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Star Thief

Page 17

by Robin Kristoff

At this even the freckled mage looked up from his dinner preparations. A dark expression crossed Cylas’s face and was visibly suppressed.

  “Ah. How…useful. How much more easier for us all,” Cylas said with a slightly harder smile than he’d had before. “As I was saying before, you must come join us. There is nothing like breaking bread together for reaching a healthy understanding between differing parties. Come. Sit. Tobin, see that food is added to the pot for our guest.”

  “Guest,” Belen grunted. “Ask him why he was following us.”

  “We are going to be friendly, Belen,” Cylas said meaningfully. “Do not forget who is senior here. And I should think the answer to that should be fairly obvious. He’s come to inquire after our Karisa.” He smiled knowingly at Nolan, stroking Kris’s hair all the while. “Come, come. Sit. Belen will take your horse.”

  At this point instincts were telling Nolan, forcefully, to get on Star and run. The idea of talking to Cylas felt every bit as unpleasant as the prospect of settling down to eat in a snake pit. But Nolan let Belen slip Star’s reins out of his fingers and lead her away. Moving woodenly, Nolan edged closer and sat warily across from Cylas.

  The older man’s white teeth glinted in triumph. “Forgive me boy, we haven’t even introduced ourselves. I am Senior Magni Cylas, these gentlemen are my partner Magni Belen and our companion, the mage Tobin. And you are?”

  Nolan shrugged, trying hard to look at Cylas rather than stare at Kris. The same noisy, insistent instinct told Nolan he would regret ever giving anything about his family away to the magni. Half-truths bubbled easily to his lips in his best surly tone of voice.

  “Nolan. From Suria. Had a bit of trouble with my master so I traveled north to make myself scarce for a bit. Met Kris on the road, and the bard.” Nolan shrugged again, doing his best to look nonchalant and sure that he was failing miserably. “We got on. Learned to talk to each other eventually—I’ve a knack with languages.”

  Belen turned from picketing Star and seated himself next to Cylas with his hands on his knees. He was moving his right arm gingerly, Nolan noticed. Nolan guessed the shallow knife-wound he’d managed against the mage had not yet healed, and at that small distraction part of Nolan smiled inwardly. Both magni looked at Nolan expectantly without saying anything. Belen rubbed the wrist of his injured arm idly.

  Nolan kept with the act of being surly and slightly slow. “All right. All right. I was…worried. A little. When you took her.”

  Cylas gave a bark of false laughter. “Took her! My dear boy, you can’t ‘take’ what rightfully belongs with you. A father doesn’t ‘take’ his daughter from the arms of an ill-minded boy, or a life of meaningless drudgery. He rescues her. He saves her.”

  “You’re not her father.”

  “This girl’s father is dead,” Cylas said with the slightest touch of impatience. “The parallel remains, if you will follow me in this vein, boy. Parents guide their children into good habits and protect them from danger and unfortunate temptations. Just so does Kris need the guidance of magni, ourselves, if she is to reach her full potential. She needs our guidance to protect herself and those around her.”

  Tobin began to serve the three of them a vegetable stew with bits of dried chicken—the first hot meal Nolan had eaten in days and more meat in one sitting than he’d seen in two weeks. Serious though the situation was, Nolan’s mouth watered. He spooned his food into his mouth in the rudest manner possible.

  “I don’t understand,” he said through the food in his mouth.

  Belen snorted. “That’s hardly surprising.”

  Both magni accepted their food without acknowledgement. The mage who quietly seated himself in the circle. Now all of the Rusamites were seated together. Nolan’s blood hummed through his veins in anticipation. If they would only relax now.

  “Come now,” Cylas chided. “You must have noticed the girl is a mage. A…what are they called here? A witch.”

  “And?”

  “So you have noticed. Good.”

  Belen grunted again.

  Cylas plowed on in syrupy tones. “She is a young, inexperienced and, I’m sure you have also noticed, somewhat temperamental individual in possession of a great deal of power.”

  He waited for Nolan to respond. Nolan just stared back at him blankly. Cylas’s eyes were sharply focused on him. There was something hypnotic in them, something compelling. Nolan was again sharply reminded of a snake.

