Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

‘Behave yourself and stop caterwalling. It’s unbecoming.’

‘I’m not caterwalling, and do not tell me to behave, Phil - ' 

‘If you must insist on your dramatics, then do not address me so. Really, Triss. I had thought you were past all this.’

‘Philippa. I don’t like this. It’s not too late.’

‘Not too late? Oh dear. You’ve hardly changed, have you? The world is truly dark these days if this is all that’s required for a seat at Tankred's table.’

Triss had changed, an awful lot. Changed enough to know that Philippa was calm when pleased, and hurtful when scared. Changed enough to know who it was that Triss was no match for. Whose memory clung to the walls like old smoke.

Sticky, tarry, and rotten.

She’d changed enough, too, to know that her cautions meant nothing.

She had not changed enough to stop herself trying regardless.

‘You invite me here, as a friend and an ally, to assist your research. You set the terms, and I agree to them. I had hoped that this meant you were no longer inclined to behave flippantly, dear. I am here, and I have agreed the terms, signed and sealed and presented to your King. And you tell me now its not too late to go back on them?’

‘Phil – Philippa. Leave pride out of this.’ She knew it wasn’t about pride. Phil needed whatever leg up she could get, and backing out of the agreement with Tankred would set her back months in her efforts to win back some semblance of power. But she had to try. ‘If this goes wrong - ‘

‘If it goes wrong, then you, an esteemed sorceress with decades of effort and money spent on your betterment, have put your word to it. I hope you are not so foolish. I know you are not. So behave yourself.’ Philippa’s gaze softened, and she fixed her dark eyes on Triss with a look that would have ruined her once. ‘If I did not have absolute faith in your judgement, I would not have answered your invite. Now, trust me, little one. I have done this before.’

Triss watched as Philippa raised her palm to her mouth, tipped, and swallowed.

The research wasn’t that interesting. A half-decipherable jumble of notes and expired spells. Things in jars. Circles on the floor hidden by years of dust.

What it was was an olive branch. Philippa, free only by the grace of the Emperor’s gratitude, haunted Montecalvo with the ghost of what she had been. The castle had become an island, unwelcome in the land it stood upon. Redania would not forget Philippa’s wrongs until long after the current generation had aged and past, and it would be longer than that before her name fell away from its place in the footnotes of Nilfgaard’s conquest of the North.

She’d backed the winning horse, of course. What else would Philippa do. What else could she have, to survive.

But a generation was a long time to wait, and the cost of her freedom was taking it's toll.

Well, Triss thought. Philipp could have done a great many things, really. Her and Keira and found their way. Fringilla had. But their ways were not Philippa’s. There were few left now who’s were.

Philippa haunted her castle, and bid higher and higher for relevance as time went on the the Emperor’s wary eye never left her.

Triss had wondered if she’d stay in that place, but of course, what was a generation to Phil. She had outlived Redania itself, and would outlast the world’s mistrust for her if she could only curry enough favour to keep herself safe long enough. This was not the end of the Great Philippa Eilhart’s story, Triss supposed. Only a long and painful lull.

Still, it was a wan time for the sorceress, and Triss saw how she stagnated behind those walls. How she loathed to be nothing, and to have nothing to strive for. How carefully she trod not to be seen as scrabbling for what she’d once had.

Yen, of all of them, seemed to have had the right idea. Not that Triss envied her, not anymore. She certainly didn’t envy Philippa. Bit by gentle bit, she was washing her hands of her old childishness, and the future, without love or lodge, shone sunny through Lan Exeter’s autumn clouds.

All the same, she felt for Philippa. Not to mention that the seeds of alliance would be well sown for the days when, as she surely would, the Lady of Montecalvo found her way back into the great game of the world again.

So she’d invited her old friend and mentor to examine the abandoned research, and take what she liked. Triss herself, along with others, had already searched it all for anything that might be against Kovir’s interests to share. It was a sentimental gift, more than anything else.

Despite that, strong objections had been made to the owl sorceress’s presence in court, and strict caveats had been made visiting the old townhouse where the half-finished work had sat gathering dust for years now.

It was those caveats that Philippa had just swallowed down.

They were Triss’s own invention, and for all that her stomach went cold to see her old idol tipping them down her throat, a part of her smiled deep to see how much she trusted Triss’s work.

