“You’ve never come with us,” she said to Lillian at the same time she realized it. On average, about ten sisters visited the market. Six, like Maddy, were regulars; the rest tagged along so they could personally choose an item, or to spend a day outside the monastery.
Lillian shrugged. “The defenders always know what I want. No need for me to go myself.”
“Don’t you ever feel like a day out?”
“Not to the market, no.”
“Where would you go?”
“Somewhere quiet,” Lillian said with a hint of exasperation.
Not wanting to annoy Lillian further, Maddy dropped the subject and resolved to remain silent until Lillian next spoke. She looked along the line of burning torches lighting the path, and realized it led to the library. She’d thought they were going to Lillian’s laboratory. She was about to ask where they were going when Lillian cut in front of her and turned onto a dark path. Maddy leaned over to take an unlit torch from the bucket standing near the path, but then a ball of fire appeared in Lillian’s left hand. Lillian made it look so effortless; Maddy hadn’t even sensed her draw fire. Perhaps the more capable the mage, the less “noisy” the drawing, and nobody was more capable than Lillian.
Not wanting to offend her, Maddy left the torch and fell into step with her again. The fire burning an inch above Lillian’s hand threw only enough light to see a foot or two ahead. They walked in silence, the rustling of their robes and their footsteps sounding unnaturally loud. “Your laboratory is in the catacombs?” Maddy blurted when she remembered where this path led.
“Yes,” Lillian said. “All the laboratories are. Nobody there cares when you brew a noxious potion or have a little accident.”
“Accident?” she asked in a shriller voice than she would have liked.
“Working out a formula involves trial and error, Maddy. Some errors are . . . er, more spectacular than others.”
She swallowed. “Oh.”
“Don’t worry. I won’t be brewing anything tonight.”
“What does Mistress Meredith need?” Maddy asked, wondering again what Mistress Meredith would want with poison.
“That’s Mistress Meredith’s affair,” Lillian said.
Maddy made a mental note to be more careful around Mistress Meredith from now on. She refocused on her surroundings, squinting at two torches flickering in the gloom ahead.
Once again, Lillian ignored the bucket of torches standing at the catacomb’s entrance. She descended the stone steps, pushed open the door, and led Maddy down more steps to a lower passage. Maddy resisted the urge to grab the back of Lillian’s robe so she wouldn’t lose her only light source. Her heart pounded as she imagined herself wandering the maze of passages in the dark, hopelessly lost, her cries falling on the deaf ears of long-dead sisters. She wasn’t claustrophobic, but the narrow passage and the shadows dancing on its walls unsettled her.
“Why didn’t you take one of the torches?” Lillian asked when Maddy, determined to stay right behind Lillian, bumped into her.
“Because you’re lighting the way,” Maddy said. “And I didn’t think you wanted me to,” she added faintly.
She was close enough to feel as well as hear Lillian’s chuckle. “Well, we’re almost there,” was all Lillian said. A minute later, she stopped in front of a door and pulled an iron key from her robe pocket. “I need both hands for this,” she murmured. The ball of fire disappeared, plunging them into darkness. “Why don’t you try holding fire? It’s not much different than lighting a candle. You want to focus on the point just above your hand.”
“What do you do when you’re alone?” Maddy asked, her insides fluttering. What if the fire touched her hand? What if she couldn’t do it?
“I stick the torch in the sconce next to the door,” Lillian said.
So Lillian normally used a torch? She’d been showing off! Elation chased away Maddy’s nervousness. She wanted to kiss Lillian, but since she couldn’t see her, she’d probably end up planting one on her nose or an eyebrow.
“A ball of fire, please,” Lillian ordered.
“All right.” Maddy closed her eyes, turned inward, and reached for Salbine’s raging fire. She could sense it, feel it, smell it, but she couldn’t draw it, no matter how hard she tried. Frustration threatened her concentration. She felt the same way she did when a word on the tip of her tongue eluded her. Fire swirled around her, taunting her; why wouldn’t fire flow through her? Her hands clenched; her lips compressed. Salbine, aid me, I beseech You!
