The Warden, page 11
Aelis spent a good hour working up a sweat. She began by simply rolling her shoulders and swinging her arms, jogging in place to get her blood moving. Then, hoping that no one was watching, she brought out her sword and began her exercises. First, guards, moving from low to high, right and left hands both. Then, still switching hands every five or so repetitions, she practiced her first steps, short and great, back, forward, to either side.
Forget the sagas. Forget the courtly entertainments. A fight is won and lost on first steps. Speed and determination.
Speed and determination had been the elven Archmagister’s watchwords. Well, Aelis reflected, that, and telling me my first step had gotten me killed.
She practiced each first step a dozen times, then a dozen times again. It wasn’t until she already felt sweat plastering strands of hair to her forehead that she even began practicing cuts. Her weapon, with its willow-leaf blade, was not made for thrusts, but she practiced those too. She moved from short cuts to longer sweeps and back, stepping into each attack and feeling her muscles move in ways they’d become unaccustomed to on the long ride to Lone Pine. The movements came back to her, her feet and hips and arms moving in concert with the blade, sweeping it fast enough to cut the air.
Got to get out here every morning, she chided herself.
Ideally, she would’ve been making wards, either with her free hand or the hand that held the blade, and working in concert with them. But after yesterday’s exertions, she didn’t want to push herself too far again today, though Abjurations, in general, required less power than an Enchantment.
To make magic interfere with the natural order of the world—to create a Ward or Summon Fire or Throw Lightning—one must only convince the inert stuff of that natural order to be other than it is. To enchant the mind of a living thing, a wizard must do considerably more.
Aelis easily recalled Urizen’s first lecture on Elathan Tilarus’s Enchanting, the standard text for the first two years of instruction at the College. A densely written and weighty tome, Tilarus had seemed, to Aelis’s undergraduate certainty, entirely too concerned with proving the difficulty of Enchantment as opposed to other College disciplines.
Someone had Abjurer envy, she remembered joking with Miralla and Humphrey over wine more than once. But after yesterday’s exertions, the most complicated Enchantments she’d ever cast in such a short time were weighing on her. There’d been the exertions of the previous days to consider as well. She’d been free with her wards and pouring a First Order Necromantic charge into her orrery each day since she’d set it up.
Aelis dismissed her reminiscence and chided herself for weakness. She prescribed another dozen of every guard, step, attack, and parry.
By the time she was done she was well soaked, and the moons were invisible behind the sun’s brightness and the hard distant blue of the sky.
She sheathed her sword, kept a wary eye for goats, and devoured the meal that had been left for her. With that done, her “rooms” as tidy as they were likely to get, and the upper floor still too much of a challenge and a hazard, she wasn’t sure what to do with herself.
She went to her writing case and dug out the list of items she’d made.
Ask Rus about Dalius.
Find out who in Lone Pine is lettered.
Keep an eye out if merchants come to town.
Prepare draft statement warning merchants if anyone tries to sell books to them.
Get the fucking door fixed.
Make goat stew.
Biting her lip and frowning at the paper produced no tangible results. She smoothed the wrinkled sheet out atop the writing case’s inclined leather blotter. “I can do one and two in the same go if I wander down to the village,” she muttered. “Should’ve done them yesterday.” Something about doing that stung wrong, though. Obviously someone in Lone Pine was warming to her; the bread, butter, and cheese she’d just eaten were proof enough of that. But going down to the village, milling around, looking for work to do like a day laborer?
Or, said a little voice, are you just avoiding Maurenia?
She shook her head, sighed heavily, and decided that item four was immediately actionable. She took out ink, pen, and parchment, and set about drawing up something suitably circumspect.
Attention Traders and Merchants: If in the village of Lone Pine and its surroundings, anyone attempts to pawn or sell a copy of Wards and Combat Abjurations for Sword and Axe, I must insist on being informed immediately. It is not a rare nor a Controlled text, but its appearance in this region would be irregular. I am prepared to reimburse any outlay made for a genuine copy that you acquired in recent days, and moreso for one of particular description.
