Arcane Exfil-Chapter 56: Correspondence

Arcane Exfil-Chapter 56: Correspondence

The Forëa at last lurched into stillness, the wheels grinding to a halt so suddenly that Elina, despite her pride, could not help the sigh that escaped her. An hour in a carriage where no one ventured a word proved almost as wearying; for even she, patient as she liked to believe herself, could not help resenting the silence once it grew thick enough to hear her own thoughts echo.
Miles was gone at once to the training-yard, determined, no doubt, to find in sparring some relief from words. Ethan, by contrast, made directly for the chapel with zeal that brooked no delay, striding as though he feared his prayers might otherwise be forestalled.
Thus Elina remained with Mack, poor soul, who hovered by the carriage as might a man before the magistrate’s bench. The hollowness about his eyes was deeper than she recalled, and she knew too well that look borne by those who have done what duty demanded, and afterward hated themselves for it.
Yet perhaps he might yet be restored. If his hands could learn to heal as well as they had struck – to bind wounds, to still bleeding, to call a man back from death’s brink – then perhaps the old voice of destruction would lose its hold upon him, or at least be softened by the weight of lives preserved.
And what a turn of fate that would be: for no other among them had so exact a knowledge of the body’s workings, and wed to magic that understanding might serve as well in mercy as ever it had in harm.
The boy Gerrick lingered in him still; of that she was certain. Possession had claimed the child beyond all salvation, save only the mercy of a swift end. Few could endure such trauma. Mack had looked, and he had not yet learned to forget.
Well, she would give him something else to see.
Elina turned her smile upon him. “Come. I have a lesson for you, and I assure you, it will serve you better than brooding.”
His eyes were void of all spark; even his assent – “Alright” – fell from him like a stone dropped without care.
It was consent in name only, yet it must suffice. Better the husk of agreement than the silence of refusal.
“Healing magic,” Elina began. “You possess a knowledge of the body not even I can match – knowledge wrung from years of study I would not pretend to fathom. And yet, for all that wisdom, you lack the means to act upon it as you might wish. That, to my mind, is waste – and waste we ought to mend, if we are able.”
She did not wait upon his reply, but turned her steps toward the eastern grounds. If he meant to trail behind like a condemned man, let him. In time she heard his tread, slow and reluctant, but moving nonetheless. Good. Forward motion, however halting, was always to be preferred above stillness.
They crossed the outer courtyard. Clerks bustled across the court, clutching their parchments as if the sheets might wriggle free and scatter themselves to the wind. Elina gave them a passing glance; they were an army armed with quills, and no less frantic for it.
To the left, the library wing loomed in its usual austerity, windows admitting light yet offering little warmth. Ahead, the yard opened into trodden grass where steel and spell rang against barrier.
Elina paid the clamor little heed, for her mind was elsewhere. Her first thought had been to take him to the infirmary, as any lesson in healing might most fittingly begin there. Yet the upper ward remained crowded with Kidry’s victims, thirty men suspended in that ghastly counterfeit of sleep – their minds fettered by whatever villainy the fiend K’hinnum had wrought.
Practice enough, certainly, but she dismissed it at once. To set Mack among them, so soon after Gerrick, would be no lesson but a torment; a wound pressed open under the name of instruction. No, better he begin where life still answers back, and face the possessed only once his spirit had recovered strength to endure the sight.
And so the training field it shall be.
The nearest yard rang with the clash of wooden blades and the crack of air-rifles, pellets darting swift enough to sting but never enough to fell a man. Elina watched the recruits flinch and curse, and a smile tugged at her mouth.
This had been her, once – bruised daily, welted hourly – until she wearied of hobbling home and set her mind to learning healing magic. Not from any noble impulse, but simply to spare herself the indignity of limping.
She glanced at Mack. “Here we are. What finer place to begin than with half-broken recruits?” Her gaze swept the melee, where none had yet collapsed. “Well. Once they finish battering one another, at least.”
Mack gave a grunt – acknowledgment, perhaps, or the sound of a man too hollow to manage words. She took it as enough.
Her eye returned to the yard, where the defenders stood safe behind anchored circles of barrier-magic while the attackers advanced beneath bulwarks of earth heaved up from the ground. The work was in the keeping of the walls – dragging them forward in concert, never letting a gap open as the air-rifles spat their pellets. The stones themselves shrugged off such fire easily enough; the sting came only when some wall lagged, and the rear ranks bore the proof.
Elina remembered it well. Bruises there were, and they faded; yet the weariness of straining to hold her wall upright, and the humiliation of faltering beneath an instructor’s gaze, had lingered far longer.
