Erietta sniffed, a prim sound that only served to emphasize her rigidity, and Wardin had to smother a laugh.
“I am an imaginative sort,” she said. “And while you might have forgotten what I was like as a girl, I was once very enamored with the idea of adventure. Contrivers make exceptional travelers, explorers, and scouts.”
“As a matter of fact, I do remember that about you.” He tilted his head to one side, considering her. “What changed?”
Her eyes slid away from his. “Perhaps I learned a lesson about the consequences of adventure. I’m the one who sent you on your way to Bramwell, remember?”
Wardin pointed at her, as though she were a pupil who’d gotten a sum correct. “And so it comes back to my vile betrayal.”
“That’s not what I said.”
“It’s what you said before.” He saw her shoulders stiffen, her lips press into a thin line, and waved a hand. “Don’t worry, I’m not asking for an apology. It doesn’t matter.” And so it didn’t. She would see soon enough how wrong she’d been, to have so little faith in him.
“Doesn’t it?”
“What you said before, no. What we were talking about at the time, yes. You said the trick that changed my memories was impossible. Or that I wanted to be tricked. But as neither of those is the case, there’s another explanation. A potion, an enchanted object, an especially dark and powerful spell. Something that could make me believe so deeply, that I actually became someone else for seven years.” He gestured around him. “I’m hoping that something can be found here.”
Erietta bit her lip. “You don’t think I thought about that? Because I did, all summer long.” Her eyes flicked downward again. “I’ve looked everywhere. Including here. There’s nothing.”
“Yes, but you didn’t have me with you. I’m the one who was under the spell. I might recognize something you wouldn’t. And you might see the significance of something I can’t. There’s a chance we’ll find something together that neither of us could on our own.”
She crossed her arms. “You still haven’t told me why. Why now, with everything else we have to contend with?”
“Because I need a trick that powerful.”
“To trick whom?”
“Four hundred soldiers.”
“Eyrdri’s teeth. That’s your strategy? You expect to trick them away?” Erietta shook her head. “No wonder you got me to bring you down here first, before you told me what you were about. I’d never have wasted my time otherwise. Even with every contriver we have working together, we could never trick that many people, across a distance as large as Avadare. If they were all grouped together in one place, and it was a simple trick like a mirror image, perhaps, but—”
“It won’t be a simple trick, and they won’t be grouped together. And that is precisely why we need something to help you.”
She started to argue again, until Wardin put his hands on her shoulders. “Your objection has been noted. But we’re here now. Let’s just look around, shall we?”
Erietta narrowed her eyes, but gave him a curt nod in reply. “As you wish. Highness.”
He scoffed. “As if you’ll ever recognize me as an authority over you. I think I’d have more luck getting Tobin to bow to me.”
“Probably.” She smiled as she moved to a shelf at the far end of the room. “He’s quite stupid. I imagine you could confuse him into believing anything. You might not even need magic to do it.”
They worked in relative harmony for a while, showing each other passages from books that might be of interest, looking through chests and cabinets, sniffing and tasting herbs and powders.
Finally, Wardin found something. “What is this?”
Erietta came over and sniffed the pouch of herbs he held out to her. “Callumsbane.”
“What’s it used for?”
“Sleeping powders, if you’re a contriver. I believe the healers also use it, sometimes, to help with balance problems.”
“Is it ever used in tea?”
“I suppose you could mix it with tea. Some herbs lose their power when exposed to too much heat, but others are enhanced by it. I don’t know which would be the case with callumsbane. Why do you ask?”
He dipped his finger into the pouch, then touched it to his tongue. “Because it reminds me of the tea I used to drink at Witmare. At breakfast. Beside Falk, every morning.”
She looked skeptical. “It’s bitter. A lot of herbs are bitter. There are three different kinds of thistle alone that are similar, and all of them are easier to come by than callumsbane. Besides, I don’t see why he would give you a sleeping powder first thing in the morning. Were you often tired?”
