Chapter 28 Apropos of Familial Relations
APROPOS OF FAMILIAL RELATIONS
Kat
Kat woke in her bed at the post every morning disappointed Azrion wasn’t there.
She had let herself get too used to their late-night snuggling sessions after…
practice and though she lamented the walk home, she craved even the chaste kiss on the cheek he always left her with.
It felt real, though Kat had no idea what real was meant to be.
At least sewing sent her thoughts along a different thread, the runes scrawled across her mind with their potential meanings as she crafted.
While she pondered magic, her latest project finished itself under her hands, a soft piece of fabric that could be tied around a head to cover an eye with a shooting arrow embroidered across it.
She sent it with Brioni to be delivered to Severath, the red demon who Ember continued to live with while the details of her house arrest were sorted out.
The only true change that occurred was Tarzul’s arrest. Rosalind had put the pieces together and brilliantly exposed his embezzlement scheme.
But he said nothing of Elliran—he refused to say anything at all, in fact, and Kat was worried that she and Azrion would have to reveal their work soon, finished or not, because according to Balran, the scholars were demanding to see her patients, and there was only so much the healer could do until they would all have to go before the council.
The council that Azrion was increasingly leery of.
Relief came each night when Kat and Azrion explored their bodies, but she still woke alone each morning, and by the fifth day, a knot formed in her stomach.
It persisted while she sorted letters, the fear they would never solve what had happened to Elli tightening around her innards until she thought they would burst. She went to Azrion’s office the moment her work was done but brought her sewing to keep her hands busy as she pored over their notes.
Azrion had identified the ingredients likely used in the spell before the runes were carved, but the runes themselves still weren’t adding up.
Kat let her fingers work as she stared at their latest drawings.
She had thought they were sister runes at first, that they mirrored one another and worked together, but there were too many inconsistencies.
Sisters weren’t like that anyway—they didn’t complete each other.
Sisters often complimented each other, though, and sometimes they hid each other’s messes like tucking the tails on a piece of embroidery or folding in a seam and…
“Stoating?” she whispered to herself, eyes pinging from one rune to the other.
“What was that, darling?” Azrion asked, chair teetering as he leaned back, feet up on his desk.
She flipped over her stitching to inspect the messy back side. “Something’s missing.”
“Well, yes that is sort of the whole problem.”
“You’ve shown me hundreds of runes at this point, and they all have…I don’t know what the word is you use for them, but they all have edges. Except for these.”
All four legs of his chair hit the ground, but the sound didn’t interrupt Kat’s contemplation.
She’d just thought her mind was wandering that evening they listened to the stars during Lykalia, but perhaps it was something else showing her the truth when the runes appeared to shift into embroidery on the cave walls.
She flipped through one of the books of standard runes just to be sure, and as she expected, there were patterns that encircled each one.
“You see this thing that goes around the outside?”
Azrion stood to better see where she pointed. “Those are barrier markings, and they can get complicated, but they are here as well.” He traced them on their drawings.
“No,” she said with a confidence she was totally sure of for once.
“If these were barrier markings, they would have a finished loop somewhere like all the others. See here and here and on this one too.” She pointed to the places on the many basic runes.
“They’re all closed, like tying off a magical knot.
The only difference is when you have sister runes, you leave the ends open so they have to work together. ”
“But we determined the runes are too different to be sisters,” Azrion said carefully. “The left one is missing these symbols, and the right has nothing that corresponds to this part here.”
“I think those markings are there, though. They’re just folded over and hidden inside.”
Azrion’s gaze danced over the papers as he circled the desk to stand beside her. “I hate to say that I don’t follow, but…”
Kat lifted the work in her hands and held it between them.
“This is actually two pieces of fabric, but it looks like one because I used stoating to join them. I put the raw edges together and”—she flipped the piece over—“I stitched them up on the inside so you can’t see.
Now my stitches are standard here, but I could do anything I wanted on the inside.
I could add in pretty little designs or hidden symbols, but that would mostly be a waste because no one would see.
