When he finaly woke up, several hours later, Gary helped him drink some water. After that Matthew attempted to mend some of his broken
bones, but quickly gave up. His concentration was shot, and his magesight suffered from the same sort of blurriness that his normal vision did.
His sternum was cracked, which was why breathing was so difficult, but beyond that, and his mutilated hand, his body was fairly sound . He had an amazing colection of bruises, his thigh was lacerated, and somehow he had lost most of the hair on the left side of his head. The part that remained smeled burned, but the skin of his scalp was unharmed.
He needed to go home.
To do that he would need a teleportation circle, but he doubted he could draw one in his condition. Fortunately, Gary was there. He didn’t even have to describe it or do the calculation to create the local rune key. The machine had seen him make them before, and Matt had already taught him the formula for the key.
The android patiently cleared a wide area of grass, and using a smal stick, drew the lines and runes on the fresh soil. The circle wouldn’t survive past the next rain, but it didn’t need to. Hefting Matthew with strong arms, he carried the wizard into the circle.
Matt couldn’t help but cry out when he was lifted, but he consoled himself by deciding it was a ‘heroic’ cry of pain, rather than the more ordinary, pathetic sort.
Once they were in the circle, he put forth the smal amount of aythar necessary to activate it, and then he was home.
***
When he woke next, he was lying in bed. His bed, in his room. He didn’t move at first. Just enjoyed the silence and the lack of pain. It might have been perfect, but his sister was sitting in a chair beside him.
He turned his eyes to look at her without moving his head, just to be safe. “Moira.”
“Myra,” she replied. “She let me have a turn.”
“Oh,” he said, somewhat surprised.
“Everyone’s been taking turns,” she added, “even Conal and Irene. Mom was sick to death with worry when she saw you.”
Matthew shifted slightly, noting the lack of pain in his chest. His sternum was fixed. A quick check showed that his other injuries had been similarly remedied. His hand was strange, though. He could feel it, but it was absent in his magesight. He lifted his arm to look at it.
It ended three inches short of where his wrist should have been. The stump was wrapped in a heavy linen bandage. A profound “Oh,” emerged
from his lips. He had known it would happen. He had been warned, but he stil wondered why it was al gone. The translation pane had only taken half his hand off. The wrist, half his palm, and part of his thumb should have stil been there.
“We couldn’t save it,” sympathized Myra. “They let Moira do most of the healing, since Dad was so impressed with how wel she had put your
arm on after you cut it off that time.”
“That was a secret,” he said sourly. “You said you wouldn’t tel.”
“Moira made that promise,” said Myra promptly. “That was before I existed, but I thought he should know. He was amazed. You hardly have a scar from that, so he let her do the healing.”
“And she let you do it for her,” he finished for her, jumping to the conclusion.
She blushed slightly. “Yes. Since I’m not ‘tainted’, she felt safer letting me do it.”
“Is this problem of hers like a disease?” he asked.
“Sort of, but it isn’t one you can catch,” Myra replied. “It’s more of a temptation. She worried she might change you since you were
unconscious and your defenses were down.”
“Change me?”
“Alter your personality,” Myra supplied. “She did a lot of it in Dunbar. Once you start doing it, it’s hard to stop. It’s a little like being a drunk.
‘Just one more drink,’ they say, but they can’t stop. In this case, it’s ‘I’l just fix that one annoying quirk’.”
“Wow,” he said mildly. The more he learned, the more it sounded like his sister had a serious, and disturbing, problem. He decided to drop the issue and return to the matter at hand. He lifted his abbreviated appendage. “Back to this.”
“We couldn’t save it,” she repeated. “I sealed the wound, the skin, fixed the blood vessels, but it just kept festering. I don’t know what you did to it, but the flesh was dying. Even the parts that looked undamaged blistered and then began to rot. You caught a fever from it, and Lady Thornbear was worried it would turn gangrenous.”
By ‘Lady Thornbear,’ she meant Elise Thornbear, Gram’s grandmother. While the old woman was no mage, she was highly skiled in the
healing arts, particularly with herbs—and sometimes poisons.
“She tried several poultices, but nothing worked,” said Myra, continuing. “Eventualy, she advised us to remove it. You might have died
otherwise.” She sounded apologetic.
Matthew sighed, “It’s al right. I didn’t expect to keep it. I made the choice, and this was the price.”
“You sound like you made a pact with a dark god. Like a story in an old fairy tale,” said Myra.
He laughed a little. “You could think of it that way, but it was nothing so sinister.” Then he laughed some more at his unintended pun: sinister. It was probably the opposite of sinister to lose one’s left hand. “I just knew that if I used it to recover my staff that it would be ruined. It was either that or give up and come home without the egg.” That prompted another thought. “The egg…”
She understood immediately. “Zephyr’s out hunting. He’l be back in a while.”
Now he was confused. Had they let someone else bond with the egg while he was unconscious? He knew there were other eggs, but after
everything he had been through, it seemed calous. “Who…?”
