Chapter 10

          Issi didn’t sleep well for the next half moon. When she did manage to fall asleep she didn’t stay there long, waking abruptly whenever she even suspected she felt sunlight on her skin.  The times she did dream, she woke to the prince’s offer ringing in her ears.

          The vines had gotten worse.

They started small, sitting at the edges of rooms, growing quietly on tables, snaking between baubles and trinkets.  Then they started dumping flowers everywhere.  Vines set to climbing chairs and the not bars of her cage, they used her easel as a trellis and cascaded petals into her paints. 

For the most part, she managed to ignore them.  But nights were…different.

          Twice she’d caught herself following the tendrils out of the wing entirely. 

          Issi berated herself during her waking hours for not having paid enough attention to the reports.  She’d thought they’d been exaggerating the importance of the delusions. 

          Or maybe, she’d thought she was better than all the fools who’d fallen prey to them.  In her small, limited world, it’d seemed plausible.

          She started sneaking the reports in her room.  Scouring over them during the day, despite the danger, and shoving them hurriedly beneath her mattress when Ner came by with whatever food went with the time.

          Sunlight hours filled with stories of cloud colored deer bleeding rose petals from knife-slashed throats, and soft burbling songs whispered from bodies of water.  When exhaustion claimed her completely, her dreams filled with forests and green things, and shifting stealthily over the ground a bow in her hand.

          She brewed stronger tea.

          She searched the libraries again and again in hopes of finding out why a Chousalian remedy her mother once brewed to stave off fevers, might do anything to beat back an illness that seemed otherwise unstoppable.  But Qasha didn’t have books that praised other magic systems.  All she’d ever found on Chousal had regaled her with tales of savagery and the backwards way they’d run their country. 

She reached dead end after dead end, the limits of everything she’d managed pressed against her.  A new suffocating weight that she carried with her always.

          Maybe that was why she didn’t notice the Grand Mage had wandered off until she felt the humid, summer air lay thick hands on the back of her neck.

          The windows in the workroom weren’t supposed to open, some of the experiments being very particular about the temperature she kept their components.  Issi looked towards the runes above the fireplace set to pull the heat towards the roof, but the magic beneath it hummed quietly.  She stood up and muttered several bitter curses as she followed the smell of overgrown herbs and heat from her master’s garden to an open window.

          She checked to make sure the Grand Mage hadn’t thread himself through to go for a night walk.  None of the plants beneath the window had been crushed.  She’d been about to set the paneling right when movement caught her eye.

          A shadow in the moonlight shifted along her lonely patch of palace wall. She blinked away inviting tendrils of green and watched in disbelief as the shadow traversed the black line of the roof.

          She nearly thrust herself through the opening, squinting at the impossible angle.  Three stories above her head, she saw the barest flutter of fabric.  A flash of a hand.

          Issi raced through the room.  Nearly slipping in the mess her master’s tea had made across the mosaiced floor. 

She slammed into the doors that lead to the second story, forcing them open before taking the steps two at a time. She sprinted past a series of empty rooms that’d once housed dozens of students and healers.  Her lungs burned.

When was the last time she’d run?

The ladder to the third floor had been drawn down.  Issi scrambled up it, fighting through the insistence of greenery and memories of orange trees. 

The third floor was filled with the remnants of experiments too dangerous to throw out and too expensive to burn.

A coating of dust covered every surface.  It hadn’t been cleaned for moons.  That had been a chore belonging to the students who knew enough not to press mysterious marks and set things better left silent to ticking.  She followed the clear patches the mage’s feet had carved against the floor’s dirty surface to a small open window, her breath leaving her in painful pants.

She spied him through the window, walking along the very edge of the roof paying no mind to the drop. 

She wanted him to jump.

Under Ose’s great skies, she wanted nothing more than for him to tumble downwards and die.

She still couldn’t imagine a world without him, any more than she could conceive of a world with no sun.  The idea of him simply being gone, made her stomach twist and her heart race.

But for a moment, she was almost willing to see it through.

The prince thought he’d seen something in her and made an offer, but there was nothing she could do.  She wasn’t what he thought he wanted, and as soon as he realized that he’d grow angry.  The Grand Mage knew exactly what she was.  His anger was familiar, his disappointment was something she’d grown accustomed to.  She’d learned, over the years, to grow comfortable with it. 

Because without Gadna, she was nothing.

And it was that thought that scared her lungs into working.  She called him through the window, just loud enough to be heard above the wind and distance. 

The Grand Mage stilled and turned, silhouetted against the night sky.  He wasn’t seeing her. His eyes tracked the heavens instead of falling to the window.

He smiled.

It made him look very young, he was very young, at least for a Grand Mage.  He’d just reached thirty.

