The Magician's Witch

Closer

"Do you think she is truly ill," a voice whispered as Eilis began to wake up.

"Well, if she is, I wonder if she is really a witch. Can they not heal themselves," a different voice responded to the first voice.

Eilis didn't stir but listened for a moment to their conversation. Now that she understood a little of the common language here, she was picking up on when people were talking about her. She debated for a moment whether to keep this new skill a secret or let them in on it.

"She is still in bed," the second voice observed, sounding concerned. "She is usually awake by now."

"Maybe she is dying," the first voice said, a tiny bit of hope in her tone.

Eilis frowned. That was rude.

"You should check her to make sure she is still breathing," the first voice told her companion.

"Me? Why do I have to do it?"

"Because you walked in first," she excused herself.

"I am not going over there," the second voice said, putting her foot down. "I will not be cursed with whatever illness she has."

Eilis grinned into her pillow. This whole interaction reminded her of Collin and Peter and how they would both push each other into typically bad decisions.

She rolled her head to one side, half her face still resting on the pillow.

"It's just a cold," she told them both. Both girls jumped, and one of them yelped in surprise.

Eilis lifted her head off the pillow and turned to look at them. "I'm not dying, although last night it felt like I was. And yes, I am usually up earlier, but I am still under the weather, and I was sleeping in." She turned her head back to the pillow, burying her face in the soft, cloud-like surface.

Both girls hesitated, frozen like statues. Eilis looked back at them. She spoke to them in Persian, a phrase Erik taught her that was the equivalent of I don't bite.

The girls looked at each other, then slowly began their routine. One of them drew a bath for Eilis while the other scurried around the room organizing what little there was to arrange. Eilis sat up finally as there was no hope of going back to bed with those two bustling about. She rubbed her face and then coughed. She felt loads better than she had felt last night—Erik's tea had worked—but she still had some chest and nasal congestion.

Something on the opposite pillow caught Eilis' eye and she looked. At least a dozen handkerchiefs lay on the pillow, all different colors and different textures. Eilis tried to snort a laugh, but it was disrupted by her swollen nasal passages.

She got out of bed, her body still aching from the ravages of the fever that left her feeling drained. One girl came out of the bathroom, indicating that it was ready for use. Eilis sighed; the warm water would feel so good. She had meant to take a bath last night, but she had felt so wretched that she had gone straight to bed, despite feeling grungy from living on the road for a week.

She sat in the bath for nearly an hour, allowing the rose-scented water to vanish the discomfort in her bones and erase the grime of the road from her skin and hair. When she finally got up, she wrapped herself in a towel and waited for the ladies to start their work on her. Eilis contemplated how awkward this had been over a month ago—now, even though she still felt a residual self-consciousness about these women helping her get dressed, it had become a new habit.

The girls worked in silence today—usually, they spoke to each other over Eilis' head while they arranged her hair and made her presentable.

Eilis looked up at the girl to her right. "What is your name," she asked in their native language.