Maker of Fire

Aylem, the Queen’s Drawing Room

Thuorfosi came back from my bedroom, then realized Emily wasn't following her and went back to get her. She was looking rather confounded and somewhat exasperated. She reappeared with a wax tablet in hand looking pleased with herself. Emily was following right beside her with an angry stare that rivaled Sassoo's divine wind of devastation. It wasn't difficult to fill in the gaps as to what happened.

Thuorfosi stopped at the edge of the circle of lounges, sofas, and chairs and Emily tugged on her skirts.

"What?" Thuorfosi protested with an evil grin. "You want this?" She held the tablet just out of reach. Lisaykos muffled a laugh and Emily shot daggers at her with her eyes. I noticed the tablet was full of writing, which implied to me the Emily was working something out for her own reference. She had filled several tablets while working out papermaking. This might be the same sort of thing.

"Thuorfosi, might I see that please?"

"Of course, Great One," she walked over and handed it to me. Now I was the target of Emily's killing-intent glare.

What I read stunned me. Imstay next to me was trying to read and understand it and looked completely lost.

"Do you understand any of this?" he asked in a low voice.

"Yes, most of it," I looked down on the scowling Emily with one hand on a hip and the other held out, waiting to get the tablet back.

"You were supposed to be sleeping, not inventing more stuff," I gave her a motherly look of disapproval to hide my astonishment. She didn't even react. Instead, she simply persisted in her killer stare and indignant pose, waiting for the tablet to be returned. As the saying goes, if looks could kill, I'd have been a corpse already.

"I have some paper on hand if would like to transfer those notes to something more permanent than wax," and handed her the tablet. The scowl of death retreated and she nodded.

"Can I see, Emily?" Lisaykos asked. Emily shrugged then crossed the room to hand the tablet to Lisaykos.

"You, with your amazing memory, forgot who Mueb was?" Lisaykos gave Emily a disbelieving look. Emily made writing motions. "Oh," Lisaykos dug into a pocket, "borrow mine for now." She handed Emily a tablet. Emily wrote something out and handed it back. "I see, that's reasonable," Lisaykos replied. "These look like more of your recipe notes, dear heart. What does it mean? Do you know what this is about, Aylem?"

I sighed, "instead of sleeping, Emily outlined how to make two more medicines."

"I put you to sleep," Lisaykos chided Emily, who with her hair done and wearing skirts looked like a small child being scolded. "I used a strong charm so you should have been sleeping still, which is why we sent a healer to wake you."

Emily wrote something and held it up for Lisaykos to read. Just for the briefest moment, Lisaykos' face showed deep concern and then resolved to unreadable neutrality so quickly that if I didn't know her as well as I did, I might have thought I imagined that concerned look.

"I smell grilled mutton," Lisaykos changed the subject seamlessly. "Are we going to eat in here, eat in the dining room, or eat on the balcony?"

"I was originally thinking of eating on the balcony, so we could put in orders for seconds from the grill that I had set up out there," I said. "But it's getting a little chilly tonight so let's stay in. Emily doesn't like coping with formal dining room furniture, so why don't we eat in here? Is that alright with you, Imstay?"

He looked a little shocked that I asked his opinion. "Yes, yes, this is fine," he replied. I knew he was lingering and staying for dinner because he was curious about Emily, especially after this afternoon's incident with the high priestesses. I half expected to see smoke coming out of his ears, he was so deeply sunk in observation and evaluation of her. Just her existence was a challenge to what he learned when he grew up. She was the contradiction to everything he thought he knew about Coyn: she was strong-willed, self-sufficient, determined, not at all respectful of rank or nobility, capable of saying no, and incredibly intelligent.

Imstay wasn't stupid. Given the unpopularity of his late mother's faction at court, he would have been off his throne well before now if he had been lacking in intelligence. After Emily told off the eleven high priestesses this afternoon, he now knew that she would not cave to bullying. Her paraphrase of the Revelation of Tessoep on the choice of right things was just brilliant given the question she was asked on the blessing of Coyn. He did not miss that at all: here was a Coyn who had not only read the revelations but could use them for her own purposes. That one performance gave the lie to his claim that Coyn were just well-trained bipeds with no originality or creativity of their own.

I would treat Imstay with kindness and patience for now because he was deeply grieved over his family's actions and I could see he was disturbed by this tiny little whirlwind named Emily.

I rang the bell on my side table and gave instructions for serving dinner to the Coyn Evoy, who was one of my oldest staff members and was on runner and errand duty this evening.

"Holy One," Bobbo spoke up after being quiet and unobtrusive since this afternoon. "Might I ask what the Blessed Emily came up with this afternoon when she was supposed to be napping?"

"I'm not sure because I don't know what these names are," Lisaykos shrugged. "Aylem, you understand better than anyone Emily's cryptic formulas. What did she create this time?"

"Aspirin, which is a medicine that can help reduce minor pain, fever, and edema. Willow oil has the precursor to aspirin in it so we're already using a weaker form of Emily's more pure version. That's the first of the two."

"So one is an improved version of willow oil," Lisaykos nodded. "That would be useful. And the other?"

