4.84: Trojan

I was folding hospital gowns when Malas came up behind me. “Kayden.”

“Huh?” I quickly caught the stack of gowns I’d pushed over when I jumped and turned around.

“I’ve sent you some introductory materials on human anatomy. Watch and read them. We’ll discuss the contents next week.”

“Ah. Homework. I knew this day would come.”

Malas raised an amused eyebrow. “Believe it or not, human medicine does in fact involve a fair bit of academic study.”

“Amazing. I never would have guessed.”

“Yes, it’s very surprising, I know. But if you want to do anything other than glorified janitorial work in the future, you will in fact have to have more than a passing familiarity with the mechanics of what you’re fixing, and occasional pop quizzes from Dae-Hyun are no substitute for a real education.”

“I’ll tell Dae-Hyun you said that. He’ll be so offended.”

“I live in fear of his wrath.” Malas moved on, slipping behind one of the soundproofed curtains to see a patient. I went back to my folding.

De-Hyun had a spell. I’d seen his mage mark. That meant, like me, he couldn’t inherit the kuracar. That meant, when we destroyed this place, when Malas died as his magic failed him and his spells went searching for a new host, burning through host after host as the locus it had once relied upon to manage its power no longer existed, killing the world’s most promising non-magical doctors one by one…

How fast did the kuracar burn through a potential host? What was the death rate of this thing that we’d be introducing into the world?

Were there any other spells, for which Refujeyo was a locus? I’d never considered, but… there might be, right? It was an absurdly powerful place, and was there any reason that two spells couldn’t have the same locus? There could be a whole bunch of fresh dangers that we’d be unleashing on –

Somebody walked in. “Hi,” I said. “Malas is just – ”

I stopped. The visitor was one of Saina’s bodyguards, the muscular tattooed one. Saina wasn’t with her.

“Is Saina okay?” I asked.

“She’s fine.” The woman went to cross her arms, and winced.

“You’re hurt!”

“That is the normal reason somebody comes to see a doctor, yes.”

“Alright, let’s have a look,” Malas said, emerging from behind the curtains. “Is it alright if my apprentice observes?”

She shrugged, then winced.

“Can I scan you?”

“Go nuts.”

Malas did so, then drew back, eyes widening. “Every Point, Theophinia!”

“It’s a dangerous job,” she said defensively.

“I don’t want to know how you got that on bodyguard duty, but why didn’t you bring it straight to me? Why treat it yourself?”

“I figured it’d heal.”

“You figured it – ” Malas rubbed his temples. “You’ve got a second degree burn covering most of your shoulder and part of your upper arm.”

“It’s only second degree.”

“You’ve got several tears in the tissue.”

“Yeah, that’s why I’m here.”

“Kayden, go and get me some penicillin, okay? Actually, no – doxycycline. One of the medium bottles, with the blue lids.” He tossed me his key.

I got back in time to catch the tail end of his lecture about burn treatment and infection risks. “How did you get burned?” I asked her when there was a break in the conversation. I couldn’t see her letting Saina do anything dangerous enough to get her bodyguard burned.

“Not important,” she grunted. Malas wrote her some dosage instructions for the antibiotic, told her to come back if she noticed any infection or if his magic didn’t hold for some reason, and sent her on her way.

“You know,” I said when we were alone, “I used to think I was your worst patient.”

“Welcome to healthcare!” he told the ceiling, throwing his hands up. “It’s forty nine per cent people who want hospice treatment for a sore throat, forty nine per cent people coming in with ‘no big deal’ problems that are a big deal because they left them for way too long, and two per cent daredevils like you who won’t stop injuring themselves.”

“You said she should come back if your magic doesn’t hold?”

“If she’s off campus for more than a few hours, it’ll run out of power. And there’s no way she got that burn following her charge around on campus.”

“So your magic can hold for a few hours off campus?”

He shrugged. “Depends what it is. Skin, yes. Bone and muscle, to a lesser degree. Organs fail almost immediately. I’m sure you’ve been off campus with my magic before.”

I thought back. “Probably?” I must have, right? When I was an initiate I’d had him patch up my skin and bones a few times, and I’d spent a lot of time at places like the rock climbing wall and the valley, out of his range.

I hoped whatever Saina’s bodyguard had been doing wasn’t going to be my problem, too. Somehow, every mystery kept ending up my problem.

“Hey, Malas,” I said. “Are there any other spells with Refujeyo as their locus?”

“What’s your obsession with my locus?”

I shrugged. “It’s a magic school. I’m interested in magic.”

“… Right. Well, no. Not that I’m aware of.”

“That you’re aware of?”

“It’s not something I’ve ever gone looking for. However, anything with this place as their locus must necessarily have come from the Pit, or a lineage of mages that stays here, which means anyone who could have it would’ve been my regular patient at some point or other. I’m sure the topic would have come up.”

“Right.” So it was just Malas’ spells that we’d need to worry about, when the time came.

