Redeemed by Heather Fledderus (ebook reader 7 inch .TXT) 📖

Jamie and Candace had confined themselves to the library, going over Candace’s notes from last year as they prepared for the semester ahead. They helped each other fill in the gaps where there was something they didn’t understand. Except for battle class, where the two of them were absolutely hopeless and had no ambition to improve, even after the events on the bus. Why bother when there were so many other careers out there that they could choose from.

Nobody saw much of Zen that week, but every so often Candace thought she saw someone around Zen’s build go into the Damaged Books section, even though only teachers were allowed to go in there.

Thursday night had Candace feeling dread. The next day, she and Jamie would be shuffled with the others who hadn’t managed to form teams yet. And that wasn’t what was bothering her. There were 143 fifth year students if you didn’t count Sylvia. That meant thirty five teams of four with three extra students. She could already guess two of the three students. Jamie still had a shot at being asked to be on someone’s team. And Candace had insisted that if a decent team asked her to join, she should. Jamie was the smartest girl in their class. The others could compensate easily for her lack of battle prowess.

Finally, Candace got sick of sitting in the common room with all the other girls who obviously didn’t want her there, and she left, careful not to step on anyone as she escaped the room. She told the dorm marm that she just needed to go to the bathroom. Since Candace was known to be a goody two-shoes, the teacher bought the lie easy enough and gave her a hall pass.

Candace walked straight past the bathrooms and headed downstairs. She just needed some air. She passed dozens of classrooms on her way to the doors that lead to the back garden, where there was a small, simple fountain that was beautiful at night. She was just passing the last one before the exit when hands shot out and yanked her into the darkness, a cloth stuffed into her mouth to choke off the cry of alarm that she had been about to scream.

“Shh,” the person whispered, their voice too low for her to tell if it was male for female. “Don’t scream.”

Candace breathed heavily into the cloth, but didn’t make a sound.

“I’m going to take the gag out,” the voice whispered. “Please don’t scream.”

The instant the cloth was out of her mouth, Candace summoned the strength to yell. She could feel herself yelling, but no sound escaped her lips.

“Seriously?” the person mocked, and Candace immediately recognized the voice.

She whipped around, the movement catching her captor off guard enough that she managed to twist free. “Zen?” she gasped out, but the word never reached the air.

Zen grinned, her hair cropped short into a pixie cut except for the three braids in her hair. Her fingers twitched and the spell dissipated. “What are you doing here? Where have you been and what have you done to your hair?” Candace demanded in a low whisper.

“Looking for you, reading up on a few things before I committed myself to something, and it’s a disguise.”

“What?”

“That girl in the infirmary, she’s a friend of yours right?”

“Yeah, I gue-“

“Tell me what happened to her to make her wink out like that. And not the story that everyone else is repeating about you triggering some death spell that found them instead of you because that is so blatantly wrong I can’t even find a decent starting point to explain why.”

A death spell? That’s what people were saying? Candace glanced around them, suddenly aware of how exposed they were. “It… I can’t talk about it here.”

“What, it’s not like you would be caught up in something majorly illegal.”

“Shh!” Candace hissed, casting a glance over her shoulder as if expecting a teacher to come around the corner at any moment.

Zen raised an eyebrow in appraisal at her for a long moment before consentingly opening the door to the classroom that they were huddled in front of. She slipped in behind Candace and let the door ease shut. She flicked on the light, but the sudden illumination caused Candace to flinch. She quickly flicked it off. “Are you crazy?” she hissed, “What if one of the teachers walks by and sees the light under the door?”

“And being caught together in a dark, empty room would certainly generate less rumours at an all-girls’ school than being caught with the lights on,” Zen replied smoothly.

“What do you want?”

“What really happened here last year?”

Candace sighed. “Basically, Sylvia, her boyfriend and her brother discovered that there was a magic artifact hidden somewhere in the school. A powerful one, a remnant from before even the Guild Wars. I was dating Fitz, Sylvia’s brother at the time, and I helped them figure out parts of “the Hunt” as they called it. We were really close to finding it, I know we were. We could all tell. That night, they were supposed to explore the dungeons, looking for something called the Essence. Fitz knew I didn’t like it down there, so he asked me to research a tangent that had come up a bunch of times about the Flowers of Price.” She felt Zen shiver as she said the name. It was cold in here.

“That night, they must have found something, maybe they even found the artifact itself. But they triggered a latent spell that must have been cast over twenty years ago, before they were outlawed. The spell triggered the school’s anti-magic system, and teachers were upon the scene within seconds. Fitz and Jason were killed on the spot, and Sylvia was severely burned, already unconscious by the time they got there. She’s been in the coma ever since.”

