Amanusa sped them through his abdomen to stop next to a dark, inflamed spot. After a moment, Elinor realized she was looking at the place where Harry had been shot--from the inside.
Did I miss a fragment? She moved closer, explaining to Amanusa where they were.
Even if you did, Amanusa said, it shouldn't still be affecting him after so long away from the dead zone. Surely it would be dead. Inert.
These machines, the ones that travel outside the dead zones, are different. Elinor probed the dark spot and Harry hissed, as if it hurt. She asked him, feeling a bit as if she stood in a bucket as she listened to his reply.
"A bit," he admitted.
"Has it been? Since it happened? This is where the machine shot you, is it not?"
"Yeah." He shrugged. She could feel his muscles move. "I figured it was just healin' up. Isn't it?"
"Not properly. There may be a fragment of the dart left behind. I need to be sure. I'll try not to hurt."
"I will block the pain," Amanusa said. "Elinor will learn how."
Elinor sensed Amanusa intend to block pain and saw the magic act to wrap itself around and around the odd, almost star-shaped fibers surrounding the area.
I am searching for someone to teach anatomy classes, so we can understand what we do, Amanusa said wryly.
And probably having trouble with it. Doctors didn't want women in their classes any more than magicians.
Ask Dr. Rosato, Elinor suggested. He would probably pay us to see inside a living body.
She had work to do. Carefully, Elinor eased closer to the inflamed spot. She willed the magic to search carefully for any foreign substance.
"What 'appens if you find something" Harry asked, almost too casually.
"Let us worry about that after we do," Amanusa said.
Elinor could feel Amanusa's tension as she blocked all sensation from reaching Harry, but she didn't dare hurry. She went deeper and deeper into the swollen area, probing carefully, but she found nothing. No tiny slivers of bone or crumbs of dirt. Not even a stray thread from his shirt. She'd been told that even so little as that could cause putrefaction. So what was wrong here?
She pushed her magic to inquire, but her confused question only confused the magic. Then it occurred to her--Harry had fainted because of a shortage of magic. This was where he'd been shot. Where the lack of magic had been concentrated into a single localized area. Her--her sorcery confirmed it. The area was not infected. There was no corruption, just inflammation. She checked with Amanusa, who confirmed it. The trouble was magical in origin.
So how do we fix it?
I'm not sure, Amanusa admitted. I've never encountered this sort of thing before. But I don't think we should recall our blood yet.
I agree. And we can feed more magic into him, as we are able. That will help this heal--but slowly.
Amanusa scowled. Elinor could feel it more than see it.
I don't like it, though, Amanusa said. We should be able to heal him more quickly. Direct the magic right to this spot and pack it in.
Elinor racked her brain for a solution. Solution. Wizardry was often carried in a solution of plant materials.
What if-- she began tentatively, thinking her way through. What if we could apply a poultice over the area? We could load it with wizardry and sorcery both. Perhaps we could lance the scar a bit, to allow the magic to penetrate better, so it doesn't have to soak its way through the skin. Or does that matter?
It takes longer to penetrate the skin.
All right, then. Elinor looked around at Harry's insides. How do I get out again?
You-- Amanusa demonstrated. "Step out."
Elinor copied her, reaching for the magic inside herself, her intention clear in her mind, and she stepped back into her own body. "I'll get that poultice."
"You're going to poultice the splinter out o' me?" Harry caught her hand as she stood.
"Oh. I'm sorry--I forgot you couldn't hear us. There is no splinter. Just a place--" She made a circle with thumb and forefinger. "About this big. Where you have far too little magic. We're going to poultice magic into you."
"What would you've done if there 'ad been a splinter?" he wanted to know.
"Asked Dr. Rosato to cut it out," Amanusa said briskly. "Aren't you glad Elinor already got it all?"
"That I am."