The tablets had been designed, on the surface of things, as means of easing the tensions between mages and political men following the third war.

Trace amounts of dimeritium would bind to the taker’s blood, blocking a mage’s powers just as chains of the same metal would. Unlike chains, the metal in the system would persist only a matter of hours, so there was no chance of being left powerless by error or trickery.

After the atrocities committed against mages across the North following Loc Muinne, not a single one would agree to be placed in dimeritium again, for fear that the shackles would be locked and never lifted.

After the atrocities committed by mages in the lead up to Loc Muinne, few people with power would agree to entertain the presence of any but the most trusted mages unless they were suitably hobbled for as long as they were in a position to cause any damage.

Triss’s creation suited neither group particularly well, but was certainly better than the alternatives. Mage’s who wished to prove their trustworthiness could do so without putting their life in another’s hands.

Personally, she suspected a deeper reason behind the research. The contract for it had come from the Empire, trusted to her personally, which was more than enough evidence to tell her that the Crown Princess was spending far less time in the Palace than she would have her father and his own mages think, and was looking for a way to hide her own magical signature without any outward signs.

The tablets themselves were safe beyond doubt. She had tested them upon herself countless time and, whilst singularly unpleasant, they were not dangerous.

All the same, nothing ever went as you expected it to with Philippa, and despite it being by her own invitation, Triss found herself begging the other sorceress to make her excuses and forsake the research she had come to see. She had a cold feeling in her gut, all of a sudden, and far too much had gone wrong in her relatively short life to not listen to that feeling when it came.

It did no good, and Triss bit her lip as the colour went from Philippa’s face and the owl sorceress leant against the doorframe to support herself. Safer option or not, dimeritium was a ghastly thing to be touching, and the dose that Tankred’s other mages had declared Philippa was to take in order to be granted access would have been enough to send weaker mages into a coma.

‘There.’ Her voice came thin and breathy ‘Nothing at all, after months in that blasted thing.’ One of her knees buckled and she snarled at Triss when she stepped forward to help her, drawing herself back up again and leaning on the door as she panted. ‘I’ll kill you, you know. If these turn out to be less than perfect.’

The withdrawal of trust stung more than the threat, but Triss stood straight and waited for Philippa to collect herself.

She mused to herself, deep down, as she watched the older woman prop herself up against the oak, that this was the only time she’d ever likely be in a position to hurt Phil. She could even strike her, she’d still have the upper hand. One of the greatest sorceresses of their age, and the most terrible, now nothing more than a slim body, struggling to hold itself up.

‘Don’t even think about it, little one. You would pay dearly later.’

Triss nodded, ashamed to have been caught, and oddly warmed to be seen so well, and led Philippa up the stairs and into the workshop.

Philippa would confess it to no one, not even in the darkest and coldest of the small hours, but sometimes she dreamt of being trapped. Sightless, magicless, unable to speak, or with hands to grasp. Trapped in the darkness, listening and waiting. Knowing all the time that she could have flown free, weak though she was, and at the same time that it was hopeless. Without magic, her world was black indeed, and she would have never been able to navigate her way to a safe roost, let alone to anyone who could have helped her.

To anyone who asked, she'd have recalled how calmly she'd bided her time, how certain she'd been in her own wiles that she could wait, and listen, and know that the time would come for her to make her move.

She would never tell anyone that she knelt that morning before her washbasin, waiting to see if her stomach would empty itself for fear of what the day would bring. She would never tell anyone how one ankle would wake her in the night burning with the sting of a metal band that was no longer there. No one would ever need to know that there had been days as an owl that she had found herself waiting only to die, there in the dark.

Her new eyes worked well enough, though they would never look the same as the one's she'd lost. There would always be something false, something glassy about them when she looked in the mirror. A reminder that what was gone would never truly return. 

Most days she chose to cover them and navigate with her magic, rather than suffer the half-lit world she had remade for herself, and the nausea of the half-sent messages she'd managed to weave a path for to her brain. The nerves were complicated, ever so much so, and sometimes her efforts went so wrong that she could only lie on the cool floor and wait for the pain to ebb.

