In Treachery Forged (The Law of Swords)

by Tatum, David A

  Six assassins came, incapacitating all of Sword Prince Agaeb’s protectors but her. She fought them all off single-handedly, and nearly died of her wounds in his arms. He nursed her back to health, and by the time she had fully recovered they were betrothed.

  Despite the general feeling of goodwill among the citizenry for Queen Amberry, some of the nobility resented her. Over the course of their life together, she had to put up with numerous assassination attempts on herself while still defending her husband’s life, much as she had when she was still his guardsman. She outlived her husband by a grand total of one week, for she was killed during his funeral; it was said she hadn’t even tried to defend herself, though many believe she could have fought the assassins off even in her old age. That outrage had caused the people of Svieda to riot, and the nobles who had opposed the marriage throughout its duration were deposed, in many cases unfairly, in the belief that they were involved in the assassination.

  Most peasant-royal couples didn’t have nearly as much popular support as Agaeb and Amberry, however. A little more than a century before Maelgyn was born, Sword Princess Ivari married Merchant Prince Laimoth. In Svieda, unlike among the Dwarves, a ‘Merchant Prince’ was not a royal title but instead one given to a man with so many funds and assets that he could match the financial power of one of the provincial governments. It was Laimoth’s trading empire that sustained the Borden Isles, and Ivari was the Duchess of the Borden Isles Province. She knighted him a peer of the realm and married him. In the Borden Isles, they were quite the popular couple... but Laimoth’s pseudo-royalty and sudden peerage was not enough for everyone.

  On the mainland, Laimoth was resented for what many people regarded as ‘unfair’ trade practices. Maelgyn had studied the historical evidence, and saw nothing but a fair businessman who just happened to have a near monopoly over trade with the Borden Isles. Given what he now knew about the Sho’Curlas’ influence in the rebellions and unrest throughout Svieda, he wondered if Laimoth’s unpopularity was brought about by their malfeasance. It was all too easy to make the less fortunate resent the wealthy just by claiming they weren’t doing enough to help the poor, the government, or whatever sympathetic cause the inciter could come up with. Or more insidiously, to manipulate dealings and give the claims of unfairness some hint of truth. Whatever they did worked, for it was Laimoth and Ivari’s son, Elaneth, who wound up leading the Borden Isle rebellion, eventually forcing Svieda into the unwanted alliance with Sho’Curlas.

  That was an extreme case, but most peasant-royal marriages were treated closer to Ivari and Laimoth’s than they were Agaeb and Amberry’s. Jealousy and resentment by the citizenry, arrogant bigotry by the nobility, and ambivalence at best from the priests, pages, squires, military officers, and others who were somewhat in-between. Would he be able to stay married to Euleilla, knowing how poorly she would be regarded by so many people who never even saw her? Especially considering how hard a life she already had?

  Maybe he should talk to her about it. But not yet... not until he was more certain of his feelings. He wanted to give her the final say, and it was only fair that she know exactly what she was up against.

  As far as signs of a growing romance between them was concerned, well... they were there. Even he could see them. They had been walking to the baths, for example, he noticed how her own sweet scent had been obscured by the stench of blood. It was only after he noticed that peculiarity that he realized he’d already memorized her natural scent, and found himself enjoying it and missing it when it wasn’t there. Cora, their maid, had remarked something about how she wished she had a man who would look at her the way he’d been looking at Euleilla when they were at breakfast the morning after the battle – the maid hadn’t meant to speak loud enough to be heard, but both he and Euleilla had heard her nevertheless.

  Still, he believed it was more of a fondness combined with physical attraction than love that he felt. Being battle partners in two separate battles and traveling companions for several weeks, that fondness was bound to exist by now, and the physical attraction had been there since he first saw her. It meant nothing, though; it was too soon for him to be in love. He didn’t think he was. Was he? He wondered, vaguely, how he would know.

  Perhaps the other question should be did he – or would he – want her as a wife? What were the qualities he wanted in a bride?