She felt light-headed and reached out to steady herself. Her fingers collided with stone; she gasped, then doubled over when pain stabbed through her.
A steadying hand touched her elbow. “Are you all right?” Lillian asked.
Maddy lifted her head. Lillian’s concerned face swam before her, illuminated by the fire that once again flickered above her hand. “I—I don’t know,” she stammered, then grimaced as a wave of nausea washed over her.
“Let me take you back to your chambers.”
“No! I tried too hard, that’s all.”
Lillian’s brows drew together. “Are you sure? Because I didn’t sense anything.”
“I’m sure!” she snapped. “I must be doing something wrong. I’m sorry.”
“No, I’m sorry.” Lillian let go of Maddy’s elbow. “I shouldn’t have asked you to try something new, not tonight. Because . . . well, we’re not here as tutor and pupil, are we?”
“I didn’t think so,” Maddy said quietly. Now that her physical discomfort had passed, humiliation was setting in. “But I obviously have a lot of work to do to pass my examination.” If the other initiates learning fire were telling the truth, they were already lighting fireplaces and hurling fireballs around the training room. Rose had triumphantly declared that she’d lit all the candles around the room’s perimeter in under a minute. Maddy was still struggling to light one. She should pay more attention to the lessons and less to the tutor. “I have to admit, I haven’t been as focused during our lessons as I should be,” she said.
“And I haven’t pushed you as hard as I might have pushed someone else. I’ve also been distracted,” Lillian replied, colouring slightly. “We’ll work on holding fire at your next lesson. Are you sure you don’t want to go back to your chambers?”
Cutting her night with Lillian short was the last thing she wanted, and it was completely unnecessary. The pain had subsided and her stomach had already settled. “I’m fine, really. I want to stay here.” She forced herself to meet Lillian’s eyes. “With you.”
Lillian blinked and stepped forward, then frowned at the fire she sustained. She pulled the key from her robe pocket again and handed it to Maddy. “Why don’t you open the door?”
Maddy set her shoulders and slipped the key into the keyhole. Had anyone else ever prayed to Salbine that a lock wouldn’t jam, or would she be the first? Please, Salbine, don’t let me botch this up too. Fortunately the key turned with an easy click. She removed it, pushed the door open, and stepped aside, holding the key out, so Lillian could enter first. Lillian accepted the key and tucked it into her pocket as she moved past.
Maddy followed her through the doorway, but stopped just inside as the fireplace ignited and three torches burst to life—with Lillian’s help, no doubt. Bunches of herbs hung from the ceiling above a round table piled with paper, parchments, and curling scrolls. Glass jars, both full and empty, labelled and unlabelled, were neatly arranged on a set of shelves. Crucibles, a mortar and pestle, scales, filters, and other items Maddy didn’t recognize covered a rectangular table.
“Come in and shut the door,” Lillian said, no longer holding fire. “You can sit over there.” She nodded toward a wooden chair not far from the rectangular table, then moved to the shelves as Maddy pushed the door closed and sat. “Shouldn’t take long.” Lillian scanned the jars. “Ah, here we are.” She set a jar filled to the brim with black liquid on the table. Bits of . . . something . . . floated around inside. Wh
en Lillian started to remove the sealing wax from around the jar’s lid, Maddy leaned away.
Lillian stopped and looked at her. “What are you doing?”
“I’m just, um . . .”
Lillian put a hand on her hip. “Don’t tell me that poison rumour is still going around. Would you like to see my thrall, too?”
“Your what?”
“My thrall.”
Maddy gave her a blank look. She had no idea what Lillian was talking about.