“You just said yourself, it has other uses. Who knows what he might have combined it with.” Wardin tasted the callumsbane again. “It’s this, I’m sure of it.”
Erietta shook her head and started to say something else, then stopped abruptly, eyes widening. “Wait, there was—” She broke off again and looked back at a pile of books on the table behind her. “Wait.”
“You already said that.”
“It might have been on the list of … I might have seen … wait.”
“All right. I’ll just wait then, shall I?”
She didn’t notice the teasing; she was already bent over the books, braids hanging down over her flushed cheeks, flipping pages furiously.
It was a long wait, as it turned out—it was a large stack of books—but eventually Erietta found what she was looking for. “Here!” She jabbed her finger down on the open book in front of her, gesturing with her other hand for Wardin to come and look. “It’s a complicated potion, and it has to be given in daily doses over a long period of time. But callumsbane is on the list of ingredients.”
Wardin leaned over her shoulder—she smelled of spiced mead and sweetnettle soap—and squinted to read the small, rather jagged handwriting of some long-dead contriver. Then, before he could stop himself, he burst out laughing. “A love potion?”
It seemed Erietta was too enthusiastic about what she’d found—whatever that was—to take offense. She nodded vigorously. “Not real love, you understand. You can’t force such a thing with magic. This would be more to elicit affection, good will. A contriver like—” Marking the page with one finger, she closed the book far enough to look at the cover. “—Quenilla here would use it to pacify a potential enemy, or someone they wanted to manipulate.”
“Ah, so that’s it.” Wardin met Erietta’s shining eyes with a smile that held no trace of mockery this time. “Sleep, restoring balance, pacification. All things that soothe the mind.” He rubbed the back of his neck as a memory stirred. “You said Falk’s trick couldn’t work on a closed mind. I believe those were your exact words.”
“Precisely. So he gave you something that opened your mind, and made you unusually susceptible.” She nodded down at the book. “Something with callumsbane in it.”
“Then all he had to do was combine that with his spell, and reinforce it at breakfast every day. A clever idea, I’ll give him that.”
Erietta’s face sobered, and she seemed to shrink, suddenly. But she held his gaze. “You may not be asking for an apology, Wardin, but I certainly owe you one.”
He winked at her. “Good, because I was lying about not wanting one.”
One corner of her mouth quirked up. “Gracious, as always.” The fledgling smile fled as quickly as it had come. “But I deserve it. I’m so sorry.”
With that, she straightened up, folded her hands in front of her, and waited, as if to be sentenced.
Wardin’s chest felt suddenly light, and he suppressed the laugh that bubbled up from it only with difficulty. He didn’t want her to think he was taunting her. Though he found all the satisfaction he’d imagined in this victory, he could find no commensurate urge to gloat. “Apology accepted. And no regrets. This is only going to help us, in the end.”
Erietta exhaled slowly, then sniffed and cleared her throat. “Yes. Well. Perhaps it will.” She
picked up the pouch of callumsbane and sniffed it again. “I don’t suppose you’ve recognized any of the other herbs?”
“None that reminded me of my time at Witmare.”
“You should keep trying. If I can recreate whatever he used, I—” She broke off with a frown. “Actually, I don’t know what that would mean. You’ve been a bit murky on what you intend to do with it.”
Wardin grinned at her. “If you can recreate it, it will save us all.”
23
Erietta
Erietta slammed her fist against the table. She wanted to throw the bowl in front of her into the pot-bellied stove in the corner. Or better yet, drink its contents, and take a lovely, peaceful nap. That was about all her potions were good for, of late.
She’d been closeted in this small, acrid-smelling chamber at the back of the contriver hall for five days, combining all manner of different ingredients, starting with those from the love potion recipe. Whenever she came up with something she thought promising, she gathered a dozen volunteers, including Wardin himself, and dosed them with it. Then she cast a trick, and had them scatter to the far corners of the valley, hoping the potion had opened their minds enough for her spell to hold at a distance.