—Aelis de Lenti, Warden of Lone Pine
It felt odd to leave the last honorific of her name out of her signature, and to regard herself as something other than Aelis de Lenti un Tirraval, the count’s daughter, the student at the Lyceum.
Aelis regarded her copy and frowned. It didn’t immediately reveal the theft, which would be a sign of weakness. A suitably alert peddler or trader would almost certainly see through the ruse and deduce what had happened, but she was counting on the promise of remuneration to override suspicion.
She set about making multiple copies, careful with each one. The monotony of the work set her mind temporarily at ease. She stopped thinking about the village, about Dalius, about Luth’s aggression, the Thorns in general and Maurenia in particular, about the oddness of her encounter with the bear, of everything except the task of scratching the letters into the sheets of parchment with her pen. When she’d half a dozen copies sanded to let the ink dry, she got out her wax and seal. She was entitled to use the Lyceum seal in black, green, or blue.
“Blue,” she said aloud as she held it over a candle to warm and positioned her seal. “Blue is the one they’re likely to respond to best, even if unconsciously. I’ll save black for when I want to terrify someone.”
Given that black was the dominant theme of the clothing hanging in her wardrobe, she wasn’t sure she hadn’t already made that choice.
“Well, the merchants don’t need to know that.” She didn’t, of course, know of any merchants in the region, or what they sold. “Surely there are some, though. Peddlers, at least, that kind of thing.” She looked to her writing case and the pile of notes she’d taken from her one interview with Dalius.
“The book going missing coupled with him never turning up again … I mistrust it,” she said. “And I don’t trust a word he said to me of the gossip and the misshapen family trees, and wouldn’t know what to make of it if I did,” she added.
When each letter was folded and sealed, she set them on the table near her orrery. “I’ll have to take them down to Rus eventually,” she muttered. She decided to put on her formal robes and had just seized the letters, intending to head out to do just that, when she opened the door to find a startled Pips about to knock.
The girl was carrying a leather sack slung over one shoulder and a heavy sloshing skin in one hand.
“Warden,” she squeaked, startled at Aelis’s sudden appearance. “I’ve brought you a midday meal. Bread, cheese, and beer. Oh, n’ Rus said to tell me if you wanted to come down for dinner or have it brought up.”
Aelis took the sack and skin from the girl and carried them inside. She looked back to see Pips standing on the threshold, wringing her hands. She waved a hand and the girl took one hesitant step forward, then practically danced into the ground floor of the tower. She watched as Phillipa’s eyes bugged out as she tried to take in everything she saw all at once: Aelis’s sword and dagger on the table by the letters; the orrery and other implements on the other table; the piles of books; even the incongruous bed set up in the middle of the left side of the tower.
“Haven’t you any chores to attend to?”
“This one,” Pips answered with a shrug, gesturing vaguely toward the bag Aelis held and then letting her eyes roam again. She couldn’t stop her hand from reaching out toward the sword; Aelis set the sack and skin down and hurried over to cover it with her own hand.
“You don’t want to touch an Abjurer’s sword if you are not one yourself,” Aelis said. “You never know what wards lie in wait.”
“Wards? Would it turn me to a frog? Or cook me with lightning? Or just blow me up like a corked bottle dropped in a fire? Or…”
Aelis raised a hand to forestall the line of, she had little doubt, increasingly gruesome fates Pips had in mind, and the girl quieted instantly. “No. None of that,” Aelis said. “To do any of those, I’d have to be a Conjurer or an Invoker, and I’d have to put so much of my power into a ward that I could scarce cast anything else the rest of the day.”
“Oh.” The girl was clearly disappointed, her features falling and her eyes drifting toward the toes of Aelis’s boots. She perked right back up, though, with another question as she lifted her eyes. “What could you do with a ward?”
