A Mark of Kings, page 11
part #1 of The Shattered Reigns Series
Then Declan’s mild amusement turned to annoyance, his eyes on the discarded blade still laying on the floor nearby.
That was twice in only a little more than a day he’d been taken by surprise because of own his reckless mistakes.
I’m getting soft.
He stood and stooped to snatch up the knife and sword belt, shoving the blade roughly back into its slender sheath while wondering if he and Ryn hadn't spent too long away from the discipline and structure of the guilds. Cursing himself, Declan gathered his still-damp clothes and started getting dressed, pulling his pants, socks, boots, and bloody shirt on in quick order. Choosing not to don his heavy traveling cloak just yet, he slipped his arms through the holes of his sleeveless jerkin, then checked on the woman one final time before turning and shoving his way through the door impatiently, sword belt in his free hand. Taking the stairs down to the common area, he found the room bright and cheerful, illuminated by a mid-morning light that said the storm of the previous night had long-since faded. A scattered assemblage of patrons had claimed seats about the room, including a few Declan had seen the previous night. Some of the loggers were chatting over tankards of mead to his left, the old grey-haired man was gnawing on a lamb bone in the corner, and even the group whose table Dia had commandeered were among the other quietly eating customers. Inclining his head in this latter foursome’s direction in a quick sign of thanks as he reached the bottom steps, Declan turned the corner of the banister and headed for the bar. Brohn stood behind the raised counter, polishing the stained wood with a worn rag, but looked up as Declan approached.
“Late riser, eh?” the bearded innkeeper asked with a chuckle, pausing in his work to toss the cloth over his shoulder and reach under the bar as Declan took a seat opposite him. Tossing his cloak on a stool to his left and setting his sword and belt on the counter, Declan watched the big man pull out a dented brass pitcher and fill a chipped wooden cup with water, which he promptly handed over.
“Would have liked to be later,” Declan muttered in answer, accepting the cup with a grateful nod. “Woke up to a nasty—”
A flutter of wings from behind cut him off, and he didn’t even have time to turn before a comforting weight settle on his left shoulder.
“Ryn,” he said in half-surprised greeting, looking up at the large shape of the hawk who had descended from somewhere in the rafters. “Over our tantrum from last night?”
Hardly, Ryn quipped back privately, stretching his wings out and “accidentally” catching Declan in the back of the head. I’ve just decided I have better things to do than pick a fight with a tavern wench.
“That one’s been waitin’ up for ya’ since ‘afore dawn, I think,” Brohn said before Declan could formulate any subtle reply, watching the bird with an impressed expression. “Well trained animal ya’ got there.”
“With some exceptions,” Declan nodded, glancing at the hawk sidelong. “Otherwise I’d have roasted him for a road-side supper a long time ago.”
Ryn kept a dignified silence at that, but Brohn cracked a grin before gesturing towards Declan’s left arm.
“How’s the elbow? Is that what woke you?”
Declan shook his head, rolling up his reddened sleeve to show the innkeeper the clean stitching. “Unfortunately not. Like I said yesterday, you do good work. I, on the other hand, was fool enough to leave my sword belt out of reach last night.”
Brohn looked confused at this, but Declan saw Ryn’s head turn sharply towards him. Before either could get out a question, he gave them the long and short of the story. By the end, Brohn was practically crying with laughter. Clutching at his sides, the innkeeper gasped for breath.
“So ha-ha-ha, y-ya got he-held ha-ha, held up in y-yer hi-hi-hi, yer own bed ha-ha-ha with your own knife?!” he roared, struggling mightily to speak through his mirth. Declan nodded, smirking himself. Brohn’s amusement was infectious, and pretty soon Declan was chuckling along, unable to keep it in as he covered his face with both hands in amused exasperation.
