Elva Rackthorn and the Tears of Azrael

Entrusted, Part 2

Mother was quiet as they padded out onto one of the packed-dirt paths that meandered around the property, always within sight of the white-stone buildings and their wide windows. Father kept up a running commentary on the landscape, the weather, the seasonal flowers living up to their biological imperative, and from his aimless chatter Elva took that Mother was having an aimless day, the sort where her identity slipped like sand from her hand and her focus was like fog. This wasn't the worst sort of day. It was better than days when she was utterly aware and certain of herself, but convinced she was as she was twenty years ago and Elva, Silas, and Henry were charaltans come to defraud her by pretending to be family. Or days when she switched so rapidly from cognizant to catatonic that she wasn't allowed out of bed for fear she might fall and crack her head. Over the years, they had seen the range of horrors and indignities the soul-damage could contort itself into.

So as they wandered towards the lake, which gleamed silver like a coin, Elva smiled, because on her last visit to her mother before she left for the capital, Amelia was at least at peace with herself.

She was wrong.

The central lake at the Institute had a strip of land jutting into it that held the greenhouses. From the lakeside path they were on, set off and raised a bit from the shore, one could see the sun reflect on the metal frames that held the glass panels of the roofs in place. Elva was appreciating the view when Amelia, who had been walking with one hand buried in Reggie's fur, occasionally leaning against him as if for support, suddenly shouted now, Reggie and started to run. Reggie, with a long-suffering snort-sigh, raised a paw and swiped at Amelia's visitors in a slow, exaggerated motion. When his paw finished its lumbering arc, it rested on Henri's shoulder. Henri, dutifully, fell over.

Amelia meanwhile had sprinted down towards the water and, with hastily drawn runes and an exertion of will, created a path of ice extending to greenhouses. As soon as she reached solid land she turned and traced a new set of runes on the ice, causing the bridge to break apart. She turned to keep fleeing, but after only a few steps she crumpled, and ended up curled against the base of a greenhouse wall.

"I've got it," Elva said, waving a hand at her father as she half-tumbled down the slope to the lake's edge. It wasn't hard to repeat her mother's rune work— icing over the stream had been a bit of party-trick sigilmancy Amelia had taught Elva before the accident, and despite her father's frowning, Elva felt she wasn't giving anything away by repeating the old skill.

Elva stumbled as she ran across the ice to reach her Mother, skidding and tearing up the palm of her hands on the roughage. But she got up and kept running, until she reached the land around the greenhouse. Then she slowed down and approached Amelia with her hands carefully visible and still.

"Amelia," Elva called out. "Are you okay?"

"Who are you," her mother whispered back. "What do you want?"

"I just want to make sure you're okay. You scared us back there."

"You know my bridge trick."

Elva nodded. "You taught it to me. When I was younger."

"Were you my apprentice?"

"I was going to be."

Amelia looked across the water, where Henri and Silas stood, unmauled by Reggie. Henri waved. "You're my daughter."

Elva nodded.

Amelia shook her head. "I don't have a daughter. I would know if I had a daughter."

A rumbling purr and heavy splashing heralded Reggie's arrival. Elva raised her hand, and smiled slightly as he snuffed against the side of her head.

"If you can't trust me, you know you can trust Reggie, right?"

Amelia nodded.

Reggie licked the side of Elva's face, his sandpaper tongue pulling strands of hair out of her pigtail. "I'm not a threat."

She extended out a hand.

Amelia didn't take it.

Elva stayed there even as the nurses caught up to them and took her mother back to her room, their conversation carefully guided by practice and protocol. Eventually one of the greenhouse keepers came out to see if the fuss had died down, and he found Elva sitting there, legs chained against her chest by crossed arms as she stared at her splintering path of ice. He asked if she'd like a tour of the greenhouses, since she was all the way out here.

"Sure," Elva said, not lifting her eyes and watching shards of ice break off into the water, "why not."

Inside the first greenhouse it was hot and the air close, enough to make the idea of ice on the tarnished-metal lake unthinkable. There were careful rows of tidy plants, but also messy terraces of sprawling bushes and creeping vines. Outside the sky was often so clear, the sun so bright and grass so green that it hurt Elva's eyes; there was a mutedness to the greenhouse, perhaps due to the humidity, that was calming. It was also far more fascinating than Elva would have thought. She fancied herself a bit of an expert on identifying and gathering necromantic herbs, but it was entirely different to grow them deliberately, and apparently there were even ways you could grow certain herbs together to alter their properties in necromancy and alchemy. She regretted a lack of paper to take notes.

There was one section of one greenhouse devoted entirely to a flower she had never seen before, with elegant petals of a purple so dark it was almost black and veins of silvery-white.

"Nightroot," the man explained.

"Nightroot is a drug, right?"

"You could call it that. In certain quantities and preparations, the seeds produce hallucinations. The roots themselves cause a euphoric calm that can easily lead to organ failure if mismanaged." The greenhouse keeper cracked his neck. "But it has medicinal purposes too. Do you know what happens to soldiers stationed in the Farrowfields?"

The Farrowfields were the area between eastern Vaier and Kathär. Like any division between kingdoms, it was a dead space where the power of the Day World was limited to itself. Vairens stationed there couldn't pull vix from the Betwixt for sigilmancy— Kathärns couldn't use their war bells and other odd musical instruments. As far research subjects went, it was fascinating, but too far afield— too far a-farrow-field, Elva had thought once with a grin— for her to justify spending time studying.

"They're cut off from vix," Elva replied, head tilted. "They can't use runes."

The man nodded. "For most people this isn't a problem. Odd and inconvenient, but little more than that. For others, though, it disrupts something deeper in their system. Makes them... twitchy, let's say, when they come back and are surrounded by the flow of vix." He gestured at the subtle uses of sigilmancy throughout the greenhouse— sigils for heating and cooling on the raised beds, the careful network of pipes and hoses directed by sigilry. "There's no avoiding vix, so we make a paste from nightroot seeds and roots that can help ease their bodies back into its presence."

Elva nodded, intrigued.

"A lot of things are like that." He continued. "You gotta take the whole of it, the good and the bad. Things that seem awful at first are just being the way they are. You just gotta learn how to work with them."

"I suppose," Elva said, but her mind was already leaping away, wondering what uses nightroot could have in necromancy, what books she could find to tell her more.

The greenhouse keeper sighed. "Your father's probably looking for you. Let's get you back inside."