Arc 1: Chapter 8: Curse-burdened Wanderers
The clouds had cleared by the time we finished burying the troll, and red had bled across the sky. A thin gray silt had been left across scores of miles by the ashfall earlier in the day, giving the irkwood a dour, surreal quality.
Lisette stood from the last of the markers we’d made from river stone and shattered pieces of the old bridge, murmuring a preosta — a priest cant. She moved first to Olliard, pressing her auremark against his chest and cleansing him of both disease and malignant od that might have clung to him from handling the troll’s carcass. He breathed a sigh of relief at the touch of her magic and smiled, murmuring thanks.
When the young cleric moved to me to do the same, I held up a hand to stop her. “No need,” I said. “I’m covered.”
The doctor’s apprentice frowned, studying me. When I didn’t elaborate, she huffed in frustration. “You’re the one who told me I should do this,” she remarked pointedly.
I didn’t want to tell her I was largely immune to disease and had my own protections against curses, and I especially didn’t want the cleric to make contact with my own aura. She’d probably sense something off with it, and that wasn’t a conversation I was interested in having.
She was using her power to stitch up your wounds, I reminded myself. If she was going to notice anything, she’d have done so already.
Maybe so, but it was still a risk I wasn’t interested in taking. I’d get myself cleansed later if I needed to. There were other ways besides the services of a priest.
“We need to get moving,” I said. I nodded toward the bridge. “Now we’ve buried the poor bastard who built that, it should be safe enough to cross it. Should be, mind. Your chimera warded?”
Olliard nodded. “Of course. I had her protections renewed only a few weeks ago by a mage in Isengotta.”
With that, there wasn’t much more to say. Olliard took another ten minutes to fuss over his beast, and I watched him add a few more small baubles to the array of charms tied either to the hog-headed creature’s harness or woven into her coarse fur. Surreptitiously, I closed my eyes and inspected the wards with my auratic senses. They weren’t the best work, but they were professionally done. They’d serve.
Lisette watched me the entire time Olliard was tending to Brume. I grew annoyed with the attention and glared at her. “What?” Burying the troll had been foul work, and between that and my taste of the creature’s dying trauma I wasn’t in the best of moods.