The Abjurer: Chapter 20-21 (Patreon)

A divination surged through her room, pulling information back through the invisible webs of the world and into my hand. The Aura began to spin and swirl, breaking into two parts, one red, and one green.

The fae waved her hands frantically, spells surging out of her to try and counter my divination.

The first thing she cut off was the red streak of aura, the tracking spell that located Osheen.

Which gave me just enough time to press Rowan’s amulet into the spell array.

I hadn’t had the time to build a new way to channel the bad luck buildup that the amulet gathered. It’d been on my list, but with so much to do, I’d simply never gotten around to it. Meaning that it’d been gathering bad luck for the entire summer and fall semester…

All of which I unloaded through the divination, right into the Spring Queen. Instead of releasing it in a single burst, like I did in combat, I instead kept up a steady stream of lesser luck. More than a minor inconvenience, but not a deadly level of bad luck.

The Silver Queen had wanted me to embarrass her, after all, and the use of the luck from the amulet actually strengthened the sympathetic link that the divination spell used. It wasn’t as perfect as a link to Osheen, but I knew that my link to him was always going to be her first priority to divert.

“What did you do?” she shouted as she waved her hands, trying to claw at the magic around her.

“Consider it a gift,” I said. “After all, if you’re unable to take care of yourself or your entourage, that is a failure on your part, Queen.”

“Do you want your husband to die?” she snarled.

I sucked in a breath, but a moment later, rational thought returned. I knew she was bluffing.

Killing someone else’s guest would be a horrible violation of the rules, and the behemoth had warned me about it.

And she hadn’t actually threatened his life, just asked a question.

“Tell me, do you have the challenge of duels here?” I asked.

“Of course we do,” she snapped.

“Then I challenge you,” I said. “A duel to surrender. The winner keeps Osheen, Lord of Fire, and is owed three favors by the loser.”

“Fine,” she snapped. “Remove this lingering curse, and we shall duel in three days, as time is measured within this altered flow.”

“Return Osheen to me in the meantime and I will,” I said.

“Deal.”

I removed the amulet, cutting off the flow of magic.

“A bit of advice? Don’t mess with a master of curse magic,” I said. “It’s never a wise idea.”

Perhaps I was acting a bit too much like the fae there – I could have lied and said I was a master of curse magic, after all. Ah, well. The deceit would hopefully be good enough

“Why did you even take him in the first place?” I asked, now that I’d gotten him back, at least temporarily.

She let out a dignified sniffing sound and turned her nose up.

“Such information is beyond your ability to pay,” she said. “Your Lord has been returned to you. Begone.”

She waved her hand and a tide of magic crashed into mine, attempting to tear it apart. I could have fought it, could have pushed my magic to conflict with hers.

But if Osheen really was here, then I had much more important things to care about. And if he wasn’t, then the debt she would have incurred to me for being wrong would be a far stronger connection than the one I had now, so I let the spell break apart and rushed to the door.

As soon as I flung it open, there was something flying right at my face.

My cloak flared to life around me, and I slipped out of the way just in time, the world seeming to slow down.

Osheen was there, as promised, but he was a lump on the floor. Not a bloody lump, thankfully, so they may have subdued him with magic or something else, but I didn’t have time to take a proper look.

In midair, over where he was laying, there was a bug-creature. It looked like a massively overgrown wasp, so large that it was easily the size of a dog, with a stinger that reminded me more of the tip of a spear than it did a natural implement. Aura gathered around the spear, faerie runes for toxins and death spinning like wild.

It had three sets of arms that ended in hands that were disturbingly humanoid on the insectile body. All of them were waving about, sketching more runes in the air. I recognized bits of spells for shielding, fire, and light, but above all, I could see more toxin spells building up.

It launched itself at me again, and I used a burst of speed to launch myself out of the way, but slipped on the thick, smooth ice of the hallway. I let out a loud curse as it dive bombed my prone form, infusing its stinger with the magic that it had built up.

Then I triggered my abjuration built into the spell. I hadn’t had many chances for my divination spells to feel out the strange, inhuman nature of summer magic yet, so it was horribly inefficient as it broke apart the spell, but it did manage to tear enough of it apart that I was able to call up my ward around me, stopping the wasp creature mere inches from my skin.

