by S. W. Clarke
“Is it working?” Freydis asked.
“It will,” Veda said. She was determined now. “The next part involves magics. Are you ready?” Veda lifted her hands, wiggling her fingers.
Freydis didn’t respond, but her eyes followed as Veda set her hand fully atop the wound. She let the same weak whine as Veda began to cast, but went silent as the glow emanated through the smoke, transferred into her arm so they were both lit golden, and behind them, the girl’s mother gasped.
When Veda finished casting, she removed her hand. The wound was untouched, the girl still at two health. “That felt nice,” Freydis whispered. “The pain went away a little.”
Gunnar leaned forward. “What happened? Did it work?”
Veda shook her head, turned to whisper: “No, I’m sorry. I can heal wounds, but this is beyond a wound—it’s an extremely advanced infection.”
“Can you try again?” the mother asked.
She nodded. She tried again. She tried three more times, but the girl’s arm didn’t change, and her health didn’t, either. She did seem to brighten, though. “You’re nice,” she said to Veda, and her mouth took on the tiniest upcurve.
The familiar fizzing pressure started behind Veda’s nose and eyes, threatened to spill over; she held any tears back so as not to upset the girl. When she stood, Gunnar and his wife stood with her. They crossed outside the hovel, stood under the glare of morning light. “I’m sorry—” she began, and then her eyes went to Wa’s Gift still in Harald’s hand. She hadn’t used it to send up the flare that morning. “I need that.” She pointed at the staff.
Harald stood as though he’d been spotted, eyes wide.
“What for?” Gunnar asked.
“It contains powerful healing magic,” Veda said, and she understood, seeing their hesitation, that they were nervous of her. They were afraid she would hurt them—all of them. Veda the Terrible; she almost laughed. If only they knew how weak she was. “It’s the only way I know to help her.”
And because he was a father with a dying child, Gunnar crossed to Harald, jerked the staff from him. “Give it to her, idiot,” he said, and deposited it himself into Veda’s hands.
As soon as the sanded wood sat under her fingers, she realized how wrong it felt to be parted from the staff. Veda crossed back inside, stooped to Freydis, whose eyes lit on the staff. “You’re one of the spirits.”
“Spirits?” Veda said.
“The spirits of Issverold bring might and magic,” Freydis recited. “They carry swords and staves.”
And, looking down on the dying child in her hovel, Veda was able to imagine for a disembodied moment how she appeared to the girl. It was the same way that she had sometimes looked at Prairie.
“Yes,” Veda said, drawing herself up. She placed the staff before her. “I’m one of the spirits, and this is Wa’s Gift. I’m going to use the magic in it to heal your wound. Are you ready, Freydis?”
The girl’s face, lit green by the gem, lifted from the pile. She offered small smile—an echo of the child she had been. “Aye.”
Give her something to wonder at, Veda thought. Give her dreams. She slid her hand up the staff, cupped her hand around the gem. She focused on Freydis.
Nothing happened.
Veda’s eyes went to her interface; she didn’t even have full mana. She cursed internally, turned back to Gunnar. “I need to regenerate my magic before I can use the staff. May I speak with the mage, Eli Rose?”
Gunnar, who by this point was so deep in, only nodded, one hand gone out to the hovel’s entrance to suggest she should step out.
Outside, Eli and Amy stood in conversation next to the hovel, Eli’s blue eyes intense on Amy, who traced something on her palm. Amy caught sight of her. “What’s the news?”
“Eli,” Veda said, crossing to her with the staff in hand. “I need full mana to use the effect on this. How do I regenerate it fast?”
A smile touched Eli’s lips. “Oh, I—”
“You meditate,” Amy said simply. Both turned to Amy, who looked between them as though the mechanic were obvious. “I’ve been in seven trials, remember? I may be a scrapper, but I know that.”
“Thanks,” Veda said, and she stepped to a clear spot in the grass, circled and sat with crossed legs. She hadn’t ever meditated, so she set the staff next to her and closed her eyes with her back straight as she imagined it might be done. “Like this?”
