The Child Prince (The Artifactor)

by Honor Raconteur

  A Bel problem, eh? He’d been so focused on training himself and breaking the curse that he hadn’t really thought about what to do afterward. Some of his ancestors had been forced to overthrow rebellions and reclaim their thrones. He remembered learning about them, vaguely, from his early childhood when he still had tutors. Maybe he should research that. Some of their methods might work for his situation.

  He didn’t have enough information to really plan anything now. Bored, and with nothing else to do, he started making idle patterns in the mud with his hands. It formed ridges and hills easily and maintained the new shape rather well. Interest slightly piqued, he started forming walls, building the basic layout of Lockbright Palace. Of course, moving the mud around sent little puffs of sulfur stench into the air. But after sitting here for so long, he found the smell easy to bear and it didn’t deter him.

  Bellomi had the main palace layout built and had started in on the gardens when Sevana finally noticed his antics.

  “You’re playing in the mud.”

  Not a question, but he answered it anyway. “Yes, I am.”

  “Will you stop that and sit still? Act your age.”

  “Which one? Eight or twenty-one?” he looked at her with a smirk, only to freeze in mid-motion when he realized she had a wand pointing at him and her notebook open in her lap. He gave her a hopeful, questioning look. “What’s the result?”

  “Not as effective as water or wood.” She tucked the wand away in her belt holder and closed the book. “I suspected as much.”

  Suspected as much? So what had this really been about? A confirmation of her theories? He hoped that was all it was. A part of him suspected that she had an ulterior motive, though.

  He didn’t question her on her motives. Frankly, he didn’t want to know. And if it meant he didn’t have to sit in this stinky place any longer then he’d take the chance to get out of here while he could.

  Bellomi started to stand and quickly realized he had a problem. He didn’t have anything firm to stand on. Climbing in, he had sunk easily. But how to climb out…? He started to wiggle, clawing at the top of the mud, trying to find some purchase. No luck.

  “You look like a turtle on its back,” Sevana observed with amusement.

  “I feel like one, too,” he groused. “Any help would be appreciated.”

  “Try harder,” she suggested with a thrice-cursed twinkle in her eye.

  “I said help, not advice.”

  Chuckling to herself, she reached for a different wand at her belt and flicked it toward him with a languid command of, “AKA NEFOLE.”

  Water started gushing out, soaking him and destroying his mud palace instantly. He almost protested at her choice of aid. Wouldn’t more water make things worse? But it quickly became apparent that this method would work as the mud lost its grip on him. With more water in the mix, he floated more to the top and he found it easier to slosh his way toward solid ground.

  With a sigh of relief, he finally got his feet back on solid ground. When he looked up, he found Sevana pointing a wand at him with a glint of mischief in her eye. Instinct said to duck, but he had nothing to duck behind and he absolutely refused to climb back into that bog.

  She twirled the wand point in a small circle and intoned, “DONE GONBE.”

  In an instant, all of the dirt clinging to him and every trace of water whizzed away from his skin and hit the ground in a series of splats. He jolted, feeling a rather unpleasant stinging sensation, as if he had just been wrapped up in rough wool for a moment. “Oww,” he hissed, more in protest than pain.

  “Oh, this spell smarts a mite,” Sevana warned him sweetly.

  He gave her a look that would have struck a lesser man down on the spot. “Warn me before you hit me with it, then.”

  She turned away as if she hadn’t heard him, collapsing and shrinking her chair and umbrella before stowing them in a pouch on her belt. Funny, Baby reacted the same way when teasing someone. Who’d taught who that bad habit? He had to wonder.

  But at least this way he didn’t have to trudge back to the village nearby stinking to high heaven. Bellomi slipped back into his clothes and shoved his feet back into his boots. Sevana paused just long enough for him to get dressed before she started walking.

