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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 an eerie tempo. Though almost musical, the wailing was wholly unlike the devotional songs the Spirish people sang during daily worship.

Some new crisis was sweeping through the infirmary or the sanctuary. Perhaps more wounded citizens had come in from the lycanthrope attack. Perhaps one of the lycanthrope spellwrights had even breached Avel’s walls despite the daylight.

But Francesca didn’t care about any of that. Her hands had gone cold. Her legs trembled. She was leaning on her patient. The world dissolved into a blur of tears.

The girl’s heart was still.

“Creator, forgive me,” Francesca whispered and withdrew her hands. “I’m sorry.” A painful tingling now enveloped her fingers. “I’m so … so sorry.”

She bowed her head and closed her eyes. Time became strange to her. She’d always been proud of her ability to prognosticate—to look forward into patients’ lives and anticipate their chances of cure, their moments of danger. But she had not foreseen Deirdre’s death; it seemed to jolt her out of time, out of her own body.

For a moment it felt as if she were someone else, as if she were standing in the doorway and looking at the physician who had just killed her patient. In this dissociated state, she felt both safe and profoundly numb.

But then she was back in her own body, blinking through tears. She had not wept before a patient, alive or dead, for time out of mind. But now she had used the wrong word, a damned indefinite pronoun. Now her carelessness had killed.

Hot self-hatred flashed through her. She bit down on her lip.

Then, as suddenly as it came, her anger vanished, and she remembered her last day at the clerical academy in Port Mercy. She had asked her mentor for parting advice. The ancient physician had smiled tightly and said, “Kill as few patients as possible.”

The young Francesca had laughed nervously.

Now, standing beside the first patient she had killed, she laughed at the memory, could not stop laughing. The strange hilarity was like gas bubbling out of her. Kill as few patients as possible. It was suddenly, terrifyingly hilarious.

Gradually her laughter died, and she felt hollow.

Around her, the infirmary resounded with wailing. She took a long breath. Other patients needed her. She had to counterfeit composure until true composure came. By extemporizing a few absorbing paragraphs, she cleaned the blood from her hands.

The floor shook again. “Is he loose?” someone whispered.

Startled, she looked toward the door. No one was there.

The whisperer spoke again, “Is he loose already?”

Francesca turned around. No one was in the solarium, and nothing but minarets and the alleyways of Avel were visible out the window. The hallway? Empty.

A weak groan. “He’ll be here soon. Help me up.”

Suddenly Francesca understood who was speaking, and her own heart seemed to writhe like a bag of worms.

She looked down at Deirdre, at the being she had mistaken for a mortal woman.

“You’re an avatar?” Francesca whispered. “A member of the Celestial Canon?”

“Avatar, yes. Canonist, no,” Deirdre corrected, pulling her bloody blouse over her now miraculously intact and scarless chest. “Sacred goddess, I forgot the shock of coming back.”

Francesca stepped away. “What the burning hells is happening?”