Liv slumped back into the thick upholstery of her favorite chair. It had been made from mountain oak, and every inch of the legs and arms had been carved into elegant loops and whirls. The wood itself, even after being varnished, was a tan color so pale that it went quite well with the white fabric which encased the cushions. There was even a matching footstool for when she was particularly tired, though she wasn’t using it at the moment.
“I think I understand why it was so hard for you to tell me,” she admitted to Wren. “And why you wanted to speak with Arjun and Ghveris first.”
At the huntress’s insistence, Liv’s solar had been cleared of everyone but the five of them – the group that had gone through the Tomb of Celris together, and everything that came after. Wren was slouched against one arm of the long couch that faced her chair, next to Arjun, who’d come up from the hospital just for this conversation. Ghveris sat on the stone bench meant to support his weight, beneath the windows in the wall, while Keri leaned back in his own, matching chair, next to Liv. He was using his footstool. The only one who was missing was Rose, but that particular absence was little more than a very old wound now – the kind that only ached occasionally, usually before a storm rolled in.
“I needed to know if it was even possible, first,” Wren explained, and from her tone Liv guessed that her friend was feeling a bit guilty.
“And once you had an answer, it was only right that Ghveris be the first to know,” Keri said, nodding his head. “No one is angry with you, Wren. I think we all understand.”
“As much as it’s possible, at least,” Liv said, with a sigh. “Alright. Let’s try to start from the beginning and go step by step. Ghveris.” The Antrian turned his heavily-armored helm to her, fixing Liv with his burning blue eyes. “I assume that, if it was possible to do this, without any sort of trickery from Ractia, without anyone else coming to hard, if we could actually trust her somehow, that you would want it. Am I wrong?”
“To have my body back?” Ghveris held up his gauntlets of enchanted steel. He gazed down at the articulated fingers, and flexed them. “If it could actually happen – it would be the thing I want most in the world,” he admitted. “Even if the magic in my blood was gone, and I could never shift again, it would be worth it, just to be able to touch –” His voice cut off, and he released a burst of steam.
Wren reached out and slipped her slim hand into Ghveris’s much larger one.
“But we cannot trust her,” Ghveris said, shaking his head. “And I could not stand it if someone else suffered for my sake. I will not take the risk,” he declared.
“Put that aside for now,” Liv said. “If what she told Wren is true, she’s now got everything she needs to finish assembling whatever machinery she’s spent the last twenty years working on. We may have slowed her down, by interrupting her mining operations in the Ratn Parvat, and in places like Coral Bay, but it doesn’t seem like there’s any point in pursuing that as a strategy any longer.” She glanced over to her husband: in strategic matters, Liv was more than happy to defer to Keri.
“We need to assume that wherever she’s building this thing, it’s going to be well defended,” Keri said, picking up the thread of the conversation with the ease of long familiarity. “And it’s clearly well hidden, given that we haven’t been able to find it in nearly twenty years of searching. We also know that she evacuated a substantial number of her servants from Nightfall Peak. We have to assume that if we mount an attack, we’re going to face whatever Antrians she has left, a scattering of Eld and Great Bats, and perhaps even a wyrm or two. Along with Noghis, of course, and Ractia herself.”
“You’re talking about a full-scale battle,” Wren said. “The kind we haven’t had since she left Nightfall Peak.”
“Which means supply lines and transportation for an army,” Ghveris rumbled. “But we cannot truly plan for those things without knowing where she is.”
“Which, supposedly, we’ll only know when she actually activates this machine she’s built,” Liv pointed out. “She told Wren it would be obvious, but that doesn’t give us a lot of time to prepare. And we neither know what the machine actually does, nor how long it will take to work.”
“She said –” Wren paused for a moment, as if to dredge the exact words to the surface of her memories, “– that it wouldn’t affect us, one way or the other. That our world will go on, for as long as such things do.”
Arjun frowned. “If we could actually trust her, it would almost be worth it simply to agree,” he said. “I don’t see how we could stop her if we wanted to.”
