by P. D. Kalnay
Chapter 3 – Magic’s Cost
I woke in my bed. Mr. Ryan was asleep in the chair that Ivy always used for watching movies. I had more pain in my hands than I’d felt in my entire life to that point—all added up together. I raised a hand in front of my face and saw it was wrapped in bandages. My movement woke Mr. Ryan.
“I see you’ve finally decided to get up,” he said.
“What happened?”
“We’ve been waiting, all this time, for you to tell us. Even your grandmother was worried, and she’s really not the type.”
All this time?
“How long have I been in bed?” I asked.
“Three weeks today.”
“No way!”
“Way.” Mr. Ryan smiled. “Your grandmother sent Ms. Mopat out to the smithy to check on you when you didn’t come in for dinner. She found you passed out in the dirt by the anvil.”
Based on the way my hands hurt, I knew I must have caught the two halves of the burning ring. Why did I do something so stupid? I wondered.
“Did she find anything else?” I asked.
Mr. Ryan gave me sad smile and shook his head.
“More worried about what you were making than your hands?” he asked. “They’re badly burned.”
My hands felt as though they were holding hot coals from the fire, but I forced myself to ignore that and sat up.
“Ms. Mopat had to fetch your grandmother, and together, with a pair of long tongs, they extracted two fiery rings from your hands and set them on the anvil. Neither could look at the rings for long, let alone touch them. Then they carried you out and locked the doors.”
“And they’ve left the smithy locked-up for three weeks?”
“I had a peek, from the doorway, when I arrived, but I didn’t go inside. Whatever you heated in the forge is still shinning away on the anvil. That kind of magic shouldn’t be possible here, for even a brief time. It’s maintained itself for weeks. Your grandmother is properly terrified now, and she blames herself for giving you a free hand.”
The job wasn’t finished. I was sure of that.
“I have to go out there,” I said.
I tried to get out of bed, but fell back, feeling woozy.
“You’ve eaten little in the last three weeks. You’re too weak to go anywhere.”
“OK, I’ll eat something first. Then I have to finish them.”
Most work at the forge ends in the same way. The rings were no different. Mr. Ryan grabbed a tray of food from my dresser. The soup was still warm, so someone must have been replacing it regularly while I slept. My hands were bandaged like two giant mittens, making feeding myself impossible. Mr. Ryan fed me soup and toast while I sat up in bed. It was weird. When the food was finished, I swung my legs off the bed and forced myself to stand. I still felt weak, but better than I had before the food.
“Are you sure?” Mr. Ryan asked. “Whatever you made has already sat for three weeks. I’m sure it can wait until you recover.”
I felt the smithy calling to me, not so much in my bones as in my incredibly painful hands. I hadn’t finished the job yet.
“It’s time to finish it. Will you help me get dressed and take off these bandages?”
Mr. Ryan helped me into a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt. He hesitated at the bandages.
“Your grandmother said your hands are in bad shape. She couldn’t take you to a hospital because of the… unusual nature of the injuries.”
“I can’t work with these bandages on.” A large part of me didn’t want to see my hands, but I held them out to Mr. Ryan anyway.
He carefully peeled back the white gauze. When he was down to the last layer, I saw light coming through the thin material. My hand was glowing with the distinctive yellow-gold light of the World Tree. Mr. Ryan was extra careful not to touch my hand. When he moved on to my other hand, I took a good look the uncovered one. Dark red lines ran across the skin of my palm and fingers. They formed the same endless pattern I’d inscribed on the ring.
“This looks bad,” Mr. Ryan said.
I couldn’t disagree, but if I didn’t finish—the pain would be for nothing.
“I don’t think I should touch anything on the way,” I said.
Mr. Ryan got the doors and opened the lock to the smithy too. He already had the key in his pocket. For the first time, it wasn’t dark inside the little room because two rings of white-yellow light lit the smithy like powerful incandescent lightbulbs. As bright as they were, I found I was now able to look at the rings without pain (not counting my hands of course).
