Deceptions (Ascendant Book 3)

by Craig Alanson

  There was nothing he could do but try, to fit arrow to bowstring and do what he had done since he was a little boy, shooting at targets on his family’s farm with a toy bow his mother had made for him. Koren sighted on one orc who wielded an evil-looking axe and was battering the sword of a tall Royal Army soldier. He waited for the indescribable inner feeling that now was the exact perfect time to release the arrow, his stomach churning that the feeling would never come to him.

  The arrow flew before he realized what had happened. Rather than reaching back for another arrow while the first was in flight, he slumped, his knees weak with relief. The spirits had not abandoned him. Straightening as he saw the first arrow bury itself in the eye socket of the orc he had targeted, he pulled another arrow out of the quiver and fitted it to the bowstring, trying to think of what he had done to bend the spirits to his will.

  No.

  Thinking is what he needed not to do. He needed to do as he had always done, before he knew his incredible ability with a bow came from magic. He needed to let it happen, trust in himself and the spirits. The third arrow was ready and aimed while the second was still in flight, and Koren had the feeling he was an observer outside his own body. Knowing it came from magic made his shooting seem more remarkable, not less. He also found the confidence to do things he had not dared try before, such as shooting at a target before he could clearly see it. With his third arrow, he aimed at an orc who was behind a soldier from Koren’s point of view, and as the arrow flew Koren had a shock that he had shot the arrow at the soldier’s head! Koren opened his mouth to shout a warning when the orc’s axe swung downward and the soldier parried the axe with a sword, the motion driving the soldier almost to his knees. Just as the soldier slumped, the arrow flew in, the bottom feathers of the arrow brushing the top of the man’s helmet and burying itself in the forehead of the orc, who was flung backward, struck instantly dead.

  Six arrow flew and six orcs died before the enemy saw their danger. The moment when the surviving orcs turned to look up the hill toward Koren, Bjorn crashed into an orc, knocking aside the creature’s axe and stabbing it in the belly with a dagger. Kicking the orc away, Bjorn backed up to join the circle of soldiers, whose leader screamed defiance and ordered a charge! The circle broke, soldiers advancing toward the now-hesitant orcs.

  Orcs were fierce fighters, but their cruelty in battle was matched only by their boastful cowardice. Seeing a seventh member of their group felled by yet another arrow shot from an unreachable distance, and with disciplined soldiers of Tarador now running toward rather than away from them, the orcs broke by unspoken agreement. As one, they turned and ran away, their short legs carrying them leaping over forest clutter with surprising speed.

  “Let them go!” The leader of the soldiers ordered. “Reform the line! Protect the wounded!”

  “Cap-” Koren froze, startled and dismayed to recognize the leader of the soldiers. “Captain Raddick, Sir,” Koren acknowledged the man with a salute he did not know was proper or not. Raddick thought him a deserter and danger, perhaps an enemy of Tarador, was a salute warranted?

  Raddick gave him an answer by returning the salute, though the gesture made the man freeze in open-mouthed astonishment. “Koren? Master Bladewell? What are- How are you here?”

  “What are you doing here?” Koren was just as surprised.

  “Was that you with the arrows?” Raddick looked around at dead orcs sprawled on the forest floor.

  “Oh, um, yes,” Koren agreed, embarrassed though he knew not why.

  Koren stood on the balls of his feet, prepared to run for his life, when Captain Raddick did the last thing Koren expected. The man went down on one knee. “Master Bladewell, we have been seeking you. Thank the spirits we found you alive! Lord Feany feared he would die before finding you in the wilderness, but you have found us. And,” Raddick stood and wiped his bloody sword on a cloth he pulled from his belt, “saved us also.”

  “Lord Feany?” Koren had almost turned around when Raddick said ‘Master Bladewell’, assuming the man was speaking to someone behind Koren before understanding that he was now ‘Master Bladewell’. “Shomas was with you?”

  “He came with us,” Raddick explained, striding over to one of the wounded men laying on the ground. “I hope he is still with us, he was gravely wounded when the orcs hunted us down and attacked. We carried him until we could run no more, and made our stand here.” He knelt by a large man who did not wear a Royal Army tunic, and Koren flung his bow aside in his haste to join the army captain.

