Leah falls to sleep shortly after putting aside the book, in the pitch dark room, and wakens again in pitch darkness to the sound of morning activity. She decides to ask for a room with a window, even a small one.
Breakfast comes by – mashed sweet potato, large dried mushrooms that crunch like popcorn, and the sour milk drink – and Seffon does not show up. John accompanies her to the study, and they do another two hours of language practice before Leah is mentally exhausted and requests a break to walk around in the sunlight, or at least near a window.
John and another guard accompany her as they walk up to the roof of the keep. Leah can see some of the tall spire-towers scattered across it, and wonders which one she snuck up to that first night. It would probably be in poor taste to ask.
The day is cloudy and miserable, but she drinks in what light there is. They pass by Beeswax in the stables on their way back, and Leah can see a figure moving past the windows on the third floor of the magic tower.
She requests to be taken back to the study, and her lunch is brought there – flatbread and egg and spicy sauce. She eats carefully, so as not to stain the books or the furniture.
A book on Algi, written apparently in Algic, is her choice for the afternoon. Just a passing curiosity, to see if she recognises the words, or if it has an equivalent language on Earth.
“Eta na Aier, Dabroushed ev etad na domair Do lav.”
She whispers the words, wondering at the pronunciation, trying to think if they sound like anything. Random capitalisation throughout, like German. Dabroushed sounds very Russian, unless I’m mispronouncing it, which is likely.
“Divett hav et na Iemar noi hoetar. Sess tabrouue do Aiev na Baiher.”
Hmm…nothing at the back of the throat. No ‘K’s, no ‘G’s, no ‘NG’s. No ‘TH’s for that matter, but they’re rare in Earth languages too. Nent has those guttural consonants, though, they must…Kimry. Hell, even in the name, ‘Algi.’ A realisation hits her suddenly. If these are less-respected, less important countries, and their languages not widely spoken beyond their borders, then I wonder if ‘Algi’ is an outsider-applied name? If so, was it weird for me to be using it?
The balcony door creaks a bit, and a sudden movement registers in the corner of her eye. She snaps the book shut and looks up, and after a second a tiny head peeks around the corner of the door, at about hip height.
Leah relaxes, feeling guilty for starting. “Hey,” she calls out softly, and the face withdraws. “If you want to come in and read alone, I can leave. I don’t want to keep you away if this is your study.”
The kid pushes the door open slightly, and edges in. Bright brown eyes stare out widely over a button nose, half-hidden under a messy head of brown curls, long and wild. The kid’s clothes are stained with stone dust, and Leah looks out at the balcony to see where she might have come from.
“How’d you get here?” she muses, standing up and slowly approaching, looking more at the balcony than the child.
“Climbed.” The voice is tiny but not shy.
“You speak Volsti?”
“Yeah.”
Leah steps out onto the balcony and looks around. Ivy grows from pots on the sides, and winds up to the next floor up; thick and woody, with large striated leaves. Certainly not strong enough to support someone’s weight, even a child, though the trellises might.
“Is it safe to be climbing here?”
“I’v’always dunnit.”
Leah turns back with a smile and sits on the low bench next to the door. “What’s your name?”
“Areiu.”
The girl seems to mostly want to watch Leah, and since the guards at the main door don’t seem concerned by the quiet conversation, Leah does not question it.
She opens the book back up and looks at a few more sentences, but feels too much like she is pretending to read – and considering other-Leah’s reputation as simple, she decides that that is unwise if she wants to be taken seriously.
“Are you here to read?” Leah asks Areiu.
“I live here.”
“In the study?”
“In the Hold.”
“Is your family here too?”
“We live next to the school.”
“What school?”
“Are you gonna attack us?”
Leah’s heart crumbles. “Of course not. I’m here to read.”
The kid continues to stare. “It’s safe here, dad says. But you got in.”
“Do you know anything about politics, Areiu?”
“No?”
“Neither do most people. So much stuff happens because people in politics say it has to, and too few people question that. How old are you?”
“Six.”
“Okay, that’s old enough to learn this secret.” Leah closes the book again and leans forward. The child does not move. “People in charge don’t know what they’re doing for sure. They go through all of life making what we call ‘educated guesses,’ and that’s okay. You don’t need all the answers, you just need enough experience to predict the safest course. If people have been lying to you, or keeping things hidden, then you can’t know the best plan. That’s what happened to me. People lied to me about this hold, and I thought I knew what to do, but I didn’t. They didn’t even tell us there were families with kids here. Now I have learned enough to realise that breaking in here was a very bad idea, that first time, and I’m glad I’m here in peace instead.”