I mentally kicked myself for not picking up my staff when I went to fetch Osheen. I was dealing with the Fae, I should have anticipated a trick of some sort.

As the hornet continued to pound on my ward, draining more and more power from my cloak with each attack, I flipped so I was on my hands and knees, facing Osheen.

The timing on this would be tricky…

The moment the wasp reared back for another divebomb, Oracle went in for one of his own, his claws raking against the hornet’s wings before he disengaged to fly back into our room.

I let go of the ward and tapped into the enhancement spell, then pushed myself off. I slid quickly across the icy floor and right into Osheen’s body, both of us tumbling through the open doorway and into our guest rooms.

I barely had time to scramble to my feet before the wasp was following us into the room, the buzz of its injured wings louder than ever. I pulled a knife from my belt and aimed at the wasp, annoyed.

Weren’t our rooms supposed to be safe? Guarded by Medb?

As soon as I thought Medb’s name, the wasp froze.

Not froze as in stopping movement. It literally froze, ice encasing it in a thick hoarfrost coat, and it fell, smashing to the ground. Bits and pieces of insect flew around the room, and a second later, I heard a woman’s voice coming from the air around me.

“Maestro Tailor,” the voice said. It was soft, but unyieldingly cold. “Thank you for engaging your rooms outer defensive layer. The Insect Court has been detained, and we apologize to you on their behalf.”

“The Insect Court?” I asked the open air. This was undoubtedly a spell, likely tucked away within the ice of the walls and floor just out of sight, so I was hoping that it would transmit my voice back to whoever it was that had spoken to me.

The silence that met me in return indicated that I had no such luck, however. I went and closed the door, then rushed to check on Osheen.

He had a pulse, and he was breathing, so that was good. The breathing seemed normal, and the pulse was slow, but he was also asleep, so it might be as simple as that. It certainly wasn’t so slow that I couldn’t feel it.

I wasn’t a healer, I couldn’t check for his mind or soul activity, so that’s naturally where my mind went. There were horrifying cases of someone’s mind or soul being removed from their body, leaving the body alive, but completely comatose. In cases like that, there was nothing that could be done, though, so I forced myself to stop thinking about those.

I scanned him head to toe for magic, looking for any traces of runes that I could see, and swept the divination of my cloak over him, but whatever had been done to him, it had left no runes for me to tear apart.

His Aura was a bit depleted, but it was nowhere near the levels that it should be in order to cause him to pass out.

Still, refilling it couldn’t hurt.

I sent Oracle into the bathroom to turn on the hot water, praying to whatever beings would listen to me that the Queen of Ice’s accommodations would include heated water.

After a moment of hesitation, I began to check him over for bites or stings. There was a time and place for decency, and even though I didn’t love that I wasn’t able to ask his permission, the risk of death was a reasonable excuse.

Especially since I’d just fought an insect that had used toxic magic, and there was no doubt that the Vernal Court would have some serpentine members.

I let out a sigh of relief when I didn’t find anything, then I bit my lip as I desperately tried to think of what sort of methods might have been used to subdue him.

My eyes widened and I rushed to the ritual room.

Ingested poisons were a funny thing, and something I’d had to learn far too much about in my classes with Wisteria, since it was a common part of rituals and alchemy in particular.

There was no such thing as ‘universal antidotes’ for poisons. Every poison altered the body in different ways, and every person had different reactions to them.

Even magic and alchemy weren’t particularly helpful here. Potions that sped up the body’s natural recovery rate were often horribly dangerous in these cases, to say nothing of the fact that they could stimulate infections and a thousand other things.

There had been a few attempts from various healers and poison mages over the centuries to find a way to perfect the healing process from poisons, but there was nothing definitive.

But there was something that had been shown to be effective against a variety of poisons. It was a shot in the dark, since it was useless against several types of toxins, especially things like lye.

But if he had been poisoned, it was by the Vernal Court, or at least someone acting as the Vernal Court’s catspaw.

