Page 9 of The Elven Healer's Apprentice

“Sina.” She finished her notations. Pocketing the notes, she turned to face me. “If you would like to inspect my work, the stillroom house is at your disposal. If you find fault, I will be in the unicorn’s pen. Today it is my turn to groom her and put her through her paces, so she won’t harass the hippogryph.”

With that, the woman offered me a slight bow, and strode out with her head held high and her back straight. Only her overly bright eyes and a tremor in her fingers betrayed the deeper emotion underneath her cool façade.

A trickle of unease prodded my temper, but I ignored it. It was an emotion that I wanted no part of. She was the intruder, not I. A year away didn’t change the fact it was my land, my clinic, and my patients. She might’ve poisoned someone or killed out of ignorance. I groaned. I needed to speak to Sina. This couldn’t happen again.

Closing the door of the clinic firmly behind me, I set a sealing spell on it. I wanted no chance of her sneaking back in to tamper with my stock further. Suspecting that Sina would be in the kitchens at this time of the morning, I set off in that direction. The path wound past my stillroom hut where I kept my supplies of herbs. Pausing to check the door, I found it locked with a simple mechanism. Undoing it was easy work.

I slipped into the fragrant coolness of the interior and initiated a light spell. It burst forth with far more vigor than usual thanks to the intensity of my emotions. A blinding glare reflected off rows of glass containers and a mirror that had been hung against the back wall. To my astonishment, I found the ceiling coated in drying bunches of herbs, evoking the memory of the woman’s dungeon-like room in her father’s fortress. Unlike that room, this ceiling arched high enough to accommodate the fragrant hanging bundles, so they didn’t brush the top of my head.

Ignoring the idiosyncratic sign of her hand in my still room, I scanned the shelves. They had been rearranged but were otherwise well stocked. Rows upon rows of human-used herbs lined the shelves next to the worktable. Jars and bottles clearly labeled and sealed arrayed on the worktable revealed the preparation for mixing a poultice for healing open wounds.

I searched the shelves for known poisons. Rarely used, I kept them in stock because they were of use to species other than my people. Also, the medications I used to treat my animals—many of them were not beneficial to other creatures. Some even were deadly. To my astonishment, I found someone had removed them from the shelves. Turning, scanning the room to see if she had simply moved them, I spotted a locked cupboard under the far window from the door. As I approached, I instantly detected a magical seal. Curious, I tweaked it, and the doors sprung open. All the ingredients I had been searching for lay within.

Humans couldn’t use magic—well, most humans. There were men and women who sacrificed parts of their souls to drain magic from those who naturally produced it. But there were physical signs of such depravity, such as black eyes lacking whites, and the woman calling herself my apprentice manifested none of those.

Mulling over the strangeness, I reset the seal and surveyed the room again, this time searching for signs of another magic user other than myself. There were tiny signs. The stale essence of magic imbued the corner near the cabinet. A lingering scent hung in the air that didn’t match any of the herbs hanging over my head. Someone had been here besides the human woman.

Heading back into the sunlight, I re-latched the lock.

Sina had much to account for. Letting another healer into my sanctuary was almost as bad as letting a superstitious human treat my patients and call herself my apprentice, especially after the debacle that happened with the last apprentice.

“Sina!” I hollered as I approached the kitchen building. A brick building coated in stucco and whitewashed to a gleaming brightness, it boasted five chimneys and a generous coating of ivy. A kitchen garden out back, bursting over in fragrant greenery and an abundance of common herbs, along with a few rare ones that Sina had brought with her when she agreed to become my cook and housekeeper nearly a century ago.

“Sina!” I called again as I rounded the back corner and headed toward the open door.

“Back here, Master Merlon. No need to holler so. You know these ears can hear you over half the compound.” Sina straightened from a patch of mint and regarded me, assessing me from head to toe. “Looking tired and thin, boy. Didn’t they feed you or let you sleep in that palace?”

I almost cried. She hadn’t called me boy in so long. “They fed me plenty and offered a good bed.” An overwhelming sensation of homesickness washed over me, cooling the burning rancor in my gut. I had missed Sina so much. “It isn’t their fault that most of the palace kept shadow elf time thanks to the curse.”

Wading out onto the path, she peered up at me. With her standing at such a short height and with my elf-given towering frame, the two of us made a strange sight, but we never cared.

She motioned for me to come down to her level. “Come, give me a hug, boy, and then I will see about some food.”

I knelt, and she wrapped her strong arms around my shoulders for a tight squeeze before releasing me. Savoring the moment of tenderness, I remained on my knees in the dirt. Walking around me, she patted my shoulder as she passed. “We missed you around here.”

Clearing my throat against the sudden tightness, I coughed. “I wouldn’t have guessed, considering you replaced me with a human charlatan and let her loose on the grounds.”

I hadn’t risen, so I wasn’t out of range when she turned and gently slapped the back of my head. “Don’t you go getting all high and mighty in the instep, boy. You let her loose on the grounds, not I. She is the reason that you still have clients. What did you expect me to do when people came looking for help?”

I rose to my feet, ruefully rubbing the back of my head. “Contact Junipergo. He would’ve taken care of them.”

“That hedge healer doesn’t have time to tend your patients and his. Besides, he has his own life.”

“What do you mean? I was only gone a year. Hardly a long time.”

“Elves!” she exclaimed before disappearing inside the kitchen.

I followed at a slower pace. Despite the distance, my elven hearing could easily make out her mutterings.

“Think they can do everything better than anyone else. And when they aren’t around to do their job, they complain we didn’t just wait for them to meander back to take care of things.” She huffed.

“A curse imprisoned me. It isn’t as though Emrys intentionally trapped us,” I pointed out as I stepped over the threshold.

“Stop right there!” She waved a wooden spoon in my direction. “Wipe your feet!”

I complied and then crossed into the wonderland of Thomasina’s domain. Savory scents and warm, floury yeastiness filled the air. Magic hummed through the very stones under my feet and flared in the ovens against the right wall. As a hobgoblin, Sina imbued magic into her tools, producing creations that both nourished and delighted those who consumed them. I might heal patient’s bodies, but Sina’s food renewed their spirits.

We first met when I was merely fifteen and grieving my mother. When I refused to go with him, my stepfather had abandoned me to pursue another wife. I would have nothing to do with him after what he had done to my mother. Alone, I foraged for food and begged door to door for work. Too proud to request help from my relations after they had cut ties with my mother upon her remarrying, I struggled to keep fed and a roof over my head. No one wanted to hire an untrained elf child with a chip on his shoulder and strange white hair.

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