The Hero's Peril (The Sorcerer's Saga Book 5)

by Rain Oxford

  “But you did.”

  “No! I never hurt anyone! I just scared people!”

  “What about those two girls in our village. Remember? I asked you if you knew what happened to them and you said no. You were lying.”

  Zuras opened his mouth to argue, then reached into his pocket, only to realize what Merlin had done to him.

  “No! No! Give me back my magic! It wasn’t supposed to be this way! I was going to have everything! I was going to have an entire world with superheroes and supervillains! It was going to be amazing! I never would have hurt anyone outside my world.”

  “That does not erase the damage you have already done.”

  “I didn’t hurt Sheena and Teres.”

  “You lied to me.”

  “I had to. They made me promise to keep their secret!”

  “What secret?”

  “Sheena’s father was going to marry her to another boy in the village. She didn’t love him, she loved Teres, so I helped them run away.”

  Merlin looked shocked. He frowned, trying hard to detect a lie that wasn’t there. Finally, he said, “You need to stop running and hiding from your past. You can only be forgiven if you learn to forgive others.”

  “You don’t know anything!”

  “Why did you take the paint and brush?”

  “I had to.”

  “Why?”

  “They were supposed to be---” He clutched his head and cried out in pain.

  “Calm down, Rheim, and tell me what is happening. Is someone hurting you?”

  Yuri, who had finally freed himself of the net, groaned in pain. “Stop yelling!”

  Zuras continued shrieking. I pointed my staff at Zuras. “Do I do it?” I asked Merlin.

  After a moment of hesitation, Merlin nodded.

  I transformed Zuras into stone. He couldn’t feel pain or regret in that state. Afterwards, I levitated him outside and wrote a sign for the sheriff to take him. He would revert to a person after a while, but he wouldn’t have the magic to hurt anyone.

  “Now all we need is some floor space and paint.”

  Chapter 14

  When Ascelin offered to protect the magic paint, Yuri refused to hand it over.

  When I offered to protect the portal book, Ascelin refused to hand it over.

  There wasn’t a lot of trust between us. I wasn’t particularly concerned that Zuras still had the brush, since he didn’t have the other four things he was after. Merlin, on the other hand, was worried that everything seemed too convenient and coincidental.

  “If you find my ring, send it to this address,” Ascelin said, handing me a folded note.

  “What does it look like?” I asked, slipping the letter into my pocket without checking it.

  “The band looks like the body of a silver snake wrapped around the finger twice. The head of the snake is the setting for a black star sapphire, which is trapped within the snake’s fangs.

  “Are we going to call Alice again to get home?” Yuri asked.

  “No. I trust Merlin’s magic over Alice’s, so we’re going to use a regular portal. We just have to find a place large enough and private enough.”

  Ascelin disappeared into the back, saying he was making room for a portal. I wanted to tell him there was no way the tiny space would accommodate a portal, but I didn’t want to insult him.

  The portals Merlin taught me to make were wide enough for ten people to stand in. They had to be to fit all of the sigils inside the pentagram and between the inner and outer circle. The combination and placement of sigils determined the world it opened on. It could even determine the time.

  “So I can go back to when I left and save my mother all that misery?” Yuri asked when I explained it to him.

  “No,” I answered before Merlin could even begin. “If you go back to a time before we went to rescue you, it would create a paradox that would eat the world.”

  “Tear the world apart,” Merlin corrected me.

  “And it would tear the world apart.”

  Yuri looked horrified. “What’s a paradox? How do we kill it?”

  “We can’t kill it, we have to make sure it isn’t created by following its rules.” I did the best I could to sound like I knew what I was talking about. In Merlin’s mind, I asked, “Is that right?”

  “Close enough, young sorcerer.”

  “I’m going to be a king someday, so I will make the rules,” Yuri said. Despite his bravado, he had gone pale when I explained what the paradox was.

  “That doesn’t help us right now. We have to go back to sometime after we left.” I looked at Merlin again and he nodded.

