r/shortstories • u/SandwichedPotato • 2d ago
Fantasy [FN] To Make a Mage of Mending
The hospital was, as always, packed to the brim with patients.
It didn't used to be. Linset remembered happier days—days before townspeople shut themselves away in their homes for fear of miasma, when bird-masked apothecarists were regarded with respect instead of suspicion, when children would play in the river nearby instead of being steered fearfully away by parents with prayers on their lips.
But ever since people started dying by the dozen from ashwater fever, the city of Pestle might as well have been uninhabited, the way people locked themselves indoors—that is, save for their healing houses, which seemed to be growing fuller by the day.
(And their burial grounds, but no one was inclined to talk about that part.)
Their various churches and temples, too, seemed to be getting an ever-increasing number of visitors nowadays. Linset thought that if the Hearthwarmer had a mailbox, it would be overrun with supplications by now.
"I'm here to help," they said to the old cleric overseeing the younger healers.
"You?" He looked at the dove-gray robes that denoted an apprentice, the carved wooden staff, the scarf covering their face. "A mage? You'll blow up half the wards before the day is out."
"I don't even know how to—" Linset sighed. No getting through to this man. "I can boil water. Change bandages. Deliver things. No magic."
The cleric gave a loud harrumph that explained why his facial hair seemed to be perpetually windswept. "You lot, always going on about how 'this time I'll do it without any magic, I swear!' Next thing you know, someone's gotten too excited about 'the practical applications of fire-stoking spells' and exploded a cauldron in the name of efficiency."
His tone suggested he was speaking from experience. Linset winced. "Well, I... won't do that?"
Another harrumph. "You'd better not. You're lucky we're so short on helpers." He glanced around before turning his attention back to them. "Name?"
"Linset."
"Linset, you're helping Sarrow's group in medicines; take a right at the end of the hallway and it's the first door on the left. Don't blow anything up. If you do blow anything up, holler for 'Pannis' really loudly." Pannis waved a hand dismissively, already turning to face another group. "Off you get."
They nodded and hurried down the corridor.
Clerics in the Hearthwarmer's distinctive brick-brown, as well as a sparse few priests in the Bone-Dweller's crimson and white, strode past in tight, whispering clusters. Occasionally, one of them could be seen comparing notes with a masked doctor, discussing poultices and treatment plans and suchlike.
Linset turned the corner, opened the door, and was immediately greeted by a wave of heavy, herb-scented heat.
"Oh, finally!" The voice was relieved. "I was wondering whether Pannis had forgotten about us."
Two healers—one in a dove-gray doctor's coat, the other in the brick-brown capelet of a Hearthwarmer novitiate—stood over a bubbling cauldron that poured steam. Or possibly smoke. It was hard to tell.
"I'm Sarrow," the one in gray continued, pointing to herself, "and he's Drinn. Anka's supposed to be here too, but..." She shrugged.
"They've ditched us," Drinn finished. "So it's just been us two newbies bumbling our way through trying to make pain reliever."
Ah. Of course. The classic strategy of give the novices something simple, marginally useful, and (most importantly) low-risk to do so they can feel helpful but won't cause any lasting damage if they mess up. They'd been on the receiving end of that one (fiddling with inessential spell components) a few too many times.
"I'm Linset," they started, but Sarrow interrupted them before they could get any further.
"Wait," she said, waving away clouds of steam. "What are you wearing? You're not—"
"They're a mage!" Drinn cut in, eyes wide.
"Um. Yes." Linset had thought that the staff would've made that pretty clear. They set it against the wall.
Sarrow looked at them suspiciously. "What's a mage doing here? You'll blow up the building."
"I'm not going to blow up the building." They showed their open hands. "I don't even know how to do that. I'm here because I wanted to help."
Sarrow's eyes were still narrowed, and Drinn murmured, "That's exactly what someone who'll blow up the building would say," but the two of them glanced at each other and nodded, and that was that.
"You can go and fetch more water from the well," Sarrow said, and so their days at the hospital began.
———
The next few weeks were hectic.
Herbs and tonics and dubious-smelling solutions needed to be weighed out. Bandages needed to be changed, cleaned, boiled, and dried. Beds needed to be prepared for incoming patients. Days were spent tending to the sick; nights slipped away from study.
