As impossible as it seemed, Bron did know where to go. He led them far away from the path into territory he had absolutely no way of knowing. And yet, at the end of the trip was a house, a little stone house set in the side of a hill, built into the rock itself. Small and quaint and in all ways unexpected and inexplicable, but there it was. A house. Or at least a cottage.
Bron and Nyasha hesitated several paces away, trying to come up with some sort of protocol for dealing with this situation. Calea, though, tromped right up to the wooden door of the cottage, her crutch clattering in the loose rocks and drifts of gritty sand. She knocked her prosthetic hand on the door, once, twice, and sheets of dust fell from the aged and pitted wood like an arid waterfall. It swung inward of its own accord, dislodged by the knocking, and Calea pushed her way inside.
The place was lit by sunlight coming through the roof above, which was part wooden latticework, part rocky ledge protruding from the hillside. The furnishings were sparse and covered with the ubiquitous tan dust that sifted over everything in this miserable region, long untouched by any human. Her feet and the end of her crutch left dark impressions in the dust on the floor.
“It’s abandoned,” she called over her shoulder, but Bron and Nyasha were already pressing in behind her, looking around in wonder.
“What is this place?” Nyasha mused aloud. “Whoever would have built it, and why?”
“I think I know.” Calea moved to a table in the back where she’d spotted, in the dust and filth, a familiar object. She leaned on the creaking table with her hip and lifted to the light a roughly cylindrical lump of dark blue glass. “It’s an inkwell. A scholar lived here.”
“A hermit, more like,” Bron murmured, brushing dust off a stool so he could sit down. He was pale and all but swaying again, now that they were comparatively safe. Nyasha halted her exploration and moved back over to him, slinging her pack off her back as she went. If she was wise, she would have brought some sort of medical supplies from the clinic. Calea was beginning to learn that Nyasha was indeed wise, in her way.
“A hermit,” she agreed, turning the inkwell around in her hand. She had had an inkwell much like it in her first classroom, but that one had been attached to her desk. Magical outbursts among the young Select often flung objects about in amusing but dangerous ways, and the Academy took a few precautions to avoid injuries. Not enough, some might argue, but a few.
Curiosity pushed Calea upright again, forging further back into the abandoned cottage. A particular formation of rock had caught her eye, and as she approached she confirmed it. Yes, these were bricks, not rocks, arranged against the wall in a semicircle that looked very much like…
“An indoor well,” she announced with satisfaction, pleased to have plumbed the mystery. She leaned against the lip of the well, looking down into the deep black pit of it. No smell of water, no sound of dripping, however faint and distant. It wasn’t a water well, though that would have been useful out here in the desert, too.
A separate water cistern against the opposite wall validated her theory. She turned back to Bron and Nyasha, nodding along with her thoughts. “There used to be magic here, probably only a very small pocket not large enough to support a community. A Select must have learned about it and built this cottage to study magic in his or her own way. A fine pursuit. I confess some envy at the idea.”
The other two didn’t look nearly as interested as she thought they should be, but they listened. Bron’s arm was now bound with clean bandages, Calea noted. He leaned against the wall and drank from a canteen, seeming comfortable enough, for Bron, and some of his color had returned. Nyasha was retrieving something else from her pack.
They were tools, each laid neatly on the floor within easy reach of Nyasha’s clever little fingers. “I want to adjust your prosthetics,” she told Calea, kneeling primly on the floor with her hands on her knees. “We have time now, and it needs done.”
Calea reluctantly left her explorations and made her way back to the others. She was leaning on the crutch less and less, she noted with pleasure, though the flat floor inside the cottage might have had something to do with that. Maybe in a few days she would be able to graduate to a walking stick.
Nyasha had wiped a wide area of the floor around her clean of dust, and Calea lowered herself down, sitting with her legs spread out in front of her. She couldn’t help a sigh of relief when Nyasha reached out and started undoing straps, releasing the tight suction of the socket against her arm stump.
“How do you feel?” Nyasha asked. “I know they’re bothering you, but how much?”
“It’s bearable,” Calea said. But her mind was caught on that question. How do you feel?
Now that the curiosity of her initial exploration of the hermitage had faded, all her confused emotions from the scene at the road were returning. She felt weak and helpless, and furious at her weakness and helplessness. Bron had been useful. Even Nyasha had been useful. All Calea had done was sit there and watch.
“Did you find any magic in that little well?” Nyasha asked as she started tinkering with the arm prosthetic. “Maybe you could start to show me how you altered your old prosthetics.”
Calea shook her head. “There was nothing. But that’s not surprising. It’s only sensible that whatever affected both Jalseion and Averieom had power enough to reach this place, too.”
Thyrion was far away over the mountains. Surely magic still filled that mighty, powerful place.
She had watched the brigand die, back at the well. Blood had flowed from the wound in his chest, and he sat there and clutched the knife, and he knew he was going to die. His face had been…terrible. Much the way, she imagined, her own face had looked when she’d realized the Well in Jalseion was empty.
Calea shuddered, trying to fight away the dread of it, the knowledge. She had seen dead bodies in the streets of Jalseion as they’d departed for Averieom, but she hadn’t seen anyone die during the disaster. This was the first time. She had always thought it would be just a thing, a process, like anything else in nature. In a way, it had been just as she’d thought. The body had shut down because it could not continue, like any machine with too many broken parts or not enough fuel.
But she couldn’t stop thinking about it. That dying man, the spark in his eyes slowly fading, his drawn face white as white could be against the red and brown rocks. He had expected only to steal a few items from unwary travelers, not to die at the hands of a stranger. He had woken up this morning just as they had, roused from his bed, and had met his companions to walk the hills, blind and ignorant in the sun. Now he would never do any of that again. He would never do anything.
Calea had been staring blankly at the wall as she thought, but now she looked up, turning to face Bron. “Don’t risk your life again,” she rapped out, harsher than she meant to. “You stood over that food, not giving way–they could have killed you. It was only food. We could have gone back to Averieom for more. It’s not worth your life.”
Nyasha snorted, but it was not a derisive sound. It seemed almost…sad. Calea whipped around to stare at her. “What?”
“Are you still so naive?” Nyasha asked, which was something, coming from her. “They didn’t only want the food. They wanted to kill you. Bron fought for your life, not just a bundle of supplies.”
Calea looked to Bron, expecting a chuckle, a shake of the head. But he just looked back at her, close-mouthed and grim. Calea drew in a breath and fell silent.
The last time her life had been threatened, she had pulled on enough raw magical power to melt stone, entombing her attackers and saving both herself and Bron. She still didn’t know if those men had survived–she hadn’t wanted to ask after them, hadn’t wanted to know. This time, she had been completely useless and unable to protect anyone, even herself.
There had to be magic in Thyrion. There just had to be.
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