The Salbine Sisters (4 page)

“I didn’t think so,” Maddy said quietly. Now that her physical discomfort had passed, humiliation was setting in. “But I obviously have a lot of work to do to pass my examination.” If the other initiates learning fire were telling the truth, they were already lighting fireplaces and hurling fireballs around the training room. Rose had triumphantly declared that she’d lit all the candles around the room’s perimeter in under a minute. Maddy was still struggling to light one. She should pay more attention to the lessons and less to the tutor. “I have to admit, I haven’t been as focused during our lessons as I should be,” she said.

“And I haven’t pushed you as hard as I might have pushed someone else. I’ve also been distracted,” Lillian replied, colouring slightly. “We’ll work on holding fire at your next lesson. Are you sure you don’t want to go back to your chambers?”

Cutting her night with Lillian short was the last thing she wanted, and it was completely unnecessary. The pain had subsided and her stomach had already settled. “I’m fine, really. I want to stay here.” She forced herself to meet Lillian’s eyes. “With you.”

Lillian blinked and stepped forward, then frowned at the fire she sustained. She pulled the key from her robe pocket again and handed it to Maddy. “Why don’t you open the door?”

Maddy set her shoulders and slipped the key into the keyhole. Had anyone else ever prayed to Salbine that a lock wouldn’t jam, or would she be the first?
Please, Salbine, don’t let me botch this up too.
Fortunately the key turned with an easy
click
. She removed it, pushed the door open, and stepped aside, holding the key out, so Lillian could enter first. Lillian accepted the key and tucked it into her pocket as she moved past.

Maddy followed her through the doorway, but stopped just inside as the fireplace ignited and three torches burst to life—with Lillian’s help, no doubt. Bunches of herbs hung from the ceiling above a round table piled with paper, parchments, and curling scrolls. Glass jars, both full and empty, labelled and unlabelled, were neatly arranged on a set of shelves. Crucibles, a mortar and pestle, scales, filters, and other items Maddy didn’t recognize covered a rectangular table.

“Come in and shut the door,” Lillian said, no longer holding fire. “You can sit over there.” She nodded toward a wooden chair not far from the rectangular table, then moved to the shelves as Maddy pushed the door closed and sat. “Shouldn’t take long.” Lillian scanned the jars. “Ah, here we are.” She set a jar filled to the brim with black liquid on the table. Bits of . . . something . . . floated around inside. When Lillian started to remove the sealing wax from around the jar’s lid, Maddy leaned away.

Lillian stopped and looked at her. “What are you doing?”

“I’m just, um . . .”

Lillian put a hand on her hip. “Don’t tell me that poison rumour is still going around. Would you like to see my thrall, too?”

“Your what?”

“My thrall.”

Maddy gave her a blank look. She had no idea what Lillian was talking about.

“So
that,
rumour finally died. Good. I never liked that one.” Lillian bent to work on the jar again. “Effective rumours have to sound halfway plausible. I can understand the poison one, but the thrall one never made sense. If I had a thrall, why would I keep it down here? I’d want it in my chambers, dusting and lighting the fire in the morning and making my tea. It would only be a nuisance in here, getting in my way and knocking things over. Honestly,” she finished in exasperation.

When the lid came free, a stench burst into the air that reminded Maddy of unwashed, sweaty feet. Grimacing, she covered her nose with her hands. Lillian’s nose wrinkled, but otherwise she seemed unaffected. Amusement flashed across her face when she noticed Maddy’s discomfort. “Don’t worry, it’s perfectly harmless. Oh, I suppose there’s no harm in telling you what it is. It’s a valerian root tincture. Mistress Meredith sometimes has trouble sleeping. A bit of this in her tea before bed does the trick.” She fetched an empty jar, then spread a piece of muslin over the jar’s mouth. “She always leaves it until the last minute to tell me she’s about to run out,” Lillian said as she poured the tincture through the muslin. Her voice took on a snide, lilting tone. “No need to warn Lillian in advance. Lillian doesn’t have anything better to do than to make my tincture. No matter when I ask, Lillian will do it.” She wrapped the muslin around the solids it had trapped and wrung it over the jar. “And Lillian does, because if Mistress Meredith isn’t getting enough sleep, we all suffer, believe you me.”

Maddy grinned.

“So, no poisons here.” Lillian dropped the muslin and its contents into a bucket and wiped her hands on a piece of cloth. “Tinctures, salves, oils, various other aids. That’s all.”