“You should maybe stay out here,” I told Mr. Ryan.
He didn’t argue. I walked over to the anvil and stared at the half-rings. Though I knew what I had to do, it was more than a little daunting.
Putting it off won’t change anything, I told myself.
Then I reached down and grabbed a fiery ring in each hand. I almost blacked out again from the pain. Desperately, I flung my hands at the water barrel, smashing through a thin skim of ice. The frigid water felt wonderful. Steam rose around my face, blinding me temporarily, but I hardly noticed. The half-rings were writhing like eels trying to escape my grasp. Something of me was going into the rings, and I was absorbing some intangible quality from the rings into my body. Squeezing for all I was worth, I held them tightly until they stopped moving, and the water stopped bubbling. Only then did I pull the rings from the barrel and carry them to the open door. I held the rings up in the grey afternoon sunlight. At first glance they appeared solid, but squinting, I could make out the fine lines in the pattern where they’d been cut from the greater whole. My hands no longer glowed. They were still horribly painful. Then I remembered something else.
“Would you hold these for a minute?” I asked Mr. Ryan.
It said something for his courage (or his trust in me) that Mr. Ryan simply held out his hands and let me drop the rings into them without question. I went back into the smithy to get my knife. It took me a minute to find it under the workbench in the dirt. Its sheath had been on my belt, three weeks earlier. I’d have to ask my grandmother where she’d put it. I carried the bare knife outside to examine. There was a tiny nick in the blade, presumably from cutting the ring, but it was otherwise unharmed.
“Is that the knife you made with Mr. Smith?” Mr. Ryan asked.
“Yeah, I needed it to cut the ring.”
Mr. Ryan looked at the identical gold-green rings he was holding.
“Which one?” he asked.
“There’s only one ring,” I said, feeling exhausted.
“One ring to rule them all?”
Somewhere in the middle of laughing at his unexpected joke—I collapsed again.
***
I woke, a few hours later, to a room full of people. I kept my eyes closed and listened.
“There’s nothing I can do for the scarring,” Dr. Davis’s gravelly voice said. “It isn’t only a physical wound, and the enchantment is far beyond my ability to deal with, particularly here.”
“Can you tell what the effects will be?” Mr. Ryan asked.
“No idea,” Dr. Davis said. “The mistress of this house is more qualified than I in that regard.”
“It’s too early to even hazard a guess,” Gran said. “Have you finished?”
“Yes, his hands should be functional in a few weeks. I can’t speak to residual pain. The burns are unusual, and Jakalain is not the same boy I’ve been examining for the last fifteen years.”
“You’ve been well paid,” Gran said. “I expect you to keep silent about your visit here.”
Nobody could have missed the threat in my grandmother’s voice. When he spoke again, it was clear Dr. Davis hadn’t.
“Of course, Mistress,” he said. “If there is nothing else… I will take my leave.”
“You may go,” Gran said. “The Mopat will see you out.”
I heard the door open and close.
“You might as well open your eyes, Jack,” Gran said. “
We know you’re awake.”
“How long did I sleep this time?” I asked.
“A few days,” Mr. Ryan said.
“I told you to be careful. Would you describe your recent behaviour as careful?” Gran asked. She sounded angry.
“I’ll be more careful from now on,” I said. It was an easy promise to keep. I’d used up all the Blood of the World Tree making the ring. “Where are my knife and the… other things I made?”
Mr. Ryan and my grandmother shared a meaningful glance.
“The rings and the knife are in the top drawer of your dresser. How do your hands feel?” Mr. Ryan asked.
Only a single layer of bandage covered my hands. I flexed my fingers gingerly. My hands still hurt, but now it was more like I’d grabbed a hot pot on the stove.
“They’re better than before.”
