Dark apprentice, p.40
Dark Apprentice, page 40
At last he found it. He tore open the stopper and gulped it down. As his hand dove back into the pouch for the breathing potion, the shield failed.
Fiery pain enveloped his body. The breathing potion in his hand cracked and burst, leaking green fluid into the surrounding water. He slurped at the water, searing the inside of his mouth. Had he gotten enough? No way to tell. His skin though, his skin wasn’t forming new blisters, and the pain subsided to a dull ache. The invulnerability potion worked.
Nikolai cast Magic Sight and the roiling magic appeared in all its glory. He dove into the middle, biting back a scream as the unbridled power threatened to shatter him. Whatever magic this was, he would master it. He wrapped the pulsing magic in his will and attempted to fuse it with his body.
Pain lanced through him, chased by the tremors of mana fatigue.
But he’d just taken a potion! If his mana drained completely, the invulnerability would fail. His lungs spasmed and darkness tinged the edges of his vision. Was he drowning, or did it just feel like it? Either way, he was out of time.
He paddled for the crevice in the rock. If he could make it halfway through the trench, he could squeeze through the overhang at the top and surface in time. It seemed to take twice as long to go half as far. He’d barely gotten past the crevice when white-hot pain seared his body. The invulnerability potion had failed.
He could no longer distinguish between the misery in his lungs and that of his skin. He swam forward, skin sloughing off in ribbons and floating into the deep. A curious fish tugged a piece still attached to his arm. He made to swing at it, but the beast darted away.
He paddled faster, muscles screaming. Injuries could be healed. All that mattered was getting to the surface before he drowned. He kicked frantically upward, head slamming into the roof of the fissure. Or was it the side? Impossible to see which way was up in the blurry seascape. His lungs spasmed again.
The world faded, and Nikolai with it.
37
DEATH CURSE
Medea sipped her tea and tried to concentrate on her book. It was no use. All week she’d ruminated on the Nikolai problem. Being back in Haven wasn’t helping. She hated sleeping at the Hanged Man, with its stuffy room and itchy blankets. Downstairs should’ve been a reprieve, but she was constantly reminded of her wayward apprentice. After so many luncheons together, her brain had formed an association between this place and Nikolai.
The townsfolk avoided her more than usual. Even the innkeeper, usually in good spirits, had barely spoken a word to her since she’d arrived and served her orders with downcast eyes. It wasn’t until a tearful girl, Shay-something, accosted her in the street with wild accusations that Medea realized the villagers thought she’d killed Nikolai.
She couldn’t wait to go home but dreaded that too. Nikolai’s time was almost up. She hoped he’d used it productively, but the realist in her doubted it was so. One way or another, they were going to have it out, and if he couldn’t shape up, she wasn’t sure what to do.
Breaking her vow to train him was out of the question, but he could always decide to walk away. As if that would ever happen! Even if it did, he would no doubt come back to haunt her after training under some lesser master. He’d challenge her, she’d kill him, and then she’d be right back where she started.
Medea shook her head. Already planning his death as if it were a sure thing. Was this what she’d been reduced to? She’d always had few peers and fewer friends, but it seemed she was destined to remain an outcast among her own kind. She suddenly wished her tea was spiked with brandy.
Rather than summon it herself, she flagged down the innkeeper. He approached cautiously, his demeanor excessively formal.
“Oh stop it,” she said. “I didn’t kill the boy. Can I get some brandy?”
“You didn’t?” The innkeeper visibly relaxed. “Thank the gods. Ever since you came back, rumors have flown. Everyone’s been asking me if I’ve seen him.”
“Nikolai’s fine. Or was, when I left him behind. The boy has far too much confidence and not nearly enough sense.”
To her chagrin, the innkeeper slid into the seat across from her and started talking local news. Petrov had been discovered dead in a secret room filled with black magic. The dueling club had fizzled out and the local youth were getting restless. Medea wanted to remind him about the brandy. He seemed to have forgotten, and now she was trapped in pointless conversation.