Without magic, she had nothing to rely upon but the half-results of her own handiwork, that she had not learnt yet to rely upon. Her vision dimmed as the dimeritium made its way into her system, and a piercing pain stabbed through her head. The fear was there, she watched it inside her self as though from a great distance, kept at bay by the company she would never loose face in front of.

She saw the younger sorceress ahead of her, hips swaying pale across her dim world in their pale skirts, and up the stairs she followed, taking each step carefully.

The smell of the rooms above hit her all the stronger for the lack of a clear image, and she hardened her jaw against the memories.

She smelled the familiar materials of alchemy, of course, long stale, and amongst that the hints of a long-lost perfume, just as stale. What she'd known she would smell amongst it all and was still not ready for was the metallic signature of magic, left behind. A ghost in the air, still lingering, long after its wielder was dead.

Triss could smell it too, of course. Young thing, she'd still known enough dead sorceresses in her short little life, and would know how the fallen lingered on in their work, to those with the nose to look for it.

'Phil...I'm going to leave you to it...I have a meeting to attend...take as long as you need. The guards will see you to your chamber once you're done.'

'Do you think your tact is charming? Go, then, attend if you are truly needed elsewhere, but don't suppose to pity me.'

Triss, who seemed to be less scared of her by the year, took her leave. The door shut, softly, behind her, leaving Philippa alone, with the guards, and the ghost, buried into the very grain of the wood.

Chapter Text

The guards followed her through the townhouse, up and down the narrow stairwell. Through each room, dusty long settled over the furnishings. Sparse, practical, but everything of the highest quality. Wasting. Moth-eaten. She smelled the decay more than she saw it. The moment the house had last been used, captured in time, but the image slowly fading as moths ate the curtains and the bars of sunlight let through washed the colour from the tapestries. 

Her head pounded with the pain of signals sent awry, too much too soon from the eyes she'd not trained herself into yet. She closed them - her new lids, made perfect again - to keep the wretched half-light out, and felt the nagging dry itch where she hadn't perfected the tear ducts.

It was between a rock and a hard place, really. How she'd have people see it. Too sure of herself to spend the work on making herself whole again, and she was a vain fool. Vain, she took no issue with. But to have people think that she was still so naive as to let that vanity stand in the way of good practice would hurt that vanity someting awful. And was bad practice itself - the world could think her a monster, but to be seen as a fool would compromise her power too much to be a worthwhile means of hiding the truth.

For certainly, she would have nobody know that she avoided the use of her new eyes out of fear. Relying on them without her magic for long enough to perfect the system left her weak and nauseous, and brought sleepless nights in which she woke  - unintentionally - as an owl, ridiculous within the folds of her silk quilts, disorientated and unable to speak. Wandering aimlessly aroung the half-seen hallways of Montecalvo, she would stop, suddenly, sure that she heard something behind her, and before she was able to stop herself would be back seeing with her mind again, glancing all around, every shadow and every corner twice as sharp as she had ever been able to see it with her true eyes.

More and more she found herself too busy to give the time to it. There was always something else to do with the day. Something that would bring softer sleep.

Better that no one knew she struggled so to use them, and damn Triss thrice for giving her the space to hide. Damn her for growing up. Damn her for understanding. 

From room to room she sauntered, every effort put into making all her weakness look no more than the effects of dimeritium, for men did so love to talk. Whenever she took a rest to close those aching eyes, she passed her hand across some item, let them think she was still using some vestige of her power untouched by the tablets to gain some strange insight into the forgotten objects.

The workshop had been turned over so clumsily that she was sure it must have been searched directly after Loc Muinne. She wondered what things had been taken away then and hidden in Tankred's vaults. Or what Merigold herself had discovered and deemed too dangerous for her to get her greedy, reaching hands on. She sneered. In the first pass alone she'd found enough unseemly avenues of magical exploration to have had their conductor clapped in dimeritium herself, and plenty of interesting things bearing a magical signature still strong enough that she was sure if interested enough that once she had them back in her own workshop she could use those traces to find plenty of things that Triss would rather she not know about Kovir's lines of research. Poor thing had nothing like Philippa's nose for magic, even with the dimeritium working its way through her system.

It didn't interest her much, but she noted those items regardless to request to take back to Montecalvo with her. A little extra information wouldn't hurt. Especially if Merigold's invite had been as political as she played it to be, and not just a pitying kindness.

