The Warden, page 25
“Aren’t the messy details between the borders the painting?”
“It’s not a perfect analogy, and besides, Bardun Jacques is a terrible painter.”
Tun snorted and picked up his jacket, slung one arm into it. “The runestone from inside the Demon Tree. Being orc magic, it should have common threads with this,” he said, tapping at the charm he wore before covering it with his fringed coat. “Should have something you could use. If you’re willing.”
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
Tun shrugged, then pulled his coat snug and buckled it. “Not something we need to worry about now. What’ll we do about the earl-gardener there?”
Currin had slumped back against the tree Aelis had propped him on, and seemed to be fighting—and losing—against sleep.
“Join him in slumber, I expect.”
“The longer we wait, the more advantages we’re giving away to them,” Tun said. “That is, if we intend to use force or stealth. We could always try to negotiate. Our man for him,” he said, gesturing toward Currin.
“I don’t think that’s a deal they’ll care to make. You heard what Nath said: kill him, he didn’t matter. She’s running the outfit and she’s got no use for this one.”
“Then keeping him around isn’t doing us any good,” Tun said.
“And we can’t just cut him loose. Either Nath’s enchantments have damaged his mind, or he’s a fine actor and has me fooled. If it’s the former, turning him loose’d be just as good as slitting his throat. The latter, and it’s slitting our own.”
“One of those,” Tun said carefully, “is a more acceptable outcome than the other.”
“If it comes to it,” Aelis said. “But I’d rather hang on to him till we know more, and till we can confront Nath on our terms.”
“She’s got the men.”
“But she has to spend her strength to keep them under her power. I don’t. If I can come to her fresh and on anything close to even terms, I don’t fear her.”
“Your confidence is commendable, but there are a score of men who make ‘even terms’ rather impossible.”
“We’ll think of something.”
“I don’t do strategies.”
“As long as you take orders.”
“Suggestions, certainly. Orders?” Tun crossed his arms over his chest and grinned around his tusks. “Not as well.”
“Fine. I’ll think of something and make some suggestions. In the morning.”
“I still think we’re giving up an advantage.”
“But we’re getting a bigger one,” Aelis said. “In the morning, I will be able to call on the full range of my talents.”
“Be nice if those included some streams of fire or a few arcs of lightning.”
“There’s more to wizardry than fire and lightning, Tun,” Aelis said. “Now I’m going to go see to the prisoner.”
She found Currin dozing, but when she nudged him awake he briefly struggled to sit upright. “I can’t feel my hands,” he whined.
“I’m going to fix that,” Aelis said. With some of the cordage Tun had produced from his small bedroll or his voluminous pockets—she wasn’t entirely sure—she bound him to the tree itself, then untied his hands.
He thanked her, and she squatted on the bed of pine needles nearby to look at him. “Currin, what can you tell me about Nath?”
“Nathalie. I don’t…” He frowned, grimaced, chewed his bottom lip. “I know the name. I know her. She was … to be my court wizard…”
He trailed off after saying the last five words, a light sheen of sweat glistening on his forehead. “I should know more. I have known her for … a long time. But I don’t. I can’t. Can’t remember.”
“In the morning I will try to help you remember, Currin. I promise,” Aelis said. “For now, try to sleep and stop worrying.” Her words sounded painfully hollow to her own ears. Tun retreated, though given that he slipped his hand blades from his pockets before he did, she suspected he was either going to tend to them or going on watch, and either way she was safe to sleep for a few hours.
She stretched out her bedroll and lay on it. Her limbs were sore, with the bone-deep ache of too much running on top of too little rest. Aelis stared at where in the night sky Onoma’s moon—blackly invisible, sometimes an outline of empty space where stars would be—would provide her night vision for another handful of days.
My orrery’s in my tower, and so are my books of orbit. These silent words felt hollow to her, though, as she knew a wizard was meant to be able to derive such knowledge on a clear night regardless of what instruments they had to hand.
