Spellbound: Book 2 of the Spellwright Trilogy
Tekst- Rozmiar: 560 str. 3 ilustracje
- Kategoria: fantasy heroiczne, psychologia zagraniczna, fantasy zagraniczne, współczesna literatura zagraniczna, ezoteryka, okultyzmEdytuj
Spellbound
Blake Charlton
Dedication
To my mother, Louise Bryden Buck, M.D.,
for patient love and lessons in healing
Epigraph
As for the poem, one dragon, however hot, does not make a summer, or a host; and a man might well exchange for one good dragon what he would not sell for a wilderness. And dragons, real dragons, essential both to the machinery and the ideas of a poem or tale, are actually rare.
—J. R. R. TOLKIEN,
“Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics”
He is at once a stratum of the earth and a streamer in the air, no painted dragon but a figure of real oneiric power, one that can easily survive the prejudices which arise at the very mention of the word “dragon.”
—SEAMUS HEANEY
Introduction to his translation of Beowulf
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Map
Chapter One
Francesca did not realize she had used an indefinite pronoun…
Chapter Two
Suddenly conscious, Shannon dropped the text he had been holding.
Chapter Three
High up in Avel’s sanctuary, Nicodemus crouched in a dark…
Chapter Four
With Deirdre in her arms, Francesca charged up the eastern…
Chapter Five
Shannon ran to the window and thrust his hand into…
Chapter Six
Francesca’s hands tingled. Whatever cloth Deirdre ripped must have loosed…
Chapter Seven
The warkite was written on an eight-foot-long strip of white…
Chapter Eight
As Francesca fell from the lofting kite, her eyes met…
Chapter Nine
Shannon-the-text touched his fingertips to those of Shannon-who-still-lived. Golden light…
Chapter Ten
When the lofting kite rose to a height above the…
Chapter Eleven
An unseen wartext blasted the ghost’s right arm into a…
Chapter Twelve
When Cyrus and Francesca were flying above the Auburn Mountains,…
Chapter Thirteen
Squinting in the sunlight, Nicodemus examined his school of five…
Chapter Fourteen
When consciousness returned, Deirdre found her eyes filled with tears.
Chapter Fifteen
Francesca opened her eyes as something hard dug into her…
Chapter Sixteen
Cyrus had just removed the spells from Francesca’s robes when…
Chapter Seventeen
The secluded Hall of Ambassadors stood three stories up on…
Chapter Eighteen
Francesca followed Cyrus down several hallways to a narrow room…
Chapter Nineteen
Suddenly, Francesca was light-headed.
Chapter Twenty
Anxiously, the ghost reexamined the contents of Francesca DeVega’s bedroom:…
Chapter Twenty-One
In a dream, Francesca had diagnosed an inflamed appendix in…
Chapter Twenty-Two
Cyrus landed his rig in the South Market. Most days…
Chapter Twenty-Three
Deirdre pulled her shawl around her shoulders. She was standing…
Chapter Twenty-Four
Cyrus followed Francesca through the labyrinthine alleys until they left…
Chapter Twenty-Five
Once they were back on the street, Cyrus walked close…
Chapter Twenty-Six
One monster jumped forward to land an overhand hatchet strike…
Chapter Twenty-Seven
At first Cyrus struggled against the spellbindings, but he was…
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Cyrus scanned the sky above the line of watchmen. “There…
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Cyrus looked down at his robes. Only a thin network…
Chapter Thirty
The bluemoon hung as a bright shard among the skeins…
Chapter Thirty-One
“What under the holy sky do you mean we’re being…
Chapter Thirty-Two
The wind picked up as Nicodemus took his students over…
Chapter Thirty-Three
Shortly after dawn, the rain clouds rolled away from Avel…
Chapter Thirty-Four
Deirdre chewed her lip while looking at the loose pages…
Chapter Thirty-Five
“I believe everything you said,” Francesca said to Vivian, “except…
Chapter Thirty-Six
Vivian’s palms went cold as she listened to Lotannu try…
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Before anything else, Francesca became aware of the hot, musty…
Chapter Thirty-Eight
On their trek through the savanna, Francesca thought about snide…
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Francesca supposed that it was an hour or two after…
Chapter Forty
Francesca burst from the cabin into sunlight and chaos. Uprooted…
Chapter Forty-One
Cyrus had been in the wind marshal’s quarters only once…
Chapter Forty-Two
Francesca had always thought of airships as flying boats. She…
Chapter Forty-Three
Nicodemus tried to sleep as they waited for darkness.
