Also on week three the king started to act like his old self, finally letting go of that guilt. I was glad, I didn’t get any satisfaction at seeing him carry it on my behalf. The following morning when I got to crack open my first book, I finally felt like I had come home…
Chapter 19
I had a nagging feeling I was missing something, but I had no idea what it was. I was pretty happy, the royal family was treating me practically as one of the family and both of my apprentices were advancing nicely. It wasn’t perfect, but what was? Still, it was nagging the corner of my mind. Was I just greedy? Was I never truly satisfied unless I was improving something?
Anna said, “Master?”
I looked across the breakfast table and smiled, shaking off my weird mood. “Anna?”
Anna said, “Are you okay? I asked if I could take Rina to Sandoval this morning. She doesn’t complain because she idolizes you, but I think she’s a bit homesick. Seeing Elaine and Helen might help.”
I was struck by doubt for a second, I thought I had everything together. I had no idea Rina felt that way. I had planned to take her this coming weekend but… I nodded slowly and said, “Only if you take me too, I think we all need a break in the routine. Now that things have calmed a bit it should be easier.”
I frowned, “The first few weeks have been difficult but I should have taken notice. How about you Anna, everything okay?”
She grinned, “Great actually, this is home after all, I was only in Sandoval for a week. I have no complaints.”
I looked over at Rina who was sitting at another table talking animatedly with Maria and Varian. I was happy for Maria, she and Varian had grown very close the last two years, political marriage or not they were in love. Could that be what I’m missing? Looking closely Maria was practically glowing. I narrowed my eyes and cast detect life then grinned. I was clearly reading four lives at the table where only the three of them were sitting.
Anna asked, “What’s that big smile for?”
I put my finger to my lips and said, “Let’s not ruin it for them, they will figure it out.”
She looked at the table then back at me and said excitedly, “Really? That’s great. They’ve been trying since the marriage, there’s even been talk. I’ll keep my mouth shut though…”
We finished breakfast and walked over to collect Rina.
I said, “Maria, were making a run for it, we should be back for audiences.”
Maria said, “Good, you’ve been killing yourself the last two weeks or so.”
We walked into a side room and I waited for Anna to open a portal, we went through and came out in the front of the shop. I laughed, Anna must have planned ahead, because Elaine was there waiting for us with a big smile.
Rina screeched happily and tackled Elaine with a hug and started to chatter non-stop.
I whispered to Anna, “Thanks for thinking of this.”
Anna blushed at the mixed compliment and apology and just nodded.
Elaine said, “Let’s go see Helen and your friends. I bet you missed them too.”
I winked at Elaine and said, “Escaped your guards again have you?”
Elaine snickered, “More like they haven’t found me again yet, it’s been hours.”
Elaine had us all laughing as we walked down the street as she went over her adventures of the last two weeks. I swear it was amazing King Leland wasn’t completely gray by now. When we got to the orphanage Rina ran ahead and joined her friends. I watched with a smile as she healed a boy with his arm in a sling. Most of them took it in stride, not surprised, and they continued to have fun.
When Helen made her way out I slipped her a bag of coin when I gave her a hug.
Helen said, “It’s good to see you.”
I told her how hectic it’s been the last few weeks, and that we should be here at least once a week from now on.
Helen said with sincerity ringing in her voice, “You know you’re a godsend, I know you don’t like it when I thank you. But… thanks to you I can give all these kids a good home, instead of just enough to survive.”
Helen didn’t understand. Neither for that matter did Maria, Anna or Rina. They knew I was from Zual, but they didn’t really get what that meant. Helping out here, and other orphanages, is the very least I could do. But it would never be enough. How could it ever be?
Even three and a half years later I still had nightmares. Oh, I wasn’t miserable and I was genuinely happy at times. But sometimes, those dark memories would overwhelm me.
No, helping these kids is the least of what I owe in this life. And it paled next to my crimes. Killing other apprentices that were trying to kill or enslave me, well, I wasn’t happy about that, after all we were all children then, but at least it was self defense. Worse than that though, is watching adults and children being sacrificed in my memories by my old master, or another apprentice. The innocent ones, those that were helpless, kids and young adults just like those here.
The worst of my memories though, was when I was forced through threat of death to hold the knife myself. No, it could never be enough, and I sure as hell didn’t deserve credit for it. I couldn’t explain all that to Helen though, or even those closest to me. I hid my monster away. I pushed it down and buried the weight of it. Helen was right, I did hate being thanked. It always made me feel guilty. It reminded me of the monster that I had been…
Not to say my actions were led purely by guilt, they were not. I took joy in spending time here and helping. But there was enough guilt tied in that I really didn’t feel I deserved thanks for it. My past colored my whole life, protecting Lethia was much the same way.
I took pleasure in keeping my friends safe, did it out of love for Maria in the beginning, my first friend in this new life. And really, that would have been enough of a reason for me to do it. But always in the back of my mind I was doing it to protect the Lethia and the rest of the kingdoms from people like I was.