She drifted off with the remnants of first-year lectures on astronomy and horology filling her mind.
* * *
Aelis awoke with a start. She expected to find herself at the unforgiving desk in a first-year lecture hall. Probably in History of the Lyceum: Priests, Wizards, and War, a required and notoriously boring class. Instead she looked up to find Tun just about to jostle her awake. He drew back in consternation. “Nightmares, Warden?”
She chuckled lightly. “No, just memories of school. If I have to dream about my time in university, why couldn’t it be parties, the breakthroughs as I learned to truly craft spells, the lovers? Why must it be first-year history?”
“I am sure I could not answer that for you, Warden. But dreams are sometimes the mind’s way of telling us something we have seen and not understood.”
“And sometimes they are just random impulses and memories jostling one another for attention.”
“Almost certainly.”
“Any schoolboy memories yourself, Tun?”
“I think you know the answer to that, Warden.”
“You can call me Aelis. And I don’t. I know almost nothing about you, excepting the bit about being a werebear, which, admittedly, is a pretty significant fact. Even so—you live the life of an outcast or hermit, but you speak like an educated man.”
“Do I?”
“Yes.”
Tun grunted faintly. “It’s time for your watch.”
“I can pass it while asking you questions until you tell me something.”
“Tutors,” Tun said, kneeling to the ground and his unrolled blanket, as if that explained enough and he was done.
“What about them?”
“I had them,” he grunted. “In grammar, among other things.”
“Such as?”
“Natural philosophy. Political economy. Rhetoric. Languages. A bit of music.” With his arms propping him up, he stretched his legs out, then fixed Aelis with a stare. “Now I am going to get four hours of sleep. I have answered as many questions as I intend to.”
Aelis lifted a hand, picked up her swordbelt from where it lay next to her, and buckled it around her waist. The weight of it was becoming entirely familiar, though she was beginning to develop a sore patch of skin where her sword dragged the belt against her clothes and her hip.
“Why a lecture?” she murmured, remembering again the uncomfortable desk, the ink stains on her hands, the parade of boring professors. “Why couldn’t it have been Humphrey or Miralla? Or both of them?”
Aelis found that Maurenia had somehow replaced both of her former lovers in her mind’s eye as she strolled around their campsite, such as it was, contemplating the possibilities of lustful daydreaming.
She brought herself up short.
“You’re standing in the middle of a hostile wilderness with a half-orc werebear and a man whose mind has been deeply damaged by an Enchanter, and who may or may not be the rightful Earl of Mahlgren. It’s not exactly the time to be indulging your fantasies.
“Not that it’s likely to matter,” she continued. “Probably I’ll never see Maurenia again.” Even as she spoke the words she hoped they weren’t true, but she pushed them from her mind and focused on listing the assets she had available.
Tun, she thought. She wasn’t sure that she could depend on him transforming himself again and wasn’t prepared to ask. Even so, she was willing to bet he was worth more than any three to five of the men Nathalie had.
Myself. Nath was clearly a powerful Enchanter. So am I, Aelis told herself, in addition to being an Abjurer and a Necromancer.
“Where did she learn and what else does she know?” Aelis muttered. “Is she only good for the one trick? Is she a hammer or a razor or both? Will my defenses hold against either, if she’s as powerful as it seems?”
She’d had a wand; those were not easily found outside the Lyceum. Anyone could cut a switch and call it a wand, of course, but Aelis didn’t imagine that was what Nath had done. Certainly, some numbers of real wands were lost as Enchanters died in the field, or were stolen. Even so, there was the possibility that this Nathalie had the same kind of Enchanter’s training as Aelis did and less scruple about misuse of her power.
Aelis found herself wishing she had brought pen, ink, and paper. Writing always clarified things for her. She suddenly recalled the list of items she’d scribbled what seemed like weeks but had really only been days ago, in her tower.
