“Miss, are you all right?” Hailey blinked. Her head throbbed. Standing over her was the mother of Juliana. She had a look of concern on her face.

Hailey sat up. “I’m ok.” But she didn’t know if that was true. She had hit the tree pretty hard. Her ears were ringing and her vision was still a little hazy. She touched the back of her head and her hand came away sticky with blood and bark. What had happened? It came back to her in a flash. “Aaron!” She pulled herself to her feet, using the tree to steady herself. Her vision threatened to leave again.

The sky was black. A man stood over Aaron, holding a lantern.

Hailey stumbled towards him. “Is he ok?”

The man looked up at her. “I don’t know. He’s breathing, but he won’t wake. I tried shaking his shoulder.”

Hailey knelt beside him. She should have stayed by his side and made sure ehe was ok. Running after the girl had gotten them nowhere. Her heart ached for him. Gently she rolled him to his side. His back was a mass of bruises. One of his arms had been sliced by a stone when he fell. The bone had to be broken.

“Miss, what’s going to happen to our daughter?” Hailey hadn’t noticed Juliana’s mother coming up beside her.

“I’m not sure.” Hailey said, feeling like she owed them the truth. “Children who have the potential to become mages are being taken from their homes all over the kingdom. That’s why we came. We wanted to protect her from whoever is taking the children.”

The woman was crying into her husband’s chest. “Do you know where they went?” He asked her and Hailey got the distinct impression that if she told this man where her daughter might have gone, he would wander into the shimmer and get himself killed.

“No,” Hailey said. “Not exactly, but if you go into the forest, you won’t find her. You also won’t come back. This is a problem I have been working on and I will try to solve it, but right now I have bigger concerns. I believe that your daughter will be safe. I don’t think the woman in black would have dragged her out of here if she wanted to kill her.” She is keeping the mages from Taivalon for a reason, Hailey thought. I just need to figure out what that is. She wanted to make it very clear to him what he would be risking if he tried such a thing.

“Is he going to be ok?” A small voice said. It was almost a whisper.

Hailey looked up and glared. “I should be able to heal him, but I need to get him back. I’m pretty sure he can be moved.” Hailey couldn’t remember all of the spells that he would need to recover his health, but she knew it was in her books somewhere.

Esmerelda just stood there, like had not done anything wrong.

“Can you bring the horses back to the castle?” She asked the couple. The mother nodded and Hailey felt a stab of guilt. She had tried. She should have been able to get the girl away from that woman. Hailey had not been fast enough and in the end, this couple would have been happier knowing that their daughter was safe in the castle, then who knows were in the forest.

“Thank you,” she said. “I’m sorry things went so badly. I do need you to step back now.”

Hailey created a glyph near Aaron. He still hadn’t moved and Hailey had wasted too much time already. She created a portal, a shimmering sphere of translucent light. The image in the center of the portal was of the roped off section of the great room. Gasps came from the people behind her. Portals were one of the coolest looking spells that Hailey had learned to do.

Then she lifted Aaron off the ground. The magic kept him perfectly still. She pushed him through the portal ahead of her and stepped through.

Hailey had gotten some pretty strange looks as she floated Aaron to her bedroom. She needed another place to keep people who were injured. But she did not want to face the soldiers and have a million questions about what had happened to him. She needed silence.

The room that Hailey had been given was much nicer than even her room at the manor. It was one of the guest rooms, usually reserved for visiting nobles. It was massive and had a large window, overlooking the lake. It was decorated in deep blue. The curtains had leaf patterns on them and were long enough that they brushed the floor. She had a sizable desk, but it was covered in books, making it seem small whenever Hailey sat at it. The light blue blanket covered her oversized bed. She loved the woven rug, made of various colors in blue. She even had a mirror on her dresser table and a washbasin and wardrobe. Even with all the furniture, she had plenty of room to pace.