The kid continues to stare.
“I’m sorry for everything that happened that time. Politics has made people do very bad things without realizing it, but now that I’ve realised it, I want to do better. Do you understand?”
The kid shrugs, and Leah chuckles.
Finally the kid talks. “Are you the dagger one?”
“Huh?”
“I hear the milishuh talking about the dagger one. She’s quiet and she kills people like this.” Areiu draws a finger across her throat. Leah pales.
“I’m uh…I’m not that one.”
“Okay,” Areiu says.
Leah sits uncomfortably.
“Are you the smash-y one?”
Leah remembers the skull crack sound and rushes to jump in before the kid decides to mime it. “Iris? No.”
“Okay.” Areiu stares. “Are you the – ”
“I’m the shield one.”
The kid stops.
“I have a shield, and I kinda…I run at people, and I push them down. I protect my friends.” The sentence trails off even as she says it. “I’m…I’m not even that, really. I’m just a normal person trapped in this world. And…even that sounds like I’m trying to pardon her. No.”
Areiu watches quietly.
“Areiu, I’m just here to learn what went wrong. So much has gone wrong. I can guarantee that none of those fighters you’ve heard the militia talking about…none of them know there are kids here. They are taught that this place is dangerous, and to treat it like that.”
“Dangerous?”
“They think that the people here are planning to do bad things. They’re afraid of a war, and they’re afraid that this place is going to start that war.”
“Because dad has magic and they don’t?”
“Your dad?” Leah asks, and then quickly sits up straight and looks to the guarded door to see if anyone is looking in.
“The other places don’t have magic, so they send fighters in to scare us away from them, so we don’t try to talk to them.”
“Uhh…” Leah shuffles away and towards the door.
“He says there’s no magic ‘t’all in Valrin.”
Leah gets a sudden idea. She looks at Areiu out of the corner of her eyes. “Areiu, are you allowed to climb across the outside of the hold?”
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.
Areiu stops talking, eyes wide, and Leah breathes a sigh of relief.
“I understand why you do it, climbing is fun, but it’s also really dangerous.”
“That’s what dad says.”
“He wouldn’t be happy to learn that you climbed here, would he?”
Areiu stares at her in wide-eyed silence.
“It’s okay, we’ll keep this a secret, okay? I won’t tell him you were here at all. He’ll never know you climbed down here and talked to me, okay?”
“M’kay. Thanks,” the kid says. A guard shuffles around outside the door, and her eyes fly open even wider. She darts back to the balcony and scrambles to the ledge. Leah’s heart jumps and she follows, watching the kid pull herself up the metal grids for the ivy, then dig her fingers into the crevices between stones and shuffle across twenty feet to the next balcony over and up.
Leah watches until the kid is safe then heads back inside and collapses onto the bench. A guard ducks his head in to check on her, and Leah waves him away, keeping her breathing carefully even.
She returns to her rooms after that, no longer in the mood to read. Her thoughts spin around the reality that not only are the Valerids sending the five to attack Seffon’s hold under the pretence of protecting Valerin, but they are lying about the nature of the building. How could the five not have noticed the civilian aspect?
She thinks back to the forges, the training area. No, this is clearly a military outpost, she decides. Though why Seffon brought along his family…and who else would Areiu have meant but Seffon? And what school?
She barely touches supper, that night. John at the door notices, and asks if something is the matter. Leah shakes her head, and says something noncommittal about missing the sky, wishing she had a window.
“No you don’t; the bugs wou get in. They’re terrible this time of yỹ.”
Leah grins at the weak attempt at friendliness, then realises that it was probably sincere, and forces the grin wider. Everything looks bleaker, now.
The thoughts are not so easy to shake, though. She goes to sleep wondering if maybe the five knew all along, or at least Meredith. Would it have mattered to them? “If the fight’s right,” they said. This fight is wrong. I don’t know what’s happening behind the scenes, but this is all wrong. God I hope they just haven’t realised it yet.
I wonder if they’ll understand, and forgive me, when they do realise it.
*
Seffon fetches her the next morning, announcing with less anticipation than expected that the spell should be ready for the final step. She accompanies him to the tower in a sour mood, but covers it.
