At the bottom of the harness was a sheath for the dagger. They were a pair, I guessed. When the dagger was placed in it, and my shirt was back on, the weapon was hidden under my clothes. It was awkward at first, pressing against my back, but I tried to ignore it as I picked up my sack of supplies and carried it over my shoulder. Candle jumped up on the other side of my head and we left the study together.
The light coming through the windows was fading as I walked down the stairs. I stopped briefly at the door to the boy’s room. By now he might have been agonizing over whether or not to use the candle flame for his familiar. I had to wonder if he might succeed at it where I had failed. I could already see the potential in him to be better than I was. I hoped Tower had seen the same in me.
The enchanted water was sparkling through its channel in the walls as I looked back up at my home. It had kept me safe for sixteen years. I wondered how many more years it had been there for my older counterparts.
I walked through the small hallway to the front door. When I reached to open it I felt the hilt of the dagger press against my skin. There was more than a decade’s worth of energy stored within it now. More gems than I could remember had been placed into that collection in the study. As the door opened and I stepped outside, it had not yet crossed my mind that for Tower it had not been enough to save him.
Chapter Twenty-Four
It was deep into the evening when I had walked far enough to no longer feel the magic of the tower. I was confident that I could find my way back by wandering through the woods but I still stopped when I was no longer aware of its presence. I reached out and found that I could seek out the tower’s magic if I tried hard enough. It was like squinting in the distance or stretching up to get something from a tall shelf.
I took Candle from my shoulder and put him in my pocket now that the sun had fully set. His fire made an easy target out of both of us and I had no idea what lurked amongst the trees. Wizard or not, I would be at a disadvantage in an ambush. At least the dragon was too big to sneak up on me. I wanted to laugh at that but I couldn’t.
My plan was to walk back to my village and meet any of the survivors. If there were none, I assumed that a year had been long enough for new people to settle in. Some of the poorer folk from nearby towns could take advantage of the empty homes and farms, even charred and ruined as they were.
From the villagers I would learn if the dragon had attacked elsewhere. My home may have been the first in a string of attacks, or part of a longer chain that I had been too young to hear about. The information in the beastiary seemed to imply that a dragon would stay and dominate a specific territory for a while. Perhaps a year wasn’t long enough for it to move on and it would be relatively close.
An hour passed before I reached the edge of the trees. I marveled at how far I ran when I was boy and then remembered how frightened I had been. I stepped out into the clearing and saw that I had veered too far south while walking from the tower. There was a stretch of fields and farmland between where I stood and the village. Another hour of walking at least.
It was a cloudless night but I still should not have been able to make out the village in the dark. I felt a lurch in my chest when I saw the fire in the distance, as if the buildings were still burning a year later. I calmed myself and reasoned that the new inhabitants had a purpose for the fire. Still, it was unsettling to see the pillars of smoke on the horizon. I had ran away from them as a boy and now I marched in their direction.
The river was on the other side of the village. I decided to cut through the farmland to the road that ran from the south. There was a point where it ran closely to the river and I could stop there before following the road. I didn’t want it to look like I was sneaking my way to the walls through the fields.
I thought of what state my home would be in as I walked toward the road. I wondered if I could use my magic to help with rebuilding before moving on to the dragon. Most of the houses had been severely damaged in the fire. The tavern’s roof had been destroyed but some of the walls were still standing when I last saw it. I tried not to think of my old house and its exposed, burning frame.
The farms I walked through now should have been full of crops. The earth had healed and no longer showed signs of the dragon’s fire but that was all that had recovered. The homes I passed had collapsed and crumbled after being left to burn. This time last year I would have been chased out by the farmers, angry that a boy might be trying to steal some of their food. Now the fields were abandoned and empty and wrong.
The people who had reclaimed the village were obviously not numerous enough to populate the surrounding farms. As I stepped onto the road I was a little closer to the village walls. In the dark, with the smoke rising above it, it looked like a dried out husk on the landscape. I hoped it did not look so dead on the inside.
“Careful now,” someone said and I whipped around on the road.
My eyes had been transfixed on the village walls. I had not checked the road or the river. The person was standing near a campfire between the two, a few meters from the road and closer to the water. There was a horse tied to the closest tree in the camp. It didn’t seem to care that I was nearby.
“Easy,” the person spoke again. It was a woman’s voice. The fire behind her was a small one and she had a hood over her head. I couldn’t see her face in the dark. Her clothes were dark, brown or black I couldn’t tell without a better light, and she had a hand at her waist. She was ready to grab the hilt of a sword there if she needed it. She hadn’t drawn it yet and I wasn’t going to give her a reason.
“I’m just walking by,” I said. “I wouldn’t have came so close if I had seen you here.”
“Which way?” she asked without taking her hand from her belt.
“Which way what?”
“Are you going? Which way are you going?” she repeated.
“North,” I said and pointed over my shoulder without turning my head.
“Are you here for the bounty?”
“There’s a bounty on the dragon?”
