Total pages in book: 20
Estimated words: 18410 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 92(@200wpm)___ 74(@250wpm)___ 61(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 18410 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 92(@200wpm)___ 74(@250wpm)___ 61(@300wpm)
Archer was asleep atop the soft duvet, his chest and feet both bare, his golden hair spread unbound over the pillow. One arm was thrown over his face, the other spasmed slightly above his naked stomach. Fosch could see right away the thin, slick sheen of sweat that covered his brother’s bare torso. The windows had been left open; the room wintry cold despite it being spring outside. There was no reason for the sweat, for the bare chest, for an open window . . . for an unlit fire.
His brother was truly sick, Fosch realized with a jolt. Until that moment he had been hoping he was wrong, that his brother’s snappish mood and extra hour of sleep hadn’t been symptoms of the plague but a reaction to something else.
Now, with the truth staring him in the eye, he knew he couldn’t fail here. How long did his brother have? How did this plague work, exactly? Why was every individual affected in a different way?
Fosch approached the bed slowly, his steps muffled by the thick winter rugs that still covered the gleaming wood planks. An empty glass lay sideways on the stand, a pair of forgotten earrings sat beside it. It was the only feminine touch he could see in the room.
For an instance, Fosch just stood there, watching the lines of the parts he could see from his brother’s face.
He didn’t look peaceful asleep, he thought. A half-formed snarl marred his lips; his fingers spasmed; the veins on his neck stood at attention.
He looked like a man on the verge of rage.
With a steady hand Fosch took the prick syringe and injected the horse sedative into Archer’s bicep. Archer’s arm lowered, his eyes opened a moment and a growl passed his lips. Then confusion entered his eyes before they glazed, the snarl died. Archer’s arm fell off the bed, and Fosch gently placed it over his naked stomach. Fosch then unlaced the small pouch with the herbs and roots he had mashed together, dipped a small paintbrush into the sharp smelling concoction.
It took Fosch the better part of an hour to perfectly draw all the sigils on Archer’s chest, forehead, abdomen, and then inlay each sigil with a power rune. He’d practiced the precision of the work last night, not wanting to have to draw the symbols more than once and risk smudging the work. The size of the sigil should be precise, balanced in a way that it could accommodate the smaller size of the runes and binding stones without touching one another.
Fosch placed the exotic binding stones on the middle of each rune, pricked his finger with a sharp scalpel-like talon and trapped the symbols inside a blood circle. He had to slice his finger a few times to keep on the flow.
It was a simple enough task, to trap the energy within the circles, a basic ritual his mother had taught him when he was just a boy.
He circled next the sigil on Archer’s chest, started from the top and moved clockwise, then the third one on the forehead. Chakra points, three of the major seven. Once every sigil had been circled, he placed one more stone, the opposite stone from the one inside the circle, out of the circle, facing north. Blue for the red stone, green for the yellow, white for the black.
When every symbol had been drawn, bound and powered, Fosch began pulling energy from his body, directing it at the outer stones, which in turn would mirror energy on the inner stones and awaken them. The sigils, healing symbols his mother rarely had occasion to use, would travel through Archer’s entire body and ‘herd’ whatever unhealthiness lived within the body, pulling it back into the circle. He added the containment rune to focus the plague in the middle of the sigil, where each stone would absorb the bad blood or vibes. He hoped the plague was an ethereal thing, something that wouldn’t need to draw blood, as he had read that drawing blood into a healing circle could be as fatal as the disease itself. Since his only other choice was to let the plague take on its deadly course, he chose to take a chance with the binding stones and the ritual.
Once the inner stone had received enough bad energy – or blood – the outer stone would circle around the bloody circle and contain the stone and keep it from overloading and exploding. He had never done this before, hadn’t found the ritual written anywhere in his mother’s journal, his grandmother’s from his mother’s side, or his great-grandmother’s. Or in any of the dusty journals he had found. But there were mentions here and there, a partial containment for the black fever, a healing sigil for the evil snake fordra – whatever that was – and of course, the binding ritual the Seelie used to banish a treasonous Seelie into their elemental form.