Nym's Arc

Chapter 15 of 41

Drasila tried to sit up. Her arms shook and gave out. She fell back to the wet grass. Her skin was gray, like all the blood had drained from it. Her eyes drifted shut, then opened, then shut again. Nym gripped her mother's cold hand. "Mother, stay with me," Nym said. "Please don’t leave again" Drasila's lips moved. No sound came out. Her head rolled to the side. Three hundred years behind that door had left nothing in her to spend. The questions Nym had chased across the world would have to wait. Magnus knelt in the mud beside them. He had waited at this same stone ring three hundred years for Drasila to return. Now she lay dying in the grass, too weak to speak. His hands trembled as he pressed two fingers to her throat. "Her heart is slow," he said. Magnus reached into his robe. He pulled out a handful of small carved stones. He set them in a wide circle around Nym and Drasila, one by one, pressing each into the mud. His pointed boots left prints as he worked. He closed the last gap and looked up. "Stay inside the circle," he said. "Both of you. Do not reach past the stones." Nym pulled Drasila's limp body against her chest. She wrapped both arms around her mother and held on. Drasila's breath was shallow against her neck. Magnus stepped into the ring. He touched one stone with his palm and spoke low words she did not know. Gold light rose from each stone. It climbed and joined overhead into a dome of shining lines. The wet clearing blurred. The standing stones smeared into streaks. Nym shut her eyes and pressed her cheek to her mother's hair. The cold vanished. She felt stone under her boots instead of mud. Nym opened her eyes. They stood inside Magnus's tower now, the weathered stone one wrapped in flowering vines and dark thorns. A fire burned in the hearth. The gold light faded from the air. Magnus moved fast. He dragged Drasila up to a table. The heat of the fire touched Drasila's gray face. Her breathing steadied, small but even. Drasila did not wake. But she was warm now, and safe, and alive. Nym sank to her knees beside the table. Her mother was here. Free of the door. Breathing. But she could not yet speak a single word about the truth Nym had crossed a kingdom to learn. "How long until she can talk?" Nym asked. Magnus stared at the sleeping woman. "I do not know," he said. "If she wakes at all."