Chapter 22 A Woman of Many Words and Letters
A Woman of Many Words and Letters
Ragnar
Convincing an emaciated and injured wild veilhound to let a demon pick it up and carry it out of the forest was a much more difficult endeavor than just convincing it to tolerate another of its kind.
What followed three unsuccessful attempts to simply lift the beast was a lot of coaxing with hiriivi meat and many more soft, soothing words.
Thankfully, Ragnar was a little better practiced in those.
By midday, the demon finally returned to the barn one veilhound richer.
And upon arrival, he discovered himself to be one human richer too.
Brioni was curled up between two veilhounds with Moar draping his head over her feet and the teal drayk roosting in the dog’s fur. It seemed humans did sleep in piles, and soundly too. Ragnar grinned—he must have really worn her out the night before if she needed a noonday nap.
But then she remained asleep while he set the new veilhound’s leg, including through a particularly loud yip, and she didn’t even move when he knocked over a sack of grain and swore loudly into the echoing barn.
She deserved her rest, so he went about his chores, but eventually Ragnar grew concerned.
He sent the veilhounds out of the stall and gently shook her. Brioni made sounds that were maybe supposed to be words, but it wasn’t until Moar licked the human’s nose that she blinked her eyes open.
She squinted up at the demon, the black dots inside her green rings much larger than usual. “Oh, I thought you were the one licking me. I was going to say, ‘wrong spot.’”
Ah, there she is. “I’d be more than happy to wake you with my tongue next time.”
She chuckled, stretching her arms overhead. Her satchel was still draped over her body, and the strap nestled itself between her breasts as she yawned deeply. Then she collapsed back into the straw, eyes closing once again. The teal drayk hopped off of Moar’s back to land atop her.
“Did you not sleep after I left last night?”
“Oh, I sure did. Alamar had to knock three times before I got up.” She blindly reached for the drayk and squeezed him as she curled into a ball. “I missed you, though. That’s why I came for lunch, but you weren’t here, so I just—” Another yawn cut her off.
Ragnar snorted at the struggling drayk. “I’m sorry I couldn’t stay. You must have had a busy morning.”
Brioni mumbled something about moonlight and packages, but none of it made much sense.
One of the veilhounds nosed its way around Ragnar and back into the stall, snuffling hard at Brioni’s hair like it might have held some tasty morsel within.
Ragnar waited for her to say more—to say anything sensible really—but nothing came.
There was no snoring either, but her limbs relaxed enough for the drayk to free itself.
It didn’t go far, though, perching on her shoulder and sniffing at her ear.
Ragnar leaned close and inhaled too, but she was only overwhelmingly human.
His innards curled around that smell and kept it, fondness blooming in his chest but not quashing his concern.
“Bri, are you feeling ill?” He waved the drayk away and pressed hands to the sides of her face, expecting her usual warmth and perhaps more if she’d caught something, but instead she felt utterly frigid.
She shook her head weakly in his hold, but her lips crooked into a smile. “Just sleepy.”
Ragnar smoothed his hand down her arm, and it was so much colder than he’d ever felt.
No wonder the veilhounds had burrowed in around her.
A closer look at her skin told him it was paler, the blue lines of her veins darker than he recalled too.
He might not have known much about human health, but he knew that this was wrong.
A true healer would have been useful right about then, and Ragnar cursed himself, but the infirmary was a long way off.
Brioni needed some kind of restorative to hold her over until they made it into town, but he had to discern what was wrong first, so he hurried to the cabinet beneath his worktable and grabbed the shrouded stone meant for four-legged, wingless creatures.
He wasn’t sure how an oliderite might work on a human, but it was worth a try.
Even a try from a healer who had lost his magic.
Two more veilhounds fit themselves into the stall in the short time it took Ragnar to return.
They nudged Brioni’s unmoving body with their snouts while Moar whimpered and pawed nervously at the ground.
Ragnar’s stomach twisted as he knelt beside her again.
The stone’s gentle yellow glow illuminated her skin, revealing she’d lost what little color she once had.
How hadn’t he noticed sooner? He cursed himself again just as the stone shifted to a warmer hue.
