Heroes at Odds

by Moira J. Moore

  In time, the lights faded out. The screams stopped, and the intensity of the footsteps pounding through the halls lessened. That soothed my headache as well.

  “I think he’s given up,” said Taro. “Would his casters be able to feel whether the lights were getting through?”

  I had no idea.

  We waited. A long time, I felt. It was over. What was Browne doing?

  Taro was pacing again, looking grim. He could feel the tsunami coming. I wondered if he was having to fight off channeling it. He was used to attacking events as soon as he felt them.

  And finally, Browne came back. “Everything all right?”

  “There’s a tsunami coming, damn it,” Taro snapped. “She has to be able to Shield.”

  “Nice to see you’re so worried about her,” Browne muttered, blowing her bangs out of her face.

  That wasn’t the issue right then; it wasn’t what was important.

  Browne dug around her sack again, this time taking out a small box, longer than it was wide and deep. She opened it and took out a small, shiny dark blue leaf. She held it out to me. “Put this under your tongue.”

  When I took the leaf from her, I realized it was hard, brittle, and sharp. That wasn’t going to be comfortable to be putting under my tongue. However, as soon as it was in place, it began to dissolve.

  And as it dissolved, its flavor crept out from under my tongue, sliding over the sides of my mouth and crawling onto my tongue. I, to the best of my knowledge, had never eaten rancid meat, but I imagined this was somewhat what it tasted like. “Zaire!”

  Browne put a hand under my chin and pushed up. “Keep your mouth shut.”

  It was vile. Far worse than the kyrra powder.

  “Swallow,” Browne ordered.

  I closed my eyes instinctively. The leaf had dissolved completely: my mouth was filled with curdled saliva.

  “Swallow.”

  I swallowed. I couldn’t help screwing my face up with disgust. “Is this some form of entertainment for you? Concocting remedies that taste that bad?”

  “Yes, it is,” Browne answered with sarcasm that was impossible to ignore. “That was for your head.” She held out a small dark orange bottle. “This is for your stomach.” She pulled out the cork. “It’s going to taste spectacularly awful.”

  “Lovely.” I took the bottle.

  “Just one sip.”

  I reluctantly allowed a small amount of fluid to flow over my lip and into my mouth, reminding myself I was a Shield and had vast stores of endurance and discipline. It didn’t actually taste as bad as the leaf. It was sour enough to bring tears to my eyes, but still superior to the flavor of the leaf.

  “How long is this going to take?” Taro demanded.

  Browne glared at him. “What is your problem?”

  “A tsunami is coming,” he practically snarled.

  “There will come a point where he won’t be able to keep himself from channeling,” I explained. “And if I can’t Shield, he’ll die.”

  “And then so will she,” he added. “We really don’t have a lot of time, and if we’re not ready it will be a mess for absolutely everyone. All right?”

  Browne grumbled under her breath.

  “How long will it take to work?” Taro demanded.

  “It’s different for different—”

  “Are we talking hours? Days? What?”

  She was still glaring at Taro, but her voice was mild when she said, “It should be under an hour.”

  Taro growled and paced.

  I crossed the room to get my purse.

  “You should be lying down,” Taro objected.

  “I want the spell components at hand.” But to make him feel better, I returned to the bed with my purse, and once I had the ingredients organized the way I liked, I lay down.

  While they tasted awful, Browne’s medicines were effective. It didn’t take long for the pain and nausea to assuage a little. “All right, you can start.”

  “Not yet,” Browne objected. “I can still see the pain around your eyes.”

  “It’s good enough.”

  “I’ll be the judge of that.”

  No, I would. I looked at Taro. “You can start.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I am.”

  He took a deep breath and visibly relaxed, his shoulders lowering just before his shields dropped.

  And, yes, it was harder than it should have been, and it brought my headache ringing back to close to its original pressure, but we were able to get the job done, and that was all that mattered.

  I didn’t like being watched while I channeled, but it seemed like it was happening more and more often.

  So I put it out of my mind. “Thank you for all your work tonight, Healer Browne. You protected the manor and alleviated my discomfort. I don’t know how to repay you.”

  “As far as I know, you’re not required to.”

  Well, no, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t wish to demonstrate gratitude. I would have to think about it.

  “I want to teach you the spells I used to protect the manor,” Browne said, packing her supplies in her bag.

  “Not right now,” Taro objected. “She’s exhausted.”

  “No, not right now,” Browne agreed. “I will return in the afternoon. I will show you what I did. I’ll want to speak to Her Grace, too. If Kent is prepared to engage in these kinds of attacks, there is more we should be doing.”

  “Like what?” I asked.

  “I don’t know yet.” She rose to her feet. “Get as much rest as you can. We’ll need you to be lively.”

  I packed my purse as Taro showed Browne out. Then I flopped back on the bed and stared at the canopy.

  “How’s your head?” Taro asked.

  “Right now, I’m wishing it wasn’t actually there.”

  “I think you should eat something.”

  My stomach did not like the sound of that. “I don’t.”

  “You haven’t eaten enough today. I’m going to see what I can get from the kitchen. Then you can sleep.”

