The Warden, page 10
Rus finally decided to take her at her word and stuck out his hand. They shook. The swordsman’s callus on his hand was unmistakable, as was the strength of his grip.
Aelis set off on the long, winding walk home.
She was halfway there before, in a haze, she realized that she’d thought of the rickety tower as “home,” but she lacked the energy to think much on what that signified. By the time the tower swam into her sight she was trudging, one foot in front of the other.
“Overextending yourself in Orders in too little time is dangerous,” she remembered one lecturer saying. A man, not much older than she was now, though this had been her first year at the Lyceum. He was making his first attempt at a proper wizard’s beard but what he’d managed was barely a wisp along his chin and jaw and but small patches on his cheeks.
She hadn’t found him terribly credible, but she’d be forced to admit that there might have been something to what he had to say in this particular moment, as her limbs turned leaden and her mind filled with clouds.
“Onoma’s cold tits, I haven’t even been drinking,” she muttered. She tried to recall more of the lecture as she plodded on.
“For example, an average wizard should attempt no more than eight Orders’ worth of magics in their primary school in one day until their reflexes and the spiritual pathways they rely on are built up over the years to withstand more. And certainly in a secondary or the rare tertiary school, no more than three to five Orders in any one day…”
“Well,” Aelis said aloud, to her own memory of the teaching assistant whose name was lost to her, “good thing I’m no ordinary fucking wizard then, eh?” She gave her head a shake and walked the rest of the way to the tower without being waylaid by either her own weariness or her memory.
When she got there, she dispelled the ward she’d left on the door; it had weakened to the point where it would have done little more than annoy anyone who tried to brush past it. Still, no one had.
“Progress,” she said as she shut and barred the door behind her, frowning at the way it hung crooked in the frame. “Well, I’m no carpenter,” she said, once more to no one in particular, and strode away, busying herself with making space for a bed.
Once done, she scanned the horizon, but there was no sign of a wagon or a cart or any conveyance that could haul a bed up to her tower. Her feet throbbed, her head was beginning to ache, and her limbs were still heavy, so she guided herself to the chair she’d been sleeping in and sat down.
It seemed just minutes later that she was jolted out of sleep by a heavy pounding on her door, but given the dark inside the tower it must’ve been some time. She cursed and sprang to her feet, running for the door.
She opened it and was startled to find Maurenia’s slim, cloaked figure standing in the falling dark. The jingle of harness drew her eyes down the walkway to where one of the company’s draft horses was hitched to a small cart, into which was loaded a disassembled bed.
“Didn’t take you for a carter,” was all Aelis could think to say before placing her fist in front of her mouth to block an enormous yawn.
“Well, your man Rus wasted an hour trying to find someone who’d take your coin,” Maurenia said. “Soon as he explained the particulars, that they’d have to actually come into the tower and deal with you personally, volunteers dried up faster than a Grave Maiden.”
Aelis chuckled, but something in the half-elf’s words stung. “I patched up one of their own lads and drove off a bear that, apparently, would’ve been allowed to slaughter them wholesale and they still won’t come to my door.” The words came out in a rush, and Aelis felt embarrassed by them.
Maurenia shrugged. “At least none of them made warding signs with their first and littlest fingers. Progress?”
“Well, I’ve only been here a week. At this rate, they’ll speak to me without calling in a priest or clutching charms in, what … a year?”
Maurenia snorted and waved a hand. “Come on. Let’s get this inside.”
“Just a moment. Give me a chance to make some light.”
Aelis didn’t bother with candles, lighting only her alchemy lamp, with as wide and bright a setting as she could coax out of it, and setting it near the front door. Elisima’s moon was a sliver in the sky, its phase almost ended, with Anaerion’s dominating the clear night and casting a faint ruddy glow over the landscape.
Maurenia had thrown back her hood, and the moonlight seemed to bring the red in her hair to the fore, giving it the color of an Invoker’s robe. Aelis took a deep breath and followed her to the wagon.
