The Weight of Magic, page 21
part #1 of Restriction Series
As he pushed against them, they bulged.
That movement might’ve been imagined.
He tried again, pushing as hard as he could, thinking that he could feel his internal pathways fill with power, and strained against the strap of energy Aldrich had used against him. Without meaning to, he had heaved even more of the power dammed inside of him, and it spilled out into the channels.
It was painful now. Torian cried out.
Movement near him caught his attention, and he didn’t have time to react.
A pair of shadow wolves came over, standing over him. The shadow wolf that had guided him here did not move, still lying in front of him, looking down upon him.
Then another shadow loomed over him. “Who taught you to do that?” Aldrich asked.
“Just let me go,” he said, his voice hoarse and cracked. It sounded so juvenile.
“Who taught you to do that?”
“No one taught me,” he said and realized that it was true. This was what he had taught himself, out of necessity, not out of any lessons that he had learned in school. “I’m just trying to get myself free. I’m sorry. I don’t want you to hurt my friend.”
The bands pressing down upon him began to constrict. It reminded him of the constriction that his sister liked to use on him, only this was not quite so deep. Unlike his sister, who often acted when he wasn’t ready for it, he had his pathways filled with power and could push on it, but he was afraid of pushing too hard and angering Aldrich.
Should he be? He pushed away that thought, as well. He was at Aldrich’s mercy, so of course he should be concerned about pushing too hard and angering him.
Could the wolves have brought him here to be trapped by Aldrich?
“Fight it,” Aldrich snapped.
“I’m trying,” he said.
“If you were trying, then you would do it. You clearly have more potential than most, so fight it.”
Torian wasn’t sure how to react to that. No one had ever told him that he had more potential than most.
The only thing that he had ever been told was that he had a lack of potential. He had an aptitude, certainly, and his time in school had given him an opportunity to observe all of the primary, first-tier, and second-tier patterns enough times that he recognized them, but he would never have been able to pass the second-tier level, as he couldn’t even get past the first-tier level.
“I don’t have more potential,” he said, hating the way that he sounded.
The pathways inside of him practically blazed with energy, and he couldn’t fight it.
“If you don’t believe so, then you don’t. And I’m not going to let you go. So you can lie here, suffer, while I talk to your friend until he decides to provide the answers that I need.”
Aldrich turned away from him, leaving the other two shadow wolves still looking down upon him. Torian tried to ignore them, but there was a presence to the wolves, and what was worse, a knowing sense of his suffering. It was as if the wolves were simply waiting for him to pass out so they could begin devouring him.
Somehow, the weight that normally pressed down upon the energy inside of him seemed to be held propped open. Maybe that was because of how much he had drawn through the pathways inside of him, or maybe it was his fear and panic that had him pushing on it. Torian had certainly used more strength than he ever had before when he had been afraid of what was happening to him, so it wouldn’t surprise him if that was what was going on now.
The energy continued to blaze through him, and he focused on that pressure holding him down. He didn’t have any way of concentrating it. There were no patterns available to him.
And maybe he didn’t need them. Perhaps that was what Aldrich wanted from him. Release the power, let it explode outward, and see if he could burn off that power.
Torian looked over to the wolf that had led him here, and it continued to stare at him. He breathed out and then pushed on that weight to try to shift it up, releasing even more power out of himself. When he did, he began to feel that power exploding through him. It was incredibly painful. So painful that he cried out.
But he felt the strange energy holding him burn away.
He could move his hands, and he brought them together, forming the second-tier beam pattern, as he knew that he had too much power trapped inside of him to release it effectively with just the first-tier pattern. He formed the pattern, pinched his fingers, and with a burst of bright light, it exploded away from him.
And then Torian lay there panting.
Exhaustion washed over him.
Finally, he passed out.
Chapter 24
NEW RESPONSIBILITIES
Torian came awake to the sense of movement.
It was a rocking sort of feeling that reminded him of when he’d traveled by horse, leaving him feeling as if he were swaying from side to side. It was soothing—until he remembered what had happened and where he’d been.
Then he was completely awake.
He tried to sit up but banged his head on something hard.
“Keep it down,” a familiar voice said near him.
“Jakob?”
Torian tried to move again, but the solid surface overhead made it difficult for him to sit all the way up. He felt around until he was comfortable with finding an opening in it, then he began to pick his way along what he had felt so that he could find a way to sit all the way up.
He’d been resting on a thin cot. There was no light in the room. The air smelled stale, and strangely of hay and horses. Were they in a wagon?
What had Aldrich done with us?
“Jakob?” he asked, keeping his voice a low whisper.
“I’m here.”
“Is there anyone else here?”
“What do you think?”
“I don’t know.” The pain in his head had eased a little, though it still throbbed where he’d struck it. There was something more to the pain, though, that he wasn’t as familiar with. Some part of him felt as if it burned deep inside as if he’d been out in the sun for too long, though rather than his skin feeling raw, it was the inside of him. “I can’t tell what’s going on here. Everything hurts.”