Kindness she didn't need. She had research of her own enough to last decades or more whilst she waited out the political turmoil. If she was so bereft of power as Triss seemingly believed her to be, she'd simply cosy up to Nilfgaard. The child of Space and Time was Yennefer and the WItcher's child, after all, not the White Flame's, and prone to lenience. 

To refuse the offering would have looked petulant, though, and petulance inspired even less respect than wanting for help. 

So she'd accepted, and scorned Merigold's knowing kindness, for what could one as young as Merigold truly know of loss. 

Loss was still painful to her, new soul that she was. She would be a century before she came to understand it as only a part of life for those with their gifts. 

Humans came and went, to be used as best one could.

The elder races stuck around long enough to make real use of their time, and as such warranted greater respect.

Mages, well. It was less expected, but a few would always fall by the wayside, and when they did one might shed a few tears when young, but by her age it'd all happened to many times before.

And their deaths, when they did come, were almost always in aid of something. No matter when it was cut short, a mages life was hardly squandered and need not warrant any real kind of grief.

Philippa knelt by the bed, guards no more than a shuffling and a breathing behind her. 

There was no research to be found here. Such a staunch pragmatist never took her work to her place of rest.

But the smell was strong, far stronger than in the workshop. Stronger even than upon the crystal where it sat, still undisturbed, in its place beside the megascope. 

She'd searched in vain - through the wardrobe, beind the tapestries, pried the mother-of-pearl from the back of a hand mirror and found only wood beneath.

No research. No useful letters. Only the smell of a magic now snuffed from the world. Fading with time, and woven into the very fabric of the bedclothes. 

Had she longed for those bedclothes, before the end? Had she wanted comfort, in the dark of her cell? Had she looked to the bars of her window and hoped to see feathers? Had she thought that Philippa would come for her? 

The men behind her heard her breath quicken, she knew it, and would have stopped their hearts for it, would it not have been the end of Kovir's diplomacy. Had she even had the power to do so. 

But she had none. She had a dark room, and a body that was nothing more than weak flesh, and a house full of things left unfinished.

She felt herself begin to shake, shake like a child, and was sure she heard them laughing and wanted them dead for it but knew as her skin ran cold and she quivered where she knelt that she could not even fight one of them without her magic.

She was powerless, again.

In the dark, again.

Unable to speak, again, as she breathed through her mouth and listened to it hoop and whoop like wind through a broken window. The world flickered around her and she heard the men - only as mortal as she was, now - behind her shouting.

'What the fuck's happe - shit - get Merigold, get her now! Shit -  hold her!!'  

Her arms flailed as her body - beautiful but weak - tried to throw off the man grasping her arms, but her mind paid him no heed as the ghost within the threads began to writhe and reach its thousands of tiny hands out to her, and she reached with her mind to see - again, and again - what lay in the fog before her but there was nothing - only a half-blind woman restrained on the floor as magic surrounded her - all around but not within - stroking her skin but meeting no magic of hers to touch it back - filling her nostrils, her aching throat, her empty sockets  - she couldn't breathe. She reached again for her power to throw the many hands off her but again met nothing but the freezing cold of her own belly as she gasped and croaked.

She heard Triss screaming, and the world went black.

Chapter Text

Fur tickled her nose as she woke, wishing that she wasn't.

Her eyes itched horribly, and her head pounded.

Philippa left her lids closed. Felt the fur as it blew back and forth with her breath. Heavy across her shoulders.

All the scent of magic was gone from it. It smelled like fur, and nothing else.

The magic was not gone. It still hummed, somewhere within the house. Directionless. Changing.

Small wonder the Koviri bumblers hadn’t discovered the spell. Even she couldn’t understand entirely what strange work had been left unfinished.

Perhaps there had been some notes on it, deemed too dangerous for her eyes. Curse that fool Merigold. There wasn’t enough skill combined in Kovir and Poviss combined to have interpreted whatever work had to have been behind this, and it was just like them to whisk the research away regardless. Stupid girl, how often she’d told her not to touch what she didn’t understand. Leave it to a more seasoned mage.

She shifted amidst the sheets.

It was troubling.

The translocation of a magical signature from its point of origin.

