“We encountered little trouble, my lord wizard.”
“My lord wizard?” Robyn said.
Heat rose to Xan’s face. “I’d almost forgotten about the blasted title. You don’t mind, do you?”
Robyn grinned. “Not at all, my lord master.”
More teasing. Great.
Xan ignored it. “Sorry for the interruption, Tina. Your report?”
“Yes, my lord wizard.” She had a bemused expression on her face. “At each village, we informed the mayor that Lord Conley demanded each citizen be subjected to a health check. Most went along without question. When they didn’t, a few coins in the right hands and the presence of our armed guards put paid to any nonsense.”
“And who are these good people traveling with you?”
“Mostly craftsmen I thought we’d need. Furniture makers, wainwrights, a blacksmith.” Tina pointed to an old man. “That one knows about buildings and planning out cities, my lord wizard.”
“Good thinking.” The newcomers would be useful, but there was one thing he needed above all others. “And the other?”
“Other, my lord wizard?” Tina grinned.
Great. She was teasing him as well. He’d not realized it was contagious.
“How many mages?”
Tina gestured toward her group, and seven people joined them.
“My lord wizard, it is my honor to present to you—Hattie Habert and Francie Cole, massers; Olga Walen and Nola Hampt, death mages; Sal Avila, a kineticist; Jobe Bell, a bolt; and Gregg Rocha, a heater.”
“Seven?” Xan said. “You found seven! That’s … fantastic! Incredible. I’m not sure what I’m paying you, but you’re definitely getting a raise.”
He’d not dreamed she’d do so well. Not counting Marco, Xan’s mage corps stood at seventeen, considering he’d convert Jo when he met up with Hosea.
Tina beamed at the praise. “They’re still only potentials, my lord wizard.”
“That’s fine. Perfect, in fact.” Xan told her about discovering a new method. “I’ll get them to surge as we walk.”
With that, the two groups merged, and they got under way. Xan’s attention turned to all he had to accomplish. So much to do. Building a brand new nation from scratch would not be easy.
He wished he had his friends to help him. Brant would make an excellent general, and Dylan would be the minister of finance. Lainey would be his chief diplomat.
Xan smiled. She’d love that.
His face fell. But his friends weren’t with him, and he didn’t know if they’d ever join him. He’d just hoped he’d find people who were both trustworthy and competent to fill the roles he needed.
Tina and Robyn were a start, at least.
They reached Heart Harbor in the early evening and found Hosea already there. Xan, Hosea’s family, and the mages took over an inn for the evening while everyone else camped outside of town.
With the craftsmen Tina recruited and new people who had joined Hosea, Xan’s non-mage population exceeded four hundred. Of course, having so many people depending on him increased the pressure on him to feed them. And provide housing. Oh, and not get them killed.
Yes, avoiding getting them killed was his first priority, starting with feeding them.
Luckily, he happened to have a wagon full of gold to help with that. The next morning, he distributed bags to Hosea, Robyn, Tina, and a few others deemed capable, and by late afternoon, he had all the supplies that the town could handle selling. Medicines and herbs, horses, wagons, food, clothes, bolts of fabric, tools for farming and building, and all manner of things Xan never would have considered made their way to the budding caravan.
While his team went on their buying spree, Xan even found a new mage, a kineticist named Lauren Duff. Trained mercenaries, however, were hard to come by. With Truna’s attack on Asherton, every local noble in the surrounding areas in both Kaicia and Bermau had hired up every available man to boost their individual armies. Xan had to make due with young field hands who didn’t even know how to hold a sword.
At dawn the next morning, Xan’s entire nation departed for the mountains and, after lunch, topped a rise. Sheer cliffs abutted both sides of the road, creating a narrow pass, and a mile ahead, a small castle blocked the way.
A dozen soldiers dressed in the queen’s purple and gold livery manned the wall.
Xan frowned. Oh well, the fortifications presented little challenge for him. He floated off the ground, preparing to strike.
“My lord wizard?” a voice called from below.
Xan turned back to find a middle-aged gentleman limping toward him, one of Tina’s mages. A heater if he remembered correctly. “Yes?”
“I’m Gregg Rocha, my lord wizard. May I ask your intentions for the mages you’ve recruited?”
“That’s a broad question.”
“Specifically, do you intend for them to be a fighting force, sir?”
Both the question and the use of “sir” were dead giveaways that Gregg came from a military background.
“I do.”
“May I suggest, sir … uh, my lord wizard … that, if you’re planning on attacking, this might be a good learning opportunity?”
Xan considered for a moment before touching back down. “Very well. Show me what you’ve got.”
“Me? I didn’t … I mean, my lord wizard, perhaps you should …”
“I want to see what you can do. You have command.”
“Yes, sir.”
Gregg huddled with Tina, Robyn, and Lauren, and a few minutes later, the four of them walked to just out of bowshot of the fort’s walls.
“Surrender or face the wrath of the Gryphon!” Tina boomed.
The wrath of the Gryphon? Xan grinned.
In response to Tina’s order, arrows arched from the fort. Instead of falling well short, half scattered off the road to the right and half to the left. Bows flew from the hands of the archers.
