The Mage Wars

by Mercedes Lackey

  She had always known, whether or not Conn was aware of it, that her liaison with the mage was temporary. She had thought when she first accepted his invitation to “be his woman” that it would only last until Ma’ar overran them all, and killed them. A matter of weeks, months at the most. But Urtho was a better leader than anyone had thought, and she found herself living long past the time when she had thought she would be dead.

  Then she had decided that sooner or later Conn would grow tired of her, and get rid of her. But it seemed that either most women around the Sixth knew the mage for the kind of man he was—an overgrown child in many ways, with a child’s tantrums and possessiveness—or else he perversely prized her. He made no move to be rid of her, for all his complaints of her coldness.

  Then again, he was a master of manipulation, and one of the people he manipulated as easily as breathing was her. She didn’t like unpleasantness; she hated a scene. She was easily embarrassed. He knew how to threaten, what to threaten her with, and when to turn from threats to charming cajolery.

  On her part the relationship originally had been as cool and prearranged as any marriage of state. He supplied her with an identity, and she gave him what he wanted. They maintained their own separate gear and sleeping quarters; they shared nothing except company.

  But you don’t allow someone into your bed without getting some emotional baggage out of it. She was wise enough to admit that. And even though she would have been glad enough to be rid of him, as long as he claimed he had some feelings for her, and he needed her, she knew she would stay. Not until he walked away would she feel free of him.

  Amberdrake had skillfully pried that out of her already—and in so doing, had made her face squarely what she had not been willing to admit until that moment. She didn’t want Conn anymore, she heartily wished him out of her life, and the most he would ever be able to evoke in her was a mild pity. There was no passion there anymore, not even physical passion. Amberdrake gave her more pleasure than he did, without ever once venturing into the amorous or erotic. And now Cinnabar, saying she should be rid of him…

  Cinnabar must think he’s a drain on me, on my resources. I suppose he is. Every time he comes back from the front lines, there’s a scene—I spend half the night trying to make him feel better, and I end up feeling worse. I find myself wishing that he would die out there, and then I’m torn up with guilt for ill-wishing him…

  Oh, it was all too tangled. Amberdrake could help her sort it all out—but if she kept her appointment, Amberdrake would learn her secrets.

  Her stomach hurt. Her stomach always hurt when she was like this. Amberdrake knew everything that there was to know about herbal remedies; maybe he would have something for her stomach as well as her back, and if she just kept the subject on that she could avoid telling him anything important.

  She put the bit of leather aside and got up off her bedroll, pushing aside the tent-flaps to emerge into the blue-gray of twilight.

  Time to go. There was no place to run from it now. And no point in running.

  * * *

  Amberdrake knew the moment that Winterhart slipped through the tent door that there was something wrong. Even if he hadn’t been an Empath, even if he was still an apprentice in the various arts of the kestra’chern, he’d have known it. She moved stiffly, her muscles taut with tension, and the little frown-line between her brows was much deeper than usual. Her eyes looked red and irritated, and she held her shoulders as if she expected a blow to come down out of the sky at any moment.

  “Is Conn Levas back yet?” he asked casually, assuming that the mage was the reason for her tension.

  But the startled look of surprise, as if that was the very last thing she had expected him to say, told him that the shot had gone far wide of the mark. Whatever was troubling her, it was not her erstwhile lover.

  “No,” she replied, and turned her back to him, modest as always, to disrobe so that he could work on her back. “No, the foot-troops are still out. They aren’t doing well, though. I suppose you know that Ma’ar is pushing them out of the Pass again. The Sixth got hit badly, and the Fourth and Third sent in gryphons with carry-nets to evacuate the wounded. It was bad on the landing-field.”

  “So I’d heard.” Skan was out there now; as the only gryphon who could keep up with Zhaneel, Urtho had assigned him to fly protective cover on her. No standard scouting raids for them; they only flew at Urtho’s express orders, usually bearing one or more of his magic weapons or protections. The Black Gryphon had already given Amberdrake a terse account of the damage, before going out on a second sortie. “After a day like today, I’m not surprised that you’re tense.”