Well it was no great mystery who was behind the commissioning of Merigold’s wretched tablets. You could have an ear a full arm’s length from the ground and stuffed with cotton and still catch mumblings that the Princess Cirilla was restless. Philippa had found it promising. Perhaps the girl’s hand could be turned towards realising her full potential after all.

Too obvious, perhaps. Enough that everyone who knew anything about the Empire would draw their own conclusions as to why Kovir was developing ingestable dimeritium and no one would question why else someone would want to play around with magical signatures.

But what would Triss have to gain from it? She wasn’t ambitious. She bore Philippa no more grudge than spurned feelings. She wouldn’t dare involve her in one of Kovir’s experiments.

No. No, more likely some reacher from the dregs of the old Brotherhood had decided to make a name for himself playing with moving signatures around, desecrated the home of one of the finest Sorceresses of their age to do so, and Triss – stupid, naïve, Triss – had not noticed and here they all were.

How much of her research had Triss shared, Philippa wondered. How many people understood the working of the dimeritium tablets. Foolish woman.

Somewhere within the house, the magic hummed.

Philippa lay beneath the dead woman’s blankets and considered.

So they’d put her to bed

It didn’t smell anything like its original owner at all, anymore.

Philippa curled her lip in disgust. She’d collapsed, and they fetched Triss to tend her.

Unfortunate, but she would deal with that later. Whatever had gone wrong with Triss’s wretched invention had gone very wrong indeed.

It was still daylight. Clearly whatever had happened hadn’t been so severe that they’d considered it worth moving her to any kind of infirmary, and it would be the next day before the last of the metal left her system.

She reached, in vain, for her magic. For even a sliver of it to seep past the dimertium’s block and ease her aching eyes.

There was nothing, and she’d known as much.

Strange, though, that no one was there fussing. They’d all been very dramatic such a short time ago.

Odd, too, to move a person into the bed of the deceased after leaving it untouched so long.

The guards who had put their hands on her were gone, or else deeply silent. Triss’s magic lingered beside her, fresh and vibrant. Buzzing like a honeybee beside the dead sorceress’s bed. Beneath that, the ghostly traces ebbed and fluxed through the lower rooms of the house.

As dusty and moth eaten as everything else there. Dead, and useless.

All the same, they moved.

The dimeritium was hurting far worse than before. A deep ache in her bones, and a nausea that brought things welling up from the darkness behind her shut eyes that she had to remind herself who she was in order to bid stay in their place.

She was not Rita, to quake at the memories of what she knew well she’d survived. Nor Triss, who let her fear drive her into Phil’s bed again and again to warm herself against the grave.

No. Hers was not theirs, and she would not waste effort on remembering the useless.

She lifted an arm to press to her fragile stomach, and found she could not.

Both arms were still, cuffed to the bed. She wondered that she had not noticed it before.

Once she did, the feelings fell down upon her all at once, as though they’d floated just above in the haze of unconsciousness, waiting for her to wake fully and understand.

Thick straps bound her wrists and ankles to the wooden bedframe. Another crossed her hips, and another her legs. The dimeritium studs dug into her skin and the ache increased tenfold, as though her bones were grating against each other as her body reacted on its own and tugged at the empty house around her for power.

Finding her neck free, she twisted it side to side, trying to survey her situation, and saw a flash through her dim vision.

A looking glass beside the bed, that had not been there before. Inside it, her own face, blurred by dust and then again by her own poor eyes.

But those eyes were strange. Not her own, that were in turn not hers but made from the closest colour she could find on the witch hunters Radovid had sent for her use, glamoured into an illusion of what she had once been.

An illusion that would have fallen away as soon as the tablets entered her stomach. Triss would have noticed the difference, besotted little thing that she’d once been. But those in the mirror looking back at her were not the eyes of the sorry man who’d given his own tissues for her to grow, but two huge orbs, whiteless and dark.

Two black agates in a monstrous face, stretching the eye sockets. Grotesque.

She turned away from it, and bellowed for Triss.

She shouted only twice, not to demean herself. Someone would come. No sensible person left Philippa Eilhart unguarded in a house full of advanced spellwork, even in dimeritium.

The person who came in wasn’t Triss, nor, by the shape of them, either of the two Koviri guards who’d lurked around the house behind her.

They were tall, dark, their existence so muted by her pain and poor eyes and lack of magic that she could barely make them out against the black of the doorway.

