Page 46 of Of Shadows and Blood

“Better, I feel better.” Slowly, I plate the cup for Cedric, trying to quell the subtle shake in my hand on my way back into the main room. All eyes land upon me and the air goes tight.

As I walk into the room, my slipper catches on the edge of the rug and my wrist flexes awkwardly, tipping the tea over. Cedric’s quick reflexes catch the plate and cup midair but the hot liquid lands on his feet.

“You are still weak,” he hisses, emphasis on the last word.

The audacity.

“You think that because you threatened me, I will bend to your will?” I spit, baring my teeth.

His white teeth glint in the light. “You will bend,” he replies. “She has not fed, Avonde.”

The cess looks at him wildly, his brazenness. The blonde one takes notes and the others stare at the chest of blood on the ground. “We will work on this, Your Highness. Liv, I’d like to run a few tests, if that is permissible,” Avonde cuts in as she motions to the rest of the group. I nod in consent, crawling up onto the other sofa. Poised with my hands on my lap, I school my face blank again until…

A branch, a sliver of darkness snakes into my being, my mind. Probing, looking. A foreign feeling as if I am being threaded from the inside out. Everything tenses, fights against it. The visual of this invasion of my mind pulls clear while a gentle throb echoes in my head.

Thud, thud, thud.

I clench my jaw and try to stop this capture. Is it the cess? This internal scoping? I look over at Cedric. A bead of sweat rolls down his temple and his eyes are glazed looking down at the rug.

“You—” I start, words caught on my tongue as I try to force him out, but I can’t. Suddenly, his eyes focus back up to my face and he blinks a few times. Goosebumps mottle my skin, the hold on me retracting. A small zap beneath my hand brings me closer to the earth. “What did you do?”

The stares of the cess around us feel like a drill on my skin and he swallows deeply. “Please forgive my attempt without permission.” He apologizes more to them than me.

“What attempt? What were you looking for? Elivienne? She’s gone.”

Avonde moves to sit next to me and I growl.

Speaking to me directly, Cedric adds, “I tried to reach your mind, to visualize the malady if possible. Mindscaping is the most intimate work of magic one can practice. Being so, you need to have a bond with the person you’re attempting to reach. Some sort of relationship. With you, I know I can get in but your mind,” he pauses, “it’s almost rotted over. A steel wall shrouded in mist, but a dark place. Where there was once light, there is an abyss.

“What used to be blooming with a beautiful and delicate lightness is now decrepit. It is a searing hot pain in a space built for bliss. It shot through the crown of my head, down my neck, through my arms and out my fingertips. As if a hot iron was being driven through every muscle and tendon.”

My limbs feel detached. Mindscaping – how many times did they attempt this when I was in the infirmary?

Avonde fiddles with her beads and the blonde one speaks up. “This means that she felt him just now.”

“Yes, I felt him like an assault on my mind,” I bite. “Do not ever do that to me again.”

Yully, the man with dirtied robes and a shorter stature, approaches me with silent shuffles. His beads, like the rest of them, are stacked and looped across his chest with varying designs, yet his seem worn from use. He smiles wildly and bows before me. “May I sit beside you?”

With my nod, he softly takes my other side. “I would like to run a diagnostic, similar to what I believe my counterpart has done before.” He motions to Avonde. “It will take only a few moments but my particular gifts work on internal structures, most notably the mind. Is this permissible?”

His calm demeanor means something to me here. “Please, do what you need.” I tuck my hair behind my ears and close my eyes as he brings his hands to my temple. A few silent moments pass and I feel nothing this time. Yully slowly pulls his hands back from my temple, cursing at his palms as he shakes them back and forth in pain.

“You felt it, too?” Avonde crosses her robed legs.

“Felt it? It burned me,” he states, presenting bright red fingertips.

“I did that?” I jump up and grab for my head. I did that to them. My body did that to them.

“I felt it as well,” Cedric adds, much to my dismay.

Avonde and Yully have a silent conversation before she turns to me. “Gods, this is more complex than we thought.” Grenn, the long-limbed one with black hair tied into a messy knot, produces a piece of parchment from his robes and begins notating.

“We have come to understand what has caused the amnesia. Well, part of it,” Avonde begins. “There is a sort of…” she trails off, looking to Yully.

“Aggressive mental block,” he finishes, his face tight. Everyone nods in agreement. The notetaker picks up speed.

“Whatever Liv experienced prior to us discovering her body, in the state it was in, was magic. A curse, to be more precise. Cast against her.”