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Etty doesn't get used to it - not exactly. Not in any sense that would leave her comfortable. She learns the routines, learns to reliably keep her dinner down, learns how limp she can go and how helpful she has to be to get it over with as fast as possible while remaining dissociated as she can manage from the experience.
She waits in the room, after, for a while, and - Nona doesn't come.
They might only get one chance. And Nona wants out too, and Etty shouldn't fault her for waiting, but she writes those thoughts on her scroll in terrible handwriting and cries and wishes that things would go faster.
She doesn't want to be one of the swans.
She's tried talking to them some more - tried imitating them, and when she does that they'll act like she's one of the flock and stop being afraid of her, but she can't get any glimmer of human memory out of them whatever prompts she tries.
She does not want to be one of the swans.
And the next girl won't even have the hope of Nona, the comfort of maybe soon.
She holds Nona, when Nona meets her in the orchard, and she thinks maybe soon, and one night she says:
"Do you - have any idea when you'll be able to say it?"
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mute_pen
mute_pen
Great.
She goes back to the spellbooks and starts looking for one that might bring her, say, a deer. She identifies a little too much with the flock of swans...
She goes back to the spellbooks and starts looking for one that might bring her, say, a deer. She identifies a little too much with the flock of swans...
There are indeed spells for animal summoning. Enough searching will even let her find one.
It requires her to eat a blade of grass soaked in her blood.
It requires her to eat a blade of grass soaked in her blood.
mute_pen
Well, that's grotesque, but she's getting the impression that that's the general theme, here; she notes it and keeps looking through the books. (It's not like she's starving yet.)
Another animal summoning spell requires her to urinate in her best approximation of a perfect circle wherever she wants the animal to appear. A third requires that she have the severed foot of the desired kind of animal, whereupon once the proper rituals are complete she can summon as many of it as she likes.
They are many and varied, and frequently very specific. One will only heal wounds made by steel; another will only heal sickness; another will only heal animal bites.
All-purpose immortality like what Nona had exists only in the Baron's notes.
All-purpose immortality like what Nona had exists only in the Baron's notes.
mute_pen
Etty will get to those later, probably. The one for sickness is general enough to be useful; she makes a note of it.
Where is Nona?
Where is Nona?
growcrooked
At the end of a trail of blood and the occasional stray bit of flesh that leads from the Baron's rooms to the lakeshore, where a pile of blankets and Baron-bits is burning.
mute_pen
"It can do a whole lot of things, though. It won't be hard to re-cast the food spell, just icky."
mute_pen
"It needs a bowl of animal blood. I don't want to kill one of the swans and I don't think I could catch anything else, and the least revolting animal-summoning spell requires the caster to eat a blade of grass soaked in their own blood. There's a lot of blood involved."
mute_pen
"I found some healing spells but nothing general, not in the books. Some of the specific ones will work on things of narrow parameters - like the type of implement. If you have something made of steel to use to get the blood you can be patched up after. All-purpose versions, like what you had before, I'd have to go into his notes for."
mute_pen
"Probably made of steel," nods Etty. "So we can operate out of here till - we know where else we'd go. I can't remember the way to Astgabels..."
mute_pen
"I'm sure someone does, but I don't even know how far away or in what direction the nearest settlement is. If I could still fly..." She nibbles her lip; she wishes she could still fly.
It turns out that she can.
mute_pen
Etty blinks, and is briefly a swan.
And then she tries wanting to be a human again.
And then she tries wanting to be a human again.
She is a human again, complete with pristine white dress.
mute_pen
"...Interesting," she says. "Okay, so I can range pretty far afield, looking for places we might go."