Elinor excused herself to go make her poultice. As she looped her apron over her head and tied it around her, she considered what she had just done. Once she'd begun moving around Harry's body, examining him from the inside out, she'd forgotten the magic was based on blood. It had ceased to feel peculiar or foreign, because it wasn't. It was no more foreign than wizardry. Less so, because it came from her own body.
Though Elinor had to admit--she and her body were not exactly on speaking terms. As long as it did what she wanted it to, she paid it little attention, feeding and resting it as necessary to keep it doing so. She had a feeling that might necessarily change. It was not a comfortable feeling.
Pearl knocked on the still room door and came in when Elinor called. "Grey and I are going to lunch at home." She yawned. "I feel a nap coming on. But I wanted to let you know--don't worry too much about that accidental familiar business. You haven't exchanged blood directly." She wiggled her forefinger. "Wound to wound, as it were. Just don't work magic together and don't give him your virginity. Not until you've pulled your blood back from him, in any case."
"I won't!" Elinor was so shocked, she almost put in too much tansy. "I wouldn't."
"I know." Pearl's grin was as wicked as most of Grey's. She was picking up too many of his worst habits. "I was just winding you up. It's so easy to do. Amanusa is staying to help with the poultice's magic, all right?"
"Yes, all right." Elinor bade her goodbye, her mind already on her spell-mixing.
Where had she put that adder's-tongue? Under "A" for "adder" or under "O" for "ophioglossum"? She found a few dried seed stalks she'd harvested near home last spring in a jar high in the corner, next to the aloes.
Aloe. She'd bought a new plant--aloe vera--imported from somewhere in the Americas by way of Cape Horn. She'd tried it in her burn salve where it had worked marvelously. Perhaps it would work in this. Or maybe she should try one of the other aloes. Aloe socotrina, from an island off the Horn of Africa, had worked well for wizards for years in closing wounds and easing pain and she had some of that in the jar right beside the adder's-tongue.
Elinor set that jar on a lower shelf and climbed carefully down her stepstool to the floor with the adder's-tongue jar tucked carefully in one hand. Once securely at ground level, she set both jars on the worktable. What else?
Crane's bill, she decided. It was useful for internal injuries and what was Harry's ailment but precisely that? That jar was lower and easily found. She would use olive oil as a base, as it was inherently soothing, possessed of solid magic, and readily took up more.
She lost herself in measuring, grinding, mixing, and then stirring in the magic with her favorite wand, the one she'd had since she made it when she was twelve from the alder tree growing in the same damp ground where she harvested her adder's-tongue. It had a little bend in it where she'd cut away a fork from her branch, but it didn't seem to affect the magic any. Or perhaps it simply suited her own bent. Elinor had always thought of herself as a little crooked. Not crooked as in wicked, but as in eccentric. No harm in that.
The poultice was ready. All it needed was blood for the sorcery. Elinor eyed the sharp paring knife on the worktable. If she put the blood in it here, no one would know. The guild's secret would definitely be kept. But did they need more, or would that already inside Harry suffice? And if more was required, how much more? Better to wait on the lessons of the master sorceress.
Elinor draped bandages over her forearm, picked up the small bowl with her potion, and headed back to the drawing room, noting the time on the large case clock in the hallway with satisfaction. "Only ten minutes from start to finish with this potion," she announced with pride. "Do we need to draw more blood to finish it?"
"Perhaps a little. Jax will donate." Amanusa stood, waving Harry back to his chair.
"I feel like some blood-sucking ghoul, taking all the blood you've given me," Harry said.
"Don't." Elinor held out the bowl to receive the drop of blood. "It's such a tiny amount. You've given more yourself for other magic."
"Yeah, but for bigger things."
"And healing the magister of the alchemist's guild isn't a big thing? You'll need to get out of your jacket and shirt." Elinor flicked a finger at him before taking up her wand to stir the blood and magic into the potion.