Aaron lay peacefully on her bed. The laundress was going to have a fit when she saw what Hailey had done to her bedding. He had landed in the mud. The entire back side of his body had been scraped and covered in mud. She had laid him face down so she could get at the injuries on his back. A bone protruded from his arm but it didn’t break the skin.

She ran the test on Aaron, making sure that there was nothing else wrong with him. She chided herself for not remembering it when she was at the farmhouse. There was nothing wrong with him, other than the gash on his shoulder, his broken arm and the massive scrapes and bruises across his back. He had also hit his head, but there wasn’t even a scrape.

She flipped through her books. “Bone knitting,” the spell said. She bit at her thumbnail. That’s what he needed for his arm.

Be sure to set the bone first if the ends of the bones are not aligned.

Hailey frowned. Was there a spell for aligning the bone or was she supposed to push not he part that was sticking up until it looked like it was straight and then maybe test his injuries again. She continued to flip through the book.

There was no spell for that. She braced herself for what she would have to do next. Healing had been one of her favorite things to learn, but she still didn’t have much experience with it. She thought about sending for one of the healers. They did this sort of thing all the time, but then she realized how much of a fool she would look. “The royal mage, who can heal things the healers wouldn’t be able to touch needs help with setting a bone because she’s too squeamish,” Hailey said to herself

The problem was, it was Aaron. Her feelings for him made her pause and reconsider her every action. Finally, she cast a spell on him to dull the pain. It only covered his arm, and then she pushed on the bone, grimacing at how much that would have hurt.

She tested her work again. The test spell moved down his body, pointing out anything that she might need to heal. She could tell that he was developing a toothache, that he had pulled at a hangnail and one of his fingers was now sore. The bones were not straight yet. She aligned them. A slight push and she had his bones in the right place.

Aaron groaned in his sleep, but still did not wake.

She took a deep breath, relieved that that was over. Bone knitting would take hours to heal something that should take days. She almost wished she had someone else to practice on. She moved her arms from side to side, ending with her hands on either side of the break. “Ossipaga,” she said. A clear blue bubble formed between her hands, knitting the bone together.

The rest of his injuries were easier for her to deal with. She had dealt with gashes before. She tested him one more time to make sure that everything was mending the way it should. She smiled. He was going to be ok.

“Next time you go flying, try to keep your arm away from rocks,” she told him.

She began to pace back and forth in her spacious room. “I am such an idiot. I should have hit her with everything I had, charged at her with the mage sword or something.” Why had she waited? She had allowed herself to be distracted by Aaron’s injuries and by what had happened to the girl. “I should have seen the threat and ran straight for her.” She sat on the edge of the bed. “Why does she hate this kingdom so much?”

“Because she’s evil. Obviously. You know, you talk to yourself, right?”

Hailey spun. “Don’t move. How long have you been awake?” She asked him, trying to remember all of the things she had said outloud.

“I know you talk to yourself because you’re used to being all alone in this castle, but you’re not alone and people can hear you. Sometimes you act like the child who was trapped in here, but you’re not. You’ve grown up. You have to leave some of these things behind.”

Hailey said nothing. Maybe he was in pain and that’s why he was being rude to her. People don’t change overnight, she thought at him, but she didn’t say it. She was not acting like a child.

“Why can’t I feel my arm? What did you do to me, woman?”

“I healed you.”

“Hailey, I’ve only got one good arm and now I can’t even feel that it’s there.”

“I didn’t want you to be in pain.”

He rolled over and sat up. “The rest of me is pretty sore.”

Hailey ignored his comment and then she gasped. “I think I know who the woman was. I should have seen it.”

“Seen what?”

“Who lives in the forest and causes problems for this kingdom every chance she gets?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, but I do think you should bring your magic fingers back over here and make me not hurt so much.” He reached for her, but she didn’t need the distraction right then.

“It has to be Isabella. Come on. We need to tell the king and queen. Maybe they know what she looks like and they can verify it.”