by Jasmine Walt
Blaise frowned. “Only by the strictest letter of the law. It’s an archaic custom that’s an unfortunate leftover from the feudal times. The Sorcery Revolution was supposed to eradicate it, but it failed in that, as it did in so many other things. Despite the Enlightenment, we still live in the Age of Darkness in some ways. This aspect of our society is something that I would very much like to change.”
Gala nodded again. She’d gathered that much from the fact that he was so focused on helping the common people. “I understand,” she said. “So when can I go there, to your village?”
“How about tomorrow?” Blaise suggested, still looking less than pleased with the idea.
“Tomorrow would be great.” Gala gave him a big smile. And then, unable to contain her excitement, she did something she’d only read about.
She came up to him, wrapped her arms around his neck, and pulled his head down to her for a kiss.
11
Augusta
Flying high above the road on her chaise, Augusta observed the shocked looks on peasants’ faces as fifty soldiers suddenly materialized out of thin air in front of them. Few laypeople even knew that teleporting spells existed, much less had ever seen the effects of one.
The peasants in the front abruptly stopped, and the people following them stumbled into them, causing a few to tumble to the ground. The fallen immediately got up, holding out their clubs and pitchforks protectively, but it was too late. They’d shown themselves for the clumsy weaklings that they were.
Knowing what was coming, Augusta smiled. They would get a bigger shock in a moment.
“Who is in charge here?” Barson’s voice boomed at them, hurting Augusta’s enhanced hearing for a moment. She’d used magic to increase the volume of her lover’s voice, and she could see that the spell had had its intended effect. Some of the rebels now looked simply terrified.
At that moment, a giant of a man wearing a smith’s apron walked out of the crowd. In his hand, he was holding a large, heavy-looking sword. A blacksmith, Augusta guessed. His presence explained some of the weapons the rebels were carrying.
“Nobody is in charge,” the giant roared back, trying to match Barson’s deep tones. “We’re all equals here.”
Barson raised his eyebrows. “Well, then, you can tell all your ‘equals’ that we have an army waiting just up this hill.” His voice was at a normal volume now; Augusta’s spell only worked for a short period of time.
The peasant openly sneered. “And we have an army about to march up this hill—”
“More like a bunch of hungry peasants,” Barson interrupted dismissively.
The man’s lip curled in a snarl. “What do you want?”
“It’s more about what I don’t want,” the Captain of the Guard said coolly. “I don’t want unnecessary slaughter.”
The blacksmith laughed, throwing his head back. “We don’t mind killing all of you, and it’s quite necessary.”
Barson didn’t respond, just lifted his eyebrows and continued looking at the man.
“You’re afraid of us,” the peasant sneered again. “What, you think a little sorcery and threats are enough to make us turn back?”
Augusta’s lover gave him an even look. “I would rather not make martyrs out of you. I understand that the drought is making life difficult for everyone, but you are marching on Turingrad. Even if we didn’t kill you—and we will, if you force us—a single sorcerer there could destroy you in a moment.”
The man scowled. “We’ll see about that.”
“No,” Barson said, “we won’t. I will give you a chance to see how futile your rebellion is. Your ten best fighters against one of us—any one of us.”
“Oh, right.” The man snorted. “And if we win?”
“You won’t,” Barson said, his confidence so absolute that for the first time, Augusta could see a glimmer of doubt on the blacksmith’s face.
A moment later, however, the peasant recovered his composure. “This is pointless,” he said, making a move to turn back.
“You’re scared of us!” A taunting voice—surprisingly high-pitched and youthful—seemed to come out of nowhere, causing the peasant to stop in his tracks. Turning, the huge commoner stared at the young soldier who was pushing his way to the front.
It was Kiam, the boy Augusta had healed during practice.
Before the peasant could respond, Kiam yelled out, “Ten to one is not enough for you cowards—you’re still scared! Why don’t you do fifteen to one? Or how about twenty? Think you’d be less scared then?”
The blacksmith visibly swelled with rage, his bearded face turning a dark red color. “Shut your mouth, pup!” he bellowed and, pulling out his sword, charged at Kiam.
Augusta gripped the side of her chaise, tense with anxiety, as the slim youth unsheathed his own sword, preparing to meet the peasant rushing at him like a maddened bull.
The blacksmith lunged at Kiam, and Kiam gracefully dodged to the side, his movements smooth and practiced. Howling, the commoner charged again, and Kiam raised his sword. Before Augusta could even understand what happened, the peasant froze, a red line appearing on his neck. Then he collapsed, his huge bulk hitting the ground with tremendous force. His head, separated from the body, rolled on the ground, coming to a stop a few feet away.
Kiam’s sharp sword had sliced through the man’s thick neck as easily as a knife moving through butter.
For a moment, there was only stunned silence. Then Barson laughed. “I said ten, the boy said fifteen, but you sent only a single man,” he yelled at the shocked peasants.
In response, five other men pushed through the peasant crowd. While none of them were as big as the dead peasant, they all appeared larger and stronger than Kiam. They were also much more cautious than the blacksmith had been, approaching the boy silently, a look of grim determination on their hard faces.