The figure bent at her feet, and slipped two fingers between her skin and the leather of the restraint to tug. Satisfied that it was tight, they moved up her body, checked each restraint.

Philippa twisted her neck, trying to make out a face. Whenever the dim light from the rotting curtains caught the stranger, somehow Philippa would blink, or they’d jerk away, and the face she thought she saw would shiver and blur.

She didn’t bother trying to reach for her magic. If shouting hadn’t worked already, it wasn’t going to. Nothing more to do than bide. Bide again. Wait to see what they did.

It was unusual, granted, for Kovir to be involved in anything particularly grim. You’d have thought if they wanted to off her for good then they would have done well to do it before the end of the War, deliver her to Radovid, that poor boy, and earn themselves an alliance in the process if Dijsktra hadn’t got himself killed.

That it would have made terrible political sense for her to die on that bed was some comfort, and even more that if they planned to keep her in dimeritium forever then she’d have woken chained to a wall rather than tucked into somebody else’s ancient blankets.

The figure straightening up beside her head didn’t seem as though they’d be the type to enjoy the sound of their own voice as they carried out whatever hideousness they planned to commit. A good few centuries gave one a good sense for that kind of thing, and it would have been embarrassing to try and goad them into it.

Biding, and biding. Wingless, limbless, strapped to a bed and unable to see nor summon her powers, Philippa considered her options.

Strapped down in dimeritium in a house full of magic. She still smelled Triss in the air, but the hum that had been hovering on the edge of her awareness was gone.

‘I do wish this wasn’t so tediously melodramatic.’  Her voice hurt, but she made it strong as she could. ‘Do you wish to take something from me with that knife?’ She couldn’t make out the image clearly, but she’d stood beside enough restrained patients in her knife to know what the figure carried. ‘My eyes again? Then hurry up. Or is it my liver? I suppose if that dimeritium’s being stored somewhere rather than simply pissed out into the sewers then you’ll want it for your research. Do send me a copy. We could collaborate.’

They wouldn’t answer, she knew, but talking might at least distract them a moment whilst she strained to pick up the magical traces that seemed to have vanished from the house.

Nothing. It was empty. Empty but for the citrussy tang of Triss’s young gift.

The knife flashed, and was not a knife as it finally moved within range of her sight, but a flask.

A thin hand slid beneath the back of her head and tipped it up, fingers slender and soft in her hair. Their magic – their scentless, signatureless magic – held her in place as she tried to twist away from the flask and for a second before the liquid met her lips, she caught sight of their face.

Clear as day, lit by a sun that wasn’t there, Philippa Eilhart looked into her own eyes. Eyes as dark and warm as beech tar in a face that had not aged in centuries, but stared back at her so much younger than she had been in a long, long time.

The liquid smelled, smelled like tar and something else, something strong, growing stronger by the second as the flask tipped and it was that smell, that smell that had clung to the whole house and to the furs on her bed only now all the mustiness and decay was gone from it and she breathed, as dark and as bright and as cold as she had once known it, the scent that had gone from her as it slid down the back of her throat.

The Philippa above her smiled a young woman’s smile and turned to leave as the cold turned hot and Philippa upon the bed jerked and tried to wrench her arms free, thrashing on top of the furs.

Her reflection flickered beside her as she struggled, a screaming face with stones for eyes, screaming like the dying had screamed at Sodden. Like they’d screamed at Loc Muinne. Like they’d screamed before, time and time again, until screaming meant so little anymore.

The liquid burned, worse than the tablets had, and the air she dragged in through her screaming mouth fanned the pain as it burned its way to her core.

Every muscle stretched taut against the restraints, she drew on all her self control to turn the screams to snarls as she stared up at the other Philippa, fingers twitching as they tried to pull the buzzing power in the air to themselves.

The face who looked back, impassive, was not her own anymore, but a man’s, unmemorable, non-descript, hooded in the uniform of the Redanian Witch Hunters.

The man grinned at something on her other side, and she turned, still thrashing, to look at the other man, just as foreign to her, who stood beneath the window.

The liquid burned and burned as it ran down to her belly, and the pain spread, slowly, out through her body as it seeped into her bloodstream.

