Chapter 17
Anne
The next morning, a hangover loomed the moment Anne woke. With a groan, she rolled over, intent on sleeping long and deep, making up for all the hours she had missed during their months of travel, and hopefully keeping her pounding headache at bay.
But her conversation with Lina nagged at her. And Anne knew she had a new promise to keep, one that was just as important as getting her revenge on Henry.
She had to make Lina proud. She had to make herself whole.
Already, ideas were forming. She would finally ask Gisa to teach her how to use a sword.
She would see if she could be of use at the hospital, perhaps advising on the herbs she knew to be most useful in spells and tonics.
And when their rest period was up, she would save a hundred more witches from the stake.
Still, a little bit of extra sleep wouldn’t be amiss. Certainly no person could be whole after so much wine. So when her door opened just after dawn and someone shook her shoulder, she very nearly cursed Gisa into the next life.
“Go away,” Anne said after opening her eyes a sliver and determining she did not need to use her bloodletting knife or speak the curse that would have laid Gisa out flat.
Gisa, the beast, pulled Anne’s covers back. “I woke up with a tingling feeling in my head. You want to ask a favor of me.”
Mystics could be so troublesome with their all-knowing ways. “Not right now,” Anne gasped, cold air washing over her.
“What is it?”
Anne scrabbled for her blankets, but Gisa held them out of reach. “I was considering asking you to teach me how to wield a sword—”
The younger woman’s eyes lit up. “Finally! Let’s get started.”
“Not. Right. Now,” Anne repeated, wondering if she would be able to curse Gisa into silence or if she would see it coming.
“I’m already awake. I teach you now, or I don’t teach you at all.”
Anne finally wrenched her covers back over her body, burrowing into their warmth. “Not at all is fine with me.”
Gisa snorted. “I’ll see you in the courtyard in twenty minutes.”
Anne wanted to prove the mystic wrong, make her doubt her own sight, but she wanted to try Jeanne d’Arc’s sword more. Still, she took her time getting out of bed and getting dressed, arriving a full half hour after Gisa’s rude awakening.
She should have had breakfast too, weak though her stomach felt, for it wasn’t long before her insides were growling for food and her arms were trembling with the weight of the sword that Gisa handled with such ease.
“Have you no muscles?” Gisa asked, peering at Anne’s arms after instructing her through a slow series of blocks and parries that made Anne’s head pulse in time with the movements. “The sword is not that heavy.”
“I’m sure I am strong enough to run you through,” Anne ground out.
Gisa laughed. “Oh, I do not die today.”
It had become something of a joke between them, a good luck charm before their missions. Anne let the tip of the blade fall back to the courtyard stones, and her body felt instant relief. “Do you know when you will?” What a horrible burden that would be to carry.
“Not yet,” Gisa admitted. “But when it comes, I will sense it. Unless, of course, my mind has left me by then.”
“It is certainly already on its way,” Anne snipped. “No sane woman would wake me at such an ungodly hour and expect to live.”
Gisa ignored the barb. “Not all mystics go mad, you know, and I do not intend to lose myself in the pursuit of power. Not even for the Sisterhood.”
Good, Anne thought. It was smart that the woman was drawing boundaries. For all the good it did, the Hellebore Sisterhood came with more than its share of danger and sacrifice, something Anne had learned the hard way.
“Well, here’s a compelling scene.” Lina’s voice, filled with far too much amusement for the early hour, carried across the courtyard. “I can just see Titian before his easel now, painting his next masterpiece: The Tired Witch and the Gloating Mystic.”
She came to stand by Anne’s side, peering down at the ancient blade Anne was now using more like a crutch than a weapon, then back at Anne with a slightly gloating look of her own. “It appears we have found the one thing Anne Boleyn cannot do.”
Anne lifted her chin high. “I’d like to see you try it.”
The other woman reached for the sword, which Anne happily handed over. “I’m sure it’s not that difficult.”
Despite her smaller stature, Lina hefted the blade with ease and spun it twice in her grip. “It’s a beautiful weapon, Gisa,” she said, before handing it back to Anne.
Anne gaped at her. “How did you do that?”
Lina gave one of her small, secret smiles and whispered, “You’re not the only one who has considered killing Henry Tudor.”