“Let every thought pass through your head without trying to hold onto it,” Eli said. “Instead, keep returning to your magic. That’s your baseline. The more you practice, the faster you’ll gain the skill. We’ll be over here so we don’t distract you.” And Amy and Eli crossed to the far side of the road.
So Veda meditated. She sat, and for a time she felt uncomfortably aware of the dying girl just a few feet away, of the noises of the village, of Amy and Eli, their voices carrying from across the road. She focused on the number in her interface, which went up interminably slow. After a time, she thought about her sister, about Galen and Eben Ness, about Sarai. She thought about Mother and Dairy, and Veda was surprised by how circular her thoughts really were when she paid attention to them—the same series of people, over and over. She thought about people constantly, she realized: what she thought of them, what they thought of her, where she stood in relation. And every time a thought like this darted through her head, she returned to her mana—not the number itself, but the welling magic inside her, the power she contained.
After twenty minutes, the prompt appeared in her interface:
SKILL GAINED: Meditation, Lvl. 1. Good job, caster! You’ve figured out how to sit still long enough to let the chorus die down and regenerate that sweet mana just a tick faster.
Within another ten minutes, she’d hit full. Veda’s eyes opened, and her hand went out to the staff. She stood, returned to Gunnar’s hovel. When she appeared in the dim light, her eyes flashed with intensity. “I’m ready.”
This time, she stood over Freydis with the staff before her, the end pressed into the dirt. One hand slid over the gem, enclosing the light, and beneath her, the girl’s eyes widened with wonder. When the effect activated, the healing stream poured between her fingers like water, swept out to Freydis, encircling her in the green powder that Wa had used to tell the story of the elves. The emerald light pooled over Freydis’s arm, and behind her, Veda heard Gunnar and his wife let noises of awe.
It really was something.
A notice appeared in Veda's interface:
QUEST COMPLETE: A Warg's Bite. You've saved Freydis and earned the gratitude and respect of the villagers.
Within five minutes, the girl was sitting up, and a seed of hope entered Veda’s chest. She knelt by her, inspecting the wound. It had deflated, the dead skin sloughed away to reveal fresh pink. “You should recover now.”
When she stood, turned to leave, the girl’s voice rose up to her: “I won’t die?”
And Veda, who couldn’t help the tears now, looked back at the girl. Probably she had just learned, this year or the last, what death meant, and already she’d been forced to come to terms with her own. “No, Freydis—I don’t think you’ll die for a long time.”
The girl was silent. Veda pressed the curtain aside, hoped that she had delivered the right truth in the right way.
Twenty-Two
Veda stepped out of the hovel with her staff in hand, crossed to where Amy and Eli stood aside. Judging by the forty-foot singed path through the ground, Eli had been demonstrating her fireball. “I charge it like this,” Eli said, and Amy watched as one of Eli’s delicate hands went up, the fingers folded to a fist. When she had raised it to the level of her chest, all five fingers opened and an orange flame sprung up, the center a mesmeric blue. Her nameplate appeared above her head:
Veda cam
e alongside, pressed the staff’s end into the dirt. “Well, the villagers don’t think I’m trying to bewitch them anymore.”
Amy and Eli turned, and the flame in Eli’s cupped hands disappeared. “Did you save Freydis?”
“Not me. I think this might have, though,” Veda said, her fingers touching the green gem; the surface still carried heat. When her eyes returned to the other two, they had anxiety written on their faces. She realized she had her shoulders hunched in and up as though in a permanent shrug, and she forced them down. “There are wargs in the midlands?” she said to Eli. Brynhild hadn’t marked a pack on this part of the map.
Eli nodded. “That was how I found the village—the screams. Lately they’ve come at night, you know, and after I crossed the river I camped in the forest just south of here. I hadn’t seen a single person, just snow and more snow. And then I found them hiding in their homes while Gunnar and Harald stood back to back with those spears. It wasn’t going well, but—geez, you should see the size of the fireball I can make. Do you want to see?”