“You bonded him, when you woke last,” she replied.
“How long have I been out? I don’t remember waking.”
“Over a week,” said Myra. Then she reached over and touched the side of his head. The scalp had been shaved clean. “Examine that spot,”
she told him.
Since he didn’t have a hand on that side, he used his magesight, and was surprised to find that a smal hole had been driled through his skul.
“What’s this about?”
“It was Dad’s idea,” she answered. “Your brain was sweling. He made the hole to let the pressure out. Apparently, he’s done something similar before, or I’d never have known it was a possible solution.”
“You’ve been up several times,” she went on. “Relieved yourself, eaten, taken water. But you seemed dazed, and each time we weren’t sure if you were realy conscious or not. You responded to commands, but this is the first time you’ve spoken.”
“And I bonded with the egg like that?”
She nodded. “It was the first thing you did. Then you passed out again. That was before the sweling and the trephination, so your thoughts might have been clear that time, but you didn’t say anything to anyone.”
“Trephination?”
She tapped her skul. “That’s what Elise caled it. Apparently, it was an old medical practice, but she thought it was quackery. She told your Dad it would kil you, but he ignored her. I think she was annoyed when he proved her wrong.”
Reaching over his head with his right hand, he felt the soft spot where the bone was missing. It was disconcerting. “Couldn’t he have put the piece of bone back?”
Myra laughed. “It had to stay open for several days.” Then she held up her hands. “Not to the air, of course, or you might have gotten sick. He closed the skin over it immediately. But the bone had to stay out so that fluids could escape the skul. Anyway, he said you’d probably need it open so you could survive when Mom finaly gets a chance to try and beat some sense into you. No point in having to do the trephination twice.”
Somehow, he didn’t find the joke as funny as she obviously did. A knock at the door interrupted their conversation,
and his magesight told him it was Karen.
She entered a moment later, and her eyes grew wide when she looked at him. “Is he talking?” she asked Myra.
His recently minted sister nodded, and he merely responded, “Of course.”
Things rapidly devolved into chaos after that. First Karen descended on him, and he thought he might die under the onslaught of her hugging and tears, but it got much worse when the news escaped the room. Soon he was mobbed by his entire family. His sister Irene was beside herself, sobbing so much he thought she must have developed a mental condition.
Idly, he wondered if she was competing to see who could cry more, she or their mother.
Conal took the news more stoicaly, but he was obviously relieved. There were no dry eyes in the room. Even Moira grew weepy, after Myra
let her resume control of their shared body.
Al in al, he was happy to see them, but the tears and continual hugging made him feel as though he were suffocating. He was grateful when
Penny finaly shooed everyone from the room so he could rest.
Naturaly, Penny remained. She had probably run everyone out just so she could have him to herself, as much as to grant him relief from al the fussing, but contrary to Myra’s joke, she did not attempt to ‘beat some sense into him.’
She fussed over him without interference, as was a mother’s right. They talked a while, and then he pretended to sleep, and she pretended to believe he was sleeping, content merely to watch him.
After a while, his pretense became reality, and he drifted into dreams.
Epilogue
The weeks passed into months, and Matthew grew steadily stronger. Despite al that had happened, he was surprised at how long it took him
to recover fuly. His head injury had been worse than he had realized at the time.
He missed his hand, though. That was one thing that wouldn’t heal. For not the first time, he wished he were an archmage like his father, who could heal almost any wound when he merged with something and then returned to himself. His body could be recreated in whatever fashion was dictated by his self-image.
It wasn’t quite that simple, but he could do it, whereas Matt could not. His father had offered to try to fix it for him, but the danger was considerable. To do so, he would have to use his unique gift to listen, become Matthew, and then to reimagine his body in its original, whole form.
He had done something similar once to save Elaine’s life, and he had later confessed to Matthew that he stil wasn’t certain if he were the original Mordecai, or if their spirits had traded places. His father had his own memories, and she had hers, so it was a technical point; but it bothered him nonetheless.
No, Matt preferred keeping his body as it was, and his inner world private. As close as he was to his father, he didn’t relish the thought of
‘merging’ with anyone.
That didn’t mean he planned to accept the status quo, though. In his memories of the distant past, one of his ancestors had lost an arm and replaced it with a magical one. He intended to do the same.
With access to Gary’s knowledge of human anatomy and the workings of the nervous system, he thought perhaps he had a chance to do an
even better job of it than his ancestor had done. If anything, he savored the chalenge. If he was to be the world’s greatest enchanter, replacing a lost hand was merely the first obstacle in his path.
Of course, he wouldn’t have had Gary to refer to, if his longer-lasting, more durable self hadn’t finaly walked into Castle Cameron about three weeks after Matthew’s return. His better looking, human-like android had lapsed into statue-like quiescence only days after they had gotten back, a victim of his short-lived batteries.
The military android’s RTG wouldn’t last forever, though. He had only a span of months left at most, but together they had come up with a
solution.
The RTG generated power through the conversion of heat into electricity. The heat was supplied by the slow decay of radioisotopes, but any heat would work. It merely had to be steady and constant.
