A Practical Guide to Sorcery

Chapter 262: Unsated

Siobhan

Month 4, Day 12, Saturday 4:00 p.m.

Siobhan spent a rather morose weekend filled half with cleaning and half with doing everything she could to avoid cleaning. Her only reprieve had been a few hours when Grandfather taught and then supervised her use of the mending spell until he was satisfied that she could cast it safely in a variety of situations. For a while, it was almost like before Mom’s death. Of course, Siobhan was forced back to reality soon enough.

On Saturday, she sat at her bedroom window to write a letter to Father. A cold snap had blown in, and frost etched patterns across the glass, beautiful and ephemeral, unlike the permanent chill that had settled in the house since Mom’s death.

Siobhan blew on the window, then pressed her hand into the foggy surface until the glass warmed and the frost melted. She was tired in a way that had nothing to do with physical fatigue or lack of sleep. For a moment, she stared at the paper lying on the windowsill and wondered if it was even worth it. But there was still a struggling, stubborn spark in her chest that was part of what her Will grew from, and so she mustered up the energy to write. She told Father what had been happening, and some of her worries—but not too many of them, or delving too deeply into her feelings, because he hated hysteria. She asked him to come home.

Monday morning, long before Grandfather would be awake, Siobhan sneaked off into town to leave the letter for the postman, along with a few of her precious coins to pay for delivery. Father usually left a planned itinerary when he traveled, but then again, he usually traveled with Mom. This time, he had ridden away with nothing but a vague promise that he would return at some point. He had tried to leave without Siobhan knowing, perhaps because he thought she would beg him to stay. She had wanted to, but felt too ashamed to do so when he obviously wanted to go.

Even without the itinerary, he would surely tell the local post office where he was going every time he moved from one place to the next. So, while she wasn’t sure where he was, exactly, if she sent the letter to Malzhan—the closest big city, which Father liked to spend a few days in any time he passed through—the letter would make it to him eventually.

After that, the rest of Siobhan’s month was taken up by her punishment detail, and she began to go a bit stir-crazy from being on house arrest. She even looked forward to going to steal eggs from the chickens in the morning, simply for the chance to be outside for a few minutes.

People kept coming by the house to call on Claudio, asking him to do dream magic for them with levels of tact that ranged from delicate hints to outright pleading while they bowed and tugged on his clothes. His sudden, excessive popularity was the result of some wishes coming true for his previous volunteers. Supposedly. The Brennan’s sick nanny cow—the family’s livelihood—got better. And Mrs. Cusack found a purse of lost coin that had disappeared over three months ago, which the family needed to buy fertilizing tinctures and repair their farm’s fences.

Siobhan thought that both of those things could easily be coincidence. Or, perhaps, the soft-hearted Claudio had given the cow some healing potions, and Mrs. Cusack’s worthless thief of a son had felt too guilty and sneakily “returned” the purse.When Siobhan grumbled about this to Grandfather, he patted her on the head. “Quite right, Hazelnut. Many charlatans will purposefully create false success, or even pay someone to pretend, so that others are more likely to trust them. People are very susceptible to influence by their peers. However, there is a sub-craft of divination that deals with summoning and induction. My area of expertise lies elsewhere, but I believe that kind of divination may have some interesting interactions with shamanry. There is a reason why Mr. Tierney is so sought-after, whether that be real results or merely the way he makes people feel.”

Then Grandfather sent her off to continue her chores, since watching Claudio interacting with the guests was apparently too entertaining for someone on punishment detail.

Two weeks into her punishment, Siobhan got fed up and realized that she had to do something, because she couldn’t make it another two weeks. So she began sneaking extra time casting the mending spell, and then she cleaned all of the floors again. With everything pristine, and three weeks having passed, she approached Grandfather with a list of arguments about why she had completed enough household service as well as learned her lesson.

Grandfather walked around inspecting everything, his eyes growing brighter with every room that sparkled like new. She had even meticulously repaired his rocking chair on the front porch, and as an extra blow to his Will—and a deniable bribe—re-stained the wood with a water-resistant resin that Claudio had found for her.

