Heart's Magic (15 page)

Harry's chest hadn't moved
to take a breath, Elinor realized. Not in a while, not while she'd
been talking. She stretched her hand flat and pushed on his chest.
"Harry,
breathe.
"

And he did, a gasping
stutter of a breath that deepened and filled his chest, lifting
Elinor's hand as it rose.

"He needs magic. More magic
inside him to replace the no-magic." Rosato took a vial from his
black doctor's bag and shook it. "I am out of restorative.
Signorina
Magister, is
there in your bag?"

"Yes. Yes, I have some."
Elinor let go of Harry to open her bag--just like Rosato's only
larger. She liked to carry big jars and bottles. She only looked
past it twice before she found the deep blue bottle with its
flower-painted label, the one that held her tansy and mint-based
restorative. She dug her maple wand from the bottom of the bag and
stuck it down the neck of the bottle as soon as she uncorked it,
sweeping as much magic as she could from the wand into the
potion.

"He needs sorcery," Amanusa
said. "Body magic." She held up a finger with a fat droplet of
blood at its tip. "Wizard magic will help, but he needs more.
Donations of blood, because his blood is too weak."

"Use the vial." Rosato
uncapped his empty container and held it out for Elinor to pour her
potion into it. "The blood will reach him quicker if we do not have
to get so much down him."

"Yes, all right." Elinor
poured. She set the open bottle back in her bag and held out her
hand to Amanusa. "You did say donations, did you not? As in more
than one source?"

"I did." Amanusa stirred
her finger in the vial, then quickly lanced Elinor's finger,
squeezing out a pair of drops. Dr. Rosato donated as
well.

Elinor pushed all the magic
she could grasp into the potion as she dunked her finger and
swirled it around. She waited for Rosato to put his drops in, then
lifted Harry's head.

"All right, Harry, I have
something for you to drink," she said briskly. "You're to drink all
of it, mind, and maybe more as well. It tastes quite nice, I
promise. Like mint tea. There's tea in it. All sorts of lovely
things." As she talked, she gave him sips from the vial. When he
swallowed them, she gave him more until all the potion was gone,
inside of Harry.

She kept his head in her
lap to keep the potion inside him, not for any silly emotional
reason like it made her feel better to have him there. She rubbed
her thumb across that full lower lip, but that was only to wipe
away a bit of potion that hadn't made it into his mouth. She made
no attempts to comb his hair into order, though it certainly needed
it.

"Elinor!" Amanusa hissed at
her. "What are you doing?"

"Nothing!" She looked to be
sure. Yes, her hands were where they should be, on her lap beside
Harry's head.

"Push magic into him. Help
me. Don't get in my way."

"I'm not. How am I in your
way?" Elinor kept her voice down, since Amanusa whispered. "I'm
sitting here, behind Harry. You're over there."

"Push." Amanusa somehow
grabbed hold of Elinor's magic sense and pushed. "Like that. Do
it.
Now.
"

Elinor could sense magic
hovering over Harry. That wasn't right. It needed to be inside him.
She did as Amanusa showed her, and suddenly she was--was
inside
Harry, with the
magic.

This time, she panicked.
Went into flat-out hysterics, thumping around, tumbling through
Harry's--mind? body?--screaming as she tried to find a way
out.

Stop that.
Amanusa's voice spoke--not in her ears. Elinor
didn't have ears. Or maybe she had Harry's ears. But she heard
Amanusa some other way. Amanusa
shook
her, only she didn't, exactly.
She pushed Elinor back out into her own self.

"Ellie?" Harry's eyes were
open and he blinked up at her from his position in her lap.
"Elinor--" he corrected himself. "Wot are you doin'--? Thought you
were in your room, brewin' poison."

"I was. Till you tried
killing yourself with that stupid machine."

"The
signore
Tomlinson would not have
died," Rosato said, his accent somehow thicker. "His heart, she
beat. He breathe, when you tell him to. The magic in the air and
everything in the world would have brought him back with time. He
did not kill himself. He just--lose conscious."

Harry smiled at her, a
smile of pure happiness. "You came to save me."

"I'd have come to save
anyone. And yes, I'd have held their head in my lap,
too."

"Yeah, but it's not just
anyone you saved. It's me." The smile slowly faded into a frown. "I
remember--
Pearl.
"
He struggled to sit up. Elinor helped him.

"Thank you for your attempt
to aid my wife," Grey said with a rather mocking bow from beside
the chair where she was now curled. "Next time, try not to faint
and drag her down with you while you're helping her."

"Sorry." Harry looked a
little shamefaced.

"And I apologize--" Pearl
stopped to yawn. "For ruining your coat."

"Oh. Did you?" Harry seemed
only then to notice that he didn't have it on, or his waistcoat,
and that his shirt was unbuttoned and hanging off one
shoulder.

Elinor was not disappointed
when he pulled it back over the shoulder, nor pleased when he did
not button it.

"I was sick on it." Pearl
sounded very apologetic. "Your coat. Violently."

Harry shrugged. "Just a
coat. Are
you
okay?"

"I'm fine, now Amanusa's
got some magic into me."

Grey looked at Amanusa. "Is
she? Fine? She was rather violently ill. Several times."

Amanusa's lips curved in a
small, private smile. "That wasn't the machine. Mostly it wasn't."
She raised an eyebrow at Pearl. "Do you want to tell
him?"

"Tell him what?" Pearl gave
Amanusa a sleepily perplexed look.

Amanusa looked back for a
long moment. Elinor watched, trying to read the undercurrents in
their exchange, and then she looked at Pearl, really
looked
with all her
senses.