Come home.
Medea jerked out of her chair, assessing and reassessing her mental barriers. Ever since Nikolai had entered her mind, she’d worried about what other spells she failed to reapply after teleporting to London. A telepathic message should have knocked at the outskirts of her boundaries. This message had bypassed them completely. Who had the skill for such a thing? The voice, if telepathy could be called a voice, wasn’t one she recognized.
The innkeeper looked up at her with concern.
“I need to go.” She whirled away from the table, spurred as much by the desire to extricate herself from unwanted socialization as by the strangeness of the calling.
Harsh words pelted Nikolai’s awareness. He tried to open his eyes and found they’d been reduced to puffy slits. Two voices, both muted, sounded faintly in his ears.
“I tell you, it wasn’t that. I was just coming to get you . . .”
“Don’t lie to me!”
He’d been on the receiving end of Medea’s irritation often enough to recognize her voice, even through the haze. A small part of him wanted to listen, but his body dragged him back into unconsciousness.
When his head cleared again, the voices had been replaced with the subtle shifting of movement. Nikolai attempted to speak and a hundred tiny blades scraped against his throat. All he could manage was a groan.
“Nikolai?” Medea sounded concerned. Another ruse. “Can you hear me?”
“Y-yes.” He tried to shift to get a better look at her, but his body didn’t respond. “Can’t . . . move,” he rasped.
“You were badly burned.” Medea was no more than a blurry red shadow. “I’ve paralyzed you and shut down most of your pain receptors while I heal you. What happened?”
“I—”
“You were testing shields underwater,” Yoxtl interrupted, voice urgent. “She can’t hear this. Don’t say it was the curse! I spent a long time convincing her it wasn’t.”
Nikolai covered his pause with a cough, the pain of which set off a true coughing fit. “Shields,” he croaked. “Testing shields.”
“So I’ve been told.” Medea’s tone said she found this dubious. “But why did your shields fail?” Her shadow stopped moving. The answer, for whatever reason, mattered immensely.
“Mana. Ran out.”
“I see.” The shadow moved again. “I had worried it might have been your affliction. You need to work on your mana pool. I don’t know what else I can do to persuade you of that.”
How much healing would she do? Would she fix his face or allow his entire body to remain scarred as another sick lesson?
“Medea?”
“Yes?”
“Face first. Throat.”
“As soon as I’m done with your chest.”
“Face,” he insisted. “Please.”
There was a pause and he thought she would refuse—lord knew she hated to have her work interrupted—but the shadow moved over his eyes. The pain in his throat subsided to a dull ache, and the laboratory came into sharp focus. He lay on the center worktable. Medea’s hands wove the air above his scarlet chest. Yoxtl was curled on the back counter, pretending to sleep.
His limbs were bloated beyond recognition and covered with weeping, angry blisters. The skin ranged from taut red to crackly black, with gaping chunks of flesh missing. Someone had haphazardly thrown a towel over his crotch. He didn’t want to know how bad the damage was there. As long as Medea fixed it, that’s all that mattered.
“Not pretty, is it?” she said. “How did you even get in this state? In some places, it’s as though you’ve been burned by fire, while the rest of your body is simply cooked. A man with your condition needs to be more careful. It’s a miracle you survived.”
“With my condition,” he said bitterly. “Tell me, how am I supposed to live my life with my condition? Shall I take no risks, ever, in case it strikes? How can I do anything with this hanging over me?”
His voice rose. Yoxtl stared at him wide-eyed. Medea simply looked resigned. A tiny part of him cautioned this was not the time, he was at her mercy and needed her help. Piss Medea off now and he might be scarred for life or left to die. He didn’t care. He was beyond caring.
“I don’t know,” Medea said, “but it is not my concern.”
“Not your concern? It started the day after I moved here! You claim you have nothing to do with this, but that’s one hell of a coincidence. Why should I believe a word you say?”
