Spellbreaker: Book 3 of the Spellwright Trilogy. Blake Charlton
the Cerulean Strait—a narrow stretch of water between the Chandralu peninsula and the northern headlands that connected the ocean with the Bay of Standing Islands. She could not yet make out any of the famous limestone islands as they were found only in the bay’s eastern waters.
Decades ago Francesca had been written by the ancient demon Typhon and placed in the city of Avel in an attempt to convert Nicodemus. Together, she and Nico had escaped the demon’s control and defeated him.
In creating Francesca, Typhon had given her memories of a physician who had studied in the clerical academy in Port Mercy and then practiced in the famous infirmary of Chandralu. As a result, Francesca had a wealth of personal and historical memories of the archipelago.
It had been a long time since she’d last visited. Ixos was now her daughter’s domain—for better or worse—and her memories of the archipelago and its history had become intermingled with the guilt, longing, and anger that she felt whenever she thought of Leandra.
In fact, Francesca had lately come to see how well Ixos fit Leandra. For example, the Ixonian histories reported that the ancient Lotus People had built Sukrapor, their first and greatest city, on a wide limestone mantle where the Bay of Standing Islands now stood. Back then, there was no bay, only a narrow estuary where the Matrunda River met the sea. Sukrapor had thrived until the Sea People had ventured out of the inner island chain on voyaging canoes and catamarans. The wars between the two cultures had been savage.
The fiercest battles had been fought in the estuary; the Sea People’s ancient gods had again and again smashed themselves into the rock mantel below Sukrapor, dissolving limestone from beneath the city into the hundreds of tall standing islands that lined the eastern aspect of the bay.
The Sea People would have been victorious if the ancient Lotus gods had not made a desperate alliance with the Cloud People of the outer island chain. Though few in number, the Cloud People possessed the earliest form of the hydromancer’s magical language. When the first water temple was built and the nascent order of hydromancers had formed, the balance of power in the archipelago had evened.
The wars had raged for decades, weakening all combatants, and ended only when the First Neosolar Empire expanded out of Trillinion to subjugate the entire archipelago. Under imperial rule, the Lotus People had retreated up the Matrunda River to build Matrundapor. An age later, when the First Neosolar Empire had crumbled, one deity from each of the archipelago’s cultures had fused themselves together to form the Trimuril, the first divinity complex. United under this deity, the three Ixonian peoples won independence as the kingdom of Ixos and founded Chandralu as their capital.
However, as was so often the case in history, strife among the cultures had continued. The ancient prejudices remained. Skirmishes and even small wars between Sea and Lotus, Cloud and Sea, Lotus and Cloud continued to the present day.
Francesca wondered again if this history wasn’t the reason Leandra had chosen to dedicate her short life to the archipelago. The Lotus Culture, the Sea Culture, the Cloud Culture, all composed the body of Ixos. Each was now dependent on the others, and yet periodically at war with one another.
Ixos, the archipelago, was vibrantly alive and yet at war with itself, just as Leandra’s body was intensely alive and yet at war with itself.
Thinking of her daughter’s disease felt like a taste of ash to Francesca. She thought of all the patients she had cured. Francesca would have forsaken them all if it had allowed her to cure her daughter. Instead, she had only managed to turn her daughter’s childhood into an endless series of examinations and experiments. During all those years, they had made only one discovery: During a disease flare, high doses of stress hormones could calm her body’s attack on her textual aspects.
Until this discovery, Francesca had not thought that Leandra would live past her tenth year. Now, even though she took the stress hormones during her disease flares, it did not seem that Leandra would live past forty years, a very young age to die for someone of her heritage. So it was that Leandra was Francesca’s most beautiful creation, her greatest failure.
Francesca thought about her other mistakes as a mother. At the time, there had seemed to be so little choice. So little choice, especially fourteen years ago in Port Mercy. Perhaps it was that night, that exact night, when she had lost her daughter.
“Magistra?”
Francesca turned to see that Ellen had come back up on deck. She was a petite woman, dark skin, deep-set brown eyes, short glossy black hair, wearing a grand wizard’s black robes. It was good to see her. “Ellen, were you able to sleep at all?”
Ellen stepped beside her. “Slept like the dead, which always makes me happy.”
“Am I not letting you sleep enough?”
“No,” Ellen said while looking at the sea. “But since I enjoy sleeping like the dead, I assume it’s evidence that I won’t mind actually being dead.”
“There’s a cheerful morning greeting for you.”
Ellen smiled. “I forgot that Magistra is an immortal before she is a physician, so gallows humor will be lost on her.”
“I’m afraid, my brilliant student, that your humor is lost on almost everyone.”
“Better to have a lost sense of humor than none at all.”
Francesca scowled. “You laugh at my jokes.”
“A junior physician is required to laugh with her senior physicians when they are present. It helps make up for how much she laughs at them in their absence.”
Francesca looked at her sideways. “You are reminding me why I chose you as my Lornish envoy.”
“Because you respect my judgment and enjoy my dry wit?”
“No, because you’re short.”
“Well, they say brevity is the soul of wit …” Ellen looked over at Francesca’s collarbone and then, exaggeratedly, looked up at her six feet of height. “Oh my, Magistra, I think I may have discovered why you’re not funny.”
Francesca sighed. “So you don’t have any bright ideas about who that sea deity was either?”
“None,” Ellen mumbled. The young physician always took failure at any task, even the impossible ones, as a personal insult. Maybe that was why Francesca liked her.
They stood together and listened to the sailors call to each other. Finally Ellen broke their reverie. “Magistra, you don’t seem that nervous about meeting your daughter.”
“That’s nice to hear, because I feel like I might puke.”
“Dragon’s vomit?”
“Crack another pun and you might make this one do so.”
“Don’t you think that is mildly hypocritical of you?”
“There’s nothing mild about my hypocrisy. I too am guilty of puns.”
“So,” Ellen said and then sighed, “you couldn’t think of a reason why that sea deity showed up either?”
“Nope.”
They fell silent again. The sun, now fully up, was illuminating the bright clouds and the dark Ixonian jungles. Through the Cerulean Strait, Francesca could make out the first of the Standing Islands.
“Magistra, this is apropos of nothing, but given what you’ve told me of your past, can I ask a rather personal question?”
“If I say ‘no,’ would that stop you from doing so?”
“Previous experience suggests not.”
“Better get it over with then.”
“When we take our news to Lord Nicodemus, do you really think your daughter might try to kill you?”
“Yes,” Francesca said, “and I wouldn’t blame her.”