Varina ci’Pallo
“YOU LOOK AWFUL TIRED, Varina,” Nico
said.
She was. She was
exhausted, so tired that her bones ached. The afternoon had been
spent preparing spells, shaping the Scáth Cumhacht until the spell
was complete, then placing the trigger word and gesture to release
it in her mind. The spell-weariness dragged at her—it was worse now
than it had been when she was younger, worse since she’d begun
experimenting with the Tehuantin method. She’d gone to the small
room where they kept Nico to bring him his supper and check on
him.
“I’ll be fine in a
few turns,” she told Nico. “I just have to go to sleep for a bit so
I can recover.”
“Talis was always
tired, too, when he did magic things, especially with that bowl. I
thought it made him look old, too. Like you.”
The brutal honesty of a child. Varina touched her
graying hair, the deep wrinkles that had carved themselves into her
face in the last few years. “We pay for magic this way,” she told
Nico. “Nothing ever comes to you in this world without cost. You’ll
learn that.” She smiled wryly. “Sorry. That sounds like something a
parent would say.”
Nico smiled:
hesitantly, almost shyly. “Matarh talks like that to me sometimes,”
he told her. “Like she’s talking more to herself than me. I’ll try
to remember it, though.”
Varina laughed. She
sat on the chair alongside his bed, leaning forward to tousle his
hair. Nico frowned, sliding back a little on the bed. “Nico,”
Varina said, drawing her hand back, “I have to talk to you. Things
are happening, outside. Bad things. After I rest a little, I have
to go do something, and when I get back, we’re going to have to
leave the city, very quickly.”
“Like I had to with
Matarh?” He drew his doubled legs up to his chest as he sat on the
bed, wrapping his hands around them. He looked at her over his
knees.
“Yes, like
that.”
“Are you in
trouble?”
She had to smile at
that. “I’m about to be.”
He sniffed. “Is it
because of that man?”
“Karl, you mean? You
might say that.”
He released his legs
and glanced at the food on the tray but didn’t touch it. “Are you
and Karl . . . ?”
She understood what
he was asking without the word. “No. What would make you think
that?”
“You act like you
are. When the two of you talk to each other, you remind me of
Matarh and Talis.”
“Well, we’re not . .
. together. Not that way.”
“He likes you, I can
tell.”
That made her smile,
but the taste of it was bitter. “Oh, you can, can you? When did you
become so wise in the way of adults?”
Nico shrugged. “I can
tell,” he said again.
“Let’s not talk about
this,” she said, though she wanted to. She wondered what Karl would
say to Nico if Nico told him the same thing. “I need you to eat,
and I need you to get some sleep because very likely we’ll be
leaving the city tonight. You need to be ready for
that.”
“Will you take me to
my matarh?”
“I wish I could,
Nico. I really do. But I don’t know where we’ll be going, yet. I’ll
take you somewhere safe. That much I promise you. I won’t let
anything bad happen to you, and we’ll try to get you back to your
matarh. Do you understand me?”
He
nodded.
“Good. Then eat your
supper, and try to sleep. I’m going to rest myself, in the next
room. If you need me, you can call me. Go on now, you should try
that soup before it gets cold.”
She watched him for a
few minutes as he ate, until she felt her eyelids growing heavy.
When she woke up, she discovered she’d fallen asleep in the chair
next to his bed, and Nico was asleep himself, curled up near to her
with one hand stretched out to touch her leg. Outside, she could
hear rain pattering against the roof and the shutters of the
house.
She brought the
covers up over Nico and pressed her lips to his cheek. She left him
then, closing and locking the door behind her.
She hoped she would
see him again.