Rosaliy

The chilly air in Dalor’s darkened room sent prickling goosebumps over Rosaliy’s skin after the drifting heat of the hallway. Her fingers hovered over Dalor’s keys. She reached just a little further, fingers wrapping around the metal ring with an agonizing slowness. She was tempted to make a run for it, but she backed out of the room silently instead, trying not to breathe.

Free of immediate danger, she darted to the locked room and slid the key in the lock, willing the click of unlocking to be quieter. She uncoiled the vine pinning the door to the frame and pushed it open. She was reasonably skilled at sneaking through a house, but her skills were honed from tending to sleeping twins. Although waking them might have felt like a life or death problem at the time, the stakes were considerably higher this time. As she took a second to catch her breath and calm her racing heart, she scanned the room for traps or living ingredients that might squawk or bite. Who knew what kind of dark magic Dalor might have been using?

She found a mess straight out of a stress-induced nightmare. Dalor had been experimenting like a first-year magician who had broken into his master teacher’s laboratory. He had pots filled with lumpy, oddly colored concoctions, some with spoons trapped hopelessly inside. He was succeeding through tenacity and occasional blind luck, not know-how. His most successful attempt at magic was a language potion sitting on a side table. She knew what it was, because the ripped page with scrawled Naxturaen directions told her. At least he could follow directions. She wondered who he had stolen the spell from.

Other than that, Rosaliy was baffled by some of Dalor’s attempts at magic. Not much of what he was using could be considered dark magic. A knife covered in blood sat on a nearby table next to a book filled with spiky Malum writing. Rosaliy could sense the magic in the blood, but she did not sense it in the nearby potions. Maybe Dalor understood using dark magic with his level of skill would likely kill him.

He had tried repeatedly to mix potions to reveal hidden magical objects, but he was using… Rosaliy bent down and sniffed. Rose water? If he had not been so off track with his attempts to improvise without Sorceress blood, he might have been successful now that he had a source of it. Maybe all the time he had spent distracted by tracking Daniella had actually kept him from finding the divination stone. Could that have been part of Daniella’s plan?

Rosaliy wanted to spend an hour organizing this sorry mess, but she restrained herself. She needed a spell to reveal the divination stone more than she needed a functional workspace. She poked at a gritty, brown paste drying in a stone bowl. She could cobble a few of these potions together with a drop or two of her blood, but they would take days of steeping to be potent. Rosaliy had no intention of finishing Dalor’s potion for him and taking the chance he might have access to it in a few days. She needed something faster. She needed to think creatively.

Contemplating, she moved to a different work station. Dalor had gathered up dozens of bottles filled with liquids she doubted he could identify, and he had an entire box full of bundles of herbs and dried flowers. She could make hundreds of things with this, but most of them cured toothaches or doubled the yield of vegetable harvests. Powerful enchantments took time. She was back to that problem again. Magic took more effort and time the further outside herself she intended to use it.

But she did not have to cast a spell outside herself. That might be an answer. She could cast a spell on herself. A hiding spell would be a good start. She could sneak around the temple without fear of being caught if no one could see or track her.

She was already uncorking bottles and sniffing the contents, separating out what she needed.

Yes, she could sabotage the divination room, find out from the Seer where she had hidden the divination stone, and find the stone, all before sundown. She swirled pale blue liquid in a metal cup and crushed up some little yellow flowers, trying not to overdo the moss herb in her trembling haste. Rosaliy had made versions of this potion a hundred times trying to help Sorceress Issabeth create some sort of cure for Cedric’s invisibility. Instead of creating anything that removed the effects of invisibility, she had inadvertently created a spell that made the user invisible. Unfortunately, the potion was rendered a nuisance when then-toddler Tansy had gotten into it and managed to hide from a frantic Chandra for an entire afternoon. After that, Rosaliy was told to please lock up potions that made the magical children invisible.

She downed the concoction with its unpleasant mossy aftertaste, watching herself melt into oblivion. The potion spread through her body from her throat. First, her chest was missing, and then her arms and legs disappeared until she was just floating fingers, toes, and hair. Finally, she evaporated completely, just in time for footsteps down the hallway. Rosaliy hurried to the door and pulled it closed, although anyone looking would surely notice the missing lock and sleeping-monkey-filled satchel outside. Rosaliy’s fingers wrapped around a stone bowl.

Iketa’s caustic voice hollered down the hallway. Rosaliy caught Dalor’s name, but little else. She could fix that problem with a language potion. She happened to be in the room with one. Could she handle the big dose of curling nettle and arbis sap at the same time? She was going to have a horrific headache tomorrow, but the chance of surviving to tomorrow was worth the grief. She finished off Dalor’s language potion just in time to catch some of Iketa’s attempt to rouse Dalor. He was a heavy sleeper.

“(Something) need a power source (something)?” asked Iketa. Foreign words interspersed with the understandable ones. Rosaliy’s potion was encountering resistance from the incompatible mix of ingredients while her head swam from the magical overload. She gripped the edge of the table as a wave of dizziness washed over her. Saps and nettles were a bad mix, but she had not expected such a strong reaction so quickly. Maybe Dalor was not skilled at following plain written directions. She stifled a gasp with her invisible fingers. The healing draught. She had no idea what had been in that or how long it would stay in her system. Her fingers faded in and out of view as the effect of three different potions battled each other.

“What?” slurred Dalor.

“…to start up the divination room. We just need a power source.”

“A power source as magically significant as the divination stone,” Dalor replied, still half asleep.

Rosaliy pressed her fingers against her throbbing temples, taking quick, shallow breaths to avoid throwing up everything sloshing around in her stomach. She had just broken at least twelve of the rules she drilled in the heads of her incoming students every year. Now she had a convincing testimonial to accompany those rules, at least.

“Come with me, dung-monkey,” Iketa exclaimed. “We’ve got one.”

“Huh?” said Dalor, moving about as quickly as Rosaliy. “If there were a powerful stone sitting around, there’d be some sort of—”

“We brought it,” Iketa interrupted, “with the Sorceress.”

“Wait, are you thinking—?”

“Yes. Hurry up.”

People who would not finish their sentences when she needed to eavesdrop on them were terrible, horrible people. Rosaliy’s head hurt too much to figure out what they thought they had.

“Couldn’t this wait until night?”

“No. We’ve got to get to the prison now.”

The prison? At least she could follow them and meet up with Drake, but what kind of power source did they have at the prison?

Dalor and Iketa were nearly down the hallway, so Rosaliy moved to follow them, nearly stumbling over her own feet. Her knees buckled, and her useless, paper legs sank to the ground. She was a living illustration of the necessity for care in potion mixing. She crawled to the hallway and slumped against the wall, squeezing her eyes shut to block out the swirling colors. She could rest in the hallway for just a minute and close her eyes, just until the dizziness passed.