“On the way back,” he said sourly. “Cause I knew good and well I couldn’t trust you to do it. But you owe me for this one, Sev.”
“No I don’t,” she chortled, wishing she could have listened in on that conversation. “He owes you, I think. Was he blushing? Give me the details!”
“Completely red the whole time, and he wouldn’t look at me even once.” Rubbing at his jaw, he added ruefully, “I was rather grateful for that, actually. But something else I realized today was that he’s just not used to physical contact with people. Sev, I know you’re not really a touchy-feely person either, but you’re going to have to be with him. He’s not used to being touched, which is something else that a king needs to be good at. In fact, being in close contact with him will probably ease his way into becoming better at managing crowds.”
She trusted his judgment on this. Kip, after all, had always been the people person. Not her. “We both should work with him on this, then.”
“Why are you smiling evilly when you say that?”
~ ~ ~
The little prince proved to be good at following orders. He brought his swords and a change of clothes along but nothing else. Actually, Sevana had packed similar things—an assortment of wands and potions at her belt, her notes of his case, and a change of clothes. It all easily fit on her back in a special pack she had custom made for travel like this. With an expression of distaste, Bel allowed her to pick him up and settle him on a hip, just like a mother would her child. He thankfully didn’t squirm, though.
Then she put on the glasses and raised the wooden blocks attached on a hinge. She took a long look toward the south, in the direction of Platt, finding an open patch of land. Then she lowered the wooden covers again. The wind rushed past her in a flurry, ruffling her hair and clothes. Then abruptly, her forward movement stopped.
Bel let out a whoosh of breath. “T-that was intense.”
“Truly?” she lowered the glasses on her nose for a moment and turned to look at him. He looked a little wide around the eyes, a flush of excitement in his cheeks. The experience hadn’t scared him, but obviously got his blood to pumping. “What is it like? With the glasses covered, I never get to see.”
“Streaks of color just blaze past you,” Bel explained in excitement, hands rising to paint the picture he saw in the air. “And it all seems blurry and yet not, as if you can almost see what you’re passing by. The further ahead you look, the clearer everything becomes.”
Hmmmm. How interesting.
He pointed a finger east, away from the plains and toward the Sanat Forest. “If I remember right, Tree-on-the-sea is directly east of us. Wouldn’t it be faster to go that way instead of south, toward Platt?”
“For someone who’s never been out of Lockbright Palace, you know your geography quite well.”
Bel gave a shrug. “I had a world Map of Mander hanging on my wall. I know my geography by heart after looking at it every night for twenty-one years.”
Good. One less thing she had to teach him. “Well, you’re right, we’re going to have to go that way eventually. But I’m trying to avoid all of the trees.”
“Oh.” He gave another look at the forest standing a fair distance off, just hovering within their view. “That would slow you down considerably, wouldn’t it?”
Thank the heavens she didn’t have to explain that. “Yes it would.”
It took several different jumps with the glasses to get to the edge of the Sanat Forest and then a considerable more chunk of time to get through the forest. Trees blocked her view and slowed them down considerably. Fortunately, they reached the edge of the Windamere mainland without her breaking another nose. Or worse.
From there, she had a clear view across the sea and to the island of Tree-on-the-sea. Living up to its name, it looked like trees grew directly out of the sea itself, with barely any land in sight. She searched with squinting eyes before finally spotting a rocky outcrop. (She absolutely refused to just look at a tree in order to cross the channel. One broken nose was enough, thankyouverymuch.)
They passed over the water with nothing more than an errant splash of sea water on her boots to show for it and landed with a crunch of boots against gravel. Sevana thankfully put Bel down as her arm ached from holding his weight for so many hours. He just as thankfully backed up a pace, obviously relieved to be on his own feet.
“Morgan said that his cottage was on the far side of the island, right?”
“Right.” The glasses would be practically useless as this point as the trees were so thick that she could barely see two feet ahead. And bypassing the trees wouldn’t be possible. She’d be in water if she tried to circumvent them. Sevana slipped them off and stowed them safely in her breast pocket. Hefting her pack on her shoulders, she started weaving her way in and around trees, Bel on her heels.
Their progress moved at a snail’s pace. Actually, the snails might be able to move faster. The trees were not only dense, but their roots stuck up above the ground and weaved together. And the bark was slippery, to boot. It proved not only challenging but hazardous to navigate through it.
“Sweet mercy, there could be a whole castle on this island and you’d never know it,” she grumbled to herself.
“Truly,” Bel sighed, and then gasped as his foot slipped on a root.
She glanced back over her shoulder. “Don’t break a leg in here. I’m not carrying you out.”
“Noted.” He shot her a gamine grin. “Don’t you break a leg either. I can’t carry you out.”
“Some prince you are. Princes are always supposed to save the damsel in distress, remember?”
He laughed aloud at that. “Sevana, if you’re a damsel in distress, then I’m a three-eyed donkey.”
“Ohh? That finally explains the ears, then.”
“Hey!”
Chuckling, she climbed around a monster of a tree and finally saw something that wasn’t either brown or green. “I see a clearing ahead.”