  It was Shomas Feany! The usually jolly wizard’s face was the color of cold ashes, and blood soaked his plain brown shirt and vest, with blood also seeping from a deep gash to his upper left arm. Blood had saturated the crude bandage and was dripping onto the ground. “Shomas!” Koren cried as he crashed to his knees, taking the wizard’s uninjured right hand in both of his own. His heart soared when the wizard squeezed back, though the pressure was weak.

  “Koren?” Shomas stirred weakly, one eye fluttering open. “Is that you, boy? Good lad, always a good lad.”

  “It’s me, Lord Feany,” Koren assured the man, squeezing his hand hard as if that could cause life to flow into the wounded wizard.

  The wizard’s one open eye gazed up, unfocused, to the tree canopy above. “Are we back in Linden already? So pretty here, so peaceful.”

  “Yes,” Koren replied with tears in his eyes, flowing freely down his cheeks to drip onto the wounded man’s chest. “We’re in the royal gardens, don’t you see? Would you like me to fetch a honeycake from the kitchens? You did love those honeycakes.”

  “Honey. Cake.” Shomas’ lips twisted in a happy smile and his eyelid closed.

  “Those honeycakes are good. I’ll fetch them. Would you like tea? Shomas?” In a panic because the wizard was no longer squeezing his hand, Koren asked “Shomas? No!”

  Raddick gripped Koren’s shoulder. “He’s gone, Master Bladewell. It was too late, no one could do anything for him.”

  “He can’t be gone!” Koren protested even as he knew the awful truth.

  “Koren,” Bjorn spoke. “Let him go, give him peace now.”

  “Aye,” Raddick agreed. “He died happily, for he knew you are safe, Master Bladewell. I wish to be so happy, when the time comes for me.”

  In horrified disbelief, Koren rose to his feet, stumbling backward. Staring at the wizard who had passed, he was motionless. Then, remembering where he was and his own peril, he stood three strides backward, never taking his eyes off Raddick, even when he bent to retrieve his bow. “Shomas was here looking for me? You were all looking for me?”

  “Yes,” Raddick replied.

  “You have orders to kill me?” Koren asked with a meaningful look to Bjorn. If Koren needed to run, he hoped the other man could assist even briefly, by distracting the Royal Army soldiers.

  “Kill? Koren- Master Bladewell,” Raddick bowed from the waist. “My orders are to rescue you, even if it costs my life and those of all my men. I was charged with this duty by Lord Salva and Regent Ariana themselves.”

  “You are not here to kill me?” Koren asked warily.

  “No,” Raddick insisted with a shake of his head. “I do not know how you heard that, but the army does have orders to kill you, only if you have been captured by the enemy and there is no other way to prevent the enemy from gaining access to your power.”

  “What? Access to my- what?” Koren whispered back.

  “Lord Salva explained it to me,” Raddick spoke slowly and surely, being careful to remember what the master wizard had told him. He didn’t like speaking about it in the open, but by now, all of his soldiers knew what was supposed to be a secret. “Just as one wizard can lend power to another, a master wizard can take power from another, unwillingly, and use that power for his purposes. Koren, if the enemy, the demon, were to capture you, it could pull power from you, and destroy Tarador. Destroy the world. Lord Salva told me the power inside you is immense, unfathomable
even by himself. Someday you will have control of your power and then you can protect yourself. You could even destroy the enemy yourself,” Raddick’s wide-open eyes reflect his incredulity at that statement. “Until you have mastery of the power within you, you are vulnerable, a tool to be used by the enemy. My mission here is to bring you home, bring you to safety, so you can be trained. Lord Bladewell, the court wizard and the Regent impressed this upon me most urgently: without you at our side, Tarador has no true hope for victory in this war. If you were in the grasp of the enemy, there is no hope for this world. The demon will use your power to break the barrier between this world and the underworld, releasing a demon host to consume us all, forever.”

  “I-” Koren did not know what to say.

  “That is why Lord Salva could not tell you the truth,” Raddick continued. “He feared that if you knew you are a wizard, you would be tempted to use your power and harm yourself, or at least reveal your power to the enemy.”

