I took my own seat, relaxing a little. Friendly. This wasn’t too dramatic a change. I could manage this.
Beatrice sat near me for the first time since the night of our arrival, and I frowned at her. She looked tired and drawn.
“Don’t you have a babysitter on purpose to stop you wearing yourself out?” I asked, forgetting for a moment her rank and position. “Did you take a break at all over Midwinter?”
“I have no time for frivolity or celebrations,” she said. “People are dying.”
My stomach churned, and I pushed away my plate, no longer hungry. She was right, of course, although I had spent a lovely two days relaxing.
Her face softened. “I don’t mean you all. You’re doing what you can. And so am I.”
I frowned. “But burning yourself out won’t help anyone. I wish I could help.”
I straightened, a sudden thought striking me. “Maybe I can.”
Beatrice looked at me curiously, and I appreciated that her first thought wasn’t to deny it. I leaned forward, full of eagerness.
“Honestly, without the ability to store compositions, I’m not much use trailing around with my year mates. Not when Acacia doesn’t trust me to open my mouth anywhere near a healing tent.”
“I heard about that.” Beatrice raised an eyebrow, but she looked amused. “I wish I had seen it.”
I grinned wryly. “I can follow instructions, I promise. That was a once off.”
She raised her eyebrow again, and I grimaced.
“Mostly.” I pressed on. “I just mean that if you let me work with you, I’ll follow your instructions down to the last detail.”
She looked apologetic. “I’m afraid you don’t have the training to work with me, Elena. It’s nothing personal, I promise.”
“I know,” I said. “I can’t do anything to help you puzzle out the problem. But what I do have is raw strength. I’ve seen you at work. There’s a lot of repetition as you test things with minute variances. I’m sure it’s complex to set up and keep track of and analyze, but a lot of the compositions you’re composing don’t really take that much skill. Not individually. You could write them out on bound, safe parchment, and then I could read them out and add the power in. Then you can save your strength for analyzing the results.”
As I spoke, Beatrice’s expression had gradually shifted from apologetic, to interested, to almost hopeful.
“I don’t want you exhausting yourself, either, Elena. You’re only a trainee.”
I brushed her words aside with a gesture. “But I’m not a normal trainee, am I? If I was, I wouldn’t be stuck being useless all day. Let me help you. Please. I promise I’ll let you know once I drain myself each day.”
“Well…” She looked down at the table and then back at me. “You’d have to check with Acacia. She might not want you to put your other studies on hold, and we would need her agreement.”
I leaped to my feet, my meal forgotten. “Thank you! I’m sure I can convince her. Just leave it to me.”
It took me a little effort to track her down, but once I had fully explained my proposition, she put up less protest than I had expected.
“So you’d be under Beatrice’s direct supervision the whole time? And you promise not to over-extend yourself?”
I nodded quickly.
“Then I think it’s an excellent idea. It will give you the chance to get some real practice which you’re not getting at the moment.”
I embraced her enthusiastically, but she just chuckled and pushed me away.
“Plus it will get you out of my hair.” She winked at me. “How could I say no to that?”
I grinned at her and flew back to the dining room, eager to tell Beatrice of my success.
We started the next day. Reese seemed torn about my inclusion, clearly not wanting to have an inexperienced trainee messing in their systems. But at the same time, his eyes lingered often on Beatrice’s gray face. He was concerned for her, and he didn’t have the strength to carry all the compositions on his own.
We soon fell into a rhythm. The most complex and delicate compositions were done by Beatrice, the more intermediate ones by Reese, and anything simple and repetitive by me. At first they both watched me like hawks whenever I composed. To check my work, of course, but also, I suspected, at least a little from curiosity.
But they soon grew used to me and began to trust that I could complete the compositions they assigned, reading them word for word and injecting a sufficient amount of power. It was obvious from the first day why Beatrice ended up exhausted. And why she had no doubt ended up exhausted and burned out on the front lines and been sent back to Corrin. She threw herself into her work with single-minded dedication and focus.
And Reese—for all I disliked him—wasn’t much better. Once they got going, their work absorbed them fully.
It was a fortunate circumstance for me, since it saved me from constant pesky questions about my energy levels. In fact, it wasn’t until the very end of the day that Beatrice looked at me, a crease between her brows.
“Elena. You’re still here. Don’t tell me we’ve overworked you on your first day. I could have sworn you promised to say something when—”
“Don’t be silly. I’m fine.” I smiled and jumped up from my chair, showing her through my energetic actions that I was far from drained.
“Oh.” She looked a little taken aback. “Well then. That’s excellent.” She watched me curiously for another moment before Reese distracted her with a question about one of the records they had made. I could almost see her interest in me fading away as she considered the problem he was presenting.
But when I went to slip from the room, Reese stopped me.
“Thank you,” he said, his voice quiet, and his eyes moving significantly to Beatrice.
I followed his gaze, and smiled. She had regained some of her color despite the long day, and she had a spark of energy in her eye that she had lacked at the meal the night before.
