The Grand Mage lay beneath the broken arms of an elder tree.  There was too much blood.  His skin was cool beneath her uninjured palm.

“Master,” she spoke as if she were trying to wake him.

He did not respond.

There was too much blood.

She shook his shoulder, and his head lolled.  Rolled.  His eyes had already started to cloud. The only thing that’d kept his skull with the rest of his body was a patch of skin that’d been too stubborn tear. Blood still wept from the wound.

Issi stared at him blankly. 

She needed to get her embroidery kit to sew him back together.

No, that was wrong.  Stupid.  There was too much blood.  She’d need the medical supplies he’d used to patch her.

Her brows lowered, “No, that won’t work.”  The sound of her voice, pure and eerily calm, made her jump.

But she was right.  Sewing him back together wouldn’t work.

          Why?

          Her mind was quiet.  She poked at him.

          The air was thick with the smell of copper and salt.

          He’d make for a ripe corpse.

          “You’re dead, aren’t you?” she asked, the words tumbled wrong.  It took her a moment to realize she’d spoken in Egrean.

          Longer still to realize why that didn’t matter.

          The idea of his death refused to solidify, instead bouncing through her thoughts and sending little waves that attempted to set her in motion.

          His dying wasn’t real, she was still there.           

          And the will was too.

What was it he’d done again?  Granted her to his cousin in Athijan?  They didn’t let those with mage’s mark over the border.  They were afraid they’d make the illness spread faster despite all evidence to the contrary.

          They’d slay her in the mountains.

          She studied her master’s unseeing eyes.

          How much time could she steal?  She’d need his resources if she even wanted a chance in Naya’s hells of finding a cure.  Chousalian herbs were both finite and expensive, and his private collection had been running low.

          His body was going to be a problem. 

Issi straddled over his head, her shoes sticky with his gore.  Beneath the thick smell of his blood lay something far less pleasant.  His bowels had loosened, the stench of him was something that’d never been covered in any of the books.  She threaded her hands beneath his armpits and tried to pull.

          He was heavier than her by far, the stress from the recent months having piled around his middle.  She was rewarded with the slightest give.  Five attempts and she was covered in his blood and breathless.

          The body had only moved a pace or two from where she’d found it.

          This wasn’t going to work. Issi wracked her brains.  She didn’t have the funds on hand to buy someone’s silence.

          Nobody would come down to the garden any time soon for maintenance.  It’d truly belonged to her master, but if the smell got bad enough, the scent of turning meat and rancid bile was going to send someone exploring. 

          The body.

          It was meat, right? 

          Issi left him there, smelling of turning flesh and blood. Her hands left ruddy prints on the windowsill as she pulled herself through. Her shoes tracked red in uneven streaks across the workroom floor.  She washed her hands in a basin, registering neither the coldness of the water, nor how her master’s blood painted the liquid an anemic pink. 

          She searched the library for kitchen enchantments.  Most of the books were lousy, thick things, she couldn’t force her way into understanding.  It took her nearly a bell to find anything useful. 

She flipped through pages of an old cooking tome, dismissing anything that’d run the body hot.  The smell of burning meat would attract someone and the burning fat and bowels…there’d be no explaining that away.

          Her eyes lit when she found the enchantment that the kitchens used for cold boxes.  If she could slow the rotting, she could buy enough time to find a better solution.

          Issi set the book on a worktable and took an engraving pen to a piece of practice wood. 

          Her hands shook, sending the lines wild.  It took her four attempts to get the enchantment to work and three more to get it to work well.  She tied it to the mage’s fire roaring in the hearth, before rubbing elderberry seed oil into it’s crevices and feeling the magic lock.

          Whenever she set it working, the flames went low, despite the fuel that fed it.

          Hopefully the maids wouldn’t think anything of it.

          She went back to the window, her hands tracing the prints she’d left before as she vaulted through.

She found the Grand Mage more by smell than sight. 

          Time served only to make his position more inelegant.  She pressed her thumb against the enchantment and prayed.