Exercises with Gisa became a part of Anne’s daily routine that winter, though her progress was both slow and painful.
(It appeared she did in fact lack muscles in her arms, but if Lina could use a sword, then Anne certainly would not be left behind.) Lina began teaching at the university during their break from travel, offering lessons in history and politics to the eager, curious students, and Gisa was instructed to redouble her studies to learn more about dream walking.
Meanwhile, Anne had been placed—or rather, thrust, with no shortage of misgivings—into her own new task. She’d made the mistake of mentioning her desire to help at the hospital to Marguerite, and the Sisterhood leader had taken the idea and run with it.
“Focus, Anne,” Dr. Al-Bashar coached. “Let the spell take hold.”
Anne held her pose a moment longer, fingertips pressed against the temples of the seizing child on the hospital cot, willing her magick to work.
Finally, only after sweat had started beading on her neck, did Anne feel her power flow into the little girl, whose entire body seemed to sigh and then relax.
When Anne looked up, Dr. Al-Bashar was smiling. “You’re getting better at this.”
Anne had—under strict supervision of the university’s head physician—begun testing her powers to help patients suffering from ailments of the mind.
At first, Anne had balked at Marguerite’s suggestion.
“My magick? In a hospital?” she’d asked, thinking her friend was making a joke.
When she’d volunteered, Anne had expected to be stocking the apothecary or helping organize the wards.
The thought of Anne doing anything more…
medicinal was absurd. The women in her family had used magick to cure small ailments, tend to wounds, and that sort of thing.
But the Boleyns bore little resemblance to hedge witches and village healers.
Anne’s magick had been honed for a life at court, a life of intrigue, a life of manipulation and secrets and self-preservation.
And though she was no warrior-witch, she certainly knew more ways to hurt than to heal.
The healing arts were an entirely different realm, one that Anne thought required an entirely different sort of person. She was not nurturing or soothing. She had little warmth and even less patience. No one wanted her at their bedside.
But Marguerite had been adamant. “You need this work as much as it needs you,” she’d replied.
Her first day on the job had been a disaster; the moment the physician handed her a bloodletting knife, Anne’s hands had started trembling so badly she’d dropped the blade and nearly cut off her own toe.
She had never used her magick like this, and she was afraid of making every patient she touched worse instead of better.
But Dr. Al-Bashar was persistent, and she spent an hour each day helping Anne discover new ways to wield her gifts.
It helped some that Gisa promised Anne wouldn’t kill anyone with her magick whenever Anne asked the mystic to divine her future. But then again, it was always hard to tell just how serious—or accurate—Gisa could be.
More than once, after a particularly grueling session, Anne found herself jealous of Lina teaching at the university.
Surely it would be easier for Anne to teach the young witches there, better for her to pass along useful knowledge than to court trouble by trying to train her magick to do something new.
Marguerite was open to the suggestion, despite having a handful of seasoned witches already doing the same work, but Dr. Al-Bashar had always told Anne to wait one more day, to try one more time.
One afternoon, Dr. Al-Bashar had brought her to see a woman who had just lost a child to a sweating sickness. The woman was so heartbroken that she wouldn’t eat or sleep or speak.
“Luisa, this is my assistant, Senora Anne,” Dr. Al-Bashar said. She spoke in Spanish, the language Anne still struggled to translate. “She is going to try to make you feel better. Is that all right?”
Luisa did not reply. She had just continued to stare blankly at the wall across from her cot.
Luisa’s eyes were unfocused, her cheeks hollow, and her hair tangled and obscuring her face.
Anne had felt a swell of empathy for the woman who carried a wound no one could see.
Anne knew something of that, and she gently sat at Luisa’s side.
“What can I do?” Anne asked.
“She needs to rest,” Dr. Al-Bashar replied. “If she won’t sleep, her mind will shatter. Her body too. She still has a family, and I hope we can make her well enough to return to them.”
A sleeping spell was easy enough. The woman didn’t even flinch when Anne brought out her knife, pricked the pad of her thumb, and placed her hand around Luisa’s wrist. Anne felt Luisa’s pulse under her hand, the beat blending with the throb of her bleeding finger.
Anne whispered a spell for sleep, her voice shaking ever so slightly.
Only then did Luisa seem to take notice of Anne, turning and looking her full in the face before her eyes began to drift closed.