Book 2, Chapter 31

We walked for about two minutes before I got tired of my mother’s silent judgment. “Just say what’s on your mind,” I told her.

“You should help the rest of them too,” she said after a moment.

“I will, provided the village agrees to my terms.”

Mother shook her head. “You should help them because that’s how we all survive. Everybody works together, everybody helps each other.”

“The way Malra helped herself to our garden?” I asked. “Or our neighbors helped themselves to the chairs at our table? Or how the village decided to place me under house arrest, not because I killed the person taking advantage of us, but because I didn’t do it under their authority?”

“Yes, there are some people who are selfish, but if everyone acted that way, we’d all die. If you want people to stop treating you like an outsider, you have to stop acting like one.”

I paused and looked up at her. “Is that what you think I want?”

“Isn’t it?” Mother sounded unsure now.

“No. I want to protect my family from the mages in Derro that are harvesting mana from, well… it seems like almost everybody. I have nothing against this particular village, but the important part of it is you and Father and Senica. I’ll bargain fairly with the Council as long as they’re fair with me, but I don’t owe them anything.”

We started walking again, this time in silence until we reached the edge of town. I could tell Mother wanted to say something, but she couldn’t figure out the words that would convince me to change my mind. To her, the village was everything. She’d been born here, lived here her whole life, and never gone farther than exploring just outside the barrier when she was a child until Father had been kidnapped and we’d been forced to chase after him.

As far as I could tell, the village hadn’t treated them well. The accident from when they were kids that had broken the barrier had turned Father into a pariah with almost no friends, and Mother wasn’t much better off. Senica seemed to be doing alright, but I doubted she was going to give up on learning magic. That would alienate her from the other children sooner or later, especially since it seemed unlikely that any of them would be following the same path.

And yet, leaving had never crossed their minds. The wastes meant death, either slowly to starvation or quickly to a monster, but death nonetheless. As bad as the village might have been day to day, they associated it with being safe. Now that I’d repaired the ward stone and they had an actual barrier—at least for some portion of the night—to protect them, there was some real safety to be had.

“Tonight, I want to talk to you and Father about leaving,” I said. “I’m not going to force you to do anything. I just want to discuss some ideas and get your thoughts on them.”

“I… I can’t promise anything except that we’ll listen,” Mother said.

“That’s all I could ask for.” I paused again. “You don’t have to come all the way with me. I’m sure you have other things to do.”

“No, nothing that can’t wait a bit. There are still a few hours until Senica gets home, and I haven’t gotten to see you in months. I’d like to see what you’re up to now that you’re back.”

Alchemy was not exciting to watch, but if it made her happy…

* * *

I let myself into Noctra’s home using an unlocking spell. The inside was significantly dustier than I’d expected, so much so that I paused in the doorway and used a bit of elemental manipulation to gather up the majority of it into a ball of hard-packed dirt and sent it out through the door. Mother watched it go with a blank expression, but said, “Handy for cleaning, I suppose.”

“Just for getting the big stuff. It’s not worth the mana to actually clean things properly,” I said. At least, it wasn’t right now. Once I’d advanced my core another stage or two, mana would be less of a concern and I could afford to be more frivolous with it.

Some rooms in the manor were clean enough, but most had been collecting dust for months. With Noctra’s death, it looked like the solution had been to just close the doors and forget about what was behind them. There was a path going from an exterior door to the ward stone that was relatively dust-free, and an office room or two showed signs of use, but the east side of the manor where Noctra and Iskara had lived and worked was closed off.

I burned a bit more mana clearing the way until I found the room I wanted. Once, it had served as some sort of experimentation lab for Noctra. The floors were textured clay tiles, easy to clean and good for preventing slips. There were no windows, but hooks built in the walls held empty oil lanterns. I wouldn’t be using those, if for no other reason than I didn’t need the smoke contaminating anything. A pair of light orbs went into the air to hover near the lanterns.

The reason I’d chosen this room in particular was that I remembered it had two workbenches against the back wall and a wide table in the middle. All of it was too tall for me to conveniently use, but I’d make do by adding some platforms in front of tables. After using elemental manipulation to give it as thorough a cleaning as possible without having any soap to add to the mix, I decided I was ready to start setting up. A bit of dust left in the corners wouldn’t hurt anything, after all.

One by one, I started pulling pieces of the pilfered alchemist’s lab out of my phantom space. My mother watched from the doorway for a minute, then said, “You can just make things out of nothing like this?”

I stopped and glanced back at the half-full table. Technically, I could do some transmutations to make it look like I was creating something out of nothing, but that was far too expensive. “No, I took all of this from a mage who tried to kill me a few hours ago.”

