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Sitting in the table's single chair, Dawn pulled her cloak tighter and took another sip of the quickly cooling soup. She tried to focus her thoughts, but they kept drifting to her chest, where every shallow breath caused an ache. She knew she had to undo the corruption before the healing draft the woman had given her left her system.

The woman sat a few feet away on the cot. She was watching Dawn. From among the blurred memories of the prior night, Dawn remembered the word scratched in a childish scrawl into the face of the wooden door against which she'd knocked with the last dregs of her strength.

strega

She took another spoonful and looked over the objects that littered the table. An odd collection, she thought. Tools and trinkets of every sort. She could identify no theme. The disorganized assortment continued across the floor, where through it strutted a preening male peacock. Dawn followed with her eyes the fowl's orbits of the table as she slowly ate the rest of the soup, hoping the food would both provide bolstering nourishment and slow the digestion and dissipation of the healing potion.

A crystalline sound drew her still hazy attention, and she saw that the bird had kicked a vial that was rolling across the floor toward her chair. She leaned gingerly to the side and picked it up. It held a swirling mercurial liquid. She looked at it for a moment, and a few synapses in her addled brain managed a useful connection. These were not the old woman's belongings. They were hers. Or, at least, they had come from within her armor as she lay unconscious. She met the old woman's eyes.

"I," Dawn said, but the word was barely audible, and she stopped to clear her throat. "I," she tried again, still quiet but intelligible, "have been studying the means by which visitors to our world carry with them possessions more numerous than would seem possible." She paused, and both she and the woman looked around the cluttered floor and table. "I have succeeded in expanding my ability to store items on my person—'produce items from' might be a more accurate statement—and as you may have noticed, there is a chaos to it I have not yet tamed. I think it my own fault. The result of my incomplete knowledge and flaws in my attempts." To punctuate her point, Dawn laid down the vial, reached into the pocket of her armor near her waist, and pulled forth a triangular object on a stick. She stared at it for a few seconds, trying to determine its nature, and then slowly tilted the stick in a circle. The triangular head, which included a gear against which rested a long, thin slat, began spinning about the stick, emitting a clicking noise that was startlingly loud in the small room.

The peacock gave a caw and eyed Dawn.

She shook her head and laid the noisy toy on the table next to the vial. She met the woman's eyes again and, to further illustrate her flawed work, reached behind her own back as she had seen Reeve and Walter do on innumerable occasions. As she did, she thought of one of her favorite daggers. Her hand returned holding a small wedge of moldy cheese. She laid it on the table with the other items.

The woman watched her.

"But that is the lesser of my current concerns. My being has been corrupted. It will be fatal if I cannot undo it soon. The food and healing aid you provided will not have the lasting effect you might expect. Within hours, I will return to the state in which you welcomed me last night." Overwhelmed by the possibly incurable nature of her plight, Dawn's gaze dropped away from the woman's eyes, and she stared instead at the woman's twisted hands. She could feel the woman continuing to examine her.

Dawn began to retrace the path that had deposited her in this unassuming cabin in a forgotten hamlet in a desolate realm. The fights, the wounds, the gambles she had taken. The woman rose and walked to the shelf along the wall, but Dawn's mind continued drifting backward through time, looking for the missed clues that might have saved her this particularly anonymous ending.

The woman put down a stack of books next to Dawn's empty bowl. She pushed the bowl to the middle of the table and began unstacking the books. Soon, five lay in a line in front of Dawn.

Dawn examined the covers. The script on each was of the same unfamiliar archaic northern language. Dawn ran her fingers over the looping letters of cover immediately in front of her. She did not speak the language, but it shared a common parent with her own modern tongue, so she could deduce a few words in the title. She shook her head and pushed the book toward the middle of the table. "It was not through ingestion that I suffered my condition." She looked at the next book. "Nor inhalation." The second book joined the first near the middle of the table. Dawn examined the remaining books. It took a few minutes to guess their subjects, and she pushed each away in turn. "Nor touch, magic, or curse. At least, not magic or curse of the type you will find here." She tapped one of the covers and looked up at the frail woman standing next to her. "It would be hard to explain, as I do not fully understand it, but every element of my body has been damaged. It is as though I could once carry with me a deep flagon of vitality, which food, sleep, or magic could quickly replenish. Now, I have but a thimble, and it is not enough to provide even the basic needs whereby this body persists."