Leah is too deep in her own bad mood to spend time thinking about his, but when she looks out the arrow slit windows at a screen of ivy, and remembers Areiu’s visit, she suddenly dreads that she knows why he is upset. I wonder if Areiu kept quiet about her little trip? She seemed worried enough, I’d bet she jumped on the opportunity to keep it a secret between us. But what else could explain his mood?
“Is something the matter?” she asks very timidly.
Seffon doesn’t seem surprised that she notices – so wrapped up in his own thoughts, he still has apparently not noticed her bad mood.
“The militia came across a force of soldiers heading inland. From Cheden,” he clarifies, seeing Leah’s sudden tenseness. “They were all killed before reaching the walls, but they had come very close.”
“Why would Cheden do that?”
Seffon sighs and shrugs, unlocking the door to the tower. “Being ‘contested’ means that enemies of Volst and Devad both occasionally try to take it out on us.”
“But is Cheden an enemy of Devad? I thought they were just mistrusting of them.”
“Cheden has been preparing to fight a war against Devad, but hasn’t worked up the guts to do so quite yet. The marriage, I suspect, is supposed to be the last piece to fall into place, to solidify an alliance before declaring war.”
Suddenly many things fall into place for Leah. She then stops dead, standing in the doorway.
“The marriage…how long have I been here?”
Seffon pauses to think. “I believe this is the fifth day.”
Leah tries to keep count, but keeps getting mixed up, the days blurring into each other the further back she thinks.
“Why does it matter?” Seffon asks.
“I think the wedding is supposed to happen today, but I’m not sure. They said it would happen on the equinox.”
“Our intelligence says the same things, and it corresponds with what we know of Valerin’s religious practices.” He looks more carefully at Leah's expression. “You seem rather cut up about it.”
Leah shakes it off. “I’m just concerned for Jeno’s welfare, if a war is coming.”
“You take your duty seriously.”
“She was in my care, and now she’s surrounded by soldiers who terrify her, and more are going to come.” Leah sits on the stone table heavily. “Poor kid.”
They continue on to the completion of the spell. Seffon checks the simmering mixture, then nods to himself, apparently satisfied.
Leah accepts the distraction of the magic gratefully. “So what’s this one for?”
“It’s an elemental spell. Its intent is not to study the mind, but the body.”
He fills a glass test tube with the remaining liquid, now much thickened, and holds it up to the light of a candle, looking through it. He examines it carefully, then brings out a sheet of glass and lets the liquid pour out like honey over the glass, and spread out. Again he holds it up to the light to look. He holds a small Herkimer diamond to the glass, and scratches out some designs using it. The liquid seems to move towards the designs of its own accord, and to differing degrees.
“Elemental runes,” he explains, as Leah observes. “You blood will pull itself towards the runes that most attract it. Give us an idea of what your body is made of, metaphysically speaking.”
“A magical Myers-Briggs test. No, never mind, don’t ask,” she cuts him off when he half-turns to her in confusion.
He watches the liquid move, lit from behind by the candle. Finally it settles in place.
“So? What have we learned? INTP? AB positive?”
Seffon ignores her comments and sets the glass down on the work surface. “A body of solidity, born under a full moon. Sun setting in the 187th degree.”
“No way, a blood-magic birth chart.”
“Not birth,” Seffon muses, half-listening.
“You said ‘born,’ though.”
“I said ‘solidity born under a full moon.’” He observes a few seconds more. “This is your body’s history, in the same way that the oil is your mind’s history. Blood has a limited lifespan, and replaces itself every few months.” Leah nods, this being the same as she learned in science classes. “The past four months show us these things. Your body went through a great ordeal about two weeks ago, just before the last full moon.”
“I was injured in combat sometime around then,” Leah confirms.
“On the day that the sun set at the 187th degree, your body underwent…something magical.”
“And what day was that?”
“It has to do with the tilt of the planet, changing the sun’s path through the sky,” Seffon says, and again Leah nods, comparing this to what she remembers from her own world’s science. “It would have been…the gibbous moon, about eight days ago.”
Leah thinks back. “That was shortly before my imprisonment, but other than that…oh, unless it was the healing spells. No, that was earlier…”
Seffon nods absently, turning the pane of glass. “Your body travelled over water, a little under two months ago. It filled you. You nearly drowned.” Leah confirms, remembering the spider dream. “And for some reason, you have apparently avoided the desiccation over the past four months; nothing about it here.”
“Desiccation?”