He’d never seen that color, and if he’d been working on an animal, he might have thought it was the bright gold of health, but Brioni’s limp body told him to look closer. The glow pulsed in and out as he waved the stone over her middle, brightest in a specific spot: her chest.
He lifted her satchel up but lost the color as he ran the oliderite over the same area. Another swear fell out of his mouth, but then he eyed what he was holding. It couldn’t be…
Brioni didn’t stir as he peeked inside the soft bag she always wore. The package he’d given her was still there along with a bit of wrapped up bread and cheese, a scrap of paper covered in tea stains—good for something spotted or striped when folded, he presumed—and a letter.
Ragnar cocked a brow. There was nothing scrawled on the outside to direct its delivery, and the envelope was sealed with a messy blob of wax without any symbol to denote a sender.
Unless she was the one to write it, the suspense at the words inside must have been killing her, yet she left it untampered with.
He dipped the stone into the satchel, and when it touched the envelope, it flared bright orange. A wasting hex? So it was killing her.
“Fuck.”
Ragnar ripped the letter out of her satchel and stumbled backward.
He wasn’t terribly enthused by magic these days as it was, but this magic—this magic could fuck right off.
He tore into the envelope, painful sparks at his fingers attempting to ward him away, but the calluses did what they were meant to, and soon he had it ripped open.
His memory was foggy since he hadn’t studied in over a decade, but the configuration of the rune inside the envelope was utterly unique.
In fact, he might not have thought the markings on the strange parchment made up a rune at all if the oliderite hadn’t glowed, but it had to be magic he held—powerful magic he couldn’t place at all.
Ragnar wrapped the rune in the oliderite’s shroud and fell to his knees at Brioni’s side again. Another swipe with the stone showed no other abnormalities, and her skin was already warming to the touch. When he gave her a gentle shake, she opened her eyes fully.
“Oh, Ragnar, I just had a dream about you.” She grinned like she hadn’t just been moments from falling into an endless sleep. “You were checking to see if I had a fever and you were touching me. Everywhere.”
He held up the torn open envelope. “What is this?”
Brioni’s eyes went wide and what little color she had earned back drained from her face. But she sat up like she’d been jolted out of a nightmare, as if the malaise had been hours ago and not mere seconds. “You opened it? You can’t do that.”
“You told me just last week that you took a peek inside one of Elder Zaretha’s packages.”
“Yeah, I did, but it was just full of naughty books.” She scrambled in the hay so that she was kneeling across from him. “You can’t look inside that.”
“Why not?”
Her mouth opened, but no words came out.
“Brioni…”
“Just give it back!” She snatched at the envelope, but he pulled it out of her reach, and she fell forward.
There was no question then that it had been the rune making her so lethargic, especially with the lively way she huffed and gaped up at him.
But then her face softened, her brows knit, and she bit her lip.
“Please, Ragnar. I’m afraid something bad’s going to happen, and I don’t want that bad thing to happen to you. ”
Her words wrapped themselves right around his heart and squeezed, but he had no time to dwell on the sweetness of her concern. “Don’t worry about me, Brioni, especially when something bad is already happening to you.”
She blinked innocently. Believably too. “What do you mean?”
“The rune that was inside this, the one you’ve been carrying in your bag—it put you to sleep.” He curled a lip at the envelope. “Well, it was probably doing something much more sinister: a wasting hex, if the oliderite is correct, though I’ve never seen anything quite like the marks on that thing.”
“There was a rune in there?”
“You didn’t know?”
Brioni sat back again shaking her head. “I never knew what was in those envelopes, I just delivered them.”
“You never peeked? Not once?” That didn’t sound like her.
But the woman sitting across from him in the straw didn’t look like Brioni either—she looked terrified. “Not once.”
Ragnar thought back to how quickly Brioni had succumbed to sleep on other occasions, a trait he had simply thought was human.
But if there were other sealed envelopes, and if she was completely unwilling to look inside them, what did that mean?
He picked up the shroud, limp without a stone inside but still with the heft of being decidedly unempty.
Carefully, he lifted the fabric and showed her.
Brioni leaned in far too close because of course she did, and then she swayed on her knees like she might fall over.
He grabbed her shoulder and held her upright. “You see? It’s curious that it only affects you, though.”
She reached forward with hesitant fingers so unlike how she touched anything else. “This parchment is…weird.”