  “She has impressive gifts,” Cylas continued when it was clear that Nolan would not respond. “But it would not surprise me in the least if she has had some difficulty in controlling her gifts. Particularly after leaving the Academy, accidents are more likely. And in one so young, so inexperienced, and with her temperament…” Cylas shrugged, watching Nolan very, very closely. “An accident, a tragedy, is quite frankly common when mages stray too long from the guidance of magni, Nolan.”

  Nolan shifted, trying to find somewhere to look that was neither Cylas’s eyes nor Kris’s prone body.

  “Even in our world, despite our best efforts, her control over herself and her power was…to put it lightly, unpredictable.”

  “To put it truthfully, she was completely unreliable,” Belen quipped. “We all saw what she was like after her father died, didn’t we? Tobin, even you must have seen what she was like then.”

  Tobin grimaced, his eyes on his food. “She set the Academy roof on fire, sir. Yes, I remember that.”

  Nolan’s eyebrows rose. She set a building on fire? In Rusam? He wondered if that was even accidental. She’d told him she’d only had trouble with her magic after she left Rusam.

  “And here, without the magni’s guidance, her control would be even worse.” Cylas continued. “You must have seen something of the like. A fire. A bolt of energy. Perhaps quite accidental but dangerous nevertheless.”

  Nolan’s eyes dropped to his hand of their own volition. The scars from Tevesque were clearly visible across his palm.

  “So you’re just here to help her,” he said as levelly as he could. “What are you going to do?”

  “That’s not your concern,” Belen growled.

  “Now Belen, we want to reassure him,” Cylas chided. “We’ll do nothing bad, boy. Nothing painful. It’s merely a…a check, if you will, on where she may direct her power. A…persuasion to let her see that we mean her no harm, and that we’re all working in each other’s interests, and for the good of Rusam.”

  “No more violence. No more fighting. Better for everybody,” Tobin added, nodding.

  “Safer for everybody,” Cylas stressed. Again he caught Nolan’s eyes with his own. “No more accidents.”

  Nolan felt as though he were sliding into the black depths of Cylas’s pupils. The scars on his hand began to itch as they had not itched in over a month.

  If Kris had more control, he never would have hurt his hand.

  No, that wasn’t right.

  Nolan’s mind struggled sluggishly for a second, then settled into its correction.

  He hadn’t hurt himself. She would never have burned him if she’d had more control.

  If the magni had found Kris earlier, she would have had control over her magic. She never would have burned him. He would have been spared weeks of pain and disability—a lifetime of disfigurement.

  Somehow that thought didn’t feel right either. But Nolan couldn’t think why. Cylas smiled once more. “Now, I’m sure you’re tired after your long journey.”

  Nolan was tired. Now that he thought about it, he felt as though he could barely keep his eyes open. He struggled against a yawn. Tobin caught the bowl that began to slip from his fingers.

  “Perhaps you would like to bed down with us for the night. We can go our separate ways in the morning.”

  Nolan nodded, yawning. He struggled to his feet and turned to walk to where Belen had piled his packs. He shook the bedroll out, still yawning. He laid the smaller pack he’d kept by him during dinner—why, he couldn’t remember—carelessly by
his feet. The Rusamites were all watching him, smiling in varying degrees. Even Belen was smiling. Nolan pulled at his boots and smiled back at them. They were really not so bad as he’d thought.

  Looking quite satisfied, Cylas ran his fingers along Kris’s hairline, tracing them down her cheek, along the skin of her throat, and finally letting them rest on her shoulder. His thumb stroked her collarbone.

  It was as though someone poured a bucket of ice water over Nolan’s head in that moment. He blinked, shaking off the last dregs of his lethargy. The wrongness of what he saw before him resonated once more through his bones. The pressing, urgent need to get Kris away from these people—by whatever means—swooped through Nolan like a brushfire.

  Cylas began to frown slightly.

  Nolan ducked his head and crawled into his bedroll before Cylas could catch his eyes again. His hands pulsed with rage as he pulled them inside the fabric with him. He had no doubt at all the Rusamites had just cast some sort of spell on him to make him abandon Kris. He didn’t want to think about how close they had come to succeeding. He would not give them a second chance.