  He would need someone with a level head. Euleilla had broken down, emotionally, twice that he’d seen her... but both of those times were definitely for just cause: Once because he had learned her secret, and once because he hadn’t understood that he’d made their supposedly pretend marriage into a real one. In crisis situations, however, she had proven herself unflappable: She hadn’t even flinched when those thugs had cornered her back when they first met. She carried herself brilliantly in battle here and when they intervened to help El’Athras – both times, she was the key to victory and his own survival. Even when searching the dead for survivors, she remained in control and in command. Euleilla qualified, there.

  He would need a wife who brought some talent or treasure into his kingdom. Well, there was no doubt Euleilla was both a talent and a treasure, given her magical ability. That, however, was a talent and a treasure he would likely have, at this point, whether she was married to him or not. He felt confident enough in their friendship that she would stay with him, regardless.

  As bad as it sounded, he had to make sure his wife wasn’t ugly. She would have to be a symbol that his people could look up to, someone they would remember positively, and physical attractiveness went a long way towards that. Maelgyn had not fears on that front, however. Despite the hair, which even he sometimes wanted to shove out of her eyes, she was very striking. Rykeifer had commented on her beauty, as well, so he wasn’t alone in thinking that.

  He wanted someone he could talk with... and, despite her minimalist form of speech at times, she was actually quite conversational. Initially it was a trifle difficult to relate to her, but now he could figure out her moods enough to know when she wasn’t talking because she was hiding something and when she wasn’t talking because she found it amusing to keep him in the dark. And, he noticed, the later reason was much more common... which showed that she had another thing he wanted in a wife – a sense of humor.

  So, was there really anything he needed in a wife that she didn’t provide?

  Well... perhaps he needed to think about this some more. He’d barely known her a few weeks, which was much too fast to make a decision of this magnitude. Regardless, they needed to talk. By the time he let her know everything she was going to be in for and let her experience just a touch of what being the wife of a Sword Prince truly was like, perhaps he’d feel a little more confident that keeping her as his bride was the right decision. Or perhaps she’d realize the idea was simply too much for her, which would take the choice out of his hands. At least then he wouldn’t be so confused about it all.

  “You okay?” Euleilla asked, startling him out of his thoughts.

  “Yeah,” he answered. “Why?”

  “You’re quiet,” she answered. “Usually, you talk. Or sometimes you hum, or whistle, or... well, usually you make noise when we travel.”

  “Ah,” Maelgyn said. He was a bit surprise at that; he never knew that he hummed or whistled. He’d have to consciously avoid that in the future – it wasn’t always safe to hum as you walked, especially in wartime. “Well, I was just thinking.”

  “What about?”

  He grinned, but made sure to keep his voice as casual and natural as possible when he said, “You.”

  “‘kay,” she answered, even more naturally and casually. Her persistent smile twitched in amusement, but she said nothing more.

  They continued on in silence for a little bit more, before the silence finally got to Maelgyn. “Aren’t you curious?”

  “Maybe,” she said. “But I’d rather you thought about me than explained what you were thinking about me.”

  Mael
gyn laughed. “Right. Well, I’ll probably think of you some more, later, but right now I’d like to talk for a bit.”

  “Sure.”

  He did want to talk, but at the moment he did not want to talk about their marriage. This wasn’t the right setting, nor the right time, to have that talk yet. But he always had other questions for her, so there would always be something to talk about. Come to think of it, that was probably a good reason for staying married to her, too.

  “Actually, I was wondering just how you sense the latent magic in people. I know it’s something you learned to do because of your eyes, but I was wondering if it was something you could teach, as well?”

  “Possibly,” she mused. “Gramps use to try playing hide and seek with me. He let me use any method I wanted, so I stuck a few grains of magic powder on him when he wasn’t looking. Sometimes, when I was following those grains of magic powder, I found myself losing track of it. I repeated the experiment several times, thinking he was using a lodestone or something to help himself hide, but I eventually realized it wasn’t a lodestone obscuring my magic; it was his own body. The human body, itself, generates the same waves of energy as a lodestone does. It’s not very clearly focused, and very hard to ‘see’ unless you realize what you’re looking for, but it’s there. Tell me, could you find a lodestone if you weren’t looking for it?”

