Deep within the swirl of purple and red was a thread of white — something in that thread was what told the spell to keep trying to find Calen. If he could send a counterspell just at that part, with new information inside it, he might be able to . . .
He knocked the spells off course a few more times as he tried to reason out his approach, then fired his own tight beams of white and orange and purple not at the entire spells, but just at those threads of white. He watched the spells connect, and then smiled, gratified, as they turned as one and flew back at Cheriyon. The mage felt his own spells coming back at him and screamed. Too late, he tried to raise a shield against them, but his surprise and panic made him react too slowly. The spells slammed into him, both at once, and the rest of the mages all stopped what they were doing to watch as his skin began to slide right off his face, as if he were melting.
It looked horrible: painful and disgusting and just — just awful. Calen felt sick knowing how close he had come to being the one who suffered that fate. Sick, and angry. Why would anyone want to do that to another person? Krelig made them practice fighting each other, and he rewarded innovation and creativity, but he hadn’t directly ordered them to be monsters.
They all continued to stand there, staring. No one dared to interfere, of course. Krelig waited a few more seconds and then, mercifully (for all of them — the gargly shrieking was getting hard to take, and Calen was sure he was going to have nightmares about what was happening to the man’s face) sent a healing spell at Cheriyon. Calen watched carefully to see how the healing spell was put together. It wasn’t just yellow energy; there was orange to neutralize the original spell, and green, probably to help regenerate the skin that had melted off. A kinder person would also have included some blue to reduce the pain. Cheriyon screamed even louder when the healing spell hit him, then seemed to pass out. He fell backward onto the floor, his skin still remolding itself into shape around his bones.
The other mages had also watched the healing spell carefully; they all wanted to know what to do if someone ever sent that spell at them! But without the colors, the others had to rely on their varying abilities to sense the magic being used around them, which was more difficult the more complex the spell. It was like they were blind, Calen thought sometimes with pity. And yet from what Calen could tell, Krelig had honed his own sensing ability to be just as sharp as Calen’s. So maybe it was just a matter of power and ability after all.
“That’s enough for today,” Mage Krelig said. “Someone get him back to his room.” He gestured in Cheriyon’s general direction, then turned and walked out. The rest of them looked at one another for a moment, and then Lestern, who had arrived the same day as Cheriyon, sighed and walked over to the fallen man. Calen could still see the last vestiges of Mage Krelig’s spell at work around his face.
Lestern stood there looking down at Cheriyon, frowning. Then purple energy started gathering around his hands. A few seconds later, he pointed his fingers at Cheriyon, and the spell lifted him several inches off the ground. When Lestern turned and began to walk away, the unconscious Cheriyon floated silently after him.
Calen watched them go. That had been odd — the way the purple energy had appeared around his hands so long before he began to cast the spell. Usually the energy appeared only at the moment it was being gathered and cast. Maybe Lestern had just been casting really slowly?
“Those two are a real pair, huh?”
Calen turned to see Helena standing beside him.
“Not friends, exactly,” she went on. “Cheriyon’s too much of a worm to have friends. But they look out for each other all the same. You can see it sometimes. Like now.”
Calen grunted noncommittally. Helena had started trying to have conversations with him lately, but he had no desire to talk to her. He turned to go.
“Wait,” she said. “Thanks for showing me how to do that shield spell today. I’ve never tried anything like that before.”
Calen paused, on the brink of walking away . . . then turned back around. This was the most polite she’d ever been to him. It seemed unnecessarily rude to ignore her when she was thanking him. “It was a good spell, with both of us,” he admitted. “Saved us from the melting skin thing, maybe.”
She raised an eyebrow at him. “It saved us from a lot of things, but not that. I saw what you did. You found some way to turn Cheriyon’s spells right back at him. How did you do that?”
“How much can you sense, when other people are casting?” he asked her in turn, dodging the question. Krelig had forbade him from discussing how he used the colors with anyone else. Not that he had any intention of doing so. Everyone knew he could see them, or that he claimed to see them, but he didn’t think they fully understood exactly how he could put that ability to use.
“Not as much as you,” she said grudgingly. “But a lot. More than most of the others. They seem so slow sometimes! I hate when Mage Krelig teams me up with them.” She looked around, as she almost always did when she said Krelig’s name; Calen thought she did it without even realizing it.
“Yeah,” Calen said. “Me, too.” It was true. Helena was really the only one who could keep up in most ways. But he still didn’t like her. He supposed, however, that he could be civil. And maybe he’d be able to learn some things from her as well.
They started walking toward the dining hall; it was getting close enough to dinnertime that it didn’t really make sense to go back to their rooms. After a moment, Calen asked, “Was it hard, getting here from the Magistratum? I didn’t — I think you know that I got here in a very different way from the rest of you.”
She shrugged. “Yeah. I mean obviously it wasn’t something any of us could talk about openly, wanting to come here. And everyone there was getting so paranoid, accusing everyone else of being a traitor. . . . We couldn’t use magic to get out. We spent a lot of nights in the woods, cold and dirty, trying to get far enough away that they wouldn’t sense us casting before we could even light a cursed fire. I was just with Mage Dothier at first. We met up with Chan, Pelerio, and Scoral a few days out.”