The current batch had not yet learned their walls were meant to move with them, not against them. Some raised them so high they blundered forward half-blind, colliding with their own line. Others lagged, their earthworks crumbling mid-stride so that the ranks behind caught the pellets meant for them.
The pellets cracked in their steady rhythm – three rifles, perhaps four, trading fire so the barrage never slackened. Competent enough, and crueler for it: the longer one balked, the longer one bled.
One recruit, broad across the shoulders and plainly drunk on his own nerve, drove his wall forward faster than the rest. For a moment it seemed almost clever: a sudden rush once the ground had been gained. But he left his fellows uncovered, their shields gaping, and earned for them a volley they could scarce deflect.
Elina almost laughed. That was youth, truly – ready to win glory for himself, even if it meant bruises for everyone else.
He reached the earthwork, set a foot to vault it. Then the loosened soil betrayed him. The fall turned him awry, pitching him face-first against the earthwork where a shoulder might better have borne the blow. He landed with a crunch. Even the rifles paused, as if to grant the boy the courtesy of silence.
He clapped a hand to his face at once, the gesture confirming what the sound had already told her: the nose was gone for certain, and perhaps more besides. Blood welled freely, thick and dark, no mere surface sting but the mark of bone broken beneath.
At her side a healer moved swiftly toward the boy – quick, attentive, as was proper. Elina raised a hand to stay him. “Pardon me, sir. Might I have the liberty of overseeing this session myself? I’ve a mind to make use of the cases as practice for my companion here.”
The healer checked his pace at once, smiling as men so often did when they found her in their path – startled at first, then eager to please. Recognition came swiftly after, and with it the bow she had long since learned to expect. “Lady Gracer!” he said, admiration warm in his tone. “The honor is ours, my lady. The field is at your disposal.”
The narrative has been taken without permission. any sightings.
“You are gracious. We shall not trespass long upon your charge.” She cast a glance toward Mack. “Come, Sir Hero; your first patient awaits.”
Mack had fixed his gaze beyond the field, beyond the recruits, beyond all of it; he stood a figure emptied of direction, as though the very notion of a road had slipped from him. If his road was lost, then at the very least she would supply him another.
She approached the boy without hurry. She knelt beside his bench – not so low as to coddle, but enough to meet his eyes properly.
He straightened, and winced for the effort. “Lady Gracer! An honor, my lady. And…?”
Elina tilted her head. “This is Sir Mack, who shall see to your nose. What is your name, recruit?”
“Sterlot, my lady.”
“Well then, Sterlot.” She kept her tone light – neither dismissive of his pain nor dramatic about his injury. “Have you broken it before?”
He shook his head. “No, my lady. First time taking a true blow.”
“Ah, a novice to bruises. Then take this lesson well: healing bites harder than harm, though it leaves no scar.”
He swallowed hard, trying to square his shoulders. “If you say it must sting, my lady, then I’ll bear it.”
So tractable, all of them; a word, a look, and resistance melts. Elina smiled. “That is the right spirit. Endure it once, and you will not fear it again. Now lower your hand, and let me see what we shall mend.”
Down went his hand. The nose lay crooked, swelling already, a gash across the bridge spilling blood as boys ever do – freely, and with much ado. The dust and grit clung fast in surrounding wounds. Blood flowed, yes, but no pulse beat beneath it. His eyes followed her clearly enough; the skull was unshaken.
The scenario was clear enough – plain injury, simple remedy. A beginning fit for Mack: he would know at once if his hand had held, or if it had failed.
She turned to Mack. “Here is your patient. What do you see?”
“Broken nose, blood pooling behind it. Cheeks are scraped up. Need to clean the wounds, straighten the nose before the swelling locks it in place. Check if anything’s leaking from higher up.”
No interest animated the man’s words; he spoke only from automatic recitation.
A laugh slipped from her. She ought to have expected no less of one who knew the body’s workings to their smallest hinge, and yet the solemnity of it caught her unawares. “Quite so. Your assessment wants nothing for accuracy.” She laced the words with warmth; perhaps it would breach that automaton’s recital, if only by a hair.
It did not. “What’s next?” Mack asked, lifeless as ever.
If only duty would set him at ease, then so be it.
Elina’s gaze slid toward the pavilion at the field’s edge, with its crates of bandages, jars of cleansing spirit, and tinctures enough to drown a horse. “Eager, then? Before we commence, I would have you know that anatomy alone may name the hurt, but healing compels obedience. Joined together, they make a healer to whom even death must bow a little.”
“Now, let us begin as you suggested. We shall clean the wound.” She raised her hand. Moisture gathered at her summons – from the flask at her hip, from the air itself – shaping into a clear stream that washed across the boy’s torn nose. Her other palm shone with a pale white light as she drew forth the grit and stone.
