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

by Rain Oxford

  “I don’t understand. If you offered to help him, why does he hate you? Did you wait too long?”

  “No.” He was silent for a few moments. “I left his world with the intention of watching over him. I was so certain I could help him… and then I had a new dream. In it, I saw him using his powers, just like before, but this time, it was to kill people. The innocence in him was gone, leaving him something more monster than man. I was confused. I was even frightened. How could he go so wrong?”

  I got a sinking feeling in my stomach.

  “He found me. I had tried to hide myself, but the minute he discovered his powers… the minute he touched a paintbrush… he was already more powerful than me. He could make anything he painted come true. If there were limits to his powers, I am unaware of them. He was still innocent, though. He was so happy he was shaking when he came to me and said he was ready. He was ready for me to take away his misery and make him a great man.”

  “And you turned him down.”

  He lifted his head and howled mournfully. “I gave him hope and I took it away! I was afraid of him and his magic. I was afraid I was the reason he would become malevolent and I was right! By rejecting him, I made him what I feared. I knew it the minute he left, but by then, it was too late. I never found him again because he never wanted to be found.”

  “How is he still alive? That was hundreds of years ago.”

  “He has more power than I can imagine. Time travel is nothing. Death itself is probably a game to him.”

  “This actually explains why he chose the people he did to help him; they were a way to manipulate you. Like, you were helping him against your will, through people you knew. It also explains why he automatically hates me. You were going to train me to be a sorcerer before I realized that being me was better.”

  Merlin nodded. “As I had said; if it had not been for him, you would not be my apprentice. He is not in the wrong here; I am. Everything he does stems from what I had done to him. I never told you about it because I was too ashamed, and because I never thought I would see him again.”

  “He knows a lot about you.”

  “His power is infinite.”

  “Thank you for telling me.”

  “You will die tomorrow, and it will be my fault.”

  “I don’t blame you, but because I know you won’t believe me, I forgive you.” I stood. “Now, I need to tell Kalyn I’m going to be late making it back to the castle.” He howled again, but I didn’t stop. I didn’t want him to see me upset. I didn’t blame him. I didn’t blame the Painter, either.

  It was Merlin’s visions that were the problem.

  * * *

  Several of us had tried transporting out to get some healing potions, but it didn’t work. Although it looked like Shaerl would survive, the Rynorm men were somber. They just hoped she would wake in time to join the fight. To them, it would have been a dishonor if she missed it, since she was the heart of the family. Malaki directed me to my father’s room, but before I could knock, I heard a familiar voice.

  “You’re not afraid of anything,” Livia said. My aunt’s voice was clear as day and easily recognizable.

  “He defeated my mother. I know when I’m outmatched. I never have been before, but apparently, it is a concept I comprehend. I thought I owed it to you to say goodbye.”

  “Don’t you dare,” Livia said angrily. Since she’d had her sorcery removed, I was shocked to hear her so demanding. “You said we would be together in the end. You promised me that. We don’t get to have a life together and I understand why. I got over it. But when we die, it will be together and it will be after my sister is gone. Do you understand?”

  No answer.

  “Do you understand?” she asked, louder and slower.

  I heard my father sigh. “As you wish.”

  “Good. Then tell me you love me and answer the door. I think your son wants to say something.”

  He whispered something and then said, “End call.” After a moment, he sighed again. “Come in, Ayden.”

  I did, hesitantly, and saw that he was holding the small hand mirror. “You took it so that you could keep in contact with Livia?”

  “What does it matter? You came in here so you could use it to contact someone.”

  I nodded. “Her name is---”

  “Kalyn, I know. She was the girl at Magnus’s castle.” He stood, approached me, pressed the mirror against my chest, and whispered in my ear. “If you want that girl to keep breathing, you will never mention to my mother that she’s a Sjau. You don’t know what it’s like to be separated from the person you love because Shaerl Rynorm doesn’t agree to it.”

  “But, I don’t love Kalyn; I’m just trying to talk to her because I promised I would help her fight.”

  “Keep telling yourself that. It will help you sleep at night.”

  I made a promise in that moment, that when we survived the battle, and after I helped Yuri save his kingdom, I would come up with some way to help my father be with Livia. It would be a little weird when my father was also my uncle… but I would get over it for their sake.

  And unlike Merlin, I never broke a promise to myself.

  * * *

  “I don’t understand,” Kalyn said.

  “When is the other kingdom going to attack?”

  “In three days.”