Calen hesitated, then asked what he really wanted to know. “But why? I came because I had to, and while I’ll admit now that it’s been worth it”— he sent a silent apology to Meg for the lie, or maybe for the fact that he wasn’t entirely certain it really was a lie —“I never would have dared to come on my own, I don’t think. What made you . . . ?”
“You don’t know what it was like, after you and Mage Serek disappeared,” she said. “Things went a little crazy. People accused Mage Brevera of killing you, then accused you and Mage Serek of . . . well, all kinds of things. And I started to realize that it was only going to get worse. The council had lost control; everyone was forming these little groups, traveling in packs. . . . it was awful. And then . . . Mage Krelig started sending us dreams.”
“Dreams?”
“Recruiting dreams, I suppose. I don’t know if everyone got them; it wasn’t the sort of thing you felt comfortable talking about. He spoke to us. To me. About how the Magistratum was dying, and why did I want to be a part of it anyway, when I could be so much more . . .”
“That sounds like him,” Calen agreed.
“Finally Dothier told me one night that he was thinking of coming to join Mage Krelig. He claimed that he thought the accusations against Krelig might be as false as some of the other ones, for all we knew. I don’t know if any part of that was true, but either way . . . we could see that the Magistratum was falling apart, and if Mage Krelig was going to end up winning anyway, why not join him now, when it could do us some good? Come over as allies instead of conquered enemies?”
“That . . . makes some sense, I guess,” Calen said.
“Yeah,” Helena said. She didn’t sound entirely like she believed it anymore, though, Calen thought.
“How did you know where to come? If everyone knows where we are, why haven’t they attacked us already?”
She shook her head. “Not everyon
e knows. In fact, hardly anyone does. We didn’t know, not for a while. Once we got out, we started trying to reach out to Mage Krelig magically, to let him know that we wanted to join him. Eventually he must have heard us. Suddenly Scoral just knew which way to go, and then in a few more days we were here.”
They walked in silence for a little way. Then Helena stopped and looked at him.
“He’s — he’s really crazy, though, isn’t he? It’s not just that he’s so much more powerful than the rest of us. The way he gets when he’s angry, the way he gets carried away with the discipline sometimes . . .”
Now Calen had to fight the urge to look around. It wasn’t safe to say things like that out loud. You never knew who was listening, even when there wasn’t anyone nearby. But it wouldn’t be safe to tell her that out loud, either. Calen looked at her as significantly as he could. He held her gaze steadily as he said, “No, he’s not crazy. He’s just . . . different from the rest of us. You’ll see. You just need to do what you’re told, and learn as much as you can. He’s going to lead all of us back to where we belong in the end.”
He kept looking her right in the eye. He didn’t know why he was trying to warn her. She must know, anyway, that it was dangerous to talk that way. He knew she was terrified of Krelig; she had been ever since that first day that he’d reached out and cut her, so casually. She’d never quite regained that same overconfident swagger that had so immediately annoyed him.
She looked back at him, wide-eyed. Then she nodded. “Of course. You’re right. I just . . . find him so intimidating, I guess. I’ll just keep trying to learn, like you said. I’ve already learned so much.”
“Yeah,” Calen said. He started walking again, and she fell into step beside him. “Me, too.”
That night the crow appeared again on his balcony.
This time when it spoke his name, it was Serek’s voice that he heard. Calen was a little disappointed, although he knew that was stupid. And mostly he was ecstatic to know that his message had reached them. But it had been so good to hear Meg’s voice that first time. He wanted to hear it again.
This message was longer than the first; it looked like they’d used another version of his own message-spell this time. Mostly the message just said that they were glad he was all right and that they were working on a way to get him home. He thought they must not have gotten very far, though, because they asked what his one idea was. He’d been afraid of that. His idea made him very nervous. But they didn’t have a lot of time. He suspected that Serek and Anders knew that as well as he did.
It also said that he had to send the bird back to Serek and Anders, not to Meg this time. It didn’t say why, though. He thought about whether to follow those instructions or not. He liked the idea of Meg being the one to receive the crow. He liked feeling like he was talking to her rather than to Serek and Anders. But they must have put that in there for a reason. Maybe it was too dangerous for the bird to seek out Meg right now. He had no idea what was going on there, after all.
It’s not because she doesn’t want the birds to come to her, he assured himself. She helped the first time. She would still be helping if there wasn’t a good reason not to. Just because he didn’t know the reason didn’t mean it wasn’t a good one.
He stayed out on the balcony the whole time the bird was there. He didn’t know why, but somehow it seemed safer in the open air. He thought there was more of a chance of Krelig sensing something if he talked to the bird inside. He hoped that it was safer outside, anyway. He didn’t really have any other options.
He gave his new message to the bird, then fed it some of the bread he’d saved from his bird-treat stockpile. “More where that came from,” he told it. “Lots more, if you get me back in one piece, my friend.”
The bird cawed quietly at him in its own voice and then lumbered off into the dark sky.