“So that, rumour finally died. Good. I never liked that one.” Lillian bent to work on the jar again. “Effective rumours have to sound halfway plausible. I can understand the poison one, but the thrall one never made sense. If I had a thrall, why would I keep it down here? I’d want it in my chambers, dusting and lighting the fire in the morning and making my tea. It would only be a nuisance in here, getting in my way and knocking things over. Honestly,” she finished in exasperation.
When the lid came free, a stench burst into the air that reminded Maddy of unwashed, sweaty feet. Grimacing, she covered her nose with her hands. Lillian’s nose wrinkled, but otherwise she seemed unaffected. Amusement flashed across her face when she noticed Maddy’s discomfort. “Don’t worry, it’s perfectly harmless. Oh, I suppose there’s no harm in telling you what it is. It’s a valerian root tincture. Mistress Meredith sometimes has trouble sleeping. A bit of this in her tea before bed does the trick.” She fetched an empty jar, then spread a piece of muslin over the jar’s mouth. “She always leaves it until the last minute to tell me she’s about to run out,” Lillian said as she poured the tincture through the muslin. Her voice took on a snide, lilting tone. “No need to warn Lillian in advance. Lillian doesn’t have anything better to do than to make my tincture. No matter when I ask, Lillian will do it.” She wrapped the muslin around the solids it had trapped and wrung it over the jar. “And Lillian does, because if Mistress Meredith isn’t getting enough sleep, we all suffer, believe you me.”
Maddy grinned.
“So, no poisons here.” Lillian dropped the muslin and its contents into a bucket and wiped her hands on a piece of cloth. “Tinctures, salves, oils, various other aids. That’s all.”
“A sister and the healing arts seems an odd combination,” Maddy said in surprise.
“Granted, Salbine’s gifts are of a more destructive nature, but I don’t limit myself to Salbine’s gifts. Anyway, I don’t know why you’re surprised. The people come to us with their aches and boils and we do what we can.”
Which usually wasn’t much. “You mean you’re the one who supplies the adepts?”
“I am.” Lillian frowned at her. “Where did you think their supplies were coming from? You don’t trade for them at the market.”
Maddy hadn’t thought about it when she’d occasionally helped the adepts minister to the poor souls looking for relief from various physical ailments. The outer courtyard was always busy on Monday afternoons, the line-up sometimes snaking through the monastery’s main gate and along its southern wall. Few could afford the fees demanded by physicians, who weren’t terribly interested in treating callused feet and bad teeth anyway. The adepts aided those they could and prayed for those they couldn’t. She’d assumed the medicines they passed out had come from outside the monastery’s walls. She would never have guessed that a sister was supplying them, especially Lillian. “I’ve never seen you with the adepts.”
Lillian’s face screwed up in distaste. “I don’t want to mix with the rabble. No. No, no, I do my work here.” She held up the jar. “Half a jar of valerian root tincture,” she declared with a satisfied smile, then set it on the table and placed a lid over its mouth. “I don’t think I’ll seal it. She’ll want to use it tonight, so she can seal it herself if she likes. We’ll have to be careful when we walk back, though. I don’t want to spill any.” After moving the dirty jar to a ledge with several others, she returned to those sitting on the shelves. “Would you like to lend me a hand? I have quite a few preparations that need to be shaken.”
“Of course.” Maddy moved to Lillian’s side.
“You start here and I’ll start over here,” Lillian said, walking to the other end of the shelves. She picked up a jar from the lowest shelf. “Give it a good shake,” she said, demonstrating. Maddy lifted a jar from her end of the shelf, grasped its top and bottom, and shook it. “Are you going to tell me about those nuts?” Lillian asked.
“They’re for the squirrels,” Maddy said with a grin. “One of the cooks puts some aside for me each morning.”
“Don’t get too attached to the ones that hang about here,” Lillian said. “One foot outside the walls and they’ll be on someone’s table in no time.”
“They have no reason to go outside the walls. They have everything they need here.”
“You like animals, then?”