I thought – hoped – that meant that the poison would be more likely to be natural. And belladonna berries, also called nightshade, were one of the few poisons that could be dosed to force someone into a slumber, rather than just killing them. It fit well with the spring theme that the Vernal Court had, and would be something their magic could create or imitate.

Oh, there was always a risk of killing someone, sure, but that was true with any poison.

And even if I was wrong about the specific type of poison, this treatment was useful against a handful – it could be used to treat cyanide and arsenic, for example, either of which the court could have used.

There were several important aspects to fighting a poison in the body. The first was to flush the body of whatever the toxins were. I grabbed some flaxseed oil off the wall, alongside some coffee beans and pods from the senna plant.

But even if I was able to get him to flush out some of the poison, there would already be some bound to his stomach.

That was where the next element of the solution came in.

Charcoal.

I sent a mental call for Oracle, who came swooping over a moment later.

Charcoal was such a simple thing, so common, and yet it was able to bind to many toxins in the stomach and intestines, which would help it be flushed out of his system, even when he may normally not be.

Any good ritual space had alchemy equipment, and this was no different. Medb had provided a small cauldron with a blue flame underneath. She was using some magic to power the flame, with a dial to alter the heat of the flame.

Normally, that sort of luxury would have me marveling, but I couldn’t bring myself to care.

For a moment, I was worried this flame would have some sort of spell to stop it from doing anything but heating the cauldron, but when I put strips of wood onto the fire, it still burned.

Good.

I turned the heat of the cauldron up as high as I could. I wasn’t sure why it worked this way, since potions weren’t my area of expertise, but I knew that the hotter the charcoal burned, the more effective it would be in this instance.

With my other hand, I began to crush the coffee beans and senna pods, while Oracle dumped the flaxseed oil into the cauldron.

As soon as the stick of wood was burnt to a crisp, I crushed it up and mixed it with the other components, then poured it into the oil and placed it on the heat, lowering it some so I didn’t light the pot on fire.

“Paper,” I said to Oracle, who went to fetch it as I got ink and a pen. I began to quickly write out strips of spellcraft onto the paper.

It was not anything fancy, since all it did was increase the natural properties of the components it was mixed with. It was, in fact, downright amateurish. Wisteria would probably have been ashamed if she’d seen me doing it. It might qualify for an intermediate-level potion, if that.

But I was relying more on the properties of the natural magic and chemistry of the components than any great spellcraft.

I mumbled out a chant and poured power into the paper, then dropped it into the hot oil, where it dissolved in a flash of viridian light.

While it sucked in power from the aura rich environment, I rushed over to Osheen.

I was far, far away from being a master wardcrafter. It wasn’t even close to my wheelhouse when it came to magic. But Jerimiah and George had shown me a ward to neutralize poisons. It was meant to work on things before they were swallowed, but I was sure that using it now would at least not hurt him.

I drew the ward circle around the rim of the bath where he was sitting, and then shoved aura into it and rushed through the chant before ducking back out to continue creating the rest of the treatment.

Flushing his system like this would cause him to lose a lot of water, and dehydration could kill just as surely as a poison could. In fact, there were some toxins that killed via dehydration.

I started by sprinting to the tap and pouring water into a five-gallon bucket, warm enough to let me dissolve the rest of what I needed, but not hot, all while Oracle flew around to gather more components.

Despite the dire circumstances, a part of me couldn’t help but admire how good of a team Oracle and I made in a well-stocked ritual room. If I survived the party, I’d definitely look at making him some sort of aura-feeding device to let him stay in the mortal world more easily.

I wrote out another basic enhancement spell onto paper as Oracle finished dropping off the components.

I threw a handful of sugar into the water, followed by a pinch of salt, and a pinch of potassium, then stirred vigorously to dissolve it while chanting out the spell. It mixed into this potion – though it was even less of one than the cure was – and began to draw in aura.

I turned off the heat on the flaxseed oil and strained it out into a bottle. It was a dark, murky color, and so thick that it was actually a little stomach churning to look at.

I just hoped it would work. I grabbed the bucket of water, a ladle, and set it up in the bathroom, then dragged Osheen into the warm bath.

