A magical mending, p.1
A Magical Mending, page 1
A Magical Mending
KORY M. SHRUM
TIMBERLANE PRESS
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also By Kory M. Shrum
This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places have been used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
No part of this book shall be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission of the publisher.
Although every precaution has been taken in preparation of the book, the publisher and the author assume no responsibility for errors or omissions. Neither is any liability assumed for damages resulting from the use of information contained in this book or its misuse.
Editing by Toby Selwyn
ISBN: 978-1-949577-76-1
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 2025 Kory M. Shrum
For Kim and Maximus,
and our morning walks in the woods
Chapter 1
If she could have chosen her own death, Saya Duskbane would have chosen to die on the battlefield with her older brothers and father. But fate had spared her, and so she had returned home victorious, in name if not in heart, with only her youngest brother, Ashbourne, for company.
That bittersweet victory felt like a dream now, with her brow wet with sweat, her throat thick with a fiery ache, her heart pounding a terrible rhythm in her temples.
She was dying.
And she wondered why.
Why spare her throughout decades of war, only to take her in a sick bed soon after?
She and Ashbourne had only been home for five months. Long enough to watch winter thaw into spring and spring ripen into summer.
Then Ashbourne fell ill.
In her fever, flashes of him in those final months, weeks, days, swam to the surface of her mind.
Ashbourne on his horse riding across the abandoned training fields.
Ashbourne feeding the hounds from a gentle hand.
Ashbourne as he had looked with his dark curls falling into his eyes, just last week, as they had lain on the roof of the keep together, looking at the stars. They’d been passing a bottle of delicious mapleberry wine between them, swapping stories about their father, brothers, and the juiciest bits of the war with each turn.
They had laughed together.
So hard at times they had to wipe tears from their cheeks. After the wine was gone, they’d settled into a comfortable silence on their backs, looking up at the sky. She thought he’d fallen asleep and she was going to have to carry him down the narrow stone steps herself.
That was until he spoke.
I could study them, you know. He gestured toward the sky. I could become the greatest astronomer of this age. There’s so much we don’t know.
You should, she’d agreed. You have a thousand times the patience I do. And your eyesight is more than good enough.
There was a reason they’d called him Skyrender, after the great, colorful birds that flew through the fields at dusk. He had excelled at long-range combat, hurling his magic great distances most mages couldn’t dream of.
You should do it, brother.
At her encouragement, his smile had folded at the edges in the moonlight, half his face smudged out by the shadows, before he’d rolled onto his side, turning away from the sky.
From her.
I’m too old, Saya. They’d never let me into Mulberry now. I’d be at least fifteen, hell, twenty years older than the oldest student. I’m old enough to teach them.
Don’t be ridiculous. Mulberry would be honored to have you.
There’d be no point. I’d only be making a fool of myself. Our time has passed, sister. But it was fun while it lasted, wasn’t it?
He’d begun coughing then, a disturbing rattle in his chest. Saya had blamed the night air and the wine and had insisted they go inside and sit by the fire.
Then the next morning he didn’t rise. His fever was already raging, his body trembling as if cold. They rang for the doctor, who came only long enough to tell her that nothing could be done.
The illness is a magical one, Lady Duskbane. His power has turned against him, and I don’t have enough magic to overpower his own, the doctor had pleaded. I doubt you can find anyone in the country with more power than a Duskbane.
A Duskbane.
She was a Duskbane. The only Duskbane left. But Duskbanes were skilled at war, not healing.
From the moment her father had brought her to this fortress, had introduced her to her brothers as the next great mage of House Duskbane, she’d done only what was expected of her.
Our house was forged for one purpose and one alone. You will train hard. You will excel without question. Anything less will dishonor your name, your station, and your gifts.
She had trained. She had excelled.
In battle she had used all her strength, her wit, her power to protect what she loved. She was no stranger to adversity. And yet, as she stood over her brother’s sick bed, pressed a cool hand to his damp, burning face, she felt utterly useless.
Ash, she’d begged. Please don’t do this.
To me.
His ragged breath was the only reply.
By the time evening had fallen on the great house, Saya had her own fever.
The servants had begged her to sleep, to rest before she became truly ill, but she hadn’t wanted to leave him.
Yet now, as her own fever burned, she didn’t think she was in his room, in the fireside chair anymore. The light was wrong. The position of the window had changed. Her own form had become supine.
Soft voices rustled past her. Hot hands moved her, adjusted her.
