Xavier got to his feet, wincing. “I broke my leg,” he muttered.
“You might have,” Rowan said. She stood, dusting her hands on her pants. “I don’t have much control over that spellslip, so from what I understand, it sort of heals everything that gets in its way. If you had a broken leg, then it would’ve gotten in its way.”
Xavier whistled. “Well, is that an impressive use of magic. Never seen a mage do that.”
Rowan flushed, apparently pleased by the compliment.
Xavier turned to Laric. “So she wanted you to understand the glyphs? But was she teaching you how to read the glyphs?”
“Well, no,” Laric said.
“Maybe it wasn’t for you.”
That hit Laric like a slap. Rowan looked over, and she seemed to recognize how much that comment hurt him.
“She wanted you to know what she knew,” Rowan said, her voice soft. “She was working with you. She was training you. She just didn’t have an opportunity to show you enough. Maybe these eggs were her way of storing knowledge so that she could one day leave it for you.”
Laric just nodded. Maybe that was all it was.
Or perhaps there was something else.
“Did she tell you anything?” he asked Xavier.
“We talked more business,” Xavier said. “Well, that’s not entirely true. We talked about some of the different spellslips she was teaching. And I suppose we talked about our past. She told me that things were difficult before she came out to the farm. She liked her life out there. She said it was nice. Peaceful, even.” He shrugged. “Not sure about that, though. Especially not sure about the peaceful part. She was running to Korthal too often for it to be peaceful, at least in my mind. I think it was just relatively peaceful.”
“Maybe she was involved in the war,” Rowan said.
Xavier had started walking away, wobbling as he went, which forced Rowan to catch up to him.
“Why don’t you sit down?” she said.
“Need to get the horses,” Xavier said. “Doubt they will respond well to you. So we can keep talking about it, but I’m going to get the horses.”
She looked as if she wanted to yell at him, but instead she just shook her head. “Let me help, then.”
She kept her arm around his waist, and though he staggered a little bit, she managed to keep him steadier. Laric hurried after them and slipped his arm around Xavier’s waist too, balancing him in between the two of them.
“So,” Laric said, “if my grandmother was still involved in the war, then maybe there was some reason she was trapping that knowledge here. Maybe she needed to do it so that she could protect it because of the war.”
Xavier nodded slowly. “Maybe. Could be.” He stumbled, and Laric and Rowan both had to catch him under his arms, causing him to grunt. “Well, don’t know how much use I’m going to be if the mages come back.”
“They aren’t coming back,” Laric said.
Xavier arched a brow. “No? There were three here. Three. All the way out here. And I realize that they traveled by dragon, but how many more do you think they were able to suppress?”
Laric didn’t have a good answer to that. He wasn’t sure that there was a good answer to that really.
“I don’t know. We will deal with it, though.”
“Right,” Xavier said. “We.”
“We can get you back to town, and you can just relax.”
“I’m not leaving you both to deal with all of this on your own.”
Rowan looked over at Xavier, then locked eyes with Laric for just a moment. Laric understood. Xavier was far too weak to be able to do much.
“How about we get back to the city,” Laric said, “and then we can see if there are any other places like this. Once the dragon is done chasing whatever he’s chasing, then we can see if there is anything that the dragon can show us about other places of potential.”
Rowan frowned deeply. “Are you sure?”
“Not particularly, but at this point, I think we need to. It’s likely that there is something else, and if that’s the case, then maybe there are other eggs, or other places where my grandmother stashed things.”
If that was true, then maybe he could get more answers.
That was the thought that lingered within him, and it was hard for him to consider any alternative. Hard for him to know what to do about his grandmother, and what to do about how little he knew about her. The only thing that Laric thought he could do was to keep chasing those answers, to try to find some way to learn more about her and what she had done before coming to the town out on the outskirts of nothingness.
As they gathered the horses together, he had those thoughts working through him, those thoughts and no others.
They helped Xavier into the saddle and had to configure a way of binding him in place.
“I thought my healing would’ve been able to help him more than that,” Rowan said to Laric.
“You probably did. He was probably much worse off than we realized. Talia made it seem like healing with that magic can be dangerous, and a little bit tenuous, even. Maybe it drains some part of him through the healing process.”
Xavier’s head sagged down on the horse’s neck.
“I’ll hold his reins,” Rowan said. “Better me than you. I don’t want you to yank them too hard and send him toppling off. I don’t know that I could help him again.”