  “Yuri is holding something back,” Merlin said.

  “What are you not telling us?”

  Yuri glanced between us nervously. “The voices are quieter, calmer, but I still can’t understand most of them. She keeps saying one word over and over.”

  “Who does?”

  “I don’t know. I hear at least three people. I can’t make out much, except one keeps saying ‘paradox’ and I didn’t know what it means.”

  “Is it warning you that there will be a paradox?” Merlin asked.

  “Oh!” I pulled out the stack of paper. “I need to write a letter to Kalyn.” Then I blushed. “I can do that afterwards, though.”

  “No, young sorcerer. A paradox is too great a threat to risk creating. Write your letter before we get interrupted,” Merlin said.

  “Does anyone have something to write with?” I asked. Yuri checked his pocket and shook his head. Without my bag, I didn’t have many supplies.

  Ascelin, who had come out of his room to set some books on the table, handed me a silver pen with black metal on the top and bottom. It wasn’t like any pen I’d ever used, but I didn’t want to make a fool of myself, so I pretended that I knew how to work it. “Do you have ink?” I asked.

  Ascelin laughed. “Underdeveloped worlds are adorable. The ink is inside the pen. Just write as you would if you were dipping it in ink.”

  I decided not to comment. The idea seemed so simple, yet impossible to implement. How did they keep the ink inside? “Merlin, I don’t think I like this world. Does it make me an idiot to not understand this stuff?”

  “No, young sorcerer. You were not taught because your world follows the way of magic. The simplicity of your world’s technology may make people who grew up in a later time laugh, but it is more conducive to magic. Furthermore, I see beauty in it.”

  I quickly wrote my letter exactly as I remembered it written and folded it. “I need a magic mirror.” Ascelin pointed to the table, where a handheld mirror was now right beside the book. “That wasn’t there before.”

  “No, but you asked for it. What’s your point?”

  Merlin stopped me and made me show the letter up to the mirror. The words didn’t make any sense. Merlin explained that I had to write it again, to make it match the mirrored letter perfectly, or it would come out wrong.

  I did as he said without arguing, and it took a long time to rewrite it. After several bad attempts, I showed my effort to the mirror. In it, it looked like my original letter. “How can that be?”

  “When you send a message through a mirror, it is reflected. Mason and Alice were smart enough to read the letters you wrote in a mirror, but I doubt Kalyn knows anything about mirrors.”

  “How does that work? She doesn’t have a mirror.”

  “It has to go through a magic mirror. If you send it through a dream, it has to come out a magic mirror. If you send it through one, it can appear in front of someone out of thin air. If neither of you have one, it will not work.”

  Deciding not to respond, I pointed my wand at the mirror and said, “I need to see Kalyn Goldom… before she goes to the Romanus castle.”

  The mirror immediately changed to show Kalyn sleeping. She was in a forest, resting on wildflowers, and from the dim light, I guessed it was sunrise. Her dark red hair was accented by the deep purple flowers around it.

&nbs
p; “Ayden,” Merlin said.

  I had been staring at her for a while. “Oh, sorry.” I tossed the letter through, hoping not to wake her, but the image vanished and returned to being a mirror before I could see where it landed.

  “It’s ready for you,” Ascelin interrupted, coming out of the back room.

  “What is?”

  “The portal. You’re going to have to paint the code for yourself, though.”

  I went around him and opened the door… to find that the room was massive. “How?” I asked.

  “How what? I said I would make some room. Did you think I was lying?”

  It was now a magic room that could put my mother to shame. It was larger than her cabin had been. There were shelves and desks lining the walls, covered in magical tools, potions, and ingredients. In the middle of the room was a pentagram that glowed blue surrounded by an inner and outer circle that both glowed red.

  “It would be easier if they were white, but that’s amazing,” I said.

  Ascelin pressed a white panel on the wall next to the door and the lines turned white. “So innocent,” Ascelin muttered as he turned and walked back to his reading chair.

  “How did you know to draw that?”