“We can, though,” Liv said, sitting up and leaning forward. “She’s told us that much herself. Think about it – if she could just use her machine without worrying what we were going to do, she’d never have tracked Wren down and made the offer. If she really can’t hide what she’s doing, we have to assume that it’s going to make it obvious where she is, and that what she wants will take long enough that we’d be able to get there and interfere. Otherwise there’s no point in her doing this.”
Keri nodded. “We can have a small, mobile group of our best soldiers ready to move on a moment’s notice,” he said. “We can have horses ready, and ships waiting at Newport, loaded with supplies in advance. Once she reveals herself, we could respond rapidly. Those are all things I can arrange with Soile, and it won’t cost anything but money and time.”
“Make it happen,” Liv decided. “No matter what we decide, it doesn’t hurt us to be prepared.”
“How bad does it make a mess of things that you need to leave?” Wren asked.
Liv shrugged. “I keep a tether attached to Bald Peak constantly anyway. We can be back from Coral Bay in a matter of minutes. And I assume that whatever sign we’re waiting for will be just as obvious from there as it would be from here. Can anyone see any reason that I shouldn’t go and see Caspian?” She looked around the room, and one by one, her friends shook their heads.
“So what do I do?” Wren asked. She leaned forward, slipping her hand out of Ghveris’s gauntlet, and almost seemed to curl in on herself in her own misery.
Liv stood up, walked past the table at the center of the room, and bent over to take Wren’s hand in her own. It was difficult: she knew what she needed to say, but she hated doing it. “You did what Ractia asked you to do, Wren. You brought her message to me. What I choose to do now is between me and her, but by the terms she offered, you’re more than justified in holding her to deliver on what she offered.”
Wren raised her head and looked around at the group. “Wait. You think I should?”
“I didn’t say that.” Liv squeezed her friend’s hand. “For a long time, we hoped that Arjun might be able to use the machines and enchantments we found up on the ring to help Ghveris. I’m sorry that we couldn’t. There’s just so much we still don’t understand about how the V?dim used magic, and it may take us hundreds of years to rediscover everything that’s been lost. I don’t think it would be fair for us to try to forbid you both from doing this, if that’s what you want.” And it might destroy our friendship if I did, she thought to herself.
“But we also may not be able to help if Ractia is setting some sort of trap,” Keri pointed out. “I think we would all try, of course. But without knowing what she is planning to do –” He shrugged.
This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
“What we’re saying is, I think it has to be your decision,” Liv said, finally releasing Wren’s hand. “Your and Ghveris’s.”
“What would you do?” Wren asked. “In my place?”
Liv tried to suppress a wince at the question. “I wouldn’t do it. I don’t trust her.”
“Nor do I,” Ghveris announced. “This is the woman who twisted my people to fight her war. If she is telling the truth, she could not be bothered to heal me when she had the chance, and would rather have forged me into a more deadly weapon for her use. If she is lying, then her offer is nothing but a trap. If the decision is partly mine, then I say no.”
With a great creaking of metal, he rose from his stone bench and crossed the solar, swinging wide around the chairs and couches, to reach the door. The Antiran swung it open forcefully enough to bound the heavy oak off the wall of the corridor, and then strode out, leaving the rest of them behind in silence.
One of Liv’s guards, who were stationed outside the doorway in pairs while the solar was in use, looked into the room. “Is everything well, your majesty?” he asked.
“As well as it can be.” Liv put a hand on Wren’s shoulder. “The carriages are loaded. Let’s be off to Coral Bay.”
?
“You don’t have any misgivings about leaving it up to them?” Keri asked.
He’d waited until they were alone in their carriage, with Rianne perched on Liv’s lap and Rei seated across from them. Professor Norris had given their daughter an intricate present of linked steel rings and bars which he called a blacksmith’s puzzle, and the child was fascinated by it.
“Of course I’m worried,” Liv admitted. Outside the windows of the carriage, the curved stone walls of the central shaft which pierced Bald Peak from top to bottom sped past, as the mana disc descended. “I can’t even imagine all of the things Ractia could do to Ghveris with a bit of his blood. I haven’t forgotten what she did to Milisant.”