“Later,” Veda said. “Have you seen Galen?”
Eli shook her head. “Haven’t seen a single person except these NPCs.”
“Do you know what the countdown is for?” Amy asked her.
“The villagers are preparing for autumn. I thought it had something to do with that,” Eli said.
Veda nodded. “It has everything to do with that. When autumn arrives—in exactly one day—the equator of this world is the only place that won’t completely freeze.”
“So where we’re standing?” Eli asked.
The other two nodded. “And Galen is that-a-way,” Amy said, holding the compass out to them. It pointed southwest.
Veda screwed up her mouth. “Can I borrow that, Amy?”
Her dark eyes lifted. “You shouldn’t need to. I’m coming with you.”
“You can’t. I need to move fast, and I have to bring Galen back with me.”
“Uh, the warg attacks come from that direction,” Eli said, her index finger pointing the same direction as the compass needle.
Amy nodded. “Veda, listen. It’s going to be night—”
“Can I borrow it or not?” she asked. She forced her eyes to stay level on Amy when every instinct urged her to retreat, to apologize, to be less direct. All her life she’d been the pet dupe, the girl who waited until others were done, who asked nicely, who sat demure and polite. Every day, society said—in a hundred different ways—that pretty and nice should be her greatest aspirations. They were even valued higher than efficiency.
But pretty and nice wouldn’t save Galen.
Amy’s eyes widened. She opened her mouth, shut it. Finally she extended her hand with the compass on the flat of it. “You’d better not make me regret this. Take it.”
And Veda did.
Within the hour Veda sat on Agnar’s back, her tunic done up to the neck. The hood framed her head, fastened just below her lips. Amy and Eli stood below, squinting into the sun that set in an orange line behind Veda’s head.
“This is crazy,” Amy said.
“She does have the staff for light,” Eli said.
“And Agnar knows the southlands,” Veda said, one hand set to the hestur’s neck.
“You’ll freeze at night,” Amy said. Even here in the midlands, Veda could feel the chill coming on with the sunset. It pierced her clothes, her skin, her muscles.
“I know, Amy: it doesn’t seem smart,” she said, lifting the reins to hold Agnar back. The hestur had set into his familiar dance, his hooves stamping into the dirt. She removed the compass from her belt, angled it so that the others could see where the needle pointed. “But we know he’s still alive. I can find him, and I can heal my frostbite. Galen can’t.”
Amy stood close to the hestur’s side, looking almost straight up at Veda. “You’re like her, you know. You probably think that’s bullshit, but you are.”
A fullness came into Veda’s chest, the familiar pressure of feeling in her throat. “There may be a reason for that.”
Amy smiled. “I’m sure there is, smartass.”
Veda set the compass back in her pocket. “I’ll see you back in the dorm, right?”
Amy stepped back, raising one hand. “You know it.”
Eli lifted hers, too, as Veda swung the hestur in a circle at the center of the small village, let off the reins. His head rose, hooves digging into the mud that he kicked up behind him as he launched into a canter. When they had left the village behind, she let him out to a gallop toward the dimming horizon. The wind blew so fierce on her face she buried her cheeks into the folds of her hood, but it made little difference.
They rode straight over a long and brown plain, what might have been farming fields but now lay barren and unused at the fore of autumn. On her back, the staff’s light came at first faint and then clearer over her head so that by the time the sky had gone to ebony, she and the hestur darted green and glowing through the night.
Within a half hour she heard the river marking the transition into the southlands, the grand and creaking sounds of moving water. Brynhild had marked two bridges, and she directed the hestur toward the westernmost one. Agnar’s hooves churned through the crisp icemelt; he ran differently in this place, with new surety, and she only had to offer the slightest tug on the reins to guide him in the direction the needle pointed.
She thought of what Galen would say if she found him. “That wasn’t being smart,” he’d chide. Running out into the night on a horse when the countdown was near its end. But she remembered, too, the small smile when she’d asked him what she should do if he was in mortal peril. “Use your judgement.”
