“You’re going to mix them all up,” Sirius remarked as he watched Amanda stick her finger in yet another bottle of white sand.

She had all of his infusements out of his coat and strewn on the ground between her and the fire.

“Not when I can identify them I won’t,” she replied, then handed him a bottle.

“What’s that one?” he asked.

“Shapeshifting.”

“Hmm, that could be useful.”

She held up another. “This one’s strongarm magic.” Before Sirius could stop her she tipped some onto the palm of her left hand and curled her fingers in over it. “Now, maybe I can lift your sword.”

“Except I’m not giving it to you,” he replied simply.

“What, why not?” She frowned as she got to her feet and looked around for something else heavy to lift. She stumbled a little on her way toward the wood pile then she picked up the biggest branch she could. It was one Sirius had found earlier and it was definitely large enough that she normally never would have been able to lift it.

She reached down with one hand to pick it up, intending on wielding it like a sword. Only as she wrapped her hands around its thick trunk, the entire thing crumbled beneath her fingers.

“That’s why,” Sirius replied.

She stared in amazement at the remains of the branch.

“Oops.” She glanced back at him.

There was the twitch of an amused smile on his face.

She put the stick back down and took her seat by the fire. “I don’t think I could break steel though,” she replied as she reached for the rum bottle without thinking.

“Wait-” Sirius’s warning came too late.

The rum bottle shattered.

Amanda yelped then swore, then began to reach for the infusement bottle to put the remaining sand back in. This time she stopped herself just in time.

“Uh.” Amanda froze. One had was dripping blood, the other holding infused sand she didn’t just want to throw away. Normally she would have just ceased using the magic but that wasn’t always so easy, especially with unfamiliar magic. Sometimes things got a little stuck.

“Here.” Sirius grabbed the infusement bottle and held it beneath her closed hand.

“Um.” The problem was, she wasn’t even sure she could open her hand.

“Okay.” Sirius set the bottle down upright and quickly moved over to inspect her injured hand. “Don’t close your fist. I’d rather not my fingers get squashed.”

She shook her head.

He turned her hand over gently and carefully picked the glass shards from her palm.

She sat quietly trying to get her other hand to open back up.

“That doesn’t look so bad,” he remarked as he cleaned the cuts.

“All the rum’s gone,” she lamented.

He glanced from the bottle to her and then focused on bandaging her hand. “It’s probably for the best. I think you’ve had enough anyway.”

“What? This is nothing,” replied Amanda without thought. Then she bit her lip and was silent as she realised that maybe that wasn’t the best thing to be bragging about.

“Maybe magic while drunk isn’t the best thing to be doing either,” Sirius added as he reached for the hand containing the grains of infused sand.

“It’s fine. I’ve just temporarily forgotten how to open my hand,” Amanda replied, and she truly wasn’t worried. She was in no danger right now, probably. The magic would burn out eventually... unless it ate her up in the process. Sometimes that could happen. Maybe it was a good idea to get her fingers uncurled.

Sirius was already on it. Carefully he pried her fingers apart. It seemed easy for him and Amanda wasn’t sure if he was using his own magic, but he got her hand open and then brushed the grans of sand into the jar.

“You ever accidentally break anything with your super strength?” Amanda asked cautiously.

He nodded. “When I was younger.”

“You ever accidentally hurt someone with it? Or an animal?”

He shook his head and started on picking up the shards of rum bottle. “I was always very careful.”

“But you were worried about that happening?” She probed carefully, figuring she was on tender ground.

He nodded but he didn’t reply.

After a moment or two of silence she said, “Honestly, I think my magic control is better when I’ve been drinking. It’s kinda like shooting, it relaxes you, up to a point anyway.”

He looked at her and cocked an eyebrow.

She smiled and added, “Or maybe that’s just me making excuses. But magic is linked to emotion. Control your emotions, control your magic. Sort of. I don't think it necessarily works for everyone and it's probably not even so true for me anymore. And infusements require a different kind of thought process than raw magic, at least when you’re first learning them, but relaxation definitely does help."

This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

With her bandaged hand she casually reached into her pocket and fiddled with the ring they’d found earlier. That was infused, she was sure of it, but with what she did not know. Perhaps if she spent enough time just probing it she’d eventually figure it out. As she touched it she tried to get a feel for its unseen shape. This magic felt light and echo-y. What was it? Sort of familiar but she couldn’t remember where she’d felt this before.

“How do you learn them?” Sirius asked.

“I don’t know. It’s like picking out instruments in a song. If you listen long enough you can hear them, and if you can hear them then you can play them. It depends on the infusement a bit though. The ones in your coat are all loosely wound so you kind of need to know what you’re doing. I think it’s easier to learn with tightly wound ones, like your sword. Those you can usually just use but sometimes there’s a trigger or a key, a certain way of thinking to get them to work.” Like the ring in her pocket. She just needed to figure out what its key was.

“I’ve never been very good with instruments,” Sirius told her.

“But you can sing...”

He smiled like he knew what she was going to ask next.

“Sing me something. I want to hear you sing.”

“Mmm…”

“Oh, come on. I’ll even play some drums as a backer.” Amanda stopped playing with the ring and jumped to her feet. From the wood pile she retrieved some smaller logs and two sticks. She stacked the logs in a line and then hit each one in turn with the sticks. Hmm, wasn’t quite enough range. She needed something with a different texture. She glanced around the clearing looking for something else she could use.

Sirius got to his feet. “Maybe when I get back. Give me a couple minutes.”

Amanda nodded, still looking for something that would make a good drum.

Sirius wandered off down the path a little way, then disappeared behind a tree.

