Vale… Is Not a Vampire?

“Wait? What? You… no… Vale. No!” Meg instantly forgot her queasiness and stormed up to me. “We are not trading your life for his.”

“Meg. Meg! MEG!” I had to raise my voice a couple of times to get her to calm down.

Right, theatrical overstatements don’t go over well.

Will so look like I’m killing myself though.

“Let me finish!” I shushed her. “And do not give me those looks. I am not going to kill myself.”

I fixed both of them with stares until I judged them sufficiently calm to continue with my explanation.

“I will need to push myself to save this man. It is going to look bad, I am not going to lie about that. You will let me work, no matter how bad it looks,” I explained, then I focused on the town healer and gestured towards my shoulder. “Reya, remember how Gery told you this was just some damage to my clothes. He lied. I heal. Fast.”

I really hoped this gamble paid off. It would have been so much easier if I had asked Gery to assist me. But no, I chose Meg for some stupid reason. Now I had to convince both of them that the horrible things I was going to do to my body were perfectly fine.

Reya looked at me open-mouthed, trying to find a way to fit this new information into her worldview. “So… you healed yourself?”

This was not a good response. I almost wanted to carve myself up with a knife just to prove my point, but Meg had just sat down at my revelation and was now looking rather sickly. I doubted painting the room with my blood would go over well with her.

“Fine. If that is how you want to think about it.” I sighed at Reya. It would have to do. “No matter how sick or unwell I look, do not interrupt or distract me. Magic is… tricky. If I lose focus while I am working—”

“I know. I’ve worked with an Academy doctor before,” Reya interrupted me. “Are you trying to get Meg to faint or are we going to do this?”

I glanced at Meg. She did look rather ashen. No matter how much I wanted her here, asking her might have been a mistake. “I am sorry, Meg, I may have underestimated how hard this is on you. Would you like to leave? I am sure we can do this with the two of us.”

“No, no, it’s fine,” Meg said after swallowing several times. “You wanted me here, right, for trust.” She gave me a thin smile. It looked entirely unconvincing.

“That’s it? She’s here because you don’t trust me?” Reya lashed out at me.

Her outburst wasn’t entirely unexpected. The village healer had shifted from being wary of me to being displeased with me ever since I’d insisted Meg stay. It surprised me more that it took her this long to really make a point of it.

“Yes.” I nodded meekly, assuming that making her feel validated was the quickest way I’d get this shut down. With some luck displaying some vulnerability would isolate her a little from Meg as well.

“That’s cheap, Girl. Real cheap,” Reya admonished me. “Trust goes both ways you know.”

“It’s fine, Reya. We did kind of threaten her earlier.” Meg shook her head. “I’d have trouble trusting us as well.”

“I… fine!” Reya spat in a way that made it clear that this was anything but fine. “Let’s leave this until after we’ve saved this man’s life.”

“I’m sorry,” I muttered, persisting in my display of submissiveness.

“Shut it. You and I will have a chat about this later.” Reya gestured towards Uncle Tare. “Now, the patient.”

“Right. Sorry. Two more things,” I said. Reya opened her mouth to shoot more venom my way. I spoke over her before she could interrupt. “One. If I pass out, redress his wounds and hope for the best. Two. Saving his leg is beyond my capabilities. We are amputating. I told his wife that was a maybe. That was a lie.”

The revelation that I needed to amputate had gone over surprisingly well. Maybe they’d had too many shocks in one night to experience any more. Maybe they’d been expecting it all along.

Or maybe I had casually forgotten to mention that there was a fifty-fifty chance of Uncle Tare not surviving the procedure, or that he might die within weeks after even a successful amputation. Granted, with judicious application of healing magic his chances of survival went up dramatically. Still, amputation was not a simple thing, and I wasn’t exactly experienced at it.

Finally, all of the explaining and preparing was done and we were ready to start. Despite the grim situation, I was momentarily giddy with excitement. Neither Meg nor Reya were mages. They would have no way to tell. Metzus magic was illegal. Forbidden. Taboo. Yet here was a situation where I could safely use it. Mostly safely.

As no one taught it I had to figure most of it out with trial and error. Little of what I knew was useable, but there was one application that was appropriate here. It would dramatically cut down on the amount of Tonaltus and Atlus I would need to channel.

The risk was minimal, so I suppressed a maniacal grin, and with barely any need to focus at all separated a large strand of Metzus energies from my being. Splitting the strand into individual threads I weaved my spell array and directed the weave into the first wound.

Pushing Metzus energies into a human body, an Atlus vessel, is bad. It’s the exact same thing as pulling Tonaltus through my Metzus vessel. Just like my body can only tolerate the tiniest, hair-thinnest threads of Tonaltus, the human body can only handle the finest filament of Metzus.

I was using this to test where the infection had taken root. By directing my weave in and around the wound, and feeling where I encountered resistance, I would know where to focus my healing. In spots where my magic damaged flesh the wound was clean and I pulled back. There where I encountered no opposition required further attention. In those places, I split my weave ever finer, until I could discern the approximate outline of the contamination.

I was further wounding the man by doing this. But I was convinced I could manage this. The tiny amount of extra healing he would require was offset by the massive savings from scouting the wound with Metz—

Damn!

A vein of black spread out from the wound, snaking up the man’s arm. I hadn’t been careful enough. I pulled back my weave and reached inside me. This was bad. This was really bad. No time to be careful. No time to layer this.

“Sard! What is—” Reya squeaked.

“Shut up!” I shut her down with a shout. I could not afford distractions.

I grasped on to the first strands of Atlus and Tonaltus I could find and began weaving threads together. No one ever weaves in their core. There’s not enough flexibility if you pre-weave, you can’t correct as you go. I’ve never had a choice. You needed to pull whole strands to weave outside of your core and if I did that they’d still be scraping me off the walls next week.

The weave I managed was crude, a hastily cobbled-together mess. Pretty didn’t matter. It was fast. I pulled the mesh out of my core and into the wound at a pace that was only barely slow enough to keep the lattice intact. I deliberately bit my lip to distract myself from the horrible wrongness deep in my bowels.

“Done.” I sagged back in the chair, directing Reya to bandage the wound.

“Are you okay?” Reya asked me with obvious concern. “You’re bleeding.”

I was anything but okay. Healing one small wound and I was exhausted. I swept at the trickle of blood dripping from my lip down my chin. As long as that was all she saw wrong with me then it was fine. As long as I did not get up she would not notice the goopy mess that was streaming down my inner thigh. From the horrible burning sensation deep in my belly, I could only assume that the ropy liquid was what remained of my intestines.

“I’ll manage,” I told her, feigned a smile, and gestured towards the next wound.

It would take a couple of minutes for what I just did to myself to heal. For this next injury, I’d need to source the Tonaltus from a different part of my core, maybe someplace a little higher up. Lungs were equally optional for me as a digestive system. I was certain Reya could manage for a little while without me talking to her.