The Book of Maladies Boxset

by D. K. Holmberg

  He made the same notation as before, though this time, he referenced himself more, adding in things that he could do to help her, including willingness to sacrifice to help Sam. It felt almost like he was trying to convince the paper to help him. It was a strange sensation, but it was the only thing that made sense to him.

  Then it was done. He felt weakened, and that gave him hope. If the healing was going to work, it needed to draw power and magic from him.

  “Did it work?” Beckah asked.

  “I don’t know.” His eyes were heavy, and he felt like drifting, letting himself fall into a slumber, but that couldn’t happen. He needed to remain awake, to help Sam if she came around.

  He felt hands slip behind him, supporting him. “I’m here,” Beckah said. “I’ll hold you.”

  “No. Sam.” His mind cleared a moment. “Anfer.”

  Beckah reached for something, and he felt a leaf pressed into his mouth. Alec sucked on the leaf, drawing from the anfer, hoping that it could grant him strength. All he needed was to remain awake, nothing else. If he could stay awake, he could help Sam.

  He felt the juice begin to run down into his stomach, and his heart began to race along with it. He welcomed the sensation of it and welcomed the warmth flowing through him, the steady hammering of his heart, and the quickening of his pulse.

  Alec sat up, taking a deep breath. “Thank you.”

  “I didn’t do anything. You did.”

  He reached toward Sam and saw that her shoulder wound appeared to have knitted closed, the healing taking place following the last notes he made on the paper. Was it the choice of paper that had made the difference, or was it more about the different ratio of blood that he’d used?

  Color began to return to Sam’s cheeks, enough that he hadn’t realized how pale she had been before it did. Alec brushed back Sam’s hair and felt a slight sheen of sweat on her forehead. “Just wake up, Sam,” he whispered.

  The tiredness had faded from him, but he hadn’t given Sam another stimulant. Maybe that was what she needed.

  “I need more anfer leaves.”

  Beckah handed him another leaf, and he rolled this up, pinching it between his fingers, and stuck it into Sam’s cheek.

  Waiting was the hardest part. As he did, he looked around Bastan’s office, wondering what had happened. Why was the tavern empty? Where had everyone gone?

  Where was Tray?

  He had a hard time imagining Tray abandoning his sister, regardless of how angry he might be about what he’d overheard in the courtyard. That made it more likely that something had happened to him.

  Clearly, Tray got Sam here, so then what? And if Bastan had been here, would he not have sought out Alec to help her? Or sent some of his men to find him? That he’d seen no sign of any of them on his way to the tavern concerned him even more.

  As he continued to gaze around the office, he thought he saw something along one of the far walls, but a soft moan from Sam caught his attention.

  Alec turned back to her just as she opened her eyes.

  “Alec?” Her voice came out in a hoarse croak.

  “I’m here,” Alec said.

  Sam tried to sit up, but he kept his hand on her good shoulder, keeping her from attempting to do too much. “Where are we?” Sam asked.

  “Bastan’s office.”

  “How… How did I get here? I remember fighting with Marin, and I remember her stabbing me, but not much more than that.”

  “When you passed out, I knew you needed more healing than what the university could offer. I was going to take you to my father’s shop, but…”

  “But what?”

  “But Tray convinced me to bring you to Bastan. He carried you here, while I stopped at my father’s apothecary shop for supplies.”

  “You saw Tray?”

  Alec nodded slowly. “Sam, there’s something you should know.”

  “He knows, doesn’t he?”

  “He knows. He overheard you and Marin and whatever conversation the two of you had.”

  “Kyza!”

  Beckah sucked in a breath at Sam’s swear. “You shouldn’t use the god’s name in such a way,” Beckah said.

  Sam rolled her head toward Beckah and blinked slowly. “What have the gods ever done for me?”

  “Sam. I don’t know where Tray or Bastan have gone.”

  Sam started to sit, and Alec tried to restrain her, but her strength had returned enough that she was able to shrug him off. “Then something happened to them.” She looked around, frowning. “How did you get into Bastan’s office?”

  “The tavern is empty,” he said.

  “Then something is definitely wrong. Bastan never leaves the tavern empty, and if he does, there are at least some men faithful to him still nearby, keeping watch. If Bastan is gone, and if the men who keep an eye on the tavern are gone… What happened to Marin?” Sam asked, looking back at him.

  “After she attacked you, she picked up the man who had been on the ground—I’m presuming it was the man we sought—and escaped.”

  Sam sighed. “I don’t understand. There has to be some connection, but what is it?”

  “What kind of connection are you afraid of?" Alec asked.

  “Don’t you find it odd that Bastan asked me to rescue a man from the university that only you would be able to help me find and then Marin just happened to appear? And then, Tray shows up following the attack and runs off with me, bringing me here, and now, everyone is missing, including Bastan.” Sam stood and seemed to wobble for a moment.

  Alec leaped to his feet and slipped his arm around her for support. She gave him an appreciative smile.

  “Can you grab her staff?” he asked Beckah, nodding toward the wall.

  Beckah went around Bastan’s desk and grabbed the staff leaning along the wall. As she did, she sucked in a sharp breath of air. “Alec?”

