Michael Stackpole - When Dragons Rage

The students never got a chance to form any sort of attachment to her, nor she to them. They differed from her in so many ways that even if she had been allowed to spend much time with them, the chances that they would have liked her were small. She knew that, and used that realization to insulate her from disappointment.

She did know there were people out there who would like her and welcome her as wanderers were welcomed into warm taverns. That much she had been told and she believed those predictions. It surprised her that she wanted such acceptance. In Aurolan she was known and revered by all because of her mother, but here she would be accepted for being herself. That would be as novel an experience as was her trip to the Southlands.

Isaura continued wandering, but refrained from making conscious decisions about where she would go and what she would do. Instead she opened herself to the vast river of magick and let it carry her along. She invoked no spells, but let the eddies and currents nudge her this way and that. Forces outside her control, be they spells cast by others, the whims of the gods, or oaths and truths that once uttered became living entities themselves, were breezes to the sails that were her spirit.

A small ripple sent a tingle through her. She turned left and drifted through the falling snow to another inn. She entered and ascended the stairs and came to a vacant hallway. She strode along quickly, clutching her cloak tightly to quiet her dress’ rustle. Loud voices sounded from behind the door on the right, but that was not her destination.

She opened the door on the left, entered, then pressed it closed behind her. In the room’s bed lay a youth to whom clung a foul miasma. Though the room was dark, she could see clearly the translucent white hue of his sweaty flesh and the livid red of the venous webwork in his skin. His breath rasped in and out as his chest rose and fell. Short and sharp came his breaths, labored and weakening. She could tell they were weakening.

A Spritha stood on the pillow beside the young man’s left ear. The little creature looked up at her and froze. “Go, out, go out.”

Isaura raised her left index finger, circled it toward the ceiling, then plunged it straight down. The Spritha dropped the hair he had been braiding, spun on the pillow, and plopped down hard. He sprawled there facefirst, his arms and legs splayed out.

She crossed to the bed and eased her hood down before she folded the cloak back at her shoulders. As she neared the youth she could feel the heat rising from him. She closed her eyes and cast a simple spell, then recoiled at the vehemence of the sensation that came back to her. She gasped aloud and raised a hand to cover her mouth.

The young man had a virulent poison running through him. It ate at him like acid. It was digesting him, slowly, inexorably, and had already done severe damage. He had perhaps hours to live, maybe a day.

Just learning that was abhorrent enough, but Isaura found the poison familiar. She wanted to deny it, but she could not. It had come from Spyr’skara. She had helped Neskartu create the sullanciri , so she could feel its influence and taint in the venom. She even knew the sullanciri had been given that sort of weapon, but for self-defense.

It was meant for self-defense, but how could this boy threaten a sullanciri? He could not have, clearly—and just as clearly Spyr’skara had bitten him out of spite or a desire to inflict pain, or just a desire to confirm his newfound power. His action had been a betrayal of everything her mother held dear.

Isaura shook her head slowly and refused to let her mother’s efforts be tainted by the actions of a flawed creation she had worked to build. She reached out and plunged her spirit into the river while laying her hands, left and right respectively, on the boy’s fevered brow and breastbone. She drew to her deep magick, then flooded it cold and pure into the youth.

His body bucked and tensed. His back bowed violently, then slackened and fell back hard enough to bounce the Spritha into the air. Another tremor shook the youth, then his eyes snapped open and his hands clawed at the blankets. His head craned back and his mouth opened, but he said nothing.

He just stared at her, wide-eyed and half-insane from pain and fear.

The magick she coursed into him did not take the shape of a spell per se, but instead flushed through his body and veins, diluting the venom. Where the poison had been molten, the magick was cool. Where the poison had irritated, the magick soothed. The magick cleansed his body of the venom and swept it swirling out into the river, where it would be neutralized.

Half the job is done . Isaura set herself to cast a spell that would repair the damage. She would begin with his neck, for his thrashing had peeled away the bandages, revealing two weeping, necrotic holes, one beneath each ear.

“Your part is done, little sister.” The voice rumbled from the darkness to her right, but she could not turn her head to see who spoke. She felt old magick holding her still; she knew its nature and nodded because she knew she would be permitted that motion.

“You are in danger here. Leave before you are detected. The rest shall be attended to. He will live and you will know him when you meet again.”

Isaura looked down on the youth’s face and into his grey eyes. “I will know you when we meet again.”

His lids grew heavy and his eyes slowly closed. His breathing came more regularly and the rattles from his chest had all but vanished. She smiled, then exited the room, trailing in the wake of two guardsmen who, though one held the door to the inn for her, had forgotten her before the door had swung shut.

Across the hall from Will’s sickroom, Scrainwood’s assessment of the deal they’d made left Alexia uneasy, but anything she might say could break their agreement. In the shadow of the dead sullanciri , she turned her attention to the one remaining problem. “Now we have to figure out how to save Will.”

The Oriosan king nodded. “I have already sent summonses to mages from throughout the kingdom. I will not lose the Norrington!”

The door to Kerrigan’s room swung open and Will slumped against the casement. “Lose me?” His voice came raw, hoarse and wet. “How will you lose me?” The naked youth’s eyes rolled up in his head, and he fell back into a startled Dranae’s arms.

Kerrigan awoke with the rumble of his empty stomach. Still in darkness, with only the growling of his bowels to compete with the dripping of water, he found himself disoriented for a moment. As it slowly came back to him where he was—though he had no idea where there was or why he was there—he began to wonder how long he had slept. The hollowness in his middle suggested he’d missed a meal.

He frowned. He liked to eat, and did it often, so his missing a meal might have meant he’d been gone for two hours or four, or two days. He made a mental note that he didn’t know of any spell that would inform him of the time or date, and began to consider how he would go about creating one.

As he thought, he heaved himself up off the straw-strewn ground and tightened the blanket around him. He coughed a little, but it was from a scratchy dry throat, not the wet cough he’d had before. While he was young and healthy, he was also aware that such coughs usually lingered for several days, and he refused to believe he’d slept that long. He played a hand over his jaw and felt little patches of stubble, that suggested he was less than a day and a half out from his last shave.

That means they used magick to clear my lungs.

The realization pleased him for two reasons. The first was that it indicated his captors did not intend to destroy him immediately. Healing spells were not easy to cast and, aside from himself, he knew of no human capable of doing so. This meant the person he’d spoken with had to be one of the elder races: elves or urZrethi. Since neither of them was known for being overly homicidal, Kerrigan gained some confidence.