Willow was certain she’d received a head injury, because it felt a lot like Carl was taking her back to his office instead of the infirmary. In fact it wasn’t until he barged through the door that she was certain she hadn’t hallucinated the winding journey. A woman in a white nurse’s outfit stood up abruptly, then sized up Carl and Willow in an instant.
“Over here,” the woman said, and hinged open a complicated-looking contraption that became a table, as if it had hidden inside itself for just such a moment. Carl under one arm, the woman under the other, they laid Willow down face-up on the strange accordion table.
“What happened?”
“A device exploded in her hand,” Carl said, and the nurse scanned down Willow’s arms.
“No, not her hand, another hand. Sorry, I think she might’ve gotten clipped by debris.”
“Well that’s obvious,” the woman said, and gently probed Willow’s cheek. The flesh there was tender and swollen, like she’d run into a door.
“And I think she’s concussed.”
“Also obvious,” the woman said, then shooed Carl away. Surprisingly, he backed off into the corner.
“Willow, can you hear me?”
Willow said yes, but then realized she hadn’t actually breathed the word.
“Yes,” she croaked.
“You’ve got a concussion and a minor laceration. I’m a nurse with the hospital, and I’m going to treat you here in Professor Brandeweiss’s office. Say ‘yes’ if you understand.”
There was so much she didn’t understand, but Willow said yes anyway.
“This may feel a little strange. Have you ever been magically healed before?”
“When… kid…,” Willow sighed. It was hard to hold onto her train of thought. She wanted to explain about the mage who’d come to her town of Bridgewater, of the royal ransom her parents had paid the woman to heal their daughter, and the disappointment in their faces when she said there was nothing to be done.
Like that time before, the nurse began muttering concepts under her breath while sketching complicated spell-forms in the air with her fingers. After what Carl said yesterday, Willow noticed the spell-form was based on a funnel shape. The better to pierce her body and heal something deep inside.
The nurse lowered the funnel into Willow’s forehead and Willow slept.
🜛
“How long’s she supposed to stay out.”
“I would say ten or fifteen minutes more, but her body’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen. You didn’t properly prepare me for what I was coming into—”
“Shh, she’s awake.”
“Willow?” Carl’s voice sounded close. Willow opened her eyes. He was crouching beside her and she’d been flipped over sometime while she was asleep so now she laid on her stomach. The nurse sat in a chair further away, watching the both of them.
“Professor,” Willow said.
“Carl,” he said, and smiled. “Welcome back. You’ve been through a hell of a thing today.”
Willow groaned and tried to sit up, but when she shifted her right arm, the movement set off a cascade of tingling, burning pain in her hand.
She hissed and drew her hand in toward her body, which only made the pain worse.
“Something… my hand.” She didn’t dare look, but at the same time she couldn’t help herself. She glanced down and saw—rather than a heavily bandaged extremity—her normal hand, fingers and all. Just above the wrist was the same strip of metal that Carl had wrapped around her arm at the start of the test.
“How does it feel,” Carl asked.
“How does your head feel,” the nurse butted in, finally getting up and striding over to Willow’s bedside. Willow managed to get up to a sitting position, cradling her hand near her stomach.
“My head feels fine, but something’s wrong with my hand. It burns, like its being stung by a thousand bees.”
“You’ve never felt anything like this before,” the nurse said, and Willow shook her head. The nurse looked back at Carl.
“She’s all yours then.”
“What’s going on,” Willow asked, as Carl took the second chair in the room and placed it beside the fold-out bed. He sat down and sighed like someone who needs to say something, but is unsure of how to say it.
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“I suppose when in doubt, it’s best to start at the beginning. On your intake papers it says you claim you survived the Wasting in Bridgewater, right?”
“Well obviously I didn’t,” Willow said. “As my examiner informed me, no one survives the Wasting.”
“That’s right. No one survives the Wasting. Until you.”
“What?”
Carl looked down at his fingers, which he was rubbing together nervously. “How much do you know about the Wasting?”
“Just that it kills babies. And now apparently I’m the only person who’s survived it?”
Carl nodded. “Its a disease, not of the humors, but something that comes from outside the body. It attacks the nerves at the base of the skull, severing them from the rest of the body. Very quickly the afflicted will lose all control over their muscles and be rendered unable to breathe. They invariably die of suffocation.”
“So… this didn’t happen to me? I fought it off?”
Carl shook his head. “No, the disease appears to have progressed as usual in your case as well. But your reaction to it is something we’ve never seen before.”
“But, you said the nerves—”
“You’ve been paralyzed your whole life,” the nurse interrupted. “Complete nervous disconnect between the brain and body. Your spinal cord at the base of your skull has been severely degraded.”
“Well obviously that’s not true,” Willow said, and rolled her shoulders, then opened and closed her hands. Well, one hand; the other didn’t seem to want to cooperate and only stirred weakly, followed by an overwhelming feeling of fatigue.