Is she awake now? Ryn’s voice managed to reach him. Declan shook his head in silent answer. The hawk said nothing more, and as Brohn continued to laugh uproariously—repeating his favorite parts of the story to himself—Declan glanced up. Ryn’s head was turned upwards, eyes on the ceiling in the direction of the room the half-elf still remained, and Declan knew the bird was extending his senses. He frowned, unsure if his imagination was tricking him into thinking that his friend looked worried, anxious even.
“What’s all this?”
A woman’s voice rang clear across the common area, and Declan looked around in time to see Dia poke her head out of the kitchen, undoubtedly drawn by the sound of her husband’s booming guffaws. She stared in bewildered astonishment upon catching sight of Brohn, who even at the appearance of his wife didn’t seem to be able to get ahold of himself. It took several seconds before he managed to catch his breath enough to repeat Declan’s story through wheezing laughs.
By the time he finished, Dia looked anything but amused.
“So you’re telling me,” she began coldly, “that the two of you are down here, having a merry old time, while that poor girl is lying all alone on a bed in your room, unable to be woken?!”
Brohn stopped laughing abruptly.
“We was jus’ havin’ a bit of fun, dearie,” he tried to explain before promptly withering under his wife’s glare as he mumbled again. “Jus’ a bit a’ fun…”
Dia, for her part, let out a loud “hr-umph!” and stalked out from behind the bar, making for the stairs, undoubtedly off to check on the half-elf. As soon as she was gone, the two men exchanged a look, grinning hesitantly at each other.
“Best be on yer way, lad,” Brohn said. “Don’t want ta’ prod tha’ one’s patience much more, or she’s like ta’ serve us in the soup tonight.”
“Wouldn’t want that,” Declan agreed readily, standing and lifting his weapons belt from the counter. Cinching it around his waist, he paused, then reached down to fish through his pouch.
Pulling out a single gold coin—almost a tenth of the advanced payment he and Ryn had made on the village contract—he set it on the bar between himself and the innkeep. It was likely worth five times the cost of the meal and room, which Brohn seemed to recognize as soon as he took in the piece.
“Lad, that’s—” he started, eyebrows rising, but Declan cut him off.
“It’s less than your and Dia’s help has been worth to us,” he said, gesturing to himself and Ryn as he slid the coin towards the man. “If you think it’s too much, then you can gift me a room next time I’m in the area.”
For a second or two more, Brohn hesitated. Finally, he took the gold piece tentatively, held it for a moment, then slid it into the pocket of his apron.
“Glad I was careful with those stitches, now,” the innkeep grumbled, eyeing Declan’s left arm as he proffered a grateful hand.
Declan laughed, accepting it with a firm shake of thanks before turning and heading back for the stairs. “Let’s hope I won’t need them much longer, if this old man you’re sending me out after is half as gifted as you say.”
From his table in the corner of the room, Gonin Whist watched al’Dyor’s whelp briefly clasp hands with the innkeeper, exchanging a few last words with a laugh. As the man turned towards the room, the horrid great bird still on his shoulder, Gonin dropped his eyes and pretended to go back to chewing on the soup bone of his lamb stew. When the pair started up the steps, though, he again lifted his gaze, studying the black hawk with particular care.
The creature, though, didn’t take notice of him. The woven wards held, the imbued bone talisman about his neck—strung to the same frayed twine from which hung his crystal speaker’s charm—hiding his power from the beast, just as the Queen had promised it would.
Gonin took a steadying breath, then settled in to wait, pale grey eyes never so much as flinching away from the landing of the second floor he could barely make out from his vantage across the room. He’d had to calm himself every time he’d seen the man and his monstrous companion. He’d wanted to strike immediately, to cast the two of them into fiery oblivion then and there, but his mistress’ words always held his hand, guiding him as they had seen him to the inn ahead of the pair the previous night. It raked at him, tore at him, being shackled as he was, but his trust in her greater wisdom outweighed his confidence in his own abilities. There was a reason she dissuaded him, he knew, a reason she tethered him with her commands. It frightened him, if he was honest with himself.