“I could scramble your mind, make you forget yourself and what you meant to do, put you to sleep…” Strip years from your life, rip your essence from your body, and turn you into my undead servant, Aelis thought. But I wouldn’t. Some part of her wanted to impress the girl with her power, but any further explanation of what a Necromancer could do was more likely to just frighten her.
“More importantly,” Aelis said, “I can make it so that the sword can’t be drawn from the sheath by anyone else.”
That seemed to get the girl’s attention, as her mouth opened slightly. “Could you show me that? Or … or anything?”
“You saw me perform two complicated Enchantments yesterday, you know,” Aelis said.
“I know, but it just…” She waved her hands as if trying to demonstrate the impossibility of saying exactly what “it” was. “It’s so boring. Almost nothin’ happens here. There’s just sheep and goats and diggin’ carrots in the dirt and I can’t damn well stand it…”
“Phillipa! Watch your language!” Aelis was taken aback at how quickly and easily the reproach came, and instantly regretted it when she saw the girl’s expression fall and her cheeks color.
She turned and started to slump toward the door. “Pips,” Aelis said, trying not to sound sheepish, “I’m … sorry I yelled.” Be direct, be honest, don’t talk down to her. She’ll know. Aelis only had to reach back to her own childhood to remember how awful it had been when adults had clearly lied to her. “I’ve no right to scold you or correct you. That is for your uncles.”
“Well,” Pips said, a mischievous smile suddenly curling the corners of her lips upward, “they don’t give a shit what I say.”
Aelis couldn’t help herself; she burst out laughing and the girl joined her, then suddenly Pips ran forward and hugged her around the waist. The impulse to wrap her arm around the girl’s shoulder took her by surprise, but she gave in to it, and together they laughed for a moment longer. “Why don’t you come and have lunch with me,” Aelis said.
“I already had my midday bread, but all right,” Pips said. Aelis took up the food that had been brought and quickly cleared space on a table. On the way to it, though, Phillipa’s eyes wandered again, this time caught by the orrery, which made a soft sound as the moons subtly shifted positions.
“What is that?” The girl lifted a hand and pointed.
“An orrery.”
“What’s it for?”
Aelis walked to the side of the table where she could stand over it. She lifted a hand. “Here is the earth, the orb we live upon…”
“How d’we live on somethin’ round without that we fall off?”
“Magic,” Aelis answered quickly. She had only ever been an indifferent student of astronomy and had no desire to try explaining it to anyone, much less a largely unlettered child. “It shows the movement of our world in relation to the six moons…” Here her finger moved from hovering over the faceted blue crystal to each of the smaller, differently colored moons, naming each one in turn.
“And why d’you need t’know that?”
“It bears on the casting of spells and the potency of magic,” Aelis said. “Magic gets stronger or weaker depending on the phases of the moon it corresponds to, and sometimes with the phases of opposing moons.”
“So your spells get weaker n’ stronger with the moons? Is that why the songs and tales of wizards and wardens always mention them?”
“I suppose it could be,” Aelis said. I need to apologize to my astronomy and my literature professors, she thought, remembering the too-few hours spent laboring over the books on those subjects, certain they’d never come up once she was a Warden.
“Does it run like this forever?”
“Nothing,” Aelis said, “can run forever. That is one of the first rules we learn. Nothing, whether made by the skill of a person’s hands or by the craft of their magic, can run indefinitely. Everything has only the amount of power we give it.”
“Well, couldn’t someone just give a spell enough power to last forever?”
Aelis shook her head. “No. And even if we could, why would we want to? Things can’t last forever, Pips. Nothing does, for good reason.”
“Well, doesn’t a water mill keep turnin’ as long as the river flows? Or a windmill, if there’s always wind?”
“But there isn’t always wind, and there isn’t always water, and sometimes there’s too much, and wind and water mills both can be destroyed that way. And even if the wind and the water stayed constant, eventually, just by working nonstop, the wood and the metal and the cloth and the rope holding such things together would fall apart,” Aelis said.