Keri opened his mouth, glanced at their daughter, and then chose his words carefully. “There isn’t much chance I’ll ever forget that,” he said. “Not if I live a thousand years. I don’t think even she deserved to end in that way.”
Liv reached out with her left hand and took his, leaving her other arm loosely wrapped around her daughter’s torso.
“No one could possibly trust anything Ractia said, after everything she’s done, could they?” Rei asked. He had a book of magical theory in his lap, but in recent years he’d shown more and more interest in the politics that came with running a kingdom. Given how often it was the subject of conversation between Liv and his father, it didn’t surprise her.
“Ractia’s always been good at offering people what they want,” Liv explained. “Most of the time, that’s meant targeting desperate people who want children, and can’t have them on their own. It’s easy to look at what she does and think you’d never fall for it, right up until she promises you something you can’t live without.”
“Most of the people who ended up serving her didn’t start out as bad people,” Keri added. “The sacrifices, the wars, that all came later – after she’d had time to twist them to her own use.”
Rei looked back and forth between his father and Liv. “So you should tell whoever you’re talking about that they can’t do - whatever this is.”
“Wren and Ghveris,” Liv said. “And I can’t. Well, I could, but I won’t.”
“Why not?”
Liv glanced out the window, as they rolled down out of the mountain and through the gates which surrounded the entrance to Bald Peak. The old mine road, now widened, leveled and paved with wide stones, led down to the city and the waystone which would take them to Coral Bay. The other carriages would be coming behind, and Kaija’s riders fanned out to either side, protecting the procession. Below, Liv saw a column of light rise up into the sky, and then die away.
“If I tell my friends that I won’t let them have what they want most in the world, how do you think they would feel?” Liv said. “No. This is a choice they have to make, and all we can do is to be there for them, one way or the other. And be ready to deal with whatever consequences come from their decision.”
“And Ractia?” Rei asked.
“We strike as soon as she reveals herself.”
The streets around the waystone were crowded with students, but they moved to the sides when they saw the royal carriages approaching, escorted by Liv’s personal guard. Still, the press of bodies slowed their journey down, and Liv counted three more flashes of light, each one signalling another departure.
“Where is everyone going, Mama?” Rianne asked, looking up from her puzzle.
“The same place we are,” Liv told her daughter. “To Coral Bay. A very important man is dying.”
Their carriages were escorted through onto the waystone, where one of the students on duty approached and held a short conversation with the coachman. A moment later, Kaija rapped on the window, and Keri opened the door.
“The students on duty are exhausted,” the head of Liv’s personal guard explained. “I’ll have the mana cost split between four of our people. We’ll be on our way immediately.”
Keri swung the door closed, and shook his head. “Remember when we had to scramble for enough mana to do this ourselves?”
“I do.” Liv leaned forward to kiss their daughter’s head. “Someday, I want all of the waystones to be supplied with enough mana that anyone can use them, at any time. Even people who aren’t mages. And I want us to be able to make new stones, and hook them into the network.”
A blue glow began to rise up around the carriage, and Liv made certain to take hold of Rianne with both arms. She’d travelled by waystone so many times over the years that it had become routine; she knew that there was no danger. But there was still a small, niggling fear that when she got to the other side, her daughter might not be there with her.
Light obliterated the carriage, and in the still, dark silence between places, Liv cast about for the feeling of Caspian Loredon, of his voice. To her relief, she found nothing. Perhaps it was only a bit of superstition - certainly no one else had ever seemed to believe her when she talked about hearing the ghosts of the dead.
Physical sensation returned all at once, like a crashing wave: the salt scent of the seat, the squirming weight of Liv’s daughter in her lap, the light through the carriage windows.
“Was he there?” Keri asked.
Liv shook her head as the carriage creaked into motion and rolled off the waystone. “No,” she said. “Anyway, I thought you didn’t believe in that.”