As the mages advanced, a brick dislodged from the top of the wall, soon to be followed by another. And another. The cast iron gate melted.
By the time Gregg and the ladies reached the wall, they’d destroyed half of it, and its defenders scattered in disarray.
“That you still live displays the Gryphon’s mercy,” Tina boomed, “but his patience wears thin. Surrender or die!”
Xan almost laughed.
As easily as that, it was over. The captain of the garrison called for his men to lay down their arms, and Xan allowed them safe passage out.
“Nicely done,” Xan told Gregg. “But why didn’t you just use death mages to knock them unconscious?”
“They can do that, my lord wizard?”
Xan sighed. They definitely had a lot of training to do, and he started it that very evening.
Two days later, Xan sensed people in the mountains ahead. He elevated over the area and located thirty armed men lying in wait.
Interesting.
Xan popped a seed and smiled as a bolt of energy hit his body. Just what he needed before a battle. He returned to the group and consulted with Gregg. Together, they decided that Xan and the four mages that had attacked the fort would ride ahead of the others to spring the ambush.
They neared the site where the enemy hid, and Xan directed microbursts of sound to the ears of each of the mages with him. “Be ready as soon as we top that rise.”
As soon as their heads cleared, a score of arrows whizzed at them.
Even expecting the attack, the swiftness took Xan by surprise. He deflected about half of them into the dirt. Lauren, apparently, was just as shocked because no others changed course.
Three melted, causing them to tumble wide of their targets.
Of the five that got through, one found its mark. Xan’s shoulder flared in agony. As much pain as he felt, he would make the men who shot him suffer more.
Xan flew them one by one from their hiding places, each landing with a thud in the middle of the rocky road. Once all thirty lay groaning, he propelled
the arrow from his body with a grunt. He ripped his shirt and poured healing into the wound. The skin knitted together as everyone stared.
“You have a choice,” Xan said. “Serve me or die.”
One glared up at him. “I’ll nev—”
The arrow Xan had pulled from his shoulder propelled itself into the man’s eye. He fell backward. Dead.
“Let’s try this again,” Xan said. “You have a choice. Serve me or die.”
A big man tentatively raised his hand. “I’m Porter. I’ll serve you, uh, sir.”
“My lord wizard,” Xan said.
“I’ll serve you, my lord wizard.”
Xan smiled. It wasn’t much of an army, but it was a start.
45.
Xan frowned.
He’d read that not one brick used to construct Eye Lake still stood atop another, but he’d hoped that was an exaggeration.
It wasn’t.
The city wasn’t just destroyed but obliterated. No wall. No building. No roads. Just a mess of scattered rocks and charred wood that extended to the fields where crops once grew.
The upside was that, if one overlooked the destruction, the site was perfect. Fertile soil. Scenic. Good weather. High mountains circled the lake, making the area easily defended. Even better, the city and castle had been located on a small island in the middle of the lake, giving them a huge moat.
Once they rebuilt the bridge. And everything else.
So much to do, so little time.
His primary task remained to get more mages, and his preference was to take care of that himself. Too many other items demanded his personal attention, though. Since Tina and Kennan had done so well the first time, Xan sent them back out.
Next on his priority list was housing and food. With winter coming, tents wouldn’t provide proper insulation, and the supplies from Heart Harbor wouldn’t last forever. And buying everything in sight would strain the closest towns.
Xan ordered more than half his four hundred citizens to plow. Since crops weren’t typically planted in later fall, they looked at him like an idiot … if an insanely powerful one. Then again, crops didn’t typically have four death mages available to help them along, either.
Building was a huge undertaking. Constructing a bridge to the island. Temporary and permanent housing. And of course, a castle.
Those things required massive manpower. Cutting trees from the surrounding woods. Digging and hauling rocks. Clearing land.
Xan assigned eighty people full-time to the task, though that seemed like way too few.
At least, they had four kineticists and two massers to help.
Clothes and uniforms were less of a priority, but there was a supply of older women who could no longer work the fields. Sewing and watching children running afoot turned them into productive citizens.
Feeding, housing, and clothing his people wouldn’t leave him anywhere if he couldn’t protect them, though, and for that, he needed an army. And a powerful one at that, consisting both of mages and conventional troops. One that would stand up to the combined might of the three kingdoms standing against him.
Xan couldn’t afford to devote his mages to learning how to fight, though. They’d have to squeeze training in where they could until things were up and running. He did, however, assign a hundred young men and women to train as the town’s militia, but he winced as he did it. Each person who worked full time on defense was a person not working to increase the city’s resources. In fact, each drained efforts from others, requiring housing, food, and clothes.
Ugh.
Over the next week, Xan bounced from one problem to the next, training a mage on an important task here, making sure a wall that wasn’t set yet didn’t fall there, and always, always, always answering endless questions.
It never ended. Even when a grown-ass man should have known what to do, he still came to Xan. Take the woodsman who’d come to him that morning. The details were fuzzy in Xan’s memory, as he’d been lifting a beam onto the top of the first floor of his castle.