Grandfather straightened, clasped his hands behind his back, and looked contemplatively to the west, even though they were too low to see the ocean from this distance. “Your arguments are well-thought, your work both competent and thorough, and your ambition pleasing. I agree. Your punishment is done, and you may hold your head high.”

Siobhan grinned up at him, bursting with glee.

He placed a large, gentle hand on her head and shook her back and forth just a little. “Perhaps you would like to come down to the tavern with the rest of us for dinner? They have offered to cover all of our food and drinks for free if Claudio and I work some magic. He will be bestowing dreams, and I will create some single-use artifacts.”

Siobhan nodded rapidly. “Yes!”

“You may order a slice of pie as well,” he said.

Siobhan could barely hold back laughter. Grandfather only suggested that she have dessert when he was especially pleased with her, or on important ceremonial days. She preemptively got ready to go out, then spent some time working on her plans to ride a sky kraken to the edge of space before they left.

When some of the village children saw her group arrive, they whispered among themselves, and one of them ran off. Rory showed up ten minutes later, flushed and out of breath. A nearby man winked at the young boy and allowed Rory to take an extra chair from his table, which Rory pulled up beside Siobhan. His feet swung beneath the chair like a puppy’s tail might wag with excitement.

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“I’m not paying for your dinner,” she warned.

“I already ate,” he assured her, stopping his legs from swinging. He sat up straighter, though no amount of improved posture could hide the fact that he had dirt under his fingernails and the sole of one shoe was starting to separate from the rest.

Even though the food was free, Claudio only had a few snacks and barely sipped his drink. She would have thought, with how he was pretending to eat all of his meals in his room but actually burying them in the back forest, he would have been starving. But he was too busy working through the queue of people waiting for his magic. Or, perhaps, he still didn’t feel safe eating in front of Grandfather, even if someone else had prepared the meal. The thought made her feel strange.

She looked over at the old man, who was wearing a multi-lensed magnifying apparatus on his head and etching a spell array into a smooth river stone for another of the villagers.

Without looking up from the delicate work, he said, “Put this in your fireplace tonight. It will clean the clogged chimney from bottom to top by tomorrow morning.”

Siobhan just didn’t think that Claudio’s fears had any basis in reality. Maybe something bad had happened to him in the past that left a festering wound inside his heart and made him think something similar was likely to happen again, even if he had no evidence of that. Mom had told her about wounds like that. Grandfather had some, though he had done his best to heal them and had gotten a lot better before Siobhan was born.

Maybe an old, festering wound was why he had been acting so…wrong lately.

When dinner was finished—and Rory had eaten the last few bites of Siobhan’s pie—Grandfather was called out back to examine a strange boil on the buttocks of one of the village men.

Rory took the opportunity to lean over and say, “I think it really was a magical infection, and Master Kalvidasan wiped it all out like he promised. And he didn’t even tell my mom about what we did. He’s such a saint.”

Siobhan raised one eyebrow. Some part of her wanted to disagree automatically. She’d continued to have sporadic nightmares about Mom, and they hadn’t even really seen anything in the tower. What if those ledgers had something suspicious in them?

But she also knew that maybe she was the one with a festering wound in her heart. Maybe it was making her suspicious that bad things would continue to happen to her and those she loved, even though there was no real evidence of that. Reluctantly, she agreed with Rory.

Claudio seemed exhausted on the way home, another sign that he hadn’t spent enough time growing his abilities as a thaumaturge. Siobhan had started out only being able to cast for a half hour each day, because Grandfather said more could cause Will-strain in someone so young. Now, two years later, she could cast for an hour and half each day, divided into multiple sessions. Grandfather could cast for half the night, it seemed, and she had seen him perform rituals that lasted an entire eight hours. He said that being able to cast for six hours per day, with some breaks in between, was the measure of basic competence, beyond which the untalented began to endanger themselves.

Claudio had barely cast for three hours and he was already dragging his feet, with grey hollows under his eyes.

Siobhan took a second look at him and frowned. Were his cheeks starting to sink in? Was he, perhaps, not exhausted from the casting, but because he was eating so little that he was wasting away?