I shook off my dark thoughts and tried to enjoy the rest of the visit. About an hour in I heard Elaine say, “Uhoh.”
I turned around and almost laughed. The guards that the king Leland assigned to Elaine for her protection had finally caught up. And they looked very annoyed.
One of the guards said, “Princess, your father would like to speak with you.”
She took a moment to say goodbye to everyone, then allowed the guards to march off with her. A half hour later we also needed to leave to prepare for the days audiences…
The first few requests went by and my mind started to wander. Then, like many times over the last two years I felt my enchanted energy elemental guardian activate at the mountain pass into Zual. I know some stealthy groups had snuck past at times, but I wasn’t too worried, whenever it came to a fight my guardian had always won in the past.
I started making plans to find out if anyone needed healing after the audience, figuring if anything serious happened the commander would interrupt the audience to get my help. That is when I felt the connection I had to the elemental wink out. It hadn’t dismissed itself, it simply and abruptly disappeared. The king turned and looked at me when I gasped out.
I said, “My apologies your majesty, I need to check something at the mountain pass.”
He said, “Very well,” when he saw the worry on my face.
I couldn’t figure out what could have taken out an energy elemental that was four times as powerful as I was. I also wasn’t too worried that whatever it was could get through four elementals protecting me from my bracelet enchantment, but I wasn’t going to chance it. If I was wrong I was dead.
For the first time in over two years I shifted to the form of an eagle, right there in the court without thinking. I was worried about the situation and needed to move. I could still feel my enchantments in this form and activated a portal, jumped through, and spread my wings. I found myself at a thousand feet directly above the pass and looked down at the battlefield. Everything was in sharp focus with my eagle eye sight.
>
Fighting the soldiers and knights were a group of demons maybe twenty strong. Demons were tough, they didn’t actually use magic the way human mages did. It was all instinct. They channeled it to make their skin tougher, their muscles stronger and faster. Most importantly, or at least the reason they were summoned by dark mages, they could channel the magic to another being.
I didn’t see the mages at first, they were about a hundred yards back in the pass. There were two groups of one master and eight apprentices. I think I understood what happened. The demons set off the elemental by starting a battle, the elemental always attacked mages, since when they died any elementals or demons summoned by that mage would go with them.
I figured the Master must have coordinated all nine in the group to cast simultaneously at my energy elemental, and because of the distance they had the time to pull it off. All nine mages including a master would easily rip apart one of my energy elementals. Currently both groups were moving forward slowly, looking around warily for another trap.
It may seem unreasonable that it took over two years to figure out a way to overcome my protection for most people, but I understood how things worked in Zual. One, any mages that saw my energy elemental would most likely be dead and have nothing to report. Two, apprentice lives were very cheap, and it probably took this long for the master mages to care to find out what was going on. And apparently only two of them at that.
I thought of sending my four enchanted elementals down there but reconsidered. It might be work for one of the groups, but between both they might even take out all four before they could get there. I needed to surprise them somehow, or be closer, which I was wary of doing. I think if I used the elementals for protection one group wouldn’t be able to stop me, but two groups were very concerning.
I couldn’t protect Lethia if I were dead.
Elementals, when summoned always appeared right next to the caster, however, when using elemental spells to control the natural elements of this world it could be done at a distance. I had never before considered using the four element spell in such a way before, but it should work. I quickly built the spell I had just conceived of on the fly and released it. I kept it as simple as possible, I could refine it later and create a shortcut glyph, but right now I didn’t have time for all that, soldiers were being hurt.
Centered on the master in the middle of the group a large ball of pure energy grew from nothing to eight feet in diameter in under a second. Then all that energy released in a huge explosion. I considered using hidden magic, but I was worried the master would live in that case. The results were… devastating. There was a huge crater in the ground and a rock slide happening. As for the dark mages, there was no evidence they had ever existed, not even a drop of blood. They were just… gone.
Now of course, since I hadn’t used hidden magic, the second group of nine mages were glaring up at me, my first strike revealed I was here and gave away my position. I activated the enchantment and was surrounded by energy dragons as the mages below attacked me with fire, air, earth, and water. Just like the mage council, the combined energy of the dragons was enough to absorb all the attacks.
The energy dragons shot a sheet of energy from their mouths like a breath weapon. There would be no surviving that. However to my horror before they were hit, I saw the master drop into the ground, his mage aura moving quickly away until I lost it, either from range or hidden magic. The apprentices were all destroyed utterly by the attack, but I was worried about what that master knew, I was worried knowledge of me would force the dark masters to work together.
I had a lot of work to do…
After dismissing the energy dragons I landed in the clearing and changed back to my normal form. I took a quick moment to create that glyph shortcut, it was a useful spell and I chided myself at not thinking of it until I was in a situation where I needed it. I wasn’t worried about the master figuring out the spell, he felt it, but it didn’t feel like an elemental spell really, it was as if when all the elements combined, it became something else entirely.
