Through it, in a wall of images around her, Toinette saw the island flick by. She recognized the tall pines and the brush, even the burnt area where they’d found the plants, though it was all faintly blurred and colored with the more extreme shades of magic. The spell didn’t pause to look at the scenery: itsought, as a good hound might do. Magical power left her, a bit at a time, to form the “leash.”
Then it stopped. Rather, itwasstopped. A shock ran through Toinette. She remembered the feeling from falls in her youth. It reverberated up the lines of power and into her. She felt no pain, not exactly, but a momentary whirlwind of sensation. Darkness was part of it—so too was cold—and a thin, whining howl wormed through her mind.
The spell tried to seek further, but to no avail. If there was a way around the thing blocking it, or a path through it, both required more strength than even she and Erik had together. Toinette raised her hands, drew her power back, and spoke the Latin words that would end the spell. After a syllable or two, she heard Erik join her.
They collapsed as it faded, both of them dropping bonelessly to the sand. This was the bad side of magic, the aftermath that left the magician wearier than three days of fighting and sicker than three of drinking—although it was far from the worst. Toinette knew that, even as she struggled to make her stomach behave. Scrying spellsusuallydidn’t backfire violently, from what Artair had told her, but she was glad not to have touched off one of those rare occasions.
Shethoughther eyes would grow back over time if necessary, but she wasn’t sure. Organs were tricky.
“Here.” A voice spoke above her. Toinette didn’t open her eyes, lest vision make her spew the previous night’s fish along the sand, but she placed the speaker: human, male, English, and therefore John. When she didn’t move, he put a tentative hand under her chin. “Drink this.”
She smelled watered wine, with a bit of honey in it, and sipped slowly. The first swallow left her sitting rigid on the sand, convinced that all her willpower would go to waste—and then her stomach shuddered and righted itself. She drank more quickly and, when she was done, tried to focus her sore eyes on John. “Thank you. How did you know?”
He shrugged. “The Scotsman”—a glance over at Erik, who was finishing his own drink with Samuel in attendance, a fact that made Toinette feel better—“said last night that you might feel sick after. Wine with honey helped my Elsie when she was carrying. So I thought—” Another shrug. “Didn’t expect itthisbad, though.”
“Me neither.” Toinette wiped her lips. The wine did help, though her stomach twisted again at the mention of John’s wife—and his children. She at least had nobody waiting for her return. “The thing that’s keeping us here doesn’t want to be found.”
“You saw nothing, then?” asked Samuel.
Erik shook his head. “Not nothing. Only nothing definite. We got into the forest, past the Templars’ bodies. And maybe those should be our next try.”
“Grave-robbing.” Samuel shook his head. “Unsettling.”
“What isn’t?” John asked. “I’d dig up my own grandmother if it meant getting off this rock.”
“Besides,” said Toinette, “it’s not actually a grave, is it?”
As justifications for necromancy went, she knew, that was very thin.
Twenty
Necromancy had to wait.
Toinette and Erik spent most of the morning either asleep or otherwise flat on their backs. Once Toinette woke long enough to see Erik’s face, only a short distance away, and to smell the warm scent of his body. A dim flicker of lust stirred even then, a quick spark in a body that had no fuel left to catch. More disturbing was the urge to roll over and lie against him, not out of passion but to enjoy his warmth and solidity.
She stayed where she was, closed her eyes again, and was unconscious before too much longer.
She was her own woman, and he was Artair’s man. Lust was acceptable, a working partnership necessary and even pleasant in its way, but comfort was a dragon-sized step too far. Artair acted for his own good and that of his people—and Toinette didn’t know that she counted. She knew that her crew almost certainly didn’t. Erik was his agent; she could trust him, but not depend on him.
Not that she could, or should, depend on anyone else.
In a few hours, she was more or less herself again, capable of walking and speaking like a normal human being, and even of helping to gather wood and build the evening’s fire. The muscles were quick to recover.
“All the same, best were we to wait a day or two before trying with the bones,” Erik said. The two of them and Marcus were chopping up nettles and crumbling stale bread. They’d mix the result with water and boil it for a kind of pottage. It worked well enough, though passing the pot around got a bit awkward. “The soul hurts more than the body with magic, and what we face is formidable—if merely scrying on it took that much out of us, breaking a spell could be quite the task. And I’m sorely out of practice: I was always more squire than scholar.” He had the chivalry not to mention how rusty Toinette’s skills were. “Best to go in as hale as we can.”
“You’d know,” said Marcus, though he cast a quick glance at Toinette first, getting her small nod before he spoke. It was a relief to see that, though he talked to her less than he had and often spoke to the crew without consulting her first. The men might look to other mortals before her or Erik. She’d expected as much, and the pain was endurable. Petty as it might be, she thought it would have hurt more if they’d preferred him.
“Meantime, there’s the, ah, winter quarters,” she said. Keeping her mind on things she could do; that was often the key. “Plenty to do there. And if I remember rightly, some lifting and digging is often what’s wanted the day after.”
Marcus gave her a bland look that, in a companion of more than ten years, said more than an illustrated breviary:It’s whatyouwant, you mean, right now.
He was right, of course, though not necessarily about the timing. Toinette mostly wanted to eat and follow that with more sleep. She was biding her time until she could manage either. After that, yes, she’d want to get her hands dirty with practical things. And she wanted to work alongside the men, where they’d be doing the same task and neither clumsy words nor awkward glances would be necessary.
“Have you a place in mind?” Erik asked, breaking the silence.
“Not yet,” Marcus replied. “You’ve already done a bit of clearing up where you fought the plants,” he said, glancing in Toinette’s direction, “so that might not be a bad spot, if we can be sure there aren’t any remaining.”
“Found something,” said Raoul, stepping through into the shelter. In one hand he held a long brown root, twisted and knobbled into rings. “We dug up a sort of a sunflower while we were pulling more nettles. We’ve never seen the like, but I thought one of you might know if it’d be any good to eat.”