“With a cottage?” Bel asked hopefully, scrambling after her. His breath came a little fast and hard in his lungs. Still not much stamina, huh.
She took several feet forward, away from the line of trees, so she could see enough to be sure. “It’s a cottage alright.” And what a cottage. It stood two stories tall, painted in pristine white with a blue shingled roof. Really, instead of saying cottage, ‘house’ would be more accurate. From this angle, she could just make out the edge of a walled off garden, too.
This place didn’t belong to any normal person. She could tell that at a glance. There were grow-not spells all along the line of trees, keeping a clearing of grass open around the house. Each corner of the house had a very strong protection ward engraved into the wood. Only a magician of high caliber would be able to make it. Sevana nodded in satisfaction. “This is Pierpoint’s house.”
“Are you certain?”
“Sure.” She set off at a brisk walk across the lawn, clearly saying words of safe passage as she walked. There were other spells and wards in place, keeping people from casually trespassing as she was currently doing, but she knew how to get around them. Every Artifactor in the world put in a safeguard so that they could deactivate a spell or ward if they needed to. They all used the same passwords, too, just in case they needed to bypass something made by someone else. Disasters had happened before they instigated that little rule in their community.
Because of that, Pierpoint had no idea that he had visitors until Sevana pushed open his front door and took a step inside. “Pierpoint,” Sevana greeted cordially.
“Sevana,” he responded in surprise, dropping the quill in his hand and turning to face her. He’d finally shaved off that hideous beard he’d kept for so many years, and his greying hair had been cut close. Away from the Council and their standards of how a proper magician should dress, he’d fallen into old habits of wearing any loose, comfortable tunic and trousers at hand. It made him look like an old fisherman. “I didn’t know you were coming. What brings you
—” at that moment he looked beyond her and saw the boy hovering in her shadow. He choked on his own words, eyes round as saucers. “Y-you’re the one that kidnapped the prince?!”
She pretended to mull that over for a moment. “Is it truly kidnapping if he came along of his own volition?”
“According to the kingdom’s 1,000 Statutes of Law, it is not,” Bel said confidently.
Momentarily sidetracked, she gave him a funny look. That book was thick enough that if you dropped it on a man’s head, it would likely kill him. “You actually read that monstrosity?”
“Cover to cover,” he answered with a shrug. “I ran out of things to read.”
Well, after ten years, he probably would. Not that it really mattered right now. Sevana turned back to Pierpoint, who didn’t seem to know how to react to their presence. “I’m working on his curse,” she told him matter-of-factly, “and I don’t want to repeat anything that you tried. Will you show me your notes on his case?”
Bel stepped forward and said in a formal tone, “I would take it as a personal favor if you would cooperate, sir.”
Pierpoint softened into a sad smile. “Of course. In truth, Your Highness, I always regretted that I couldn’t help you.”
“I always regretted that you lost your position at Court because of it,” Bellomi admitted frankly. “But if you’ll help her, I’ll have you reinstated when I’m back on the throne.”
Pierpoint stood from his chair and gave him a bow. “It would be my honor to serve you again. I accept your terms. Please, come in. I will fetch my notes.”
She took one of the padded stools that sat next to the table, looking around idly as she sat. The place could be an almost exact replica of the workroom Pierpoint had had at the Lockbright Palace. Herbs for potions hung on the walls and from the ceilings, and bookshelves covered the walls, housing everything from books to magical tools. A single massive table dominated the center of the room with stools all around it. Everything was in place and perfectly organized, with the only “mess” being the project that Pierpoint currently had out on the table. Even the smell reminded her of his previous workshop—the slight tartness of sage, earthiness of wood and the metallic twang of metal smoldering.
Bel struggled to get up into the barstool. With a roll of the eyes, she grabbed the back of his pants and hauled him upwards. With a gasp, he flailed a little and finally caught hold of his balance. Wiggling about, he righted himself enough to turn and give her a glare. “I could have gotten up unassisted.”
“No, you couldn’t.”
Pierpoint cleared his throat significantly, breaking up a fight before it could start. He put a large, leather-bound book in front of Sevana and flipped it open to the front few pages. “Here are my initial evaluations of the curse. Well, it’s really just a spell. Does it match with his current condition?”
“Why wouldn’t it?” Bel asked in confusion, leaning forward to peer at the book himself.
Pierpoint, being a patient sort, answered. “Magic isn’t a stagnant thing like most people believe. It has its own properties, its own…life, if you will. If you cast a spell or create a magical device and leave it alone for a long period of time, it will develop its own quirks.”
“I’m not sure if I truly understood that,” Bel admitted slowly.
“Allow me to offer an example,” Pierpoint suggested genially. “If you hung a hammer on the wall and ignored it for a year, what would happen to it?”
“I imagine it’d gather quite a bit of dust but nothing else.”
“Then what if you stored a bucket of water in the same area and ignored it for a year?”
Bellomi made a face. “I imagine it would become very stagnant. I saw that happen once with the palace fountains. The water turned black and stank.”
“Exactly so. Magic doesn’t necessarily deteriorate, you understand, but it does change as time goes on.”
