Heart's Magic (19 page)

"But don't you
want
to learn?" Pearl was
sometimes very much her age, only twenty. "Think of it. You already
know so much about healing. What if you could combine your wizardry
with actually looking inside the body, directing the potion exactly
where it should go? Or looking to see which potion was truly the
one needed?"

"I could do that?" Elinor
was sorely tempted.

"I don't see why not. The
sorcery would allow it, if the wizardry would." Amanusa's voice had
taken on that tremendous gentleness again. "Perhaps your talents
could help us discover a way to heal the mind."

Elinor wanted it. She
wanted the knowledge and the magic and, yes, maybe even the power.
But she feared the price of that wanting.

"Come." Amanusa opened the
door. "Let us see how you do with the calling out of your blood
from Harry."

Elinor hesitated. "I was
inside him yesterday, wasn't I? Riding his blood. I heard
you."

"Yes."

"I panicked." It shamed her
now, and frightened her. What if she panicked again?

"You didn't know what was
happening. Now you do." Amanusa indicated with a tip of her head
that Elinor should come inside. "Do you not have delicate tropical
plants growing inside? You don't wish them to take a
chill."

Elinor hurried into the
warmth of the glassed-in room, feeling as if she crossed a
threshold of an entirely different sort.

"Will you look around
inside Harry?" she asked. "Before you call your blood out? To be
sure he's recovering properly and that the machine did him no
permanent damage? One shot him, you know. The first one we found
outside the dead zone. It made him quite ill."

"I will supervise if
you
wish to look around."
Amanusa gestured for Elinor to take the lead. "I am sure he is
well. He always bounces back precisely as he should from his
brushes with the dead zones."

"But there have been so
many." Elinor shed her shawl and then her pelisse as she led the
way through the warm conservatory.

"Then by all means, have
your look."

"And she says she doesn't
love him," Pearl muttered bringing up the rear.

"I worry about all of my
patients." Elinor entered into the main part of the house,
depositing shawl and pelisse with the waiting footman. He was piled
quite high by the time Pearl followed.

"We have come to assure
ourselves of your recovery." Amanusa addressed Harry as she sailed
into the drawing room where he lounged with Jax and
Grey.

"Have you solved the
world's problems while we were away?" Pearl crossed to kiss her
husband on the cheek.

"I thought that was your
job." Grey pulled her down next to him.

Amanusa's greeting to Jax
was more subdued, but just as intimate. All that intimacy made
Elinor uncomfortable, but looking at Harry didn't help. Not the way
he looked back at her with his eyelids half closed over eyes that
smoldered with heat and--and desire. Elinor looked away, at the
furniture, to decide where to sit. The only place remaining,
however, was the end of the sofa from which Harry had just removed
his feet.

"We have come, Harry dear,"
Amanusa said from her seat in the chair Jax had given up to her,
the one near Harry's end of the sofa, "to see how you are faring
after your little adventure yesterday."

"I feel all right." He
shrugged.

"Nevertheless," Amanusa
said.

"We want to be sure."
Elinor folded her hands in her lap. "The effects of the dead zone
no-magic have never lasted so long before."

Amanusa pointed and
beckoned. "Your hand, sir."

Harry sat up straighter. He
glanced at Elinor who looked implacably back, shrugged again, and
laid his hand palm up in Amanusa's. She lanced his longest finger
quickly, ignoring Grey's exaggerated wince, and a drop of blood
welled up.

Elinor sensed the moving of
magic this time. She'd felt it before, she realized now, but had
ignored it because it wasn't the cool bright green of wizardry. It
was warm and dark and musky. It made her nervous.

Amanusa didn't reach inside
Harry, but called to what was hers. Elinor could--"feel"
corresponded more closely with her physical senses. That bit
felt
like Amanusa, but
that wasn't the bit she was calling out. The blood was Harry's.
Misdirection?

"Didn't you want to examine
him?" Amanusa looked at Elinor as she blotted the drop on Harry's
finger. "It is your decision."

Harry gave her a curious
look. The others' expressions held various levels of
anticipation.