I force fed him the potion and watched him carefully as it took effect, slowly making him drink the water.

It was a slow, dirty process. He flushed the toxin just about every way I could think of, and I had to keep washing him off.

About an hour into it, his eyes began to flicker open, and I felt my heart rate spike wildly.

“Can you hear me?” I asked, taking his hand. “Squeeze my hand if you can.”

A moment later, I felt a weak squeeze of my hand, and I let out a sigh of relief.

“You’re getting out the toxins,” I said. “You’re safe. Just keep drinking the water, okay?”

I felt another squeeze of my hand.

~~~

It took two more hours before I heard Osheen speaking.

“M’sorry,” he mumbled.

“Shh, relax,” I said, stroking his back gently as I continued to feed him and wash him off. “It’s not your fault, and you don’t need to talk right now.”

It took most of the rest of the day before Osheen was ambulatory again, and he apologized a second time, his voice a lot stronger sounding.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “They caught me by surprise, and their Queen was able to stop my fire completely. I couldn’t touch her…”

“It’s not your fault,” I said. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have left you. We may be at a party, but I think we’re in a more dangerous spot than just about anywhere in our world. I’m sorry.”

“It’s my fault, not yours,” he said. I leaned in and kissed his cheek, despite the fact that he smelled terrible

“It’s not. I love you. I don’t think us blaming ourselves is going to help anyone.”

“That’s true,” Osheen relented, then blinked and turned his head to look at me curiously. “How did you get me back?”

“I may have cursed the Queen you were talking about.”

“You… what?”

I related the story of how I’d gotten him back while Osheen washed and dressed himself. When I told him of the terms of the duel, he grimaced.

“That’s… not great,” he said as we moved to the sitting room. “Three days isn’t a lot of time.”

“It’s not,” I agreed. “And she’s got more raw power than I do. I’ve also no doubt that she’s going to acquire defense against curses, and possibly lightning, before the duel.”

“What advantages do you have?” Osheen asked. “Your cloak and the sword will both grow more effective through the fight. Maybe we can convince someone to cast some faerie fire spells at you beforehand, to give them more adaptation?”

“That’s a good idea,” I said. “We should also speak to the Autumnal Court. I’m sure they’d love to see their rival court defeated by a mere Maestro, especially since the Silver Queen split from their ranks. It’s practically a proxy match for pride.”

“You think they may give you some things for free?” Osheen asked, then shook his head. “Never free for the fae, but they may still be willing to help you, with humiliating her as the price.”

“They may… though I wonder. The Silver Queen made humiliating her one of my goals. Did she know this would happen?”

“Like you said,” Osheen said. “We’re practically a proxy, but we’re tiny compared to the big courts. She may not have known this specifically would happen, but she probably did know that the Vernal Court would go out of their way to smack us down, and wanted us to bite back.”

“Politics,” I said, and Osheen smiled.

“If you think Fae politics is bad, you should never deal with human ones. It’s far less common to be able to take out your opponents with a fight there, outside of civil wars.”

“You’re right,” I said, reaching out and taking his hand. “But I’ll take a fight where I can.”

Osheen ran a hand through his hair and sighed.

“I’m exhausted and hungry, which… I was passed out for hours, I don’t see how.”

“Your body was fighting hard,” I said, then glanced at the clock. It, too, was made of ice. “It’s pretty late. I don’t think we should make a food run, unfortunately. I have an idea that the Fae who are out and about at night aren’t nearly so pleasant. But we should sleep.”

“You’re probably ri–” Osheen started to say before he was interrupted by a knock at the door.

I leapt to my feet and flared the power of my cloak out around me, then dashed to the room to get my staff.

Osheen raised his hands, Aura swirling out and into heavy, spiky runes of an overpowered immolation spell.

“I’ve got the door,” he said.

“Nonsense,” I said, using a burst of speed to reach it before he could and opening it, pointing my staff out the door, just in case it was some sort of assassin. Sure, they probably couldn’t enter the room without me simply thinking about Medb and freezing them to death, but it couldn’t hurt to be cautious.

“I swear that we mean you no harm,” a baritone voice rumbled.

I took a half step back and looked over the pair. They were quite the contrast.