Chapter Forty-Four
Francesca couldn’t sleep. Cyrus lay next to her in the…
Chapter Forty-Five
Francesca woke in a tent lightening with dawn. It took…
Chapter Forty-Six
As Captain Izem brought the Queen’s Lance around to approach…
Chapter Forty-Seven
When the bleeding stopped, Francesca dabbed the blood from the…
Chapter Forty-Eight
Sitting on a ruined crate, Lotannu pulled a blanket around…
Chapter Forty-Nine
Midmorning sunlight slanted through the redwood forest as Nicodemus rode…
Chapter Fifty
When marching into battle, druids wore plates of wooden armor,…
Chapter Fifty-One
The Queen’s Lance had covered half the distance to the…
Chapter Fifty-Two
Shannon woke when someone took his hand. He had been…
Epilogue
Starfall Island rose out of the blue horizon. Its forested…
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Other Books by Blake Charlton
Copyright
About the Publisher
Map
Chapter One
Francesca did not realize she had used an indefinite pronoun until it began to kill her patient.
Someone, no one knew who, had brought the young woman into the infirmary with an unknown curse written around her lungs. Francesca had cast several golden sentences into her patient’s chest, hoping to disspell the malicious text. Had it gone well, she would have pulled the curse out of the woman’s mouth.
But the curse’s style had been robust, and one of Francesca’s mistakenly ambiguous pronouns had pushed the curse from the girl’s lungs to her heart. There, the spiteful text had bound the once-beating organ into silence.
Now plummeting toward death, the girl bleated a final cry.
Francesca looked around the solarium and saw only white walls and a window looking out onto the city of Avel. Voices of other medical spellwrights sounded from down the hallway; they were also working to save patients wounded by the recent lycanthrope attack on the city walls. Both the infirmary and the neighboring sanctuary were in crisis, and so Francesca was alone.
To her horror, Francesca’s first reaction was relief that no one had seen her mistake.
She turned to her patient. The girl’s wide green eyes had dilated to blackness. Her distended neck veins betrayed no pulse.
Francesca’s fingers tingled. This couldn’t be happening. She never made mistakes, never used indefinite pronouns.
The patient had been able to whisper her name when the curse was still on her lungs. Now Francesca addressed the young woman: “Deirdre, stay with me.”
No response.
Francesca could not see the curse; it was written in a language she did not know. But the golden countercurse she had cast now visualized the malicious text that spellbound the young woman’s heart.
Invasive action was needed.
Spellwrights created magical runes in their muscles; presently, Francesca used those in her left forearm to write a few silvery sentences that glowed on her skin. With her right hand, she pulled the spell free. It folded into a short, precise blade.
Francesca moved with confidence. She was a remarkably tall woman, lithe, clothed in a wizard’s black robe and cleric’s red stole. Both her long hair and wide eyes were very dark brown, making her pale features more striking. An illiterate would think she had maybe thirty years. A spellwright would know she had twice as many.
With her left hand, Francesca tore off her patient’s blouse. Deirdre’s smooth olive complexion, small chin, and raven hair indicated her youth. Yet there was something mature in the creases around her eyes.
Just then the floor shook and the wooden rafters chirped—a small earthquake possibly, or the blast from another lycanthropic attack. Somewhere in the infirmary or the adjacent sanctuary a man wailed.
Francesca laid her left hand on Deirdre’s shoulder. As a physician, she shuddered—cold, and full of doubt. Then she leapt into the safety of action.
After a few steady cuts, she lifted Deirdre’s small breast upward to expose the lattice of bone and muscle. The next cut ran between the fifth and sixth ribs, starting at the sternum and traveling around to the spine. The blood that flowed was bright red. Encouraging. Darker, slower blood would have confirmed death.
Francesca pried the ribs apart and extemporized a spell to hold them open.
The distant wailing grew more urgent.
“Deirdre, stay with me,” Francesca commanded as she slipped her hands into the girl’s chest and found her heart. Francesca held her breath as she pulled off the malicious sentences.
The floor shook again. A second and then a third voice joined the wailing.
Francesca bit her lip and unraveled the curse’s last sentence. The heart swelled with blood but did not beat. Francesca began to rhythmically squeeze the organ with her hand. She was about to call for help when the heart began to squirm.
It felt like a bag full of writhing worms.
“God-of-gods,” Francesca whispered. When a heart was denied blood, its once-coordinated action might expire into a chaos of separate spasms.
She continued to compress the heart. But each time she squeezed, the writhing lessened. The muscles were fading into death.
Francesca did not stop, could not stop.
More voices had joined the wailing, which rose and fell in a