It never did. At least, never on more than two or three of them. And all the while, the enemy tunneled through the mountain and made ready to destroy the last magistery. Her magistery. Her responsibility.
All right, Etta. You don’t have the luxury of giving in to despair, and you certainly can’t spare a minute to throw a tantrum. The survival of magic is at stake. And you’re running out of time. Focus.
She took several deep breaths and looked toward the stove, where Hawthorn lay on the stone floor, soaking up what warmth he could. “What am I missing? There’s something I haven’t thought of. Probably several somethings.”
The hound thumped his tail, but offered no advice.
“No, I’m afraid that won’t do. You’re a blackhound. You’re supposed to be intensifying my magic.” She snapped her fingers. “So get over here and intensify.”
With clear reluctance, Hawthorn rose and came to her, the click of his nails loud in the otherwise still room. He was, no doubt, as drained as she was.
Erietta scratched him behind the ears. “Tell you what, I’ll sneak you some dried mutton if we find anything today.” She rested her palm on top of his head and closed her eyes, feeling his energy meld with her own.
Gathering that energy, conducting it downward through her limbs, she held her other hand over the bowl and tried once again to transfer her magic into it. That magic should bind the ingredients together, wrapping them in the spell, turning an otherwise ordinary herbal mixture into a potion.
But despite Hawthorn’s assistance, this second attempt went no better than the first. Erietta’s magic fell dead into the air and dissipated.
Apparently her latest idea was so mad, it couldn’t produce any sort of potion at all, much less a useful one. The callumsbane wouldn’t even fuse with the other powders and pastes and liquids in the bowl.
Frustrating as that was, she had to admit it wasn’t especially surprising. It had been a mad idea, after all. The pine sap, in particular, had been a foolish addition. Even a first year student could tell her it didn’t mix well with wren feathers.
But what else was there to do, when she’d run out of sensible ideas, except resort to the mad ones?
“What am I missing?” she asked again.
Erietta began to pace, though the room was no more than four strides in any direction. “Not an ingredient—I’ve used every ingredient that does what I’m trying to do.” She pointed at the hound. “And that, Hawthorn, means there’s something else I should be trying to do. Something this potion should be doing, that it isn’t.”
She chewed absently at her fingernails, and mentally reviewed what she knew. Falk had given his mixture to Wardin only once a day, and then not seen him again until breakfast the following morning. That single dose had been enough to keep the old scout’s trick intact, through both time and distance. And so Erietta had focused her efforts on ingredients that might help a spell last. To no avail.
Because that wasn’t enough. The callumsbane might open the mind to the intrusion of a spell, and once that mind was infiltrated, other ingredients might give that spell staying power. But there was another step in the middle: the spell itself. What if that part wasn’t entirely down to the magician who cast it?
A trick of the sort that had been cast on Wardin—and of the sort that Wardin was proposing to cast on their enemies—was an extraordinary one, one that went beyond merely fooling the senses or causing temporary confusion. That kind of trick had to go bone deep, deeper than any spell normally could. Hence the need for a potion to make the victim susceptible in the first place.
But what if the purpose of the potion was more than just susceptibility? What if it must also contain some sort of reflection of the trick itself? Perhaps she should try infusing it with the actual spell she meant to cast.
How would she do such a thing? What sort of ingredient could carry with it an actual illusion?
The sort that was known to cause visions, of course.
All at once, the invisible fist that had been strangling her heart for days loosened its grip. Erietta stopped her pacing mid-stride, nearly tripping herself, and burst out laughing.
Tail wagging, Hawthorn thrust his nose into her hand. She bent to kiss his soft head. “Yes, you should be glad. I know just what we need. What do you say we go have lunch in the keep today? You need your bit of mutton, and I need to speak with my brother. And our prince.”