As strong as Gonin was, and despite the added power of her bone charm, the Queen still feared that that was a fight he was not guaranteed to win alone…
There was the clunk of booted feet, and Gonin watched silently as the woman innkeep—Dia, he had heard her called by the other patrons—reappeared, leading the way down the stairs in front of the man and his beast, the former of which now carried the limp form of the half-elf they’d arrived with yesterday in his arms. Gonin had to keep his face in check as annoyance welled up in his chest, seeing the unconscious woman again.
Months of preparation to see his mistress’ pet was fed, all gone to waste in the course of a single night…
Shoving the irritation aside, Gonin’s long, lank hair shifted over the edge of his grey-brown mantle as he followed the group’s descent, then watched them navigate the length of the common area until Dia opened the inn door for the man and his burden. There the two held a last brief conversation, the plump woman apparently offering directions before they exchanged their farewells, and the door was closed again.
Gonin didn’t bother watching the woman return to her husband behind the counter, his interest in the couple having dissipated the night before after he’d come to the conclusion the two were nothing more than pawns in this game the Queen was playing out. Instead, he stared at nothing, extending his senses only slightly, straining to feel through the thick timber walls of the inn.
He didn’t have to be patient long. A brief shiver of magic told him the creature had changed forms, and not two minutes later the rapid strikes of hooves fading down the forest road reached his ears.
With a nasty smile, Gonin drew back his power, gathering it to himself, and began to weave.
The Purpose formed quickly, the shifting blue-black light of the spellwork invisible in his gnarled hands to any but his own eyes. Quickly he threaded the simple command into the magics, forming and shaping it. When it was done, he shattered the ethereal entity with a thought, cracking it into a score of smaller shards, each carrying their own will. With a flick of his wrist, he banished the fractured spell through the wall to his left.
Getting to his feet, Gonin’s smile lingered as he dropped a couple copper pieces on the table and made for the door, feeling his enchantments chase the distant sound of galloping, bearing with them their hungry, singular need.
Devour.
CHAPTER NINE
“There is a stock misunderstanding among the gentry of our country that all who practice the arcane arts can and should be classified as one and the same. It is an understandable confusion, to an extent. To the simple mind of the commoner, any display of magical ability must appear something along the lines of miraculous. To them, there is little difference between a mage who diverts a river to assist in watering dying crops, and one who summons up a three-day storm. These examples, likely, are equally astounding to the uneducated eye, and understandably so.
We who have had the fortune of that otherwise lacking education, on the other hand, know better. Beyond the classification of arcanic affinity, beyond the labeling of auramancy, verdamancy, pyromancy, and the like, it is to our benefit to equally be aware of the tiers of ability in our kingdom’s spellcrafters. One should not, after all, confuse a college acolyte in their first year of study with the King’s own court magus, less the former die of embarrassment and the latter strike one from the face of the earth with little more than a thought for such an insult…”
-On the Study of Magic, author unknown, c. 300p.f.
When Bonner yr’Essel was troubled, the entirety of the forest shivered in mirrored concern.
Three days, now. Three days his daughter had been absent from their home. Ordinarily Bonner wouldn’t have been so worried. Esteria had left their clearing a hundred times before, sometimes taking to the outside world for weeks at a time. She enjoyed exploring the deeper woodlands and farming communities nearby, occasionally going so far as the High and Low Roads to meet and speak with travelers from all across the nation. It was her way of understanding the wider nature of the land, and she only steered clear of the larger nearby cities of Kanrys and Ranheln at his and her mother’s insistence.
Still, on those occasions, Esteria had always left word of her departure, as well as some indication of when she would return. This time, if anything, had been even more deliberate, as she had taken leave bearing the responsibility of a grim task. For months she had been returning from her excursions with tales of disappearances, of vanishing villagers from all the nearby hamlets. At first, they had chalked the trouble up to wolves and the occasional wild warg that strayed too far south.