  “That design is the root of many spells, not just portals. I use it all the time. Keep the pen. I have plenty.”

  “Thank you.”

  I lit a few candles and set them around the circle in order to see my work. The light of the circles and pentagram actually came from carved lines in the floor. It was something in the floor that was glowing.

  Merlin found a jar of white paint on one of the shelves and had me paint the sigils using it. Merlin had made sure I knew the code for Caldaca in case we ever got separated on another world. Unfortunately, we never got to the actual traveling part, so I had lost hope I would get to see other worlds.

  “The last time we did this, you focused on finding… you… and I focused on finding… well, you. How do we do it this time?”

  Merlin smirked. “Who do you most want to see again?”

  “Um… I don’t know,” I lied.

  “Is that so?” He was not buying it. “In that case, we need to decide where to go first.”

  “We need to get to the Rynorm family so they can help Yuri with his egg.”

  “I want to go home first and see my mother,” Yuri argued.

  “I don’t have the energy to transport all three of us from your castle to the Rynorm family.”

  “Ayden, I need to see that she’s safe!” he insisted forcefully.

  “You really weren’t raised like normal wizards. Your mother must be extremely brave. I can focus on Kalyn. She’s the only one at the castle I know enough. Is there anything we should do here before we go home?” I asked Merlin

  “There is no time to waste!” Yuri insisted.

  “There will be time for traveling later,” Merlin said. “Right now, we have a prince to return and a dragon egg to hide.”

  “The portal’s ready.”

  We all stood inside it. This was Yuri’s first time traveling through a non-mirror portal. I cleared my mind and imagined seeing the night sky full of stars. I visualized the stars aligning themselves with the glowing lines. Then I unleashed my magic. I had done this enough times that my magic knew what to do, yet not enough that it was second nature. Thus, I wasn’t startled when my energy was immediately sucked into it. The portal began pulling on my magic forcefully. Although I wasn’t doing physical labor, my body reacted as if I was; I started sweating and breathing harder.

  * * *

  There was no point in trying to predict what situation we would interrupt. I didn’t know if we would appear in the middle of a crowd or alone with Kalyn… possibly during her bath… or if the king and queen would be there. I didn’t know what they would say if two people who looked identical to her son appeared.

  The last thing in the world I expected was to appear in Yuri’s bedroom with Kalyn (in her natural form) on the chair while Thaddeus and Mason sat on the bed.

  But that was what happened.

  “Welcome back, Ayden, Merlin. And this is Yuri, I presume?” Kalyn stood and approached us.

  Yuri blushed. “Yes. I’m Yuri Romanus, prince and only heir to the Romanus kingdom.” He reached out to take her hand, but I accidentally stepped between them.

  “Before we get into that, what are you two doing here?” I asked.

  Thaddeus and Mason stood. “You asked us to come,” Mason said, pulling a letter out of his pocket. The first thing I noticed when he handed it to me was that it had the same blue hawk as the note I had sent Kalyn. Unfortunately, I couldn’t read a word of it.

  “This is extremely unhelpful.”

  “You’re the one who sent it to us.” He walked over to a familiar object, covered by a familiar sheet. When he pulled down the familiar sheet, it revealed his familiar magic mirror. He used it to show me a reflection of the letter.

  Mason and Thaddeus,

  The Romanus castle on Ademora is under attack. Kalyn is there disguised as the prince, Yuri Romanus, who looks exactly like me. It’s creepy how much he looks like me. Anyway, please help Kalyn. She’ll explain more.

  Ayden

  “The castle is under attack?” Yuri asked.

  “It really is creepy how similar you two are,” Thaddeus said. “I can’t tell you two apart, and your my brother. The clothes and staff are the only giveaways.”

  “What do you mean?” Kalyn asked. She studied me closely, and then gave Yuri the same scrutinizing gaze. “How are they similar?”

  We all gaped. “How are we similar?” I asked. “I can’t tell us apart.”