  “And my stomach’s in a knot,” she said, wrapping herself in a loose robe, before she turned back to face him. Her expression mingled wry hope with resignation, as if she hated to admit that her body had failed her. “I don’t suppose you have anything for that, do you?”

  “Assuming you trust my intentions,” he countered, trying to make a joke of it. “I’d prescribe an infusion of vero-grass, alem-lily root, and mallow. All of which I do have on hand. You aren’t the only person who’s come to me today with your muscles and stomach all in knots.”

  Her eyes widened a little, for all three herbs were very powerful, and had a deserved reputation for loosening the tongue and giving it free rein—and for loosening inhibitions as well. “I don’t know,” she replied hesitantly. “Then again, between the state of my back and my stomach, maybe I’d better.”

  He had made the same concoction often enough for himself that he could nod sympathetically as he went to his chest of herbs. He took measured amounts of each into a cup, poured in hot water, and left the medicine to steep. “Believe me, I know how you feel. As I said, I’ve had to resort to my own herbs more than once since this war started. I’ve been with Urtho’s forces since—let me think—right after the High King collapsed, and Urtho more-or-less took over as leader.”

  She accepted the cup of bitter tea carefully, made a face as she tasted it, and drank it down all at once. “That’s longer than I have,” she remarked. “If you’ve been with Urtho that long, I suppose you must have seen quite a bit of the Court, then.”

  “Me? Hardly.” He laughed, and could have sworn that she relaxed a little. “No, I was just one kestra’chern with the Kaled’a’in; all the Clans came in as fast as they could when Urtho called us in, and he didn’t sort us out for several months after that. He just gave the Clan Chiefs his orders, and let them decide how to carry them out, while he tried to organize what was left of the defenses. At that point, no one knew what ranking I was qualified for—kestra’chern aren’t given a rank among the Clans the way they are on the outside world. My rank and all that came later, as things got organized.”

  She arranged herself on the massage table, face-down. “The way that the Clans stood by him, though—you must have been disgusted at the way the nobles just panicked and deserted him.”

  He paused, a bottle of warm oil in his hand, at the odd tone in her voice. She surely knew that he knew she was no Kaled’a’in—but there was something about the way she had phrased that last that was sending little half-understood signals to him. And the direction the conversation had been going in…

  Go slowly, go carefully with this, he thought. There is more going on here than there appears to be. I think, if I am very careful, all my questions about her are about to be answered.

  “We stood by him because we were protected and never felt the fear,” he replied, pouring a little oil in the palm of his hand and spreading it on her back. “We have our own mages, you know. Granted, we don’t go about making much of the fact, and they only serve Kaled’a’in, but between the mages and the shaman, Ma’ar couldn’t touch us—and there was no way that he could insinuate agents into our midst to bring us down. Not the way he did the High King and his Court.”

  The muscles under his hand jumped. “What do you mean by that?” she demanded, her voice sharp and anxious.<
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  He soothed her back with his hands, and deliberately injected a soothing tone into his voice. “Well, Ma’ar has always been a master of opportunity, and he’s never used a direct attack when an indirect one would work as well. Treachery, betrayal, manipulation—those are his favorite weapons. That was how he got control in his own land in the first place, and that is how he prefers to weaken other lands before he moves in to take them with his troops. He may be ruthless and heartless, but he never spends more than he has to in order to get what he wants.”

  “But what does that have to do with us?” she demanded harshly. “What does that have to do with the way those cowards simply deserted the High King, fled and left the Court and their own holdings in complete chaos?”