She could feel Amanusa adding magic to the blood from Jax and tried to put in her own. She could, but it wasn't easy. The blood wasn't hers. It was--it felt exactly like Amanusa's.
"I thought you used Jax's blood," Elinor whispered.
"Jax is my familiar," Amanusa said in a normal voice. Nothing more. Elinor had to work her way through the rest of it herself.
"Jax's blood is the same as yours?" she whispered to Amanusa again.
"Almost," Amanusa murmured back, magic still flowing.
Elinor laid out the fabric to hold the potion and used the small wooden paddle she'd used for mixing the herbs into the oil to spread it onto the tightly woven surface. Harry had his shirt off, she noted with a quick glance, and the wound area looked inflamed from this side of his body too. Amanusa scratched her lancet lightly across it, opening up a few small stripes in his skin, less than the equivalent of a cat's scratch.
"You should have told me it wasn't healing properly," Elinor scolded as she laid the cool decoction over the reddened area. The oiled cloth tended to slide, so she held it in place while she reached for the bandage. Amanusa handed it to her.
"I thought it was." Harry craned his neck to watch what she did, his arm up over his head out of the way. "I been--well, not shot. But I've been cut before, 'ad things poke into me an' make holes. Took longer than this to 'eal."
"But then, you didn't have Elinor healing you," Amanusa teased. "She expects instant results."
"No, I don't," Elinor protested, then had to admit, "Not instant--but very, very quick."
She found herself slowing as she put her arms around Harry to pass the bandage behind his back and made herself move faster. The last time she'd done this, it had ended in a way she was determined would not happen again. And the damned poultice kept sliding, which meant more turns of bandage were required to hold it in place.
When she was finally able to tie it off, she straightened and her head bumped Harry's nose. She frowned at him and he leaned even closer. "You smell good," he murmured. "Makes you hard to resist."
"Try harder." She intensified her frown as she wiped her hands. They were a little oily too.
She checked the bandage, but there were enough layers, the potion shouldn't seep through to stain his clothing. And the bandage was cotton gauze. The process of transforming it from seed fluff to fabric took away much of its magic potential, but she could still use it to create a protective barrier to hold the magic against his skin.
"If it took only ten minutes to make this potion," Harry asked, "why did it take most of yesterday to make the potion for the challenge? Are poisons that much 'arder to work with?"
"It's not the poison so much as the magic," Elinor said. "This one was fairly simple. We wanted to pack as much healing magic into it as possible and I wanted to do it quickly, without including anything that would interfere with the sorcery. We also wanted the magic to leave the herbs quickly and go inside you. With the challenge potion, I want the magic to stick strictly to the ingredients and be difficult to remove--at least until it's drunk."
"But why do wizards use poisons?" Jax asked. "Why is it even allowed?"
"Because in lower doses, many poisons become effective medicines." Elinor held Harry's shirt for him to slip his arms into. She needed him to be covered. "Even without magic added, a tincture of digitalis--foxglove--can help steady the heart. In large amounts, it will kill. Wizards should also know the poisons in order to be able to neutralize them and to recognize which has been used.
"Herbs are a tool, like all magic. The evil is in the one using them, not the tool being used. We must study what each one will do. We do not yet know, by any means, all the uses even of the plants native to England and Europe, much less those in the rest of the world. A great deal of study is required."
"And with only twelve wizards--" Harry buttoned up his waistcoat. "We ain't 'ad enough of them to do the studying. Another reason to start admittin' females." He allowed Elinor to assist him into his jacket. He generally favored the shorter tail of a sack coat to the long-skirted frock coats Jax and Grey usually wore. He seemed to prefer the freedom of movement allowed. "Is it time for lunch yet?"
After lunch Elinor had the meeting arranged with the headmaster and faculty at the school. The sorcery students were something of a special case, since most of their sorcery classes would have to be taught by either Amanusa or Jax, who held a vast reservoir of knowledge from his 300-plus years of living. Though Pearl was ranked as master, she was still a very new sorceress and worked much of her magic, Elinor feared, by instinct. Pearl sat in on many of the sorcery classes and now Elinor would too. Quietly and without fanfare.
