The next twenty hours proceeded forward in a clumsy mismatch of lurching sprints and low belly crawls. Mara’s mind adopted a singular focus, separating from her task only long enough to put her son to bed and, ten hours later, wake him up for the next day. She didn’t know what she’d have done if he’d started the day clingy and nervous instead of flying off with glee to play with his new friends. Fortunately, he spared her that moral quandary.

  With Nick content and cared for, Mara spent every remaining moment focused solely on Carissa. She brewed. She coaxed the wan, listless child to drink water and tea. She comforted Lev and Farin. She forced Eli to take his mandatory hourly breaks. And then she did it all again. And again, in a layered, overlapping, rippling blanket of time.

  Late the next morning, time straightened itself out as she found herself standing over the kitchen table with Vauntner at her side, performing the final uncertain step of the brew–the last point where something could go wrong. Vauntner held the handles of the pot with a towel, the base half submerged in frigid well water. Mara briskly stirred the mixture within the pot as it cooled.

  “What do we do if it doesn’t come together?” Vauntner muttered.

  “It will.” She stirred harder, biting her lip as she watched wet, waxy clumps form in the watery liquid.

  “But what if it doesn’t?”

  “Steps four and five turned out perfectly. If it doesn’t come together, we made a mistake in combining them. We saved enough of the broth to start over at step six.”

  “That’ll take hours.”

  “I know.” She swiped at the loose hairs that tickled at her damp temples. “But it doesn’t matter. It’ll come together. Stop talking and let me concentrate.”

  Her stomach churned aggressively as she mixed the topical. Her annoyance with Vauntner aside, he was right. It would take hours to start over, and she didn’t know if Carissa had hours left. Despite Eli’s magic and Mara’s own dedicated efforts to keep the girl hydrated, her body was wasting away before their eyes, consuming itself in the effort to remain alive in spite of the ravaging toxin. If the topical didn’t come together in time, Mara may very well have prolonged her suffering for no reason.

  Which was why it was going to come together.

  Lumps formed on the spoon and she scraped them off, broke them up against the bottom of the pot, and kept stirring. Vauntner, wisely, kept quiet as they both watched the oily surface of the mixture eddy with the movement of the spoon, clumps bobbing sporadically to the surface. She reversed direction and stirred more vigorously, mustering her focus. None of the steps for this brew required channeling, but this one tended to work better with it. There’d been an asterisk by the step in her Codex, and a footnote that consisted of a tiny sketch of interlocking hands next to a circled letter ‘v.’ Her shorthand for ‘visualize joining.’

  She closed her eyes and imagined first interlocking hands, then loose fibers twisting into yarn. Water poured from two vessels into one. Puzzle pieces slotting together. Braided hair. Small children, stumbling into a fumbling embrace.

  A door clicked shut and footsteps approached, stopping in the entryway to the kitchen, but she hardly registered what was happening around her. Her mind, after so many months of practice, knew the motions of control. Her hand moved on its own, stirring the loose, clumpy mixture as she let herself fall deeper into the images. Joining. A waterfalling, tumbling into a deep, waiting pool. Vines, twisting around tree trunks.

  Other things. Intimate, powerful things.

  Clasped hands, pressed deep into down and soft cotton, damp with sweat. Beads of sweat, mixing and melding into a thin sheen between feverish bodies, driven to a frenzy by flailing hearts. Heartbeats, first offset and then falling into rhythm. The rhythm of joining itself, slow at first and then quickening to the endless split second of a lightning bolt.

  A bolt of blue lightning lanced through her, and she would have fallen if not for the hand that materialized at her elbow, a second at her waist.

  She blinked and found herself still standing, still stirring a mixture that had, between one moment and the next, thickened to a smooth, goopy-grainy consistency that resisted the spoon more with each rotation. The color had changed from a sickly yellow to pale blue.

  “I can take over stirring,” Eli said from very close, too close. She looked up and found him all but pressed against her, and only just then realized that it was his hands at her elbow and her waist. She must have almost fallen, caught in the channeling. Perhaps she should have been sitting, but she never expected anything so powerful to happen. Without a source in direct proximity, channeling was little more than an energetic nudge, and she’d had nothing alive in proximity from which to draw. It only worked with plants and certain animals, not humans. There were natural protections in place to shield a person’s magic, as hard as a skull bone and as vital. One could crack the barrier, but nobody had ever survived it. Neither Eli nor Vauntner appeared to have had their magical, figurative skulls cracked.

  But she’d definitely channeled something.

  “Mara, I can take over,” Eli said again, drawing her sluggish mind back to the present. The mixture had now thickened to a paste.