“But what if you used magic to hold it all together?”
“If one were to employ wards to hold the parts together—and renewed them every day—then I suppose a machine like that could last a while longer, but nothing like forever.”
All her talk seemed to have confounded the girl, who looked back to the orrery. “How does this run, then?”
“I power it, a little bit each day, with a small spell. Slowly, the magic builds up inside and keeps it running along with the phases of the moons, so long as it is properly set when activated.”
“But it would eventually stop runnin’?”
“Aye,” Aelis answered. “As will all things.”
“How long could you keep it runnin’? Like, say you were to pour in as big a spell as it could handle…”
“A wizard’s orrery is designed to only accept so much magic at a time. Enough to run it for a week, perhaps, and no more,” Aelis said.
“Why?”
She shook her head, pulling free one of the two round loaves in the sack, and holding half of it out to the girl. “Too much to explain.” She brought two stools over to the stone table, on the farthest end from the orrery, and sat down, while Pips climbed onto the second and took the offered bread.
“Why’s it too much to explain?”
“Because it involves a lot of complicated magical theory that I don’t know if you could understand…”
At this the girl’s face fell again. Aelis was astonished at how expressive the girl’s features were; the merest hint of a slight or of a disappointing answer and the girl’s eyes would fall to the ground, her mouth descend into a frown, her entire posture slump. Growing up the child of a nobleman had made Aelis conscious of constant observation, and the necessity of steady composure had been impressed upon her from a young age.
“And because it involves a Warden’s secrets … and those I cannot tell you,” Aelis added, leaning forward and dropping her voice into a conspiratorial whisper.
At this, Pips brightened considerably, sitting up straighter and lifting her eyes as she tore at the bread with her teeth. They ate in silence for a few moments before Aelis remembered the day before.
“So, Pips; do you want to learn to read?”
The girl shrugged. “Uncle Elmo says it’s devilish hard—he had to learn when he was in the army, says he had to not only learn letters n’ sums but also ciphers.”
“Oh? Was he a quartermaster?”
The girl shook her head, stuffing a wad of bread into one cheek with her tongue to clear up space to answer. “Scout. Said he had to report orc strength and learn how t’send and leave messages in cipher. Said he never wants to look at another book the rest of his life, nor a pen and ink or a charcoal stick.”
“Well, regardless of what Uncle Elmo says, do you want to learn?”
“Why should I?”
“You said nothing happens here. Sheep and goats and carrots, right?” Aelis shrugged. “Learn your letters, and books make the world that much bigger.”
“There’s naught but two books in the entire village, and Rus owns them both. I saw him readin’ one and he snapped it shut and told me it wouldn’t do for children.”
Aelis frowned. “Is there no priest in town?”
“We get a circuit rider now ’n then. Priest of Stregon. I expect he’ll make it here sometime next year.”
“Well,” Aelis said, eating a last bit of a dry, crumbly cheese that she suspected was past its best date, “there are considerably more than two books in the village now.” She stood up and beckoned the girl after her, toward the nooks in which she’d stored her library.
The girl wandered over, still nibbling a crust. Her eyes widened, but only faintly. “How many’s that?”
“Two dozen,” Aelis answered.
“Are they books of spells? Grimmaws?”
“Six of them are grimoires, yes,” Aelis said, gently correcting the girl’s pronunciation, thinking that in truth, there was one fewer than two dozen and only five grimoires. “Three are histories—one of each of the kingdoms—and two are collections of all that is certain about the orcs, their ways, alliances, chieftains, and the islands they came from, and the lost territories. There’s the official history of the Wardens, and two books on the lives of famous Wardens—”
“You mean there are stories about wizards?” Once more Aelis was startled by the expressiveness of the girl’s face, the wide, hopeful eyes and the mouth ready to break into a smile. “Could you read them to me?”
