Chapter Forty-Eight
Sitting on a ruined crate, Lotannu pulled a blanket around…
Chapter Forty-Nine
Midmorning sunlight slanted through the redwood forest as Nicodemus rode…
Chapter Fifty
When marching into battle, druids wore plates of wooden armor,…
Chapter Fifty-One
The Queen’s Lance had covered half the distance to the…
Chapter Fifty-Two
Shannon woke when someone took his hand. He had been…
Epilogue
Starfall Island rose out of the blue horizon. Its forested…
About the Author
Other Books by Blake Charlton
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Chapter One
Francesca did not realize she had used an indefinite pronoun until it began to kill her patient.
Someone, no one knew who, had brought the young woman into the infirmary with an unknown curse written around her lungs. Francesca had cast several golden sentences into her patient’s chest, hoping to disspell the malicious text. Had it gone well, she would have pulled the curse out of the woman’s mouth.
But the curse’s style had been robust, and one of Francesca’s mistakenly ambiguous pronouns had pushed the curse from the girl’s lungs to her heart. There, the spiteful text had bound the once-beating organ into silence.
Now plummeting toward death, the girl bleated a final cry.
Francesca looked around the solarium and saw only white walls and a window looking out onto the city of Avel. Voices of other medical spellwrights sounded from down the hallway; they were also working to save patients wounded by the recent lycanthrope attack on the city walls. Both the infirmary and the neighboring sanctuary were in crisis, and so Francesca was alone.
To her horror, Francesca’s first reaction was relief that no one had seen her mistake.
She turned to her patient. The girl’s wide green eyes had dilated to blackness. Her distended neck veins betrayed no pulse.
Francesca’s fingers tingled. This couldn’t be happening. She never made mistakes, never used indefinite pronouns.
The patient had been able to whisper her name when the curse was still on her lungs. Now Francesca addressed the young woman: “Deirdre, stay with me.”
No response.
Francesca could not see the curse; it was written in a language she did not know. But the golden countercurse she had cast now visualized the malicious text that spellbound the young woman’s heart.
Invasive action was needed.
Spellwrights created magical runes in their muscles; presently, Francesca used those in her left forearm to write a few silvery sentences that glowed on her skin. With her right hand, she pulled the spell free. It folded into a short, precise blade.
Francesca moved with confidence. She was a remarkably tall woman, lithe, clothed in a wizard’s black robe and cleric’s red stole. Both her long hair and wide eyes were very dark brown, making her pale features more striking. An illiterate would think she had maybe thirty years. A spellwright would know she had twice as many.
With her left hand, Francesca tore off her patient’s blouse. Deirdre’s smooth olive complexion, small chin, and raven hair indicated her youth. Yet there was something mature in the creases around her eyes.
Just then the floor shook and the wooden rafters chirped—a small earthquake possibly, or the blast from another lycanthropic attack. Somewhere in the infirmary or the adjacent sanctuary a man wailed.
Francesca laid her left hand on Deirdre’s shoulder. As a physician, she shuddered—cold, and full of doubt. Then she leapt into the safety of action.
After a few steady cuts, she lifted Deirdre’s small breast upward to expose the lattice of bone and muscle. The next cut ran between the fifth and sixth ribs, starting at the sternum and traveling around to the spine. The blood that flowed was bright red. Encouraging. Darker, slower blood would have confirmed death.
Francesca pried the ribs apart and extemporized a spell to hold them open.
The distant wailing grew more urgent.
“Deirdre, stay with me,” Francesca commanded as she slipped her hands into the girl’s chest and found her heart. Francesca held her breath as she pulled off the malicious sentences.
The floor shook again. A second and then a third voice joined the wailing.
Francesca bit her lip and unraveled the curse’s last sentence. The heart swelled with blood but did not beat. Francesca began to rhythmically squeeze the organ with her hand. She was about to call for help when the heart began to squirm.
It felt like a bag full of writhing worms.
“God-of-gods,” Francesca whispered. When a heart was denied blood, its once-coordinated action might expire into a chaos of separate spasms.
She continued to compress the heart. But each time she squeezed, the writhing lessened. The muscles were fading into death.
Francesca did not stop, could not stop.
More voices had joined the wailing, which rose and fell in an eerie tempo. Though almost musical, the wailing was wholly unlike the devotional songs the Spirish people sang during daily worship.
Some new crisis was sweeping through the infirmary or the sanctuary. Perhaps more wounded citizens had come in from the lycanthrope attack. Perhaps one of the lycanthrope spellwrights had even breached Avel’s walls despite the daylight.
But Francesca didn’t care about any of that. Her hands had gone cold. Her legs trembled. She was leaning on her patient. The world dissolved into a blur of tears.
The girl’s heart was still.
“Creator, forgive me,” Francesca whispered and withdrew her hands. “I’m sorry.” A painful tingling now enveloped her fingers. “I’m so … so sorry.”
She bowed her head and closed her eyes. Time became strange to her. She’d always been proud of her ability to prognosticate—to look forward into patients’ lives and anticipate their chances of cure, their moments of danger. But she had not foreseen Deirdre’s death; it seemed to jolt her out of time, out of her own body.
For a moment it felt as if she were someone else, as if she were standing in the doorway and looking at the physician who had just killed her patient. In this dissociated state, she felt both safe and profoundly numb.
But then she was back in her own body, blinking through tears. She had not wept before a patient, alive or dead, for time out of mind. But now she had used the wrong word, a damned indefinite pronoun. Now her carelessness had killed.
Hot self-hatred flashed through her. She bit down on her lip.
Then, as suddenly as it came, her anger vanished, and she remembered her last day at the clerical academy in Port Mercy. She had asked her mentor for parting advice. The ancient physician had smiled tightly and said, “Kill as few patients as possible.”
The young Francesca had laughed nervously.
Now,