I climbed out of bed and painfully pulled my top dresser drawer open. The knife was back in its sheath, and the rings sat next to it, atop my boxer shorts. Leaving the knife where it lay, I took the rings and sat back on the edge of my bed. They appeared to be smaller versions of the original ring, with one exception. The ends of the greater pattern, where the cut had been made, were now visible.
“What exactly are those?” Gran asked.
“Two halves of a whole,” I said turning the rings over in my hands. “A broken pattern that wishes to be complete again.”
“Why did you make them?” Mr. Ryan asked.
“For you,” I said.
“For me?”
“One half is for you.” I held the rings out to him, one in each hand. “You should pick.”
Mr. Ryan took the ring from my right hand without hesitation.
“What do you expect them to do?” he asked.
“Find each other,” I said, returning the other ring to my sock drawer.
“It looks like an arm band,” Gran said.
I shrugged. Mr. Ryan slid the ring up his left arm, stopping just below the sleeve of his black polo shirt. The ring slid easily and stretched somehow to accommodate his substantial muscle.
“Is that wise?” Gran asked.
“I have a good deal of faith in him,” Mr. Ryan said.
He seemed less than confident a moment later, but I couldn’t blame him. The ring sank into his flesh in much the same way the binding vine had done on my wrist in the First World. As had been the case with the vine, it left a tattoo of sorts behind. The complex twisting pattern, from the original ring, now circled Mr. Ryan’s upper arm in shimmering, metallic golden-green as he moved it around to get a better look.
“Who is the other ring for?” Gran asked.
I smiled at Mr. Ryan. He was rubbing his new tattoo with a thumb.
“As Ivy tells it… dragons really do like gold,” I said.
Mr. Ryan gave me a tight grin.
“I’ll take the other half with me when I go to the First World,” I told Gran.
“How much of the Blood went into these?” she asked.
“All the rest.”
Chapter 4 – A Hefty Key
With summer holidays fast approaching, I was excited to see Ivy again. My weapons practice, and general making of things, had been put on hold due to the poor condition of my hands. After weeks of healing, and whatever Dr. Davis had done, my hands didn’t look so bad anymore. They’d returned to their normal colour… unless you looked closely at the skin. The pattern from the ring hadn’t disappeared. It remained visible, as fine red lines under my skin, covering the insides of both hands. My hands still hurt—a lot—and I couldn’t hold a hammer or a practice sword. I told the few people at school who’d asked that I’d burned my hands in the kitchen. My lie was uniformly accepted.
One thing that was nice was Mr. Ryan stuck around. He said he wouldn’t leave again before summer. He also said I didn’t need my hands to swim, run, or do the footwork from the katas. I had many more conversations with Mr. Ryan in those weeks. We talked about all kinds of topics, and life in general, but we never spoke of the armband, or the First World. I think we both knew it wasn’t the right time. All winter, I’d worried over Ivy, locked in a cell in the Talantial palace, but I had no idea how to help her. Finally, the day of her return arrived. Following a mostly sleepless night, I stood waiting, next to Gran and Mr. Ryan, in the little room at the end of Gran’s basement hallway.
Whatever deal Gran had made involved precise arrival and departure times for Ivy’s visits. Torn over whether to give them to her right away, or in private, I’d left Ivy’s butterfly hair clips up in my room. Truthfully, I thought kissing might result. I didn’t want my reward to be interrupted by my grandmother’s, or Mr. Ryan’s, presence. I danced nervously from foot to foot as we waited. A pillar of golden light shot up from the circle carved into the floor. Three things were strange about that—not counting the whole magically-travelling-between-worlds thing as strange. The first was that I felt the light. The pillar pulled at my body like a gentle current. It was strongest in my hands, and they rose up of their own accord towards the circle. The second was that I felt a sickly wrongness in the vine tattooed on my left wrist. It made me want to vomit. The third strange thing was the person who appeared in the circle wasn’t Ivy. Instead, Sir Andriel, who I’d met on my ill-fated visit to the First World, stood before us. He wore an old-fashioned, black three-piece suit with a small World Tree monogrammed in silver thread on the left breast. I took a step forward, hoping Ivy was standing behind him. She wasn’t.
