Salamander
Page 23
"We can talk freely; neither the coachman nor the groom is talented.
"My half of the story is simple enough. I saw what the Forstings were doing, guessed why, and so accepted Duchess Gianna's invitation. The Salamander left the Northfire fifty years ago. Since then the fire has slowly cooled; I put it back for long enough to change that."
"The day after I finished doing so, someone invoked the Cascade. I could feel it drawing fire from both of us, on a less lethal scale than last time. When it stopped I discovered that I and the Salamander had each somehow acquired a protective shield strong enough to cut off the flow. It looked to me as though His Highness had invoked the Cascade and then, a few minutes later, the two of you had invoked your spell to block it. Where he and you found enough mages for two stars at once, or how you managed the necessary power without my assistance, I have not yet figured out. I wondered if perhaps you had limited the protection to just the mages in the Keep. But I would have thought that by the time it started, the Cascade would have spread farther than that."
"It had. Much farther. We did two spells, but it only took one star for both of them."
"You used the Prince's Cascade to power your spell, to shield every mage in the area?"
Coelus nodded. "Every mage for about fifty miles around, if I got it right. To spread it farther we'll have to do it again later, with your help and two more mages. The pool was supposed to have power enough from the final stage of the Cascade to both spread the shield and let the Prince undo the magery that was melting the pass clear. But he didn't quite make it. Once the bubbles got thick enough to start cutting mages out of the Cascade, there was no more power coming into the pool—and no way of getting more even if we had been willing to run the Cascade again. I spent several hours afraid that my cleverness had killed all of us, until Fire Mountain erupted. It didn't occur to me that that might be your work until Ellen told me you were here."
Ellen opened her eyes. "You mean our cleverness, don't you, love? If we had ended up killed by the Forstings it would have been my fault as well as yours. I didn't know Father was here either."
Durilil smiled. "Both of yours equally, I think. Dying for your principles is all very well in stories, but on the whole I prefer to live—it makes it easier to fix my mistakes. If you only spread the shield for fifty miles, someone would eventually have tried the Cascade somewhere where it would work. Some of the Prince's people know enough to do it, I expect, and not all of them were in the Keep. And there was Iolen too. You were very clever indeed, but you should have allowed more of a safety margin. It's not as if the Prince had ever had that sort of power to play with before."
Ellen let her eyes close again, her mind drifting. Mari's wedding, Mari resplendent in silk and jewels, Mari some day as queen. Perhaps Ellen should volunteer herself as royal mage. It was amusing to imagine how Kieron would respond. But no, Coelus would never leave the College willingly.
Weddings … .