Sam laughed. “Just because I told you that you were something of a father figure to me doesn’t mean that you get to act all paternal.”
“I think I get to decide how I will act,” Bastan said.
“Will you help?”
“He’s your family. Which means that he is mine.”
32
After Marin
Ryn was heavier than he looked, and Sam dragged him from the room, keeping his hands bound behind his back. Bastan looked ridiculous with a bandage tied around his neck, wearing it as if it were nothing more than a scarf, but he leaned occasionally on Tanis, admitting to Sam that he was more injured than he let on.
“You should go back to the tavern and rest,” she said.
“Not until this is done.”
“You’re no good to me if you’re dead.”
“Is that right?”
“I don’t mean it like that. All I’m trying to say is that—”
“I understand what you’re trying to say.” They stepped out of Ryn’s tavern and into the night air. All of a sudden, Sam realized that she was exhausted. Fatigue set in, and it was nothing like fatigue she had felt before. When she had used augmentations with Alec, she had often been tired after them. This was something quite a bit different. This was fatigue that seemed to settle deep within her, and she wasn’t sure she would be able to go after Marin. It might be that she needed to rest.
There was a soft splashing nearby.
The swamp.
Those stupid eels within the swamp were splashing around.
“Bastan—”
She cut off when she realized the splashing couldn’t be the eels. It was too rhythmic. It was the sound of a…
Kyza!
“Take Ryn. Get back to Caster,” she said to Bastan.
“Why? What’s happening?”
Sam looked out into the night, staring out over the swamp. There was a strange reflective glow over the swamp. “Nothing you can handle.”
“Samara.”
She turned back to him. “No. Not with this. With this, I have to take care of it. If I allow her to get too close to the rest of you, there’s a chance that someone else will get hurt. I can’t have that.” She stepped over to him and gave him a quick hug. It felt strange hugging Bastan, but at the same time, there was something reassuring about it. He was strong, and he was able to protect her most of the time, but this was a time when she would have to protect him. “Please, Bastan.”
“Don’t get yourself killed.”
“I won’t.”
She reached into her pocket and dipped the pen into the eel venom. If she was left with no other option, she may have to use it. She didn’t like that idea, much as she didn’t like the idea of losing Marin before she had the answers she wanted, but she wasn’t going to let her hurt anyone else.
Sam flipped out into the night.
When she landed, she perched on her staff, looking around. The steady splashing was out there, near the shore, but not so near that she could see where Marin was coming from.
She focused on augmentations.
She needed to augment her strength and her speed, but right now, sight would be the most beneficial. She thought about what Alec might write, thinking about the way he would disparage her normally weak eyesight, and use some combination of enhancing medicines that would give her better sight. She tried to think about the sense of cold that would wash through her.
Were she not so tired, she wondered if it would be easier.
It came.
Slowly—ever so slowly—the sense of the augmentation washed over her.
With it, everything seemed to lighten.
In the distance, she saw another staff, and Marin perched on it. She was probably two hundred yards away, far enough that she may not even see Sam, not without enhancements of her own. Did Marin know enough to add visual enhancements?
Of course she did. After all, Marin was the one who had told her how to enhance herself.
Sam had to believe that Marin didn’t want to hurt her. Or maybe she did, but more than anything, Marin’s primary interest was Tray. He had been her focus all along.
Sam had to use that.
Tray was her focus too.
She flipped out into the swamp, trying to land softly so she didn’t make too much of a splash. She didn’t want to draw Marin’s attention before she had a chance to get close enough to counter her.
Sam watched, and Marin started toward the shore again.
Was there any way she could head her off?
It would take a significant jump—and strength she didn’t have without an augmentation.
Could she add another augmentation, or was she already pushing the limits of her strength?
Sam took a deep breath and focused on strength. With it, as she often did, she wanted speed, but she decided that strength might be the most important this time.
Even more slowly than before, the sense of the augmentation washed over her, and she jumped.
When she landed, she was directly in front of Marin.
Sam kicked, thinking she could disrupt Marin, but the woman was quick, and she grabbed Sam’s leg, trying to pull her off her staff. Sam jerked her leg free, the augmentation granting her enough strength to do so.
“Your Scribe must have found more paper.”
“Did you hurt him?”
“Hurt him? Why would I hurt him?”
“You don’t have to do this, Marin. Tray isn’t even in the city.”
“Ah, I know that now. Your Scribe told me. Much as he told me that you have the remainder of the eel venom.”
Sam tapped her pocket, perched on her staff as she was, just far enough away that she couldn’t be attacked where she stood. Marin would have to leap at her with an augmented jump.
“Why do you want the eel venom?”
“There are things that need to be done, Samara.”
“Like poisoning Lyasanna?”
“You say that as if she doesn’t deserve it.”