Calen’s days began to fall into a new kind of rhythm. They still always started with his morning lessons, which he now looked forward to without reservation. He couldn’t help it. Every day, every single day, he learned something new. Something significant. Some whole new way of looking and thinking and working with magic. He told himself it was all right to love the learning. He deserved to get something good out of being here, didn’t he? After everything he was enduring, everything he had sacrificed? And the stronger he got, the better his chances were of being able to help Serek and the others defeat Mage Krelig. It was all part of the plan. It didn’t change anything that he happened to like this part.
It helped that Krelig didn’t punish him very often anymore. He was just as interested as Calen in finding out how deep those new reserves of power were.
And the power itself was . . . incredible. Easy spells were easier; harder spells were easier. He was casting things now that he’d never even imagined being able to cast before.
One morning Krelig showed him how to stop a mage from being able to cast. It was the same spell Sen Eva had used on him on the day Mage Krelig had returned. It was ridiculously simple, or at least, it seemed so now. The only trick was that once someone cast it on you, you needed help to remove it. Krelig had removed the one Sen Eva had cast somewhere during their long, terrible journey to wherever they were now, but Calen had been too distracted by betraying his friends to even notice until much later.
Krelig wouldn’t allow Calen to practice on him, of course. But he encouraged him to use it on one of the others during their next group lesson. He also taught Calen how to prevent someone else from using it on him. These moments, when Krelig conspired with him against the other mages, were always . . . confusing. Calen didn’t ever want to feel like he and Krelig were on the same side. But he didn’t want to be on the traitor mages’ side, either. And of course he wasn’t on either of those sides, not really. But he had to do so much pretending; sometimes it took him a minute to remember what the truth was.
The group lessons were educational in other ways. The other mages had learned to be wary of him; they knew that he tended to show up with new tricks up his sleeve. And they were beginning to understand how powerful he really was. Sometimes when they looked at him, he could see the fear in their eyes, and he was glad. They should be afraid. A day would come when he could stop pretending, and then they’d find out exactly what they had to be afraid of.
But not yet, he reminded himself regularly. He’d never really come close to losing control during a lesson. He’d just had occasional moments of wishing he could. He hated them so much.
Except for Helena.
That had been hard to accept at first, but he knew that it was true. She and Calen had fallen into a pattern as well. After group lessons, they would discuss what they’d seen and learned, and practice some of the spells they’d watched the others craft, or think of new ways to defend against attacks. He still didn’t like her, but he couldn’t deny that he didn’t quite hate her, either.
Evenings varied: if Krelig was there, there might be additional lessons; if not, there might be more free time to practice on their own.
And every night, Calen sat on his balcony, watching for crows.
One evening, practicing with Helena again after the group lesson had ended, Calen noticed the colors around her hands before she cast, as he had that time with Lestern. Just for a second, maybe two. But . . . early. Earlier than should have been possible.
He paid closer attention for the rest of their practice session. Not every time, but often, he could see the colors gather before she raised her hands to cast. She was like most mages in that she used her hands to direct the magic once she’d crafted the spell. Krelig was the only one Calen had ever seen who hardly ever needed to use his hands. Even he still did sometimes, although most often only when it didn’t matter. Calen thought about how he’d struck him across the dining hall table without moving a muscle, but had gestured to summon his glass of wine.
They practiced attacking each other — just with harmless tag spells, nothing that would hurt beyond a tiny pinch — as
they often did; Krelig loved to make his mages attack one another, and perfecting their abilities to cast and defend at the same time was probably the most important part of their training. It made sense. When they fought the other mages, the ones who opposed Krelig (the good mages, as Calen always thought of them), that’s primarily what they would be doing, after all.
Usually Calen and Helena were almost evenly matched in terms of speed when it was just the two of them. Helena got flustered sometimes when she had to fend off multiple attackers at once, but one-on-one, she was often as fast as Calen. Not as strong, not anymore, but just as fast. Sometimes even faster. But tonight was different. He kept seeing the colors seconds before she actually cast something at him. Which gave him a few extra seconds to prepare.
“All right, stop!” she said after he had intercepted her latest attack as soon as she released it. “How are you doing that?”
“Doing what?” Calen asked. They were both breathing hard at this point. Physically they were just standing there, facing each other on opposite sides of the room, but the constant casting and concentration was hard work.
She walked over to him, rubbing a hand against her forehead, which was glistening with sweat. “It’s like you know what I’m going to cast before I do!” she said. “Am I giving myself away somehow, all of a sudden?”
Yes, Calen thought. Gods, that’s exactly what’s happening. I can see her spells before she casts them. But he knew, without one shred of doubt, that this was something he should keep to himself.
“Maybe I’m just getting better at reading you,” Calen said. “You do sort of make a face before you cast certain things.”
She punched him in the arm. “I do not!”
Just like Meg, he thought, with a strange mix of affection and annoyance and a sadness that seemed to pierce right through him. But he couldn’t dwell on that; he had to distract her.
He shrugged. “Sorry,” he said. “You do. You sort of scrunch up your eyebrows. Especially when you’re casting something you think is going to hurt.” He paused. “Or, you know, would hurt, if you could ever land one on me.”
The Mage of Trelian Page 10