  “Why, everything,” he told her in mild surprise. “Ma’ar had a dozen agents in the Court, didn’t you know that? Their job was to spread rumors, create dissension, make things as difficult as possible for the High King to get anything accomplished. I don’t know their names, but Cinnabar does; she was instrumental in winkling them out and dealing with them after the King collapsed. But the major thing was that once Ma’ar believed that his agents had done everything they could to get the Court just below the boiling point, he sent one of them into the Palace with a little ‘present’ for the King and his supporters.” His mouth twisted in distaste. “Treachery of the worst sort. Have you ever heard of something called a dyrstaf?”

  “No,” she said blankly.

  “Skan could tell you more about it—he was there at the time, in Urtho’s Tower, and he found out about everything pretty much as it happened. For that matter, so was Lady Cinnabar, but she’s not a mage, and Skan is.” He tried to recall everything that Cinnabar and Skan had told him. “It’s a rather nasty little thing—it’s an object, usually a rod or a staff of some kind, that holds a very insidious version of a fear-spell. It looks perfectly ordinary until it’s been triggered, and even then it doesn’t show to anything but mage-sight. It starts out just creating low-level anxiety, and works up to a full panic over the course of a day and a night. And since it isn’t precisely attacking anyone or anything, most protective spells won’t shield from it. And of course, since it wasn’t active when the agent brought it into the Palace, no one knew it was there, and it didn’t trip any of the protections laid around the King.”

  “A fear-spell?” she said softly. “But why didn’t the Palace shields—oh. Never mind, it was inside the shields when it started to work. So of course the shields wouldn’t keep anything out.”

  “And by the time anyone realized what was going on, it was too late to do anything about it,” Amberdrake replied. “In fact, it did most of its worst work after dark—at a time when people are most subject to their fears anyway. The mages always slept under all kinds of personal shielding, so of course they weren’t affected. Anyone with Healer training would also sleep under shields; remember, most Healers have some degree of Empathy, and this was an emotion—they would also have been protected against it.”

  “But anyone else…” She shuddered.

  “And what most people did was simply to run away.” Amberdrake sighed. “By morning, the Palace was deserted, and it wasn’t only the nobles who ran, no matter what you might have heard to the contrary. It was everyone. Cinnabar said that the only ones left were the mages and Healers; there wasn’t a horse, donkey, or mule fit to ride left in the stables, the servants and the Palace guards had deserted their posts, and the King was in a virtual state of collapse. She and the others called Urtho from his Tower. By the time that Urtho found the dyrstaf, it was too late; the worst damage had been done.”

  “But they didn’t come back.” No mistake about it: Winterhart’s tone was incredibly bitter and full of self-accusation. “They could have returned, but they didn’t. They were cowards, all of them.”

  “No.” He made his voice firm, his answer unequivocal. “No, they didn’t come back, not because they were cowards, but because they were hurt. The dyrstaf inflicts a wound on the heart and soul as deep as any weapon of steel can inflict on the body; an invisible wound of terror that is all the worse because it can’t be seen and doesn’t bleed. They weren’t cowards, they were so badly wounded that most of them had gone beyond thinking of anything but their fear and their shame. Some of them, like the King, died of that wound.”

  “He—died?” she faltered. “I didn’t know that.”

  Amberdrake sighed. “His heart was never that strong, and he was an old man; being found by Urtho hiding in his own wardrobe shamed him past telling. It broke his spirit, and he simply faded away over the course of the next month. Since he was childless, and everyone else in direct line had fled past recalling, Urtho thought it better just to let people think he’d gone into exile.”

  “What about Cinnabar?” she demanded sharply. “Why didn’t she run? Doesn’t that just prove that everyone who did really is a coward?”

  “Cinnabar was already a trained Healer, dearheart,” he said. Not like you, little one. You might have had the Gift, but your family didn’t indulge you enough to let you get it trained. “You’ve worked with her; you know how powerful she is, and her Empathy is only a little weaker than her Healing powers. She was shielded against outside emotions, and didn’t even know what was going on. Then, in the morning, she was able to tell that the fear was coming from outside, and she was one of the ones who got Urtho and helped him in a search for the dyrstaf. They all came in by way of Urtho’s private Gate into the Throne Room—all but Skan; he was too big to fit. Unfortunately, by the time Urtho and the mages found it, it was too late to do any good.”

