Chapter 178. Archibald (Patreon)

Adom and Sam reached the healers' in the late afternoon.

Celene, Sam's mother, had her room at the end of the upper hall, a quiet corner the family had all but moved into since the bad news came. Through the half-open door Adom could see Elena, Sam's little sister, in a chair pulled close to the bed, watching their mother breathe.

Archibald Harbinsky stood in the hall outside it.

Sam's father was a big man, broad-shouldered, usually the most composed person in any room. But not today. His collar hung open, his jaw was dark with stubble, and the skin beneath his eyes was shadowed and heavy. He hadn't slept.

He straightened when he saw them.

"Sam." He caught his son by the shoulders and looked him over, the salt-stiff clothes, the grey exhaustion on him. "Where have you been? We tried to reach you half the night."

"I know. I'm sorry." Sam gripped his father's arm. "Father, listen to me. Before you say anything, just listen."

Then Sam told him. About the rune, and the leviathan they'd sailed out to find, and the thing they'd cut into Adom's arm before first light. That it could take an ordinary healing draught and push it past anything the healers could manage on their own. That it might, finally, be enough.

Also, they wanted to try it on Celene. Today.

Archibald's face went still.

"You want to what?"

"Show him," Sam said.

Adom pushed his sleeve up past the elbow and turned the arm over. The rune sat there in the lamplight, a heart with lines running out from it like veins, the skin around it still red and raw from the needle. Archibald looked at it for a long moment.

Then his brows drew down hard. Whatever he'd braced for, it hadn't been this.

He didn't shout. He wasn't that kind of man, and he respected the young magus in front of him far too much for it besides. So he let out a slow breath instead and pressed two fingers to the bridge of his nose, eyes shut.

When he lowered his hand, he looked older than he had a moment before.

"Oh, Sammy." His voice was gentle. "We have done everything. You know we have. Every healer in this city has come through that door, and a good many from beyond it. The finest there are."

His gaze moved to Adom, and there was nothing unkind in it.

"Your own mother among them, Adom. She's come more than once. Sat with Celene, looked her over, told me plainly what she found."

Adom hadn't known that. Maria had never said a word.

"And every one of them tells me the same thing." Archibald's eyes returned to his son. "In kinder words, or plainer ones. There's nothing left to do but keep her comfortable. Make what time is left good."

Sam started to speak but his father went on before he could, though not harshly.

"A real treatment takes years, Sam. Testing, and more testing, and people who give their whole lives to the work. You know that far better than I do." 

He shook his head slowly. "She has weeks. Perhaps fewer. I won't spend them on a thing the two of you made in a single night, soaked to the skin and half out of your minds with worry. If it goes wrong, we don't lose a cure. We lose her early. We lose the goodbyes."

"Father, please." Sam's voice cracked on it. "I promise you it works. I've seen it with my own eyes, I watched it happen."

He suddenly turned, casting around the hall, and found the little fountain set into the wall by the window. Three strides and he had both hands cupped under the water.

"Here. Adom," he came back with it spilling through his fingers. "Show him. Do something with it, anything, show him it's real—"

"Sam." Archibald reached for him. "Sam, put that down."

"Just watch, that's all I'm asking, just look."

"Son—"

"One minute, give me one minute and you'll see, I swear to you you'll see—"

"Sam."

"Please, Father, please, if you'd only let him—"

"SAM!"

The shout cracked out of him. His hands closed hard on his son's shoulders, and the water spilled from Sam's hands onto the floor between them, and the hall went very quiet.

Adom said nothing. He'd half-thought to step in, light the rune, give the man his proof. But it was the wrong moment, and he knew it. Anything he did with the water now would land as a trick in a corridor and nothing more, and Sam was in no state to make it mean otherwise. So he held still and kept quiet.

Archibald looked at his son for a long moment. Then his grip eased. His hands came off Sam's shoulders, and he dragged one down his own face.

"...I'm sorry," he said. "I shouldn't have shouted. That was poor of me." He breathed out. "It's been a hard few days on all of us. On you most of all, I know that."

Sam wouldn't look at him.

"But you have to stop now. Just for a moment. Look at me." He waited until his son did. "You haven't slept. You're a mess, salt still in your hair, running on nothing, and you've come here ready to stake your mother's last weeks on a decision you made in the dark, half-asleep, out on the water. That isn't you thinking, Sam. That's you frightened."

He ducked his head a little to keep Sam's eye.

"What did I always teach you? You don't close on a thing while your blood's up. You sleep. You let the head go cold, and you look at it again in the morning. Every bad bargain I made in my life, I made it tired and afraid and sure I couldn't afford to wait." His voice gentled further. "So I'm asking you to wait. One night. That's all I want."

Then Archibald looked at Adom, and smiled gently.

"Adom." He shook his head slowly. "You're a good friend to him. I've known it a long while. A man rests easier about his son in this world, knowing there's someone like you standing at his side." 

His gaze stayed on Adom's face. "And I can see it on you right now, the very same as on him. He turns up half-mad with fear, and you don't sit him down and talk sense into him. You go and do all of this. For us. For people who aren't even your own blood."

His voice thickened.

"I don't have the words for what that's worth to me. I want you to hear me say it. I do." He drew a slow breath. "But this has to end here. For his sake as much as Celene's."

Adom simply nodded.

"You're right."

