Jacque opened his mouth, saliva frothing upon his dark lips, and let loose what I’m fairly certain was a stream of curses. I was vaguely aware of movement around him—the carriage driver, thrown clear of the wreckage but clearly injured, and a passenger pulling himself out of the overturned compartment in a daze. All of this barely registered in my mind before the sight of Jacque, his leg crushed and bent at a sickening angle.

  Nadine and I stood there. He needs help, I told myself. We needed to help him. But what could I do? Nadine was the physician. She should have been by his side, tending to him.

  But she wasn’t.

  With some effort, I smoothed the trembling of my hand into the tight back-and-forth sway of Truthbinding magic. My fingers rebelled at first, but I somehow managed to twist them into the familiar signs, channeling the aether into my library spell. The pages of Nadine’s medical textbooks filled my mind. There was one particular book I sought, one that had exhaustive diagrams detailing all manner of physical trauma and, hopefully, their treatment.

  Once I had that book fixed in my mind’s eye, I turned to Nadine and—against my better judgment—brought my hands together into a sequence of giving. Knowledge of the pages flowed from me to her, tearing painfully at the edges of my mind as they went, and she shook her head, blinking.

  I was breaking the third taboo by transferring truth without consent, but my effort had the desired effect. In the span of a breath, she rushed to Jacque’s side. Later, I would wonder if I’d made a terrible mistake, but saving Jacque took precedence. All the more so because I’d had a hand in his accident.

  I followed soon after, crouching beside her. She was checking his vital signs, fingers deftly moving over his throat, his face, his chest. He looked up at her pleadingly, rasping words that I couldn’t understand. She shushed him, and he looked back up at the sky with unseeing eyes, a despairing groan issuing from his lips.

  After fussing over his vitals for what felt like entirely too much time, she turned her attention to the leg, probing the area where it had met the carriage. Jacque gasped at her touch, but otherwise remained still. Perhaps he was in shock? I racked my memories for what one is supposed to do in such a situation—tie off the leg, I thought, to prevent bad blood from flowing to the rest of the body.

  But Nadine didn’t do any such thing. One of her hands rested on the injured leg while the other grasped the necklace around her throat. I searched her face, wondering if she’d lost her nerve again, but no—instead I found narrowed eyes, a furrowed brow, lips in silent movement as though debating next steps.

  Still, she wasn’t doing anything, and Jacque needed help, and it was my fault he had stepped out into traffic in the first place. But why wasn’t she doing anything? This injury threatened to take his leg and it was my fault and we needed to act immediately to save his life and it was my fault and there was something I was missing and—

  I abruptly shifted my casting, and the images of the book vanished from my mind. After weeks of the tight, repetitive oscillations and finger-bending sign shifts of Truthbinding magic, my arm was stiff, almost painful; even so, the wide, sweeping arc of my arm and the simple yet precise articulation of my wrist came naturally as I transitioned into Spellweaving. Intangible threads unspooled from my fingers, carrying vibrations of aether back down to my fingertips as they probed the world around me, and I focused my spell on Nadine.

  It was magic. Nadine was casting magic.

  ***

  Perhaps you tire of reading this, but I feel terribly foolish.

  I do have one thing to say in my defense for overlooking the existence of Panzean magic all this time, though I fear you will find it to be quite feeble. Since my arrival here, my mental faculties have been fully engaged with trying to understand the world around me. My days were largely spent updating and memorizing my language spells, and whenever my mind was free from that burdensome task, I instead set myself to devising a way to retrieve your body. Everything about this place, its culture and customs, had flown in the face of everything I’d ever known. And so I admit, it never occurred to me that I should also have to challenge the one fundamental truth of the universe that I thought I knew.

  Magic is the manipulation of ambient aether to effect change in the mental and spiritual worlds.

  We know three spheres of magic, one for each of the great ancestors. We bind truth, we call upon the spirits, and we shape the forces of magic itself. To master the physical world, we have always relied upon human ingenuity and advances in technology.

  This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

  Not so in Panzea.

  As Nadine worked her spell, I took a moment to trace the flow of aether around her. This magic—healing magic, I realized—had a resonant feel to it, coming in pulses like a heartbeat; as I touched it with the threads of my Spellweaving, the aether vibrated into me, filling me with a sort of physical calm.

  She channeled it through the gemstone on her necklace. As the aether streamed from her body, it felt unfocused, but after passing through the gem, it took on discernible shapes and patterns. The actual spell, then, originated from the necklace rather than the mage, which would explain why I’d yet to see anyone perform the physical act of spellcasting since I’d come here.