One voice broke through her fragmented, feverish memories.
“M’lady.”
Saya tried to swim toward consciousness but couldn’t find her footing. There was no solid ledge to pull herself up on. She felt like she was back on the warships, the decks rolling beneath her, thrown by the tremendous waves the terravores created.
Cold hands grabbed her face. “M’lady. Please.”
Her eyes fluttered open. Sweat stung them, and the room was little more than a glowing haze. One face surfaced, and she knew it.
Mirabel. Her sweet maid.
Her hair, streaked with gray, was pulled back from her face. Her brown eyes round with fear, lips dry. The shadows below her eyes seemed so dark, or were the candle flames that unforgiving?
“Good. Stay with me,” the maid said.
The heaviness of sleep reached out and wrapped its arms around Saya again.
“Stay, damn you!”
A sharp pain shot through her arm, causing her eyes to roll open to see the source of the attack.
It was Mirabel, pinching her.
“I need you to hear me and hear me well,” Mirabel said. “You must fight this, Saya. You must use your magic.”
“I’m not—I can’t—”
“You are. You can,” Mirabel insisted. “You have everything you need inside you to turn this. Do you understand?”
She didn’t. But she had no idea if she had said so.
“If you decide that you will stay, you will stay.”
Stay?
For what?
Her family was gone. Her purpose fulfilled. With the war over, with her father and brothers gone and now Ashbourne, too—yes, she knew in her heart that he had left her.
There was no one.
She had only an empty fortress with no one for the servants to attend. Empty training fields with no soldiers to use them. Armories dusty and forgotten. Stables full of horses that wouldn’t be ridden and kennels full of hounds, but no battlefields for them to charge.
She was the sole mistress of this place.
She was alone.
“There’s nothing left for me here.”
The words sent another stab of pain through Saya’s chest.
The maid was shouting at her, but she could catch only scraps of the words being hurled at her like curses.
“—summers in the cottage—”
“—your little hound—”
“—books by the fireplace and hot cups of tea—”
“—sunrises over the sea—”
“—stars. For the love of the goddess, the stars!”
It was like a strange incantation, accompanied by the frantic press of a cold cloth to her face. And she had no idea how the spell ended, for at the mention of the stars, that was all she could see, that great, expansive sky, and how her brother had looked beneath it as he had smiled up at the heavens, his eyes full of dreams.
Chapter 2
Her magic turned and twisted within her as if responding to a call.
It took her a moment to realize what was happening. Her magic was harmonizing with the tune.
Remembering it.
Like an old friend. The connection was so powerful that the dream fell away.
The battle and beasts gone.
She followed the song into the glowing sunlight.
Her eyes opened and fixed first on Mirabel.
The maid was in one of the chairs normally kept by the fire. Red velvet and high-backed, it had been dragged to the bedside, allowing Mirabel to sit within arm’s reach of Saya.
She was dipping a cloth into a basin and touching it to Saya’s exposed feet, legs.
When she turned toward the basin again, their eyes locked.
“Why, hello there. Decided to come back, did you?”
“I heard you singing.” Saya attempted to speak, but her throat was so dry that the words cracked and blistered on her tongue.
“What a compliment. You decided to live because of my little song? And Mr. Barnes had the audacity to say I sounded like a strangled crow whenever I dare put two notes together.”
Saya tried to sit up but her body resisted. She was exhausted beyond measure and her muscles ached as if she’d taken a direct hit from a terravore’s tail.
“I feel like death.”
“You look like it too. And you smell like a regiment of men fresh from the fields. I’ll run the bath, but first, drink this.”
It took a lot of effort to get her to sitting, and Mirabel couldn’t move her into position alone, so two of the servants came in to help. Once they knew she was awake, the house burst into action.
It seemed a dozen people were in her room at once, and they asked so many questions.
“Are you hungry, m’lady?”
“Do you want us to open the windows, m’lady?”
“What clothes would you like for me to put out for you, m’lady?”
“Shall I call for tea, m’lady?”
“Let her breathe!” Mirabel cried. “I’ll get her into the bath, and you can lay out whatever is soft and clean, nothing heavy. She needs to eat but nothing too rich. A bowl of soup and some fresh bread, I’d say. And of course she needs a cup of tea. Use the herbs I brought back last time. I already measured out two satchels. Use the one with the yellow tag.”
Saya was grateful that Mirabel fielded the questions on her behalf and then sent everyone away.