"I'm not sure I understand all of this, but it looks like the essential core of what's in willow oil can be mixed with a metal that Emily calls bismuth to make something Emily calls bismuth subsalicylate, which is a medicine that settles indigestion and may be able to help infant running disease." That got both Lisaykos' and Thuorfosi's attention and also resulted in Emily giving me a questioning look. "You know it by the name of infantile cholera, Emily." She nodded, having been given its name from our previous lives.

"You're doing it again," Bobbo said in quiet that followed my the response to Emily. "It's like the two of you have your own little language."

"Yes, I've noticed that too, Thuorfosi said a little timidly, not sure if she should be speaking out. Lisaykos looked a little worried and Emily went very still like she often does when she feels threatened. Imstay had his thoughtful face on. I had already planned on how I would handle this when it came up so it wasn't a problem for me.

"General Bobbo," I said kindly with just a little tiny bit of deliberate condescension, "might I remind you that I am very talented with mind magic." I waited for his confused face before proceeding. "I usually know what Emily is thinking because I know what Emily is thinking. Most of the time it's passive reading, but if I need to, I can read deeper. I don't need to with her since she's a very clear thinker. I can't help but know what's in her mind because to me, she might as well be able to speak."

"Oh." Bobbo looked gobsmacked. It was fun to see that face on him since his expressions were usually so carefully constructed to fit every possible occasion. It was nice to trip him up for once.

"Oh, look," I sat up and looked toward the staff bringing out tray tables and skewers of grilled meat and vegetables, "here comes our food."

---

Lisaykos, the Queen’s Drawing Room

We saw Imstay and Bobbo out the door after dinner. I needed to return to the guest quarters where the rest of the high priestesses were staying but I wanted to find out what sort of bad dream could wake Emily from a charm of deep sleep. It did not escape my notice that she hardly ate anything at dinner, which wasn't good since I'm sure she skipped mid repast. If she got much thinner, she might blow away in a strong wind.

I saw Thuorfosi getting ready to give Emily a bit of grief over not eating enough but caught her attention and shook my head. Emily hadn't gotten down from the chair she was sitting on so I walked over and got down on my knees in front of her so she wouldn't have to look up at me.

"Emily, I'm a little concerned about this afternoon," I said once I had her attention. "You said what woke you was a bad dream." In my peripheral vision, I saw Aylem start listening from where she was standing by the door, out of Emily's line of sight. Thuorfosi was listening too but she was to my side. "I used a charm of deep sleep on you. You should have slept without dreaming until you woke on your own sometime tomorrow or a healer woke you by undoing the charm. Was it the nightmare you have with the burning building?"

We all knew she had bad dreams. I found out what was in some of those bad dreams when I was working late one evening and heard her tossing and whimpering in her sleep. I inadvertently saw what she was seeing in her nightmare when I touched her to wake her. It confirmed for me what I suspected about her, that the experience of a breeding farm created lasting trauma for her. I put her into deep sleep that night so she could at least get some real rest.

We had a long talk the morning after, if Emily with a tablet is the equivalent of talking. She described the barest outline of what was in that dream and admitted it was based on what had happened to her as a child in a breeding farm. I told her we had mind magic that could help make the nightmares and the flashbacks go away. I didn't push her at all to take advantage of this since, at the time, she hadn't yet decided to spend the cold season here to relearn how to speak. People can very touchy when it comes to admitting to a mental disorder. Events and people can wound a mind just like accidents and people can wound the body. They are all disorders that need healing.

After that night, I had her commit to waking me if she had nightmares and needed help falling back to sleep. She actually did one time during the rotation before we fixed the old fracture in her skull.

"Emily?" She was staring at the tablet in her lap and not looking up. "Emily," I lifted her chin gently and made her look at me. "I know there's an old brain in there, young lady, but that makes little difference when it comes to bad dreams. Was it the burning bunkhouse?"

She shook her head and started to write. What she wrote on the tablet shocked me: "A woman who called herself grandmother Mueb gave me the steps to make aspirin and bismuth subsalicylate and told me where to find one of the ore mineral forms of bismuth on the west side of the west ridge of the Valley of the Vanishing River, in back of Tourmaline Mountain."

I just sat there with my jaw hanging. She took the tablet back and wrote: "Didn't mean to upset you. But that's what I dreamed, except it felt too real to me to be a dream. Now I can't get it out of my mind: I want to see if there is bismuthinite in back of Tourmaline Mountain."

Aylem had walked over and took the tablet from my hands. She read what was written and frowned down at Emily, "is this the same as you telling me about remembering things when you sleep?"

Emily motioned for the tablet and wrote: "no, this was different."

"Gods," Aylem bit her finger. "Lisaykos and I have to attend another compulsion of truth at the Well at Galt tomorrow. Given that there will likely be an execution at the Shrine of Landa the day after, the soonest we'll be able to do anything about this will be in three or four days. Thuorfosi, can you take care of the splint and bandages on Emily's hand in the morning? I'll have to be dressed and on my way to the Shrine of Galt before the sun is up."

"Certainly, Great One."

"Can you please see Emily to bed? The high priestess and I have some things we need to talk about."

"Of course."

I had a bad feeling about leaving Emily in this state but my obligations took precedence. I told myself she would be alright under Thuorfosi's eye. Considering what happened while we were dealing with Lord Nirirgi's punishment, I should have locked Emily in the deepest dungeon to keep her from committing, well, the crazy things that only a maniac like Emily can do, which of course, she went and did.

---