Amanda finally spotted something. A strange orange looking fruit, half way up a nearby tree. It was chonky like a watermelon. Maybe that would make a good drum sound? It looked easy enough to climb up to.

She wandered over to the tree and looked up. It seemed further up now she was closer to the trunk. The bark was jagged, almost like scales. Good handholds for climbing at least. Careful not to put too much weight onto her injured hand she pulled herself up onto the tree. Climbing was all about footwork and this tree had plenty of places to put her feet. Maybe she wasn’t so bad at tree climbing after all.

Up she went. Hand over hand, focused only on what was above her. She was just below the fruit when Sirius’s voice called out from down the path.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m getting the fruit.” She reached out for it. Not quite close enough. She took another step up.

“That’s not good eating fruit.”

“I’m getting it to make a drum.” She had a hold of the fruit now. All she needed to do was pull it off. She twisted it but it was pretty strongly attached.

“I don’t know if you should be climbing trees after drinking.” She could hear him coming back up the path now.

She twisted around to tell him she was fine but at that moment her foot slipped and down she went. Her sudden stop was accompanied by the sound of a loud and distinctive crack.

She knew immediately from the sound that she’d broken something but the pain didn’t hit until she tried to move. She pulled herself upright and a feeling like a bolt of lightening shot through her leg. She sucked in some air and resolved not to move again. When she risked a glance down she could see her bone sticking out through her skin.

She closed her eyes tight and took a few deep breaths to calm herself.

“Shit!” Sirius was by her side the very next second. “Don’t move.”

Amanda opened her eyes. “Wasn’t planning on it,” she groaned then spared another glance at her injury to assess it.

Sirius placed his hand briefly and comfortingly at the back of her shoulder, then got to his feet and headed toward their box of stuff.

“I don’t think Shiv left us any first aid supplies.” He started rifling through one box regardless. He pulled out a small towel-like shawl and put it aside with a frown.

“We don’t need them,” she called after him. “There’s healing infusements in your coat.”

He stopped his rifling and looked up, same frown on his face. “I don’t know how to use them and you’re still drunk.”

She shook her head. “I could use a healing infusement in my sleep. Trust me, these I’m good at.” She held out a hand and fixed him with a determined look.

Still frowning, he left the box of stuff and made his way back to her side. He pulled out one of the vials but he didn’t give it to her yet.

“If you get this wrong, it’ll be harder for a proper healer to fix later.”

“We are miles and days from a proper healer. If I don’t do this now, there might not be a later. I could die of infection before anyone shows up to rescue us. Plus you’d have to set the bone manually and there’s a chance it could heal crooked which would also be harder for a healer to fix later. And sure, maybe I could give myself cancer but I won’t because I have done this a thousand times before. Healing is my dad’s power. He taught me how to use it.”

Sirius handed her the bottle with a sigh. “You’re a walking accident case you know.”

She took the bottle from him and popped the lid. She tipped the entire bottle into her hand.

“Can I help?” he asked. She could hear the worried tone in his voice.

“No.”

He nodded and took a seat nearby to watch quietly. He didn’t probe or ask anymore questions. He just watched as she placed one hand down near the break. The other cupped the sand, familiar, safe, easy.

She’d done this so many time before, no exactly like this but close. An understanding of anatomy was helpful, and she knew the basics, but a body had a sort of memory too. No child was born with medical knowledge and yet most born healers still intuitively figured out how to use their own magic, at least on themselves. It was far easier to heal the self than it was to heal another. It wasn’t typically themselves that most healers accidentally gave cancer to.

Amanda could sense what had been connected only a few minutes before, what wanted to be connected again. Breaks and bullet holes were easy as long as they didn’t puncture an organ. You just put things back how they were, filled the hole, mended the break. As long as you knew roughly what was was there and what it looked like. Even organ injuries, Amanda could do pretty well these days. Illness and longer term problems however, were outside of her repertoire. Those sorts of things tended to be difficult even for born healers.

She watched as her bone was sucked back through her skin and fixed itself to the other broken half. It wasn’t without pain, no healing ever was but Amanda tried not to wince or make any show of it least she worry Sirius and he distract her from what she was doing. She pushed through it, knowing it would be over soon, mostly. No injury healed perfectly straight away, not unless you were a very good healer. There would be some pain and discomfort if she tried to use that leg over the next few hours. But it a matter of days it would be as good as new, assuming she’d done a decent job of it.

The skin started to mend itself together, like a zip being drawn up and then vanishing. Her skin was still red and puckery when suddenly everything stopped mending. She tried to feel for the healing in her hands, in the sand, but the sand was gone, eaten up by the magic.

She turned to Sirius. “I need another bottle.” She’d never had a heal stop in the middle before. She’d thought that she was being efficient with it, but it seemed there just wasn’t as much magic in those vials as she’d initially thought.

He handed her a second one.

She uncapped it and poured only some of the sand into her hand this time. She probably didn’t need that much more. Her hand grew warm as she picked up from where she had left off. She’d have to be careful about her own energy usage too. She could feel that the bone wasn’t quite knitted back together either so she focused on that first. Then she closed the last of the external site. There was still a bright red line in her calf when she felt this magic also run out. The wound was closed though, safe from infection. She wouldn’t waste healing magic on superficial fixes. She closed the vial and handed it back to Sirius.

He was studying her leg. “You’re not going to heal the last of it?” he asked.

She shook her head. “That’s expensive stuff and there’s not as much there as I’d initially thought. I don’t want to use more than I have to.”

“That’ll probably scar.”

She flashed him a confident smile. “I don’t mind. Scars are cool. A mark of survival.”

Slowly, he matched her smile and with a slightly far off but relaxed look in his eyes he replied, “I suppose they are.”