I took stock of the injured and just started healing them, the worst off first. Sadly, four died during the battle and I couldn’t do anything about it. I had often thought of increasing the power of their enchantments now that it was easily supported, but I was worried about putting weapons too powerful in their hands. It felt like I needed to balance it, just in case one day down the line if normal humans turned against mages and had automatically charged enchantments… That thought felt hollow right now, perhaps it would have made a difference in one or more of those four deaths.
I had noticed a pattern though, the knights seemed to mostly fight off demons when a skirmish happened, leaving the mages to my enchanted energy guardian. There was a way I could make the swords much more effective against demons, while leaving them relatively unchanged against a mage.
I called over the captain when I was done healing and asked, “Captain, do all the men out here have the new enchantment on their swords for charging?”
He said, “Yes lady, all the knights do at all posts. The ones that are left for you to finish will probably go to a locked vault for backup weapons.”
I nodded. That made sense, I knew I had already enchanted more weapons than we had knights, so the extra weapons were superfluous. I had the Captain order all the men in a line and present their swords.
I said loudly enough to be heard by all, “Do not panic at the elemental, I am adding another enchantment to your weapons.”
I casted an earth elemental, then walked along behind it. There were only twenty one knights present so it took me about ten minutes. The elemental scribed in the glyph for banishment, which I enchanted as I followed. I kept the aura small, three feet. If I made the aura too big it would drain the enchantment faster than they could be kept up with.
When I was done I explained it, and then headed to the ocean pass to repeat the process. I asked the captain there to have the commander let me know when they were rotated out so I could get the next batch of swords. With only eighty or so knights, I would only have to hit both passes one more time. I could do the swords in lockup at my leisure after that.
When I returned, lunch and the first half of the afternoon audience was a blur. I knew I needed to ease off on the paranoia, I had time, there would be arguing, and fights, before the Zual masters could put something together. I had a plan to create more enchantments like my bracelet, with a controlling glyph that would get energy elementals to work together. It would help, it would have stopped those today without my intervention I think. But really, it was just a bigger hammer and shield that would in turn cause another escalation of teamwork through mind control from Zual. I needed to come up with a plan that included the big hammer, but also more.
I also had one other worry. They used the passes mostly because it was convenient for the masters and when or if they ever tried to conquer they wouldn’t want an enemy behind them. As an apprentice in Zual I had no idea the travel portal ritual existed, but I had to assume most if not all of the masters there had access to it. I also couldn’t conceive of someone making it to master without having been on a raid at some time or another so they must know destinations in Lethia.
So I worried that if I made the pass to impregnable, they would start using the ritual. Not that I would allow raids to preclude the possibility, but I had to keep in mind the unintended consequences.
I took a deep breath and moved my concentration to where it should be now and started to pay attention. Yes, it was boring, but it was my duty.
The next few months passed quickly. I had put my enchantments in the pass by the end of the second week, I had also put protections close to the city gates and in all six of the villages. In the pass it was easy to program responses. There were demons, and blacked robed mages to be killed, and soldiers to be protected.
The ones by the city though, and in the villages were harder. What if a townsperson wearing a black shirt was pissed off one day a
s they walked past the ward? Roasted villager. So I had to make these a little different. I only actively targeted demonic auras for death, also, anyone with a mage aura that was wearing black. Of course, the mage part could be defeated with a simple hidden magic spell, so I would consider any activations closer to an alarm, I would need to be there to direct things.
But as time went on I started to relax a little. Either it was taking longer than I thought, or I had over reacted and there wouldn’t be an escalation of hostilities at all…
Anna was doing much better and was close to master mage status, she was just seventeen now and it amazed me how far along she was. I wasn’t sure what would come first, her master mage status or her eighteenth birthday. I just knew I would miss her when she had to leave.
Then the inevitable finally happened, Anna walked into the library with an old familiar beaten black leather book, her face was frozen with her mouth open.
I don’t know why I didn’t remove that book from the library. At first it was because it made me chuckle that the white mages had access to the information they had so desperately wanted from me within reach. Assuming they could stop politicking long enough to increase their knowledge and power, which I was pretty sure wouldn’t have happened.
After coming back here as master court mage, I figured I was the first in a few hundred years to figure it out, and if someone else did they earned it. Was it dangerous? Yes, but so is everything else a powerful mage knows. I wouldn’t hand out that knowledge and make it easy, but that was a far cry from suppressing all evidence of it.
Plus, Anna was a wonderful young woman. I wasn’t worried about her finding out about it and abusing the power. But only if she figured it on her own.
As far as the energy elemental, I still wasn’t sure. She was able to cast four spells at once now, so was very close to being able to use the knowledge if I gave it. Maybe just a hint? But that was a worry for another time.
The Formerly Dark Mage Page 17