“A sister and the healing arts seems an odd combination,” Maddy said in surprise.

“Granted, Salbine’s gifts are of a more destructive nature, but I don’t limit myself to Salbine’s gifts. Anyway, I don’t know why you’re surprised. The people come to us with their aches and boils and we do what we can.”

Which usually wasn’t much. “You mean you’re the one who supplies the adepts?”

“I am.” Lillian frowned at her. “Where did you think their supplies were coming from? You don’t trade for them at the market.”

Maddy hadn’t thought about it when she’d occasionally helped the adepts minister to the poor souls looking for relief from various physical ailments. The outer courtyard was always busy on Monday afternoons, the line-up sometimes snaking through the monastery’s main gate and along its southern wall. Few could afford the fees demanded by physicians, who weren’t terribly interested in treating callused feet and bad teeth anyway. The adepts aided those they could and prayed for those they couldn’t. She’d assumed the medicines they passed out had come from outside the monastery’s walls. She would never have guessed that a sister was supplying them, especially Lillian. “I’ve never seen you with the adepts.”

Lillian’s face screwed up in distaste. “I don’t want to mix with the rabble. No. No, no, I do my work here.” She held up the jar. “Half a jar of valerian root tincture,” she declared with a satisfied smile, then set it on the table and placed a lid over its mouth. “I don’t think I’ll seal it. She’ll want to use it tonight, so she can seal it herself if she likes. We’ll have to be careful when we walk back, though. I don’t want to spill any.” After moving the dirty jar to a ledge with several others, she returned to those sitting on the shelves. “Would you like to lend me a hand? I have quite a few preparations that need to be shaken.”

“Of course.” Maddy moved to Lillian’s side.

“You start here and I’ll start over here,” Lillian said, walking to the other end of the shelves. She picked up a jar from the lowest shelf. “Give it a good shake,” she said, demonstrating. Maddy lifted a jar from her end of the shelf, grasped its top and bottom, and shook it. “Are you going to tell me about those nuts?” Lillian asked.

“They’re for the squirrels,” Maddy said with a grin. “One of the cooks puts some aside for me each morning.”

“Don’t get too attached to the ones that hang about here,” Lillian said. “One foot outside the walls and they’ll be on someone’s table in no time.”

“They have no reason to go outside the walls. They have everything they need here.”

“You like animals, then?”

Maddy nodded. She’d always been a bit suspicious of those who didn’t. “Do you?” she asked hesitantly, hoping her budding relationship with Lillian wasn’t about to come to an abrupt end. “This morning you said you’d spend the day with Thomas.”

“I helped him with a couple of new horses. First time they’d felt anyone draw.” When Lillian set her jar back on the shelf and picked up the next one, Maddy did the same. “You need absolute control with the new ones. Just a whisper, at first. Had one horse bloody-well near kill me a few years ago. I’d barely drawn air when it reared and charged at me. I should have been more prepared, had a barrier up, but it had never happened before. I didn’t have time to throw one up when it panicked, so I did what anyone else would have done and ran for my life. Somehow, in all the ruckus, it managed to kick me in the back before Thomas and the other men calmed it down. Spent a week lying on my stomach.”

Maddy stifled a laugh. “Is that how you got that scar on your, um . . .”

“My arse? Yes, that’s how. And yes, I do like animals—prefer them to people. That’s why I got right back out there once I felt up to it. I work with the new ones, and I’m every horse’s final test. Or nightmare, depending. Surprising thing about the horse that charged me was that I was drawing air. It’s fire that usually gets them. They don’t like fireballs whizzing over their heads.” Lillian chuckled. “Can’t say I would, either.”

Maddy vividly remembered the first time she’d seen Lillian test a horse. She’d just started to help out at the stables and had been mucking out a stall on a beautiful, sunny afternoon. A loud thunderclap had made her drop the pitchfork and race from the stable in confusion. Having only arrived at the monastery two weeks earlier, she’d never seen such a display. She stood transfixed as the mage rode the horse around the yard, drawing fire, air, earth, and water. Neither the horse nor the stable hands seemed afraid, and when Maddy screamed at a fireball heading straight for her, the men looked her way in amusement. “It’s all right, there’s a shield,” one shouted, which explained why the fireball exploded into nothingness before it reached her. She wondered later whether Lillian had deliberately thrown it at her.