“Have any doctors looked at her?” Zen wanted to know.

“Her father’s the best in the field, and even he couldn’t make sense of it. He took whatever time he could scrape up in the first few weeks as he tried to figure out what was wrong, calling in favours from anyone who might have even the remotest chance to help. He even called in a Repeller, but he couldn’t do anything for her. Whatever it is, it’s not a spell.”

They stood there in silence for a little bit. Candace could almost hear the gears turning in Zen’s head. Zen shifted her weight, then sighed loudly. “She’s a good friend of yours, isn’t she.”

It wasn’t really a question. “Yeah. I mean, when we were first years, she hated me as much as the others did, but she didn’t pick on me for it, or forbid her brother from dating me. She can be a bit of a control freak, but she’s a great friend. The kind that sticks up for you in a fight that she barely just learned about.”

“Alright,” Zen said at last. “I’m going to do something tonight, but you are not allowed to talk about it, at all, to anyone. And we’re not talking about casting some sort of stupid Vow of Silence on ourselves. This is serious. You cannot breathe a word of this to a single soul, or even write it in your diary in code or anything like that. And no thinking about it around mind-readers either, because that’s the same as telling them.”

“What are you talking about?”

“How good are you at distracting people? I’d need you to keep it up for at least five minutes, probably closer to ten. It’s not like I’m experienced at this sort of thing.”

“I’m pretty decent, I guess. What thing?”

“Your friend Sylvia, that coma she’s in? It’s slowly killing her.”

“I know. Her father’s been working on a cure for months now, but he’s not getting any closer.”

“And I sincerely doubt that he ever will, especially if he’s treating this like it’s medical. It’s not. It’s hardly even magical. I can’t say more than that, thanks to those damn promises of silence that we always seem to be making, but there it is. Sylvia is dying, and I’m not even sure what I’m planning to do will help in any way, but it’s her best shot at recovery. If she’s in that state for much longer, it will become completely irreversible.”

What she was talking about finally sunk in. “You can wake her up?” Candace whispered. “H-how?”

Zen sighed. “Better you don’t know, besides my explanations aren’t always viewed as being the best way to put things. But I need to know. Are you with me? Can you do keep Madame Kirena off my back for ten minutes?”

Candace nodded and grabbed Zen’s outstretched hand. Zen flashed her a grin, seeing in the dim lighting Candace’s determination. “Excellent,” she whispered. “Now let’s go raise the dead.”

Distracting Madame Kirena was a lot easier than anticipated, thanks in no small part to the fact that Madame Kirena wasn’t very alert after her customary evening cup of hemlock tea. A mild concentration, but it still left her woozy. So when Candace wobbled into the infirmary, moaning with the most grotesque of painful whimpers, Madame Kirena immediately dashed to her side as quickly as her poisoned body could move. Candace collapsed on a bed on the opposite side of the room from Sylvia, so that Madame Kirena had her back to both her other patient and the ajar door, through which Zen quickly slipped and slithered into the visitor’s chair beside Sylvia.

“What seems to be the problem child?” Madame Kirena cooed.

“I was just getting up to go to the bathroom,” Candace moaned, “When my head suddenly felt completely light, as if I had nothing in there at all. I felt so dizzy and I couldn’t seem to get air to go in my lungs. I was breathing still, but nothing was going in and all of it was going out and I couldn’t move.”

Zen was bent over Sylvia, an ear pressed to her chest, her hands glowing a faint blue.

Madame Kirena’s hands were pressing down on her stomach. “There dear, does that hurt?” her hands moved to another spot and Candace gasped out in sudden faked pain.

Now Zen was sitting cross-legged at Sylvia’s feet, massaging her toes. Her lips were moving, but Candace couldn’t hear the words.

Madame Kirena tutted to herself. “My dear, it appears that you may be experiencing sub-acute renal hemorrhage.”

“Is it serious?” Candace asked as she watched Zen out of the corner of her eye. Now Zen leaned forward and flicked Sylvia on the right hand and leaned to the side to do it to the left as well. What in the world was she doing?

“Not at all, my dear. It’s nothing a bit of Barmarian elixir won’t fix.”

She turned towards Zen, since the medicines were all stored on that side. Before she could turn enough to spot Zen, now standing on the bed and towering over Sylvia with her arms raised as if she were pretending to be a monster or something else equally as silly-scary, Candace snatched at her wrist and yanked her back. “What’s that?” she asked, allowing fear to creep into her voice.

“Oh, it’s nothing bad my dear. It just has a bit of foxglove, yarrow root, the