"Yes." Elinor made up her
mind completely in that moment. She did want what sorcery offered.
She might never use its justice side, but she wanted the healing.
She wanted to see. And she wanted to start with Harry.

This wasn't something she
could keep a secret, either. She cleared her throat, suddenly
nervous. "It seems--" she began. "Amanusa and Pearl have informed
me that--" She cleared her throat again. "Apparently, I am also a
sorceress." She had to get it out quickly, or not at all. "Rather,
I could be. I have enough ability to make the study of sorcery a
necessity, not an option. Or so I am told."

Harry stretched his arm
along the back of the sofa till his fingers almost brushed her
shoulder as he watched her. "I 'ave to say, I'm not actually
surprised."

"You're not?" Elinor gaped
at him. "I am absolutely gobsmacked."

"Yeah, well, you're walkin'
around inside all that magic. You can't see yourself from this
side." He offered up his hand. "You plannin' on 'aving a look from
the inside?" He cocked an eyebrow at Amanusa. "She ready for
it?"

"She went on an accidental
ride of your blood yesterday." Amanusa took his finger and squeezed
another tiny drop from it.

Pearl quietly poured a
half-cup of tea, brought in by the butler since the ladies had
joined the gentlemen, and Amanusa used the side of her lancet to
scoop up the blood and stir it into the tea. Harry drank half, and
Elinor drank the remainder. She could feel the magic in his
blood--warm and musky, earthy as well--seep into her all the way
down her throat and into her heart. From there, it traveled to her
farthest extremities. Even her toes tingled.

Amanusa called her name and
Elinor turned from her absorption in Harry's magic melting into
her. "Do you remember how you pushed the magic yesterday?" Amanusa
asked.

Elinor nodded. Speech felt
too distracting.

"Do that again. Draw it
from inside yourself and push it into Harry's blood."

She'd never thought of
magic being inside herself before. It had always been something
inside leaves and flowers, stems and roots. Even the old, feeble
magic lingering inside furniture and floors. External. Other. She
wasn't sure how to call it from inside her. Was it even
there?

But she'd felt the magic in
Harry's blood and he was an alchemist. She was bound to have more.
Elinor reached into all the places where she'd felt Harry's magic
dissolve, into her fingers and toes, head, heart, and all the
places between, and using the same technique she used for wizardry,
she
called.

The magic came. Erratic and
uncertain, but it came. Elinor couldn't help her delighted
grin.
How lovely.

Now, to push. She wanted
her wand, but sorcerers didn't use them, did they?

"Make the connection with
Harry's blood." Amanusa raised her eyebrow and pointed at Harry
with a semi-disguised motion.

Right. Connect with her
blood inside Harry was what she had to mean. Elinor had felt it
when Amanusa was stirring the magic, when she'd first lanced his
finger. Elinor grasped the magic that had answered her call
and
pushed
it at
Harry, the way she had yesterday. And she was inside him, tumbling
on the edge of panic.

Steady.
Amanusa was there, a reassuring presence beside her. A
presence Elinor could use to orient herself. The falling sensation
ceased. She wasn't falling. She was--two places at once.

She took a deep breath and
felt her lungs inflate. But she could also feel Harry breathing. It
was all right. Everything would be all right. This was what was
supposed to happen.

Intention is everything
here, Amanusa said. What do you wish to see?

His heart,
Elinor responded promptly.
And his lungs. Fainting can come from improper
breathing.

Already the sorcerers were
rushing through him to see his heart beating strongly in its cage
of ribs.

I am no anatomist, but his
heart seems to be working well.
Elinor
could not help her awe. She was observing Harry's living, beating
heart.

I don't know...

What?
Elinor moved them in a circle around the pulsing flesh,
examining all sides. Amanusa's uncertainty frightened
her.

He looks--
Amanusa took them on a quick tour of Harry's
internal organs. Elinor wished she knew what she saw.

It may be that Jax has an
excess of magic,
Amanusa said.
Since he is my familiar. But the magic Jax holds
for me is in other places. It seems to me that Harry is still low
on magic. Especially here.

Elinor pulled more magic,
feeding it directly into his heart to spread it throughout his
body.
Where?

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.