Starfall Island rose out of the blue horizon. Its forested slopes climbed steeply to become craggy mountains shrouded by flocks of seabirds. On a high plateau of the northern slope sat several rectangular white towers. As Francesca watched, a golden colaboris spell erupted from the tallest tower and flew over the western horizon.
Starfall Keep was tiny compared with Astrophell's domes, and it lacked the grandeur of Starhaven's inhumanly tall spires; even so, Francesca thought it beautiful. Nicodemus stood beside her on the bow. She tried to focus on the wooded island, the ancient academy, but nausea sloshed through her like wine in a jug. She had sailed many times before but had never suffered from such horrible seasickness. Some days, shortly after eating breakfast, she had to bend over the railing and be sick into the swells. Blessedly, the queasiness usually dissipated in the afternoon.
Now, after fifty-three days, their journey to Starfall was almost complete. Francesca felt weary in a way she had not thought possible. Most highsmiths and druids recognized Nicodemus as their champion, but radical elements in both Lorn and Dralâwanting to prevent the League of Starfall from forming so they might continue their ancient war against each otherâhad focused their violence on Nicodemus.
In the Skywood, their caravan had barely survived the attack of a Dralish forest god: a massive treelike being with archers loosing arrows from his boughs and rootlike limbs burrowing into the flesh of Nicodemus's party. In the City of Rain, a highsmith assassin stabbed Nicodemus's back. Fortuitously, his cacographic nature disspelled the knife's metallic spells before they could punch a meshwork of needles though his body.
After that, the Lord Governor of Rain assigned a company of horsemen and a seraphâone of Lorn's genderless subgods bound to their metal godâto escort Nicodemus down the River Road. But ten days outside the city, a troop of antileague border guards pulled down a section of Richard's Wall, letting out the lycanthropes of the Tulgety Forest. The wolves killed two of Nicodemus's company and overturned several caravan wagons. In the fray, Shannon broke his left collar boneâa painful injury for a man
already in a fragile state. Whenever they could, Nicodemus and Francesca attended to Shannon.
In Skydoc, rioters set fire to the ship meant to sail them to Starfall. The next night the governor snuck the party aboard a Lornish warship leaving on the morning tide. Once at sea, Francesca and Nicodemus finally had time to discuss what they had discovered in Avel. Twice, they hotly debated if they were destined to instigate Typhon's Disjunction. Nicodemus thought it was possible; Francesca didn't.
As hard as the seasickness was for Francesca, it was worse for Shannon. His already-small appetite diminished, and his collarbone was slow in mending. When a cough went around among the sailors, Shannon ran a fever and began coughing up dark phlegm. Francesca attended the old man, and Nicodemus kept him company. That morning, Shannon's fever had worsened, and she and Nicodemus had been at his side until a cry of landfall had brought them above deck.
“I fear for Shannon,”
Francesca wrote as they entered the broad harbor lying beneath Starfall. On the far shore, two-score rectangular housesâwhite walls, thatched roofsâmade up the island's largest port town.
Nicodemus looked at her.
“Was I rong? Did I fale to remove all of his canckers?”
“No, you removed them all. But as you suspected, you could not restore the health that was lost during a decade of fighting the disease. The curse accelerated his physical age. I can feel how the valves of his heart have stiffened, and the beating muscle itself is dilating. His body is hard-pressed to fight the infection in his lungs.”
“What can we do?”
She turned to face Nicodemus.
“I'm afraid there is little to do but keep him comfortable and pray.”
“Do you know?”
he wrote.
“From your prgonosis?”
She shook her head.
“He may survive ⦠but mortal danger will soon return to him.”
He only nodded and held her tighter.
An hour later, two sailors rowed them to a quay lined with wizards. With typical academic pomp, they were led up to Starfall's grassy courtyards and white stone buildings. Francesca gave instructions as to how Shannon was to be transported while Nicodemus spoke with a procession of deans and dignitaries.
When she rejoined him, Nicodemus was talking to two lesser wizards; one was older and very tall, the other shorter and with thinning brown hair.
The large man's name was John of Starhaven, but he had once been known as Simple John and had lived with Nicodemus and the other Starhaven cacographers. The shorter man's name was Derrick; apparently he had been a cacographic student in Nicodemus's first and only wizardly lecture. Both men had come to Starfall Keep once the counter-prophecy faction had taken power in Starhaven. Weary though she was, Francesca was delighted to meet two men from Nicodemus's old life.
The cacographers seemed as if they would have spent the whole night talking and renewing their friendship, but when Francesca mentioned that Shannon was fairing worse, both John and Derrick excused themselves to call on their old mentor.
Nicodemus looked as if he would have liked to join them, but several grand wizards ushered him and Francesca into a long, formal dinner.
When not talking to other wizards, Nicodemus described to her the different factions he'd already discovered within in their new home; one he suspected was already taking Astrophell's coin to spy on him. Meanwhile, other factions seemed to already be spying on Vivian. One dean reported that Vivian was emptying Astrophell's treasury to build grammar schools andâalmost incrediblyâprinting presses. Why she should invest in mundane text production was a mystery.
When the last speech was given and the last toast made, Francesca and Nicodemus were shown their new residence of an entire floor of the westernmost tower. From the balcony, she could look out on the island forests, the ocean beyond.
Shannon had been situated in one of the bedrooms and was being attended by two acolytes. Though cheered by John and Derrick's visit, Shannon remained in poor health. Francesca administered a small dose of the alcoholic tincture of Ixonian opium to suppress his cough and help him sleep. Nicodemus sat with his former teacher. Francesca excused herself, eager for a feather bed.
