Chapter 7 #2
“This?” He held it up, lips quirked in amusement.
“House Phel, of course. But it’s not a knife.
It’s a letter opener. I thought it would be useful, you know, for cracking wax seals on missives and so forth.
Gabriel invited me to pick from the moonsilver weapons he and Jadren had been cataloguing, and this was pretty, so…
” He shrugged, carefully setting it to the side. “Came in handy.”
Alise could just imagine the looks on Gabriel and Jadren’s faces when, having offered Cillian his choice of hunter-melting, moonsilver weapons, he selected a letter opener.
“It’s an antique,” Cillian continued with enthusiasm.
“Dating back to pre-fall days. Jadren was pretty confident—and I believe was going to research—that Phel had originally held a grandparented trademark for enchanted artifacts made via moon magic. Which would at least put to bed one of the supposed ‘crimes’ committed by House Phel. Though El-Adrel would’ve been the ones to pursue reparations for the alleged infringement and that won’t happen now. ”
Her head spun. She’d been low on magic before, but this felt worse than that. Maybe also crashing from the fear and worry of the prolonged escape and battles. “So, we’re leaving the carriage here?”
“Yes, we could limp it off to the side, but it won’t hurt to block the road for a while.”
“I should release the air elemental,” she said, hearing the hollowness of her own voice. “It would be inhumane to leave it tethered to this abandoned wreck.”
“Do you have the energy for that?” he asked, searching her face. “You look very pale.”
“You’re always saying how pale I look,” she replied with irritation, but she had little gumption behind it. “Maybe I’m just pale, period, you know?”
He regarded her patiently. “Alise.”
“I’m tired, okay? A nice bracing walk in the open air will do me a world of good.”
“Let me give you some of my magic.”
“Not a chance, boy-o. You might need it to immobilize any hunters that come after us.” She went out the other side of the carriage, glad there were doors on both sides, so she didn’t have to try to get past Cillian, who looked concerned enough to physically stop her.
“I don’t really need much. Just grab whatever.
I’ll just handle the elemental and we can start walking. ”
She ignored whatever he started to say and went around to the front of the carriage where the air elemental was housed.
It wasn’t contained so much as magically tethered to the carriage.
The air elemental wasn’t like a horse, attached by a harness to the conveyance to pull it along.
Instead the elemental sort of expanded its aegis, enveloping the carriage in its own sure travel through the air that it derived from and returned to.
Though she couldn’t see the creature with her physical eyes, her wizard senses told her a great deal about it—not good—and her peculiar form of synesthesia showed magic to her as a visual.
The elemental had been stretched to its limits by her wizardry, by her pushing it, expanding it too fast and recklessly.
Now it seemed to her like a balloon blown up to its limits and then deflated, leaving a saggy, wrinkly sack behind.
Elementals didn’t make sounds, as such, but if this could, it would be whimpering.
Alise, already far too familiar with her old friend and enemy, wracking guilt, simply sunk deeper into feeling terrible.
You couldn’t really kill an elemental, but you could injure them and she’d done a number on this one.
Even if the carriage hadn’t come fully apart, the effort of dragging something along against such great resistance had strained the non-physical fibers of its being, rendering the creature a ragged shadow of itself.
Almost tenderly, she detached the elemental from the magical bonds tasking it to convey the carriage.
It could have been installed centuries before.
No real way to tell, as Elal production methods had been standardized longer than that, but the carriage had likely been new when Elal wizards bound the elemental to it.
There were rarely reasons to swap them out.
Given the condition of the carriage and what she knew of House Harahel and their tendency to hold onto everything forever, she wouldn’t be at all surprised if that had happened hundreds of years ago.
To her knowledge, in fact, long-bonded air elementals were never released following the retirement of their vehicles—they were simply transferred to a newer model.
Of course, she’d never seen or heard of an elemental this distorted by magic. Probably most wizards with spirit magic lacked the power to do this, and those few who did possess the power, never had reason to take such extreme measures.
She gently disentangled the sagging spirit from its bonds, feeding it a bit of magic so it could restablize itself.
She’d once seen fisherfolk doing this, returning too-small fish to the water by holding them in a float just below the surface at water’s edge.
The fish would loll there, looking dead, until suddenly it came to life and zipped away.
The air elemental, fully free, similarly hung there, nearly lifeless.
She scraped the mental bottom of her reservoir of magic, finding a few crumbs to feed it.
Like the fish, the elemental came to abrupt life and disappeared.
Alise had a moment to smile. She’d done at least one good thing. Then curious shadows crowded the edges of her vision.
She swayed.
And knew nothing more.