  “Then I’ll make it. I just can’t get back today, like I said I could. I wanted you to know so you wouldn’t worry.”

  “Why aren’t you going to be back today?”

  “I told you. I’m trapped on the Rynorm island by an extremely powerful sorcerer who is going to sink the island at sunset tomorrow if we can’t defeat him by then. I’ll be a couple of days late.”

  “How can you be sure he won’t kill you? If he’s powerful enough to stop you from transporting out, he’s powerful enough to kill you.”

  “Like I said; I’m stubborn.”

  * * *

  “Mother hasn’t woken yet,” Malaki said. “We need healing potions, but my wife can’t get to us.” His wife was the only mage in the family.

  Merlin, Yuri, the Rynorm sons, and I were all in the living room, surrounded by hatchlings. While I had been talking to Kalyn, they had been bringing the young dragons in out of the cold. Kalage was by Shaerl’s side so that she wouldn’t wake up alone.

  “I know some…” Yuri’s voice faded when everyone turned to him.

  “Yes, Yuri?” I asked.

  “I was trained by mages. I could only do wizardry, but I was raised to know as much as I could about everything. While I can’t enchant a potion like a mage can, I know plants that can be used to help. I can make all kinds of teas for everything from energy depletion to open wounds.”

  “We don’t have many resources on the island and what we do have is being buried in snow as we speak, so go now. Keamon and Kador, go with him.” As they got to the door, the dragoness struggled. “It’s too cold out there for a hatchling,” Malaki said.

  Yuri reluctantly turned to me. “Will you protect her for me?”

  I nodded. He came to me and gently transferred the hatchling to my arms. “Why me, though? The Rynorms are the best in raising dragons.”

  “You helped me chase her across three worlds to save her, and I know if anything happened to me, you would do it again if she needed you. Most importantly, I know you won’t punish her for what I did.” With that, they left.

  The hatchling stared after him and let out a mournful… howl… as soon as he was out of sight. “Merlin, did you have something to do with this?”

  “What? You think I am her father? I will take a paternity test to prove otherwise.”

  Unfortunately, our attempts to lighten the mood had no effect on the Rynorms, or the dragoness. In fact, when I looked down at the hatchling, she had turned solid black. “What’s the plan?” I asked. “He has to have a weakness we can exploit. We need to set a trap for him.”

  “The Painter has no weaknesses. He could not kill me
because I was immortal. Now he has returned to finish the job. I will face him and I will die, but in doing so, I might be able to convince him to let you all go.”

  “You can’t just give up and let him kill you.

  “I deserve it for telling him he was unworthy of my training. I gave him hope and---”

  I stood up angrily, startling the dragoness in my arms. “Stop!” The dragoness hopped onto my shoulder and hissed. “You didn’t make him like this. You rejected him, but you’re the only one calling it a mistake. There’s no telling what he would have done to you if you had agreed to train him. For all you know, his parents made him like this. Life can be pretty hard, Merlin. Not everything that happened to him is your fault. You weren’t responsible for him. You did the best you could for everyone. You did what you thought was right and having seen him myself, I’m pretty sure you succeeded! You rejecting him once isn’t what did that to him, at least not if his mind was stable to begin with.”

  “You cannot---”

  “I’m not finished!”

  He shut up.

  “You’re my best friend! If you hadn’t come along, my mother would have killed me a long time ago, so don’t say you don’t deserve to live. I deserve for you to live! I don’t care that you lie sometimes. I believe in you and since you’re the one who taught me to believe in myself, I think it’s about time you do the same.”

  The room was filled with nothing but the sound of my irritated breathing.

  And that was irritating.

  “I’m finished, so someone talk before I start up again!”

  No one said a word for a very long moment.

  “Well, that was such an impressive speech I regret missing the part that got you so fired up,” came a soft voice from the hallway. Every Rynorm gasped with relief; Shaerl was awake, standing on her own two feet.

  * * *

  I was in a dark pit that was only high enough that I couldn’t see over. Standing above me, laughing cruelly, was Ilvera Dracre. I tried to climb out, but the walls of the pit were slimy mud. This made her laugh harder. “Struggle all you want, until your fingers are bloody. It won’t make any difference. You’re going to be buried like a worm.”

  That wasn’t my mother’s type of threat, which assured me it was a dream. I stopped trying to climb out and instead focused on visualizing my wand. Thanks to Merlin’s persistence in my lessons, I was soon able to imagine it strongly enough that I could feel the smooth wood in my hand. Once I was confident in it, I released my power. It shot through my fake wand and surrounded me, about to levitate me out of the pit.

