Glyphbinder Read online

  He wore more blood than Kara had seen on any living man in the whole of her life. Some oozed from a wound in his scalp while more stained his damp shirt bright red. His left knee bent wrong, yet he stood with little trouble. He stared at her with eyes that were like those of a corpse. Unfocused and empty.

  “Who are you?” Kara found her voice. “Are you ... are you hurt?”

  “Kara.” It was like someone else moved his lips. “Why have you come to the Thinking Trees?”

  His voice was soft and free of menace, with a hint of huskiness common to Tellvan peddlers. It came from years of breathing desert sand. There was no love lost between Tellvan and Mynt, Kara’s home province for every one of her eighteen years.

  “My business here is none of yours.” Kara stood taller than men of twenty, and she forced herself to remember that. She could haul in a full net and hold a boom in high winds. “How do you know my name?”

  “The demons whisper it. Their servant comes to take you. Run.”

  “Demons, is it?” This man was as mad as a sunbaked sailor, but he had not attacked her. A good sign. Kara slung her quarterstaff over her shoulder with its attached leather strap.

  “You’re bleeding. The Magic Academy of Solyr is less than a league from here.”

  “Kara—“

  “It’s my home and the menders there will see to your wounds. Come with me to Solyr and you'll live.”

  “You must run.” The wild man took two more steps on his broken leg. “Please, Kara.” His eyes grew wide. “Run.”

  “Who’s coming? Is whoever did that to you still out there?”

  “Run.” The man waved one hand. “Now.”

  Kara huffed. “You’re hurt. I’m not leaving you. If someone’s after you, we’ll run from them together.”

  A twig snapped, near enough to echo, and Kara unslung her quarterstaff and scanned the distant cedars. Something or someone waited out there, and if it had done this to this poor man, what would it do to her? Break her legs? Bash her head open?

  What did it matter? She would not leave this man to die. Yet when she heard howls rising on the wind, she briefly considered it.

  Chapter 3

  THE FIRST GRAYBACK crested a ridge about fifty paces distant, halting when it saw her. The wolf’s dark fur sported a streak of gray that stretched from its black nose through its dark eyes and triangular ears. Its whiptail slipped from side to side, ending in a poisonous barb that could paralyze a full-grown elk.

  Kara’s legs trembled like her arms.

  Five more wolves exited the cedars at the edge of the circle of dead earth. More graybacks. Their thick torsos were barrels jutting from slim black hindquarters. Their deceptively thin, sinewy legs ended in large paws with thick yellow claws.

  The leader howled. Its pack answered. Then the graybacks charged in a single snarling mass, kicking up leaves and dirt. They were coming to rip her throat out.

  Kara closed her eyes and took the dream world. She saw then that the orange forms of the graybacks were transfixed with dark red star-shaped glyphs. Someone controlled their minds. Someone out there intended to murder her.

  She could not outrun the wolves — she knew that — but she could fight them with blood glyphs. She could do as she’d been taught. She set her staff aside and knelt amidst thick leaves.

  As wolves snarled and leaves crunched, Kara forced herself to remember hours under the hot sun. Eyes closed. Journeymages shouted commands or flicked her and others with switches, trying to break their concentration. Make them drop the dream world.

  Blood glyphs carved in the heat of battle would never be carved in a quiet room, and Solyr’s teachers knew that. Kara pretended she knelt back in Solyr’s central square. The Lorilan faded.

  Theotrix, Bird of the Hunt. It came first. She sliced her finger and drew its complex glyph on the earth in blood. As a wolf howled she imagined a Journeymage making that sound, playing tricks.

  She painted more glyphs in a line of power, each new glyph modifying those before. Braun the Sculptor. The Adynshak. Rannos the Wolf. Olden the Turtle. All were needed and all complex.

  Kara ignited her glyph line as a grayback snarled, so close. She tossed out her arms and threw back her head. She howled back. She might die today, but she would not die alone.

  Rannos’s claws churned earth into rubble. Theotrix swept those clumps up in its claws as the soul glyph of Braun formed them into jagged shards. The Adynshak darted the shards at her attackers and only the shell of Olden, the great turtle, kept the storm from shredding the wild man at her side.