She rubbed at the wrinkle between her eyebrows. Wow, what an idiot. Didn’t Claudio know that magic required even more sustenance than normal activity? Even if he was unnecessarily paranoid about eating food other people had prepared, was he incapable of providing for himself?

That evening, she sneaked a few rolls of bread and some old travel rations out of the kitchen, knocked on Claudio’s door, and gave them to him. “You need to eat,” she told him sternly. “Food is fuel for your body and those spells you like casting so much. If you can’t even keep up with basic sustenance, how are you ever supposed to get better at magic?”

Claudio took the bundle of food with a strange expression.

“My grandfather hasn’t touched any of that. He probably doesn’t even know it exists.”

After a long pause, Claudio said, “Thank you.”

Siobhan gave him an irritated “humph” and stomped off.

The next day started the weekend, and Siobhan woke much too early from another nightmare about Mom. This time, Mom was tied inside a huge, circular torture device that stretched her until her joints popped and her skin tore. Mom didn’t fight. She didn’t even scream, just hung there limply, staring with all-white eyes until she ripped apart entirely. Her pieces caught fire and burned away until nothing was left. And the whole time, the dream forced Siobhan to watch, unmoving and silent despite the wrenching pain in her chest.

She woke already crying, with an itch in her bones that urged her to do something, anything, to suppress her insidious thoughts.

She left the house early enough to greet the dawn and went down to fetch the week’s post. Most of the villagers rose early, and they were already beginning to go about their work. Maybe the paper would have something interesting enough to distract her.

Grandfather said the gods of irony weren’t real, but he still often cursed them.

As if those same gods were watching her, a man ran into the main street from the south, slid in a spot of mud, and sprawled onto the ground. Mr. O’Dredricks pushed himself up onto his hands and knees, barely seeming to care. “The sheep! They’re dead, every last one! Killed! Eaten!”

Everyone in shouting distance turned toward him, and a few people opened their shutters and leaned out of their windows.

“Fetch the sorcerer!” he screamed again. “Help, we need—we need help!” Something about the desperation in his voice hastened Siobhan’s pulse and made the world seem to compress, the moment drawing out and impressing itself forever into her memory. It was as if some part of her knew this was the moment before the world changed irrevocably and was marking the spot.

He screamed more, but Siobhan didn’t hear, because a woman who had been walking past Siobhan turned so quickly that her basket full of pickle jars smacked Siobhan on the back of the head and sent her reeling to the ground.

The woman apologized profusely and helped her up, but by the time Siobhan was steady again and had the mud cleaned from her face and hands, someone had already gone racing down the road that led to Siobhan’s house, and everyone else was following Mr. O’Dredricks back to wherever the sheep had been found.

The blow to the head hadn’t changed Siobhan’s feeling about the moment. Her skin was tingling. And since Grandfather wasn’t there to stop her, she followed the villagers, too.

The sheep were a few streets over, in the small, fenced area behind Mr. O’Dredricks’s house on the edge of the village, and a crowd was already gathered around and packed in close. A few people screamed at the sight, she saw several responding with hand signs to ward off evil, and others actually tried to stumble away, only to be held in place by the crowd.

Siobhan was too small to make any headway through the press of people, but when she crouched down, she caught a few glimpses between people’s legs.

At first, all she could make out was blood. It was spilled everywhere, so thick that it had stained the ground and puddled in places where the clay was dense. There were signs of some other liquid, too. It was thick and clearish, but couldn’t be water; it hadn’t rained in the last couple of days, and water didn’t lay on the ground like that. It looked more like some kind of slime, perhaps produced by whatever monster had supposedly killed the sheep.

And then she caught sight of one of the sheep’s legs. It was unattached to the rest of the sheep—torn completely off. Siobhan shuddered with a sudden, bone-deep chill as all the warmth inside her seemed to blow away. She stared, wondering why this was affecting her so. She had seen dead animals before, felled and half eaten by predators, butchered by other humans, and even those who succumbed to sickness.

But something about that single, torn-away leg screamed its wrongness in her mind.