She was a service admin. She had never been told to use her own judgement; her life had spooled out along a certain course, every possible question already troubleshot, already with a pat answer. Veda had thought that judgment wasn’t built into her, that she’d been engineered only to follow, to sit passive and docile.
That wasn’t true. She was using her judgement now, and she knew this was the right thing. She had evaluated all the factors, the risks, the chances of success, and Veda knew as well as she knew when she was hungry or tired that she could do this. Her eyes went down to the compass again, the glass now tickled by etchings of frost at the edges, and the needle pointed southwest.
The noise came so soft at first it could have been something else: a bird, a fox. But this wasn’t a creature’s noise so much as a metallic clinking she heard somewhere beyond the hestur’s hooves, his heavy breathing. Clink. Clink. Clink. This noise was embedded deep in her, she realized, her mind spiraling back to that first night on the campus. “Listen for this sound, Veda. It’s the sound you’ll hear before Wilt and I come for you.”
Sarai Waters was finally making good on that.
The warg call came, emboldened and richened by the night. Another followed, and another, a back and forth, a song of dire intent. Before her, the hestur’s ears perked forward, swung back to listen. “I hear them,” she whispered. “Don’t slow down.” He didn’t slow; his ears pinned to his head and he leaned forward, carrying them faster. They came into thicker snow and now the calls sounded closer, but the hestur poured through the snow like hot water. And Veda thought: maybe with only one rider, maybe this time we can outrun them—
But she was wrong.
The wargs of the southlands were faster, leaner, hungrier. She heard their paws clawing snow in the dark, sensed them running alongside. A howl set her to shivering like the cold never had; she tried to guide the hestur further west and away, but he ignored her tug on the reins, continuing on the path they’d originally set. “She came from the southlands on that hestur,” Herathor had said, which meant that they were in Agnar’s home, his territory. And once again, she was left to trust him.
She leaned close, staring past his flying mane and shoulder. The world came into view almost as soon as they were on it, and in the green light she could see nothing but snow. It made sense, then,
to close her eyes, to rely on her other senses as she’d always done. It was painful, but she let her hood down to hear better.
At least six of them ran behind, splayed out like spokes on a wheel, that clinking louder now, closer. Even with the hestur galloping and only a single rider atop him, the wargs closed the distance. She heard something else, too, that set the hairs on her spine upright: a human whistle. She knew that particular voice, hidden as it was beneath the wargs’ noises. As they came upon Veda, she finally turned her face left.
“Hello, dupe.” Sarai’s face emerged lit and gloating from the darkness, and two metal balls attached to a long chain swung into view, cleared Sarai’s head and flew toward Veda. No—not toward Veda. They flew low toward the hestur’s two back legs. An entangling weapon. Veda jerked the hestur right so hard he neighed a protest, but his body followed—right into a warg on the other side. The two creatures collided, and Agnar’s weight overwhelmed the warg, who fell away into the darkness with a snarl.
“You good?” Sarai called.
“Just a bump,” returned Wilt’s voice.
“She’s fast,” Jess Snow’s voice floated from somewhere behind.
“Stay on the light,” Sarai called.
Veda stared into the space Sarai swam in, her face appearing and then disappearing in the light, and she finally understood the Waters had managed to tame the wargs as mounts. The others, unridden, followed as a pack. That was why the wargs had become uncommonly aggressive. That was why they’d attacked the villagers. That was why Freydis had nearly died.
The clinking resumed; Sarai must have multiples of the weapon—two balls at either end of a chain—meant to bring down a fleeing creature. Smart. Even with everything that had happened and might happen, Veda felt a certain admiration for Sarai’s technique, her persistence.
She also cursed herself: Wa’s Gift made her and the hestur a beacon in the night. She could fix that. Veda pressed her lips together, dropped low on the hestur. The clinking resumed, this time faster. She stared, waiting for Sarai to appear on her left again, and when she did, the metal balls at the chain’s ends swung into view, disappeared, swung back around. Every time they came into view, they clinked, clinked. And every time, they moved faster.