“Clea!” Holly shouted, lunging forward to catch the other sorceress at the last moment so her head didn’t slam against the flagstones. As she slowly lowered Clea to the corridor’s cold floor, Holly tried to assess the severity of the other woman’s wound. She was no doctor, but it didn’t seem to have produced much blood, and it wasn’t bleeding now. So the Orini construct’s knife either hadn’t actually hit anything vital, or Clea was bleeding internally, where Holly couldn’t see what was happening or gauge how bad it might be. Or the blade could have been poisoned, or otherwise magicked to cause harm in ways not immediately visible to the naked eye.
Whatever the mechanism of injury, Holly had seen Clea take a shot from Amanda Sefton’s magic and not go down, so if she had to make a guess about her companion’s condition, she would have to go with “pretty bad”.
Healing spells were not Holly’s forte, and even if they had been, she had none of the components such workings often required in witchcraft. She had no doubt there were plants, stones, and other natural items with equivalent properties here in the Dark Dimension, but she did not have the luxury of time to go search them out.
Except it wasn’t exactly true that she had none of the trappings needed for a healing spell, was it? She did have a Clea poppet.
Holly had never actually used a poppet for healing purposes, but she did know restoration was both slow and incomplete. Which wasn’t going to work for her purposes. She needed an upright and functioning Clea immediately, if not sooner.
So, she was just going to have to MacGyver the doll.
First, she tore some of Clea’s shirt from where the construct had knifed her and tied it around the doll. Then she plucked a few strands of Clea’s silvery hair from her head and braided them into the white fringe already on the poppet’s head. Finally, she opened the chest cavity and removed the tiny vial with its precious drops of the Sorceress Supreme’s blood.
Then she took Elizabeth’s knife – the Tsuut’ina woman had insisted Holly keep it after making the poppets – and dug the tip of the blade into the doll’s abdomen, roughly in the same place Clea’s wound was.
If she’d been back on Earth, she might have gone through the process of casting a sacred circle and calling the corners. It was a Wiccan practice Agatha frowned on, calling it cheap reconstructionist theatrics and unnecessary for spellcasting, and the old witch might be right. She usually was. But not always, as Holly was beginning to learn.
Even though Holly didn’t follow that particular path, she still found the ritual calming, and considering she was about to make up a sympathetic magic spell from whole cloth, without knowing what it might do to the friend she was casting it on, she could have used a little peace of mind. But there wasn’t time, and she had no idea which direction was which here, anyway. Gravity was more of a suggestion than a law in the Dark Dimension, if the orientation of the floating islands she’d seen in the sky were any indication.
Holly took a few moments to formulate a quick rhyme. Then, taking a deep breath, she removed the miniature stopper from the top of the vial.
“Here goes nothing,” she said to the empty hallway. Except, of course, it was actually everything. If she couldn’t heal Clea, the Sorceress Supreme could very well die, and her plot to save Ardina and the Dark Dimension would die along with her. And they didn’t really have a plan B.
“Image of woman, echo of wound,
Through the kindred bond attuned.
As done to image, so too real,
And with Clea’s blood, now heal.”
As she spoke, Holly poured the scant scarlet drops of Clea’s lifeblood onto the gash in the poppet’s stomach she had just made. Then, figuring it couldn’t hurt, she added, “And as I will, so mote it be.”
Then she sat back on her heels and held her breath, waiting. She hadn’t actually practiced this type of magic in a very long time, having moved on to more complex workings that required neither couplets nor components, and sometimes not even words. A desire and a focused will were all that were truly necessary, but it could take decades, even centuries, to reach that level of mastery. She still had a lot to learn, but she definitely had the need and intent part down for this spell, if nothing else.
After a few heart-stopping moments, Clea took a hitching breath and sat up so suddenly that Holly, who’d been squatting beside her, was knocked on her rear.
“Wh-what happened?” Clea asked, looking around in momentary confusion before focusing on Holly. “And what are you doing on the floor?” She paused. “What am I doing on the floor?”
Holly could hardly believe the spell had worked. She felt a thrill of satisfaction.
Take that, Agatha!
“Would you believe we slipped?” Holly replied lightly, focusing on her friend. If the silver-haired sorceress did not remember being stabbed by her father’s lookalike, Holly wasn’t going to be the one to remind her.
Clea looked at her oddly, one slim white eyebrow raised. Then she seemed to notice her wound, or what remained of it – a thin white line that cut diagonally across Amanda’s fading sigil, like an interdictory symbol without the circle. But just as she opened her mouth to ask Holly about it, a deep clanging noise began to reverberate through the hallway.
“That’s the breach alert,” Clea said, scrambling to her feet. “Either Rahl and Synth have made much better headway than we could ever have hoped for, or Umar knows we’re here.”
“I’d like door number one, please, Bob,” Holly quipped, even though she knew the second option was far more likely. Hopefully her poppet spell had been “low-level” enough not to catch Umar’s attention, but worrying about it now was like trying to close the barn door after the horse had already bolted – pointless. Instead, Holly grabbed the doll that they had intended to place in Umar’s baths and chucked it as far back down the hall as she could. “Sorry, poppet. Change of plans.”
The other doll was no longer usable for its intended purpose, so she left it where it was. It no longer had any connection to Clea, so would pose no danger to her. It was just a poorly carved figure in badly made clothing. Perhaps a servant child would find it and take it home to play with. Or wrinkle their nose and throw it in the trash. Both choices seemed equally likely.
“So,” she said to Clea, “time to turn these puppies on and head for the throne room?”
Clea nodded, the corner of her mouth quirking upward.
“I’d intended to wait until we rendezvoused with the others before activating the poppets, but that decision seems to have been made for us. Go ahead. Say the word. I know you’ve been dying to, though I still don’t understand why.”
While Holly thought that was a poor choice of words, all things considered, she had indeed been looking forward to this part. Facing the back of the corridor where she had thrown the poppet and trying to suppress her fangirl glee, Holly drew herself up haughtily and jabbed the pointer finger of her right hand out into the air in front of her with authority.
“Engage!”