One of them was absurdly tall, easily seven feet. She wore all black, with a long funeral dress and black cloak. The only spot of color on her was the bleached white whip that was wrapped around her waist like a belt.

It looked like it was made of a human spine.

She gave us a deep bow, removing her head and placing it under her arm in order to do so, and my stomach churned a bit at the sight.

The other one was short, standing a few inches shorter than even I was. He possessed the inhuman, slender grace and beauty of many of the Sidhe that I’d seen at the party, with dark caramel skin, curls and a temple fade, and a youthful face. He gave a bow as well, though far shallower than the tall woman at his side had given us.

“I am Garnet, King of Twilight,” the pretty one said, then gestured to the tall one. “This is my servant: Ashe, Lady of Death. We come as representatives of King Octavian of the Autumnal Court. We mean you no harm, as I said before. May we come in as your guests?”

I glanced at Osheen, who gave a halfhearted shrug, then nodded.

“You may,” I said.

Ashe turned to face the hallway to stand guard as Garnet swept inside.

“Good evening gentleman. I trust you are doing well tonight?”

“As well as can be, given what I went through,” Osheen said mildly. “Yourself?”

“Oh, simply wonderful. When my older sister told me that she’d be sending representatives to this meeting and suggested I rush my ascension to the status of a King, it meant only one of three hundred and twenty-six things can be happening.”

He leaned forwards, a gleam in his eye.

“So, please tell me. Which is it?”

I frowned at that, not having expected such straightforwardness from the fae.

“What are you willing to offer for that information?” Osheen asked, coughing slightly into his palm, then wiping at his mouth.

“Oh, very well, very well,” Garnet said, glancing over us. “I propose a deal of mutual alliance until the end of this party between my Court and the Silver Court. This means we will each do what we can to assist one another with our goals, share information freely, and provide access to our resources. All within reasonable parameters, though enough refusal to assist may be cause for either party to break the alliance.”

I thought it through, turning each word over in my mind. I didn’t want to be bound to helping a group that I knew basically nothing about, but at the same time, their assistance with my goals meant that it shouldn’t be too horrible.

“Agreed, on the provision that after the alliance is over, whether by time or early breakage, neither party shall attack the other for a year and a day, either directly or through external agents.”

Garnet seemed to think that over for a bit longer than I’d have liked before he eventually smiled and extended a hand.

“Deal.”

I shook his hand, and he leaned back in his chair.

“Now, I suspect that the first order of business is going to be addressing the remainder of the poison within Osheen’s system. You’ve purged the physical toxins, but there are still threads of magic that could present a danger. More have been removed than I would have suspected though…”

After a moment of thought, I tapped the sword at my waist.

“This probably did it.”

Garnet looked at the sword and his eyes widened. He let out a long, slow breath, then nodded.

“Indeed, that probably did. Interesting. Perhaps you won’t need quite as much help as I had feared…”

He raised one hand and pointed at Osheen. Faerie magic spiraled out of Garnet, twisting into the shape of curling constellations from the human sky, as well as ones I didn’t recognize – presumably from the sky of the Fae Sovereignties.

They spun and twisted in the air, connecting and chaining into a three-dimensional spell array. I squinted at it.

This was the second time I’d seen the fae using a three-dimensional spell. The first time, I’d simply written it off as Medb being Medb, an absurdly powerful being of ice and winter.

But now I was starting to wonder…

I had a few ideas about how I could use faerie magic to serve as a magical z-axis for my normal human magic, and my current power should do a good job with assisting me in building that. I didn’t think it would actually let me go much stronger with me spells in terms of raw power, but it may let me cram more details into the same space.

I realized I’d drifted off then I heard Osheen retching out the remaining magic, and Garnet wrinkled his nose. He waved his hand, and a wave of cleansing power swept through the rooms, cleaning everything. It washed over me, and I felt absurdly clean.

Every nook and cranny of myself, my clothes, and my gear was cleansed of all the filth, grime, and sweat that it had built up, which was a not inconsiderable amount.

