The Silver Boy

13) Swift Healing

©2013 by A. B. Selle.                                                            All rights reserved.

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Chapter Thirteen: Swift Healing

Uma flipped a mushroom for Elle’s antidote that was frying over the fire Markus had conjured. She had made the antidote before, as she had been shot with demon-blood darts in an attempt at an assassination. She had bullied the shaman into giving her the recipe for the antidote, saying she would arrange for his shunning if he did not cooperate.

Uma put the mushrooms into a quickly carved wooden bowl. She added water, which made the mushrooms sizzle and turn into liquid.

Today Uma was supposed to learn magic. But instead, she was stuck making medicines for sick people. Sphasus had summoned the wind to deflect the darts; she hadn’t done anything... She wished she were a witch instead of a mage. Then she could just learn words of power and perform magic that way. It seemed like it would be easier.

Elle came back from her ‘scouting’ expedition. Uma knew it wasn’t really for scouting; Elle just needed to be alone for a few minutes to vent her feelings. She hadn’t been living on a goblin island, so she didn’t know how to cope with emotional troubles quietly.

Uma was surprised to find that Elle did turn in some evidence: a silver hair. Evidence of what, Uma was not sure. The size of the hair made it seem like it must have been from a huge animal, but the hair was not course enough to be a wolf’s, or any other carnivore, so she wasn’t too troubled.

*

The sun rose and fell above the clearing. Hot rays beamed down on the three.

"You,” said Uma, pointing at Elle, “stir this until I tell you to stop. I’m going to build us a shelter for the night.” Without question, Elle sat down in Uma’s place and began to stir the concoction, wrinkling her nose at the sight of the muddy, brown liquid.

Uma told Markus to help her collect branches for their shelter. Soon a pile of bendable saplings sat on the edge of the clearing. Uma paced round the clearing, looking for the best spot to put a shelter. It needed to be close to the fire pit, so if anyone smart saw it they would expect the maker to have moved far away. She also needed the placement of trees just right, so she could make their shelter almost invisible. She found a compromise of the two, and started digging an indent in the ground with a rock. The soil was slightly harder to dig than on Linawatiti, but she made do.

“Can I stop stirring now?” Elle asked from the fire pit.

"What color is it?” Uma responded.

"Yellowish,” Elle said back.

“Keep going until it turns blue.” Uma kept digging.

Uma lodged some saplings around her hole. She bent them into a flattened dome, and then placed leaves carefully across the top, so it would keep rain off and prevent anyone from seeing the unnaturally placed sticks. By the time Uma was pleased that her handiwork would fit three people relatively comfortably, a clear night had fallen and millions of stars shone brightly. Uma joined Markus and Elle at the fire pit.

Uma took in more about the surrounding forest over the next hour. She stared at the huge mountains, bigger than she could have ever imagined, in the distance. The bottoms were covered in thick forest, while a little ways up was granite-grey, and the very peaks had white icing the top.

It was much colder than Linawatiti and everything seemed to revolve around this. The animals had thick fur and layers of fat; and the trees had stiff, sharp, elongated leaves that Markus called pine needles. As nighttime approached, the three’s breath turned to fog in the chilly air, especially Markus’s, whose breath was much hotter than Uma or Elle’s.