  The village lay a short distance away, just on the edge of the Mudlands and not far from the Gaynah Sea. Someone in Slayden, several decades ago, had hit upon the scheme of bottling the mud here and selling it as ‘medicinal mud’ that helped prevent wrinkles. The villagers had been making a steady living off of it ever since. After spending several hours chest-high in the stuff, Bellomi highly doubted the veracity of such a claim, but apparently there were some in the world who did believe. Enough to keep a whole village alive.

  Sevana insisted on staying the night here, for some strange reason. He still didn’t understand why. The far-see glasses wouldn’t be able to get them back to Big before dark, true, but they could certainly reach the larger city of Guide without trouble and have much better accommodations. She wouldn’t hear of it, though.

  He didn’t particularly mind. After spending his entire life in a palace room, he enjoyed seeing the rest of the world. Especially on a beautiful day like this. It was late-spring now, and although it was a warm day, a light breeze took the edge off. He lifted his face to the sun and enjoyed the sensation of sun and wind on his skin. “You said that water and wood is the most effective?”

  “So the results show.” Sevana actually sounded aggravated by this. “Of course, it would be the two elements that are the hardest to combine.”

  He blinked at that, but soon saw her point. After all, water and wood mixed together makes wet wood and nothing more. “So how would you combine them?” he asked, lengthening his stride so that he could walk right beside her on the hard dirt road.

  “You don’t. Not really.” She spared him a glance. “The only way to do it is to build a device of wood and find some way to tie in water with it. Your situation is particularly tricky because it requires moving water or still water that has a great deal of inherent power.”

  Yes, that did sound problematic. “Any ideas?”

  “Not a one. But I need to sit down and do a great deal of calculating and research before I really hit upon the right combination of the two. The hardest part will be the wood,” she added this last part in a lower tone, as if she were speaking more to herself than him. “It will take some very old wood.”

  “Like that old oak tree I sat on?”

  “At least that old,” she grumbled, mouth flattening into a line. “Older would be better. Bel, I’ll be frank. There’s only two ways to approach this. One is the slow way, where I build a device that wears away at the curse until it fails because it simply doesn’t have the power to keep going. That way will take at least a year, depending on the elements I can get.”

  A year…he winced. He’d hoped for a faster solution than that, but he’d already been like this for ten years with no hope whatsoever. If he had to wait another year, he could do so…although it would cause even more problems for him later. “What’s the other way?”

  “It’s faster, but more hazardous.” She rubbed at her chin for a moment before saying, “You’re aware that the mythical races harbor more power than anyone or anything else, right?”

  “Right. That’s why they used Dragon’s Breath in the spell on me.”

  “Yes, good. Alright, then you’ll understand when I say that something from a race that is equally powerful will break your curse faster?”

  He almost tripped over his own feet. “Wait, you mean get something from another dragon to break the Dragon’s Breath on me?”

  “Something like that. Although a bottled resource from a mystical creature loses potency over time. If you want your curse broken instantly, then it’s best to get it directly from the source.”

  His mouth went dry when he understood. “Directly…from a dragon?” The most temperamental species in the world? The ones known for smash
ing up castles just because they didn’t like the shade of the roof?

  Sevana dropped into her ‘lecture mode’ as she explained, “Not all dragons’ species are impossible to deal with. Some of them are highly intelligent and can be negotiated with. The Water Dragons, for instance. If you mess up negotiating with them, you still become lunch, of course. But most of the time, they’re reasonable.” Almost as an afterthought she added, “But the dragons are not the sole powerful beings in this world. For water, you’ve still got the Asrai, Naiad and the Melusine.”

  He walked in silence for a time, navigating the rough ruts in the road absently as he thought. Thanks to the reading he’d been doing from Sevana’s library, he recognized these races. The Asrai were a type of aquatic fairy who were very shy and only bathed in moonlit water. They were known to become stunningly beautiful when seen by a man but they avoided all human contact as they were afraid of being captured. Bellomi didn’t imagine that getting one of them to help him would go over well.

