Garinor awoke many hours later to the strangest sensation. He felt like he was immersed in water, but that a boulder was set upon his chest, keeping him at the bottom of a lake. His vision swam with wavy lines and he could barely see. There was a darkened haze everywhere and shadows chased after his vision wherever he turned.
He tried to push himself upright, but when his arm reached out in front of him, the world was pushed away with a creaking sound. Bending and stretching his legs also had no effect whatsoever. But then again, something was brushing up against his left leg. It changed the drowning sensation somewhat and he then felt as if he were buttressed up against a wall, hanging limp.
Garinor struggled in his murky prison for a long time before anything else happened. His mind churned, befuddled. He was vaguely aware of a shape floating in the distance. It took a moment for him to recognize it as a small shark which had entered the frigid water and was hunting him down. It drew nearer and nearer, seeking his flesh. Sharp, shiny teeth reached out to bite him.
“Ow!”
The shark bit into his flesh again, leaving his cheek burning with pain. His arms flailed, trying to get him away from the savage fish, but the boulder on his chest stopped him completely. There was nothing he could do but suffer the agony of those teeth.
After numerous bites, the pain lessened at last. The darkness in his eyes started to clear like clouds being blown in a gentle breeze. Then things around him resolved into their original shapes and he fought to put it all together.
He was lying on the floor. The table had fallen over and was pressing against his side. A chair was just beyond his reach; he had apparently pushed it away. His kicking legs were swinging outward for he was curled into a ball on his side. Nearby, the old woman was leaning over him, her gnarled hands inches away from his reddened cheek where she had been slapping him.
“Are you back with me now?” she croaked in her raspy voice.
Garinor struggled to make sense of up and down. It was some time before he could answer her. “I think so.” He rubbed his sore cheek after pushing the heavy table off his side, which the woman had not been able to do. “What happened?”
The woman made a guttural sound and muttered for a moment as if trying to find the right words. “I gave you cold tea, but I made it with the wrong mix of herbs.”
“What?”
She sighed. “I poisoned you. Accidentally,” she amended quickly. “I gave you a wolfsbane and valerian root mixture I use to sleep. You came at night. I made the tea out of habit.” She shook her head. “Valerian calms you down but wolfsbane is a type of poison. An old hag like me, though, needs something with a little kick to it to put me down for a night. But I’ve given you enough antidote that you’re not likely to sleep for quite a while now.”
Garinor rubbed the sides of his head and moaned softly. “I feel so strange.”
“That’ll be the herbs battling it out inside of you, but you’re resilient. You’re going to be fine. If you weren’t, it would already be over,” she added with a dour tone. “Took half the night to get you to drink the whole thing, but now you’re up, all’s well.”
He certainly did not agree with her assessment, but he couldn’t find a way to argue. Every set of words he tried to say jumbled together and he finally gave up. As he sat on the floor, he realized the old woman was much more haggard than when he had first seen her. “You’ve been up all night.”
“I did just tell you that,” she agreed.
“You need sleep,” he murmured and then pushed himself awkwardly to standing. He felt more like a rope trying to stand up than a person, but he managed it with a little teetering on his feet. He spread his feet out wide for extra support, then reached to help the old woman up from the floor. It was a wonder he didn’t crash on top of her.
He helped her into bed and pulled the covers over her. His body felt like it belonged to someone else, and he planned to hunker down on the floor and curl up until he fell asleep, but the woman was right and he found he couldn’t settle himself.
His body argued with him, because it felt so bizarre that it wanted to rest and to forget this feeling, but his mind was running faster than a horse down a steep mountainside and he couldn’t rein in anything coherent. He was racing through frantic chunks of thought and memory, most of which were mashed together nonsensically. He hoped the sensation wouldn’t last for long.
Hours went past and his eyes were exhausted from chasing the scenes being enacted in his mind. But things were slowing down at last and he felt a lot better. The late morning sun gazed through the window. Garinor found the light utterly painful, as if his eyes were letting too much of it in.
The old woman stirred at last and pushed together two plates of food for them to start the morning. Garinor only hesitated for a moment before he accepted the food and drink, wondering if maybe she had served him poison again. They ate quietly and didn’t discuss the events of the night before until everything was set aside.
She apologized only once for poisoning him, but she seemed to think it was irrelevant since he wasn’t dead. She talked again of the prophecy and wondered what he thought he would do next.
Garinor’s options seemed limited. Seeking the king now seemed pointless, so he crossed it off his list. That left him with pursuing the prince and trying to bring an end to him, or trying to find the scepter. When he verbalized these ideas, the old woman added that he did have the option of trying to leave it all behind him and search for a new life altogether, but that didn’t sit well with him.
“Seeking the prince is a fool’s errand,” she declared then. “For as I said, the three players meet at the scepter anyway. Why waste time seeking the prince when you could spend your time looking for the third player or the scepter?”
“Why seek the third player, either, if we’re all meeting at the scepter?” he countered.
“Good point,” she conceded. “So that doesn’t leave you much choice, now, does it?”
Garinor shook his head, muttering, “There is always choice.”
“Yes, that is true. So then, young one, what will you do next?”