“Because I am not a liar!” A jar flew into Medea’s hand. She wrenched the lid open and furiously dabbed a foul-smelling ointment on his chest.
“You might as well be. You do nothing to dispel my ignorance. I almost died tonight. It might not have been the curse—yes, I know it’s a curse—but it could have been. I suppose that doesn’t matter to you. What’s one more apprentice to the great Medea? I know you don’t care about me, but I thought at the very least you would honor your duty as my mentor.”
“I have! Time and again! Though you seem keen on ignoring my advice. Still you view some magic as better than others. When I scarred your face, did you turn to the library as I had urged you? No. Yoxtl tells me you crafted an illusion to hide your failure from the world. You learned nothing, and I’ll not heal that for you. Stop blaming me for your own ineptitude!”
“Me? You act as if the curse were my fault!”
“It is your fault! All of it! Your impatience, your greed, your insistence on coming here. That’s what brought you to this.”
Her careful knitting of his flesh stopped. To kill him, she need do nothing more than allow him to die. Maybe there was a way to convince her otherwise. He set his jaw and met her eyes squarely.
“I’m obviously not the apprentice you want. When you’re done healing me, I’ll leave. All I ask is that you remove the curse before I go.” He stamped down his thoughts of revenge. Though confident in his ability to detect a telepathic intrusion, he would take no chances.
She shook her head and began healing again. “The curse is not mine to remove. I will not interfere with someone else’s magic, especially given the circumstances under which it was placed. Really now, I grow quite weary of you blaming me for your own error in judgment.”
“What error in judgment?” Could the woman be any more vague? She acted like Yoxtl under the geas, tiptoeing around a topic for fear of triggering the spell, but for Medea it seemed self-imposed. Unfathomable, but he could work around the constraint. “What do you mean, you won’t interfere with someone else’s magic?”
“It’s not all magic, but curses in particular. If someone has one, they likely did something to deserve it, making it unethical for me to remove.” She paused and absently rubbed her face. “And sometimes the curse itself is indicative of a heinous crime.”
His mind raced. Who could have cursed him, if not her? Someone in Haven. Ethne? She wasn’t the type. Mr. Gallagher? Perhaps he’d found out Nikolai was banging his wife. But the man had no skill. Shailyn? Even less skill. His mind drifted to the last time he’d fucked her—under the tree he’d set on fire in a moment of rage. Shit. A lone hawthorn tree, he was sure of it.
The Irish said it was bad luck to harm a hawthorn tree, for they belonged to the fae. And he’d knocked over a milk saucer left as an offering. He’d never given any credence to the superstitions before, but now he knew spirits were real. Had he pissed off a spirit? Is that why Yoxtl could see the curse?
“Yoxtl. Yoxtl! Stop pretending to sleep. You’re not fooling anyone.”
The spirit opened its amber eyes and yawned. “What?”
“If I pissed off a fae—whatever spirit that is—could you help me make amends?”
Medea laughed bitterly and shook her head. She went to the cabinets, opening and shutting them again with undue force until at last she returned with another jar, which she slammed onto the table next to him.
Her mouth opened. Then closed. Then opened again. Finally, she blurted out, “What did you do the day we left Haven?”
“I put in my last day at the shop. I went home and packed.”
“That’s not all you did.” There was venom in her voice.
Had she known or simply guessed? In either case, there was no point in lying about it anymore. Time to see what truth would buy him. “I killed Petrov.”
“Yes, you did.” Her hands went back to work.
“What does Petrov have to do with—” But he stopped, for Yoxtl had fallen over in a fit of laughter.
“It was the Petrov guy,” Yoxtl burst out between laughs, “he cursed you.”
Had he? Nikolai replayed Petrov’s final moments in his mind. “Petrov didn’t have time to curse me. I struck quickly, without warning—”
“I bet you did,” muttered Medea.
“—so he’d have no chance of fighting back.”