  Mara didn’t stop stirring and she didn’t hand over the spoon. She would have tugged out of his hold, but her balance was off. She wasn’t dizzy so much as she was rising and falling on a floor that undulated like the surface of a boat. Not that she’d ever been on a boat, but she’d seen the way they bobbed and seesawed when they were docked at the river.

  “It’s done,” she said, giving one last sweep of the spoon before smacking it against the edge of the pot to clear the excess. She lifted the spoon for a whiff. It smelled right. It looked right. “It came together.”

  “That was amazing!” Vauntner exclaimed, his contained demeanor falling away to boyish excitement. “Can you always see the channeling like that?”

  See the channeling? Mara couldn’t wrap her mind around the question. One couldn’t see channeling. It moved beyond the realm of the senses proper. That’s what sensing was–reaching beyond what one could see, hear, smell, taste, and touch.

  Take Eli’s voice for example.

  “Get a chair,” he said, and yes, there were the words, one could hear those plainly. Anyone could. There was the cadence and the volume. Considering all the pieces of the thing together, one could hear, with ears, a fair amount. Urgency. Significance. But there was also so much to hear that the ears couldn’t possibly pick up. Things that registered beneath the skin. Command. Concern. Though honestly, it was one thing to hear, another thing to hear, and an entire third thing to actually understand. She heard and she heard, but she couldn’t for her life piece together why Eli needed a chair in the first place, let alone why he was being so intense about it with all those bloodred threads in his voice. “Vauntner, get a chair.”

  “Oh. Oh. Yeah. Yeah, just a–”

  There was a scrape of wood on wood, and the water beneath her imaginary boat rocked it upward in a way that didn’t feel imaginary at all. Her knees buckled with the force, and suddenly she was sitting. A hand gripped the back of her shirt, another cupped her shoulder, and she was levered forward until her forehead rested on her knees. The fist gripping her shirt relaxed into a hand, flat between her shoulder blades.

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  “Get some water.”

  “Is she okay?”

  “She’s fine. Water.”

  Footsteps and the clatter of ceramic. Water splashing. The hand at her back sent little rivulets of refreshing cool across her back, through her chest, out to her toes and her fingers. Another, more powerful wave washed through her skull and she was no longer rocking on an imaginary boat or rambling down winding roads of nonsense thought. She was firmly in reality, planted on a hard chair, folded double with one arm dangling toward the ground and the other pressed painfully between her belly and her thigh. The pieces fell into place.

  First–she’d just worked yet another piece of impossible magic, another appropriation of Eli’s energy. Because there was no other explanation except divine coincidence for the fact that she’d felt that jolt of lightning right when the brew had come together. She had been channeling and there was nothing else to channel from but the two men, and if it had to be one of them, she was fairly certain it wasn’t Vauntner.

  Second–the brew had come together.

  Third–she’d apparently fainted.

  Fourth–the brew had come together!

  Fifth–Eli was talking. Again. Still. His voice no longer resounded with meaning as it had before, but it was still a little richer than normal. “Mara?” The hand on her shoulder squeezed, the one on her back rubbing briskly. “You with me?”

  “Yeah.” Braced for dizziness, she sat upright. Eli’s hand dropped away from her back, but the one on her shoulders shifted down to her upper arm. An unnecessary precaution, as it turned out. She felt perfectly steady. She blinked a couple times to clear the last of the fog. “Sorry about that.”

  “Don’t apologize.” He was on one knee between her and the table, and her eyes caught on the pot, sitting on the table just to the right of his head.

  “You need to take it out of the cold bath,” she said, trying to stand, but Eli’s hand tightened around her arm.

  “Vauntner’s got it.”

  “I’ve got it, Mrs. Linhart,” the young man confirmed, setting a cup down on the table and lifting the pot carefully from the water.

  “It needs–”

  “Ten minutes in sunlight. I’ve got it.”

  Slumping back in the chair, she watched Vauntner walk carefully from the room, a towel draped over the top of the pot. They’d already selected a spot beneath a west-facing window for the brew to sunbathe, not trusting it with the abundant wildlife outdoors. And they’d already decided Vaunter would sit and babysit it in case Nick and Quint came barreling in unexpectedly, or some other catastrophe tried to knock it over.

  After Vauntner left the room, Eli handed Mara the cup of water, but didn’t move from his spot at her knee like he was worried she’d faint again if he moved.

  “I’m okay now,” she said, giving his shoulder a light push. “You don’t have to hover.”

  “I’ve indulged your hovering, you can indulge mine. Drink the water.”

  Only because her mouth was dry, not because he commanded it, she took a sip.