When they reached him, the first man made a lunge for the boy, which Kiam dodged, like before. This time, however, he proceeded to slice at the man’s midsection. Another two peasants attacked at the same time, but Kiam, like a dancer, moved his body away from the blows, and swung his sword. Three more men were on the ground in moments. The last man standing hesitated for a moment, but it was too late for him, too. Without giving the man time to make up his mind, the young soldier jumped and sliced.
The last attacker was no more.
Augusta could hear murmuring in the crowd. This was the critical moment, what Barson had been counting on with this demonstration. One fairly small boy against several large men—there could be no clearer statement of the soldiers’ fighting abilities. If the peasants had any common sense, they would turn back now.
At least, that’s what Barson had been hoping. Augusta had been uncertain about this part of the plan—and she could now see that she’d been right to doubt. The peasants had come too far to be deterred so easily, and instead of retreating, they began to advance, pulling out their weapons. As they got closer to the soldiers, they spread out and started flanking Barson’s men.
This was the point at which Augusta needed to teleport the soldiers back. Her hands shaking, she reached for the pre-written spell, and the card slipped from her fingers, falling off the chaise. She gasped, frantically trying to catch it, but it was futile. As the card flew to the ground, Augusta was overcome by a panic unlike anything she had ever experienced.
If her spell failed, she would be responsible for the deaths of Barson and his men.
12
Blaise
Shocked, Blaise took a step back, staring at Gala. Did she realize what she was doing, kissing him like that?
Despite her startling beauty, he had been trying not to think of her this way. She had just come to this world, and in his eyes, she was as innocent as a child. Her actions, however, belied that idea.
This was getting complicated. Very complicated, very quickly.
Swallowing, Blaise thought about what to say. He could still feel her soft lips pressed against his own, her slim ar
ms embracing him, holding him close. He hadn’t realized that he would react to her so strongly, that it would take all his strength to step away from that kiss.
She took a step toward him. “Um, Blaise?”
“Gala, do you understand what a kiss means?” he asked carefully, trying to control his instinctive reaction to her nearness.
“Of course.” Her blue eyes were large and guileless, looking up at him.
“And what does it mean to you?” Was she just experimenting with him, trying to ‘learn’ about this aspect of life as she tried to learn about everything else?
“The same thing that it means to everyone, I imagine,” she said. “I read about it. There are a lot of stories about men and women kissing if they find each other attractive. And you find me attractive too, right?” There was a questioning look on her delicate face.
Blaise knew he had to tread carefully. Despite his aptitude for sorcery, he was far from an expert when it came to understanding women. The charming creatures had always mystified him, and here was one who was not even human. He might’ve created her, but her mind was as mysterious to him as the depths of the ocean.
“Gala,” he said softly, “I already told you that I find you irresistible—”
She gave him a look that resembled a pout. “But you just resisted me.”
“I had to,” Blaise said patiently. “You’re so new to this world. I’m the first man—the first human—you’ve ever met in person. How can you possibly know how you feel about me?”
“Well, aren’t feelings exactly that? Feelings?” She frowned. “Are you saying that because I haven’t seen the world, my feelings are somehow less real?”
“No, of course not.” Blaise felt like he was digging himself a deeper hole. “I’m not saying that what you’re feeling right now isn’t real. It’s just that it might change in the very near future, as you go out there and see more of the world . . . meet more men.” As he added that last tidbit, he could feel a hot flare of jealousy at the idea, and he squashed it with effort, determined to be noble about this.
Gala’s eyes narrowed. “All right. If that’s your concern, that’s fine. I’ll go out there tomorrow, and I’ll meet other men. And then I’m going to come back and kiss you as much as I want.”
Blaise’s pulse leapt. “Why don’t I take you to the village right now then?” he said, only half-jokingly.
Her eyes lit up, and she practically jumped with eagerness. “Yes, let’s go!”
13
Augusta
Below, Augusta could see the peasants launching their attack.
Barson and his soldiers were expecting to be teleported, but when it didn’t happen, they began fighting with ferocious determination. Soon they were surrounded by corpses. Augusta’s lover seemed particularly inhuman in his battle frenzy. Realizing his strategic value, the rebels came at him, one after another, and he dispatched them all with the brutal swings of his sword.
Seeing that the guards were holding their own, Augusta tried to concentrate. She couldn’t fly down to retrieve her spell card—not with a bloody battle raging below—so she had to write a new one.
Getting her thoughts together, she took out a blank card and the remaining parts of the spell. All she had to do now was re-create from memory the complicated bit of sorcery code she’d written earlier. Luckily, Augusta’s memory was excellent, and it took her only a few minutes to recall what she’d done before.
When the spell was finished, she loaded the cards into the Stone and peered below, holding her breath.
A minute later, Barson and his soldiers disappeared from the battleground, leaving behind dozens of dead bodies and baffled rebels.
“I am so sorry,” she said when she rendezvoused with Barson and his men back on the hill.
Luckily, no one was hurt; if anything, the fighting seemed to have lifted everyone’s spirits. The soldiers were laughing and slapping each other on the back, like they had just come back from a tournament instead of a bloody battle.