“Thank you,” I said. “For letting me be helpful. I’ll see you tomorrow.” He nodded once, and this time I did manage to escape. I almost ran to the meal, my heart lighter than it had been since we arrived.
Finally I had found a way for my powers to be useful.
Chapter 15
I helped all the next day. And the next after that. The other trainees and students had been excluded from observing since Beatrice told Acacia she had reached a critical stage of her research and wanted no interruptions. I still couldn’t really understand what they were doing, or the process they were using, but there was enough repetition in the compositions they called on me for that I became quite adept at them.
The workings themselves ceased to be a challenge, and I found my mind wandering to Lucas’s nighttime lessons back in the arena. While Beatrice and Reese debated some complicated medical question, I considered how I could shorten the compositions I had done for them most often.
And without exactly planning to do so, the next time they called on me for assistance, I did exactly that. It worked—perfectly from what I could tell. But I still expected a reprimand. It never came. In fact, I wasn’t sure they had even noticed.
And so for the rest of that day, and all through the next day and the next one, I kept practicing. Finally, on the sixth day, I managed one of the most common ones I had been doing with a single three-word phrase. After so much repetition it was easy to overlay the sense of the full words as I poured my power into the three words I pictured and spoke. The binding words made it longer, of course, but it still felt like a victory.
And for the first time, Beatrice glanced at me. She looked confused, her mind still half elsewhere.
“Did you just…?”
I grinned. “I did the composition you asked for. Is there a problem with it?”
“No. I just…It sounded like you…”
But Reese let out a triumphant cry, and she wheeled around, my composition forgotten.
“It worked! It worked!”
he cried. “I think we’ve got it this time.”
Beatrice responded calmly, carefully going over each thing he showed her. When she had finished, she looked at him, looked at me, and then sat down hard.
“Oh, thank goodness,” she said, tears flowing silently down her face.
“We’ll have to take it to one of the tents. It will take a few days to know for sure,” Reese cautioned, although I hardly imagined Beatrice needed the reminder.
She nodded. “Yes, of course. We should leave immediately. Elena, you come with us. You’ve earned it, and you can probably help, too.” For a moment her memory of our earlier conversation seemed to return, and she glanced with narrowed eyes between me and the parchment on the desk in front of me which held the words I had been supposed to say.
I grinned back at her innocently, and she shook her head and began to gather the necessary things.
She didn’t tell me to go ask Acacia for permission, and I didn’t suggest it. Better to ask for forgiveness later, if necessary. And, anyway, she had given me permission to work under Beatrice’s supervision, which was what I was doing.
We started in the smallest of the tents, Beatrice and Reese tearing the compositions they had just written, one per patient, and flicking the mist toward carefully chosen subjects. When they had ripped all except one, Beatrice glanced over at me.
“As we know, if left untreated, everyone will enter the second phase. But that phase will only be deadly for some. The whole point of this is to identify who will get through the second phase on their own. Those patients can be safely left unhealed, allowing us to focus our resources on those who would otherwise die,” she explained to me, although after sitting with her and Reese for days, I didn’t really need the explanation. I didn’t interrupt, though, and she continued.
“So, these chosen test patients won’t be healed unless the working indicates it’s necessary. Since we might still be wrong, we want to pick the strongest of the patients. The ones who wouldn’t have been chosen for healing anyway, so they have nothing to lose.”
She held out the last composition to me and indicated the final patient. I ripped it, my hands trembling with excitement as I did so. If they were right, if this was it, we were so close to beating this epidemic.
It was something of an anti-climax to return calmly back to the campus building, but we had to wait for morning to see the results, they told me. The next day was a rest day, and we were the first three in the dining room for breakfast. Even Beatrice fidgeted slightly, a sight I had never seen before, and Reese could hardly sit still.
We hurried straight out to the healing tent we had visited the afternoon before. No visible change had occurred in any of the patients in relation to the disease itself, but then that hadn’t been the purpose of the composition. Instead each patient now had an unnatural spot of color inside one of their wrists.
We moved among our test subjects, eagerly examining each wrist. Seven of them had green dots, three had purple.
“Purple means healing required,” Beatrice explained, although I already knew that too. I appreciated her desire to include me too much to protest her unnecessary explanations.
When she reached for her own ever-present satchel rather than calling for the tent’s healer, I put my hand on her wrist to stop her.
“Please. Let me.”
She hesitated and then nodded. “Very well.”
I spoke the now familiar compositions over them to heal the necessary elements of the first stage infection. Each of the three healed patients—two women and a man—sat up almost immediately, asking for water or food or both.
The healer hurried over. “Oh. You’ve already done it.” She examined each of their wrists and nodded in satisfaction. “How long will the color last?”
“A week, at least,” said Reese. “We wanted it to last long enough that those marked green would stay marked through into the second stage. That way we won’t be testing people twice.”
The healer nodded, and Beatrice handed her an unused testing composition.
