The pirate covered a yawn with her hand, then wandered out and closed the door behind her. Isaura heard the other door close and slowly smiled. The gesture of dismissal had spawned a spell that created a current linking the two of them. It eroded Vionna’s energy and brought to Isaura the fleeting impression of the pirate’s intent to find other ways to make the youths in the common room blush. Yet because of the spell, Vionna received Isaura’s fatigue, and the Aurolani Princess stood, refreshed as if she had napped for hours.
She acknowledged that using the spell on Vionna without her consent was not the sort of thing done to a friend, but Vionna was not a friend. Isaura had exaggerated the displeasure at the straw to provide Vionna a reason for disliking her. The pirate clearly had no desire to be her escort and saw her as a delicate rime-blossom that had no business being in the south at all.
Isaura harbored no illusions about her own lack of experience, but she also knew that did not make her a fool. She had learned much and would learn much more, but Vionna’s contempt hardly made her a good instructor. Moreover, Isaura’s mother had desired her to visit the Southlands to learn about them, and being toured around by a renegade-in-heat would hardly provide her with the sort of information she wanted.
With the wave of a finger Isaura extinguished her lamp and entered the hallway. She drifted past Vionna’s door, suppressing a smile at the snores echoing from within, then descended the stairs. A man coming up twisted his back to the wall to let her pass, though by the time he reached the hallway above he had forgotten her. She passed out the door and into the darkened street, leaving a shivering couple near the common room door wondering where the draft had come from.
Knowing the track of her boots in the snow would betray her presence, Isaura kept to the streets and walkways on which the snow had been tamped down by the feet of passersby. She saw well enough at night that she eschewed magick to enhance her sight. She did regret the way snow covered everything, for she wished she could see what lurked in the alley middens. From what little she could see as two tatterdemalions dug through one mound, each would have been a treasure trove in Aurolan, with useful bits of wood and food and scrap metal.
Wandering through the city as night fell and the day’s warmth fled, she found a city slowing as if moving toward hibernation. People hurried along the streets and crowded into common houses that rang with laughter. Yellow light and flickering shadows splashed over snow, and while the night was not nearly cold enough to discomfit her, Isaura still felt a chill.
She recognized it immediately for it was no stranger to her. In Aurolan she felt it often. Distance existed between her and the others. The sullanciri viewed her with a reverence that invited no intimacy. Nefrai-laysh might joke with her, or compose simple rhymes, but she knew that to be a compulsion with him, not anything born of affection. Neskartu, while praising her skills at magick, did not show her even as much fondness as he did his students.
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.