The Magi: Callum: Helping the Carne?

[k_a_webb]

There were times when Callum wished he hadn’t followed Lorna. Leaving everything he knew behind had been surprisingly easy at first. It had been an adventure and Lorna was… she was amazing then and still was, even after travelling around the country for over twenty years. Everywhere they went there were people who needed help, whether that was medicines, a dose of healing energy, or both, because the Magi, who had once been a force for good, had changed under the rule of the new matriarch. No one had the same respect they’d had for the Magi when they were truly a group of healers.

Instead people respected the travelling healers, who were Magi but had left behind the new rules and were seen as an entirely different group of people. Lorna and Callum were just two of a growing number, but they were the first. It was thanks to Lorna’s collection of seeds that there were plants all over the country for the travelling healers to gather, because she’d spent their first winter turning a run-down old cottage into a place she could start off some of the more delicate herbs. For Callum it had been the hardest time and some nights he’d thought seriously about running back to his family and begging for their forgiveness.

Cold nights in winter reminded him of that period, and they were still hard for him, but the years had made him realise how important they both were. Without them, without the time Lorna had spent thinking about the future and the hard work they’d both done to create gardens everywhere they could, without those tiny little plants that had become big plants everyone could use, there wouldn’t be travelling healers all over the country, doing the work the Magi turned down, and he was always going to be proud of being a part of that. Even when Lorna had him kneeling down under a huge bush looking for a tiny little herb she needed to make a certain medicine.

Sighing, he ran a hand through his hair, trying not to think of where they were going to be travelling to. News had reached them of an illness that the Carne were facing and their own healers hadn’t been able to combat. That was followed by rumours of the disappearance of a Carne prince and the argument he’d had with his father not long before. Callum had never believed that the Magi should withhold help from anyone, but he wasn’t sure about travelling into Carne land.

Lorna didn’t have any worries at all. They needed her help, so she was going to give it, because she didn’t think that any of the new Magi, as she called them, would walk away from their matriarch in order to help a race of people who had once held their ancestors captive. She’d told him that when they’d spoken, but Callum wasn’t so sure. Once their entire race had been healers, before either of them had been born, and slowly they’d split into two different groups. The healers, like Lorna, and the Magi, and he didn’t doubt that there were still healers within the Magi who would leave to help the Carne.

Mirrored from K. A. Webb Writing.