  Nolan lay still and forced his breathing to deep evenness. He didn’t bother to resettle himself away from the rock protruding into his ribcage. Nolan ignored how the roll of the ground slowly caused him to lose the feeling in his toes. He uncoiled each muscle in his body and let himself lie limp. Though it now went against every self-preserving instinct and each scrap of common sense his mother had tried to instill in him over the course of sixteen years, Nolan closed his eyes. He counted to himself to set a rhythm to his breathing that overruled the thudding of his heart.

  “Guess he’ll sleep well tonight,” Tobin said.

  “I believe he will,” Cylas’s voice still carried a smile. “We should be gone before he wakes.”

  “And the girl? I believe we agreed she’d ride with me tomorrow from first light, am I right?” Belen sounded uncertain for the first time.

  Cylas sighed. “I’m a man of my word, Belen. I promised you we would share her, and of course we shall.”

  “I don’t mean to imply otherwise, of course,” Belen answered hastily. “I hope you’ll understand—I am eager to heal the burn on my arm. With her power through the day, I think I can completely recover before we reach Vorolitz.”

  “Of course. I wish you every success on your recovery, my dear Belen.”

  Little more was said. The Rusamites finished their meal, occasionally murmuring to each other. They stirred very slowly from their seats long after the sounds of slurps and chewing died away. They murmured a bit more and tramped carelessly in and out of the campsite in search of privacy. Someone—probably Tobin, added wood to the fire. The first of them bedded down with sounds reminiscent of a pig routing for grubs. The last of the crisscross of footsteps finally ended. Cylas began to snore. Nolan kept his breathing steady: In and out. In…and…out. If there was one thing he’d learned in the past few months, it was how to wait.

  An owl hooted above him. All else grew still. Nolan leaned up on his elbows to look at the sleeping Rusamites. Cylas slept beside Kris with one hand over her waist. Belen and Tobin lay on either side of the campfire. Mindful that the appearance of sleep could be deceiving, Nolan edged his fingers along his smaller bag until he found the opening. His fingers brushed the handle of his knife.

  With the knife tucked up his sleeve, Nolan rose to his feet. Leaving his discarded boots behind, he padded barefoot over the frosty ground to the men lying by the campfire. His breath sounding abnormally loud against the stillness of the forest, Nolan slowly lowered himself until he was just over Belen’s head. He glanced once at the snoring Cylas. Though Nolan’s loathing for him ran deeper than his feelings for the others, Cylas had given his oath that Nolan would not be harmed. Hurting him would serve no purpose if the next few minutes ran as Nolan had planned.

  Under any other circumstances holding a knife over a sleeping man would have felt like the basest form of cheating. But, Nolan told himself firmly, that was when you didn’t consider magic into the mix. Nolan had to have something on his side to balance the fight. And these were men that had forced Kris to trade her freedom for her brother’s life. The boiling coil of anger burning in his gut told him quite firmly this was mere justice, and right now Nolan wasn’t interested in listening to any other voice.

  As if the knife, and the hand on it, were something quite separate from his own body, Nolan watched the blade descend until it hovered just over Belen’s throat. Nolan gulped a chest full of air and lowered the flat of the knife.

  Belen woke with a yell fit to wake the dead, and most certainly the sleeping. His eyes flew open and he jerked forwards, succeeding only in cutting himself and releasing another scream. Cylas and Tobin rolled to their feet with half-formed calls of alarm.

  Do it, Nolan thought.

  With an instinct borne of grim determination Nolan managed to lock his free arm around Belen’s chest and weight them both so that they remained kneeling on the ground. Nolan took the knife off of Belen’s skin and kept it hovering just a breath away.

  Belen grew very still. “How dare you,” he hissed. The magni seemed beyond any further words.

  Cylas and Tobin took in the situation in a matter of seconds. Their eyes darted between Nolan’s bedroll, Nolan, Belen, and Nolan’s knife.

  “He was supposed to sleep past dawn!” Belen snarled at Cylas.

  Do it, Nolan thought at them desperately.