Creating an enchanted stone of the proper size and proportions, which would produce the right amount of heat for a long period of time,
couldn’t be simpler for an enchanter like Matthew or his father. The core of the RTG was removed and buried, replaced with a heat source that would last at least a year, and one they could recharge when needed.
Gary wasn’t happy with being stuck in the military android body, however. It was cold and unexpressive. With their help, the AI came up with a plan to swap the thermoelectric power source in his military android body with the batteries in the civilian android.
It wasn’t perfect. The former RTG was a little larger than the batteries had been, so he had a noticeable bulge in his lower back, but it wasn’t anything that loose clothing wouldn’t cover, and he was pleased to have a face that could show emotion. It was also nice having a form that didn’t frighten people. No one who didn’t know him could even tel he was a machine, rather than a human.
Matthew and Karen’s relationship remained strange. They had both reluctantly accepted that everyone thought they were a couple, but neither of them were completely comfortable with it. They did things together occasionaly—walks, a picnic or two—but they stil weren’t ready to make any permanent arrangements.
Of course, she had been understandably angry with him for sending her back against her wil. She hadn’t expressed that at first, while he was recovering, but once he was nearly back to ful health, she had let him know. She had said she had forgiven him, but there was stil a distant look in her eyes whenever the topic came up. He could tel he had wounded her pride, but he had no idea what to do about it.
As with most things he was helpless to change, he simply put it out of his thoughts.
But she didn’t.
***
One spring morning, several months later, Matthew was sitting with Zephyr, watching the dragon eat half a goat. His new dragon, Desacus’s
descendant, was already half grown. The enchantment that created and sustained them saw to that.
Matt had somehow hoped his dragon would be more like his previous self, but his personality was different. Not bad, just different. Zephyr was more gregarious and open. He possessed a sense of humor, but it wasn’t the same as the dry, sarcastic wit that Desacus had shown.
Matt missed the dark humor.
As he watched Zephyr eat, a thought occurred to him. “You ever wonder what human would taste like?”
The dragon turned one eye to look at him and it widened with surprise, “No. Have you?”
He waved his hands. “No, no, of course not. I’m not a cannibal. I just wondered if you ever thought about it.”
The dragon coughed. “That’s disgusting. It would be like you eating horse. Would you eat a horse?”
He remembered what Desacus had said about horses and cattle. “Actualy, a horse looks a lot more appetizing to me than a cow.”
The dragon regarded him as though he might be il. “You’re sick. How about a dog, then? Humans are close to dogs too. Would you eat one
of them?”
Thinking of Annie, he immediately replied, “No. Definitely not.”
Zephyr sniffed. “That’s something at least. Not sure if I trust you enough to sleep near you anymore, though. You might take it into your head to try dragon next.”
Matthew laughed. “Fair enough. But back to my original question. You’ve never thought that people might be tasty?”
The dragon swalowed his latest bite and then pushed the last of the carcass away. The conversation had made him lose his appetite. “Why
would anyone think that? Not to be rude, but humans smel awful. When you bathe, you smel like flowers and grass, when you don’t bathe, it’s even worse. Not to mention al the metal, cloth, and other odd bits you people cover yourselves with. I can think of nothing worse to eat than human, and I’m beginning to question your sanity for bringing it
up.”
“What if they were already dead? Like if you found someone who had had an accident?”
Zephyr narrowed his eyes to slits. “What sort of ‘accident’?”
“Maybe they fel off a cliff, for example.”
“There’s stil the clothes and metal and stuff,” protested the dragon.
Matthew was undeterred. “Let’s say they were naked, or that I stripped the body for you. Or maybe—hel, say it was cooked too. How about
then?”
“I would say that I need to talk to your parents,” answered Zephyr. “There’s something not right with your head. Where would you even get an idea like that?”
Matt shrugged. “Nowhere in particular. Just something I wondered, you being such a dangerous looking carnivore and al.” He refrained from
bringing up Desacus. Mentioning Zephyr’s predecessor inevitably made things awkward.
Considering the dragon’s comments on how humans smeled, he decided that Desacus’s remarks had probably been al for show, since they
had probably smeled the same to him. It would be just like him to come up with a topic like that just to shock his master.
He started to wipe his face with his left hand and then switched to his right. His eyes were damp for some reason, and the cold metal of his artificial hand wasn’t wel suited to rubbing them.
Idly, he wondered if he should add an enchantment to warm the metal slightly, to a more human temperature. Maybe later; this was just his first prototype, after al. He had many more improvements to make first.
***
A week later Karen found him in his new workshop, where he was working on the next iteration of his prosthetic hand. Gary had suggested he
use a metal caled titanium, but his information on how it could be found and smelted sounded like a lot of trouble.
Matt had decided to wait until he had perfected the design in steel first. This ‘titanium’ sounded wonderful, being lighter and stronger, but he didn’t want to go to the effort of refining it until he had his design complete beyond any question of a doubt.