Chapter 472: A Good Student
"Noooo!" Hauke shouted from deep within his mind. He’d been listening attentively and observing while the two men worked but now, what was this madness? They wanted to cut off his horn to break the curse? He would rather die!
"No, you can’t!" Hauke roared, his voice echoing off the icy walls of the cavern within his mind. "Why can’t you hear me! Do something so you can hear me first, old man! Do something so you can talk to me before you start cutting on me!"
The cave that held Hauke prisoner shook and trembled with a combination of his fear and anger as he threw himself once again at Eraric’s binding spell, trying to do anything, anything at all to demonstrate how unwilling he was to suffer such an extreme mutilation.
"You can’t touch his horn," Aspakos said, stepping between Hauke and the smiling artificer. "I promised that we wouldn’t treat him until Lady Nyrielle passed judgment and she’s not going to do that until she holds court tomorrow night. Put the saw down and think of what else could be done to free him from this curse."
"You know that my sign says ’curses broken’, not ’curses gently removed’ right?" Erkembalt said with a huff as he put down the saw. "I’m not a healer. My methods aren’t delicate and my customers understand that."
"I doubt your customers would come to you if they had any other alternative," the other sorcerer said ruffling his feathers and heaving a heavy sigh of relief that his friend hadn’t been insistent about following the quickest path forward. "But we have alternatives. We’re traveling with witches now, aren’t we? If you can reveal the intricacies of the curse, then the Severing Knife of a witch is the perfect tool for gently prying it out."
"Reveal it’s intricacies? Do you know how long that would take?" Erkembalt says, shaking his head. "We have at most a day. In that time, I can find one or two other methods to remove the curse by force but if you want me to reveal it’s intricacies well enough to unravel it..."
"Then, not enough to unravel it," Aspakos suggested, thinking of a different approach he could take with his stubborn friend. "Understand it well enough to explain to Lady Ashlynn and Lady Nyrielle. When they sit in judgment, they will want to know what we’ve learned. Since you’ve found one solution already," he said, charitably referring to the notion of cutting off the young Frost Walker’s horn as a ’solution.’ "Let’s see how many more we can find."
Inwardly, Hauke heaved a huge sigh of relief of his own. He’d started to notice something when they applied the strange, silvery powder to his horn but before he could consider it, the mad butcher had picked up a saw and started talking about cutting off his horn!
Now that the man with the broken beak had managed to once again talk sense into the saw wielding madman, Hauke returned his attention to the strange sensations he felt from his horn since Erkembalt applied the powder.
Before, he’d only noticed the way the curse manifested on him within his own mind. He could feel the ice surrounding his hands and feet, binding him in place, trapping him between two pillars of ice within his mind, but the mental space he’d shared with the ancestral spirits was so realistic he’d forgotten that it was only a manifestation of imagination.
This space was his own mind, and within it, he should be its master. The actions of the ancestors had robbed him of his ability to control his own body, but his mind was still his to do with as he pleased. While he might not be able to free himself from the ice that bound him, he could still do a great deal to change the space around him.