“Yeah, they said it would be that way for you. Apparently, that’s the price you pay when you push past natural barriers or some such nonsense. I don’t know what to make of it.”
Natural barriers?
Torian had been pushing past the weight that he felt deep inside of him, but he hadn’t been trying to push past any natural barrier.
Or had I?
He had been pushing on that weight that was within him. Without that pressure, he wasn’t sure that he’d have been able to burn away whatever had been laying over him. Even doing that, he didn’t think that he’d done enough to get himself out.
Torian pressed his fingers into a primary pattern and waited a moment, holding onto that power until he could push some of that pressure off to the side so that he could free a little of that power inside of him. With the primary patterns, it wasn’t about pushing that much aside, but he was still raw from what he’d done, so it was more difficult than he thought it should be. The pain lingered in his insides as if some part of him had been seriously injured when he’d been trying to free himself.
“Did we get out?” he asked.
Legs swung down, dangling in his face. “What do you think?”
“I don’t know. That’s why I am asking. I remember pushing, trying to free some of that power from inside of me, and…” Torian closed his eyes, focusing on what he had remembered. When he had been pushing, he had drawn even more power than he ever had before, a considerable amount of energy that had flowed through his channels. He would have had enough to have released one of the third or fourth-tier patterns, if he would’ve had enough knowledge of them. Gaspel had tried to work with him to get him to master them, but Torian had been so focused on trying to practice his earlier tier patterns that he had not taken the time that his instructor had wanted to work on something that might’ve been of benefit to him to escape. “I remember Aldrich attacking you.”
“Attacking me?” Jakob jumped down, landing with a thump next to him. He was a shadowed form, nothing more than that, as sunlight must have slipped in through cracks in this room. He stood in front of the bunk before leaning toward him. He was a strange, looming shadow that left him unsettled. “He didn’t attack me. I think he was the one who helped when we were jumped, returning to Sarot. I didn’t get a good look at the man. It took out Cory, and…” Jakob took a deep breath. “I got hit. Hurt. I needed help. I think he helped me.” Jakob dropped down on the cot next to Torian. “And now we’re here.”
“Can you tell me where here is?”
“Near as I can tell, he was traveling with a caravan. He kept us separate from the rest until he knew that we weren’t going to be a danger to them, but once you burned off whatever he was doing — and let me tell you, that impressed him, though he wouldn’t say it — he needed to get you to a place of safety. At least, that was what he continued muttering to himself as he dragged us away. Now we get to see… well, whatever it is that they’re going to see.”
Jakob seemed almost excited about the prospect, which bothered Torian. His friend had always wanted more than he would have been able to have in Sarot, but even he would have to know it shouldn’t be this way.
Torian had never wanted to leave town. Not like Jakob. He had never wanted any adventure. The most he wanted was to master enough of the sahir tiers so that he could one day serve as an instructor at his school.
Torian rubbed his eyes, trying to work the sleep out of them. His head throbbed where he’d smacked it on the upper bunk, and the part of his pathways that he had burned left him feeling a strange agony, but it wasn’t fully unpleasant. He didn’t mind the way that he throbbed, as if it were something that he should have done long ago.
He tried to push on that heaviness inside of him, wanting to shove it aside so that he could push power into the primary pattern to create a lantern beam that would illuminate the inside of the room, but even trying to push a little bit was too much for him.
“Are you trying to use it?”
“I can’t,” Torian said.
“He said that if you woke up, you were going to have a hard time. So maybe just relax.”
“I don’t know that I can relax. I don’t know what is going on.”
“We’re safe,” Jakob said. He leaned back and rested his head on the back wall. “I haven’t been out of the wagon, though, so I can’t tell you much about our new hosts, only that they told us that we are safe for now.”
“I’m not even sure if we can trust them or him. I felt what he was doing. He’s powerful. At least fifth-tier sahir. He was able to do much of the same things that I’ve seen Willa doing.” And he had even done more than that. Torian wasn’t even sure what level to call Aldrich, only that he was powerful.
The way that he had held Torian down had been far too easy, as if Torian were little more than a child. Then again, given the kind of power that he had developed while in school against somebody like that, he was little more than a child. Even a third-tier sahir would have been able to hold him down with the right kind of pattern. And from what he had seen of Aldrich, he was far more than just a third-tier sahir.
“They have a pack of shadow wolves traveling with them,” Jakob said.
“I know. I saw them. I thought it was a weven at first, but it wasn’t.”
Jakob leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “I don’t remember a whole lot once he got me free. Everything seems to be a bit of a blur. And my head hurt so badly.”
“My head hurts now.”
“Well, you shouldn’t go smacking it on the bottom of the bunk. I thought that it would be better for you to be on the bottom bunk because the top one has even less room, but I didn’t expect you to sit up so suddenly.”
Torian sat for a moment in silence.
“Sarot is gone?” Jakob asked.
“Gone. Completely destroyed. And one man did most of the damage.”