  “I feel like all I’ve done is sleep,” I complained.

  “Well, you’ve been using your mind in unnatural ways, haven’t you? And taking drugs. Of course you’ll be knocked about. I won’t be long.”

  I sighed. I closed my eyes. The headache and the nausea continued to ease, just a little bit at a time, but I couldn’t relax. Our warning hadn’t delivered a promising response. I didn’t know what would. How could anyone respond to an unprecedented attack like this?

  I had no idea. Probably no one else did, either.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Browne returned to the manor the next afternoon, and I met with her in the front room. Being the person she was, she wasted no time and led me down to the cellar.

  “I relied on the old standbys,” she said. “North, south, east, west. It’s usually safe to start there.” She drew me into a corner that I presumed corresponded with one of the directions. She pulled away a sack of something—turnips?—revealing a small glass set into the floor. Inside it was a chunk of crystal from the cave. Wrapped around the glass was a length of red yarn. “It’s fairly simple, really,” she said. “I just hum the right note, which awakens the crystal. The glass picks up the note and the vibration carries back and forth between the glass and the crystal. This particular shade and make of yarn carries the influence far. So . . .” She hummed, and the glass filled with light. She pulled me to another corner of the cellar, revealing another piece of crystal within. She hummed, and not only did this glass fill with light, but a beam of light developed between the two glasses. She did the third, and then drew me back to the entrance of the cellar, where she had buried the forth. “We have to make sure we’re standing outside the range of the beams before we close the square,” she explained. “Or we’ll be stuck inside until the cast fails.”

  “How long does that take?” I asked.

  “I’m not sure, I couldn’t stay to watch, but I wou
ld guess a couple of hours. I was able to leave shortly after treating you.”

  “Why would this keep you from leaving? It’s just the cellar. And how did this protect the house from the lightning?”

  “I also did it in the attic and around the manor. It shielded the entire structure.”

  “But you said you’d never come across anything quite like these crystals before.”

  “I haven’t.”

  “Then where did you get the spell?”

  She shrugged. “I just did what made sense.”

  “You mean you made a spell up?”

  “Aye.”

  “Just on the fly?”

  “It wasn’t that difficult, really.”

  “How do you do that? Just make things up?”

  Another shrug was the only response it looked like I was going to get. “Come with me,” she said. “The others are collecting at mine. We thought it best to have a discussion.”

  “What? Right now?”

  “Do you have somewhere else you need to be?”

  “No, I suppose not.” So I followed her out of the cellar and then out of the manor.

  “No one was hurt, yesterday,” Browne told me. “There wasn’t even a lot of structural damage. News of that will reach Kent. He will try again.”

  “He doesn’t appear to be endowed with any great focus.”

  “He’s using the scatter approach. Spells. Physical attacks. There are ever more rumors about Fiona being incompetent, which I have no doubt Kent is helping to spread. And I think the fish are being poisoned deliberately.”

  “It seems like it, but that doesn’t make sense. Why would he deliberately destroy a resource that contributes to the wealth of an estate he wants to take?”

  “Possibly he can remove the poisonous element after he’s successful.”

  “Possibly? So if there is such a spell, you don’t know of it?”

  “It seems to me that I’m not the only one creating new spells. We’re going to have to catch up in some way.”

  “I wonder how she’ll react to that.” I didn’t like it. And maybe Fiona would object to having tenants with that kind of power. I would, in her place.

  “It’s the one way we can help her. She has enough to worry about without dealing with Kent.”

  “You mean, the discord among the tenants.”

  “And that the land isn’t settling to her.”

  I frowned. “I’m not sure what that means.”

  “The land is having difficulty adjusting to Her Grace, because she wasn’t born here.”

  “I don’t understand that.” Or believe it, really.

  “Spells are stronger here. They’re coming back faster here than anywhere else.”

  I was aware of that theory. “What does that have to do with who the titleholder is?”

  “Blood is a particularly powerful component in spells.”

  Aye, I’d heard that. “But Her Grace invoked the ritual making her the titleholder. I thought that was powerful.”

  “It is, but she was chosen from outside the immediate family. She wasn’t a natural heir.”

  “The law doesn’t recognize natural heirs. Titleholders can choose anyone they want.”

  “What the law recognizes is very different from what natural power recognizes. This title was kept in the immediate Karish family for generations. Source Karish was born here. The land may recognize Source Karish in a way it doesn’t recognize the Duchess.”

  Westsea had wealth.

  Westsea had political might, though that might be waning.

  Flown Raven was a powerful place for magic.

  Neither the Dowager nor the Emperor had been born in Flown Raven; neither carried Karish blood. They would probably have similar difficulties should they own the property themselves. Worse problems, possibly, than Fiona was experiencing.

  The Dowager had run the estate when Taro’s brother had the title, and she had tried to rule the estate when Fiona first arrived. She thought Taro had no spine of his own. She probably assumed she could rule the estate if Taro had the title. But the real question was whether she was acting on behalf of the Emperor, and if she was, why? What would she get out of it?