“What was even on that list? Find out who was literate. Make headway on my stolen book.” She sighed, as those concerns seemed too remote. On balance, she supposed, chasing a possible fratricide did indeed take precedence over a stolen text.
“And what about that babbling old hedge wizard and his balls of harmless light?” Something about what he’d done bothered her. Perhaps the fact that he’d seemed to mingle an Illusion with an Evocation, something that ought not, so far as she knew, to be possible. At least not to anyone incapable of less than Third Order magics in both disciplines, but then, what he’d done had been harmless and intangible, which weren’t the hallmarks of powerful magic.
Her concern melted away as a wind stirred the pines. She tried to refocus on the current moment.
“I’ll have to work on the assumption that she is powerful. And…” Aelis grew silent as the night pressed down on her, and slowly a plan began to form.
21
THE WAND
“You cannot,” Tun said, “seriously be thinking about a frontal assault.”
“Not an assault,” Aelis said as she checked the draw of both sword and dagger, the action of her wand in her sleeve, and wished she had an Evoker up the other one.
“Not denying the frontal part.”
“Wouldn’t want to lie to you, Tun.”
“Warden, if you’re thinking that strolling in there and starting a fight will trigger something out of me…” Tun let out a sigh that had a bit too much of a growl underlying it. “Well, you might not be wrong. But you might not like the results.”
“I wouldn’t plan that way without asking. If you’re willing, though, I need you to manage His Lordship here.”
“So, it is to be a prisoner exchange after all?”
“Something like that.”
“Warden. I will take suggestions, and I owe you my help, but I won’t go into an action blind.”
“I have my reasons, Tun. The situation has to be fluid, and it may legitimately be to our advantage if you don’t know what I’m going to do.” Would help if I did, though.
“Does this have something to do with…” He waved his fingers vaguely at his temple.
“Is enchantment the word you’re looking for?”
“If that’s what you mean for magic that affects the mind, then yes.”
“Well, it does. That’s what I know Nath can do. And powerfully, at that.”
“So you’re going to challenge her at her greatest strength? Are you stronger than her as an Enchanter?”
“I would say that forcing so many minds to a single goal, and keeping up the effort this long, is the work of someone capable of the power of Fifth Order Enchantments.”
“And you’re what, Sixth Order? Seventh?”
Aelis cleared her throat. “Third. On a good day.”
“Five is more than three.”
“I said capable of the power of Fifth Order. That is not quite the same thing.”
“It’s a fine distinction to hang several lives on, ours not least among them.”
“Tun, I’m gambling. I won’t lie about that. I haven’t got the raw power she seems to have. But my bet is this: that’s all she has.”
“Raw power.” Tun spoke the words slowly, filling them with disbelief. “Is all she has.”
“Does the strongest man win every fight if he’s so muscle-bound that he can’t move his feet?”
“He only needs to land one blow.”
“And what if I can work out exactly how to counter it? Look.” Aelis pointed to where Currin slumped against the tree. His head lolled to one side, and drool soaked the shoulder and chest of his jerkin. “We’re going to have to walk this man every step of the way back to their palisade reminding him who he is. She’s got power, but a wizard, a true wizard, is not about power. We’re about subtlety. Precision. Control. The least application of magical power where it can do the most good. That’s the principle I was taught. If I wanted to keep a band of desperate men dancing to my tune for weeks on end, I could do most of it with mere suggestion, a fingernail on the back of their necks now and then, and a trickle of magic a day. I wouldn’t have to reduce them to drooling hulks with hammer blows to their mind.”
“So you can, what, persuade them to listen to you by flicking your hair and swinging your hips?”
“I’ll save that for an emergency.” Aelis’s voice was flatter than the blade of a knife. “Tun, you’ve felt the touch of my enchantment. Do you remember it?”
Tun let out a long breath. “I can, though it’s hazy, a morning fog waiting for the heat to burn it away, but it never quite does.”