Though the horse was inside the barrier, it trotted around as if it hadn’t a care in the world. She later learned of the intense desensitization to the elements all Salbine horses underwent. Now she barely noticed when mages were working with horses, but she’d never forget that day. When Lillian had completed her test, she’d walked by a shaken Maddy with hardly a glance. Maddy had stared after her in awe—and fear.

“Your horse must be deaf and blind,” she said to Lillian, still not quite accepting that a horse could endure a display of prowess from a mage as strong as Lillian for long.

Lillian’s lips pressed into a thin line. “He most certainly isn’t! He’s very brave, and I love him. I ride him as often as I can. We like to go up to the river and watch the currents. I can give him a good workout there. If the weather’s good, sometimes we pack a lunch, spend the whole day.”

We? “Who’s we?”

“Me and Baxter.”

“Baxter?”

“The horse! I like to ride alone. Though . . . maybe you’ll come with us, sometime?”

“I’d like that very much,” Maddy said, warmed by Lillian’s invitation.

They finished shaking their last jars and looked at each other. “Well, that’s that,” Lillian murmured. “Time to take Mistress Meredith her tincture.”

“You know, we could have arranged to meet later, after you’d finished here,” Maddy said. “I thought we’d be here all night.”

Lillian nodded sheepishly. “I know. I realized that afterward. I . . . You surprised me, when you said you wanted the same thing I do. I didn’t think you’d want to see me at all.”

She reached for Lillian, and sighed contentedly when Lillian leaned into her.

“What are we doing?” Lillian whispered.

“I don’t know. I just know I like being with you.”

“Me too. I mean, with you.”

“Then let’s be together. We’ll eventually figure out what we’re doing.”

“Take an empirical approach, you mean? I can certainly agree with that.”

Maddy chuckled and drew back, her arms looped around Lillian’s neck. She moved in and gently touched her lips to Lillian’s. “For someone with such a gruff exterior, you have the softest lips,” she murmured.

Lillian arched an eyebrow.

“I wasn’t ready for you to take me to my chambers when you suggested it earlier, but I am now.”

“And I’ll be happy to oblige. We do have to make a stop along the way, though.” Lillian hesitated, then pressed her palm against Maddy’s cheek. “Do you think it’ll be different, now that . . .”

“Now that we’re not pretending we don’t really care?”

Lillian swallowed. “Yes.”

She turned toward Lillian’s hand and kissed it. “Let’s go find out.”

“Here, carry this.” Lillian slid a torch from its sconce and handed it to Maddy with a wink.

“Thank you.”

“You have the torch, so I suppose you’d better lead.” Lillian strode to the door and turned around. “You coming?”

“Aren’t you forgetting something?”

“Oh, yes.” Lillian waved her right hand, and the fire and the two torches still hanging on the wall flickered out.

Maddy struggled to keep a straight face. “Very impressive. But that’s not what I meant.”

Lillian’s brow furrowed. “What, then?”

“The tincture.”

“Right.” Red-faced, Lillian collected the jar from the table and cleared her throat. “Lead the way.”

In the passage, Maddy held the tincture while Lillian closed and locked the door. “You’ll have to direct me,” she said as she handed the jar back.

“Go left.”

Maddy set off, smiling when Lillian grasped her free hand. “I don’t want to lose you,” Lillian murmured.

Aware that Lillian was only trying to make her feel useful, Maddy squeezed her hand. “You won’t.”

Only later did she realize that she hadn’t sensed Lillian drawing fire in the laboratory—at all.

L
illian shifted impatiently, waiting for Maddy to emerge from the lower common room in the Initiates Tower. Maddy had said they’d finish about three, and it must be past that by now. A passing sister slowed her pace and bobbed. Lillian nodded absently, not registering who it was and not caring, either.
Ah, the door’s opening.
She reminded herself not to appear too enthusiastic when Maddy came out. She had to show restraint, not embarrass herself by behaving like an infatuated girl.

Sisters spilled into the hallway, chattering to each other. “Mistress,” said one, bobbing to Lillian. That led to a chorus of greetings and much knee-bending. Lillian resisted the urge to roll her eyes and remained focused on the door. To her dismay, a smile spread across her face when she spotted Maddy.
Restraint! Restraint!
She tried to smooth her features, but Maddy had already witnessed her pleasure and was smiling in return.