  “Paedris lied to protect me?” Koren could not believe it.

  “Shomas intended to tell you the whole story, but, yes, the truth of it is the wizards lied to protect you. It’s a hard thing to hear, I know, but there it is. You must come with me, now. Those orcs will be back, with others. They have already killed most of my men, and one wizard.”

  “We cannot leave Lord Feany here,” Bjorn argued before Koren had to. “He is a master wizard, from a foreign land, come to aid Tarador. To leave his body for orcs to toy with, and carrion-eaters to consume, is beneath our honor as a nation.”

  Raddick scuffed the ground with a boot heel. “The soil here is rocky and we have no shovels, no picks to dig with. We have no time,” the army captain declared. “Those orcs will be back with more, they-” he halted as they all heard a harsh, guttural cry echoing through the forest. “We may already be too late. Master Bladewell, Mr. Jihnsson, we had twice our numbers yesterday, half of my men are already laying unburied behind us. It pains me to leave them, as it pains me to leave these two, but we must. My orders are to find Koren and bring him safely back to Linden, at all costs. Those were Lord Salva’s exact words to me. If you,” he looked at Koren, “can summon wizard fire to cremate these men, then we will-”

  “Ha!” Koren laughed bitterly. “Captain Raddick, what you have seen of my wizard ability is all I can command. I am an excellent archer, that is all. I have no more ability to pull fire from the spirit world than I can fly to Linden.”

  “That is,” Raddick searched for a tactful word, “unfortunate.”

  “Could we make a fire?” Bjorn asked. He had been digging at the ground with his own boot and he was forced to agree with Raddick that digging graves there was impractical. So was carrying the bodies elsewhere; Raddick’s men were exhausted and Lord Feany was too heavy for one man to carry far. “An ordinary, unmagical funeral pyre? There is plenty of wood around here,” he kicked a log for emphasis. That log was damp with moss, but late in the season, the woods were dry even though it had rained the previous night.

  Raddick’s hand clasped and unclasped the hilt of his sword as he decided. The idea of leaving behind the bodies of men who had sacrifice their lives for Tarador did not sit well with him. Pausing to listen, he did not hear any more orc battle cries. “Very well. Gather wood, and-” He was interrupted by another blood-curdling, guttural sound as orcs called for their fellows to join the hunt. There was an answering cry, both too near for comfort. “No!” Raddick shouted in alarm. “Run now! Run for your lives!”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Paedris and Cecil staggered at the same time, falling to their knees in their cabin aboard the Lady Hildegard. “Shomas,” Paedris announced as he breathed deeply, fighting nausea that threatened to overwhelm him.

  Cecil nodded, putting his head between his knees and gulping air slowly and evenly. “Oh, Shomas. What a good friend you were. Paedris-”

  “I know,” the court wizard replied, anguish evident in his voice. “We will mourn our friend in due time. For now, we must go on.”

  “How can we?” Lord Mwazo pushed himself to his feet, and helped Paedris stand. “Shomas is dead, and he had not yet found Koren. If we cannot bring Koren back, this,” he waved a hand to encompass the desolate land around them, “is all for nothing.”

  “We will go on because there is nothing else we can do,” Paedris chided gently. “We are committed here, we can do nothing to help Raddick find Koren.”

  “We don’t know whether Captain Raddick is still alive!”

  “We do not, neither do we know he is dead. We do know Koren is not dead, for we certainly would have felt that. We must continue onward, and have faith, until we have reason to believe our hopes are for nothing.”

  Cecil nodded after a moment. “You know I hate it when you are right, Paedris.”

  “Would you prefer I was wrong?”

  “Not in this instance, no. Ah, Shomas being gone from us is a bitter pill.”

  “Come,” Paedris clapped his friend on the back. “When we return to Linden, we will have an epic feast in his honor, and stuff ourselves until we burst.”

  “Yes,” Cecil agreed, though he knew the two of them would never again see the city of Linden, nor ever again eat anything resembling a feast.

  “Master Bladewell-” Raddick began to say when Koren spun angrily toward him.

