Dark apprentice, p.22
Dark Apprentice, page 22
But the damned curse complicated things. It had kicked in far sooner than she thought it would and made lessons nearly impossible to complete. Rather than giving her new novice the customary one day off a week, she’d pushed them both to make up for lost time. To his credit, the boy tackled his studies with appropriate fervor whenever he felt well.
Still, it was going to be a very long ten years. Probably longer than ten. Fast learner though he was, at this rate she’d be lucky to get him out the door in twenty. The idea of sharing her home for that long made her shudder.
Removing the curse was out of the question. That would be interference. No, he’d just have to deal with it on his own. The curse wove through him in a way that would almost certainly result in death if not removed with expert precision. He might one day be able to extract it himself, but for now it lay beyond his capabilities.
As much as she wanted this one to live, she’d vowed to protect him from her training, not his own stupidity. Actions had consequences, and some consequences led to death. She wouldn’t break her own rules to help him.
Dragging him from the water had been a monumental error. When she’d detected his health failing and found him in the cave pool, her first thought was that he’d slipped and hit his head. It was only after saving him and seeing the apathetic expression on his face that she realized the curse was in effect. Accidental or not, she’d broken her rule.
She’d been furious. Furious at herself for interfering. Furious at the boy for putting himself in a situation where the curse might be fatal. Furious for not realizing sooner and leaving him be. Furious at being relieved she didn’t have to sit by and watch him die. That couldn’t happen again. Interference was against her rules.
Of course, a part of her nagged, she had already broken her rules by restricting the boy’s access to certain information and areas. No matter how many times she told herself it was for his own good, that he would get all the information he wanted in due time, it didn’t feel right.
She couldn’t help him with the curse—not directly—but perhaps she could nudge him in the right direction. Healing was something she attempted to teach all her apprentices. The practicality of the magical school was almost unparalleled, yet for some reason students of the dark variety shied away from it. The boy was no different. Why he didn’t think to look in the healing or potion sections of the library for ways to mitigate his symptoms was beyond her.
That said, even if he was looking, it would take him a long time to stumble upon the answer. Both sections in the library were immense. She couldn’t just give him the books he needed to solve his problem—that would be interfering—but she could leave them out in places where he might see them, mixed in with other selections.
Medea stood and raised her hand. The bedroom door at the top of the stairs swung open.
“Tino!” she called.
A mottled blur leapt from the open door onto the landing, changing color and texture as soon as it hit the stair railing. It scurried down, then launched itself into Medea’s waiting palm, where its skin changed from smooth iron grey to a semblance of lichen. The gecko turned its head and gazed at her with string-of-pearl pupils. Medea rubbed it affectionately under the chin.
“Sorry you’ve been cooped up. You want outside?”
“I’ll stay with you,” the lizard answered in the masculine voice of its long-dead human master. Well, one of them. Unlike most familiars, Concertino had been spawned by not one wizard soul but two. The creature had no voice of its own but could replicate any sound it heard. It nosed under Medea’s hair, its tummy cool against her neck.
Hearing the voice was a painful blessing. Valerio had been a good friend all those centuries ago. Part of him lived on in Tino, but he was dead now, and the constant reminder stung. Sometimes she told Tino to use a different voice. Other times she took comfort in Valerio’s raucous laughter.
“We’ve a bit of work to do in the library,” said Medea. “Mind a bit of singing?”
Nikolai stumbled away from Harper’s flat. Dark thoughts swirled all around, pressing their weight against him. He collapsed not far from the building and sobbed until a policeman came by. Pummel would make quick work of him. Nikolai pulled his wand and muttered “Collido.”
Nothing happened, and the policeman laughed at his seemingly drunken antics. He was a failure. Couldn’t even cast a basic spell with a wand. What little remained of his logical mind tried to argue. It was the city. Everyone knew Mundane technology affected spells. The affliction countered that if he was a remotely decent wizard, it wouldn’t matter.
A firm grip on his bicep snapped Nikolai back to attention. He punched the policeman in the one place guaranteed to bring the man to his knees, then ran. Half the night was gone by the time he managed to stumble back through the gateway.
As he suspected, the return trip was more pleasurable than his departure. Medea had definitely woven a spell into the gateway that made it more desirable to return than to leave. Even with the affliction drowning him in despair, he had a moment of purest exhilaration the moment he crossed through. The two sensations warred with one another. He was whole again and everything felt wonderful. No, he was a failure and he’d never amount to anything.
Drawing as much strength as he could from the euphoric sensation, he entered the common area and lurched toward his room. He just needed to make it to his bed before the feeling faded and he was left alone with the dark thoughts. Something whispered behind him.
Nikolai halted, ears straining. Medea was never up this late. She rarely even left her room in the afternoons. He moved to the library door and pressed his ear to the wood. Faint music, almost operatic. Abruptly, it stopped.
Nikolai wrenched open the door and ran down the center aisle. A dozen rows down, he found Medea. She was reading in an armchair, not an unusual sight by itself, but everything here screamed wrongness. Medea had three reading postures. Relaxed, she curled her feet under her body like a cat. Sometimes she leaned back and propped her legs on a cushion. If a book really had her interest, she hunched over it like a miser and devoured it.