  The three closest graybacks disintegrated. The other three yelped as earth shredded their flesh, blasting them away. They landed and stumbled as bloody balls of maddened, yapping fur. Kara opened her eyes to find a smoking circle seared into the earth around her.

  She remembered the bite of cold stone on her knees. The babble of Solyr’s central fountain. Warm blood dripped from her ears and more tasted coppery in her mouth. She ignored it.

  Glyphs consumed far more of her blood than she scribed — her pact with the Five Who Had Made the World — and she only had so much blood. No sane animal would attack after she shredded its skin, but the five-sided stars in these wolves left them far from sane. They would chew their own legs off to end her.

  The wild man had not moved, so Kara tore open the top of her shirt. She scribed a snakelike glyph just below her neck, and it burned as she retrieved her quarterstaff. Osis, the ancient serpent, coiled around her heart, or would … until she ran out of blood.

  “Move, damn you!” Kara stepped forward as the wild man took no notice of her, the wolves, or the world. He was a living statue. The wolves stumbled closer, snorting heavily through bloody snouts.

  Kara could outrun these injured wolves, if she needed to, yet fleeing would leave this man to their mercy. She had to finish this fight. End their suffering before they ended her.

  Kara dropped into a low guard, sweat running down her back, and closed her eyes. The wolves were bright orange shapes in the dream world. The red glyphs in their heads flared as Osis coiled tight around her heart.

  The first wolf charged. Kara channeled Osis, and the ancient serpent spit greenish soul sparks from her mouth. Those sparks burned her tongue — a necessary cost — and cooked the grayback alive. It thumped into the leaves as the smell of scorched meat assaulted her nostrils. That made her wretch and cough.

  Another wolf lunged and Kara swung her quarterstaff. Teeth shattered and blood spilled, but the blow failed to halt the wolf’s momentum. It knocked her down, shattered the dream world, and drove all breath from her lungs.

  She tossed her staff and gripped the wolf’s neck as it pushed and snarled, jaws snapping at her face. She couldn’t glyph. She couldn’t get it off her. She was really going to die. She would never be able to save her mother, and she couldn’t bear that.

  So she pushed back.

  Something massive slammed into the grayback — her own quarterstaff. The blow knocked the wolf into the air. It smashed the head of the other wolf in the same smooth motion.

  Kara scrambled up, lungs burning, as the wild man stumbled after both snarling wolves. He kept after them as he whipped her staff around like a massive club. What did he think he was doing?

  Both wolves rushed him, as oblivious to their wounds as the dead-eyed man they meant to kill. Kara took the dream world and gasped. Green tendrils covered the wild man’s orange dream form.

  Initiates rarely saw green in the dream world, for green was spirit energy. The energy of the human soul. Mages only saw it when someone died, and green energy covered this man.

  He smashed the first wolf as Kara spit another burst of soul sparks at the second. The effort shattered the dream world and left her gagging on hands and knees, but it ended the fight.

  The last wolf whimpered and twitched. Its battlemage had abandoned it, and now it knew nothing but terror and pain.

  “Kill it,” Kara whispered. “Please, don’t
let it suffer like that.”

  The wild man swung her quarterstaff and caved in the wolf’s skull.

  Kara struggled to breathe. Her skin felt cold and her vision swam, which meant she might be anemic. She stood and stared as the wild man threw down her staff. He stared back, and Kara could not think of a single thing to say.

  “You.” The man spoke. “You are—”

  “Kara. Remember?”

  “Alive.” He fell to his knees. His eyes fluttered closed. He hit the bloody leaves with a muffled thump.

  A grayback had stung him. Their poison paralyzed victims and she had to walk him out of here — while she still could — or he would bleed to death. She slung her quarterstaff over her shoulder and slipped her arms beneath the man’s shoulders.

  He was heavy, impossibly heavy, but Kara refused to give up. If she couldn’t carry him, she would drag him all the way back to Solyr. Its menders would heal him, heal her, and ensure they lived.