That was something.

I finished my shift and left. Grabbed some dinner. Headed for my room. I had a lot of reading to get done, since apparently I had homework now.

“There’s a package for you,” Kylie called as I entered the room. She tossed it over. It wasn’t big, maybe the size of two fists, so I yelped and nearly dropped it when I caught what felt like a bag of rocks.

“You could’ve warned me,” I said.

“That you had a package? I did.”

“Har har.” There was a letter attached. I went to my bed to read it.

I recognised Melissa’s handwriting immediately.

Kayden,

How are you doing? Things are great here. We almost got a sponsor for our youtube channel but Chelsea convinced me to turn them down because she doesn’t think we should ‘sell out’. Anyway, I was spring cleaning and found some of your old stuff. I’m sure you don’t want it, but I thought I’d send it just in case.

Let me know how things are going with Saina!

Love,

# Melissa #

I frowned.

Melissa had surrounded her name with some fancy scrollwork, including a curly line underneath hashed with several uneven strokes. This wasn’t weird for her (I should be grateful the note wasn’t written in glitter pen), but those strokes caught my eye.

When we’d been about seven years old, Chelsea, Melissa and I had been super excited to learn about Morse code. A secret code that we could write secret messages to each other in? We had to learn this! Of course, upon being faces with 26 Morse letters to memorise when we’d only been properly literate for a year or two ourselves, we decided it wasn’t so exciting and gave up immediately. But not on the idea of secret codes, though.

We’d invented our own ‘Morse code’ – a simple dot-dash language that we could use to communicate ‘secrets’ to each other without grown ups being able to read them. We’d tap out messages on each others’ arms, draw or cut them into the edges of notes, knock them onto doors, all the usual stuff. Instead of a full alphabet to memorise (boring!), we came up with ten or so codes with specific meanings. ‘Pretend to disagree with me’, ‘I’m lying for the grownups’, ‘meet me under the peach three in three hours with your completed homework’, stuff like that. It worked well enough for us.

And the decorative lines scribbled under Melissa’s name said to me, clear as day, “This is a trojan.”

A trojan gift. Interesting.

I opened it up, and was immediately confused. Inside were two objects – a little metal charm shaped like a fairy on a chain, and a bracelet of very chunky beads. The charm was silver, or at least a good imitation of it. I picked it up and it made my skin itch. (That was the second time silver had done that to me. Had I developed a new allergy? There wasn’t any rash or anything… after a couple of minutes of experimentation, I decided that it was Kylie’s magic reacting to it, much how it did to foreign magic. So I had enough magic to be vulnerable to some of the anti-curse stuff that had never worked on me in the past now, I supposed. Fan fucking tastic.)

The chain attached to the charm wasn’t a bracelet or anything. It was just a bit of chain, probably for hanging the charm over a doorway or window or something.

The bracelet was similarly curse-oriented, a rough thread of spun bark (probably yew) strung with beads of rowan wood, some scorched (presumably by lightning), and round stoned that had presumably been bored by water. A couple of iron charms hung from it, too. Two objects that any cursed kid would recognise.

The problem was, they weren’t mine.

Oh, I’d worn these sorts of charms as a kid – a silver key around my neck, a water bored stone in my shoe – but never on a bracelet like this. I’d been keeping my curse a secret as a kid. There were only two reasons to wear something like this – if you had a curse, or if you were trying to protect yourself from them. It was way too likely to garner attention for me to wear.

So why had Melissa sent them to me?

I looked at the charm again. A little silver fairy, dangling on a chain. I’d never owned a fairy charm like this, but I’d… I’d seen charms like this before, hadn’t I? Not at home; no one I knew was rich enough to just leave easily stolen silver dangling around. Most people just hung holly for that purpose. You’d want to conceal something like this, as a protection against theft, in which case, it wouldn’t need to be decorative. So where had I seen this kind of thing?

Concealed in a wind chime, hanging among cheaper aluminium charms. The first time I’d met Cheryl, I’d gone to her house. Her yard had been full of wind chimes with these silver charms concealed in them. Her curse-bearing arm had been covered in big, chunky bracelets like this.

This package was from Cheryl.

I searched the bracelet more carefully, bead by bead, charm by charm, until I found… yes! A stone key, hanging between an iron key and a chunk of rowan wood. I untied the bracelet to free the key, unable to stop grinning.

Cheryl was safe. Or at least, she had been safe when this was sent. Presumably she still was. She’d made contact with Melissa, for some reason. Made sense, I supposed; it would be far too dangerous to contact her own friends and family, and she could find mine pretty easily through their youtube channel. They had no connection to her whatsoever, so while the sekkies might give everyone connected to the coven a quick look, they were unlikely to waste resources monitoring them constantly.

And Cheryl was clever. She’d know not to hang around. She’d probably already moved on.

I pocketed the key. I hoped it worked. Unrestricted access to medicine storage, to figure out that portal… that had to be useful.

If it worked.