Quickly and capably they carried all the pieces up. It was a simple thing, made of thinly stained wood; four pieces held together by old, splintery pegs and three slats that went across the middle of it. It sat only half a foot off the floor on thick, unadorned posts.
Carrying the mattress up the walkway proved a little more difficult.
“It occurs to me,” Aelis said, halfway up the walk, as they both struggled to keep the thing aloft, “that it would’ve been easier to un-stuff the ticking, carry it in, then restuff and sew it shut.”
“I’m no seamstress,” Maurenia said contemptuously. “Are you?”
That seemed to provide the spark they needed to wrestle the straw-stuffed thing into the room and toss it onto the frame. It hadn’t much of its shape left, but Aelis reasoned that could be dealt with later.
She turned from looking at the results of their labor to find Maurenia standing with her hand extended.
“Well,” the half-elf said, “you weren’t going to try and stiff me on the promised payment, were you? Two tri-crowns for the innkeep and an unspecified amount of silver for the ‘men’ who carted it up here.”
Aelis reached for the purse that hung at her belt, prying it open with two fingers and pulling free a handful of coins. Gold gleamed brightly in her palm, and she pulled three coins—round, thin, larger than the silver that surrounded them and stamped with three crowns on one side and the columns of the Estates House on the other—and handed them over.
“Do what you will with the difference between the silver and the gold,” she said. “I’m too tired of sleeping on a chair to care.”
“Three tri-crowns is a princely sum for a worn-out bed, even including the delivery. Where does a Warden—those notoriously spartan wizard-justices—learn to be so free with coin?”
Aelis shrugged and sat down heavily on the mattress. It shifted under her weight, with air blowing through the ticking and straw threatening to poke its way clear. Still an improvement over a chair, she told herself, only to be surprised as Maurenia sat down next to her.
“If I were to guess, I’d say it’s because your father is the Count of Tirraval. You did say your name was Aelis de Lenti, yes?”
“I did say that,” Aelis replied, drawing the syllables out slowly, surprised that the half-elf had picked up on it. No reason to make yourself a liar. “And your guess would be correct. Stay abreast of your lineages and holdings, do you?”
“Well, you didn’t use the final honorific in your name, so it was just a guess,” Maurenia said, turning toward Aelis and grinning. The slight upward curve of her lips changed the symmetry of her features, just slightly. It highlighted her cheekbones and shifted the sharp line of her hair against her jawline.
Aelis found it took an effort to pay attention to Maurenia’s words.
“But keeping track of the families with Imravalan holdings is something of a hobby of mine, I suppose. I didn’t know Count Guillame had a daughter gone to the Lyceum.”
“Well, it’s hardly gossip of the top drawer now that five years have passed. Besides, it’s not as if it were a scandal. As the youngest of four, I am distant enough from succession for it to be of little worry, and having chosen the Lyceum, I will not cost my father a dowry.”
“But you didn’t just choose the Lyceum,” Maurenia pressed. “You chose the Wardens. You could have become a researcher, a teacher, immediately become some margrave’s Court Wizard. Why?”
Aelis smiled faintly. “I don’t believe in half measures. Real wizards become Wardens, and Wardens are the real wizards, aye?” Then she shrugged. “I could’ve done those things. And then I would’ve wondered if I truly had it in me.”
“Had what?”
Aelis struggled to come up with an answer. “It,” she said. “The quality, whatever it is, that makes a Warden, as opposed to some timid associate professor of something who never moves beyond teaching introductory classes, or a Diviner who spends her life reading cards for noblewomen in the salon, or with her hands buried in birds’ entrails, trying to augur a good match for a knight’s bucktoothed, walleyed son.”
Maurenia laughed, lightly, musically. “So it’s about testing yourself, then? Adventure? Learning your own qualities? I would’ve thought that noble obligation might factor into it.”
Aelis thought of her shock and horror on the day that the Warden postings were announced, at how she’d scrambled for explanations, for a way out of her assignment. At just how much she dreaded her daily walks to the village and the reek of sheep shit and the drudgery of what little work she’d found to do.