The three female wizardry students could follow the regular wizard's curriculum at the academy. The ladies had adopted young Mr. Little, the lone male wizardry student, as a sort of pet and he seemed to adore it, so conflict among the students would not be an issue. But there were other classes they needed, everything from history and mathematics to magicians' law. Amanusa and Elinor had already decided how those subjects would be taught.
The boys and girls had to be in classes together. It wouldn't do to have the sexes looking at each other like they were strange creatures from another world. Eventually they would have to work together. They needed to know each other, respect each other, and have knowledge of what the various types of magic could do. Harry and Grey of course agreed, and since the magisters of the four guilds were the directors of the school, they had the final say.
Headmaster Whitson had been amenable to the idea. As Grey had said, he was a forward-thinking man. The faculty were another matter entirely.
It took most of the afternoon and several threats of dismissal from their posts to convince the schoolmasters that not only would they teach the females in their classes, but they would also treat them fairly. Oddly enough, the wizardry instructor John Fillmore was not the most intransigent. That honor went to a crotchety alchemist. Elinor had heard Harry claim several times, even before this meeting, that the man should be put out to pasture. That time may have come.
Elinor left the academy feeling the need to crack heads. She was not ordinarily a hot-tempered woman, but the stubbornness of certain arrogant, self-important, ignorant-- She diverted her anger to grinding herbs for her burn ointment. She did get a trifle snappish with Dr. Rosato, even though he was truly a help in the making, but he took it in good temper.
Friday arrived and with it the second challenge. Elinor climbed onto her stepstool to retrieve her potion hidden across the room from the prominently labeled potion she'd used for Cranshaw. No one had attempted to break into her stillroom to tamper or steal--an advantage of having the room attached to Harry's house--but one could never be too careful.
The challenge itself was almost an anticlimax. They had agreed on a simultaneous working for this one, so Elinor started on Dodd's potion as soon as he started work on hers. His poison was as straightforward in its malevolence as the man himself, without any knots or twisty bits to comb out. She neutralized the potion, drank it down, and popped in one of Dr. Rosato's peppermints, which had been admitted ahead of time by Dodd's second, Phineas Allsup.
Dodd was still working over Elinor's potion. Forehead glistening with sweat, he would stir a moment, then mutter for several more before stirring again. Once he changed wands, but went back to his first after only one stir.
Elinor occupied herself by mentally reciting plants by common name, Latin name, and Gaelic name, then listing the properties of each, beginning with the letter "R" for variety's sake. She had gone off into a meditation on possible new uses for curly dock, rumex crispus, Gaelic name lost somewhere in memory, when Dodd threw down his wand, startling her back to alertness.
"I can't do it," he snapped out. "I won't drink it. I dare anyone else to try. I say even she can't drink it. A wizard who can't neutralize his own potion can't be magister."
Elinor sighed and held her hand out for the cup, pewter this time. With a sneer, Dodd handed it to Rosato who sniffed it.
"Bene," he said. "He has added nothing to it." Rosato sniffed again. "I cannot tell that he has taken much away, either."
He handed the cup to Elinor who still had her hand out, waiting. With a sigh, she pulled out a birch wand and stirred it through the potion, pulling all the nastiness out. Magic and poison, anyway. It would still taste foul.
She gave it one more stir to be certain all the magic had taken up residence in the wand, set the wand aside, pinched her nose shut, took a deep breath, and drank down as much of the awful tasting stuff as she could stand. She came up coughing and spitting. Oh, it was nasty. It took two more peppermints before she could endure her own mouth again.
All the while, the audience--almost as large as the previous one--waited on tiptoes to see whether her sputtering might be merely the prologue to her painful death. Alas, they were to be disappointed.
