“You’re not going to stay and see if she has any side-effects? Complaints?”
“I’ll do another diagnosis spell on her before I leave.” Sheirdan tapped their fingers on Sera. “There. All done. She’s fine. I’m leaving.”
I sighed. “And if she needs to find you for a second treatment…?”
“I’ll contact her directly. Her little mark has gained my interest, so you can be certain I’ll try to follow up. I’m not sure I can fix damage this extensive, but I enjoy a challenge.” Sheridan turned and headed toward the door. “Now, if you need anything else…” They smirked. “I suppose you’ll just have to track me down.”
“And how would I do that?” I asked.
Sheridan reached into a bag at their side and retrieved a business card.
It read:
Sheridan Theas — Professional Necromancer
Raising the Dead, Not Prices*
For Inquiries, Contact House Theas
*Not actually raising the dead, either
There was no address, just a single glowing rune below the text.
I recognized it as a form of targeting rune. In this case, a type designed for a non-enchanter to store a bit of their mana. This type was usually used to identify the owner of an item so that it could not be used by anyone else. In this case, though, I got the impression that it was more like a signature.
When I looked up after reading the card, Sheridan was gone.
I had the distinct feeling I’d just been flirted with.
Maybe.
That was strange on a number of levels, not the least of which was my half-dressed and unconscious sister being next to me.
The pools of blood on the floor weren’t helping the atmosphere, either.
And I still wasn’t quite sure where I stood on the idea of flirting or relationships in general.
I tried not to think about it. Instead, I slipped the bracer of regeneration out of my bag and slipped it on Sera’s wrist. Unlike the ring, I could activate the bracer myself, so I turned it on.
I hoped it would help.
After that, I pretty much just stared blankly at the doorway for a while.
I did hold Sera’s hand again, though.
I held it until she woke up.
It was silly. I didn’t know if she could even tell.
But she’d done the same for me when I’d been hurt, so the idea of it clearly meant something to her.
After a while, it barely bothered me at all.
Chapter IX – Rest and Recovery
I ended up doing the bulk of the cleaning. In spite of Sheridan’s joking about making Derek do the work, I owed him a great deal for both housing us and letting us make a mess in his lab.
I helped put his equipment back, too.
Sera wrote that she felt miserable in the aftermath, but she seemed stable. She coughed a bit more here and there, but there was a minimal amount of blood, and fortunately, no more of the liquefied scar tissue.
More importantly?
She already could whisper again.
It just provoked a series of terrible coughs every time she did.
I reminded her every time that Sheridan had told her not to try to talk for a few days, but Sera was just so happy to be able to communicate verbally at all, she couldn’t stop herself.
She gave me a few more hugs, too, in the direct aftermath. I braced myself for them as best I could. I knew she was just excited.
The most common thing she tried to whisper was some variation on “thank you” for helping her.
That mostly made me feel more awful.
I still felt like the whole thing was my fault on some level, since I’d given her that potion. The whole “it was what let us survive” thing was great, but I had a hard time internalizing that and pushing the self-recrimination out of the way.
It helped that we’d made some progress, though, and I was determined to do more.
Sheridan had given us some hope that Sera’s condition was fixable, even if Sheridan wasn’t certain they could fix it entirely through this method.
If a cure existed, I’d find it.
But for the moment, I had a more pressing priority.
The next dueling exam was coming up, and I didn’t feel even close to ready. I was probably one of the strongest general duelists in my own class, but there were still types of attunements that I didn’t have a good way of countering.
Especially Shapers.
I had plenty of practice “training” against my father, but I still didn’t have any effective means of countering his attunement. The tiles seemed like my best bet, but a skilled Shaper could still shield themselves from the effects of stepping on one.
I spent some time putting together ideas on how to handle each attunement, making some notes. It comforted me to get into that familiar mode, almost like I was preparing for my Judgment again.
But I was still nervous.
I made another mana watch to help diminish my anxiety. I tried to convince myself that I was working on ways to improve my original design, but I knew the truth. I’d grown completely reliant on the mana measurements. I didn’t know if I could function without them.
I felt a little better when it was done. I’d built in one extra function; the new device stored and displayed the last two measurements, rather than just one. It was an incremental improvement, but the bit of progress made me feel less guilty about spending my time on the watch.
The watch was simple enough that it didn’t take long to make, even with the improvements, but at that point the pain had finally gotten to the point where it wasn’t manageable.
If I’d been a more social person, maybe I would have spent the few remaining hours of the night checking in to see how Sera was doing or visiting Marissa or Patrick.
But that wasn’t me.
I spent the rest of the night reading instead.
I still had so many things I needed to learn. I had a bad habit of realizing I was behind on a subject and ignoring it in favor of something that felt more urgent.
I needed to work on breaking that habit, and I was going to start with something that I was interested in studying.
Foreign attunements were a tempting prospect, but I decided to research something a little bit more immediately relevant — tracking magic.
Even if the spire was sealed, there was still a good chance I’d need to track my brother down soon. To do that, I’d need to have at least a basic understanding of the types of tracking magic that were available.
I didn’t have any specific books on the subject, but Derek had a library, and I was able to find a general book on Divination. I paged through it, stopping at a section that caught my eye.
One of the traditional uses of Divination in noble households is paternity testing. In older houses where the retaining purity of a bloodline is of paramount importance, such spells are often used prior to the declaration that a child of questionable birth is an authentic family member.
Similarly, when a “family member” disappears for a long time — say, during war — and later returns, similar spells are often used to verify the person’s identity.
In cases where an entire family is believed to have been wiped out during an event, authentication spells can be used to compare the bloodline of a claimant to a stored blood sample — or even a relic that had been exposed to an ancient family member — to determine if an ancestral connection exists. This practice is somewhat controversial, as seen in the case of the Errant Prince of Valia in the third century…