  The other two races seemed a better bet to him. The Naiad were nymphs that presided over fountains, wells, or any type of freshwater. They were as powerful as a river spirit and because of their long association with humans, easy to bargain with. The Melusine were the same, beings who lived and thrived in fresh water, although they were part serpent and part man. The book he’d read suggested they were harder to deal with than the Naiad as the Melusine were tricksters and didn’t always fulfill their end of the bargain as they should. “I would think the Naiad would be easiest to deal with,” he concluded aloud.

  “I agree, if they have enough power. I have a bad feeling they won’t, though.” Her nose wrinkled up in aggravation. “I’ll have to run the numbers to be sure, but I’m willing to bet that only a water dragon will be able to break this curse. Especially since the dragon that lent his breath to the spell is still alive and well and feeding power into it.”

  Not the answer he’d hoped for. “So, in the meantime?”

  “In the meantime, you continue to train and study while I figure this out. And part of your studies,” she pointed ahead to the rough gate that stretched over the north road into Slayden, “is learning how to interact with people. Go get us two rooms for the inn, including meals and a bath and don’t let the price be more than ten coppers.”

  He’d never travelled before this and stayed at an inn, so he had no idea what lodgings normally cost, but…he had this feeling that she’d just handed him a near impossible task.

  Bel failed to get everything in only ten coppers, but he did manage to get it down to eleven. Sevana ruthlessly teased him about it, but really, he didn’t do half-badly. And he’d managed to charm the innkeeper into giving them not only dinner, but breakfast for that amount so they were getting their money’s worth.

  She wouldn’t let him live it down, though.

  The inn felt solid, unlike most small village inns. The outer walls weren’t logs thrown together with mud crammed into the chinks, but actual planks that were cut and fitted tightly together. The place even had a wood floor. Each guest room only had enough room for a single bed and a washstand, making it tight quarters, but Sevana suspected that just from the look of the outside. The building couldn’t be called spacious by any stretch of the imagination. The beds were clean, the dinner meal had been hearty food that wouldn’t poison her, and the bath water fresh without any sulfur smell to it. She couldn’t ask for more than that.

  With her hair still damp from the bath, she sat cross legged on her bed and pulled out her notebook on Bel’s curse. By the light of the oil lamp on the windowsill, she pulled out a never-inking quill and flipped to a clean page.

  The sliver of ice from the Endless Sea had a power of one (originally, at least), and the captured moonlight and captured sunlight both had a power of two, and of course the Dragon’s Breath had a power of seven, which gave Bel’s curse a very powerful rating of twelve. Or at least, that had been the power at the very beginning, when it was first cast. Also, of course, the power had faded and warped over time. (How, she was still discovering as the numbers changed from day to day.) But it certainly hadn’t gotten stronger, so if she could devise something stronger than twelve, then it would be an easy victory.

  Argh, I can’t believe I thought that. ‘Stronger than a twelve?’ Who am I kidding? A 12th level spell is almost as high as you can go without breaking some serious taboos!

  She’d never experimented with the Mudlands before and so hadn’t been quite sure of their power level. Sevana had assumed somewhere between a three to five since it was running water and a natural, if unusual, landscape. It had, in fact, turned out to be somewhere around a four. Not nearly powerful enough. Well, it would be if she could leave Bel in there making mud palaces for a year straight. But she hardly thought he’d be willing to do that.

  Sevana let her head thunk loudly against the wall behind her. If there was an easy solution to this problem, she didn’t see it.

  A soft knock echoed on her door before it cautiously creaked open and Bel’s head came into view. “Sevana? Everything alright?”

  “Fine,” she responded with a roll of the eyes. Where did this busy-body nosiness of his come from? He was constantly checking up on her during the course of the day even when she’d made it clear that she didn’t need any help. He’s bound to make some pampered woman a fabulous husband someday. Provided she doesn’t clobber him for being overprotective.

  He eyed the open book on her lap. “The results from today’s test weren’t very heartening, were they?”