          She wasn’t sure whose realm hiding a corpse fell under, Ipheoth goddess of mercy, Mihr-Did, god of tricksters, or Naya, goddess of death, so she sent prayers to each of them in turn before she set the pendant atop his chest.

          A few heartbeats passed and nothing happened.

She added a quick prayer to Hoten, god of luck.

She waited a few beats longer when ice started to spread tentative tendrils from beneath the wood.  Fingers of cold stretched across his breast dripping down his torso, pulling the still wet blood into sharp crystalline angles.  Her skin prickled as her breath clouded the air.

          The smell became less pungent and Issi’s legs attempted to fail. 

          Would this give her a day?  Two?  Maybe three if she was very clever about it.  She bit her lip running through spells she’d read about on those quiet nights she’d managed to sneak tomes from her master’s library. 

          There was no time.  She looked up at the skies and hopelessly wished for rain.  Anything to wash the blood, and gore, and shit, into the soil or somewhere far away.

          But the skies were clear.

          She left what remained of the Grand Mage, frosting over in the walkway and put herself through the window.  She stripped, pulling her slippers away, and gathered the ruined cloth of her dress.

His blood had stained her skin. 

Her stomach flipped.  She nearly lost the tea she’d managed to drink.  He was ubiquitous, bits of him tracked everywhere she’d been.

She tossed her clothes into the low flames of the fire. His blood made it catch faster than it’d any right to.  Magic a fire all they wanted, there were reasons mages had been burned on pyres.

          Issi dumped the remains of the water she’d been squirreling away for the extra cups of “tea” she’d taken to brewing throughout the day into a shallow basin.  It barely filled half, though she’d retrieved two, and a handful of cloths used for wiping workstations. 

          She dipped a clean cloth into the water before scrubbing at the blood. It wasn’t long before it’d run completely red and useless.  The cloth landed with a wet thwack in the second basin before she picked a second. Six piled in the bowl’s shallow belly by the time they’d finally stopped dyeing red.  She fed them into the fire too.

She didn’t feel any cleaner for it.  The stench of her master had lodged in her nose.  The clock above the hearth informed her it was nearing 6^th bell.

The sun was beginning to brighten the sky.

A brief round about the room with what was left of her water and a few cloths took care of most of the blood, or, at least, smeared it into something unrecognizable.  She was thorough with the windowsill, erasing her handprints completely as well as any memory of red.

It was a relief to close the window.  She drew the curtains for good measure, but it turned out she needn’t have worried, because nearly a beat later, she heard a raindrop strike the glass. 

Followed quickly by another.

And another.

A downpour struck the building in waves.  Issi stared at the window not quite trusting her ears.  But when she dared to pull the fabric back to peek, she saw only water.

She sent a quick prayer to Ose and left the room to dress.   

Chapter 11

          “Issi,” Ner’s voice rang out like a shot.

          Issi started, her knife pulling from where it’d been moments from biting into her hand, “Shit.” 

          The maid hurried over, all grey skirts and worry, “Are you okay?  Did you hurt yourself?”  She clasped Issi’s gloved hands in her own.  Issi stared at her blankly, too tired for the panic that flared to make much of a difference.

          She pulled herself free and studied her gloves.

          “I’m fine, Ner,” she rubbed her eyes, “I’m just tired.”

          “Well, the Grand Mage is out, why not get some rest?”

          Issi glanced at her window.  Rain still beat against the glass.  It’d been going for bells now and had shown no signs of slowing or stopping.

          At this rate, the island was going to flood, and the ships that ferried people in and out of the capital would soon dock to wait the weather out. 

          “Why don’t you go home early?”

          Ner blinked, a small frown appeared on her butterfly lips, “There’re things to be done.”

          “The ferries aren’t going to run for much longer,” Issi pointed out, “And the Grand Mage isn’t here. I’ll be fine. You don’t get this chance very often.”