  “If I wasn’t looking for it?” he said, surprised. “I... well, no. Not unless it’s a very large one.”

  Euleilla nodded. “Think of someone untrained in magic as a very tiny lodestone, one which you’d have difficulty finding unless you already knew it was there. You wouldn’t ‘see’ the lodestone if you weren’t looking for it. Likewise, you must ‘look’ for magic in people. If you ‘look’ at a person with this method, and find they are just so unfocused and dispersed that you can’t even see the pattern of magic inside them, they are not a mage. If you can see the pattern... well, then you’ve found a mage. They become a beacon of intense magic, and from that intensity you start to get a sense of how strong a person is.”

  “Okay,” Maelgyn said slowly, mulling that over.

  “And then you need to learn to keep looking for magic of that sort all of the time. Something which may be hard to do, if you aren’t a person who has to rely on magic to see,” she considered. “But you don’t need to do that to sense latent magic. Once you get to the point you can sense people not trained in magic, you can apply the same trick to any trained mage and you’ll be able to figure out how much latent magic they have yet to access. Like I said, I believe you’ve got the potential to be much more powerful than you are now. You have so much more magic you have yet to access.”

  Maelgyn nodded. “Maybe you could help me practice ‘seeing’ magic?”

  “I don’t think I could help you with that,” Euleilla answered. “You need to work with someone not trained in magic, first, for this to work. I can help you learn how to use your magic better, though.”

  “And I could help you, as well, I suspect,” Maelgyn noted. “Somehow, I think you haven’t had much practice with counter-magic, since you need a partner mage for that.”

  “No, I don’t think I’ve had much practice with counter-magic,” Euleilla admitted uncertainly. “Or rather, I haven’t studied any counter-magic. I’ve never even been aware of such a thing, unless you’re referring to lodestones and dragonhide.”

  “No,” Maelgyn answered. He pulled up the memory of a lecture given by Thoniel, his old magic tutor, and recited it as closely as he could. “Counter-magic can only be done with another mage. It works under the same principle as all Human magic – by borrowing on the behaviors of lodestone. Hold two lodestones together one way, and they attract each other. Hold them another way, and they try to push each other away. It’s one of the major defensive concepts in magical combat.”

  “Hmm,” she said. Suddenly, he felt a magical force pushing on him in what was recognizably counter-magic. It wasn’t nearly as strong as her usual magical touch, but he matched it back instead of trying to break through.

  The “battle” continued for hours as they hiked on. It started becoming an interesting game of magic. In Euleilla’s case, she was trying to write her name on his skin using a magical combat training technique – forcing a person’s blood to come up and mark their skin in a sort of bruise. Maelgyn was trying something else. He was trying to take control of the muscles in her arm and force her to touch her own nose.

  They could have easily burst through each other’s defenses if they had applied their full power: Euleilla was still an amateur at counter-magic, and Maelgyn’s defensive capabilities were not as strong as Euleilla’s regular magic. That wasn’t the purpose behind the exercise, however. They were simply practicing their defenses, which would improve all of their magical abilities in the end.

  When Euleilla finished writing her name on the back of his hand before Maelgyn could make her touch her nose, the game changed. She started magically tickling him, and he tickled her back – sometimes in places he wouldn’t dare touch with his real fingers. By the time they set up camp for the evening, both were laughing so hard they were losing their breath.

  Euleilla was gasping in air, the battle over, while Maelgyn built the fire pit for their dinner. Sighing contentedly, she said, “Oh, my, that was fun. We’re going to have to do that again.”

  Maelgyn smiled at her. Her face was flushed with excitement and humor, her chest heaving with the lack of air, and her hair a tangled mess. She was beautiful, but he had known that for a while. Now, however, she was more than beautiful to him. She was vibrant. No, that wasn’t the right word – radiant, that was better.