As she drifted off to sleep, she worried about her body. Her mind was slowly recovering her extraordinary perception of time, but her body showed no sign of regaining its draconic potential. She had foreseen futures in which she regained this capability and futures in which she did not.
She did not know what she could do to restore her draconic potential, but presently she did not mind its absence. There was some other processâhealing perhapsâto which her body was dedicated.
She came halfway out of sleep when Nicodemus climbed under the sheets. He made the bed too hot, so she rolled into cooler sheets, dreaming ⦠and sat bolt upright as someone grabbed her shoulder. Colorful
words flashed. One of the acolytes attending to Shannon was speaking. Something had happened.
Francesca hopped out of bed and jogged toward the old man's room. Outside, the black sky was still sprayed with stars. She found Shannon breathing fast and mumbling green. His skin was cold and clammy, his pulse rapid and weak.
“What hapened?”
the question floated before her. She turned to see Nicodemus in the doorway.
She laid her hand against Shannon's chest and felt his heart bounding.
“I fear the infection is in his blood. His vessels are dilating from the shock. Talk to him. See if he is making sense.
Nicodemus crouched next to the bed. They spoke in dim colors.
“Its hard to understnad. He's tlaking about his wife, I think,”
Nicodemus wrote.
“He says heis cold.”
Francesca draped two more blankets over Shannon. His breathing was becoming labored. Nicodemus wrapped one of the blankets around Shannon's hand and squeezed it.
“What can we do?”
Francesca bit her lip.
“My love, there are no good options.”
She began to write two paragraphs, but then noticed that Nicodemus had looked away. He didn't want to be seen. She finished her paragraphs and sat on the other side of the bed. Shannon shifted restlessly. She took his hand.
Nicodemus remained very still. Once, he wiped his eyes. She pretended not to notice.
As she always did when caring for the dying, Francesca felt as if grief surrounded her but could not touch her. And yet, as she watched Shannon shifting and murmuring, she became keenly aware that some part of her was still mortal. One day she might lie in a bed, fading into death.
Twisting inside of her was the need to move, to do, to launch into the safety of action. In her hands, she held two paragraphs. Each one described a course of treatment. But Nicodemus, not she, should decide between the two. She longed to thrust the golden words at him and demand that he read, that he decide, that he do something. But she forced herself to wait while Nicodemus hid his grief. Perhaps a quarter hour passed. It felt like a lifetime. Shannon said words of brown and orange.
Finally Nicodemus turned to his old teacher. His face was bright with tears, his mouth pulled back and quivering. He looked like a mask, like a terrified child, like a grotesque, like heartbreak.
And in that moment, Francesca felt something in herself break as she realized that there was no safety in action, that even if she threw herself into Shannon's treatment, it would be only a distraction from the truth that one day Nicodemus would die and her own face would become the mask, the child, the grotesque. She felt a strange awe at her own grief.
Nicodemus wiped his eyes.
“What are our optieons?”
She paused, then held out her first paragraph:
“I could textually spike his shin bone, give him fluids to fill up his dilated veins, and pray he recovers before his kidneys or bowel die from lack of blood.”
She waited for him to read this and then held out the second paragraph.
“Or I could give him alcoholic tincture of opium to remove his fear and shortness of breath and gentle his passing.”
When Nicodemus finished reading, he turned away again.
Suddenly it was too much for Francesca. She jumped up and began pacing. She dried her eyes on her sleeve. The two acolytes were standing out in the hall, looking at her with terror. She thought about saying something but then saw a lavender and white sound. She turned.
Nicodemus was holding out a question.
“If you spik him, what would his chnaces be?”
“Better but ⦠still poor. It might be painful.”
She feared that Nicodemus would turn away again, but he talked to Shannon in dull colors. The old man's all-white eyes swung around, finding nothing.
Nicodemus looked at her and wrote a sentence. It broke in half when she took it. “
I think
” was all she got. He wrote again.
“I think we should take his pain away.”
She nodded solemnly.
“I think so too.”
She stood and felt a release from grief so powerful she made a small noise of surprise. Her actions unfolded almost automaticallyâpouring, mixing, helping Shannon drink the tincture. When finished, Nicodemus tensed. She went around to him and put her arms around his shoulders.
“It will take an hour,”
she wrote.
“Maybe more.”
Nicodemus held her hand and continued to talk to Shannon. She stood with him. After three quarters of an hour, Shannon's breathing began to slow. He stopped writhing. After a few more minutes, color stopped coming from the old man's mouth. Nicodemus's teacher took each breath more slowly than the last, until he did not take another.
The room went still for a moment, and then the old man's body shone with golden prose. A ghost sat up out of his author's body. Nicodemus bowed his head, and the strength seemed to drain out of his arms and back.
Magister Agwu Shannon was dead.
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NICODEMUS WALKED WITH Shannon's ghost down a wide hallway toward Starfall's necropolis.
Nicodemus had known that being within a body as it died transformed a ghost. He had known that such ghosts became incoherent and longed
only to enter a necropolis. But knowing of this transformation had not prepared Nicodemus to witness it.
The ghost beside him did not respond to voice and replied to few spellwritten queries. Each time, the text had not answered Nicodemus's question but reminded him that a ghost rarely, if ever, emerged from a necropolis.
As they walked, Nicodemus looked over. The ghost wore a distracted expression and gazed far off to the right, even though the hallway turned left. Then the ghost turned and held out a paragraph. Nicodemus translated with as few misspellings as possible:
“It's as if I was a singer and now I am a song. But it's not like that at all. It's as if I were two signers and now I'm only one singer. But not like that ether.”