  “Let him go, boy,” Cylas said. He sounded remarkably calm but now, finally, there was no trace of that satisfied smile in his voice. “You’re not helping anyone with this kind of rash display.”

  Tobin’s eyes flicked again. Belen’s neck was bleeding. Nolan watched the mage impatiently, not daring to risk looking Cylas in the eye again.

  “Let Kris go first. Then we’ll talk about him.”

  “She made a bargain. Herself for her brother. And we have kept our side. She cannot break hers.”

  “Then you’ll have to kill us both.”

  Tobin’s eyes flicked between the magni. He looked very tense, and very indecisive.

  Do it.

  “There will be no need for any such waste.”

  Silent rage was rippling off of Belen’s body. The magni might have been at a loss for words but Nolan’s doubted he’d remain still much longer. It was all taking too long.

  “We can discuss this as civilized men, Nolan. Come, you don’t want to hurt that man before you. Let him go and we can talk about this. About what’s best for everyone, including Karisa.”

  It was a trap. A spell. And Nolan would not listen to any more. He touched the blade to Belen’s neck again.

  The magni gasped in fresh pain. Tobin jerked.

  Do it! Now! Belen elbowed Nolan hard in the gut. Nolan winced, letting the motion roll him forwards to loosen his hold on Belen’s torso. His knife hand dropped down, giving Belen a small opening…

  He took it. The older man lunged forwards. Nolan caught him with the knife and opened one long slice along the side of Belen’s stomach. The magni rolled to the ground with a shriek, clutching the wound.

  DO IT!

  Nolan lunged for the magni with his blade raised. He felt the knife hit something soft. His own weight carried it in. Nolan could have howled in that moment. His plan had not worked at all.

  It was a relief when a weight like a felled tree hit him with a force that sent him somersaulting backwards.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Nolan allowed himself only a moment to lie on his back in a stupor. Even in his somewhat fuzzy mind he knew that lying prone and helpless blinking at the trees overhead was the last thing he ought to be doing. The world swam unsteadily as he dragged himself to his feet. Every sound that reached his ears sounded distant and wavering.

  Even so, the sound of Cylas dying was terrible to hear. Nolan had heard the vow that Cylas’s blood would boil if any harm came to Nolan, Jal or Tylan at the hands of Rusamites. Nolan had not imagi
ned what such a thing would look like. The magni seemed beyond the pain that would have permitted him the comfort of screaming. Instead he emitted wrenching, guttural, gasping sounds, his eyes huge and panicked and focused only on Nolan. Nolan made himself watch. The magni fell to his knees. His hands worked frantically over his neck. Blood spurted out of Cylas’s nose and mouth. Gurgling replaced the gasps, until finally the magni lay still and silent.

  Belen had also gone very quiet. Nolan stepped closer, his bare feet crunching the soil. The younger magni had a crisscross of burns over his throat. He lay unblinking in a puddle of the blood that streamed from his stomach wounds.

  Nolan really had not expected there to be so much blood involved in the magni’s deaths. He hadn’t known there would be such a strong, putrid smell. His stomach clenched and rolled.

  There was a clear path between Nolan and Kris now, save for Tobin standing mutely on Nolan’s right. Tobin’s eyes were huge as he stared between the magni. His breath came in shallow, shuddering gasps. His hands shook.

  “You…this is your…you killed them.”

  “They stole my friend.”

  Kris still lay motionless under the blankets the magni had given her. Nolan had hoped she would wake up once the magni were gone. He’d never planned on facing the mage alone.

  “I should kill you,” Tobin said softly.

  “Where will you go?” Nolan asked at the same time. “With the magni…gone, what will you do?”

  “That’s no business of yours.” His eyes cold, Tobin raised one hand as though he were going to throw something.

  “They won’t blame you, will they?”

  Tobin’s face froze. The power growing in his hand vanished, and his eyes grew large. This thought clearly had not occurred to him before.

  “What will they do when they find out the two magni you were with are dead?” Nolan asked softly. Tobin didn’t answer. He stared at Nolan, horror plain on his face. Nolan had a fairly good idea what would happen to a mage, almost a bodyguard, who had failed so badly.

  “They’ll think you had something to do with it, won’t they?”

 

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