“I don’t know what she deserves. I don’t even know if I can trust what you’ve told me she did. All I know is that you claim Lyasanna wanted Tray dead when he was born. All I know is that you used the Book of Maladies on me to steal my memories because of something that my mother did.”
“It wasn’t all about your mother,” Marin said. She jumped and swung around with her staff, and it nearly cracked into Sam’s head. She moved fast—much faster than what Sam could counter, even with her strength augmentation. She needed speed, but she didn’t have it—not yet. She wasn’t sure she would be able to focus on that augmentation while facing Marin.
“You could have been skilled,” Marin said. “And it is a shame that there isn’t more that I can do to explain my actions, but know that Tray is my primary focus.”
“Why just Tray? You used me for some reason. There was something about my connection to him that was important.”
“I thought there was, but now that your mother has gotten to you…”
Marin jumped again, and she swung her staff around.
The movement was so quick that even as Sam tried to push off, Marin’s staff collided with hers, and Sam went down.
She would hit the water. There was no way to avoid it, not now, and when she did…
Then the eels would attack.
She plunged into the foul-smelling water, holding tightly to her staff. As soon as she went down, she tried to push her staff into the muddy bottom of the swamp, so she could climb back up, but it wouldn’t gain purchase. It was her body weight and movement that typically allowed it to push deep into the muck. She continued to work at it, floundering underneath the water, and then she felt movement near her.
Kyza!
Was this going to be how she would die?
Alec had explained the barbed tale of the eel, and she had seen men die from the poison, and she wanted nothing to do with it. The eels seemed drawn to her, especially the way they continued to attack her staff whe
n she was out in the swamp. There was no way she would avoid them.
Cold washed over her.
Was that the water, or was that her augmentation fading? Something bumped up against her.
She pushed, and with a heave of strength, she managed to clear the water. When she did, something clamped on to her leg.
An eel.
It was clamped on, but it wasn’t piercing her skin.
How was that possible?
Could Alec have actually found easar paper? Was that the reason?
She grabbed the eel and pulled it off her leg and flung it at Marin.
The other woman tried to move, but the eel arced, twisting toward her, and the mouth clamped on to her foot.
Marin jumped, flipping into the air, and when she landed, Sam saw the spiked tail swing around. She wasn’t even sure whether it was intentional or not. It might have simply been Marin’s movement that forced the tail into her thigh.
Marin screamed and slipped off of her staff.
Kyza!
She didn’t want to help Marin, but at the same time, she didn’t want to lose her and lose the possibility of answers.
Sam flipped forward and landed near where Marin had gone underwater. The woman’s canal staff drifted away, floating across the surface of the water.
She prayed softly that Alec’s augmentations continued to hold. If they didn’t, she would be once again vulnerable should the eels attack.
Taking a deep breath, she dived beneath the surface. It was no more pleasant than above. She found Marin and jerked her free, and then pushed off with a massive heave of her staff, flipping forward. Reaching the shore would be difficult, and she didn’t know if her augmentation would last long enough, and so far, it didn’t seem as if Alec had given her any other augmentation other than the impermeable skin.
Cold started to drain away from her.
This time, she knew it was the augmentation fading.
The shore was only ten feet away.
Sam pushed off and threw herself forward.
As she did, the rest of her augmentation failed.
She splashed down only a few feet from shore.
She kept Marin wrapped around her, hoping the augmentation Alec had placed would hold, and felt an immediate flurry of eels swarming around her, attempting to grab at her legs. She kicked, afraid to stop moving, afraid that one of their tails might stab into her.
And then hands grabbed her and pulled her out of the water.
She rested on the shore, taking a deep, gasping breath. Bastan looked down at her.
“You were supposed to go back to Caster,” she said looking up at him.
“And you were supposed to stay out of the water.”
Sam rolled over. She was exhausted. It was the kind of exhaustion that she hadn’t felt in quite some time. It was the kind of exhaustion that would take a long time to recover from.
And yet, she had Marin. Whatever else happened, she had Marin.
But for how long? if she did nothing, the woman would die.
She reached into Marin’s pockets and found soggy pages of easar paper. They would be useless now. There was the jar that Alec had filled with the strange milky white fluid, and she opened it.
“Are you going to tell me what you’re doing?” Bastan asked.
“Look at her leg,” Sam said.
Bastan glanced to Marin’s legs, and then he pulled back the fabric of her pants, revealing the deep puncture wound. The skin around the wound had blackened, and it was already starting to work up toward her chest.
“There’s nothing that can stop this, Samara. Without the apothecary—”
With a surge of inspiration, she jabbed the pen into the jar of milky liquid and then stabbed it into Marin’s leg.
“Samara?”
“Alec thinks these two venoms will counter each other,” she said.
“And if they don’t?”
“Then Marin dies, and with her, so does any chance that I can really understand what happened to me and get answers as to why she used me in her plan with Tray.”