  She scoffed. “Silly Ayden. I’m a magician. We don’t see with our eyes.”

  “That makes no sense.”

  “I’ll explain later.”

  “She’s right,” Mason said. “We need to focus on the battle.”

  “Other than the fact that I wrote it in my letter, why do you think the castle is under attack?”

  “The kingdom spies have warned us.”

  “What about the seer?” I asked. Every kingdom had at least one seer.

  “He went into hiding when we lost magic,” Yuri said.

  “Why would anyone want to overthrow this kingdom?”

  “Because the Romanus kingdom is unbelievably wealthy,” Yuri said. “I don’t mean just the castle, either. There is no poverty or hunger here. Everyone has immediate access to a fantastic mage, a large family of elementalists keeps the crops in excellent condition and provides delightful weather, a warrior family keeps everyone safe, and our land is teaming with gold and precious jewels. If that isn’t enough, my parents are the most loved king and queen I’ve ever heard of, so they receive more gifts than they know what to do with.”

  “You just said you have warriors. Why can’t they deal with it?”

  “They’re not really good for that kind of thing.”

  “How are warriors not good at being warriors?”

  “They keep the peace between our own people and they fill in for guards sometimes, but they aren’t official guild members and they aren’t prepared for outside attacks. Relying on them was how I got killed in the first place. We need to protect the castle ourselves.”

  I nodded. “Kalyn, Mason, and Thaddeus, you stay here and protect the castle. Yuri, Merlin, and I will go to the Rynorm family.”

  Only Yuri disagreed. “We can’t leave!”

  “We have to protect the dragon egg. You’re immortal for as long as it’s safe, but you’re also powerless. You can stay here, but I need to get the egg away from the battle.”

  He carefully pulled the egg out of the bag and held it to his chest again. “I know you’re right, but I don’t want to give it up.”

  “Why do you have to be the one to take him to the Rynorm family?” Mason asked. “You would be more help here.”

  “Because I’m a Rynorm. They’re more likely to help me than you or Th… Kalyn.”

&n
bsp; Thaddeus glared. “Kille Rynorm is my father as much as he is yours.”

  “Yes, but you haven’t met them.” The only reason they tolerated me as one of them was because I was a Sjau. Shaerl wanted a Sjau in her family and was willing to overlook my Dracre lineage in order to get what she wanted. I highly doubted they would do the same for Thaddeus.

  “It’ll be fine,” Mason said, trying to keep the peace as usual. “You can get there, stick the egg somewhere safe, and get back before sunset.”

  “It’s going to take a little longer than that. I don’t know how far Kalika is and transporting three people twice will be difficult enough. I wouldn’t be able to fight afterwards.”

  Mason grinned knowingly. “You won’t have to.” He pointed to his red, sparkly boots.

  “They suit you,” I said reassuringly. Merlin and I had found them and gave them to him as a gift. I had no idea why he was bringing them up, but I was glad he liked them.

  “You never bothered to figure out what they were, did you?”

  “They’re boots.”

  “They’re more than that.” He stomped his right foot and vanished. Thaddeus wasn’t surprised. “Aren’t they neat?” Mason asked, appearing right beside me.

  I did what any sane person would do; I shrieked and jumped back, crashing into Yuri. Thaddeus laughed hysterically. I was not amused, and neither was Yuri, who had landed on his back in order to protect the egg. I helped him up and we both checked the egg over, trying to hide our mutual embarrassment.

  “Does he do that often?” Yuri whispered.

  “You mean, be a jerk or vanish?”

  “Both.”

  “No. I think Thaddeus is rubbing off on him.”

  Merlin said something in another language and I was positive I didn’t want to understand it. Mason and Thad finally got themselves under control and Mason removed his boots. “Take these. Anyone and anything you’re touching will be transported with you. I don’t know how much they can handle, because I haven’t had a chance to do much practicing with them. Use them just like you would your wand when transporting yourself. Imagine the place you want to go and stomp your foot. They will do the magic for you so it doesn’t use up your energy.”