Medea sat now with her legs demurely crossed, back rigid. The thick book in her hands was held up, a position one couldn’t maintain long with a text of that size. Both her hair and her dress looked as though they had been arranged rather than being allowed to fall naturally.
“Good evening,” Medea said. “How was your day off?” Asking about his day was another thing she never did.
“Fine. I bumped into an old friend from the Academy.” The residual euphoria from the gateway was fading. Nikolai clung to it like a life raft.
“That’s nice.” Her tone suggested she hadn’t listened to his response, nor did she care to.
What alcove was this? He’d have to remember it, come back and check. Potions.
Medea rose and set her book on top of the rather large stack already on the table. “You know, it would do you good to freshen up on potions. And healing. Such wonderful things to be learned from healing! I’m off to bed.”
Nikolai sank into the armchair and closed his eyes. If he had to ride out the affliction, he might as well do it in comfort.
20
SAY IT
Nikolai grinned even as pain lanced through his foot. The carpet of leaf litter on the forest floor offered no solace from Medea’s attacks. His senses strained, trying to determine when the shoots would erupt next, ready to dodge at a second’s notice. Challenge with a dash of danger—just how he liked it. So much better than endless drilling or boring lectures.
Another shoot sliced through his heel, causing him to stumble. He jumped, grabbing on to a low-hanging branch, then swung deftly to land on a fallen log. Her attacks would have to come where he could see them now. He danced along the log, careful to keep turning so his back wasn’t always facing the same way.
“You know that’s not how this works.” Medea sat cross-legged on a stump, long blonde hair gleaming in the sunlight. “You’re supposed to sense them, not see them.”
The bark rippled like a wave. Nikolai toppled to the forest floor, where he was stabbed twice more in the back. He attempted to roll over with some difficulty. The plant shoots embedded in his flesh were still attached to their root systems, and reluctant to budge. One tugged loose, but the other broke off under his skin and clung there like the world’s most uncomfortable splinter.
“Am I going too fast for you?”
“I’m fine,” he said, even though he couldn’t sense shit. Errant leaves clung to his shirt. Nikolai brushed them off, wincing as his muscles tugged the shoot stuck in his back. He twisted to see if he could reach it and found he couldn’t. “Can you get this fucking thing out of me?”
Medea smiled. “Certainly.”
Momentary pain, followed by a blessedly dull ache.
Two months had passed since his first trip to London. True to her word, Medea let him have a day off every week. Each yielded similar results. The malaise struck with the same irregular frequency as it did on the island. One day, after a particularly prolonged episode that lasted almost a full day, he asked Medea for a week off, claiming a friend desperately needed help. She hadn’t been happy but consented to the break. He timed it with one of Harper’s numerous tours out of town, giving him a week alone at the London flat. The change in scenery didn’t help. Dark thoughts plucked at him the whole time, and he was forced to admit that the island could not be the cause.
It had to be Medea herself. Either she’d followed him to London, or the reach of her abilities was extreme. Didn’t voodoo dolls allow you to do that? It was difficult to counter her spell without knowing the method of it.
He’d searched the library for spells matching his symptoms. While there were many that addled the brain, causing fear or apathy, nothing quite matched. His affliction had a draining quality that killed his appetite and made him tired but unable to rest. Still, it was a start, and he’d begun to experiment with potions that claimed to solve self-deprecation and apathy.
For his initial attempts at treatment, he chose potions containing commonly available plants—St. John’s wort, English lavender, and Roman chamomile. Even without Medea’s insistence that ingredients be replaced doubly, he wanted potions that could be made with ease. Rare and exotic wasn’t helpful when you needed round-the-clock prevention.
In the supply cabinet, he found that someone had helpfully made a catalog of every ingredient and where it could be found, along with any gateways that were relatively close to collection sites. The penmanship was elegant and graceful, not at all like Medea’s chicken scratches, which adorned the pages in the form of corrections.
It seemed that in recent years she’d had to cross out many of the gateways. Usually a replacement was written underneath, but not always. All three of his chosen plants were common and readily accessible near gateways. It only took him a few days to gather enough to replace Medea’s stock, as well as build up a nice supply for himself, which he stashed in his room.
With the plants, he crafted several potions of varying concentrations. So far, none of them prevented his shifts in mood. Only the Roman chamomile remained. If that failed, he’d have to try rarer plants or concede that whatever was affecting him could not be solved with a simple potion.
Practical lessons had become more intense. Medea graduated him from repetitive wandless casting to various training exercises, and he soon understood why apprentices found her methods cruel. For his first exercise, she bade him lay on his back in the field. He was to conjure a shield no larger than his head and deflect small stones falling from above.
The task proved to be more difficult than he’d anticipated. At first he kept summoning a full body shield, which blocked the stones but earned him a magical slap. When he was finally able to get the size right, he never seemed to summon it in the right position in time. Soon he was bloody and bruised.