          “Issi—”

          “I’m worried, Ner,” she interjected, “master doesn’t…leave very often under such short notice.  Or, he’d at least have told me beforehand instead of just leaving some vague letter about his departure that had to be read to me,” her voice warbled, and she paused as if to collect herself, “This is new to me.  I want to think he’s really out there studying, as he said, but I can’t help but worry that he’s off somewhere doing something else…someone else.”

          She fretted for a moment wondering if she’d been too dramatic.  When she looked up, red spread beneath the soft brown of the maid’s cheeks. Ner’s jaw worked a few times before she managed to open it.

          Issi let out a breathy laugh, her eyes tracing back towards the window where a vine had started to curl about the frame, “I’m sorry, that was vulgar.  Just, please, I’d like to think this over without having the maids waltzing around and eyeing me with pity.  Can you arrange that for me, Ner?”

          The maid paused.  It’d been years since Issi had truly asked her for anything. It was clear that Ner wanted things to go back to the way they had been, when Issi had confided in her, and told her stories.  Before the Grand Mage had relieved Ner of her thumb and Issi had taken to keeping to herself and filling the quiet moments between them with idle chatter.

          Maybe Ner hoped this was a step in the right direction. 

          “Okay,” she answered softly, “I can do that.”

          Issi smiled, “You’re the best.”

          It wasn’t long before the last maid sauntered out of the wing, whispering excitedly about how she intended to spend her unexpected evening off.

          Issi waited half a bell before she left her cage and scurried through the halls.

          She hesitated before the workroom.  Part of her was afraid she’d somehow dreamed the whole thing up.  That the Grand Mage would be in there, bent over a desk, or hidden in his library, wondering where the maids had gone.

          She’d seen his body.  She’d been covered in his blood…but her limbs still froze and she had to talk herself into pushing the door open.

          The workroom was empty.

          There was no smell of heat and spark, just the faintest tinge of orange.

          She checked the entire floor, just to be sure.  There was no sign of the Grand Mage having been there, even the tea he’d spilled the night before had been cleaned away, and the faint bloodstains Issi hadn’t been able to completely clear had been scrubbed to oblivion.

          She approached the window and shoved it open.

          The rain was bracing, cold, despite the summer heat.  Issi hissed as she worked her aching body through the frame. 

          She was soaked within beats.  The plants beneath the window had been trampled, so, at least, climbing through had been real.  As she neared the place she remembered leaving her master’s body, her breath began to cloud. Her slippers stuck to a thin layer of ice.

          The rain had done wonders at washing away the blood.

          The Grand Mage was exactly where she had left him.  A twisted, frozen, soaking mess.  Her eyes filled with tears.

          He was dead.  And the world still spun.  Time was moving forward, and she was still there.

          Thank Ipheoth, it hadn’t been a dream.

          Issi shivered as she crouched beside the corpse.  His skin had gone brittle, his eyelashes frozen over with a mixture of blood and ice. 

          She had no more luck moving him now, than she had the night before.  Her thoughts wandered vaguely to the practicalities of a shallow grave, but she wasn’t convinced she’d be able to dig it in time.

          And if people got nosy, or if a downpour like this ever happened again, or a maid so much as scuffed a slipper in the wrong spot, she’d be in trouble.  She couldn’t afford to waste time worrying about that. 

Issi ran her fingers down the length of her master’s arm, lingering quietly on his wrist, and grimaced.

          Of all the things she was going to have to do, this felt the most like a sin.

          She grasped his pointer finger with one hand and his palm in the other.  The frost of him bit through her gloves.  She shut her eyes, “Ipheoth, grant me forgiveness for the sins I must commit.”

The finger broke with a clean snap, right above his knuckle. The base of it was a jagged mixture of muscle and bone. 

Her stomach twisted and she turned to keep from desecrating the corpse any further.  She wiped her mouth on her sleeve and peeled off a glove before wrapping the digit in the fabric.

She swiped at the rain that dripped down her eyelids. It felt like she should say something, like she owed him some form of thanks or apology.