Maddy nodded. She’d always been a bit suspicious of those who didn’t. “Do you?” she asked hesitantly, hoping her budding relationship with Lillian wasn’t about to come to an abrupt end. “This morning you said you’d spend the day with Thomas.”
“I helped him with a couple of new horses. First time they’d felt anyone draw.” When Lillian set her jar back on the shelf and picked up the next one, Maddy did the same. “You need absolute control with the new ones. Just a whisper, at first. Had one horse bloody-well near kill me a few years ago. I’d barely drawn air when it reared and charged at me. I should have been more prepared, had a barrier up, but it had never happened before. I didn’t have time to throw one up when it panicked, so I did what anyone else would have done and ran for my life. Somehow, in all the ruckus, it managed to kick me in the back before Thomas and the other men calmed it down. Spent a week lying on my stomach.”
Maddy stifled a laugh. “Is that how you got that scar on your, um . . .”
“My arse? Yes, that’s how. And yes, I do like animals—prefer them to people. That’s why I got right back out there once I felt up to it. I work with the new ones, and I’m every horse’s final test. Or nightmare, depending. Surprising thing about the horse that charged me was that I was drawing air. It’s fire that usually gets them. They don’t like fireballs whizzing over their heads.” Lillian chuckled. “Can’t say I would, either.”
Maddy vividly remembered the first time she’d seen Lillian test a horse. She’d just started to help out at the stables and had been mucking out a stall on a beautiful, sunny afternoon. A loud thunderclap had made her drop the pitchfork and race from the stable in confusion. Having only arrived at the monastery two weeks earlier, she’d never seen such a display. She stood transfixed as the mage rode the horse around the yard, drawing fire, air, earth, and water. Neither the horse nor the stable hands seemed afraid, and when Maddy screamed at a fireball heading straight for her, the men looked her way in amusement. “It’s all right, there’s a shield,” one shouted, which explained why the fireball exploded into nothingness before it reached her. She wondered later whether Lillian had deliberately thrown it at her.
Though the horse was inside the barrier, it trotted around as if it hadn’t a care in the world. She later learned of the intense desensitization to the elements all Salbine horses underwent. Now she barely noticed when mages were working with horses, but she’d never forget that day. When Lillian had completed her test, she’d walked by a shaken Maddy with hardly a glance. Maddy had stared after her in awe—and fear.
“Your horse must be deaf and blind,” she said to Lillian, still not quite accepting that a horse could endure a display of prowess from a mage as strong as Lillian for long.
Lillian’s lips pressed into a thin line. “He most certainly isn’t! He’s very brave, and I love him. I ride him as often as I can. We like to go up to the river and watch the currents. I can give him a good workout there. If the weather’s good, sometimes we pack a lunch, spend the whole day.”
We? “Who’s we?”
“Me and Baxter.”
“Baxter?”
“The horse! I like
to ride alone. Though . . . maybe you’ll come with us, sometime?”
“I’d like that very much,” Maddy said, warmed by Lillian’s invitation.
They finished shaking their last jars and looked at each other. “Well, that’s that,” Lillian murmured. “Time to take Mistress Meredith her tincture.”
“You know, we could have arranged to meet later, after you’d finished here,” Maddy said. “I thought we’d be here all night.”
Lillian nodded sheepishly. “I know. I realized that afterward. I . . . You surprised me, when you said you wanted the same thing I do. I didn’t think you’d want to see me at all.”
She reached for Lillian, and sighed contentedly when Lillian leaned into her.
“What are we doing?” Lillian whispered.
“I don’t know. I just know I like being with you.”
“Me too. I mean, with you.”
“Then let’s be together. We’ll eventually figure out what we’re doing.”
“Take an empirical approach, you mean? I can certainly agree with that.”
Maddy chuckled and drew back, her arms looped around Lillian’s neck. She moved in and gently touched her lips to Lillian’s. “For someone with such a gruff exterior, you have the softest lips,” she murmured.
The Salbine Sisters Page 3