"Look at the Duchess' feet."
Kendall looked, and grimaced. Although Captain Faille had been carrying Rennyn about most of the time, the bottom of the makeshift bandages was dusty-black, and damp in patches. Oozing. Even with all the advantages of a couple of dozen mages, they were still out in the middle of nowhere having to make their supplies from scratch, and were already close to running out of spare shirts.
"We spent all morning building a house for nothing."
"I was not looking forward to sleeping in it."
"I suppose we would have all caught Herself’s cold, too."
"Perhaps." Sukata reached out and took Kendall’s hand, and squeezed it. "She will come through this. She has her own brand of pigheadedness."
"Bah," Kendall said, and squeezed back. The air was decidedly nippy now, but she felt hot all over.
Captain Faille had returned once again, and the mages clustered closest to Rennyn parted like magic to let him through to pick her up. Kendall guessed that he told her that there were no more mages to come, for she nodded briskly, and said something to Maja Keshkant, who promptly clapped her hands together like a teacher bringing a class to order.
"We are to line up in pairs," Sukata translated, as the Kolan woman began speaking. "It is important that we stay as close as possible together, and move briskly. If anyone lags or stumbles, those around must do what they can to keep them moving. It is important to not prolong the casting time."
Darian Faille had Lieutenant Meniar slung over her shoulder. The Pest and his sister-Samarin linked elbows. The more squabbly of the mages reluctantly found someone to hang on to. Tesin, toting the Imperial Smugness' sword, trotted down to play rear guard—and perhaps gee up anyone who started to lag.
Invisible, intangible, loudly there, a tunnel opened. Kendall clutched Sukata’s hand, remembering the headache she’d earned last time, and how that had apparently let her in for accidentally doing all sorts of things. That was probably important not to think about right now, so she kept her head down, and trooped forward with the rest.
It seemed like no time at all before the feeling of a tunnel went away, along with the last trace of late afternoon. They were somewhere dark and cold, and Kendall briefly wondered if Rennyn had managed to send them altogether wrong, but then she turned and saw the lights of Aurai’s Rest. And there came Lieutenant Faral, bounding at the head of a crowd to find Lieutenant Meniar in the confusion and snatch him into her arms.
She must have squeezed him tight, because he woke up with a gasp, and then said: "Keste," in a pleased little voice, before going straight back to sleep.
Rennyn had actually managed to keep her eyes open. Too many people were crowding around her for Kendall to get a proper look, even when they started conjuring little lights, and moving toward the nearest buildings. But she’d got them here, and there would be a warm bath, clean clothes, and probably half a dozen healers to fuss over her. Rennyn would be all right.
She would.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Rennyn woke, and celebrated that fact. Then she groaned, coughed, and croaked: "Illidian?"
"Off at a Kellian meeting."
Rubbing grit from her eyes, Rennyn blinked at late afternoon light drifting through open windows, then shifted in time to see Kendall closing a Sigillic dictionary. The girl stood up, arms folded.
"How do you feel?"
The question sounded portentous, but the answer surely unsurprising. Rennyn’s skin itched, her feet throbbed, and the inside of her throat was raw. Her bladder ached—though she was at least far less grimy than on her last waking. She…
Rennyn lifted her hand to her throat, found a thin chain, and traced it to a wire pendant holding her focus. On the way, her fingers brushed the tender line she’d cut into her own skin, scored across the bite mark. Then she levitated.
It was the kind of self-indulgent Thought Magic she had not dared for months, and her attention was all for how her aching body reacted to a sustained flow of Efera. She drifted up to the ceiling.
"Enjoying yourself?" Kendall asked, with the particularly fierce glower Rennyn had learned to recognise as an attempt to hide pleasure.
"Yes, rather," Rennyn said, but allowed herself to sink back down to a sitting position. "So they got the miscasting off me?" She felt dizzy, but it was from sudden, violent relief, not the bone-deep physical weakness that had dogged her for so long.
"This morning. They decided they had to try, because…it was something about your heartbeat going too slow. And also, I think, because a whole bunch of them wanted to show each other up and be the one to do something that even you couldn’t manage."
"There are advantages to rescuing a few dozen mages. Did they use my Wicked Uncle’s focus?"
"Yes—they got Captain Faille to crush it. I think he liked that. You’re still sick, though, and run down and all that stuff, and are supposed to stay warm and not do anything much."
"I think I’ll take myself to the privy," Rennyn said, with a level of pleasure that a year ago she would never have associated with such a statement.
"I’ll get you something hot to eat," Kendall said. "Don’t go wandering—I’m not supposed to be letting you out of my sight."
It felt like no effort at all for Rennyn to whisk herself down the corridor and back, but by the time she regained the bed the tremor she hated had come back to her hands. Run down, too many weeks without regular casting exercises, or a physical weakness she would never escape? Destroying her Wicked Uncle’s focus made for appropriate symbology, but undoubtedly killing him would have been a better choice to rid her of all trace of the miscasting.
She coughed for a while, numbed the pain in her feet, and decided that whatever the case it was still an improvement on yesterday. The great hurdle had been overcome. She could move on to other concerns.
The tremor had mostly gone by the time Kendall returned, and she managed, under the girl’s critical eye, to eat without dropping spiced mince all over herself.
"What is the meeting about?" Rennyn asked, once the edge had been taken off her hunger.
"You think they tell me stuff like that?"
"That depends on the meeting. And whether you picked up enough to make a few educated guesses."
Kendall shrugged. "Your stupid uncle, mostly. A bit about that smug-ass Emperor as well."
That made sense. Two major potential threats to the future of the Kellian.
"Are any of the mages we rescued still here?"
"Most of them. You’ve only been asleep a day. They’re still all covered in leaf patterns, and they never shut up."
This had been delivered with a particularly aggrieved note. "And how have they been annoying you?"
"That blabbermouth told them I can Thought cast. Talking of people who never shut up."
"Fallon? Aurienne?"
"Auri," Kendall confirmed. "You’ve given Fallon your cold, and he’s already sicker than you are."
Rennyn frowned. "I hope they’re staying close together. I think Fallon is still sustaining her."
"He still dreams of her all the time he sleeps, so yes. Captain Faille told her to stay in the so-called Dezart’s room, and put Fallon in with her. Last I checked, she was trying on all his clothes." A pause. "Are you going to take her on as a student? She seems to think you will."
"Not for Thought Magic," Rennyn said firmly. "Unless she demonstrates considerably more focus than I’ve seen so far. But I don’t have a problem trying to teach her devising—if only to keep her in check. Unless something comes up, I’ll start you on the exercises for abstract casting tomorrow. And what is that expression about?"