“No,” she answered flatly, “it doesn’t.”
“You should’ve just taken your degrees and joined some pioneers, then.”
“To do what? Fight monsters, dig for trinkets in the ruins of once-great holdings? Steal gold and silver out from under the noses of the orcs?” Even as she spoke the words, she regretted them. Maurenia turned away, but behind the neatly cut curtain of auburn hair, Aelis could read the hurt in the set of her jaw.
“Is that all you think we do? Sure, we risk our health and our minds for riches … but we are blazing the trail to Ystain to grow again. Settlers will follow the paths we’re laying, when the time comes. And besides…” The half-elf turned back toward her and Aelis found herself caught in the bright optimism of her green eyes. “If you want to test yourself, there’s no better place. The frontier doesn’t even try to kill you; it doesn’t need to; it just will. If you’re weak, if you’re slow, if you’re dumb, it’ll just happen.”
“I like my bed and my hearth at night,” Aelis said. “I like walls and streets and people…”
“… but not cow-paths and muddy cart tracks, not crumbling stone towers and simple farmer folk, am I right?” Maurenia poked Aelis’s arm with one finger. “You’re a city girl. I can tell. And you’re at a loss out here.”
Aelis rocked to one side from the sharp poke, then rubbed at the spot on her arm. “That’s true. I hoped for a post to Antraval, Tirraval … any place with good cellars and streetlights, really.”
“Why didn’t you get it?” Perhaps as an apology, Maurenia briefly rubbed her fingertips over the spot she’d poked as she turned to face Aelis directly. Though it was only a moment, warmth spread from the half-elf’s fingers and up Aelis’s arm and shoulder to her neck.
“I don’t know,” Aelis said, picturing Archmagister Ressus’s smug, satisfied face.
“Perhaps there’s something in the landscape your schools are suited to?” Maurenia’s voice took an encouraging tone, and she leaned a bit closer.
“I’m a Necromancer first, an Enchanter and Abjurer second and third, in whatever order you like. Have you seen a musty old crypt full of the unquiet dead? If so, please do point it out to me.”
“I’ve not,” Maurenia said. “But Timmuk way well have. He was a map collector before his family fortunes changed. Like as not there’s plenty he could tell you about the surrounding area.”
“My warrants don’t extend to the frontier unless the pursuit of my duties takes me there,” Aelis answered.
“It’s a shame. Many a company could use an Anatomist, especially one that stitches as well as you, not to mention an Abjurer. Timmuk has even spoken of trying to fit the wagon with a laboratory in order to attract an alchemist, but I suppose that’s just talk.”
“You wouldn’t want to run a calcination oven on a wooden wagon anyway,” Aelis said. “The temperatures it reaches could make the wood combust.”
“Set it on a steel plate and keep buckets of sand handy,” Maurenia countered. “Everything can be accounted for with the right planning.”
Everything except where I am and what I’m feeling, Aelis thought, but once again, didn’t say. They lapsed into silence for a moment. Aelis’s awareness of the woman sitting next to her grew, the smell of her body—leather, metal, wind, sun, and soap all mingled together—and its heat, her weight on the mattress.
Then Maurenia stood, and Aelis as well, clumsily. For a moment they bumped against each other, nearly face to face, or face to chin, as the half-elf stood a couple of inches taller than Aelis. They quickly stepped apart, but Aelis knew that she was flushed, and she thought, for a moment, that Maurenia was as well.
“Will you come down to the inn? There’ll be tales—Timmuk loves an audience. And Dashia and Darent have lovely voices, if they can be coaxed into singing. I’ve no doubt there are a number of musicians among the folk here…”
Aelis shook her head before she even knew what she was answering. “I’m for bed. Been a long day…”
“… and you can’t mingle with the people you’re set to protect, and, need be, to judge. Understandable. Good night then, Warden Aelis. Will you be down in the village tomorrow?” Aelis thought that Maurenia’s eyes, the set of her mouth, were showing a guarded hope of some kind, one that she’d only just stopped herself from voicing.