  Understatement. Vast understatement. She had a bad feeling that it would come down to bartering with a water dragon for help no matter how many calculations she ran. And they didn’t have the necessary bartering power to get a dragon to agree right now.

  He came all the way in without a by-your-leave, kicking the door shut behind him and sat on the edge of her bed, one leg tucked under the other. He took in a breath before asking her directly, “Be honest with me, Sevana. How bad is it?”

  For a moment, she didn’t know how to answer him. This was why she didn’t like to help people, curse it. Because they looked at her like that, with absolute faith and trust, as if she could somehow solve all of the problems in the world when in reality she couldn’t. In reality, it took every ounce of skill, every bit of knowledge she possessed, to keep the ones around her alive without somehow blundering and messing everything up. Prodigy was not synonymous with perfect. Didn’t anyone realize just how fallible she really was?

  Strangely enough, Bel smiled at her and gave her an encouraging nod. “It’s alright. Tell me. I’ve been hearing nothing but bad news for the past ten years. I know how to deal with the ugly truth.”

  She slammed the book shut and tossed it to the other side of the bed, fighting the urge to scream in frustration. Sevana hated imparting bad news more than anything, mostly because it meant that someone else had crafted something better than she could. Her pride always smarted at such moments. With a deep breath, she ground it under a mental heel and answered steadily, “Pierpoint explained that all elements have power in them, and that there’s a hierarchy to it.”

  “Right,” he agreed immediately. “True sources of an element have a higher power to it than other things.”

  Bel had one of those minds that he could retain anything once you taught it to him. Sevana blessed the heavens for his intelligence. She hated dealing with stupid people. “All of those elements combined give an overall strength rating to the spell. Your spell has a rating of twelve, or at least it did when it was first cast, and that is one of the highest ratings you can obtain. Well, without breaking the rules.”

  “You said when first cast,” he interrupted with a frown. “What is it now?”

  “Depends on what you’re doing,” she answered with forced patience. “If you’re outside of Big for any length of time, then the Dragon’s Breath power is renewed a little. You’re hovering somewhere between a 9 to a 9.5, which is still very powerful
for an old spell.”

  He rubbed at the back of his still-damp hair, head hanging. “Almost sorry I asked,” he muttered under his breath. Looking back up he asked, “So what power did the elements we test have?”

  “The Milby River had an eight, the oak tree had a four and the Mudlands today had a four.”

  Bel thought about that for a moment before venturing, “So the most effective one was the river?”

  “It’s actually more complicated than that. Elements that are similar to the one used in your curse strengthens the elements in there and feeds power into the spell. Conversely, if you use an element that is the opposite of it, then it will weaken the power of that element. So even though the oak tree only had a four power rating, it still is the opposite of wind, and so it had an effect on your curse.” Just how had she started lecturing on the basics of power in elements, anyway?

  “Which is why you tested it, even though you knew it wasn’t as naturally strong as the river,” he said in enlightenment, perking up slightly. “Alright. I think I understand. So what breaks a 9.5 spell?”

  “That’s the problem,” she growled in renewed aggravation. “Nothing does. No power in this universe is stronger than an eight, and very few of them are even that powerful. That’s why I’ve been searching for a combination of elements because the strength of two combined will be more powerful automatically. But Bel, I’m not saying that a 10 power will break your curse. It doesn’t have to just be more powerful but overwhelmingly so. At least a twelve. Thirteen or fourteen would be better.”

  She’d lost him. She could see it in his expression even before he opened his mouth and objected, “But why does it have to be that more powerful?”

  “Because you’ve been living with it for ten years!” She ran a hand through her hair, temporarily forgetting that she hadn’t yet combed it, and got her fingers caught in a snarl. She yanked her hand free with a wince even as she explained shortly, “You’ve developed an affinity for the curse. Your body is used to being attached to it. It’s going to take a lot of power to thoroughly purge it from your system.”