"Do you honestly think," she croaked when she could, "that I am so stupid to put magic into a poison without knowing how to take it out again, with the poison?"
Dodd merely scowled.
Elinor shook her head. "Of course you do. After all, I'm 'only' a woman. You'll learn to think otherwise soon enough."
"She did not drink all of the potion," Allsup protested.
"Rules require that the wizard drink only the majority," Sir William retorted.
"Do you want to finish it?" Elinor waved the cup in Allsup's direction. "There's no harm in it now."
Both Dodd and Allsup backed away. She didn't actually blame them. There were stories from the old days, before the burnings, about wizards who could neutralize potions within themselves while allowing anyone else who drank it to be affected. She couldn't do it, but it might be an interesting thing to learn. Not that she wanted to poison people, but if she could do it with a truth spell? Could be advantageous.
"Oh, for--" Harry hopped off the dais and strode to the challenge table which had been moved much closer to the front this time. He picked up the goblet and tossed off the remaining swallow of potion. "There. Happy?"
He spat on the floor and looked around for Rosato. "Got any more o' them peppermints?"
"Idiot," Elinor hissed at him. "You do not go about drinking wizard's potions willy nilly. Not if you can't tell what's in them."
"You drank it. I knew it was safe." Harry stuck the peppermint in his mouth and sucked on it.
"Don't do it again." She looked back at her godfather. "Sir William? Are we done?"
"Show some respect!" Allsup snarled at her.
Harry stirred as if to respond and Elinor cast him a sharp look. She was wizard's magister. He seemed to recall that and held his tongue.
"Respect is given where it is due, Wizard Allsup," she said calmly. "And where it is reciprocated. When I am shown respect, when I see wizards who deserve it, then I shall certainly give it. As for this challenge, it seems finished to me."
"The challenge is concluded," Sir William said, overpowering any other muttering. "Magister Tavis has successfully met the challenge of Wizard Dodd and prevailed."
Allsup's glower became more fierce. He began pulling off his glove with sharp angry snatches at each fingertip.
"Furthermore--" Sir William's voice got even louder. "There will be no more challenges to the authority of the wizard's magister for the period of one month. Four weeks from today--"
He consulted a calendar produced by his conjurer secretary. "On February 19, a challenge may be issued by any of you who still wish to risk it. And yes, as head of Magician's Council I have the right. Not to ban challenges entirely, but I may set the timetable. Read your charter. We are done for at least the next four weeks."
He nodded at the gathering. Elinor curtsied, the male wizards bowed, and the audience broke into a gossiping crowd.
"Dr. Rosato." Elinor laid her hand on the handsome Italian's sleeve, holding him in place. "I am feeling guilty for abandoning a patient to your care. Would you go with me this afternoon to see Mr. Cranshaw?"
"But of course, Signorina." He took her hand in his and bowed over it, pressing his lips to the back, his eyes holding hers the whole way down. It made Elinor feel rather silly. "Anything for you."
"What's this?" Harry drew closer, scowling fiercely at Rosato. While she'd been teaching the dottore to make the burn ointment, Harry had come to the stillroom half a dozen times, just to "see how it was going." She needed to make it more clear that he had no right to dictate her activities.
Rosato seemed far too amused by it. He tucked Elinor's hand into his arm. "Signorina Eleanora will go with me to visit the wizard Cranshaw for his health this afternoon."
"Not alone." Harry's expression was adamant.
"Of course not." Rosato patted her hand. "She is going with me. And perhaps the brigata Norwood. He has the keys." He looked down at Elinor, so much mischief in his eyes it made her wary. "Shall we share luncheon together before we go?"
"Good idea." Harry signaled to Grey and Amanusa on the dais. "We'll all go."
Rosato didn't seem too disappointed. Perhaps he'd intended to goad Harry into this result. Nikos Archaios and the Prussian joined them as well, but it was a smaller group that visited Holborn Tower.