“You don’t need to make such a fuss. I can manage,” Vi muttered, hobbling alongside him. She hadn’t even crossed halfway to the castle when said cleric ran out.
“Princess, what has happened?” The blue-eyed woman fussed, eyes immediately drawn across the constellation of bruises and scrapes across her body, then to her leg. “Goodness, just what have you gotten yourself into this time? The older you get, the worse shape you’re in when you return from these hunts of yours.” She dropped to her knees, setting her basket down, and began rummaging through it. She continued muttering as she worked. “Hunts, why do we even still call them that? We all know they’re just excuses for you to have a few days out exploring.”
Could she be blamed for it?Everyone had their limits in captivity. But Vi held her tongue. She’d caused more than enough trouble for one day.
Ginger, a Waterrunner, had been sent from the South with Vi from the very beginning. Waterruners made some of the best clerics due to their abilities to manipulate the water in the body as well as change the properties of salve. She’d been the best cleric Vi could ask for—overall focusing mostly on mending her after she fell, or reviving her when she was ill, rather than the recklessness that usually brought those things about.
“When we saw the flame, I prepared. I just knew you’d come back worse for wear.” Ginger paused, hands sticky with salve. “It was you, the fire, wasn’t it?”
Vi quickly tried to weigh the scales of answers in her head. As trusted as Ginger was, she was also a Southerner with deep ties to the capital. However, any word she could send back wouldn’t make it before Vi was headed back as well, which meant she and Romulin could thwart any nefarious uses for information.
Then again, who else could’ve started and stopped a fire like that?
“It was me behind the fire. There was a threat to my person and the Chieftain’s daughter,” Vi answered ambiguously. If there was one thing Romulin had stressed, it was that she owed no one more explanation than she wanted to give.
“A threat? Goodness, of what kind?” Ginger paused. “But that also means you’ve finally Awoken, princess. How exciting!”
“Thank you, Ginger,” Sehra interrupted, as if somehow sensing it had crossed into sensitive territory. Vi hadn’t even noticed her walking over. “When you are finished seeing to the Crown Princess, would you mind tending to my daughter and Jayme?”
“Not at all.” Ginger gave a smile and a small nod. Of all of Vi’s staff and tutors, Ginger had integrated the easiest. Perhaps it was her clerical demeanor—that she saw all people as patients, nothing more or less. Or perhaps Ginger was a better soul. Either way, Vi trusted her more for it. “Just one more second and I’ll have finished sorting the worst of it.”
Vi closed her eyes, feeling the thick salve Ginger had coated her swollen leg with chill to a temperature that was almost ice-like. As it warmed back up in the heat of the air, the pain was significantly reduced, swelling gone. Vi placed her weight on the leg delicately. There was stiffness, some stinging, but, as Ginger put, the worst of it seemed sorted. Luckily the injury hadn’t been too severe.
“It may feel better, princess, but it is still mending so do take care. No running, jumping, riding, fighting, or whatever it is that you find yourself inclined to, cleric’s orders.”
“Yes.” Vi gave a nod to the mostly white-haired woman. She was one of the few who had never seen an issue ordering Vi around, despite their difference in status.
Ginger gave a nod, stood, and departed, leaving Vi with Jax and Sehra.
“I apologize for not checking on you more promptly, princess,” Sehra began and Vi couldn’t tell if she meant it, or was merely saying what would be expected in such a situation.
“It’s I who should apologize to you.” Vi turned to face the woman. “Know I would not have endangered Ellene with my fledgling magic if were it not for the noru afflicted with the White Death. Our lives were at stake.”
“An infected noru? The plague has spread to animals?” Sehra turned from Vi to Jax.
“I was already planning to send word of it to Lady Elecia in the West. She may be able to help get a message to the capital.” Jax never failed to jump at an excuse to reach out to Elecia. The two of them were in a hopeless orbit around each other. But Vi couldn’t read too much into this particular suggestion, given the circumstances.
“I think her mother, Ambassador Amrosah, is still in the southwest region of Shaldan. I can send couriers there.”
“Certainly. I’ll draft a letter.”
A thought crossed Vi’s mind, briefly, that perhaps her uncle would leave her when they arrived south. She would no longer need a guardian and Jax would be far happier with Elecia, Vi would bet. It settled an ache in her that she was ready to ignore the moment Sehra spoke again.
“Thank you for handling it.” Her uncle gave a small bow of his head. Sehra turned to face her, and her alone. “More pressing, for now… Go clean yourself up, and meet me in my throne room.”
Vi kept her face passive, keeping her worry at whatever punishment would be levied against her locked within. “Understood, Chieftain.”
* * *
The stronghold of Soricium could be maze-like for the uninitiated. She’d heard of the castles in the south being rather twisting as well… but it was hard to think they could twist a person more backwards than branches that became bridges that connected to wide platforms before disappearing into the trees themselves in a series of hollowed out tunnels.
It could easily set a person on the wrong course. That is, if they weren’t like Vi, and hadn’t grown up among them. So she had no excuse for any delays other than purely dragging her feet.
Now, Vi stood before an intricately carved door at the end of a long stone bridge, set against the trunk of the center-most tree in the fortress. This was the oldest tree in the world—so the wrinkled men who sat around fires said—and they called it the Mother Tree. It was this tree that was said to have caught a falling star—a shard of the Mother’s light—in its branches. By the time the star finally reached the ground, it had absorbed life from the tree and became a woman. The same woman cut civilization from the boughs of the Mother Tree, forming all of Shaldan.
Briefly, the ruins she’d landed in appeared in her mind. But Vi pushed them from her thoughts. She had more important things to focus on now.
Lifting a fist, Vi gave a few raps of her knuckles against the wood. The doors peeled apart, opening inward by a magic force. Inside, the hollowed center of the tree arched above in a dome. Flowers and vines hung from the ceiling, giving off a cloyingly sweet smell that hung in the room despite half of it being open completely to a wide balcony.