Willow winced at the sensation and Carl leaned in. “While you were out, I had Annabelle reconnect a tiny bundle of nerves back to your brain. Just the nerves she identified as targeting your right hand. Everything else is as it was before.”
“What are you saying?”
Willow grimaced and tried to move her hand again. The pins and needles sensation wasn’t abating with time, and it felt like her hand was sapping her of energy.
“I can move. I’ve been able to my entire life. I’m not paralyzed.”
“But you are,” Carl said. “And you always have been. Have you done any research into the spell ‘psychokinesis’?”
“No, I haven’t. Pretty much just been focusing on magelight.”
Carl nodded. “Well, its an intermediate spell, it wouldn’t be in the introductory text you’d have been using to prepare for the exam, but its effect is that it allows you to physically manipulate another object at a distance for a short period of time.”
“Okay… and?” Willow was in pain and running out of patience. What she wanted more than anything was just to be back in familiar surroundings. Back in her room on Grave street, back with Leopold and Bryan and Margaret and even little Benny. Back at home; back in Bridgewater.
Carl gestured to her hand in such a way that she felt as though she should understand what he was implying, but she didn’t. She shook her head.
“That’s how you’ve been able to survive. That’s how you’re able to move. You’ve been using psychokinesis on your own body your entire life.”
The room was dead silent, she could feel both Annabelle’s and Carl’s eyes on her. She tried to flex her right hand again, but it felt like it took nearly all her strength to do it, and it twitched only the smallest amount.
Then, she began to chuckle. The chuckle grew into a laugh, and the laugh grew nearly into a cackle before she began to choke with the spasms of it. She had to double over, painfully pinching her hand in her stomach, but she couldn’t help herself. What the hell were they saying?
“Willow, are you okay,” Carl asked.
“What is this? What are you on about? Why are you trying to get me to believe this ridiculous story? Is it a test of some kind? If so, I pass. No dice.”
“No, Willow. This isn’t a story. This is the truth. We don’t need you to believe it for it to be true, but it would be easier if you’d believe us. There are some demonstrations I can do—”
“Like I’d trust anything you put me through now. What was that back in metrology? Did you put a bomb in one of those things? Is that why it blew up?”
“No, Willow. It blew up because you squeezed the meter so hard it shattered the crystal base. By the end we were reading over two thousand pounds—”
“Enough,” Willow said, and swung her legs over the side of the fold-out bed. She glanced around the room and saw her cane propped next to the door. She gingerly hopped down, shuffled over to her cane, and leaned on it in her off-hand while cradling her right hand at her abdomen.
“I don’t know what you’re trying to feed me, but I’ve had enough. It’s been a terribly long day already, too long by far—”
“I told you she wouldn’t believe—” Annabelle said.
“Shut up,” Carl spat at the nurse, who didn’t react in the slightest.
“—but I’ve got to go home now. I’ve got to get something to eat, or I’m going to pass out. Thank you very much for rescuing me from your own invented little catastrophe back in the lab, but if you don’t mind, I think I’ll be doing my own tutoring from here on out. Thanks for all the help, Professor.”
“Oh Willow,” Carl sighed as she swung the door open and stepped through. “You don’t even need my help anymore.”
She slammed it before she let herself be pulled back in by the mystery of whatever that meant.
🜛
Leopold was nowhere to be found but she had to get out of there, so she stumbled through the main building of the Arcanum to the courtyard between it and its low outer defensive wall. All of the buildings in the city looked to be made of the same kind of pale stone, but this wall was seamless in such a way that suggested it had been built by magic instead of by hand. Willow leaned her forehead against the cool wall and tried to gather her thoughts.
What the hell had happened back there? That nurse had obviously healed her since her cheek no longer smarted from the shrapnel of the failed metrology device, but she’d also done something to her hand to make it itch and pinch terribly. Once she stopped moving the discomfort came back to assail her full force and she rolled her head back and forth against the wall to try to distract herself.
Healed her spine? Unless she was terribly misinformed, a nurse didn’t have the training to do that sort of thing. Only advanced magical surgeons could perform treatments on internal organs through spellwork alone. Somewhere along the line Annabelle was lying, but to whom Willow had no idea.
And Carl. Why would he spring all this on her, this obviously concocted two-bit story? What he was saying was impossible. You had to focus to cast a spell, to shape the spell-form and conceptualize the essence. Only magical creatures could use essence without those, and they couldn’t actually cast spells.
She thought of the salamander with its flame-licked skin and giggled crazily to imagine it human-sized and wearing her clothes.
Ridiculous. Absolutely ridiculous. Willow moaned in agony. Why wasn’t the pain going away?
“Willow?”
Willow turned to see Leopold standing a step away, his hand out to touch her shoulder. The sight of him was like home to someone lost in the forest, and she staggered forward on her wobbling cane.
“What’s wrong? Did something happen with the professor?”
“Let’s get out of here. I’ll fill you in on the way back.”