“The four elements: moon, sun, water, desiccation.” Leah readjusts and pays attention. “Usually it refers to any close encounters with death or disease; time spent in deserts; heartbreak, in extreme cases.”
I guess leaving Kimry and Jeno wasn’t really heartbreaking. Leah feels guilt at thinking of them both in that way, and distracts herself by asking Seffon a question. “Why is that special? Most people don’t nearly die every four months, and there are no deserts nearby.”
Seffon puts the glass aside and turns to look at her critically. “Being knocked unconscious by a trap spell should have shown up. I was hoping a finer analysis of the rune would reveal how deeply, and maybe if you came closer to death in a way that opened the barriers between life and death in some way…between this world and the one you remember.” Leah gets almost hopeful, but he presses on. “But there’s nothing. Your body was unharmed by the spell, yet I have multiple eyewitness accounts of you being found asleep by the trap’s trigger, your allies trying to pull you away to safety. I saw you myself, and you were asleep. For three days!”
“Was she?”
“Was who?”
“Was Leah really asleep? How could you have known? Can you measure REM, or brain activity?”
Seffon pauses. “No-one can pretend to be comatose for three days. Her body functions were fully suspended. Her heart beat once every hour, her breathing would not have stirred a feather held over her mouth. She was under the effects of the trap.”
Leah reflects on this. It never really struck me before how odd it was that when I awoke from three days asleep, my body had felt comparatively normal, if a bit slow; no pressing need to pee, and no evidence that I had done so while asleep. No hunger, no thirst. No soreness.
“That’s obviously not normal sleep.”
“No, it’s…slowed down sleep.”
“And it only affects the body?” Leah hesitates, then decides she can’t have dreamt a lifetime in three nights of slow sleep. “Suspended animation?”
“It – ooh, that’s a good name for it,” Seffon muses. “Yes, excellent name.”
Leah paces, feeling like she’s close to a breakthrough, but just missing it. “But does it suspend brain function?”
“How could we tell? I was certainly able to get the imprint of your soul…”
“Yes, about that.” Leah snaps her fingers. “The anchors. The lead you made me inhale.”
Seffon clicks his tongue impatiently. “Why are you still on about the lead?”
Leah gives him a stern look. “Just…avoid using for anything unless extremely necessary, in the future. Back to the point: what did that spell tell you? The anchors ‘wanted’ to go somewhere, you said. Why? What does that tell us?”
“Yes, the anchors tell us where the soul is least strongly attached. Your body can feel it lifting away during the spell, and begins to panic. It’s not dangerous,” he quickly reassures her, “But it can be quite uncomfortable. The anchors serve as a temporary balm. They take on a sort of mimicry of your mind, and reassure the body that it won’t be abandoned.”
“And yet you said that I was unconscious, and so couldn’t use the anchors, that first time.”
Seffon’s face freezes, falls.
“You had the anchors, which mimicked my mind, my soul. My body was panicking because some part of it probably felt like it was dying, and no balm came.”
“But it couldn’t – it wouldn’t actually leave!” Seffon shakes his head. “That’s not what the spell does. It takes an imprint of the mind, not a sample of it.”
“But my body was stuck in slow-motion, and was convinced that something was missing.” Leah thinks. “Where are the anchors now?”
Seffon makes a few false starts, then turns to a drawer and pulls out a bowl with the lead rings in it. “I kept them in case, but I was about to throw them out before you arrived – they can’t be reused, they’re already in a sort of split-state…not really lead anymore, so you really shouldn’t be so touchy about that…” He pokes them around with a finger, and they skid dully across the ceramic.
Leah reaches out a hand over them.
She realises she is holding her breath in anticipation, but five seconds have gone by with nothing happening. Seffon is watching her as though expecting something amazing to happen. She lets her hand fall, and breathes out sadly.
The breath stirs up a cloud of residual ash in the bowl, and the lead rings begin to glow. Leah’s neck begins to ache.
“Seffon?” she asks, and then begins coughing violently. The room around her flashes for a moment, and she can hear street traffic outside.
Heart twisting in an uncomfortable mix of hope and fear, she turns to look towards the noise. As soon as she does, it dissolves back to the sound of horses whickering, stable-hands calling to each other, and guards walking under the passageway.
“Did you see something?” Seffon asks excitedly. “Feel something?”
Leah rubs her throat. “Less than a flash,” she says. “But definitely something.” She coughs a few more times.