“We held our ground,” Barson told her triumphantly, snatching her up in his strong arms and twirling her around.
Laughing and gasping, Augusta made him put her down. “You’re lucky I was able to replace that card so quickly,” she told him. “If I’d lost some other card, it would’ve taken me more effort to replace it, and you’d have been fighting longer.”
“Perhaps there is something you can do to make up for that blunder,” Barson suggested, looking down at her with a darkly excited smile.
“What?” Augusta asked warily.
“The rebels will be here soon,” he said, his eyes gleaming. “Do you think you could thin their numbers a little?”
Augusta swallowed. “You want me to do a direct spell against them?”
“Is that against the Council rules?”
It wasn’t, exactly, but it was highly frowned upon. In general, the Council preferred to limit displays of magic around the commoners. It was considered poor taste for sorcerers to show their abilities so openly—and it could be potentially dangerous, if it incentivized the peasants to try to learn magic on their own. Offensive spells were particularly discouraged; using sorcery against someone with no aptitude for magic was the equivalent of butchering a chicken with a sword.
“Well, it’s not strictly speaking against the law,” Augusta said slowly, “but it shouldn’t be obvious that I’m doing this.”
Barson appeared to consider the problem for a moment. “What if it looked like natural causes?” he suggested.
“That might work.” Augusta thought about a few spells she could quickly pull together. She hadn’t expected to do anything like this, but she did have the right components for these spells. She’d brought them for different purposes, but they would help her now too.
Digging in her bag, she pulled out a few cards and rapidly wrote some new lines of code. When she was finished, she told Barson to have his men sit or lie on the ground for a few minutes. “It might get a bit . . . shaky here,” she explained.
The peasants were still a distance away when she began feeding the cards into her Interpreter Stone.
For a moment, all was quiet. Augusta held her breath, waiting to see if her spell worked. She’d combined a simple force attack of the kind that might have blown up a house with a clever teleporting idea. Instead of hitting the peasants directly, the spell would be teleported into the ground under the feet of their attacking army. There, beneath the ground, the force would break and shatter rocks, creating the chain reaction she needed—or so Augusta hoped.
For a few nerve-wracking seconds, it seemed like nothing was happening. And then she heard it: a deep, sonorous boom, followed by a powerful vibration under her feet. The earth shook so violently that Augusta had to sit or be knocked to the ground herself. In the distance, she could hear the screams of the peasants as the ground split open under their feet, a deep gash appearing right in the middle of their army. Dozens of men tumbled into the opening, falling to their deaths with frightened yells.
Step one of the plan was complete.
Augusta loaded her next spell. It was one of the deadliest spells she knew—a spell that sought pulsating tissue and applied a powerful electric current to it. It was meant to stop a heart—or multiple hearts, given the width of the radius Augusta had coded.
The spell blasted out, and Augusta could see the peasants who were still on their feet falling, clutching their chests. With her enhanced vision, she could see the looks of shock and pain on their faces, and she swallowed hard, trying to keep down the bile in her stomach. She had never done this before, had never killed so many using sorcery, and she couldn’t help her instinctive reaction.
By the time the spell had run its course, the road and the grassy fields nearby were littered with bodies. Less than half of the original peasant army was left alive.
Still feeling sick, Augusta stared at the results of her work. Now they would run, she thought, desperately wanting this battle to be over.
>
But to her shock, instead of turning back, the survivors rushed toward the hill, clutching their remaining weapons. They were fearless—or, more likely, desperate, she realized. These men had known from the beginning that their mission was dangerous, but they’d chosen to proceed anyway. She couldn’t help but admire that kind of determination, even though it scared her to death. She imagined the rebels behind the Sorcery Revolution—the ones who had overthrown the old nobility so brutally—had been just as determined in their own way.
All around her, Barson’s soldiers prepared to meet the onslaught, assuming their places and drawing their arrows.
As the peasants got closer to the hill, a hail of arrows rained down, piercing their unshielded bodies. The soldiers hit their targets with the same terrifying precision that Augusta had seen during practice. Every peasant who got within their arrows’ range was dead within seconds. Yet the rebels persisted, continuing on, pushing past their fallen comrades. Lacking any kind of structure or organization, they simply kept going, their faces twisted with bitter rage and their eyes shining with hatred. The futility of all the deaths was overwhelming for Augusta. By the time Barson’s men ran out of arrows, less than a third of the original aggressors remained.
Tossing aside their useless bows, the guards, as one, unsheathed their swords. And then they waited, their expressions hard and impassive.
When the first wave of attackers reached the hill, they were dispatched within seconds, the soldiers’ sorcery-enhanced weapons sharper and deadlier than anything the peasants had ever seen before. Standing off to the side, Augusta watched as waves of attackers came and fell all around the hill.
Her lover was death incarnate, as unstoppable as a force of nature. Half the time, he would singlehandedly tackle the waves of rebels, easily taking on twenty or thirty men. The other soldiers were almost as brutal, and Augusta could see the peasants breaking up into smaller and smaller groups, their ranks diminishing with every minute that passed.