“Spirits protect you! Are you alright?” she demanded, rushing toward me as she spoke.

It was so abrupt and caught me so off-guard that my shield ward activated, stopping her from grabbing hold of me. She blinked down at me, her arms pressed against the magic that kept her from touching me. “What is this?”

I took over manual control of the wards to let Mother through. “It’s a defensive spell that keeps things from hitting me. It reacts automatically unless I tell it not to. Sorry, you surprised me. But I’m fine, honestly. The fight took more mana than I wanted, but I got it all back and then some. The crazy amount of mana I pulled out of that mage’s lair is actually why I’m back. I need to use some of it up and he had a lot of alchemy supplies, so I’m looking for a place to set up a temporary lab.”

I let Mother fret over me for another minute until she was satisfied that I was uninjured, but eventually I had to disentangle myself from her grasp after she showed no signs of letting me go. I got back to work and gave her a heavily edited account of my time out in the wastes and Derro. If I’d known she was going to get this clingy at the thought of me being in danger, I wouldn’t have mentioned where I’d gotten the alchemy equipment from or the mages I’d ambushed on their way to the village.

Eventually, someone else showed up. I sensed their mana at the edge of my range, outside the manor, just one person but with a core holding three times as much mana as mine. Nobody else I’d sensed in the village had that much mana, so my best guess was that it was someone from the arbor, probably my one-time student, Shel. Unlike my father, she’d taken an active interest in learning magic and didn’t pay much attention to personal boundaries.

Whoever it was must have sensed Mother standing near me. My own mana was kept strictly hidden, a trick not unlike walking around with my stomach clenched all the time, except in my mind. I tracked their progress while I bustled back and forth in front of a workbench. Various reagents were laid out in front of me, waiting to be processed so I could add them to my mix. I had everything I needed for a trial run at an ointment of aging, though almost all of it was substitutions and compromises from the recipe I was familiar with.

It would probably work, though perhaps not as well as my version. The mana saturation was a bit low on a few of my key ingredients, but in all fairness, I hadn’t found anything that could match the saturation levels I was used to in just about everything I normally used. I was compensating with a lot of extra ingredients, which required more calculations to properly balance the recipe, not to mention all the extra mana I had to personally invest to keep everything working together in harmony.

Knowing that I’d be interrupted any moment now, I focused on prep work and told my mother, “You’re going to want to take a step to the side. Someone’s going to be coming through that door any second now.”

The door burst open about six seconds later, revealing Shel standing there. “You’re back!” she said as she strode into the room, only to pause and look around. “What… What is all of this?”

“Alchemy equipment,” I said. I’d need to put a lock on the door when I started the delicate part of the process.

Shel’s eyes sparkled as she looked at me. “Are you going to teach me how to use all this?”

“Depends how long I stay,” I told her. “And how good of a job you’ve done with my corner of the new greenhouse.”

“Everything’s growing just fine,” Shel assured me. “Though there’s one patch that’s just grass, but it’s blue? I wasn’t sure if that’s what you were going for with that section.”

It wasn’t what I was hoping for, but it was about what I’d expected. I’d made some alterations to a few seeds in the hopes that with mana embedded into them, they’d grow into something useful. Not every experiment could be a success, unfortunately. I’d find some use for the grass, but I’d been hoping for something else.

“How long is it?”

“Six inches, maybe?”

I frowned. Maybe I wouldn’t be able to use it for anything but compost. “Very well, come over here and I’ll explain what all of this is. This isn’t really suitable for a beginner’s alchemy lesson, but I’m making something as a personal project. Just try to follow along as best you can.”

“I need to go soon,” Mother said from by the door. “Senica will be getting home from school. You’ll come home tonight?”

“One way or another,” I said. I gave Shell a look. “It’ll be easier if the Council agrees to leave me alone.”

“You have my vote,” she said. “I imagine Karad will also vote yes, considering he’s the one who brought it up. And I might note that he’s looking better today, presumably thanks to you. Solidaire will probably also vote yes if it means getting his men back in fighting shape.”

“Which leaves just Melmir. Does it matter if the vote isn’t unanimous?”

The leader of the Collectors did not like me, initially because he thought I was going to put him out of a job. To be fair, if I’d stayed long enough, I would have. That had only grown when the Council had realized they didn’t really have a lot of leverage to control me. Though in his defense, Melmir had advocated for exile. Solidaire had wanted to murder me, presumably in my sleep.

“It does not,” Shel assured me.

“Good. Then yes, I’ll be home this evening, Mother. If you need me earlier, have Father use the scrying mirror to get my attention.”

I said my goodbyes, then turned back to my work, my one-time student hovering over my shoulder.