"Oh!" Elinor put her hand
to her mouth to hold back any other exclamations.

"Oh, what?" Pearl flounced
to a new position, frowning at them. "What are you both on
about?"

"You see it?" Amanusa now
gave Elinor that long, studied look.

"That she's--" Elinor's
hand fluttered, trying to express what she didn't want to say
aloud.

"I'm what?" Pearl sat up
straight and put her feet on the floor, having to scoot forward in
the chair to reach it. "You are annoying me tremendously with your
hints and winking and--"

"I never winked," Elinor
said.

"Are you trying to say--"
Grey began slowly, "or trying
not
to say, rather--that Pearl and I are to
become...
parents?
"

"What?" Pearl collapsed
back into her chair.

"I think so," Elinor
said.

"Yes," Amanusa
said.

Grey stared at Pearl like
he'd been hit in the head with a brick. Pearl stared at nothing at
all, as if she'd been hit with a barrow full of them.

"I think--" Jax seemed to
appear out of nowhere, as he always did. He was always there, at
Amanusa's side, but you never, ever noticed him until he spoke and
drew notice to himself. "I think we should take our leave and offer
the prospective parents some privacy."

Harry let Jax lift him to
his feet, buttoning his shirt as fast as he could. Elinor hovered.
Harry was her patient. Or was he Rosato's? But the
dottore
was already at the
door, heading out. Amanusa waited with Elinor, for Jax. Harry could
walk and button at the same time, with Jax's hand on his arm to
steady him.

"Wait," Grey said, and the
entire procession stopped, turned to him. "When?"

"Some time in August, I
should think," Amanusa said. "Perhaps near the end of the
month."

How did she know so
quickly, without counting it up? Elinor always had to use her
fingers.

As they neared the door,
she couldn't help looking back. Pearl still stared. Grey knelt
beside her, took her limp hand into his.

"Aren't you happy,
darling?" he kissed her hand.

Finally she looked back at
him. "Are
you
happy?"

"I asked you first. You're
the one who has to do all the work."

"Yes, but--"

"Asked first," Grey
reminded her.

Elinor smiled as the door
closed on them. All would be well. They were mad about each other,
and would be utterly ridiculous about this baby.

"...use bones for armor.
Animal bone," Harry was saying when Elinor's thoughts caught back
up with the rest of them. "Animal's the one thing we don't use for
magic."

"Why not?" Elinor moved up
beside him to observe his recovery. He seemed to be walking all
right. Jax had let go.

"Dunno. Does it matter?"
Harry wobbled, just a bit, and Elinor caught his arm.

Harry tucked her hand in
his elbow, as he would in simple escort. Was he playing a game,
pretending to be worse than he was to get close to her? But his
skin was still pale and sweaty when she looked at him and his pulse
raced under her hand. She wished she could get more magic into him,
but then his pulse steadied, so that was all right.

"I think," he went on,
"that bone acts as a barrier to magic for the machines, an' that's
'ow they're getting out of the dead zones to wander round the
city."

"But why?" Nikos Archaios
had joined the group, along with a good many others who'd been at
the dissection. "What do they hope to accomplish by
this?"

"Reconnaissance?" Jax
suggested.

"Communication with the
other dead zones." That was Mr. Ramsey's offering. Elinor knew him
from all the times he'd called on Harry during her short
apprenticeship.

"Perhaps they don't like
the wall we build round them," she said. "Perhaps they're trying to
learn how to bring it down."

Harry stopped and looked
sourly down at her. "Lovely thought, that."

He hadn't stopped just to
frown. They'd reached the Briganti I-Branch office and progress had
slowed to funnel through the door.

Elinor shrugged. "Better to
think of the worst possible event ahead of time than to be
surprised when it happens. Why are we here? This is
Grey's--"

"Closest large space to
confer that doesn't require stairs. Or contain machine parts." Jax
was holding the door for everyone to go through. "Amanusa is an
I-Branch consultant. It's her office too. And we do need to confer,
if briefly."

"Did you take notice of the
differences between the two machines?" Archaios said as soon as
Harry came through the door on Elinor's arm.

"Somewhat." Harry leaned on
one of the desks circling the large open space in the center. As
soon as he did, Elinor removed her hand from his arm and backed a
few steps away. "The first one was larger. And there weren't gaps
between the bones on its shell."

"Exactly." Archaios spun
away to pace, the tails of his frock coat flaring out. "And the
first one you found, was it not going in the direction of the dead
zone?"

"Yeah, it was." Harry
started to roll up his sleeves, as if he could not be in
shirtsleeves without rolling them up for work. Elinor hadn't seen
him often without a jacket, but as far as she could remember, his
sleeves had always been rolled up to expose his brawny forearms.
"Till we tried to catch it. In fact, it kept trying to run away to
the zone until after we hit it with magic a couple o' times and
made it mad."

"I suggest this." Archaios
stopped pacing and stared at the floor a moment before speaking
again. "I suggest that the second machine found, the smaller of the
two, was the first one made. An earlier experiment. And that it was
found broken because its shielding, its armor was not so complete
as the later machine. The gaps between the bones allowed magic
through."

Harry nodded thoughtfully.
"Yeah. Yeah, I can see it. Sounds possible." He looked at the
committee members who'd joined them here. "Think you lot can find
anything out to verify that before the things fall apart too much
more?"

"Aye, sir, I think we can."
Ian Ramsey led the rapid, clattering exit.

Archaios didn't go with
them. He wasn't technically a member of the committee, merely a
consultant and observer from the International Conclave. Though
Elinor thought he'd have gone if Harry hadn't been scowling right
at him.