“Just one?”
“And I think Aldrich knows him.”
The door came open.
The sudden influx of light was almost too much for Torian’s eyes, and he squinted to ignore it. The figure that loomed in the doorway was too large to be Aldrich. He was average-size and average build, whereas this person was solid and muscular and filled the entire doorway with his bulk.
“You come with me,” he said, his words accented.
Torian didn’t recognize the accent, but there was something about it that suggested to him that this man was Rusavian. It seemed impossible, as he thought of the escape from their soldiers, but maybe they hadn’t. Maybe they had traded one prison for another.
“Jakob…”
“I know how it looks, but we’re safe.”
Torian got to his feet. The wagon lurched slightly, and he staggered for a moment before he managed to brace himself on Jakob and got his bearing again. As he stood there, wobbling for a moment, he wondered if he would be able to draw upon enough of his stored reserves to try to find a way to escape. He wasn’t even sure if he would be strong enough to escape if it came down to that. He thought that he might be able to after he rested for a little while longer, but that assumed that he could recover enough so that he could shift some of that weight again.
“I can help you,” Jakob said, taking his arm and guiding him forward.
They reached the door, which led out onto a small step, where he looked around to see the trees moving past quickly. They were in a caravan, a series of interconnected wagons, and the large man had disappeared to the next wagon.
“We could just jump,” he said.
“And go where?”
“I don’t know. Back.”
But back to what?
The idea that they could go back to Sarot was impossible, as was the idea that he would even be able to find his way from wherever they were. He had no clue how long he’d been unconscious while they were traveling. And they could have traveled in any direction. Torian simply would not know. The trees around him looked like any other forest, a blurring of oak and pine and even some birch. From the speed of the wagons, he had to assume they were taking a road, but were they heading toward the attack, or could they be heading away from it?
Jumping off the side of the wagon wasn’t going to get him the answers that he wanted, and more than that, he wasn’t even sure that he could survive a jump. If they had a pack of the shadow wolves following, Torian doubted that he’d be able to get very far before the wolves tracked him down. Assuming they cared so much about him that they came after him.
“Just keep moving,” Jakob whispered. “If they wanted to hurt us, they would’ve done it by now.”
“I know what happened during our walk,” he said.
“Well, they could have dealt with you while you were unconscious.”
Maybe, but the invaders had also had an interest in those who had sahir ability. What if he’d not been intriguing to them before but had shown something to them during his escape and then run through the forest? Maybe he had suddenly become a more appealing target.
The wagon jostled, and he nearly fell.
Were Jakob not there, he probably would have tumbled off the side of the wagon and then down. Thankfully, he managed to stay on the wagon, so he took the next step and cleared the distance to the next wagon. The door was cracked open a little bit, and he ducked his head as he stepped inside.
This looked completely different than the other wagon.
In the brief flash of light that he’d had, he’d been able to tell that the other wagon was little more than a pair of bunks. Maybe there was more in there, though he’d been distracted by their sudden—or maybe not so sudden, depending on how long he’d been unconscious—change in fortune.
“Come in,” a woman’s voice said.
Torian stepped forward onto a plush red carpet. Paintings hung on the inside of the walls, and a long cabinet took up most of one side. He stepped past a curtain to see the hulking man that had opened the door to their wagon waiting next to a much smaller and petite woman dressed in a pale yellow dress. Her eyes were a deep green that matched the slip of lace wrapped around her forehead, holding her raven hair back.
“Give them a place to sit, Visthor,” she said, waving a hand at the large man.
Visthor grunted, then pulled open one of the doors to the cabinet along the wall and withdrew a pair of stools, which he pushed toward Torian and Jakob. Jakob took his seat and quickly sat, looking around with interest.
Torian was slower to accept the stool and slower to sit. There was something off here. He wasn’t sure what it was, but he could practically feel it. If he weren’t mistaken, they had ended up in some place controlled by the Rusavians, but it was different than he would have expected. The other Rusavians had been brutal and violent. It remained to be seen what these two would be like, though Torian worried that it would be more of the same.
“Sit,” she said.
There was force to her words. More than that, a large shadow wolf suddenly sat up and bared its fangs at Torian.
He licked his lips. Though he’d eaten something and managed to fill his stomach, he didn’t feel any better restored than he had been before. His stomach rumbled, which elicited an arched brow from the woman as he took a seat, perching on the edge of the stool as carefully as he could, not wanting to let her know how uncomfortable he was, though suspecting that she already knew.
“What is your name?” she asked.
“I’m Jakob. I told you—”
“Not you,” she said, ignoring Jakob. “You. What is your name?”
“Torian Ranth.”
She smiled. “Are you afraid of me?”
Torian wasn’t quite sure how to answer that. Should he answer honestly, as he was afraid of her, or should he keep the truth to himself and make her think that he was more concerned about the uncertainty?
“I don’t know who you are. I don’t know where I am. All I know is that you seem to have a Rusavian accent, and my town was recently destroyed by Rusav.”