Issi forgot that most days.  It felt like he should know more than she did, be more, be grander somehow, than a man who purchased love.  But he wasn’t and he had.

Somedays it felt like that was more her fault than others. 

She forced herself through the window.  Humid air gathered around her, drawing sweat from her skin.  Her legs shook, her knuckles paling as she gripped hard on the frame.

“Master,” she shouted.  She couldn’t see if he’d heard her or cared.

It didn’t look like he cared.

“Grand Mage.”

Nothing.

“Gadna,” her voice rang high with desperation.  She suspected it was the total lack of decorum, that caught his attention in the end.

He glared at her. Issi felt her heart, which had already busied itself hammering against her ribs, try for an extra leap.

“I, uhm, could you come back inside?” she worked on prying her fingers from the window frame, “It’s not safe up here.”

He glanced off the rooftop, seeming to register the drop for the first time.  He gawped a moment, before the annoyance in his face shifted to fear, “Why weren’t you watching me?”

And there he was.  The most powerful mage in all of Qasha, in his nightrobes, perched at the end of a roof, moments from tumbling to an unseemly demise.

Completely and utterly indignant.

It struck her as funny.  This sad little man was the only reason she still existed.

She laughed. 

It wasn’t the proper titter, the high bell-like bullshit that he insisted on that she’d never once uttered with any sort of sincerity.  He seemed surprised at the sound of it, harsh and stupid, spiked at the edges with honest joy.

“You are not to laugh at me,” he snapped.

“That’s the most lucid you’ve sounded in days,” she gasped, snorting, which only made her laugh harder, “You’re ridiculous.”

He opened his mouth, surely to berate her.  Call her a whore, or useless, or stupid, perhaps some less than imaginative combination of all three.  But all it did was make him seem more childish than he already did, and Issi found herself caught in another fit of giggles.  Her sides ached.

His eyes ticked away, following the damned birds. 

Right, this was important.

Issi gasped, trying to gather herself, the world had run bright with tears. Her vision cleared in time to see her master totter on the roof’s edge.

The fool was going to do it.

She released the frame, her legs carrying her too quickly to the drop.  Her heart sank with the realization that she wasn’t going fast enough. 

He tipped forward slowly, like he was sure the ground would catch him.  Like he was on a morning stroll to his gardens.  She doubted he even noticed the roof ended.  She launched herself forward trying to clear that last bit of distance.  The tiles hit hard, driving air from her lungs as they dug into her stomach.

She forced her hand to clasp around his ankle.  Her nails bit into his flesh. 

She was dragged forward, roughly, her free hand grabbed at a decorative outcropping.  The skin along her palm tore, as she caught.  Her arms strained as she tried to still. 

He was too heavy.

She was nothing without him.  She needed him, nearby and unafraid, as he’d always been so she knew the world was as it was supposed to be. 

The world could not go on without Grand Mage Gadna Niao.

She hissed as the outcropping ripped away the rest of the skin on her palm.  She started sliding forward.

He was going to take her with him.

She clawed at whatever was in reach, the tiles, the stone.  Nothing stuck.

There was only a beat to decide.  Maybe one day, Ipheoth willing, she could convince herself that she actually thought she’d be able to reach him on the first floor and care for his wounds. Tell herself that she’d every intention to call a healer.

But, truthfully, the moment her fingers snapped away from his ankle, the only thought that’d run through her head was, fuck it, maybe he’ll actually die.

The Grand Mage plummeted, a cry startled from his throat before he hit the overgrown weeds with a series of rustles and cracks and crashed to the ground with a loud snap.

Her ears strained as her eyes tried to pick him out between swaths of green both real and imaginary. 

He was silent.

She scrambled back from the ledge, falling on her back.  The ache of it was distant.  She remembered her mother’s tales of Ose, the god of sky and adventure.  In the stars that danced distantly above her, she wondered if he was watching down on her from his spired tower.

The gods felt so distant in this damned country.

Issi wasn’t sure how long she stayed there.  But her body had grown sore and stiff by the time she decided to move.  She’d all sorts of scrapes and bruises, her palm stung where her skin had ripped away, and she’d torn through patches of her dress.

All that time and the Grand Mage hadn’t uttered a single groan. It’d been quiet but for the night song of insects.

Issi worked her way through the mage’s wing, until she landed in the workroom.  She’d never gotten around to closing the window. She pulled herself through it painfully, the strong scent of crushed herbs met her nose.

The garden pavers wound about, stopping beside specimen that’d once been trimmed and pretty but had now grown unkempt.  Issi lingered by a few, wondering which enchantments she’d be using them to strengthen. 

She found the blood first, thick and dark, in the moonlight.  It spread slowly across the pavers, soaking into her slippers, threatening to pull the silk away from her skin.  

She hardly noticed.