“Dragon?” there was a crack of amusement in her voice and I saw her shoulders relax. She took her hand from her side and I felt the tension drain away as she laughed. I felt like I had said something stupid but I still kept a loose connection to the harness under my shirt. I wasn’t fully relaxed just yet.
“No, not the dragon,” she said as she stepped back away from me. She must have decided I wasn’t going to attack her or that I wasn’t a threat even if I did. I didn’t know how to feel about that. “A dragon hasn’t been killed in a thousand years. The bounty is for the trolls up there,” she motioned her head in the direction I had pointed.
“Trolls,” I said. Stronger and more agile than their farren brethren and usually twice the size of a human. Intelligent enough to live and hunt in groups and use primitive tools. They could regenerate just like the farren but they could still see, albeit poorly. I strained to think of more I had read in the beastiary. Were they resistant to magic? I didn’t think so.
“Yes,” she said as she stepped toward the campfire. She pulled down her hood as she turned from me. Her hair stopped at her shoulders and was as dark as her clothes. In the firelight they looked to be made of a coarse leather, far too heavy to wear in the summer heat. She must have been wearing it for protection.
“This village,” she continued, speaking down to the fire, “was destroyed about a year ago. There were a few survivors. They began rebuilding but the trolls came in a few months ago. Not enough people were here to fend them off. They killed the survivors and have stayed here since. If you’re heading north you’ll have to go around. I’d cross the river too, just to be safe.”
“And the bounty?” I growled. My teeth were set firmly against each other. I had just found out about the survivors and how they had died in the same breath.
“Posted to clear the road for the traders that pass through here. You’re not here for it? I thought I was the first to see it.”
> “No, but I’d like to help. I had,” I hesitated for a moment. Giving too much information might lead to questions that I couldn’t answer without sounding crazy. “I had friends that lived here. I only recently heard about the dragon attack. Not the trolls, though.”
“And you came to fight the dragon?” she smiled at me as she said the words, a smile that made it plain that it wasn’t a serious question. “You can help if you can fight. Can you?”
I nodded and tried to think how much I should explain. She stepped toward me, her back to the fire, and looked me over. She circled me once and I stood there, tense as she did so. I wondered if she thought that I was odd or acted strange. My isolated life may have taught me many things, but talking with people wasn’t one of them.
“You have the arms of a swordsman but no sword. The dagger under your shirt won’t help you against a troll. You’re obviously not a farmer but not a soldier either. A miner or a smith, I’d guess. You can’t fight,” she spoke firmly, but not harshly. Still, I took it as an insult.
“Magic,” I muttered, and then continued louder. “I can use magic.”
“Magic!” she said and her eyes widened. “You’re far too young to be a wizard. Don’t lie.”
I looked closely at her in the dim firelight, suddenly wondering how old this woman was to label me as too young to do anything. There didn’t seem to be any signs of aging on her face or gray in her hair. I felt foolish as I tried to judge her appearance when she was the first person I had seen in sixteen years.
“I’m not a liar,” I said simply.
“And what is your name, young wizard?”
“Tower,” I said and was surprised that it wasn’t ‘Bryce’ that came out of my mouth.
“That’s a funny name,” she said and another smile spread over her face. “Oh, sorry, that was rude of me,” she added as the smile grew into a grin. I couldn’t tell if it meant she was very sorry or not sorry at all.
“And you?” I asked.
“Kate,” she replied, still grinning. “Show me some magic then. If you really are a wizard you can help.”
She took one step back from me and stared at me, certain that I was about to make a fool of myself and already amused by it. I had a moment of doubt as I stood there, on the edge of her campfire’s light. I had nothing to prove to this woman and I felt confident that I could handle the trolls alone if they were anything like their farren cousins.
Yet I found myself mentally flipping through my list of spells for something flashy, something to wipe the grin from her face. I remembered something Tower had shown me when I had been a boy, a display of power that seemed so impossible.
I held out my hand and focused a burst of energy there, drawing it from the harness around my torso. The flames appeared on my forearm and swirled down to collect above my palm. I saw Kate’s eyes narrow at my hand in the second before I unleashed the energy and then it was gone, lost behind the column of fire that spiked into the air between us.
“Enough! The trolls will see!” she hissed at me and I snapped my hand closed. Her mouth was a straight line as she looked at me now, as if she couldn’t believe what she was seeing. “What are you?”
“A wizard, like I said.”
“No, I’ve met other wizards,” she said and took another step back from me. “You can help, but you stay behind me. The bounty isn’t important. I’ll split it with you but the trolls are mine after we kill them. Deal?”
“Trolls are yours after?” I started to ask and then stopped. It wasn’t important. “Deal.”
Her eyes lingered on me for a moment as though she was looking at a puzzle that she couldn’t solve. I wondered if she was deciding whether or not to attack me. I kept myself tethered to the energy stored in the harness until she backed away again. The old wizard of my village had been a liked man even though he had been a recluse. Were wizards regarded differently in other parts of the world for her to react in such a way?
