He kept his head turned away from me, and the silence hung long and heavy.

“You make a compelling argument.” His voice was choked, and when he turned his head, I could see the gleam of tears on his cheeks. “Do it then.”

I nodded and looked at Élise. “I’ll need your help.”

It seemed my mind stepped back and away from what it was witnessing as I carefully mixed the spell’s ingredients into the basin, following its instructions to the letter. “I need fire,” I muttered, and Élise held out her hand, silver flames blossoming from her palm.

I stared at it for a minute. “Real fire,” I said. Tearing a blank page from the book, I rolled it tightly then held it to her troll-fire, nodding with satisfaction as it flared up with yellow and orange flames. Holding the burning paper above my mixture, I turned my attention to Élise. “Are you sure you can do this?”

She licked her lips, and I could see her hands were trembling. “If this doesn’t work, he’ll bleed to death in moments.”

“If this doesn’t work, I’m dead anyway,” Tips said. “This isn’t the time for you to turn prissy on me, Élise.”

“All right,” Élise whispered. “Then I’m ready.”

Tips twitched slightly as her magic bound him to the bed and the ambient sounds of the house faded as she blocked us off – the last thing we needed was for Tips’s screams to draw attention down upon us.

“Bite down on this,” I said, putting a spindle we’d broken off the chair back between his teeth. “Close your eyes.”

“When I put my hands in the basins…” I broke off and gave Élise a hard look. Her lips tightened, but she nodded.

Touching the burning paper to the mixture, I jerked back as it burst into flames. Then I began the incantations. Eleven times I repeated the words, and on the twelfth time, I plunged one hand into the burning mixture and the other into a basin of water. Power flooded up my arms, filling me, and then spilling over. I nodded at Élise.

Troll magic sliced through flesh and bone like a surgeon’s scalpel, blood spraying in all directions, and Tips screamed once. Leaning forward, I grasped hold of the bleeding limb and said the incantation for the thirteenth time: “Heal the flesh.” At the touch of his blood, I could feel a faint hint of his alien magic, but I passed it by, knowing instinctively that he was a child of this world. The earth’s power drained out of me and into Tips, recognizing him. Amazed, I watched as pink skin sealed over the wound, paling and hardening into tough scar tissue before my very eyes. Then exhaustion hit me, and I fell backwards to lie on the cold, wooden floor.

“Cécile!” Élise’s face appeared above me. “Are you all right?”

“Yes,” I croaked, although I was not entirely sure that I was. “Is Tips alive?”

She moved out of my line of sight. “He’s alive,” she exclaimed. “Unconscious, but alive. And the wound is healed over as though it were half-a-lifetime old.”