“Was it an overwhelming power? Did it take away all your volition? Or was it simply a gentle shove? A reminder of who you were, what you wanted to be doing, and how it wasn’t what you were doing?”
Tun held up one hand, palm out. “Fine, Warden. You’ve convinced me. Let’s wake up our earl. Our trail should be easy enough for even you to follow.”
“Even me?” Aelis couldn’t really work up the effort to sound offended, and Tun merely snorted. She set about cutting Currin loose, tapping his cheek to wake him up. His breathing hitched, his head lifted, but his eyes didn’t even flutter. She tapped harder, harder, until finally she gave him a light slap across the cheek.
His eyes opened, but took a long time to blink into focus.
“Nath? Where’s Nathalie? I…”
“Shhhh, Currin. Shh. My name is Aelis, remember? Warden Aelis de Lenti. Nath betrayed you. I saved you.” She knelt next to him and placed her hands on his shoulders. “I saved you, but we’re going to go confront Nath and rescue the rest of your men now.” She slipped one hand to the back of his neck and let loose just a trickle of a spell, barely a First Order Enchantment. It was a simple thing, meant to remind him of his ambitions and plans, of his claim to the Mahlgren title.
“Are you … going to be my court wizard now, Warden Aelis?”
Aelis smiled. “I would have to receive permission from the Lyceum to accept such a position, Earl Mahlgren. But one thing at a time, eh? Come on. Let’s go save your men.”
She hooked her hands beneath his arms and stood up, giving him little choice. His legs wobbled and he leaned against the trunk of the tree for balance. But he nodded, and took a hesitant step forward rather than waiting to be led.
Aelis decided to take that as a good sign, and off they went.
* * *
“Nath! Come forth and answer for your betrayal!” On their walk, which took them perhaps an hour at a much more leisurely pace than the crashing run they’d made the night before, Currin had gained strength. By the time the palisade wall came into view—with the section Tun had brought down still lying flat on the grass—he’d worked himself up into an indignant boil. That he started bellowing before even the lazy guards behind the wall had noticed their approach had Aelis scowling.
She’d spent the walk chewing the inside of her cheek and concentrating on the spell she wanted. There was no ready-made Abjuration or Enchantment for what she wanted to do.
Onoma’s cold arms, why couldn’t this just be some standard-issue grave robber or spirit binder? Cut through him like a good knife through soft cheese.
The first thing was the proper ward. It had to be strong enough to deflect any physical attacks the men would launch before Nath started hammering anyone with a spell. But it also needed to be porous to magic if Nath tried what she thought she might. Ogrinden’s Steel Net was something like what she wanted. But I’d need six more Abjurers and a small army to cover it with.
No, she finally decided. An all-purpose ward to start. Let her try her hammer blow and recoil when I shrug it off. Of course, she immediately undercut herself, if she tries something else, and you’ve hardened your ward against an Enchantment, you’re dead.
“If she had more than one trick up her sleeve she’d have tried it last night,” she finally muttered, drawing a dark look from Tun.
By the time they stopped, with Currin yelling for satisfaction regarding the dishonor done to his person, the base betrayal of his most trusted adviser, and quite a lot of other nonsense, Aelis had Adaeric’s Preparation called to mind. It was among the most powerful Abjurations she could call upon. She rehearsed the syllables, drew her thumb in sigils over the hilt of her sword then pulled it free as soon as men appeared.
That they bothered to unlimber and swing open the ponderous and now unbalanced gate rather than simply exit through the hole Tun had made in the palisade further confirmed what she thought about their ability to think clearly. And when she saw Nath walking in the midst of a party of six armed men, it was all she could do to keep her focus on the ward she was prepared to call, rather than lashing out with an inducement or charm of her own.
Nath had her wand to hand. Aelis drew energy into her sword and unleashed it with the syllables of her ward, just before Nath’s voice washed over them.
“Put down your weapons, Warden, and your companions as well. Come in and we’ll discuss all this over tea.”