‘TRISSS!!!’ She snarled.’ TRISSS – ‘ She wrenched her head to the side as she was struck, the blunt metal splitting her lip and cracking her lower front teeth. ‘TRISS!’

The second hit came harder, and she coughed and spat not to swallow the shards of her own teeth.

She’d been eyeless before. This was nothing.

She’d watched her sisters burn to death before, this was nothing.

The world she knew had broken and split and been remade by her own will to survive countless times and even if it reduced her to shrieking for help, she would not meet her end by something so banal as this.

This was nothing.

Triss’s signature flicked in the air around her, as bright as the world was dark, and Philippa forced herself quiet, breathing hard against the pain leaching out from her stomach into her heaving chest, and waited. The door would be blown open any second, and Tankred’s apology would have to be unparalleled in order to make up for this.

The door didn’t open, and the men either side of her went on leering. Grinnnig at each other.

They were waiting for something. For the potion to take effect. Dimeritium, somehow in liquid form now. It had to be.

Deep within the back of her mind, beyond the pain, beyond anywhere she dared even glimpse, the fear began to grow, that whatever they had given her may not pass from her system like Triss’s tablets.

That fear was too terrible to acknowledge, so instead Phlippa began to plan. If the metal concentration was as high as the pain told her, then it could surely not all be absorbed by her. She would expel it, some unsightly way or another, or else it would be stored within her.

She would have to regrow those parts anew. She had the technique, by then. A liver, some fat, those were simpler by far than eyes. She would take the tissue from these men, once that door blew open and Tankred offered her whatever he could to make this right again.

Triss would assist her research, it was the least she could do.

They would be prisoners first. She could put them on a table far less kind than this bed and she would purge all the results of their foolish lives from their bodies first, make their tissues clean and perfect before she took them.

She’d find who paid them without needing her magic, and once she found which mage it was, she’d use their magic to carry out the work. Triss could siphon it off them and wield it through her own body. It would do her good, too, give her some more mettle for her new post. Clearly she needed it, to have let something like this slip past her.

Still, the younger witch’s magic fluttered in the air. Still, the door did not open.

Around Triss’s magic, the buzzing of the house had grown louder.

It stood beside her, behind the eyes of the men who stood with the bloodied eagles on their breasts. It looked down from the shadows on top of the bookshelves, emptied of everything Philippa might have found use or meaning in.

It drew in from below in the house that had stood empty for so long whilst the half-finished work with in it rusted and decayed. It moved, louder and louder through the dim haze of Philippa’s magicless sight, to stand at the foot of her bed.

And Philippa knew, at last, that no one was coming.

Triss Merigold sat upon Sile de Tansarville's chair, observing Sile de Tansarville's bed. The chair was wicker, and had probably not been very comfortable even when its own was alive and well.

She shifted, again. She had thought about having something better brought in, but it felt wrong to change the place. Besides, she couldn't shake the sense that she didn't deserve a great deal of comfort at that moment.

It took as much effort not to bite at her lip as it did not to slough in the uncomfortable chair. She kept her back ramrod straight against the wall. A young mage again, awaiting her punishment for the latest lapse of judgement.

She'd truly thought that she was past all that. Too skilled and too cautious for oversights. Too calm, now, to let her feelings drive her to foolishness. 

The silvery mass at the bedside spoke otherwise.

The illusion shone like quicksilver, her own wan face peering back at her from its mirrored surface.

Her spells had done nothing. 

No one's had.

Every mage in Lan Exeter had tried, and three more from Pont Vaniss who'd portalled through to answer her summons.

Old enough now, she supposed, to at least not try to hide her mistake.

All of Kovir and all of Poviss knew. Soon the whole North. Sooner than that, the Empire would. If they did not already.

But it was worth it, if it meant that help came soon.

The other mages had been and gone, their efforts expended. Night had long fallen, and they would resume in the morning. 

No harm could befall anyone in an illusion, of course. 

Of course.

But of couse, an illusion could not touch dimeritium.

Triss had argued, claimed it was all in good diplomatic sense. The sooner they solved the issue and found the culprits, the softer the reparations would be.

She shrank into herself. She would pay for this. 

But she was older, and stronger.

So she would not think about herself.

The moonlight moved sideways across the moth-eaten curtains, glinting off the quicksilver surface, and Triss sat ramrod straight.