  “Any nausea?”

  She pressed her lips together and glared at him. “No.”

  “Dizziness?”

  She ought to throw the water at him. “No.”

  “Headache?”

  “No.”

  “Drink some water.”

  “You drink some water. How’s Carissa?”

  “She’s fine. And if you’re going to sass me, at least be clever about it. Drink the water.”

  Lifting the cup, she drained it in a few pointed swallows, set it on the table by his head, and straightened her posture in the nearest approximation of defiance she could manage from a seated position. “I’m fine.”

  “People who are fine typically don’t faint. A physik ought to know that.”

  “I only fainted because somebody can’t keep his magic to himself.”

  He tipped his head at an incredulous angle and raise one eyebrow. “I wasn’t the one channeling at the time, Mara. Whatever just happened, it wasn’t my doing.”

  “Aren’t you meant to be some kind of godlike, once-a-generation persuasive power? You couldn’t throw up a wall or something?”

  “Not against you, apparently.” He sat back a little, and Mara sagged against the back of the chair.

  “I didn’t do it on purpose,” she said quietly, all the fight gone out of her. All that was left was relief that the brew had come together, that Carissa would likely be okay. And shock. They’d done it again–something they shouldn’t have been able to do once. And guilt. Natural magic was infinite. Human magic wasn’t. It came from a mortal source. She’d taken something she had no right to take.

  “I know.”

  “I’m sorry. This really isn’t meant to be possible. I don’t understand what’s happening.” The bond between chaining partners took years to develop, not to mention unchecked intimacy and hours upon hours of study and practice. She could understand it, justify it once, in that moment of existential terror, awash in the chaotic magic of a monster like the Songbird. Anything could happen in circumstances like those.

  But this? Standing in a kitchen, brewing? Maybe if it was Nick’s life she was trying to save, but she didn’t even know Carissa. She was a child and Mara wanted to save her, but there was none of the animalistic maternal furor that might justify what had just happened. And yes, she had been using…intimate imagery to channel from, but it’s not like it was Eli she’d been imagining. It was Davy. She wasn’t in some sort of denial about it. It had definitely been Davy.

  “It’s not meant to be possible.” The back of her neck burned. Depths, she felt bad enough. Now she felt like some kind of sexual pervert, dragging poor Eli like an unwilling voyeur into her closed-door fantasies. What had she been thinking reaching for that kind of imagery when she wasn’t alone? Even if Vauntner hadn’t been able to tell, Eli was so sensitive to her energy, surely he’d sensed it. She clenched her hands together and watched her knuckles blanch. “I’m so sorry. I really didn’t mean to.”

  “Mara, I know. It’s okay. We’ll figure it out. The Enclave has a library, we can do some research. And there’s that Polandrian shadow-caster Quint mentioned. You said the Polandrians have record of this. Maybe he’ll know something.”

  “Maybe.” The Polandrians who practiced chaining almost exclusively studied on the remote, sea-swept isles of the northern shore. But sure. Maybe this random shadowcaster would know.

  “Mara.” He nudged her chin up with the crook of his finger–a glancing, inconsequential action, but her nerves were drawn so taut it felt as if he’d struck her, her heart shooting into a gallop. But when she met his eyes, it slowed, like it had run into water. Warm water.

  “It’s okay,” he said again. “For now just be happy. That was the last big step of the brew, right?”

  She nodded. “Right.”

  “It’s done. You did it.” A smile broke across his face–small but genuine. “She’s going to be okay.”

  Mara huffed but returned the smile, grateful that he’d brought the conversation back to what mattered–Carissa. “Now who’s dealing in false hope?”

  With a brisk nod, as if he’d accomplished a task, Eli pushed to his feet and went to refill her water. He returned with two cups and, instead of resuming his place at her side, took the chair across from her. They sat, sipping their water in exhausted silence until Vauntner returned. He set the pot with reverent care on the table before Mara.

  She leaned forward, using the clean metal spoon he handed her to scoop up a small portion of the thick, green paste. She scraped it off onto the back of her hand and rubbed it in with he thumb. The skin immediately turned red, the sensation like she’d pulled a spoon from her tea and laid it across her skin–not quite a burn, but distinctly hot.

  Perfect.

  The topical had two purposes–one was to counteract the toxin, and they wouldn’t know if that was working until they applied it. But the other was to open up all the little blood vessels where it was applied, to better ferry the cure into the body. That part was working perfectly. Which, if she did the steps in the right order, which she had, increased the odds of the other working to 99 in 100.

  “Well,” she said, offering each man a tentative smile. “Let’s try it.”