“I’ve never experienced it myself,” her husband said. “But I’ve seen you do enough impossible things that I’ve learned not to ever bet against you. If you say it happened – I’ll keep an open mind. But in this case, hopefully it means that he’s still alive.”
“Look at all the people!” Rianne exclaimed, setting aside her puzzle for the moment. “There’s even more than at home.”
And Liv had to admit, it was true. There was hardly room on the street for the carriages to move in single file, and then only because Liv’s guards used their horses to push people out of the way, accompanied by constant shouts of ‘make way for the queen!’
Though they were in Lucania, the blue and white crest painted on the sides of their carriage, the very same displayed on the jack-of-plate armor that the guards were wearing, proved more than enough for the people around them to recognize who Liv was. She couldn’t actually hear what they were saying – none of them were shouting as loudly as her guards, nor were they as close by. Still, Liv could see arms raised to point at them, men and women leaning in to speak to each other as they stared at the procession, and the occasional cluster of students, wands at their hips, craning their necks to get a better view.
“Are they looking at the queen, or the archmage, do you think?” Keri mused.
“In Coral Bay? The archmage,” Liv said, without a trace of doubt in her mind.
It was worse than either of the two conclaves which had taken place here, or even the four archmage tests that she’d attended. Liv saw the heraldry of a dozen Lucanian noble houses, and she wasn’t even looking. Caspian Loredon had spent eighteen years ruling Lucania as one third of the council of regents, and that was a lot of time to form relationships among the aristocracy.
But it was the Watchful Guild of Magim who had come out in full force. As they made their way up the bluff – past not only The Crab and Gull, which was still in operation, but also the more recently built Fisherman’s Wife, and the Blue Dolphin, which had once been painted white and was under new ownership – Liv could see the village of tents down on the breach, where all the culling mages would be camping. It was easily twice as large as when she’d come for her testing, extending farther north up along the strand.
“It would make him happy to see this,” Liv said, and allowed herself to smile.
“It turns out that having two colleges, instead of only one, and admitting Eld besides, was a recipe for growing the guild,” Keri remarked, in a wry tone. “But yes. I didn’t know the man as well as you did, Liv, but there were two things he devoted his life to: his guild and his family.” He paused for a long moment. “Are you alright?”
“Yes. I don’t know.” Liv took a deep breath. “Probably not. But I need to put on a good show, at least.”
The carriage rolled to a halt in the courtyard of the college, where Liv had arrived so many years before as a student who had no idea of all the things ahead of her. Then, she’d come to learn. Now, she was coming for a funeral.
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Dramatis Personae
Livara t?r Valtteri kaen Syv? - Archmage, former scullery maid at Castle Whitehill, the bastard daughter of Maggie Brodbeck and Valtteri Ka Auris. Queen of the Alliance and Lady of Winter. Learned it from Julianne: Never give an order that won't be obeyed. [38 Rings of Mana, not counting mana stored in items.]
Arjun Iyuz - Master Guildmage from Lendh ka Dakruim, professor of healing at Bald Peak, and running a hospital, as well. Feels a bit like a failure that things have come to this. [19 Rings of Mana]
Ghveris, the Beast of Iuronnath - Formerly a Great Bat in service to Ractia, now the remains of his body form the heart of an Antrian juggernaut. Exercising his veto! ...think it'll work? [Mana Battery: 10 Rings]
Inkeris "Keri" ka Ilmari k?n B?lris - Originally of the Unconquered House of B?lris, now Prince Consort of the Alliance. Husband of Liv, father to Rei and the princess. "It won't cost anything but money and time." Said like someone who has plenty of both... [22 Rings of Mana.]
Rei ka Inkeris k?n B?lris - Son of Keri and Rika. Learning politics. [14 Rings of Mana]
Rianne t?r Inkeris, Princess of the Alliance - Daughter of Liv and Keri. Puzzles! [11 Rings of Mana]
Wren Wind Dancer - Daughter of Nighthawk, cousin of Calm Waters. Did not get the reaction she expected from Liv.
