Page 41 of Tales of a Monstrous Heart
We passed rooms with open doors revealing rows of beds illuminated by muted light. All empty.
The rooms all seemed the same, until we turned a corner, seeing more cluttered workspaces like Emrys’s study, a communal dining hall and spacious sitting room. I tried to make out more details, only to collide with something solid, rocking back to see I’d walked right into Emrys’s back. He’d stopped suddenly outside a worn door that had a notice pasted to the front of it.
Confinement.
He opened the door quickly and guided me inside. The room was small but warm, an overwhelming strange bitter stench filled the air, strong enough to cover the usual scent of beasam bark that followed Emrys.
A desk sat in the far corner, a small fire with a pot of water boiling, a chair draped in clothes and a small healing bed upon which lay a figure.
‘Robert Thrombi, a farmhand from one of the villages surrounding Paxton Fields,’ Emrys began as the door closed behind us.
‘That smell!’ I gasped, and moved to the other side of the bed, considering the man’s faintly flushed face and the unsteady breaths that came panted through his lips.
His chest was bare, lying there in nothing but light cotton trousers. His feet were hooved, legs covered in thick, white hair that blended into flesh. Two tusks came from his dark chin.
He was a miroc, a creature between forms. They were a lesser fey who usually dwelled in the eastlands.
‘That smell isn’t septime weed.’ I’d know it anywhere. I could detect that scent in my worst nightmares. How it had come off Alma’s skin as she clawed at herself, mad with fever in Daunton. Just like all the other children.
‘I dosed him with whelm weed before the fever took hold.’ Emrys reached into his pocket for a small vial of white powder, holding it across the bed in offering. I took it, wondering if William had grown it for him.
Then I understood. Emrys suspected this man was a victim of dark sickness.
‘You’ve seen this before?’ I asked. The number of files he’d given me to study were vast, but I didn’t see any notes on living subjects. Not like this.
‘Three. I didn’t get to them quick enough.’ A coldness came over his expression quickly to hide his emotions. ‘They didn’t break the fever.’
He turned to the large chalkboard, already covered in his scrawl, in the corner of the room for answers.
‘I can’t work out the formulation for the healing draught. Not when the sickness is as combative as this one.’
I was alarmed at the chaos before me. He wasn’t exaggerating when he said healing wasn’t his specialty.
‘Nothing is working,’ he continued with the frustration of a man completely out of his depth, but trying none the less.
My attention returned to Mr Thrombi. The sickness was similar to septime weed poisoning, but something was missing. Something I couldn’t place as I moved about the bed, tucking the vial Emrys offered me inside my apron.
The man was deathly pale, his skin holding a greyish hue as a sheen of sweat covered him. One side of him was a more alarming shade of grey than the other.
I summoned a small burst of my magic, rolling it into an orb of light in my hand, illuminating more details and confirming my suspicion about his right side.
I turned over his arms, revealing the rest of his side, seeing a strange injury just below his ribs. A webbing of purple and black marks, like veins, leading to the side of his thigh, where the darkness was contained. They paled in the light, something dwelling in there, reacting to being so close to fey magic.
I pressed the skin gently to see it fade and move upon contact, trying to get away from that light.
‘I assumed it was bruising from labouring,’ Emrys commented next to me.
Dark things hide right in front of us and use our foolish doubt against us.My father’s words came back to me. How not all monsters take a monstrous form.
‘It’s a bite,’ I whispered, trying to stop fear from tightening my chest at the brutality of the dark magic before me, impossible but real at the same time.
‘What?’ Emrys leant closer to see, but I was already reaching into my bag, rooting through my things anxiously as I kept an eye on the man’s breathing.
I pulled out the hilt of my father’s blade, letting it fit against my palm as it manipulated itself into a small knife.
‘It’s an anthrux bite,’ I answered.
Anthrux were small spider-like creatures formed of dark magic. Only certain spells could result in their creation, and casting any of them was punishable by death – if you survived speaking the incantation. Dark magic like that hadn’t been successfully wielded in centuries.