Bastan frowned and settled himself down on the ground. He looked worse than Sam felt. How badly had he been beaten by Ryn’s men?
“Samara, even if she doesn’t come around, you understand that the answers you seek may not be the answers that you need.”
“Fatherly advice now?”
“General advice. I’ve seen plenty of men who go in search of something and when they find it, it’s nothing quite like they had hoped it would be.”
Sam breathed out in a heavy sigh. Perhaps Bastan was right. Perhaps any answer that she might get would not matter. And perhaps all she needed was to focus on the people around her that she could trust and that she cared about.
“But I might need her,” she said.
“Why?” There seemed to be hurt in his voice, and she owed it to Bastan to explain.
“Because, whatever else, I have to go after Tray. Marin might be the only one who can teach me what I need to know.”
“You don’t think your mother can teach you?”
“I think Marin knows things that my mother does not.”
Bastan just nodded. He sat next to Sam, neither of them saying anything, watching Marin. Sam didn’t know how long it would take to see if the antivenom worked, but as time passed, stretching out into long moments, she began to think the worst.
And then, Marin took a gasping breath.
Sam looked over to Bastan. “I… I think I’m too tired to hold her.”
“Don’t worry. You don’t have to hold her.”
“Somebody does, Bastan. Marin doesn’t need to be augmented to have her abilities.”
Bastan looked at Marin, and the same intensity came to his eyes that she had seen before. “With this, I think I am able to ensure that she does not escape. Maybe I put her and Ryn together.”
“Bastan,” Sam started, “you really can be a bastard.”
He laughed.
“But you’re my bastard.”
33
Healing
Sam found Alec at the university.
“You… You’re still alive,” Alec said.
Sam glanced over her shoulder and waved to the two men Bastan had sent with her to ensure that she made it here safely. This was where she needed to come, mostly because if there was anything she could do to help Alec, she needed to be here. If it was about easar paper, the pages she had taken back from Marin should be enough to help with those at the university who were poisoned by the eel venom.
“I think because of you,” Sam said.
“I managed to find a scrap of easar paper. I don’t have much, and the”—he lowered his voice and leaned toward her as they made their way through the halls of the university—“blood that I have is old, so I wasn’t sure whether it would work.”
He started to guide her up the stairs and toward his quarters, but she shook her head. “We need to go and help your father and the others.”
“Sam, we don’t have easar paper. I can’t find Master Helen or any of the other Scribes, and I don’t have my sigil to get over to the palace.”
“I don’t know that it matters,” she said.
“What? Finding Master Helen or the other Scribes? They can help us, especially if it is about having easar paper.”
Sam shook her head. “I don’t know that I can go back to the palace, not yet.”
“Why?” Alec looked at her with a deep expression of concern.
“I’m not sure I can trust them. I don’t know how much of what Marin has told me is the truth.”
“You know, you could just go and ask the princess.”
“I don’t know that I can.” Even if she went to Lyasanna, would she tell Sam the truth? Sam wasn’t sure Lyasanna had told her anything that was true. And what reason would she have to be truthful with her?
“Come on, let’s go down to your father. I have some easar paper that I rescued from Marin. It’s a little wet, but…”
He hurriedly guided them down to the hospital ward, and they reached the cot with his father lying on it. There was another physicker standing next to him, and he had a vial of some liquid in his hands that he was trying to administer to Alec’s father.
“What are you doing?” Alec asked.
“He started to tremble,” the physicker said.
“What are you using on him?”
Alec didn’t wait and grabbed the vial from the other man.
“This won’t work. Didn’t you learn anything from the other patient? Go. Leave me with him.”
The man hurried off, glaring at Alec.
“I get the sense that not everyone is thrilled with your promotion.”
Alec glanced up and his gaze shifted briefly to the other physicker. “Maybe not,” he said. “But if they knew how to handle treatments better, it wouldn’t matter.”
Sam liked this Alec, the confident one. He had every reason to be confident in his abilities and his knowledge, and too often, he was not.
She held her hand out, and he glanced at it before making a small cut in the center of her palm. He did the same on himself and hurriedly began to write. She watched the words as they formed on the first page of the easar paper and waited.
Within a few moments, the trembling stopped. Another moment later, his father awoke.
“Alec?” His father’s voice was weak.
Alec leaned toward his father and wrapped his arms around him in a hug. “Father? It worked.” Tears welled in his eyes.
“What… What did you do?”
“It’s the easar paper. We—”
His father shook his head weakly. “The easar paper won’t work on this. It will be temporary. You need to find the…”
His father faded.
Alec’s eyes went wide. “I don’t understand it. The easar paper has always worked.”
“Maybe it’s the paper.” When Alec looked up at her, she shrugged. “Both Marin and Helen seem to think the eel venom is tied to the paper. Maybe the poisoning can’t be countered with the paper.”
Comatose: The Book of Maladies Page 26