Whatever else he might or might not have gotten from her excited babbling, the hound knew the word lunch. With a joyful bay, he scrambled for the door.
“Are you sure about this?” Wardin sniffed the air and shook his head, as if the fetid smell of the tunnel ought to deter them.
Erietta scowled at him. Of all the moments for Wardin Rath, of all people, to choose to be timid. “Of course I’m not sure. But it’s all I’ve got to go on at the moment, so off we go.”
“What difference does it make if she’s wrong?” Arun handed Erietta a torch, then muttered a spell to light his own. “It’s still an excuse to get away for an hour or two. I’d rather spend all day down here than another hour in the yard or the keep.”
“Don’t be so dramatic. It’s not that bad.” Wardin sounded personally offended, as if Arun were a guest complaining about his accommodations. Erietta didn’t see what he had to be so sensitive about. She was the archmagister. The state of the place was her responsibility, not his.
“Not that bad?” Arun scoffed. “I saw two fights break out at breakfast this morning. And who can blame them? No meat, no honey cakes. Have our stores really run so low already, Etta, or have you just been neglecting your other duties in favor of working on this potion of yours?”
“This potion of Wardin’s, if you want to be precise, and neither.” Erietta adjusted her grip on the cage she held in one hand, raised the torch in the other, and began walking. She made no effort to lower her voice; it would only serve to help draw their prey. “We don’t know how long we’ll be trapped, and we don’t want to risk giving Bramwell an advantage by running through our supplies too soon. We have to plan for the worst. And honestly Arun, you know all that.”
Arun grinned at her, although there was a nastier edge to it than usual. Even his good cheer was wearing thin, as the days scraped by. “Of course I do, but it cheers me up to complain.”
She snorted. “Spoiled brat.”
“Well, I am your mirror image.”
“This is probably far enough, don’t you think?” Wardin stopped and banged his own cage against the wall until the clanging reverberated around them. “I still don’t see how vividrake venom helps us. It made my true memories come back. How is it going to give other people false ones?”
There was an answering splash. Erietta set her cage down and reached into t
he bag slung over her shoulder, taking one of the dead mice inside by the tail. She’d rolled the unfortunate rodents in sleeping powder before packing them up. “We’re not looking to give people false memories. We’re looking to give them visions. The vividrake venom made you see your past. It gave me awful, vivid nightmares. Both are visions, of a sort.”
“There!” Wardin moved toward Arun and kicked away a leaping vividrake. The creature spun around with a shriek, the flaps on its head sticking out like gigantic ears, and rushed back at them. Arun charged with his torch, herding it toward Wardin, who in turn used his own torch to send it in Erietta’s direction.
She opened the cage door and pushed the beast inside—a bit repulsed by its clammy, leathery skin—then tossed her mouse in after it. The vividrake pounced on the treat with a hiss.
Arun kicked the cage door closed. “Nicely done, but are you sure we can’t just kill them?”
“Certainly not,” Erietta straightened up and extended her torch, peering toward the water and preparing another mouse. There was never just one vividrake. “They’re the only ones in existence. We’ll bring them back down and set them free when— there’s another, on your left.”
They kept at it until Erietta’s muscles ached from bending and her wet, muddy braids clung to her neck. All of them ran afoul of a drake’s teeth at one point or another, but they’d come prepared with heavy gloves, leather bracers, and high boots, and no lasting harm was done. After that first time down here as children—and the painful days that followed for her, with her bite—they’d learned quickly how to withstand a vividrake assault without casualties.
Finally, the immediate area seemed to have been emptied. She hoped they wouldn’t have to move to another spot. “How many have we got?”
Arun held his torch down to one of the cages on the tunnel floor. “Four in this one.”
“Three here,” said Wardin.
Erietta bent before the third cage. “Three here as well. I’d say that’s enough. I don’t know that we can fit many more anyway.”
Forsaken Kingdom (The Last Prince Book 1) Page 26