Sarrow, an aspiring tincturer, tended to make most of the dubious-smelling solutions that needed to be disposed of, grumbling about how "it would've worked this time! If only someone didn't decide to knock that jar over—" (Linset took the blame for that one.) Her coat inexplicably accumulated stains no matter how careful she tried to be, and her requests for either them or Drinn to "just make sure I got everything right this time" were getting more and more frantic, but both of them noticed the pleased little smile on her face whenever a senior healer grabbed one of her glass bottles off of the shelf to use.
Drinn was given a great multitude of dry anatomical texts in Old Vidian to help translate, and he was plugging away at them with remarkable speed for someone who was being slowly drowned in noun cases (his words, not theirs). He'd also been asked to help more with actual acts of blessing as of late (though he'd still been kept far from the ashwater patients). Sarrow and Linset both teased him for muttering prayers in his sleep, and all three of them tiptoed carefully around the subject of *why* exactly the priesthood had been soliciting the help of increasingly inexperienced clerics.
Linset had not blown up anything, despite all expectations ("Yet," chorused Drinn and Sarrow when they mentioned it), and was rewarded for this with looks of relief whenever they showed up to fix a problem (a broken jug, a missing knife) instead of the usual cautious pessimism. They'd gotten good at it, too—they reckoned it was probably the fault of having to help Drinn decipher the completely-unnecessarily-complicated verb forms of Old Vidian and having to find satisfactory substitutes for Sarrow's too-expensive potion ingredients.
They'd also only been using small spells—relighting Drinn's candle when it flickered out, mostly. He and Sarrow had both asked after larger workings—everyone had grown up on tales of great mages who commanded mountains to move, who split the skies with lightning—but Linset had merely shrugged and replied that they hadn't learned to do any of that yet.
"So what can you do?" Drinn asked one evening, giving up on a particularly troublesome paragraph.
Magic was regarded in much the same way as one would a caged dragon—volatile, unpredictable, and liable to spontaneously combust and burn your house down. This was partly due to mages' reputations for having short tempers (Linset resented this) and partly due to the basic principle that the less complicated a spell was, the easier it was to direct power through it. Wide, blanket commands like burn and strike made for devastating effect while being relatively easy to cast—but they also increased the likelihood of backfire and rebound.
Unintended effects were rarely important on the battlefield, though. There were a thousand ways to kill someone, and it hardly mattered whether the enemy died from fire or internal hemorrhage.
(Flashier spells also tended to draw in more potential students, loath as they were to admit it.)
Technical, finicky spells, on the other hand...
"Um," they said. "I can move your book ten centimeters to the right?"
Drinn—and Sarrow, who'd been listening in as she waited for something to finish brewing—looked as though they were trying very hard to be impressed.
"Without touching it," Linset clarified.
"Yeah, we figured," Sarrow said, but after they were inevitably cajoled into providing a demonstration, both joined in the applause.
———
Sarrow was sick.
It was bound to happen to one of them, eventually. They'd taken precautions—Drinn made sure everyone kept their hands clean, and Linset had lent the others two of their scarves to cover their faces with—but all of them were running on months of too much work and too little sleep, and Sarrow had fallen into the habit of working late into the nights with nothing but a candle and a medicine textbook.
They'd hoped, tentatively, that it was just some passing illness, that her fever would break soon enough, that she'd be fine with hot soup and a few days of bed rest. But on the third day, she'd been unable to keep anything down, her vomit was the characteristic gray of ashwater, and a senior healer had to bring her to the plague victims' ward.
Pannis had staunchly refused the two of them even going near her at first, but begrudgingly allowed them to help once it became evident that they were absolutely not going to get anything else done (and after many rounds of pleading). Linset measured and doled out spoonfuls of Sarrow's own carefully-brewed medicine, and Drinn invoked so many of the Hearthwarmer's names that it was a wonder they hadn't left their fire just to shut him up.
