What did he tell you when he met you?” Victor asked, swallowing.
Brogan stopped and sat back to look at him. She squeezed the water from her cloth into a bucket. Victor wondered, in a flash of hysteria, if the other alchemists knew she was a girl. They must: none of them were idiots. But it still somehow shook him. He was too afraid and ashamed to ask about it.
“He understands you better than you know,” Brogan said finally. “Come, we are to eat.”
Victor rose with great effort and followed her into a cozy living room.
It was night now and the house was golden with lanterns and candles.
It was a much larger house than Victor had thought.
The ceiling dipped and swelled with the hills above it, and he could tell there were many rooms. It was bigger than Alain’s cottage by double.
He looked at Brogan’s old and veined hands and wondered if she had carved out the house herself. She must have. There were no paintings of loved ones or items that looked like they belonged to anyone else. Even the room he had slept in was impersonal, empty.
Brogan left him in a plush chair made of wood and homespun fabric. The house smelled like earth, clean wool, herbs, and the food Brogan had been cooking.
She brought him a bowl of root vegetables in a thick cream sauce. Then she settled across from him on a much harder wood chair.
“Elias Hilfiker sat where you are sitting,” she said.
Victor closed his eyes to absorb that blow, then opened them and nodded.
“He came to my house, still stinking of blood and foul deeds. His clothes black and face haggard. But he has a kind gaze, soft like a child’s, so I let him in.”
She ate for a while in silence. Victor leaned his elbow on the arm of the chair for extra support and listened.
“Alchemists do not do deals with the common folk. But he stank of our magic,” Brogan continued. “How much do you know of him?”
Victor shrugged. “I met him twice. I . . . hunted him. Picked him because he was light and near death himself.”
Brogan shook her head. “You stole from God.”
Victor rubbed his face. “Willem said that,” he whispered.
Brogan nodded. “Willem is a good boy. He was my apprentice, you know. You are supposed to be found, sworn to our ways, and placed with someone who teaches you the meaning of your own strength. If you’d had the patience to wait, you would have learned that enchantments that require words are deals, not expressions of true power. ”
She leaned forward and jabbed her spoon at Victor’s chest. “Did Willem need words for that?” she said. “No.”
“You can see it?” Victor covered his heart with his hand.
Brogan pursed her lips. “I don’t have to. It’s good work and settling fine. Without it you’d be dead by now.”
Victor nodded and took another spoonful of his rich soup. He was beginning to become immune to bad news.
“Elias, how did he . . . How was he doing?” Victor asked tentatively.
Brogan took another bite. “He was the most favored child in his house. Well-loved and taken care of. When he came to them after your wickedness, they could not recognize him and drove him from his own home and into the woods.”
Victor put the spoon down.
“They were going to let him stay with them until the end. They didn’t mind him being weak because he was kind.
They didn’t mind that he was slow and fatigued easily.
They worked hard to provide him with meat and to take him to doctors in the city.
They were happy to have every moment with him because they knew there wouldn’t be many. ”
Brogan tilted her head at him. “They were so happy you were interested in him. It is different in the country. Life is precious and love is hard to find; there’s no care for politics.
Their child courting the attention of a person of means, young and beautiful—a man, too, as his attentions lie that way.
How lucky. How fortunate for their beloved eldest son. ”
She took another bite and shrugged. Victor saw Willem in the gesture.
“By the time he reached me, he had managed to fill the holes that were missing from his study. He’s remarkably bright, and with the strength he is gaining at your expense, he walked into my home hale and hardy. Does that answer your question?”
Victor nodded. He took another spoonful of the soup because he had to.
Brogan finished her bowl and got up.