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“You’re welcome here,” Garrett pleaded. “Any day. Whenever you’d like.”
“Thank you.”
“Wait. Please. Don’t leave yet.” He left Alex standing in the arched doorway, bemused; he ducked into the kitchen, found an empty bottle with a stopper, called back, “Give me just a minute!”
Alex sat down on the closest bench, intrigued. “As many minutes as you want.”
Water from the pool, a few herbs from the garden and the stores. Vervain, willow bark, chamomile, lavender. That part wasn’t magic, only herb-lore. “One more moment!”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
Except you are, Garrett thought. You are. And who’s Lady Claudine?
He found twelve small stones that’d work. Held them in one hand. Reached into them, down in the lattices and weavings of rock-structure and being-ness, and opened them up a hairsbreadth. Pulled serenity, smoothness, healing to the surface: stones were good at being what they were, true to their nature, hard to shift. They could be sympathetic to someone else wanting to be whole again.
This one took some binding-energy, putting himself into each. But that was fine; he wanted to do it.
He tipped all twelve into the bottle, put the stopper into it, ran back over. “Here.”
Alex took it, and looked at it.
“If there’s something—I don’t know how serious—I don’t think it’ll heal much past a broken bone, I can’t bring people back from near-death or anything—take the stones out. Put one or two or more next to…whatever it is. Touching. It should help. The water’s really just water, but it keeps them cool.”
Alex turned clear glass in one hand, watched pebbles settle and sink. “Is twelve a magical number?”
“No. Honestly, it was as many as I could find in a minute.”
“You’ve got magic for everything.”
“No,” Garrett said, meaning it. “Oh, no.”
He watched Alex leave with a sense of the world shifting like the pebbles. Inadequate. Suspended. Caught behind glass.
The apprentices emerged like a flock of noisy doves. Lilac said, “Why is Prince Alexandre attending one of my mother’s poetry readings? She always writes about the latest impoverished artist who’s caught her eye. She rhymesmoonwithJuneevery time. Though once she rhymed it withcoming too soon, which was at least a change.”
“Your mother,” Garrett echoed, no less mystified, only now in a new way. “I don’t know.”
Quen, uninterested in Lady Claudine’s amorous misadventures, picked up the silver tangle again. “Lilac, are these runes? Or scratches? Can you tell?”
Lilac, with a sideways glance at her Second Sorcerer, who’d welcomed her back, came over and said, willingly, “Let me try to find out.”
