Adela’s hand? Burning with pain from a magical bullet strike. Hard to concentrate with that much pain distracting you.
She must push it aside and raise the protective bubble around their campsite though, because the middle of a guerrilla warzone? Yeah. Not a good place for Adela and her friends to sit around unprotected.
But of course, the pain isn’t the only thing distracting Adela right now…
Another Changing Tides story exploring the consequences of two former enemies being thrown together on the same side of a magical war.
Sorcerers Always Lie
The first problem was that Adela’s left hand was still on fire. Not literally, of course, though it might as well have been: the tiny, red-gold sparks of glowing light embedded through it were the remains of a magical bullet, a bullet that had exploded into a softball-sized sphere of pain and light, like a very localised, very painful firework.
The cold making Adela’s teeth chatter didn’t help, goosebumps prickling her bare arms as she tried to make her mind focus on the dark, snow-crusted forest around her.
The dark trees—spruces, maybe, or some kind of pine, Adela had never been good at botany, although she’d learned to identify food and medical plants per force over the last few months—definitely they were some kind of conifers, though, broad with branches almost sweeping the ground, and they skulked, seeming to move and dance in the corners of her eyes.
The whole moonlit scene kept sliding in and out of focus, as though clouds were passing over the face of the full moon, even though the sky was cloudless and the stars twinkled fiercely.
She inhaled deeply, trying to force herself to calm through the pain.
They definitely smelled coniferous, with that cold, green, sappy smell.
Could have been her imagination, though, as her stomach roiled in response to the constant burn of her hand.
Focus, Adela. Don’t worry about dancing trees, or flicking moonlight, or the fire alight in your hand. Focus.
There was grass under her feet, thick and green like a cultivated lawn.
Surely it was too cold here for that kind of grass?
Adela stared at it dazedly, sure she was missing something.
Usually, her brain moved at the speed of light, drawing connections between things faster than most people could blink. Usually, it would have taken her a matter of minutes to weave the spells to form a protective bubble around the campsite, shielding the tent from passersby—not that any passersby seemed terribly likely here, wherever here was.
But Adela and her two friends—and Jiri, mustn’t forget Jiri, saving him was the whole reason they were in this mess to begin with—had broken camp in a hurry and vanished through to God only knew where—none of them had recognised it when they’d arrived, although one of them had to have, for the group to have transported here in the first place—and her hand was still on fire.
It seared, in much the same way as your hand might if you were ever dumb enough to stick it into a camp fire and hold it there, Adela imagined—not that she’d ever had any personal experience in being so stupid.
The boys, though? Well. They were both House Liione. It was practically a right of passage at the Sibelius Sorcery Academy to do dumb crap in the name of bravery and courage.