  “They always said her family was eccentric,” Winterhart said, as if to herself. “Letting the children get training, as if they were ever going to have to actually be Healers and mages and all. I envied her—” A gasp told him she had realized too late that she had let that clue to her past slip.

  “If your parents had allowed you to have Healer training, instead of forcing you to learn what you could on your own, you probably wouldn’t be here right now,” he told her quietly. “Don’t you realize that if you’d been properly trained, you’d have been standing beside Cinnabar, helping her, on that day? There is nothing more vulnerable than an untrained Empath. You were perhaps the single most vulnerable person in the entire Palace when the dyrstaf started working. Didn’t you ever realize that? If Ma’ar’s spell of fear wounded others, I am truly surprised that it didn’t strike you dead.”

  Her shoulders shook with sobs. “I wish it had!” she wept into the pillow. “Oh gods! I wish it had!”

  Carefully, very carefully, he sat down on the edge of the massage table and took her shoulders in his strong hands, helping her to sit up and turn, so that she was weeping into his shoulder instead of into a comfortless pillow. For some time, he simply held her, letting her long-pent grief wear itself out, rocking her a little, and stroking her hair and the back of her neck.

  She shivered, and her skin chilled. Gesten slipped in, silent as a shadow, and laid a thick, warmed robe beside him. He thanked the hertasi with his eyes, and picked it up, wrapping it around her shoulders. She relaxed as the heat seeped into her, and gradually her sobs lost their strength.

  “So that was why you chose the name ‘Winterhart’,” he said, into the silence. “I’d wondered. It wasn’t because it was Kaled’a’in at all—it was because a hart is a hunted creature, and because you hoped that the cold of winter would close around you and keep you from ever feeling anything again.”

  “I never even saw a Kaled’a’in until I came here,” came the whisper from his shoulder.

  “Ah.” He massaged the back of her neck with one hand, while the other remained holding her to his chest. “So. You know, you don’t have to answer me, but who are you? If you have any relatives still alive, they would probably like to know that you are living too.”

  “How would you know?” The reply sounded harsh, but he did not react to it, he simply answered it.

&n
bsp; “I know—partly because one of my tasks as a kestra’chern is to pass that information on to Urtho in case any of your relations have been looking for others of their blood. And I know because I lost my family when they fled without me, and I have never found them again. And there is a void there, an emptiness, and a pain that comes with not knowing, not being able to at least write ‘finished’ to the question.”

  “Oh. I’m—sorry,” she said awkwardly.

  “Thank you,” he replied, accepting the spirit of the apology.

  He sensed that she was not finished, and waited.

  Finally, she spoke again.

  “Once, my name was Lady Reanna Laury…”

  * * *

  Winterhart spoke, and Amberdrake listened, long into the night. She was his last client—he had instinctively scheduled her as the last client of any night she had an appointment, knowing that if her barriers ever broke, he would need many candlemarks to deal with the consequences. So she had all the time she needed.

  He talked to her, soothed her—and did not lay a finger on her that was not strictly platonic. He knew that she half expected him to seduce her—he also knew that given any encouragement whatsoever, she would seduce him. But the situation was too complicated to allow for one more complication, and he would have been not only unprofessional, but less than a friend, if he permitted that complication to take place.

  Much as he wanted to.

  She was very sweet, very pliant, in his arms. He sensed a passionate nature in her that he doubted Conn Levas even guessed at. She was quite ready to show that nature to him.

  But the essence of a kestra’chern’s talent was a finely honed sense of timing, and he knew that this was not the time.

  So he sent her back to her tent exhausted, but only emotionally and mentally—comforted, but not physically. And he flung himself into his bed in a fever, to stare at the tent-roof and fantasize all the things that he wished he had done.