  “Stop calling me that! Call me Koren. I’m not a ‘Master’ anything.” Koren knew he was acting like a pouting child but he didn’t care, he was sick of how the army captain looked at him. He saw the man’s slightly awed and distinctly fearful expressions, and he knew none of it was justified. “I’m not a wizard! Look,” he held out a hand, palm open, and willed fire to appear in his hand, knowing it would not happen. It didn’t. There was no spinning ball of magical fire, not even a slightly warm pink fog.

  “I, don’t see anything,” Raddick’s face reddened with embarrassment, though whether he was embarrassed for himself or for the young wizard, was not clear.

  “Exactly!” Koren whispered. “There’s nothing to see, because I can’t do it! Ask me to shoot the feathers off a bird in the air,” he pointed to a sparrow flying overhead, “I can do it every time. There isn’t any other magical thing I can do. Call me whatever you call a master of archery, but don’t call me Master anything, because I’m not any kind of a wizard.”

  “You have incredible sight and hearing,” Bjorn noted unhelpfully.

  “I’m younger than you,” Koren retorted with a bit of spite, instantly regretting the hurtful comment. “I’m sorry, Bjorn, I didn’t mean that. What I meant is, I don’t know if my eyesight is because I’m a wizard, or because I’m young. When I was aboard the ship, the captain always selected younger sailors and lookouts.”

  “Ship? What ship?” Raddick asked, staring at Koren in wonder. What else did Raddick not know about the young wizard’s recent adventures?

  “It’s a long story, for another time,” Bjorn waved a hand dismissively. “Koren, you can create a fireball with magic, I’ve seen you do it,” he insisted.

  “When was this?” Raddick asked eagerly.

  “Once!” Koren shot back at Bjorn. “I did it once. I have no idea who I did it then, and I have only been able to make even the most feeble flame appear a few other times.”

  “Ah,” Raddick nodded happily. “You can do it, then. Lord Salva told me you will be a powerful wizard, and I believe him. Lord Feany intended to instruct you while we traveled-”

  “He’s dead!” Koren threw up his hands. “Shomas is dead, and now no one can help me, can they? The Wizards’ Council was supposed to have begun my training years ago, but they didn’t and now everyone expects me to save the world? The whole world, by myself? I can’t do it. Whoever you hope I am,” he jabbed a finger toward Raddick, “I’m not that hero. Leave me alone, damn you!” Fuming, Koren stomped off, then began running up the slope, leaping from stone to stone on the exposed ground.

  “Thomas,” Raddick ordered a soldier, “go after him! We ca
nnot let him-”

  “Leave him be,” Bjorn advised with a hand on the captain’s forearm. “He needs to be by himself a while and think. He won’t run off, where would he go?” Bjorn made a sweeping gesture toward the tall mountain peaks all around them. “He is a wizard, as you say, maybe even a powerful one,” Bjorn could not keep the skepticism from his voice. “Think on this; a few months ago, he was a servant who thought his parents abandoned him because he caused too much trouble. Now you tell him he will be responsible for destroying Acedor, and saving the world? He’s just a boy, Captain Raddick,” Bjorn pointed up the hill, where Koren was already slowing, no longer racing from rock to rock. “Give him time to take it all in.”

  “We don’t have time,” Raddick frowned, but gestured for Thomas to remain where he was. “He doesn’t have time. I am sorry if he finds the truth difficult to understand, but I can’t change the truth. If he had not run away from the castle, he wouldn’t be having-”

  “From what I have heard, fools in the Royal Army caused Koren to run away, fearful of his life, because they falsely called him a deserter” Bjorn stepped closer to he and Raddick were almost nose to nose. Bjorn was not in the army, nor any longer part of the King’s Guard. Raddick had no authority over him, and Bjorn was angry enough not to care what Raddick thought. “When I met Koren, he was seeking a dwarf wizard to remove a spell Lord Salva had cast upon him unwillingly. Shortly after, the lad learned his parents had not abandoned him, they were killed by a bandit. I helped him track down and kill that bandit.” Bjorn took a step backward, holding up his hands in a peaceful gesture. “I costs you nothing to give the boy time to think, we will be traveling these mountains many days, I think, before we can turn south toward Tarador. It will gain us much if, when he finally reaches a wizard who can help him, he has accepted the part he is fated to play in this war.”