  Kara felt her reagent pouch against her chest and pulled the unconscious man, grunting as sweat rolled down her brow. The acorn inside her pouch was one of several rare reagents she needed to heal her mother’s disease. She was one step closer to saving her mother, but only if she made it home.

  That was going to be the most difficult part of this whole day.

  Chapter 4

  KARA WAS AWARE of little over the next few days, but she knew the Thinking Tree’s acorn was safe. She had buried it in her cloak outside Solyr. The glyphs she had scribed had almost killed her, and her hands had been shaking when she piled on the dirt.

  She drifted in and out of consciousness for what Solyr’s Bloodmenders told her was three days. In her dreams, wolf tails stabbed her, trees ate her mind, and a dead man with bloody red eyes chased her through the woods. Early in the evening on the fourth day, Senior Mender Landra finally dismissed her.

  Landra led Kara to a plain changing room with light cedar walls and a hard marble floor. Kara entered by a thin sliding door marked with the chalk outline of a mending glyph, the symbol for transfusing one's own blood. A worn mirror hung inside.

  She donned a thick gray shirt split by thin golden lines, a pattern specific to Solyr initiates. She tugged on a pair of tough cloth pants and cinched a handcrafted belt around her waist. Finally, she strapped on the flat forearm pads that all initiates wore at the academy, hard surfaces ideal for scribing blood glyphs.

  She stared at her own tan face and blinked her orange eyes, the unnatural color of her irises a reminder of the first glyph she had ever designed. That seemed so long ago. She pulled back clumps of brown hair that had fallen into disarray, kneading and twisting it all into a long braid. Finally, she pulled on her simple leather boots, wincing at the needles in her shaking legs.

  That did it. She was a person again. Kara took a breath, smiled at the orange-eyed woman in the mirror, and stumbled from the infirmary gritting her teeth. Her muscles were sore, not ruined.

  She stepped out into a cool, clear evening beneath a setting sun. It cast odd shadows over the ancient poplars and marble columns that sheltered the soft grass of the Solyr Commons. Mage stone walls, rocks no power could shatter, surrounded the academy and glittered with a thousand colors in the fading light.

  Kara remembered the grayback pushing toward her throat and shuddered. She had never come so close to dying. She thought of her mother, of her friends, Sera and Byn. She thought of the strange man she had dragged out of the woods.

  How had that man come to be so injured? She pictured his tangled black hair and blood-smeared face. He had been ranting about demons. Was it possible—?

  “Kara!”

  Kara turned to find a slim woman running at her with arms wide, and she could not help but smile. Sera all but pounced as she hugged Kara tight, and Kara let her. That hug just felt so good.

  “You’re out!” Sera pulled back. “Are you feeling all right? Is there anything I can do?”

  “I’m fine. Perfectly fine. What are you doing here?”

  “Waiting for you.”

  “You didn’t have to do that.”

  “I didn’t have a choice. Landra wouldn’t tell me when you were getting out.” Sera wore the same shirt and pants that Kara did, an outfit common to all initiates. “What happened to you out there? How did you burn so much blood?"

  Sera’s long dark hair hung in wavy curls, framing her narrow face, and her green eyes were wide. Kara couldn't tell anyone about the Tellvan battlemage or the graybacks that he had sent to kill her. That news had too many dire political repercussions.

  “I found a man half dead. Bleeding. Either bandits got at him or he tumbled off a cliff.”

  “Really?” Sera raised a slim eyebrow.

  “I did what I could to stop his bleeding. It took some blood. Then I had to drag him back here. He weighed as much as a dead boar.”

  “I see.” Sera snorted and rolled her eyes. “It's okay. I know you'd tell me if you could.”

  “I did tell you.”

  “Bloodmender. Remember?”

  Kara winced and looked away. Bloodmenders learned everything about the human body. They knew it intimately, caught lies without meaning to, and Kara knew no way she could lie to Sera. Not about the woods. How could she explain?

  “Listen.” Kara looked up. “I wish I could, but—”

  “Shush.”

  “What?”

  “I don't care if I ever get the whole story. It doesn’t matter. I'm just glad you're alive and here, with me.”

  "Really?"