“He didn’t need time,” Yoxtl said, glancing at Medea as though checking to see if this would violate the geas, but she focused resolutely on her healing. “It’s called a death curse. You cast it on yourself. If someone slays you, the curse ensures your killer faces justice.”
“It’s the kind of thing you want to check for and dispel before attempting to kill any reasonably talented Magi,” said Medea.
Nikolai closed his eyes. The world as he knew it reordered itself. Petrov! He’d never thought much of the old man. Even when Medea mentioned Petrov was good at curses, he hadn’t put two and two together. The curse on him was so masterful, so complex, it could only have come from Medea.
Except it hadn’t. It came from an old man in a dingy shop. One who had never amounted to anything.
“My head hurts.”
“Oh, good,” said Medea, “maybe it’s finally working.”
He frowned at her. “It’s too bad Petrov never bothered to show me how to cast spells like that. Then maybe I wouldn’t have killed him.”
“It’s too bad he took on such an ungrateful, impatient ass for an apprentice.”
Medea finished with his torso. His arm levitated and a chunk of flesh detached, dropping to the floor with a wet plop. She winced and stepped to the side, then began her work on the underside of the arm.
“I knew Petrov for many years,” she said. “He always found me good items, even if he didn’t see them as such. You could have waited and finished your apprenticeship with him first. It’s not like I was going anywhere. But no, you had to be impatient. Worse than that—impulsive! Did you even stop to consider the consequences of your actions before killing him?”
“I had two years left. Unlike you, my time is limited. I plan to make the most of it.”
“And how much of your time here has been fruitful, given the effects of the curse?”
“Less than I’d like,” he admitted. His time on the island felt infinitely longer, thanks to all the half-started, broken-up lessons.
“Did it not occur to you that I would have spoken with Petrov on your behalf, had you but asked?”
“No. And I didn’t think you’d wait for me.”
Her hands cupped his arm. The tissue underneath softened and changed color. “As you keep pointing out, time is not something I lack. Two years is nothing to me. I’d already given my vow to teach you. Unlike your word, mine means something. If Petrov hadn’t budged, I would have allowed you to join me in two years.”
Damnit, she was right. He’d been so caught up in the moment he hadn’t even considered if there were other options—but there was no use thinking about what might have been. It was done. The only thing that mattered now was moving forward.
He studied Medea as she worked her magic. Her perpetual frown intensified with her concentration, but she was still easy on the eyes, even more so now that she wasn’t trying to kill him. Of course he still owed her for the face. And she still couldn’t be allowed to train future students. But for now, he could set those things aside.
“There. I think I’m just about done.” Medea stepped back, her eyes roving over his body. “I’m going to release you now and reactivate your pain receptors. Let me know if I missed a spot.”
He gasped as his body flooded with sensation, then screamed at the fiery burning in his crotch. His hands clasped it through the towel and he nearly rolled off the table.
“Sorry! Sorry!” Medea’s magic halted his fall and the pain vanished as quickly as it had come.
“You healed everything . . . but that,” he panted.
Medea hugged herself. “It’s not something I touch with my magic.”
“It’s just a body part, like any other.”
“No, it’s not. It’s a—” She shook her head. “You’ll just have to take a potion.”
“And leave myself scarred?” She couldn’t be serious. Scarred face and cock, he’d never get laid again. “I don’t think you realize how important it is.”
She laughed ruefully. “Well do I know the importance men place on that.” She closed her eyes and leaned against the table, nails biting into the wood, breath measured. After a moment, she addressed Yoxtl. “Could you?”
Nikolai sent a pleading glance to the spirit. His fate hung on the next words.
“I don’t have the magic for it.”
The air left the room. Was this his life now, truly? It couldn’t be.
A golden beam shot from Medea’s hand to the spirit. Yoxtl’s fur stood up and crackled as though beset with electricity. An attack? But Yoxtl smiled and its amber eyes glowed intensely.
“Come get me when you’re done,” said Medea. “I’ll finish the rest.” She paused at the door, tone harsh. “It will be covered when I get back, understand?”