  “What is it?”

  “There’s… There’s someone else here.”

  Alec glanced at Sam. He helped her toward the desk, and when they reached it, she gripped the edge before looking on the other side. After what Beckah had said, Alec had half expected it to be Bastan, but the figure was too large and too muscular.

  “Tray?” Sam whispered.

  32

  Another Scribe

  Sam still felt the effects of whatever poison Marin had used on her. She couldn’t believe that the woman had poisoned her in the first place, but she had. She hadn’t killed her, but she might as well have.

  And now Tray lay motionless in the back of Bastan’s office.

  She ran to him and fell forward, her legs too weak to support her. She grabbed his face, afraid that he’d already passed, but it was still warm, though blood trickled down the side of his head. He didn’t move, and she checked the artery in his neck much like Alec had taught her to do and found that he still had a pulse. That much was good.

  “Can you help him?” she asked, looking up to Alec.

  Alec knelt down next to Sam and did a quick examination of Tray. His hands ran over Tray’s head, then moved down to his sides, working in a practiced fashion. He leaned in and listened, pausing for a moment as he did, and then sat up, a pained look on his face.

  “You can’t help him?” Sam said.

  “It’s not that I can’t help them, but we’ve used too much of our strength trying to bring you back. I… I don’t have any left,” he said.

  Sam shook her head. “You have to do something. You have to try. We can’t just let Tray die.”

  “Sam—if we try to heal him, we’ll use too much of our own strength. And if we are too weak, I don’t think it will work.”

  There had to be something they could do, some way they could get Tray help. “Alec, he would do anything to help me, so there has to be something I can do.”

  “We almost didn’t survive the last healing,” Alec said. “You can barely walk, and I needed a stimulant to bring me back around, otherwise I wouldn’t be awake.”

 
It seemed impossible that there wasn’t anything that could be done for Tray. After everything they’d been through, after everything they’d learned of their abilities, how could they be at this point, unable to help her brother? That seemed too cruel. Impossible, and… she refused to believe it.

  She worked her way around the desk and saw her cloak lying on the ground. She started toward it, but staggered and fell, sprawling forward onto it. All she needed was to reach into her hidden pocket, find the sheet of easar paper, and… What? What did she think she could do alone?

  Alec was right. She was too weak. He was too weak. To be effective, both Kaver and Scribe had to have the necessary strength to make the augmentation work. With healing, it required a specific touch, from both of them.

  Would she lose Tray before she even had a chance to explain what had happened? Would she lose her brother and never have the opportunity to tell him what he meant to her? What did it matter that Marin had lied to her? What did it matter that he was not her brother by blood? He was still her brother.

  “What are you doing?”

  She looked up to see Alec watching Beckah. She was kneeling over something—easar paper, Sam realized.

  “I thought it was worth a try,” Beckah said.

  “It requires a specific ability,” Alec explained. “You need both Scribe and Kaver.”

  Sam had a hard time focusing. She really was tired. “Tray is at least half Kaver,” she said.

  “You’re not helping,” Alec chided.

  “Let her try,” Sam said.

  “What are the odds that she might be a Scribe?”

  “Probably the same odds that you were a Scribe when I stumbled into your apothecary,” Sam said. They hadn’t discovered what made a pairing of Scribe and Kaver, but she suspected it was little more than chance. It certainly had only been chance that she had stumbled into Alec’s apothecary shop. Had she ended up anywhere else, she wouldn’t have gotten the help she needed. She wouldn’t have survived the poison from the Theln’s arrow.

  “Are you going to help, or are you going to continue to give me a hard time,” Beckah said to Alec. “Or are you worried that I’ll be better at this than you?”

  Sam smiled in spite of herself. “Does she always give you a hard time like that?” Sam asked.

  Alec groaned. “Sometimes worse,” he said.

  “Good.”

  Alec sighed. “Fine. Let’s prove that this doesn’t work. What you need to do is write down the symptoms and how you intend to treat it.”

  “How I intend to treat it? That doesn’t make sense.”

  “Pretend that you have access to all of the university resources. Pretend that you have access to everything that my father has in his apothecary shop. Use that and write it down.”

  Beckah glanced up at him, almost a look of disbelief on her face. “Maybe this was a mistake,” Beckah said.

  “No. I think it’s worth trying.”

  Sam could tell from the way he said it that Alec didn’t expect it to work, but he was willing to attempt it. That meant something to her.

  Beckah turned her attention back to the page and started writing.

  Sam couldn’t see what she was doing, and maybe that was for the best. If she could see her documentation, she might compare it too much to what Alec did, and there was no benefit in that.

  “Good. That’s good,” Alec said.

  “Do you think this might work?” Beckah began, and Sam noted the scratching of her pen across the page.

  Curiosity got the best of her, and she looked up, turning to watch Beckah as she wrote. From her angle, crouched as she was on the ground, she couldn’t read the words on the easar paper.

  “That could work,” Alec said. “You might try adding a comment about how to heal his wounds.”

  “I didn’t see any wounds, other than the one on his head.”

  “There are likely internal wounds,” Alec said.