  I split my attention, continuing my Spellweaving with one hand while the other hand recalled Nadine’s medical library. There were pages and pages of diagrams contained within that I now realized were spell diagrams. As I flipped through the pages in my mind, I tried to find some correspondence between the diagrams in the books and the shape the aether took in Nadine’s spell.

  My head was beginning to pound; forcing knowledge into Nadine’s mind had been painful enough, and sustaining another Truthbinding spell immediately afterwards was too taxing. Still, I pressed on until I found a chapter filled with diagrams of various leg injuries.

  A brief comparison between the diagrams and the flow of Nadine’s spell revealed that something was wrong. Her magic wasn’t penetrating deeply enough into Jacque’s leg. If I understood the illustrations correctly, we needed to get the carriage off of him. Once his leg was free, we could use spells to set bone and reinforce muscle, staunch bleeding and knit arteries.

  But the streams of aether from her necklace felt too shallow. Part of the issue was that she wasn’t applying very much aether at all. While this form of magic was new to me, her spell was perhaps comparable to a simple memory cantrip; I very much doubted that it would suffice to heal such a gruesome injury. Further, as I traced the shape of her spell with my threads, I could find no correlation between the diagrams in the book and whatever it was that she was casting.

  A grim thought occurred to me then: she intended to amputate his leg.

  Certainly I had to be mistaken! This was wholly foreign magic to me, of course, so it must have been that I didn’t understand. But as I probed her spell again and again, I grew more confident that, no, this was not a spell that would save the limb.

  Could she have forgotten the spells in the particular book I was referencing, somehow? Breaking taboo for a second time, I shoved the correct spell diagrams into her mind. She faltered, shook her head, and then continued with her casting.

  I may have screamed then. I’m not entirely certain. I felt a rough hand on my shoulder, but I shoved it aside. It was my fault that Jacque was in this position, and I would be damned to oblivion if I allowed him to lose his leg.

  I took hold of Nadine’s spell with my threads and twisted it into a new shape. It’s generally not advised to interfere in magic you don’t fully understand; it is perhaps the height of foolishness to do so when you lack basic literacy in that magic’s notation system. I was vaguely aware of Nadine’s eyes on me, but I continued to reshape her magic, pouring in a portion of my own aether to make up the difference needed for the new spell.

  She suddenly shouted something. I didn’t see how it happened, but the carriage shifted off of Jacque’s leg. The hand reappeared on my shoulder, but Nadine shouted again and it pulled away.

  I felt Nadine’s hand on my back. She said something softly into my ear, and I allowed her to take control of the spellwork once again. To my relief, she pressed on with the new spell I had “proposed,” and I let her guide the magic while I supplied more aether to power the spell.

  I soon lost myself in the golden resonating world of healing magic. At some point—perhaps minutes later, perhaps hours—Nadine spoke again and pulled me away. Olrick and another person I didn’t recognize shifted Jacque onto a stretcher, and they carried him inside into Nadine’s office.

  She positioned me beside her as we stood over Jacque, who was laid out upon the examination table. She must have realized that I couldn’t understand her words (I was naturally too focused on supporting her healing spell to use my own language spell), because by this time she had switched to communicating to me through gestures.

  The surgery was remarkable. With the initial shock of the accident behind her, Nadine was invigorated. While she guided the spellwork using nothing but her mind, she probed all along his leg, checking the bone, feeling for warm and cold spots in the muscle, examining the skin for discoloration. Even though I was no longer taking an active hand in shaping the magic, I did provide the vast majority of the aether for them. At the time, perhaps I thought she was holding her own energy back so she could concentrate on diagnosis; then again, perhaps I was too preoccupied to consider it at all.

  At one point, after the sun had waned to a crescent in the late evening sky, she took a small, sharp knife and cut open his thigh. Somehow, probably through some mechanism of the spell that I have yet to grasp, she drew only a scant few drops of blood, and her knife weaved between skin and muscle to reach the bone.

  She inserted a metal frame to hold the ghastly wound open, and then used her bare fingers to fit shattered bone back into place. We stood together over the exposed bone for a while longer, channeling magic into it. I did my best not to become physically ill, though the sight of Nadine stitching the wound closed again—sometimes with magic, sometimes with a needle and thread—did challenge me in that regard.

  She cycled from spell to spell for a while longer. After a time, my vision grew blurred and I felt myself sway on my feet, and Nadine put a hand on my shoulder.

  She thanked me—even without my language spell, I could understand that much. What she said next was beyond me, but it didn’t matter, as I fell back into her chair and lost consciousness.