Then Esteria had come back with tales of a third child being taken, and Bonner yr’Essel had decided it was time to intervene.
It had taken them two weeks of searching, of his scrying and weaving whispers into the forest and her putting her mother’s training to use before they’d pieced together even some trail of the kidnappers. It proved a more troublesome task than either had been expecting, and Bonner regretted now having chalked up their difficulties to any particular skill on the criminals’ parts. Still, they had agreed together the work shouldn’t have claimed more than a day and a night.
Three days, the fearful thought came again.
Bonner’s weave trembled as his concentration faltered, and he pressed the distraction aside with the iron discipline he had instilled in himself too many centuries ago. Being worried was a father’s right, to be sure, but it would help Esteria little if his magics failed under the strain of something as base as parental sentiments.
Bonner cursed himself. Perhaps if he had been less diverted in his initial search, he would have sensed the tinge of power flickering in the trail they had been hounding, the near-invisible hint of a dark, guiding hand in the action of the kidnappers…
Perhaps he might not have been so foolish as to allow Esteria to set off on the hunt on her own…
The weave shook again, and Bonner clenched his jaw, solidifying it once more. This time he did not allow himself to be drawn away, did not allow his thoughts to disturb the spellcrafting he had been at since the early hours of the morning. He stood with his eyes closed in the smaller clearing some ways west of the glen in which he had first made a home for himself and Arathia, built beyond the reach of common man and all his follies. His hands were outstretched, and he knew without seeing that a dozen tendrils of power undulated from every finger, faint in the light of the fading day. They snaked their way into the trees, connecting him to the vital aura of the forest itself piece by piece. It was a spell that was neither as accurate nor quick as scrying would have been, but given enough time Bonner’s consciousness would be connected to the uniform life of the western woodlands. If his spirit held, by tomorrow night he would share a presence with the earth itself for some hundreds of miles in every direction. His senses would be weak, practically useless to search for much of anything, but Esteria was of his own blood. He was confident he would find her, in this fashion.
After that, whoever or whatever had taken part in her disappearance would know the wrath of powers from an era in which magic was anything but forgotten…
Already Bonner’s awareness extended a dozen miles in every direction, and he willed it further, feeding the spell with all the magic he could provide. The largest details of the forest opened up one by one, revealing themselves to his weave. Here the churning force of a river. There the rising swell of a great hill. He ignored them all, focusing, seeking his daughter’s presence with all his might.
Bonner was so intent on doing so, in fact, that when he suddenly found it, the sheer presence of the being that accompanied her nearly shattered the fragile weave into nothingness.
Bonner staggered and gasped, barely keeping to his feet. Relief took him first, feeling Esteria’s wavering aura approaching, but the creature she was with was like a weight on his mind even through the indistinct sensations of this weaker spell. It brought him down, pulling him towards the ground like it needed nothing more than the force of its monstrous existence to crush his will into nothingness.
What’s more, Bonner knew this presence, and knew it well.
Ryndean?
There was a third with them, he realized then, and the moment of closer examination Bonner spared the person—the man, he registered—confirmed his astonished inner eye. A seed flickered inside this one, he could see, an echo of the greater power of the beast accompanying him.
Blood did not lie.
Bonner let out a wheezing laugh of relief, straining to cope with the torrent of information that had taken hold of his mind all at once. Esteria was in good hands, and a friend from a past life looked to have made himself known once again. Something like anticipation bloomed where worry had only seconds before taken hold, and Bonner made to release the spell little by little, intent on scrying out the trio’s more specific position.
Before he managed to do so, however, yet another force broke the boundaries of his extended mind.
The black smell of death filled his nose and mouth, and Bonner retched, unable to stop himself. He watched, horrified, as the chasing Purpose hounded his daughter and her strange companions. He felt, too, the familiarity of that banned magic, the notes and tenor of the weave that marked its maker.
In it, he saw the very hand which had played a part in Ester’s initial disappearance.