Kate walked around the campfire now. She added a knife to her belt to accompany her sword and then went next to her horse. There were saddle bags near the animal that I hadn’t noticed before. She carefully searched through them and I heard the clinking of glass as she shifted things around.
I moved next to the fire and tried to peer over her shoulder at what she was doing. There were more bottles than I thought could possibly fit in the bags she had. They were various sizes. The larger ones looked empty while the smaller ones were filled with all sorts of fluid. Some looked like blood but were too viscous. Others looked like water but were dark, rich colors.
“You’re an alchemist,” I said and remembered the equipment in the tower’s study that I had never touched.
“And you’re a wizard,” she repeated plainly without turning to me.
“Why are you here for trolls?”
She ignored me. She pulled out a bottle from the bag and stood up. The contents of it were as clear as water but with hundreds of black bubbles floating within it. They looked strange, too perfectly spherical to be natural. She held the bottle to the campfire and the bubbles shrunk to tiny specks in the light. I suddenly wished I had experimented with the apparatus in the study.
“Do you know a spell to see in the dark?” she asked.
“No,” I said. All those years in the underground and I had never thought to try that.
“Take some of this then,” she said as she opened the bottle and held it toward me.
The bubbles were inflating now that I was blocking the firelight. I scrunched up my nose into a grimace as I looked down at it. I wasn’t about to drink something the first stranger I met offered me. Plus it didn’t look like it would taste pleasant.
“No thanks. You can drink it,” I said.
She rolled her eyes.
“It won’t hurt you. And I never said to drink it,” she leaned her head in close to me.
I kept my eyes on her face, not wanting to blink in case she was going to strike me. Which was exactly what she wanted me to do. She abruptly raised the bottle and then stopped it, splashing some of the liquid up into my eyes. I shot my hands up and started wiping the liquid away. It didn’t burn or hurt but the shock of it was enough to send me into a panic.
“Oh stop it, open your eyes and let it settle.”
I gathered my focus and readied myself to make a crater out of the camp site if I was blind. I opened my eyes and immediately lost my grasp on the magic, awestruck at how the night had been transformed. Every star in the cloudless sky looked thrice as bright. The light of the moon was too much to look at directly, but the water of the river caught its gleam as it illuminated the countryside. I could see as though it was a sunny day, and it was the colors of the world that were washed out and darkened, rather than a light that gave everything a pale glow.
“See?” she said as she delicately tilted a drop of the fluid into each of her eyes. I watched as her pupils expanded and pushed her irises until I could no longer see the green of them. I assumed that my eyes must have been in a similar state, except I had wet cheeks and eyebrows to go along with them.
She put the bottle back into the bag and brought out another. This one contained a pale blue liquid, but I wasn’t sure if I could trust the color that my eyes were seeing. She removed the stopper from the bottle and drank half of the contents. I saw her shudder after she was finished but she made no sound that she may have been in pain.
She closed the bag and checked that her horse was securely fastened to the tree before she motioned that she was ready. She pulled her hood up over her head and once again looked the way she had when I first stumbled out onto the road. Her face was covered in shadows but her eyes still somehow caught the light like glass.
“Let’s kill us some trolls,” she said and we set off to the ruins of my village.
Chapter Twenty-Five
I couldn’t help but be amazed at how clearly I could see in the night as we walked along the road. Perhaps it was a way of keeping my mind off of what we were wa
lking toward. As a boy I would have been terrified of monsters and trolls. Now they were the least of my worries. Seeing the wrecked buildings and occupied corpse of my village was what I was dreaded.
Instead I focused on how Kate’s concoction worked. Was it a kind of magic? I wondered if it would have let me see in the underground and concluded that it likely would not. My eyes seemed to be more sensitive to the low light that was around us now rather than piercing through the darkness. There was no light to begin to exploit in the underground, save the areas of lava.
We stopped when we were a few minutes from the village wall. The wooden gate that used to block the road was a ravaged thing now, burned in the dragon’s fire and hung in tattered scraps on crumbling hinges. I could already see some of the broken houses through the gateway. The smoke was coming from deeper into the village.
“Tower,” Kate said firmly.
“What?” I turned to her.
“I asked if you know any magic to move quietly. Something to absorb your sound,” she was regarding me strangely again as she spoke.
“No,” I said softly.
“That’s fine. Try to follow me as closely as you can. I’ve been in here a few times already to see how many are here. I’ve seen five. At most there might be two more on top of that. Trolls can’t see very well in the dark so we already have an advantage. They aren’t the most cautious creatures either. We’re going to follow the wall around once and then start with whichever one is farthest out from the others.”
I nodded along as she whispered to me. I made to move toward the wall and she grabbed my shoulder.
“Don’t burn them too much,” she hissed at me. “If you have to use fire aim it at their heads.”
She started walking without answering and I followed behind her. We slipped in through the gate and pressed up against the wall. We stood there for a few minutes as Kate waited to see if she could hear any movement nearby. The crackling of the fire was audible now but I still couldn’t see it. The building in front of us had collapsed entirely into a dense wreck that blocked our sight.
The Wizard And The Dragon Page 22