It took so much out of her just to get into the bath, she hadn’t the strength to wash herself without aid. Her limbs shook with the effort.
“Your strength will come back,” Mirabel promised, helping her with her hair, her back.
“Some of it might,” Saya conceded. Because her hands had trembled even before the illness, a souvenir of war. Her tendons and muscles remembered every time she’d struck a target with a mace and all the magic she had channeled from her heart and mind, down her arms and out into the world through her fingertips.
And it hadn’t forgiven her for it.
The nerve damage would likely only worsen as she got older.
If she got any older, that was.
By the time she had bathed, dressed in fresh clothes, and eaten her fill of warm soup, she had fallen back to sleep again.
It went on like this for days.
Her dreams punctuated by meals and tea and baths.
They opened the windows. They changed the bedding. They kept the fire lit.
Sometimes she woke to quiet whispers. There was always one voice she heard above the rest. “She just needs time. The worst is behind her.”
Mirabel. Her faithful maid.
No matter what time of day or night Saya woke, she found the woman there.
Mirabel, the closest thing Saya had to a mother since she came to House Duskbane. Since her father had learned of her magic and had collected her to begin her training, ending her idyllic childhood with her mother in their cottage in the woods.
A bright, happy time full of sunlight and laughter and an overwhelming sense of freedom. Of wildness. Her mother’s and her own.
All of it replaced by the cold, hard discipline of her life in the North. Of war.
She dreamed of the cottage more and more as the days passed. Of the woods surrounding it. Of her little adventures exploring. Her mother teaching her the names of the plants, the birds, the rivers. How to speak to them, yes, but more importantly, how to listen.
They have so much to teach us, sparrow. Listen well and you just might learn something.
In her latest dream, Saya was extending her hand toward an ecuret, which hung upside down from a birch tree, chattering at her. The creature inched forward, reaching for the seeds in her hand. Its soft white body skittish, unsure, as it inspected her with large dark eyes. Before its little paw could touch her fingers, Saya woke to a door closing somewhere in the great house.
The forest dream evaporated like morning mist.
She sat up, surprised to find she had the strength to do it. She dared to do even more, and threw back the covers and placed her bare feet on the stone floor.
“Mirabel?” Her voice cracked, dry as parchment.
No answer.
It appeared she was alone. No matter. Even maids had to use the toilets, did they not? And Saya had managed well enough thus far.
She pushed herself to standing. There was an air of weakness about her limbs, but they obeyed her commands, so she shuffled across her bedchamber to the mirror standing between the fireplace and her armoire.
Her violet eyes stared back at her. They were clear and bright, but the bags beneath them were unforgiving. And her dark hair was a mess. She couldn’t remember the last time it was down and wild like this—as a child in the woods, perhaps. As a soldier, she’d kept it brushed into a high, tight mohawk braid that had arched up and away from her forehead, falling down the center of her back, and well away from causing her any trouble in battle.
“I’ve looked worse,” she told her reflection. “At least there’s that.”
The door opened and Mirabel lit up at the sight of her.
“Look at you. On your own two feet and all.”
“Thanks to you, I’m sure.”
“Give yourself some credit,” Mirabel said, coming into the room with the tray. “An old lady can only do so much for you.”
“I was very ill. The doctor said—”
Mirabel snorted. “I know what he said. Doctor! How they can call themselves that with as little as they know, I’ll never understand. Didn’t even know the selvash for what it was.”
The selvash. Saya had heard of it. A terrible kind of magical illness where the magic flowing through a mage turned on the conjurer and killed them. Then all at once, Saya remembered how it began.
“Ashbourne—”
The look on Mirabel’s face spoke volumes.
“I am so sorry, my love. He didn’t pull through like you did. We tried everything, but it wasn’t enough.”
It hurt, but Saya was not shocked by the news. “I think I knew. Somewhere in all of that—I think I felt him leave this world.”
“We buried him properly,” Mirabel said as she put the tray with tea and spice cakes on the low table in front of the fire. “If that’s any comfort to you.”
“It is, thank you.”
In truth, there was no such thing as a proper burial for House Duskbane, but Saya didn’t say so. She was sure that Mirabel meant proper according to whatever customs were followed in the villages. In House Duskbane, the only acceptable way to die was in battle, and even then, it was expected that the mage would leave this world so spectacularly that there wouldn’t be so much as a single hair left to bury, as had been the case for her father and elder brothers.