“If no one delivers any breakfast, I expect so. Be walking about, looking for places to stick my hand in and do some work.”
“Well then, perhaps I’ll see you. I imagine we’ll stay a handful of days … Timmuk likes to spread coin around in every village, make sure everyone sees us.”
“Perhaps,” Aelis said. “Good night. A safe drive under Anaerion’s moon.”
Maurenia nodded and strode toward the door. She gave a backward glance, her eyes hidden in the dark and by the fall of her hair.
With the door shut and latched, Aelis busied herself in digging out bedding and smoothing out the worst lumps on the hay-stuffed mattress. Then she took her alchemy lamp and Aldayim to bed, and wondered why exactly it was that a half-elf adventurer flustered her so.
9
THE SWORD
Aelis woke up sweating, with the blanket tangled around her legs. She had dreamed of Humphrey, of the hard muscles of his arms and chest under her hands, of his reticence and her enthusiasm when their tryst had initially begun, of how quickly he had learned.
There’d been an element of competition; Miralla had once remarked to her how attractive she found Humphrey when they were all first-year novices. That, as much as Humphrey’s own sterling qualities, had been impetus enough for Aelis to bed him first.
In her dream, though, whenever she’d finally peeled his robes off and been about to have him, he’d changed to Maurenia, clad in her studded leather and watching her with one immaculate eyebrow raised, her lips in a fine and kissable grimace.
“Well, I could lie here and try to catch that dream again,” she said, pulling up the blanket haphazardly and then flinging off her nightshirt and wishing for a cool breeze, “or I could dress and see to some of my sword exercises. Wouldn’t do to have my arms getting weak. Lavanalla would thrash me if she even suspected it.”
For a moment, she pondered her elven swordmistress. Certainly, by any standard, she was beautiful, with her high cheekbones, golden hair, and fine features. She was perhaps the only elf Aelis had known to any personal degree, but something about her power, her position, her gravitas, had put paid to anyone’s notion of trying it on with her.
She missed the understanding that had developed between her, Miralla, and Humphrey. They’d never really done more than pretend that what they had was meant to pass the time at school as pleasantly as could be managed. There were awkward goodbyes and promises to write between them, but Aelis thought if she was ever going to exchange letters with either of her former lovers it would be Miralla, whose mind had been more of a match to her own.
She made use of her washstand and basin, then dressed and took up sword and dagger before going to her door in hopes of food.
Aelis threw open the door and startled the goat that was standing just outside. He bleated at her before clattering down the walk. She was sure it was always the same one; it had the same gray coat, the same whiskers, the same curled horns.
“Stregon as my witness, if I were an Invoker you’d be a dead gods-damned goat,” she yelled after it, raising her fist and half drawing her sword. Then she looked down and saw what had attracted the goat; a basket, enticing her nose with the scent of fresh bread.
“If that goat ate my breakfast, I am going to kill it, and then I am going to reach into Aldayim’s forbidden lore, bind and raise it, and spend the next week killing it again,” she swore. She bent down and twitched the nibbled cloth aside.
Everything in the basket—two round brown loaves, a stone bowl of butter and a smaller one of cheese—seemed untouched. Her stomach lurched and she had a loaf halfway to her mouth before she thought of Lavanalla’s cold-eyed stare.
“After exercise,” she said, carrying the basket inside and setting it down on a table.
The sun had dispelled most of the night but the red moon still flanked it. The green was no longer visible even as the waning sliver it had been, and, as she glanced at her orrery, she expected Onoma’s moon to rise.
She walked over to the table where that contraption of silver, brass, and crystal glided in its silent song and cast a simple, unfocused First Order necromantic spell into it. She felt the buffer inside it give and then absorb most—but not all—of the power.
“Hmm. Could probably let it go a couple of days at this point.”
Then she seized up her swordbelt and the heaviest leather vest she owned and went outside in search of a suitably flat and secluded spot, warding the door shut behind her.