“My lord wizard,” the guy had said, “I have a problem with cutting wood.”
“How would you solve it?” Xan had said.
The guy proceeded to describe exactly what should be done.
“You probably should do that, then,” Xan had said.
The guy had looked at Xan like he was a blasted genius.
If not for the licuna seeds, he wouldn’t have survived. If he slept at all, it was mere hours a night. To take some burden off himself, he assigned Robyn to be his top lieutenant and directed people to her whenever he could. As they realized they should go to her, fewer came to him, and even better, she loved it. The attention. Talking to people. The way the authority made people look up to her.
And she was good at it.
Fresh off his success in having her handle administrative chores, Xan decided to define the army’s hierarchy, appointing Porter captain of the mundane troops and Gregg to the same position over the magic users.
News of his settling Eye Lake and the open policy for refugees spread, and quite honestly, more people chose to follow him than he’d expected. Considering the bias generated by the nobles’ orchestrated campaign against magic, he’d have never believed so many people wouldn’t be bothered by it.
Instead, individuals and groups wandered in by the day. Robyn had them tested for magical potential and assigned them to appropriate tasks. At the end of the week, the population of Eye Lake had risen by another hundred.
Of course, the open acceptance policy risked letting in spies and assassins, but he didn’t see what he could do about that. He knew of no way to discern loyalties, and he needed all the people he could get.
Things went as well as he could have expected, though. Somehow, few of the recruits were slackers. Everyone pitched in where they were most needed. Xan believed they worked so hard because everyone was scared of dying if they failed, but Robyn thought it was because everyone had bought into what Xan was trying to accomplish.
Her words made him take a mental step back. He’d never thought of himself as inspiring anyone. More like the guy who droned on and was ignored. But he’d take it. He’d definitely take it.
Though Xan was the supreme authority in Eye Lake, he didn’t exempt himself from the most onerous chores, including spending a lot of afternoons in the fields. The nobles who destroyed the buildings had scattered the rocks throughout the farm land. With the massers and kineticists busy with new construction, no one besides Xan was available to move the heaviest of the boulders out of the way.
He needed more mages.
While he worked one day—make a rock light, hurl it kinetically to the island, repeat—two different farmers petitioned him to settle personal disputes. Xan grimaced. Robyn was great at organizing and delegating, but she refused to handle the arguments that constantly arose, especially since everyone was too busy to record official laws.
Judging such matters was a legitimate expectation, but Xan simply didn’t have the time. Not to mention that most of the issues were so trivial! He barely refrained from banishing about half those who came to him.
“Hosea is the wisest person I know,” Xan said. “Go to him.”
The next day, Xan realized he forgot to inform Hosea of that little decision, and boy, did Hosea let him hear about that.
Later that evening, Xan stumbled, exhausted. Though he desperately needed sleep, he had way too much to do. He popped a seed and waited for the bolt of energy to hit him.
Instead, he experienced the tiniest of jolts.
He groaned. That was a bad sign. Any drug’s effectiveness diminished with over-consumption. The seeds were losing their impact.
And he really, really needed a boost.
Hmm. The seeds produced a chemical reaction in his body. If one were, say, an alchemist with the ability to, you know, add energy to that reaction, one could conceivably increase the impact. A lot. Probably, a lot a lot.
What a horrible, terri
ble idea. If ever in the history of everything did anything sound like a bad idea, increasing the already potent power of a licuna seed was it.
But he was tired and had a lot to do. Would a little tiny boost hurt anything?
He chewed another seed and hit it with his magic.
Wham!
The energy hit his body like a shot. He rocketed a dozen yards into the sky.
Yeah. That was the stuff. He’d be able to go all night on that.
46.
Brant’s eyes darted to the northeast.
Magic surged in that direction. A lot of magic. Again.
Over four weeks had passed since he’d murdered Michal, and Brant’s next step was to penetrate Dastanar, but for that, he and his team needed papers. Forged papers. Which took blasted forever to prepare.
And while he waited, stuck, events passed him by.
Rumors swirled on every tongue of a great and powerful wizard—Xan, a great and powerful wizard? Really?—reestablishing Eye Lake, practically daring the kingdoms to attack him. Such a bold move. Courageous. Hard to believe the skinny, unambitious kid Brant had saved from bullies so many times had risen so high.
Brant gripped his hilt. He, on the other hand, wasn’t even guaranteed to become Marshal of the Mages. Lucan was surely brown-nosing the duke. Though okay, Lucan and “ingratiating” didn’t go together, but he’d also probably recruited actual officers from the army to be mages. Those men would already be trusted, an easy choice for leadership.
The longer Brant stayed away from Asherton, the more likely it was that someone would steal his position. His chances were all slipping away. He needed to get the information fast and get back.
The good thing was that he and his team finally had the papers and an actual objective. No more sitting around blasted taverns. No more waiting for something to happen. Better to take the situation under control, even if that meant a dangerous mission.
Get to the castle. Infiltrate. Find where the information was being held. Steal it. Escape without detection.
How hard could that be?
Gryphon (Rise of the Mages Book 2) Page 27