  "Really. Now walk with me. It's the best way to get better. We're going to go to the cafeteria and get some food in you right now."

  Sera pulled her out onto the grassy Commons. Her friend had a healer's voice when she needed it, confident and brooking no argument. They had been friends since Kara first came to Solyr.

  In addition to mending skin and organs, Solyr’s Bloodmenders were able to transfuse their blood into patients at a slow rate. Saving people. Mages like Sera were rare, even at Solyr, as only those with pure blood could transfuse it into others. Those without pure blood could harm those they tried to heal, even kill them.

  Small cuts took minutes to heal. Larger wounds took days. The man Kara had saved would be in the infirmary for at least a week.

  "Byn's waiting at the Path of the Makers," Sera said as they walked. "A horse went lame today, and he spent most of the afternoon tending it. The poor thing's much better now."

  Kara smiled at the thought of Byn tending a horse. They had grown up together, playing and wrestling the day away and getting into more trouble than most children thought possible. They had spent many summers away from Solyr braving the waters of the Northern Sea in Byn’s rickety fishing boat. Until a few years ago.

  Kara still went home every summer, but she now spent her time tending to her mother. The debilitating disease that afflicted Ona was mysterious, resilient, and agonizing. Little worked, but Ona was stronger than Kara was. She was the strongest woman Kara knew.

  Kara felt a lump in her throat and fought it. Now was not the time. As she and Sera passed other students in uniforms like their own, Kara focused on the academy to block out all else.

  Solyr’s builders had placed benches of smooth marble and stone throughout the many poplars, some sheltered by awnings of light-colored wood. The buildings surrounding the Commons were stone and brick covered in panels of treated wood. Candles burned inside their windows, unadorned stone portals with glass frames.

  As they neared Solyr’s central square, a squirrel ran into their path and stopped. Squirrels were common in Solyr, of course, but this one looked different. Purposeful.

  Sera stopped. "What's it doing?"

  The squirrel stood at attention like a tiny sentry, nose straight and bushy tail raised in salute. Then another joined it, and another. Soon six squirrels were arranged in a straight line in the middle of the path, tails raised and twitching noses pointed. At them.

  Someone big swept Sera off h
er feet. Kara spun to face the threat as the squirrels scattered, dashing off into the Commons grass. She gasped as she remembered a grayback lunging for her head.

  This was no grayback, no threat. It was Byn Meris, squirming as he spun with Sera in his arms. He was being an idiot again.

  “I caught a mermaid!” Byn laughed as he fixed Kara with playful brown eyes. “Can we keep her?”

  “Drown me, Byn!” Kara shoved him and he stumbled back, Sera eeping as he nearly dropped her. “You put that poor girl down.” Her heart still pounded.

  Byn just laughed as Sera swatted his chest, forcing him to put her down, but her cheeks were flushed and her eyes were wide. She did love Byn. Kara loved him too, even if she wanted to kill him sometimes. Having a brother felt like that.

  “I’m sorry.” Byn sobered as Sera found her feet and shoved him. “I just wanted to surprise you. What did you think of the squirrels?”

  Byn was the same height as Kara, but his wide farmer’s frame could lift one of Sera in each thick arm. His uniform was cut differently, with shoulder pads and a raised collar. He had a round face and a nose too big for it, but he carried himself with grace.

  Kara took a breath. “It’s a good trick.” So far as she knew, no instructor in Byn’s Beastruler school dealt with squirrels. Byn had figured this out on his own, and useless as it was, it did impress her.

  “You all right?” Byn stepped closer. “You look pale.”

  “I look like someone just scared me half to death, Byn Meris.” Kara always used his full name when she wanted to be cross with him, just like his mother. “We’re going to get food now and I can hardly walk, let alone wrestle you, so you can come with us or go have dinner with your squirrels.”

  “Well, that’s ridiculous.” Byn squeezed her shoulder. “You don’t have to walk. I’ll carry you. C’mon, hop on.”

  “Try it and I'll break both your arms,” Kara said, but a grin split her face despite her best efforts. She struggled to stay angry at him and failed. Byn just made you want to like him.