  He gave up trying to find the right word and just nodded. “I agree. Anytime you want.”

  Maybe, just maybe, marrying her was the best mistake he’d ever made.

  Chapter 10

  It took just one more day before they crossed into the mountain pass. Other than the continuation of their practice duel from the previous day, it passed fairly uneventfully. The pace of that action, however, was fast and furious, and this time didn’t dissolve into a tickle battle. Maelgyn, to his own surprise, won the day, making her touch her nose just like he’d intended. Then, just to make up for it, he allowed her to sign her name on the opposite hand. He could have removed the first mark, but he hadn’t, and now was rather proud of his matching “tattoos.” At the conclusion of their day’s frivolity, they made camp at the mouth of the mountain pass, and in the morning crossed over into Mar’Tok Dwarf territory.

  It was easy traveling, but extensive. The Dwarven roads were superior in durability and maintenance to the roads in most Human countries (and even, theoretically, most Elven countries, though the last purely Elven country dissolved before the time of Svieda’s founding), but that didn’t make the trip any shorter. They had to walk down many miles of winding roads, and it was going to be a three day journey to cross the entire mountain range. There weren’t very many good places to camp along the pass, however, so they had no choice but to make it to a Dwarven village that night.

  They weren’t playing their magic games as they walked. A fall in this area could be fatal, so they couldn’t afford the distraction. The road was wide, and fairly safe if you could see the cliff-side edge, but there was nothing magically reactive for Euleilla to ‘see’ on that side, so Maelgyn was being especially careful to make sure she was well away from that ledge. In fact, he was not willing to trust the magical lifeline Euleilla had wrapped around him as a proper guide, so instead was leading her by the hand. Whether she noticed that a tiny part of his own magic was concentrated in making sure that grip wouldn’t break, he didn’t know, but he wasn’t going to take any chances with her life.

  For such a well-built and heavily maintained road, there hadn’t been much traffic. According to the papers he’d read, even in its busiest time this road only had the occasional merchant train. There were many other, much busier roads in the mountains that the Dwarves maintained,
but this one seemed unusually well maintained for so little traffic. There was only one reason Maelgyn could think of to have these roads this well kept, and that reason didn’t please him at all. There were only two places this road exited – into Largo Province, and into Sopan Province. And there was only one excuse for their level of upkeep – the expectation of an army using them. Of a large army using them. Of a large army using them against Svieda.

  It didn’t make any sense for the Dwarves to launch a war against Svieda. Mar’Tok and Svieda had one of the most cordial relationships in Dwarven-Human history. Svieda had never launched a single war against any Dwarven holding and had always traded with them in good faith. And yet, there was this road which was built for no apparent reason other than to make war on Svieda.

  Not exactly the most comforting of thoughts for a Sword Prince to have as he was crossing through Mar’Tok territory. He did have the gratitude of one of the Mar’Tok Merchant Princes, but how far that gratitude would stretch he wasn’t sure. Especially after that little warning El’Athras had given him about not letting anyone else know who he was – if that wasn’t a sign that members of the Svieda Royalty might not be welcome in Mar’Tok, he didn’t know what was. However, as long as his cover story held it would remain a fairly safe route. And a cover story which was true was always a good one – even if that story was only half-true.

  About an hour away from the village, Euleilla frowned. “Maelgyn, are we near the village?”

  “We’ve still a ways to go,” Maelgyn said. “We should reach it before night falls, though.”

  Euleilla shook her head as if to clear it. “How odd. I’m sensing a great number of Dwarves... only they aren’t on the path ahead. They’re... next to me.”

  Maelgyn frowned and looked around before he realizing what it was that she was feeling. “Caves. ‘Mar,’ in Dwarvish, is ‘Cave Kingdom.’ The people of Mar’Tok originated in the caves, and in fact this is possibly the oldest Dwarven settlement in the world. The caves go on for miles underground – we must be near a pocket of them.”