Scholar of Magic (Art of the Adept #3) - Michael G. Manning Page 0,141

promise I’ll come back as soon as I can, and I’ll cook something special for everybody.”

Sammy hugged him and then stepped back. “Be sure to bring Selene next time. I’m sure your wife must be desperate for my advice on how to handle you.”

The words brought a quiet stab of pain, but he laughed politely, wishing he could do exactly that. “I’ll tell her. She definitely wants to visit.” His mother hugged him then, and after a long exchange of ‘good-byes’ and ‘be carefuls,’ he and the cat escaped back into the Glenwood. Will hobbled along on his crutches while the cat walked beside him.

Will waited until they were a good distance from the house before he asked, “Mister Mittens, huh?” The goddamn cat declined to respond. Will wondered if the demigod realized there was a ribbon tied in his hair. Had he played along, or was he oblivious? In the end Will decided it wasn’t worth risking his life to ask.

When they were almost to the congruence that led to the Shadowlands, the Cath Bawlg resumed his larger form. Will was pleased to note that the bow wasn’t dislodged during the transformation. It was killing him to keep from sniggering.

Casting the climb spell on himself, Will painfully crawled up the beast’s side and back until he was once again centrally positioned and well affixed. “Hang on,” cautioned the goddamn cat, and then they were flying through the forest. The constant jarring sent a continuous stream of painful impulses up Will’s leg, causing him to grunt and moan whether he wanted to or not.

A leap into the dark shadows beneath a particular set of trees, and Will found himself once again within the strange, twisting Shadowlands. It didn’t improve the pain in his leg, but the wound did distract him from the headache caused by the strange dimension’s weird geometry.

Chapter 32

The goddamn cat left him at the outskirts of Cerria. Will was grateful to end the torturous ride, but now he faced a less painful, but much longer walk through the city. He watched the cat walk away, aloof as always, never looking back—and still with a pink bow tied between his ears. He smirked as the demigod left. “Even the darkest day has something to chuckle about,” he told himself.

He summoned the crutches from within the limnthal and set off down the road. The sun was about to set, which meant he was getting close to the twenty-four-hour mark for when his friends had been injured. His goal was to have the potions to give to them before hitting forty-eight hours.

Will had no good way to judge what his true time limit might be, but sooner was safer. He also worried about the time the potions would take to produce. Last time he’d had only a quarter as much troll urine, and he’d managed to make seven potions. This time he could potentially make several times that many, but he would need to restrict the size of the batch he worked with, otherwise it would take far too long.

The first stage of the process involved boiling down the urine to fully sterilize it, but boiling a hundred gallons of urine took a lot longer than boiling twenty or thirty gallons, and that was without considering the fact that he would have to work in smaller portions because he didn’t have vessels large enough for such amounts.

He thought about it as he walked and decided he would scale his production to half of what he had done the year before and try to produce four potions. “One for Janice, one for Tiny, and one for this gimp leg,” he muttered. That would leave only one to spare for an emergency, but he could make three more similar sized batches later.

It had taken him three days to make the regeneration potions last year, but that had been partly because he’d had other things to do as well. If he kept the batch small and stayed throughout the process, starting the second and third stages as soon as they were ready, he thought he could finish in about twelve hours.

Will was halfway through the city when the sun sank fully below the horizon and the street lighters began to light the lamps. Other