Alysoun resumes her examination of Stormy while I quietly watch on.
Alysoun and I go back nine years now. She was part of the team that rescued me from the cave in Italy where I was hiding out with Muta after my mother, after being bludgeoned from behind by some beast named Alfonso, had be dragged out of our house by an irate mob to the village square where they tied her to a stake, doused her with oil and set her ablaze. I changed forever that night for with every shriek from my mother as she writhed dying in the flames a part of me died with her until nothing was left inside me but a heart forever frozen in a block of blue ice. Many ask me why I did nothing to save my mother. What they do not realize is that, at age fourteen, I was only a shadow of the Witch I am today. What I had in the way of powers then didn't even rate a pathetic parlour trick compared to my powers today. Then all I could do is cloak the light about me to make myself invisible and cringe helplessly in fear as I watched them murder her.
But it did not end there. The entire village then turned its energies to hunting for me. I was entirely safe from the villagers and witch hunters in the refuge of our cave but even with Muta's help I could not sustain myself for long with the meagre provisions available. Unlike Muta, I cannot subsist on dried fruit, tree bark and grains of wheat that Muta found amongst the frozen stubble of the fields. It was also winter time when Muta spent much of her time in hibernation – another thing I cannot do – thus conserving her energy and reducing her need for food. I was finally driven to stealing chickens and eggs to get some sort of protein to subsist on. But there were only so many chicken coops in the region and soon enough the villagers came to realize that their "fox" was capable of opening locks and avoiding traps so they set themselves to guarding their coops night and day so that even cloaked it was too risky to go near them.
Shortly after, I gained my ability to draw from the body of common knowledge that is available to all Witches. It is a nightmare, however, to access the information stored there. This body of common knowledge is a huge but totally random repository of what thousands of Witches for thousands of years before me thought might be useful information held together with some sort of glue. Visually, it is like huge warehouse that goes on forever filled with boxes, books, manuscripts and other weird and wonderful artifacts. One enters it with the concept of what is needed in one's mind and prays that the box, bag, book or even writing on the wall required will present itself. It did, however, show me how to set traps whereby I managed to catch the odd rabbit or bird. But even then, fortune seemed to be against me for, even though I set many traps, I found myself competing with starving foxes and wolves who often got to my catch before I could collect it. Often I would find only torn bits scattered about which I collected, washed off and ate. But worse still where the human hunters who made a point of destroying any traps of mine they happened to find.
It was mid-winter when I was out collecting from my traps. I moved invisibly collecting what little bounty there was when in my haste I blundered into a hunting party packing muskets loaded for Witch. Usually, if I stood still, I was protected by my cloak of invisibility but this only worked when hunters had human eyes. This time, there were also hound eyes and they were not fooled. The hounds started to bay in my direction and, although I tried to move silently behind a tree, I was not fast enough. I saw the musket being raised, heard the shot, saw the heavy musket ball coming for me and dove for cover but still it gored me deeply as it burned its way across the top of my hips. I shrieked and although I maintained my cloak of invisibility the blood flowing from the wound became instantly visible as soon as was beyond my short sphere of influence. I flew straight up and managed to escape the hail of musket balls that followed and make it back to the cave. I washed out the wound as best I could but found I could not stand up without my head swimming and falling down again. I was soon reduced to eating cave crawlers and to eating raw the luminous fish from our underground wading pool. When Alysoun and her group found me, I was emaciated and near death suffering from malnutrition, fever induced from the infected wound on my back and from worms and parasites that infested my intestines. Even after being transported to the safety of Cloud Tower I was to remain delirious with fever for several more days while Alysoun and other Witches worked powerful healing magic to wrest me back from the clutches of grim Death. It was that together with traces of Faerie dust the Witches said they found in the wound that saved me. As for Muta, the rescue team took only what little time was necessary to pack me up and transport me to Alfea. Although they recalled seeing telltale signs that a Faerie had been dwelling in the cave too, they could not spare any time to go looking for her. My guess is that Muta was hibernating near the warm waterfall, or, if she was awake, she took off and flew as far and as fast as her Faerie wings could carry her the moment the Witches showed up. I have only the constant pain of our bond deep within me to tell me that somewhere Muta is still alive. When I awoke, the first words to penetrate my mind were, "What is your name, child?" I remember hearing myself respond, "Isha", in a weak, slurred voice. "'Icy' is it?" says another voice next to me. "Well, it suits her well enough so Icy it is." I had yet to learn that my hair had changed to blue-white, my skin to the colour of snow and my eyes to a frozen pale blue.
"There is no serious damage that I can determine," chirps Alysoun in her avian dialect of Witchspeak which sounds like a human voice married to an alto recorder. "She will need around-the-clock surveillance until she awakens. I suspect that she will probably sleep for a long while yet and when she awakes she will be starving."
Alysoun reaches into her bag and retrieves from it what looks like an adult-sized baby bottle with a nipple, a jar filled with brown powder and a measuring spoon. "One measure of formula in a full bottle of water every four hours. At least four bottles of water between the bottle of formula until it's finished," she instructs me. "There is not much more I can do until she awakens. Call me the moment she does."
"I'll move my bed next to hers," I tell Alysoun. "If she wakes up or begins to stir, she will wake me up."
"How are you holding up?" asks Alysoun while brushing my cheek in that gentle way she did when I was bedridden those many weeks after the rescue barely able to speak and much too weak to hold even a spoon.
"I'm doing okay," I tell her, "I'm just wiped from all of tonight's goings-on."
"I can give you something to help you relax, if you wish," offers Alysoun.
"Not necessary, Alysoun, I'll relax with some deep breathing," I reply.
"Fine, send for me as soon as Stormy wakes up," says Alysoun and vanishes.