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Synopsis

Francesca DeVega is a healer in the city of Avel, composing magical sentences that close wounds and disspell curses, but her life is thrown into chaos when a newly dead patient sits up and tells her that she must flee the infirmary or face a fate worse than death. Now Francesca is in the middle of a game she doesn’t understand-one that ties her to the notorious rogue wizard Nicodemus Weal and brings her face-to-face with demons, demigods, and a man she hoped never to see again.

It has been ten years since Nicodemus Weal escaped the Starhaven Academy, where he was considered disabled and useless, where he battled the demon who stole his birthright and murdered his friends. Unable to use the magical languages of his own people, Nico has honed his skills in the dark Chthonic languages, readying himself for his next encounter with the demon. But there are complications: his mentor suffers from an incurable curse, his half-sister’s agents are hunting him, and he’s still not sure what part Francesca DeVega will play. He certainly doesn’t know what to make of Francesca herself….

Introducing new twists to the unique magical system of Spellwright and uncovering more sinister dangers, Spellbound is sure to please Blake Charlton’s fans and earn him new ones.

Excerpt

Chapter One

Francesca did not realize she had used an indefinite pronoun until it began to kill her patient.

Someone, no one knew who, had brought the young woman into the infirmary with an unknown curse written around her lungs. Francesca had cast several golden sentences into her patient's chest, hoping to disspell the malicious text. Had it gone well, she would have pulled the curse out of the woman's mouth.

But the curse's style had been robust, and one of Francesca's mistakenly ambiguous pronouns had pushed the curse from the girl's lungs to her heart. There, the spiteful text had bound the once-beating organ into silence.

Now plummeting toward death, the girl bleated a final cry.

Francesca looked around the solarium and saw only white walls and a window looking out onto the city of Avel. Voices of other medical spellwrights sounded from down the hallway; they were also working to save patients wounded by the recent lycanthrope attack on the city walls. Both the infirmary and the neighboring sanctuary were in crisis, and so Francesca was alone.

To her horror, Francesca's first reaction was relief that no one had seen her mistake.

She turned to her patient. The girl's wide green eyes had dilated to blackness. Her distended neck veins betrayed no pulse.

Francesca's fingers tingled. This couldn't be happening. She never made mistakes, never used indefinite pronouns.

The patient had been able to whisper her name when the curse was still on her lungs. Now Francesca addressed the young woman: "Deirdre, stay with me."

No response.

Francesca could not see the curse; it was written in a language she did not know. But the golden countercurse she had cast now visualized the malicious text that spellbound the young woman's heart.

Invasive action was needed.

Spellwrights created magical runes in their muscles; presently, Francescaused those in her left forearm to write a few silvery sentences that glowed on her skin. With her right hand, she pulled the spell free. It folded into a short, precise blade.

Francesca moved with confidence. She was a remarkably tall woman, lithe, clothed in a wizard's black robe and cleric's red stole. Both her long hair and wide eyes were very dark brown, making her pale features more striking. An illiterate would think she had maybe thirty years. A spellwright would know she had twice as many.

With her left hand, Francesca tore off her patient's blouse. Deirdre's smooth olive complexion, small chin, and raven hair indicated her youth. Yet there was something mature in the creases around her eyes.

Just then the floor shook and the wooden rafters chirped--a small earthquake possibly, or the blast from another lycanthropic attack. Somewhere in the infirmary or the adjacent sanctuary a man wailed.

Francesca laid her left hand on Deirdre's shoulder. As a physician, she shuddered--cold, and full of doubt. Then she leapt into the safety of action.

After a few steady cuts, she lifted Deirdre's small breast upward to expose the lattice of bone and muscle. The next cut ran between the fifth and sixth ribs, starting at the sternum and traveling around to the spine. The blood that flowed was bright red. Encouraging. Darker, slower blood would have confirmed death.

Francesca pried the ribs apart and extemporized a spell to hold them open.

The distant wailing grew more urgent.

"Deirdre, stay with me," Francesca commanded as she slipped her hands into the girl's chest and found her heart. Francesca held her breath as she pulled off the malicious sentences.

The floor shook again. A second and then a third voice joined the wailing.

Francesca bit her lip and unraveled the curse's last sentence. The heart swelled with blood but did not beat. Francesca began to rhythmically squeeze the organ with her hand. She was about to call for help when the heart began to squirm.

It felt like a bag full of writhing worms.

"God-of-gods," Francesca whispered. When a heart was denied blood, its once-coordinated action might expire into a chaos of separate spasms.

She continued to compress the heart. But each time she squeezed, the writhing lessened. The muscles were fading into death.

Francesca did not stop, could not stop.

More voices had joined the wailing, which rose and fell in an eerie tempo. Though almost musical, the wailing was wholly unlike the devotional songs the Spirish people sang during daily worship.

