Angelfire | The Whispering Wall #3

Nine: An Offer

Nova knew what Jan was going to say before she'd even opened her mouth.

"I've slipped a stitch again," she mumbled, to save her the effort.

"You've slipped a whole row." The housekeeper extracted her gently from the knotty mess of wool around her fingers and relieved her of the knitting needles. Nova gave them up without protest. She teased Grace for her embroidery efforts, but it wasn't like she was any better. Since she was a girl she'd been far more interested in wooden swords and wrestling in the gardens with the other palace children, despite her mother's exasperated efforts to keep her by the fireside and teach her to mend clothes and weave instead.

She'd never had a gift for such things, nor the interest to make up for it. She'd only really agreed to let Jan teach her how to knit and sew because it was the only thing she had to occupy her when she wasn't in the study or the library. Grace worked long hours these days while the castle was always full of guests, and Jeorge was usually loitering about throwing her pathetic, meaningful looks that she had to ignore or he'd take it as an invitation to talk. She didn't imagine he was having a pleasant time in Nictaven's current climate, but she also couldn't have cared less. She'd had a far worse time for far longer, and it was in large part because of him.

He was in fact haunting the kitchen like an unpleasant odour at that moment, crouched at the far end of a workbench with a pile of books in front of him. Nova was certain he didn't have permission to bring library tomes this perilously close to dinner preparations in full flow, so they must have been his. She wondered how much Harkenn was paying him, to be able to get books of his own. He had a light frown on his face, as if whatever he read displeased him.

He looked towards the kitchen door a second before she detected two familiar auras approaching up the corridor. Both Haverford siblings entered, Thorne looking very much like he was here under duress. Grace had the bright-eyed, triumphant look she got when she knew she'd had a good idea about something. She glanced over and met eyes with Nova, offering a slightly apologetic smile as she frogmarched her brother to the table where Jeorge had camped out.

Nova frowned, but after a minute could see why. She had not paid vast amounts of attention to Thorne's aura in recent weeks, usually too exhausted from trying to get her own astral skills back up to scratch to bother. Now she saw that the cracks in Thorne's aura after Cael's torture of him had not healed. There was something sad and mangled about it that she couldn't put a finger on; she felt the same compulsive urge to fix it that she might have felt while smoothing out the crumpled page of a book. But this was far more complex than smoothing out crinkled paper, and she hated to admit that Jeorge was the best man to try.

"Well, that's a turn," Jan muttered, her eyebrows disappearing in her froth of white hair. Her fingers worked unconsciously through the motions of fixing Nova's lumpy attempt at a winter scarf. She was amazed she had been allowed anywhere near a commodity like wool.

"Yes, it is." Nova got up and crossed the room, her curiosity getting the better of her.

"How often do you have these seizures?" Jeorge's voice was the carefully non-judgemental tone of any trained physician or carer for the dead – which, in a sense, he was both.

"It's not regular," Thorne mumbled. "They used to happen a lot, but now it's when I'm stressed, or something surprises me. I...still get tremors. Most days."

"And night terrors?"

"Most nights."

Jeorge sighed, ran his hand through his hair. "I cannot guarantee you anything. Cael's abilities were far more advanced than anything I've seen before, possibly enhanced by some process I cannot begin to guess at. I am good at my vocation, but I'm not a miracle-worker. Cael was an anomaly. You understand this?"