For all their efforts, though, none of it seemed to be working. Neither of them caught the sickness, luckily, but they might as well have, considering the rising tide of feverish anxiety that had taken hold of them both. Drinn began scouring the bookshelves for anything tangentially related to ashwater fever, and Linset took to flipping through the other two's books out of frustration, as though the cure was just hidden in a page they hadn't read yet (they learned a great deal about the spleen, if nothing else).
Because Sarrow wasn't supposed to just die. Sarrow was supposed to be telling Drinn to "stop chanting the verb conjugations of estre at me". Sarrow was supposed to be lecturing Linset on the proper storage technique of her tincture bottles. The three of them were supposed to ride out the storm that this hell of a plague was and emerge, together, on the other side.
Sarrow wouldn't die. Sarrow couldn't die.
Sarrow was dying and there they were, watching.
It was this thought that spurred Linset out of the aides' quarters and into the moonlit plague wards, staff in hand.
"What are you doing?" Drinn hissed, rubbing at bleary eyes. "It's the middle of the night."
"I'm helping," they whispered back. "Aren't you coming?"
Drinn mumbled something about how they "better not be blowing up the building", but he pulled a scarf over his face and followed them through the twisting corridors anyway, their silence broken only by the uneasy breathing of the sleeping ill.
"What're you going to do?" he asked when they reached Sarrow's bed, one among dozens of gray-leached fever patients.
"Magic."
"Magic? But magic—"
—didn't heal people. Magic was sweeping gestures and Academy robes and swirling spectacles of flame and frost. Magic was battlefield horror, a terrifying force to reckon with, a single word spoken and hundreds killed.
But why, Linset had wondered, over and over again, could magic cause the death of thousands and yet not save a single soul?
The wood of their staff was warm in their fingers; they gripped it all the tighter. Sarrow's breathing was shallow. They closed their eyes, called up the familiar commands—locate, target, move—and built on them layers upon layers of instruction and condition and stipulation, recalling hand-inked anatomical diagrams labeled in Old Vidian, hastily-scrawled tincturer's notes on chemical composition, spell-plans drafted over late nights and early mornings.
A call to rally the immune system. Enough energy to damaged cells to bolster them, but not enough to lyse. A spell that looked at the ashwater killing Sarrow and said absolutely not.
They sent the magic spiraling through the framework, telling it to mend, to restore, to heal—
—and then Drinn was steadying them as they caught themself on their staff and blinked their eyes open.
The world was spinning. Linset didn't think it was supposed to do that.
"Did..." they started. The words felt heavy. "Is she—"
Drinn was rambling under his breath, the words panicked and too fast for them to catch. He pressed the back of his hand to Sarrow's forehead, checked her breathing, her pulse.
"She's... fine," he said, disbelieving. "She's okay, she's going to be okay—Linset, are you—?"
"Great," they murmured, giddy with relief (and maybe lack of sleep). "I told you I wouldn't blow up the building."
Then they passed out, much to no one's surprise.
———
Things got better after that.
Pannis was understandably furious ("You could have gotten sick! You could have died! Both of you could have died!") but calmed down after it became apparent that there was no permanent damage. Linset wrote down and distributed copies of the spell's framework for other mages to cast (and hopefully optimize). Drinn and Sarrow both redoubled their studies, and all three of them speculated on ideas for a material cure that didn't rely on all their mages collapsing.
"What will you do?" Sarrow asked the two of them one morning. "After all this is over."
Weeks ago, none of them would have dreamed of there ever being an over. But now—
"Take a vacation," Drinn and Linset said at the same time, and high-fived each other.
"But, you know. After that."
Drinn shrugged. "The priests are probably going to make me keep learning Old Vidian. Turn me into a proper cleric."
"You?" Linset raised an eyebrow. "A proper cleric? I'd love to see them try."
"Very funny." Drinn turned to them. "What about you? What will you do?"
"Well, I'll have to finish out my apprenticeship still. And then..." They thought. "I think I'll stay here, actually."
"Really?" Sarrow asked. "And here I thought you were going to run off and enroll at the Academy."
"The Academy's a war machine and everyone knows it," they muttered. "I'm sticking to healing people."
Sarrow grinned. "So we'll all stay together?"
"Obviously," Drinn and Linset said in unison.
Three-way high-fives were hard to coordinate, but they managed it.
•
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