Some new crisis was sweeping through the infirmary or the sanctuary. Perhaps more wounded citizens had come in from the lycanthrope attack. Perhaps one of the lycanthrope spellwrights had even breached Avel's walls despite the daylight.

But Francesca didn't care about any of that. Her hands had gone cold. Her legs trembled. She was leaning on her patient. The world dissolved into a blur of tears.

The girl's heart was still.

"Creator, forgive me," Francesca whispered and withdrew her hands. "I'm sorry." A painful tingling now enveloped her fingers. "I'm so ... so sorry."

She bowed her head and closed her eyes. Time became strange to her. She'd always been proud of her ability to prognosticate--to look forward into patients' lives and anticipate their chances of cure, their moments of danger. But she had not foreseen Deirdre's death; it seemed to jolt her out of time, out of her own body.

For a moment it felt as if she were someone else, as if she were standing in the doorway and looking at the physician who had just killed her patient. In this dissociated state, she felt both safe and profoundly numb.

But then she was back in her own body, blinking through tears. She had not wept before a patient, alive or dead, for time out of mind. But now she had used the wrong word, a damned indefinite pronoun. Now her carelessness had killed.

Hot self-hatred flashed through her. She bit down on her lip.

Then, as suddenly as it came, her anger vanished, and she remembered her last day at the clerical academy in Port Mercy. She had asked her mentor for parting advice. The ancient physician had smiled tightly and said, "Kill as few patients as possible."

The young Francesca had laughed nervously.

Now, standing beside the first patient she had killed, she laughed at the memory, could not stop laughing. The strange hilarity was like gas bubbling out of her. Kill as few patients as possible. It was suddenly, terrifyingly hilarious.

Gradually her laughter died, and she felt hollow.

Around her, the infirmary resounded with wailing. She took a long breath. Other patients needed her. She had to counterfeit composure until true composure came. By extemporizing a few absorbing paragraphs, she cleaned the blood from her hands.

The floor shook again. "Is he loose?" someone whispered.

Startled, she looked toward the door. No one was there.

The whisperer spoke again, "Is he loose already?"

Francesca turned around. No one was in the solarium, and nothing butminarets and the alleyways of Avel were visible out the window. The hallway? Empty.

A weak groan. "He'll be here soon. Help me up."

Suddenly Francesca understood who was speaking, and her own heart seemed to writhe like a bag of worms.

She looked down at Deirdre, at the being she had mistaken for a mortal woman.

"You're an avatar?" Francesca whispered. "A member of the Celestial Canon?"

"Avatar, yes. Canonist, no," Deirdre corrected, pulling her bloody blouse over her now miraculously intact and scarless chest. "Sacred goddess, I forgot the shock of coming back."

Francesca stepped away. "What the burning hells is happening?"

The immortal woman looked at her. "A demon named Typhon has invested part of his soul into me. He won't let me die."

"Won't ..." Francesca echoed, " ... let you die?"

The other woman kneaded her temples. "I'm Typhon's rebellious slave. The bastard can control most of what I do unless I find a way to kill myself. Given my restraints, self-assassination takes a bit of ingenuity. But if I can off myself, I win roughly half an hour of freedom after revival." She smiled at Francesca. "Today, my creative method of suicide was you."

Relief swept through Francesca. "You set me up? It was impossible to disspell that curse on your lungs?"

The other woman pressed a hand to her sternum and winced. "Not impossible; a few master clerics have managed it over the years. I'm always heartbroken when they save my life."

The hollowness returned to Francesca's chest. Failure. She had killed a patient after all. Despite sacrificing most of her life to medicine, she still wasn't a master.

Deirdre closed her eyes and quirked a half smile. "It's sweet to be free again. Almost intoxicating." She shivered as if in pleasure but then opened her eyes and grew serious. "Now that I've come for you, so will he."

Francesca took a step back. Nothing felt real. She laughed in disbelief. "I'm sorry ... but ... could you excuse me for just a moment? I'm punishing myself for killing you by going completely out of my bloody mind."

"You are Cleric Francesca DeVega?"

"Oh, I was a cleric until a moment ago when I went as crazy as a spring hare."

Deirdre frowned. "Have I pushed you too far? Forgive me. I shouldn't be so glib. You have a reputation for ... bravado."

Francesca laughed. "To hell with 'bravado'; I'll tell a superior he's an arroganthack if he's harming my patient. But now that my shoddy prose has killed, I--"

"Cleric," the other woman interrupted. "You were meant to fail. If you hadn't, I wouldn't be free. I'm sorry I pushed you. But right now, I need to break the demon's hold on you. Around your left ankle there is a fine silver chain. Show it to me...

Copyright © 2011 by Blake Charlton

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