Page 62 of Untempered
“I’m sorry,” I said, but those words were drowned in the mother’s wails, and I was glad. What good did my regret do?
The door opened, and Chay’s familiar face, carved in painful neutrality, blurred until I blinked away tears. The mage entered behind him, an unfamiliar man who glanced around warily, his gaze lingering on me.
“He’s a Magework Healer,” Thomas said to the older boy. “He’ll help.”
The mage shot him a look of caution, putting down his toolbox on the table with a thump. The woman was weeping now, and I didn’t know if I should look at her or not.
“I’ve not seen this,” he told me matter-of-factly. “How long have you been unwell for?” he asked the older boy. The mage’s fingers were long and marked with scars and burns as he undid the catches on his toolbox, and it sprang open. Cogs whirred, and an elaborate selection of metal and crystal implements were displayed. Tiny cases formed miniature staircases up and down the display, and the whirring, clicking sound of a mage’s work hummed in the background.
“I’m not unwell,” the boy snapped.
“How long have their eyes looked odd?” he asked the brother, setting out three ceramic basins in a triangle around the eldest.
“Three days,” said the boy opposite him.
The older brother scowled. “Their eyes arefine.”
“No, it’s been four days,” said the other, shaking his head. Unconcerned, the mage snapped on his metal-framed eyeglasses, flicking through the crystal lenses, frowning and cycling back, until he found what he wanted. “Ma got it the day we got eggs, remember?”
The eldest brother’s scowl deepened. His cheeks took on a strange gray hue, but before there could be an argument, the mage snapped his fingers, and fire ignited in the bowl, making the boy flinch. “Have you had a runny nose, felt hot or cold?” asked the mage. The boys shook their heads. “Do you think your ma has?”
They hesitated, the older one holding the infant closer than I thought was perhaps wise. The last few tendrils of steam curled off the soup before him, forgotten. “Ma, she was strange. Not hot, but ice cold. Used up a week’s wood in one night.”
The mage accepted this silently, measuring out oils into the bowls. Sparks crackled where the liquid met the flame. The familiar smell of fragrant oils and metal made some of the tension ease out of me. Would he be able to offer me information on the sickness once he’d healed them? “I’ll see what I can do for this one,” he told me, his movements brisk as he tightened the seal on the jar of oil.
Thomas had known what to do for the mother when she’d been mourning.Thatwas what I needed to do, not flee but help where I could. I didn’t know what to do, but I had to do something, didn’t I? Wasn’t that my role?
“Do what you can, please,” I said, relieved to have someone who got straight to the point and wasn’t going to make me justify, explain, or finagle. The hum of magic contained within the mage’s box made the quiet of the room seem heavier.
He nodded, taking the infant from the arms of the older brother with not a gentle word to soften any of it. He just took a few deep breaths and then went curiously still.
Isolde was looking at me again, and I knew she wanted me to run. But I wasn’t running.
I looked to the woman, sitting in a puddle on the ground, her arms around the body of the small child. She wasn’t wailingorweeping. She was perfectly, utterly still, her eyes staring toward my left shoulder. The world started to spin around me.
“Breathe,” Isolde said softly, and I did.
The woman’s eyes were deep, dark black, veins beneath her skin like ink-stained cracks. Even in death she clutched the child to her breast.
I was standing in a hall with two now-dead people who’d had a mystery illness that made them look like evil itself had infected them. And I had not a clue what to do.
Isolde’s hand was on my upper arm again, and this time, I wasn’t breaking free. I looked up, jolted from the shock to see the mage’s skin was deathly pale. Even as I tried to recall the exact shade of brown of his skin when he’d arrived, the veins in his neck became clearer. I watched the darkness spread, like he was cracking and crumbling before us. There was something hypnotic about it. The fires in the bowls flared, sparks spluttered dramatically, and then were snuffed out.
I found myself unable to look away until man and child slowly melted to the floor, a lifeless pile of flesh. Did people always look boneless in death? Had the illness changed something that meant they moved so slowly? What sort of illness could spread through the mage’s spells?
“Audrey,” Isolde said quietly, “You need to leave.”
I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t make sense of it. That wasn’t how magic worked.
“Ma?” asked one of the children who had been eating.
“Go, Audrey,” Isolde said, releasing me. “Now.”
Even with the ring of command in her voice, my feet were rooted to the floor, and it was lucky they were, or I’d’ve flown to the rafters and become wedged there. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t speak, either, to tell her. The cogs of the mage’s box were silent.
The younger brother stood, his soup tumbling off to the side. The metal bowl bounced away with a noise that felt like a knife to my skull. Opposite him, his older brother stood, looking from the mage and infant to his mother’s fallen form.
Isolde’s hand bit into my arm so hard it was a wonder it didn’t make me weep from the pain, but I couldn’t feel it. She was pulling me backward, but my feet weren’t working properly. I watched them, the two young children. I couldn’t tell what their faces meant. I didn’t know.