That was when the shitstorm began, literally. Medea declared he lacked sufficient motivation. She summoned feces from god knew where and rained them down from above. He rapidly improved, but not before taking half a dozen hits.
Not all her exercises were that grotesque. Most of the time, Medea simply picked a magical school for her own attacks and tasked him with surviving the onslaught. The injuries were near-constant, and he worked through his collection of healing potions in short order. Despite the pain, he enjoyed these lessons, the adrenaline rush satisfying some primal craving.
For a week now, they’d been working on the current lesson, which took place not in the meadow but in the forest, a place he had yet to explore on his own. He arrived early, ahead of Medea, and cast Magic Sight before entering. As usual, the whole of the island held a faint glow of magic. The trees themselves held even more, and the largest were bright against his senses.
Unlike the rest of the island, which was dotted with pine and wind-battered cypress, here the trees were mostly deciduous—tall and already changing into their fall colors. Shafts of sunlight broke through the canopy, dappling the forest floor. He found some semblance of a path, barely a game trail, and followed it through dense overgrowth.
Light dimmed as the leaves thickened overhead. Soon the air grew chilly. Moss blanketed trunks and branches. Every so often he caught a whisper of something in the distance or saw a light just outside his field of vision. Like the details of a dream fading upon waking, so too did the sights and sounds vanish as soon as he turned toward them.
The path led to a clearing dotted with fallen logs and scattered boulders. Magic Sight turned up no enchantments, and yet he couldn’t shake the feeling he was being watched. He stretched out on one of the logs and waited.
The forest was silent until Medea’s arrival. She tiptoed barefoot over the leaves and took a seat on the log a few feet away.
“They haven’t bothered you, have they?”
His head jerked up. “Who?”
“The spirits who dwell here. This is a sanctuary of sorts. Not all of them come. Many choose to make a last stand where they are, but others find this form of exile preferable to the alternatives.”
That explained the lights and odd sounds. He put his head back down. “Huh. I didn’t think spirits were real.”
“Of course they’re real. Didn’t you listen to a word I said when we talked about the fae?”
“When you talked about the fae.”
“You didn’t, did you?” She made a disgusted noise and got up. “It’s a shame, because they’re as worried as I am about the current state of the world. Not only that, you’ve got a target on your back. Soul like yours—they’d be eager to have it. I’ve forbidden them to talk to you. For your own safety. If they try, let me know straightaway and make no oaths or bargains. Spirits are—well, they’re tricky to deal with.”
Was she trying to bait him? She had to be, as she’d brought up the topic and he never would have guessed spirits were on the island. But to what end? He set the thought aside as Medea started explaining the day’s lesson, which involved anticipating magical attacks.
Spells could be felt as ripples in the ether. Bare skin helped, which explained her distaste for footwear. It was the reason so many nature-casters of old ran naked through the woods, giving rise to stories of nymphs and dryads. Nikolai enthusiastically suggested they strip for the lesson, which earned him a rap on the head and a stern warning that he was to remove his socks and boots only.
The object was to stand, feet grounded, and dodge the plant shoots Medea sent at him through the forest floor. Her attacks came in rapid succession, no doubt due to his colorful comment, and within the first ten minutes both his feet were bleeding profusely. Never had he needed to take a healing potion so fast.
Even after she slowed her attacks, he had difficulty sensing anything in time to dodge. An hour later, his feet were raw from so many regrowths of skin. It went like that all week. Yesterday the buildup of scar tissue had been so thick he could barely walk, and she had to halt the lesson to do a proper healing.
“Shall we go again?” Medea still wore a smile. She did nothing to disguise how much she enjoyed hurting him during their little lessons.
Nikolai gestured for her to wait and downed a healing potion. The dull ache in his back subsided, replaced by the tightness of fresh scar tissue. He’d have to get her to fix that. A look in the mirror this morning had revealed skin heavily marred by such spots. At least he’d gained a bit of weight back. Now that he knew the malaise was affecting him that badly, he’d taken to eating twice as much on his good days. It left him feeling bloated and ill, but what else was he to do?
“Ready.”
Medea studied him for a moment. “Let’s try something different.”
Great. He’d probably have to dodge feces again.
“Sit down with your back to that tree, firmly against the trunk. Good. Now close your eyes.”
Nikolai did as he was told, nose primed for the stray scent of shit. The bark rubbed unpleasantly on his recently healed back.
“This exercise is designed to calm your body and clear your mind.”
Medea had him relax his muscles, one by one, and focus on his senses. Wind brought the scent of the ocean and rustled the leaves overhead. Birds chirped. Water bubbled in a nearby stream.
“Let the magic of the grove flow through you. Open your mind to it. Allow yourself to reach beyond what your physical senses can detect.”
At first he felt nothing, then a slow trickle of information began to flow. A beetle larva chewed through the bark of a tree. Leaves reached up in reverence toward the sun. An earthworm worked steadily to tug a leaf underground. A pocket of fungus pushed against the soil; tonight, it would erupt as mushrooms. Even the soil itself was a living thing composed of microorganisms. And there something else . . . something sinister, hovering before him.