The ancient knight looked human now and far more than a single year older. He nodded to me in greeting.
“Well met, Jakalain,” he said.
I was about to demand to know where Ivy was, but Gran was way ahead of me.
“Where is Ivangelain?” she asked coldly. The way she asked caused Sir Andriel to take a small step back. I’d inadvertently taken a step away from her too. Gran was bringing enough intimidation for the both of us. “An agreement was made. She’s to spend four summers under my roof.”
“I’ve been sent as a neutral envoy,” Sir Andriel said. “I volunteered for the role.”
“Very brave, or very foolish,” Gran said softly. “An agreement was made.”
Mr. Ryan set a gentle hand on her shoulder. She gave him a surprised look.
“Plenty of time for threats and killing later,” he said. “Let’s hear the full message first.” He removed his hand and turned back to Sir Andriel. “Out with it boy,” he commanded the old knight.
“No one has called me boy in over a thousand–” Sir Andriel’s mouth fell open, and he stared at Mr. Ryan.
“Ivy said Sir Andriel was her friend, and the only one at the Talantial palace to show her any kindness,” I said.
“I wish I could have been a better one,” Sir Andriel said. “She deserves better.”
“Have you held to your vows?” Mr. Ryan asked.
“All of them.” Sir Andriel said. “Although, sometimes—by the letter—rather than the spirit. There is much to tell.”
He looked around at the little room.
“We can discuss it over tea,” Gran said.
***
We sat in the sitting room where important matters got decided at Gran’s. A replacement coffee table, I’d made, sat between us. The table held a silver tea set and a plate full of warm chocolate chip cookies.
“The current situation came to a head after Ivangelain returned to the palace,” Sir Andriel began. “She bore a new confidence and returned to her cell without complaint. I met her, and escorted her there, so no others noted her new necklace or its enchantments. Shortly after his duel with Jakalain, Duzalain was demoted to Third Prince. The sword was a treasured heirloom. Its loss by his hand was punished severely. Duzalain had ever been cruel to young Ivangelain, and a few days after her return, he paid a visit to her cell. Doubtless… to exact a measure of retribution.”
“What happened?” I asked. “Is Ivy OK?”
“She wasn’t harmed,” Sir Andriel said. “But Duzalain died h
orribly, three days later. Her necklace proved more than sufficient protection.”
“How so?” Mr. Ryan asked.
“I have only the story of the guardsman who came in response to Duzalain’s screams. He claimed a swarm of bees surrounded Ivangelain before returning to her throat. Duzalain was covered in ugly black sores that festered over the following days. He died fever-mad and screaming to his last breath. None of the healers could affect a cure. Careful examination of the necklace, by those most learned in such arts, followed. Each left the cell unwilling to try their hand at breaking its enchantments.”
“Did you intend such a thing?” Gran asked me.
What? I just made a present for a girl I liked. I remembered something Ivy had once said out in the garden.
“No, but bees only sting when provoked.” Maybe I should have felt sympathy for Duzalain, but he’d tried to hurt Ivy.
Sir Andriel continued his story.
“Ivangelain became a dangerous, unknown quantity in the palace, but she still had value to the three Houses. Coercing her had become a chancy proposition, but a method of control remained.”
I looked at the vine tattoo on my wrist.
“They planted the vine,” I guessed.
“They planted the vine,” Sir Andriel agreed. “A fast ship was sent to Knight’s Haven, and the vine was transplanted, years early. Ivangelain’s pain was as horrible as Duzalain’s had been. No slave would have willing moved so far from a planted vine. Another ship stood ready, in the harbour, waiting for that day. I carried her to the ship, and escorted her to Knight’s Haven, myself. Never have I felt as helpless as I did on that voyage. She recovered only when the island came into sight on the horizon. I don’t believe Ivangelain will be able to take the smallest journey from Knight’s Haven again.”