“Hmmm, I didn’t know that.” Bel sounded interested, but anything new caught his interest. He leaned further on his barstool, making it rock a little, as he tried to read sideways. “So how did it change?”
“It weakened, actually.” While they talked, she’d pulled out her own notes from her satchel and put them on the table for a side-to-side comparison. Sevana pointed to the numbers that were written down. “The strength of the spell is now about half of that. It’s also warped slightly, relying more heavily upon its base component.” She traced the line of numbers with a thoughtful finger. “If we left you alone, the spell would wear itself out in another ten years or so.”
A flash of panic crossed Bel’s face. “Err…but you’re not going to do that, right?”
The opportunity proved to be too much. She gave him a sly smirk. “It would certainly save me some work, wouldn’t it?”
Bel really panicked at that. “Well, but, it means that I would still look like an eight year old in ten years, right? I’d still need another ten years to actually grow again and look like an adult. And I still wouldn’t have the skills I need to be king. So it’s not really feasible to just leave the curse alone.”
“Hooo.” She clapped her hands together in approval. “So you do have some negotiation skills.”
Realization sank in and he slammed his hands against the table with a loud bang. “SEVANA! This is serious!”
She tsked him, wagging a finger in a chiding manner. “It’s only serious when I can’t fix it.”
“Now, now,” Pierpoint patted him on the head as if he truly were a child. “Stop teasing, Sevana. He’s been under the pressure of this curse for a long time.”
“You’re too soft,” she dismissed while turning back to the book. “Hmmm. So it was wind-based, eh? I thought as much.”
“Wait, I never could prove that,” Pierpoint objected. He reached around her shoulder to flip to a different page. “Here, see? I went through several different tests but couldn’t be completely sure.”
She read through the pages quickly, nodding here and there as she caught a particularly well done test. “I see. You really did go through a great many possibilities. But I’m confirming it. I did different tests and reached the same conclusion.”
Pierpoint let out a long sigh. “So I actually could have broken the curse earlier. If I had been able to devise something stronger than the wind-base, that is.”
“Perhaps. But I think you would have needed an Artifactor to create something to do the job.” She closed the massive book with a whump. “Regardless, I have the information I need. I can get to work now.”
“Wait, wait, you’re talking in riddles,” Bel complained, hands held up in a pleading gesture. “What does all of this mean?”
“The curse is breakable,” Sevana said.
Bellomi felt his mouth go dry. He swallowed twice and wet his lips before forcing any words out. “You can break it?”
She put a hand on her hip and gave him the cockiest, most arrogant smile he had ever seen on a woman’s face. “I can.”
“B-but—” his eyes darted to Pierpoint, mind whirling in confusion. If one of the most powerful magicians in the known world couldn’t do it, how could she? Sevana kept telling him she didn’t have power, but talent. And he was under a very powerful curse…right…?
Pierpoint took pity on his obvious confusion. “I’ll explain, Your Highness.”
Bellomi gripped his knees with both hands, eyes glued to Pierpoint’s face. “Pray do, sir.”
“There are three basic rules of magic,” Pierpoint started, ticking off points on his fingers. “The first, most basic rule, is that every element of the world has a certain degree of power to it. There is, in fact, a hierarchy of the power that these elements hold. Do you see?”
He did. And at the same time, he didn’t. “Give me an example, please.”
“Fire and water,” Sevana inserted from the side. Her eyes weren’t on either of them—she was in fact scribbling in her notebook—and she kept writing even as she explained. “What happens when you splash water on fire
?”
“It’s put out,” he responded instantly but his mind didn’t really register what he said. Why would it be put out…? “Because water has more natural power than fire?”
“Correct,” Pierpoint smiled. “Fire, in fact, has the weakest power of the elements because it is highly unstable. From strongest to weakest, it goes like this: wind, water, earth, fire and wood.”
Bellomi blinked, not sure what to make of that order. “I would think earth would be the strongest?”
“Most would. But wind and water can wear down a rock, given enough time and exposure. I grant you, the power levels are very close to each other. The only true gap in power is between earth, wood and fire.”
“It gets further complicated after that,” Sevana put in helpfully. “Because if those elemental forces are used by mythical beings, or is tampered with by magicians, then their properties and power levels change.”
How very, very interesting. “How does this first rule play in?”
“All spells have some element as its base. Now, in order for us to truly understand how a spell or curse is formed, we have to know what elements were used to create it. If we can break its base, you see, we can break the spell. Your curse was particularly tricky. Whoever devised it went out of their way to make sure that the base element was well camouflaged.” Pierpoint grimaced in frustration. “I never was quite sure which one was used, which is why I didn’t dare attempt anything on you. A mistake would have killed you.”
Unnerved, Bellomi managed a smile. “I thank you for your forbearance.”
Pierpoint actually chuckled. “But Sevana’s diagnostic tools are better than mine. She did discover which element was at the base and because of that we know what we can do to break the curse.”
“Or at least, in theory we know,” Sevana muttered.
“Yes, well…” Pierpoint looked away for a moment and sighed. “The trouble, Your Highness, is that the base of your curse is wind.”
Wind. “The strongest element?”
The Child Prince (The Artifactor) Page 7