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The woman returned Dawn's gaze for several seconds and then left the table to revisit the shelf. She brought back to the table the book she had been studying the night before, opened it to the bookmarked page, and placed it before Dawn.

Dawn looked over the anatomical diagram before her and the runes that spelled out a corporeal language new to her. She sat forward. "Yes," she said, "these are all of the elements that have suffered." Her excitement was short-lived, and she looked back at the woman. "I did not know these runic representations but instead similar ones from the magic in which I work. Alas, that is not what keeps me from healing myself. It is an incomplete understanding of the nature of the changes and how to undo those changes. And I'm sure you see, if I attempt a cure and it is not perfect in construction and execution, the consequence would likely be immediately fatal."

The woman leaned forward and turned several pages.

Dawn looked at the drawings on the newly revealed pages and shook her head. "These methods of healing, as with the potion you provided me to grant me this short stay of execution, require a vital capacity I no longer possess."

The woman turned the page once more.

No drawings lay on the pages before Dawn, only the foreign script. Discouraged, she shook her head but nevertheless looked for similarities with her own language that might give her a clue as to the meaning of the text. Something to do with the body. Body parts. Or segments. Organs? Health. Marmots…no, that seemed unlikely, perhaps a false cognate. Building or growing, maybe restoring. Expanding. Content. Or maybe volume.

Dawn shook her head. "Thank you, but I do not understand. And even if I were the quickest of studies with languages, I would be gone before I could decipher this text."

The woman frowned at Dawn. She went to the shelf and returned with a piece of parchment, a quill, and an ink pot. She looked at Dawn. After a moment, Dawn nodded and rose from the chair. The woman sat, placed the parchment next to the open book, and began writing. Dawn watched over her shoulder. After the first few words had been penned, she said, "You know my language this well? You write better than many who work for us in our government back home. But you do not speak it?"

The woman turned to Dawn and opened her mouth. She had no tongue. Whether by nature or a human hand, Dawn did not know. Dawn nodded.

The woman returned to writing. Initially only curious, Dawn was soon transfixed by the information being revealed letter by letter. For the first time since she regained her senses in this tiny cabin, Dawn lost track of her quickly waning time.

When the woman finished writing, so too did Dawn finish reading the translated text. She squatted next to the woman and looked into her eyes. "These instructions are meant as only temporary modifications, as might be used in battle. But I know how to co-opt their purpose to more permanently address my malady. Or I would, if I knew the specific spells to which the text refers."

The woman frowned at Dawn. She turned in the chair and raised one hand, fingers spread as much as their limited flexibility would allow. Dawn knit her brow, uncertain of the meaning. The woman curled down her fingers, only her thumb still outstretched.

After a moment of hesitation, Dawn said, "First of five?"

The woman nodded. She rubbed both hands together slowly for several seconds as though to impart them some warmth and then flexed them several times. She looked at Dawn and began moving her hands through the air. The motions were stiff, and where someone younger might have stretched out gestures, hers were compact, as though less cautious motions might cause her pain, but Dawn immediately felt as though she were watching a virtuoso musician past their physical prime, diminished but with a command of their craft still beyond all but a few.

"You cast," Dawn said quietly. "Or you once did."

The woman ignored her and finished the cast, turned toward the peacock, and directed the spell at the bird. It continued its preening strut.

The woman looked at Dawn and raised one thin eyebrow.

Dawn nodded. "I saw."

The woman raised her other eyebrow.

Dawn nodded and began the cast herself, the woman watching her closely. As Dawn neared the end, the woman reached out and caught Dawn's left wrist. She shook her head and, with her free hand, made the gesture Dawn had performed imperfectly.

Dawn nodded and restarted, this time reaching the end uninterrupted. As she finished, she directed the spell at the bird, who strutted on.

The woman nodded and raised her hand, thumb and finger extended.

"Second," Dawn said.

The lesson continued through each of the remaining spells, Dawn watching and then practicing each. The woman had to correct her twice on the second spell, which was particularly elaborate, and once each on the third and fourth, but Dawn took some pride in completing the fifth on her first attempt, even as she felt her concentration beginning to slip.

"I am fading," she said to the woman. "My senses will only dull with time. I must act as quickly as I can."

The woman shook her head. Rising, she gestured Dawn into the chair and then went to the shelf and began working again with her glass containers.