Then Sam's head turned at once.

"...What?" He was staring at Adom now. "Adom?"

Before Sam could get a word out, Adom stepped in.

"Thank you, Uncle Archibald." He held Archibald's eye. "You're right. All of it. We'll come back once he's slept and eaten, and we'll talk it through with clear heads."

Archibald nodded, the relief plain on him. "...Good lad."

Adom took Sam by the arm and steered him off down the hall before he could dig his heels in.

The moment they were round the corner and out of his father's hearing, Sam pulled his arm free.

"What the FUCK, dude." He was furious. "What the fuck was that?! You agreed with him! You actually— you just folded, right there in front of me!"

"Keep walking."

"Adom—"

"Walk." Adom kept his own pace easy, heading deeper into the building. "Your father is a merchant. One of the best there is. He doesn't take an offer on faith, no matter who's putting it to him. He takes it when the proof's sitting in front of him and the gain plainly outweighs whatever saying yes might cost." 

He glanced sideways at Sam. "And what did we walk in there with? Two worn-out boys, a story about a sea monster, and a wound on my arm a few hours old. He was unconvinced before either of us opened our mouths. He was right to be."

"So what are you saying?" Sam was half-jogging to keep up now, the fury in him faltering into confusion. "What, we just leave it? We let him—"

"I'm saying we bring him proof it works."

They came out at the top of a wide stair. Below them the healers' opened into its lower ward, the floor where the day's urgent cases came through, and it was full. Splinted limbs and fever-bright faces, a man cradling a wrapped hand against his chest, a child crying somewhere out of sight, healers moving between them all at a brisk clip.

Adom stopped at the rail and looked down at it.

"Something he can see with his own eyes. That costs him nothing to watch." He tipped his head toward the ward below. "And there's plenty of it right here."

So they went down.

The lower ward was warm and close, loud with the low constant noise of people hurting and trying not to show it. Adom moved through it slowly, Sam a half-step behind him, and looked.

He passed the urgent cases by, for now. He'd come back to them. But he wanted to find his footing first, on something that gave him room to be sure of himself before he reached for the ones who couldn't afford a mistake. A plain case. A clear hurt, a clear mend, nothing that could go sideways in front of an audience.

He found what he was after along the far wall.

A man in city guard uniform sat propped against it, one leg stretched out in front of him. His thigh had been opened by a blade. The cut ran deep through the meat of it, bound now with linen gone dark red and stiff. Someone had stopped the bleeding, but they hadn't done much for the pain. His jaw was clenched, his face pale and slick with sweat, his breath coming in slow measured pulls through his teeth.

A second guard crouched beside him, still in uniform, unhurt, one hand resting on his comrade's shoulder.

Adom crossed to them. "Good afternoon."

The unhurt one looked up, and went rigid. Recognition landing on him all at once.

"Magus." He was on his feet before he'd finished the word, back straight, fist to his chest, which was uncalled for, given that the Magisterium had no jurisdiction over the City Guard. "Sir. Ghost of— sir, forgive me, I didn't see you."

"At ease. Please." Adom waved him back down, not bothering to point out he did not have to do all that. "I'm not here as anything. Just passing through."

The wounded man turned his head, took in who was standing over him, and managed a rough "Magus" of his own before another wave of pain shut his eyes again. He hadn't the spare attention for ceremony, and Adom didn't hold it against him.

"What happened to him?" Adom crouched to their level, while Sam hung back a pace.

"Drill, sir." The standing guard was still half at attention. "Live steel. He got careless on a parry and my blade came through deeper than either of us meant." He grimaced. "My doing, near enough. I was his partner."

"These things happen on a drill yard." Adom looked at the bound thigh. "And now?"

"Waiting on a healer, sir. They stopped the bleeding when we came in and sat us down. Said one'd be along to close it proper once they were able."

"Once they were able." Adom glanced up. "What do they close it with? When one comes."

The guard looked faintly thrown by the question, but answered it. "Their own, sir. Their own mana, I mean. That's how they do the bad ones here. A healer pours it into you and knits the wound shut." 

He nodded down the ward, where a cluster of robed figures sat slumped at a long table, cups in hand, none of them working. 

"Only they've been at it since first light. More come through that door than there's healers to meet them, and that kind of mending takes it out of a person. So they rest. Build themselves back up before the next round." A note of apology crept in. "We're in no rush, sir. He'll keep. There's plenty worse off than us in here."

The standing guard's brow creased then.

"If you don't mind my asking, Magus." He looked between Adom and the quiet young man at his shoulder. "Why all the questions?"

Adom straightened.

One of the robed healers was pushing up from the long table, rolling the stiffness from her shoulders. Rested enough, by the look of her, to go again.

Adom watched her a moment, thinking.

He had some experience in healing magic himself. But he'd never drilled it the way these people had. He had mended his own bones before, but it was another experience entirely on other people. A scraped knee was fine, he could help with that. But a blade-deep gash through a man's thigh, with the man awake to feel every wrong move? He didn't trust himself that far. Not yet.

But he didn't have to be the one mending it. He only had to make whoever did it better at the job.

And how far that went, he had no idea. A potion was one thing. A living spell, drawn by a trained hand, with his mana poured in beneath it to carry it past anything the weaver could manage alone and enhance the healing spell?

He wanted to find out how that would turn out.

"Be right back," he said.