Except runes aren’t necessarily about being seen, not once they’re activated, right? Especially not these.”
Azrion touched the zigzagging stitch then his coloring faded. “Are you suggesting there are runes inside poor Elli and our other unfortunate patient?”
Kat nodded, heart pumping with every new thought because it had to be right—it just had to. “I really think so! I think the edges that are missing were somehow folded under and hidden so that no one could undo the work.”
“But that means we’ll have to cut into them to find the missing pieces of the barrier markings. You need those to activate sister runes, one side and then the other. Oh, darling it’s rather gruesome, and I fear they might not survive—”
“The bear!” Kat jumped to her feet, eyes peeled. “Where did you put it?”
“Put what?”
“The bear,” she stressed, running to a shelf and grabbing a stack of parchment to flick through the papers, throwing the useless ones on the ground.
“I don’t know what in blazes you’re talking about, but I am loving this enthusiasm.” He scooped up another random stack and held out the first page. “Is this a bear?”
“No.”
He crushed the paper in hand and flung it across the room before showing her the next. “What about this?”
“No—Az, the bear figurine from Tarzul’s office. You copied down the squiggles from its stomach. And there was a second animal too, remember?”
“Oh, the otsoran. Well, you could have just said that, darling.” He went to the place it had been tacked up and plucked the copied symbols down from the wall.
She snatched the page away. “I bet these are the missing pieces!”
“But those are just reflection symbols for water workers. Fenthorn might be able to parse them out, but I don’t see how they would…
oh. Oh, Kat.” Azrion’s voice went low, eyes wide.
“Before you and the other humans arrived, Fenthorn was working on a way to send messages through water, changing the reflection in one bowl to match what was displayed in another. But when he presented his work to the scholars, Itcheran said it had greater implications and forced him to turn over all his research. It made no sense, but there’s no questioning an elder’s decision. Fenthorn was inconsolable for weeks.”
Kat worried the edge of the parchment she held. “Who did he reassign his research to?”
“The demon who was killed before he could be questioned, the one who had your friend Brioni carry around that constitution weakening rune: Zelvax. Oh, gods and stars, he even mentioned the power humans held once, but I just didn’t listen. Was he trying to do the same to her?”
Cold anger crept up Kat’s spine. “Is there any way to bring him back so we can kill him again?”
Azrion cocked a brow. “If only. Though all of this suggests he had done it once before. He already had a human, and if he was trying to shift that human’s shape, he would need a demon.”
“A demon that knew too much and had to be gotten rid of. Like Elli.”
“If these are really sister runes, and these are their missing barrier markings with no closed loop…” He took the parchment from Kat and picked up a quill, sketching in the missing symbols on the runes they already had.
Something happened then that hadn’t any time before—a spark of light enveloped both runes, and the parchment hovered over the desk, suspended by magic until there was another flash. It floated back down as if it had simply been dropped, and when it landed, the runes had traded places.
“That’s it!” Azrion’s black eyes went wide as he turned to Kat, grabbing her arms and pulling her right up against him.
“You brilliant, beautiful, perfect creature, that is exactly it! Oh, gods, Katarina, you’ve done it—you’ve saved them!
” Azrion planted the sloppiest kiss on her lips and wrapped her in a tight embrace.
His words were wonderful, and Kat squealed with excitement.
There was a deeper inkling though, one that felt a bit like sadness because this was it, the end of their studying sessions.
Of course it was what she wanted, a resolution to the horrible magic that plagued the others, but now it was done. All of it. Done.
“I’ll need Fenthorn’s help to pull it off since these used to be his spells,” Azrion said, pacing across the office and collecting ingredients and tools.
“Stars, he’ll be sick over this, but at least he’ll get his work back.
Though the implications with Itcheran…ah, no, can’t think about that right now.
And we certainly shouldn’t cut into them like Zelvax did to complete the runes and switch them back into the right bodies. ”
“No,” Kat said quietly, wrapping her arms around herself. “But we can probably tattoo them.”