“The even more important thing is that we can see the test hasn’t harmed any of these people,” said Beatrice. “Of course, we won’t know for sure if it works until these seven are allowed to run the course of both stages and emerge alive, as our test indicates they will. But I think it’s worth testing the rest now. If we wait for the full results, too many of the current patients will already have passed through to the second stage.”
The other healer nodded. “Even without complete testing, it seems as good a way as any for picking who should receive the healings. And far better than most. We’ve been groping in the dark up until now. You’ll take copies to the other tents?”
She scanned the parchment she had taken from Beatrice, not waiting for a response. “This seems simple enough. One for each patient. I assume it doesn’t require much power?”
“The tiniest dab,” Beatrice assured her. “It was one of our required parameters—otherwise we’d have the same problem we have now.”
The healer nodded, already starting to walk toward a small desk someone had squeezed into a distant corner of the tent.
Beatrice hesitated and then crossed to me. She handed me one of the unused parchments. “Here, let me see you compose this. You can read it off here.”
I almost asked her if she was sure before changing my mind and turning to the nearest bed.
The healer had been right. It was simple and required only a tiny expenditure of power. My voice would give out long before my power did.
And so it proved. Runners were sent to each of the other healing tents, carrying a copy of the composition and instructions on reproducing them so that the other healers could start manufacturing copies for their own tents immediately.
But even with the other healers working on the task, Beatrice and Reese and I still remained among the tents for the entire day. We visited several different ones, leaving each only once all the patients had received the test composition—either spoken by me or written by one of the healers.
In each tent, the healers were to be found at a desk or other flat surface, furiously scribbling. Beatrice and Reese would join them, while I began to roam up and down the lines of beds. I could move faster than they could, since reading took so much less time than writing, and I soon had a nurse assigned to do nothing but follow me around with a glass of water.
I grew weary from exhaustion—the regular kind—my eyes blurring and my steps slowing. Until at last, I looked for another bed and could find none. A scrap of material had been tied around the wrist of each tested patient, and I could see no more unmarked patients.
“Where’s the next one?” I asked Reese.
He shook his head. “There are no more. We’ve tested them all.”
I blinked at him, trying to process his words.
“No more? Are you sure?”
He nodded, something in his eyes that I didn’t entirely like. It almost looked, the slightest bit, like awe.
“You’ve done this whole tent,” he said. “The compositions we’ve been writing will be saved and distributed between the tents for new patients coming in tonight and tomorrow.”
“Oh. Well. That’s good.”
“Yes, it is. It’s time for us to get back now.”
I nodded and followed him blindly. The evening meal was over by the time we returned, but someone had set plates aside for us.
Acacia came up behind me while I was eating and put a hand on my shoulder. I turned to grimace up at her.
“I’m all right,” I said. “Just regular tired, not drained tired.”
“I know,” she said softly. “I’m a healer, remember. I can tell.” She hesitated. “Well done, Elena. Beatrice says you’ve been a great help. That they couldn’t have done it so quickly without you.”
I flushed and looked down into my plate. “I had none of the skill or the knowledge required. They’re the ones who did it.”
She shook her head. “It’s true en
ough. But I don’t think you realize, Elena, just how unique you are.”
I managed to find the energy to grin at her. “Believe me, that is one thing I do know.”
“Do you?” She shook her head. “Well, sleep well, Elena. You can take tomorrow off.”
I nodded, but it didn’t stop me arriving in the dining room at the same time as Beatrice and Reese the next day. Once again we were the first three there.
Reese opened his mouth when he saw me, but closed it again at a glance from Beatrice.
“You look rejuvenated,” she said to me, and I nodded, heaping my plate high.
“I had a very deep sleep.” I laughed. “I imagine both of you did as well. It was a long day.”
“But productive, I hope,” she said, and both Reese and I nodded.
We had eaten and left before anyone else appeared. When we visited the first tent, we discovered the first of our original batch of test subjects had recovered from the first stage and had just entered the second stage.
“No blood in sight,” the healer in the tent assured us. “Although it’s early days yet.”
“Please keep us informed,” Beatrice told her.
We had brought a fresh batch of healing compositions, both from my year mates and from a messenger from northern Ardann who had arrived the night before. We used them on those who now had a purple dot, Beatrice even allowing me to compose a handful of the healings.
As we moved from tent to tent, we found some already cleared out of purple-dot patients, while others had barely been touched, depending on their existing supplies and the strength of their healers. We noticed something of a trend, with the more vulnerable—the elderly, the young, the frail—more often coming up purple. But some surprised me. One wiry little girl, horribly tiny in her stretcher, showed up stubbornly green, while the brawny young man beside her showed purple. It took some self-control not to heal the girl anyway, but I knew I needed to trust Beatrice’s research.
“She’s only just come in,” a nurse whispered to me, as I tore myself away from her bed. “She still has time…if the first test cases prove a failure.”
Voice of Command (The Spoken Mage Book 2) Page 14