If I could bottle that level of cleaning power, I was certain that I could sell it and make a fortune. Heck, I wanted it, and I decided to look into cleaning rituals.

Well, I would when I had the time. I wasn’t sure when exactly I would have that much time, but I was sure that stress would have to let up eventually.

At least, I hoped so.

“That will have to do,” Garnet said, and he looked weary. “The magical aspect of the poison was slowing your Aura, subduing it and stopping it from being shaped as easily. I can’t truly fix it, but I’ve halted it.”

“You can’t fix it?” I asked, concerned.

“Curing isn’t in the domain of twilight or constellations,” he said seriously. “My sister, the Silver Queen, might have been able to. The Spring Queen can. But halting it’s the best I can do. You’re lucky I got here as fast as I did – it’s already going to make advancing further with his… Archon stars, or whatever you call them… difficult.”

That gave me even more of an incentive to win than I’d already had. I wasn’t sure if my defenses would eventually purge the toxin or not, given that they had been made with the Silver Queen’s power, but even if they couldn’t, a favor from the Spring Queen would certainly allow me to fix it.

“Now, what goals did my dear sister give you to complete at this party? I already know you need to speak with the ambassador of the Huntsman – you’ll likely find whoever the Huntsman sent down in the sparring rooms. We’ll discuss that aspect once you have the deal made.”

“I have to humiliate the leaders of the Vernal Court,” I said. “But given what they’ve already done, I think I can do that just by winning.”

“No,” Osheen said, shaking his head, but was cut off by Garnet.

“Actually, it will. You being a Maestro will help accomplish that. Titles mean even more to the Fae than they do to you humans, and a Queen losing to someone who’s only recognized as a Maestro by a minor court? That will burn her pride badly.”

“But you have to actually win,” Osheen said. “Not just beat her, you have to humiliate her in the match. Make it apparent that for all of her power, you have a trick and a counter.”

“Exactly,” Garnet agreed. “This is where I can only be of some small assistance. While I could hand over a sum of Autumnal Power, which you could no doubt distill into Silver Power, that’s going to be winning on borrowed magic.”

“I do have a few tricks that may be able to help,” I said. “I hit her with an advanced curse from my mother, who was a master of curse magic, so she thinks I’ve got far more curse magic than I actually do. My cloak and sword both also have proprietary adaptive magic, with strong memory banks, so I should be able to adapt to whatever magic she uses, and if I can get some of the spell designs beforehand, that would make it even easier.”

“You’ve also upgraded your armband with power from the Court of Air,” Garnet noted. “That wasn’t in our records, so I assumed it happened here. Was it public?”

“Semi-public,” I said. “I met a Queen of the Breeze and agreed to make her an item in exchange for upgrading it at the same time Osheen was being kidnapped.”

I still felt a pang of guilt in my stomach when I said that.

“Hmm. We’ll give it even odds she knows.”

“Problem with that,” I said. “I don’t know how to use the upgraded flight function.”

“I didn’t even know it had a flight function,” Osheen said.

“Neither did I until I met that Queen,” I admitted.

“Well, that is a problem, but not an unassailable one,” Garnet said. “Both Spring, Summer, Winter, and Autumn all have roughly equal control of the sky, but the Court of Air is the undisputed master of it. She may have more practice with flight, but I don’t think she’ll be able to disrupt your enchantment. You simply need to practice.”

“I can help,” Osheen said, his wings of fire spreading from his back. Oracle squawked, and gave me the impression that he would help as well.

“Very good,” Garnet said. “Now, let’s talk about offensive power. She is going to use fire, what will you use?”

“Lightning is what I’ve got built into my staff. I’ve also got a few throwaway force spells, and paralysis magic built into my knives.”

“Hmm, I see,” was all Garnet said. He leaned back in his chair and constellations began to swirl in his eyes.

I opened my third eye to watch the magic, taking as many mental notes as I could. I wished that I had an eidetic memory, or else a memory crystal, since his constellations magic seemed to lean hard into the divinatory aspects, and I may be able to work some of it into the magic of my cloak’s future sight spells.

Eventually, he stopped and took a breath that sounded far more ragged than it had any right to be.