  Beckah nodded and turned her attention back to the page, the pen scratching along the surface.

  And then she stopped.

  Sam looked over and saw Beckah leaning back on her heels. “Oh.”

  She started to wobble and then leaned backward.

  Alec was there and caught her before she could fall. He watched Beckah for a moment, his face twisted in an expression of confusion. “Beckah?”

  “I… I feel… exhausted.”

  Alec watched her for a moment before looking over to Sam. “How? How could this work?”

  Sam flicked her gaze crawled around to the back of the desk, where Tray lay unmoving. He was part Kaver, which would explain that, but it wouldn’t explain why Beckah would be able to serve as Scribe to him. “Do you think it could have anything to do with the fact that you’re at the university?”

  “I was your Scribe long before I went to the university,” Alec said.

  “But you’d resisted going.” Sam wasn’t sure what she was getting at, only that there seemed to be a connection between the university and Scribes. There had to be, didn’t there?

  The princess had access to the university, as well, and the kind of access she had indicated that she had more than a passing familiarity with it.

  “What if there’s something about those who succeed at the university?” Sam asked.

  “Why would that matter?”

  She shrugged. “I can’t say that I understand, only that it would be the only other connection. I mean, even the princess had some connection to the university.”

  “What of Marin’s Scribe?” Alec asked.

  Sam thought for a moment before catching her breath. Marin hadn’t said anything about a Scribe, but if she had been at the university, there had to be a reason. Was she searching for a Scribe—or was she searching for her Scribe?

  “We need to meet with one of your masters.”

  “What will that do?” Alec asked.

  “We have questions. I think it’s time that we have answers.”

  33

  The Next Step

  After waiting for nearly an hour, Sam’s strength began to return. Once it started, it built quickly. She breathed out a sigh, wanting nothing more than to run to the university with Alec, but she had to wait. Tray still hadn’t fully recovered.

  It still amazed her that Alec’s friend was able to connect to Tray, Scribe to Kaver. There had to be some answer, some connection, that made it so the two of them could work together, but if so, wouldn’t Marin have known?

  Maybe it only required the right potential. Sam and Alec meeting had certainly been chance, no different than this. Could that be all there was? Chance?

  She sat in Bastan’s tavern, quietly nursing a mug of hot tea. She didn’t want anything stronger, not wanting the ale to cloud her mind, not when there was so much still to do.

  “He’s awake,” Alec said. He stood in the doorway of Bastan’s office, his face drawn, and his eyes looking tired.

  “How is he?”

  “Recovering. He doesn’t know what happened, other than that when he brought you here, he was attacked. He didn’t get to see who attacked him.”

  “Bastan?” Is that why he’d not returned? What was his connection to the man they’d tried to save?

  “You’ll have to ask him.”

  “You haven’t told him about how he was healed, have you?” Sam asked. That had been their agreement. They didn’t want to reveal the truth until they knew how Tray would react.

  “I haven’t told him. He deserves to know. If he has this potential, he deserves a chance to work with it and discover what it means. Think about what would have happened had you never learned what it meant for you to be a Kaver.”

  She didn’t like the idea of keeping it from Tray, but until she knew, until she could be certain that he hadn’t completely abandoned their connection, she wasn’t comfortable with telling him. “When it’s the right time, I will share it with him.”

  Alec took her hands and squeezed. “I’ll wait out here.” He held her ga
ze a moment before looking past her, toward Beckah sitting in the back of the tavern alone.

  Sam had preferred that she remain that way, but she suspected Alec would go over to her. And she couldn’t be jealous—she shouldn’t—but she was. She couldn’t answer why, though.

  Sam sighed and stood, heading for Bastan’s office. Sam had picked up the statues and put them back where they belonged, to the best of her recollection, but she left the paintings leaning against the walls of the office. She could only imagine Bastan’s reaction when he returned. If he returned, she reminded herself.

  “Tray?” She paused at the door, looking at her brother as he sat propped against the wall behind Bastan’s desk. He had changed so much in the last few months; his eyes wiser, his body thicker, more muscular, but those weren’t the most noticeable changes. There was something else that she couldn’t quite put a finger on, but it was just as important.

  “Sam. What happened here?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. There was an attack. I was hoping you would be able to tell me about that.”

  Tray surveyed the office. “When I got here, Bastan was gone. There were three of them, but they moved too quickly. They knocked me out, and apparently, left me for dead.”

  “Why did they leave you?” Sam asked, taking a few steps into the room.

  Tray shrugged. “I don’t know. Probably because I was useless to them.”

  “Why did they leave me?”

  He met her gaze and then shrugged. “I didn’t let them see you.”

  “How?” When he didn’t answer, she sighed. “Please, Tray. How?”

  “I covered you.” He met her eyes for a long moment. “You’ve protected me my entire life. It was time I returned the favor. What are you going to do?” Tray asked.

  Sam walked over to Bastan’s desk and leaned against it. “I have to find out what Marin’s up to.”

  “I was only to watch shipments in and out of the university. Nothing more than that.” He hesitated. “So… she’s my mother?” There was a bit of defiance in his tone, but she could also hear his confusion. He looked a bit lost.