  “Wait a moment. You said, earlier, that the marriage contract had some kind of spell supporting it, and that this was severed or something when I was called to the Academy.”

  “Aye.”

  “So why didn’t Taro’s call to the Academy sever his connection to the land?”

  I watched her think about that. “His father held the title,” she said. “And then his brother. Source Karish was already a Source when he became the heir. There was no severing event after that.”

  “He asked the Empress to sever him from his family after his brother died,” I said. “He officially abjured the title. Doesn’t that count?”

  “I’d forgotten that.” She tapped her teeth with a fingernail. “That might be enough. He may experience similar difficulties to Her Grace should he take the title now.”

  “Can we tell everyone that? It might make things easier for Her Grace.”

  “I want to think about that for a bit, make sure that kind of information would actually help her.”

  All right then.

  We reached Browne’s cottage. Her kitchen felt very crowded with all the members of the casting group within. They stood clustered around the large table, and on the surface of the table was a collection of bunches of dried blossoms and herbs, small pots of powders of various colors, cinnamon sticks, shards of wood, and pieces of crystal from the cave. “Thank you all for coming,” said Browne. “I think we can agree that someone is attacking Flown Raven, and will attack again.” She didn’t mention Kent. I wondered if he had been discussed by the circle. “As many of the attacks involve spells, I believe it our duty to meet those attacks and hopefully stop any further assailments from happening. So, does anyone have any ideas?”

  “Patrols,” said Mitloehner. “There should be as many of us walking the grounds as possible at all times. When whoever is doing this hears of it, it will act as a deterrent.”

  “All of the grounds,” Thatcher added. “Not just the perimeter of the manor.”

  That seemed to be a weak strategy.

  “That’s an enormous area,” said Browne. “And people can’t spare that kind of time away from their work.”

  “If we come up with a long yard way of calling each other, we could keep the numbers down.” There was something about Thatcher’s voice that made it clear they’d been disputing this before our arrival.

  “We do not come up with spells,” Mitloehner snapped.

  “You don’t have to work as hard as the rest of us, old man,” spat Berlusconi. “You can afford to spend hours walking the grounds, day after day. We can’t.”

  “There is no reason not to see if we can create a suitable spell,” said Thatcher. “All spells had to be created by someone at some time.”

  “The First Landed spent centuries, maybe even millennia, crafting these spells,” Mitloehner declared.

  “We don’t know that. For all we know, they made up three spells before breakfast every day.”

  “Perhaps they did, but we are not them.”

  “That doesn’t mean we’re less than them.”

  “It is likely they had an intensity of training we lack.”

  “There’s no way to know that. They had all sorts of machines, machines grand enough to take them between worlds. What need had they for spells? It may have been nothing more than a hobby for them.”

  This was getting us all nowhere. Couldn’t they have settled this argument before I’d been brought in?

  And wasn’t that arrogant? As if my time was any more valuable than theirs. But this was frustrating. Especially as I had nothing to contribute. Being useless was so annoying.

  “She is our Duchess,” Tye interjected. “It is our duty to do anything necessary to protect her and her people.”

  “Including creating spells that i
njure people?” Mitloehner asked. “Because that’s what we’re really talking about here. This isn’t just about communicating. It’s about fighting back. And it’s not our duty to do anything like that.”

  “It is, actually,” Browne said. “We’re Her Grace’s vassals. Part of our duty is to fight at her order.”

  “With spells? Create spells to kill people?”

  “What else would you have us do? Kent is attacking us. And that no one has died so far is only luck. They were running people down with horses. They started fires. If they weren’t actively intending to kill anyone, they certainly didn’t care if they did. We can’t let this stand.”

  “It’s Her Grace’s responsibility to protect the people.”

  Fiona was trying. She just lacked the tools necessary to do it. Any titleholder would. Even in the times when titleholders more regularly attacked each other, I would wager casts had played no part in it.

  “She can’t fight against this. Not alone. You know that.”

  Mitloehner didn’t respond. He just looked grim and annoyed. The others were content to be spectators. Some were watching Browne with smiles, or frowns, or furrowed brows of thought. Others were looking down at their feet, prepared to let someone else make the decision and thereby avoid all responsibility for it.

  I was uncomfortable. This was not what I’d had in mind when I started dabbling with spells. The thought of learning spells designed to hurt people appalled me.

  I didn’t know why, though. I’d killed a man with my Shields. I’d killed a man with a knife. Why did the idea of doing something similar with a spell feel so much worse? It didn’t make sense.

  I didn’t want to do this.

  The idea that anyone who could cast could then use those spells to kill was appalling. No real training. No authority making sure the skills weren’t being abused. If such spells were being used in Flown Raven, they would be developed elsewhere. If not right then, soon.

  People didn’t kill each other a lot. Not like they had in earlier times. The deaths I’d been around had been weirdly high in number, because my life was just that special. But for the ordinary person, mortal violence was a thing of the past. The Imperial Guard didn’t really fight so much as police, protect the royals, and collect taxes. But all that might change if people thought they could kill, unseen, from the kinds of distance spells could apparently allow.