She halted, leaving the wound partially uncleansed. “Use telekinesis to draw forth the debris as you clean.”
Mack obeyed at once, drawing the water as though he had done so a hundred times. It rose clean, obedient, no faltering in his will. It appeared uncanny for a first attempt, though not so strange in a man who had long studied the body and bent mana to other ends.
As he washed the wound with a surgeon’s precision, Elina continued, “Healing is the will made flesh. For lesser hurts – scrapes, gashes such as this – we serve only to quicken what the body itself already strives toward, making ourselves accomplice to time rather than its subject. But when the injury is grave, when flesh is wholly lost or bone lies splintered past nature’s power to restore, then we must give what nature cannot: to weave mana into matter, or to take ruin in our hands and shape it once more to wholeness.”
The last of the grit yielded, carried away in the reddened stream. Mack set the water aside with the same mechanical precision that haunted all his motions; useful, yes, but lifeless, as though he followed instructions engraved rather than chosen.
“Now comes the distinction that sets healing apart from every craft you have touched till now.” She lifted her hand above the boy’s abraded cheek. “When you conjure flame or raise stone, you impose will upon matter insensate. But flesh – living flesh – bears a will of its own. To heal, you must correspond and align your two wills.”
Her palm shimmered, and between skin and spell there bloomed a faint green radiance, soft as spring leaves in sunlight. “This glow marks true correspondence. My mana does not merely pour into him, but meets his vital force and abides with it. Bring your hand close. Do you feel it?”
Mack’s brow furrowed. For the first time his voice carried a spark. “Yeah, it’s like a resistance, or something. No, more like… presence?”
“Just so. The body knows its design, seeks its wholeness. We do not command it; we lend it strength.”
The boy winced as flesh knit anew. Ruin gave way to form again, time’s slow labor accomplished in an instant, and the body stood as it had always meant to. The glow hung on, obstinate as a guest unwilling to leave, then dwindled into nothing.
She stepped back. “You may heal the other scrapes.”
Mack set his hand above the scrapes. A green radiance bloomed between hand and flesh; his will joined with the boy’s, and the boy’s in turn received him. The skin drew tight, the blood ceased its wandering, and the cuts began to close.
Sterlot flinched and gave a startled laugh. “Feels sharp.”
When the last mark vanished, Elina looked upon Mack and saw that the emptiness in him had lessened. His eyes were not alive with interest, yet neither were they so vacant as before; the dead glass had thinned, and something nearer to the man he had been now looked back at her.
“Well done.” She turned her attention to the nose, still swollen and awry. “Now it is not haste that will serve, but setting it right. Guide the bone gently, else your force will tear what ought remain whole.”
“Guide it how?” His voice carried genuine puzzlement. “Healing’s split between natural acceleration and, I guess, creation? How do you do that?”
“Hmm, perhaps this may aid you.” She gathered a scatter of stones, shaping them into the crude likeness of a nose: two long pieces for bone, smaller for cartilage. With a thought she bent the bridge askew.
“Heal it thus, and the fault is sealed forever.” Earth answered her call, binding the crooked pieces fast.
The bond dissolved at her next command. She drew the fragments straight with a fine telekinetic grip, aligning each to its place, and when the form stood true again she fused them with earth once more. “But restore the shape before you mend, and the wholeness abides.”
Elina let the stones collapse back into the dirt. “You know the structures better than I – septum, cartilage, all your hidden hinges. Apply that knowledge with mana as your hand. The rest will follow.”
Mack raised his hand, and the air answered with the faintest tremor as he set the pieces straight. The bridge drew true beneath his will, cartilage settling where it belonged, the boy wincing only at the pressure. Then came the glow, green and steady.
Elina held her poise, though within she marked the feat. To set so cleanly on a first attempt, and then to bind without error, spoke of skill unseen in any other. For Mack it seemed no trial at all, as though medicine and magic had never been strangers. It was plain enough why, considering his prodigious skill in
both
medicine and magic, individually.
Sterlot touched his face, his wonder plain. “My nose… my nose! It’s as though the injury never was! Thank you, Sir Hero.”
The corner of Mack’s mouth lifted – faintly, yet with the unmistakable truth of a smile born from within.
It struck her with a kind of wonder scarcely less than water being coaxed from stone, or breath given back to the lifeless. For this, too, was a miracle: that a man who had worn death as his garment since Gerrick’s bitter fate should show, however briefly, a resurrection of spirit.
She had thought such a sign would ripen only after many weeks of patient tending; yet behold, it sprang up before her. Life proves stubborn in its return, even where the ground had been marked barren. She could not help but be glad of it.

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Chapter 56: Correspondence