  At the same time, she pointed her wand at me and black lightning blasted out of it.

  * * *

  A heavy smack to my shoulder woke me and, considering the circumstances, I screamed. Then I said some things to my eldest uncle that would have been extremely impressive had I been holding my staff. On the other hand, they would have been extremely unimpressive had I been holding my wand.

  “Relax, Sjau. It looked like you were having a bad dream, so I woke you as gently as I knew how. It’s morning now.”

  We were still in the living room, trying to come up with a plan. Apparently, plans were not easy to come by. Despite the fact that every Rynorm was highly intelligent, powerful, and trained by dragons, no one could come up with a plan that Merlin didn’t shoot down by saying, “he can make your entire island turn to ash with a stroke of his brush.”

  By the tenth time he said that, I was getting tired of hearing it, as it was neither helpful nor encouraging. “There has to be someone more powerful than him.”

  “Which does us no good because we are in here, and they are not.”

  And then an idea occurred to me. “I don’t know who we need, but I know what we need.”

  “What’s that?” Malaki asked.

  “We need a ghost.”

  Merlin sat up, curious as to where I was going with that.

  “Why?” Malaki asked.

  “Because they can go through anything and even be---”

  “Invisible,” Merlin interrupted. I nodded. “That is brilliant. His power is over everything he can paint. If he has a weakness, invisibility makes the most sense.”

  “So we attack him invisibly?”

  “No. He knows our faces; he could easily paint us back into our normal state. We need someone he has not seen.”

  “Then it’s hopeless. No one stayed inside when he attacked. We can ask the dragons.”

  “The hatchlings?”

  “Right. I forgot they’re the only ones left right now. That’s good; at least they’re not in danger. Actually…” I said, feeling ill just saying the word. “There is someone… who wasn’t outside when the Painter attacked.”

  “You don’t mean that evil creature I have locked in the box,” my father said.

  “I do mean her. Ilvera might be the only thing evil enough to defeat him.”

  “That is…” my father trailed off and rubbed his face with frustration. “… not the worst idea you’ve ever had.”

  “It would be suicide for her,” Merlin said.

  “It’s Ilvera. Who cares?” Malaki asked.

  “I care,” Father argued. “I still need her for something more important in the future.”

  “She was the smartest of the Dracres,” Shaerl reasoned. “If invisibility gives her an edge, then I can see her at least distracting him for us.”

  “She’ll turn on us,” I said.

  “She’s smarter than that.”

  They excluded Merlin and me after that, so we went outside. They said they knew Ilvera better than me, but it wasn’t true. I had used her against Baltezore and it had backfired. The Rynorms would use her against the Painter. No matter what excuses they came up with, it was a good plan. It was a sorcerer’s plan.

  The Rynorms were extremely powerful people, but they were still sorcerers, so if they could force one enemy to fight another, they would. It seemed so wrong when someone else wanted to do it, even though I had done the same thing. Perhaps my father had manipulated me into making that decision. Or maybe I was more of a sorcerer than they gave me credit for.

  Either way, I knew what the Rynorms would do, and what Ilvera would do. That world I had sent my brothers too… the one without magic… would it hold Ilvera?”

  “Yes. It would be as if the black star had stripped her magic from her.”

  “I remember the code.”

  “I will find something to paint it with. You decide where you want it.”

  He went back into the house. Ilvera Dracre deserved whatever she got, but that didn’t mean I wanted to deliver her punishment. For someone like Ilvera, losing her magic was the worst thing that could possibly happen to her. She would be unable to take care of herself at first. She would try to force people to do her bidding and without magic to enforce her will, she would be overpowered.

  I never wanted to take anyone’s power away.

  However, I knew what she could do, and I wouldn’t let her terrorize my friends and family… or me. Just because she was my mother didn’t mean she had the right to make me wish I was never born. She didn’t own me. I didn’t have to love or respect her because she had never earned that. I would do what I had to do to stop her.

  And if, for some reason, she didn’t turn on us, no one would have to know what I had planned.

  Merlin returned at that point and gave me a knowing look. “What?”

  “Nothing, young sorcerer. I am just realizing how much you have changed since you got out of your mother’s house.”

  “I never told you, but I was going to turn back. That night we met, I had already decided to go back to her in the morning.”

  “I knew.”

  “How?”

  “I just knew.”

  I chose a spot to paint the portal. The only thing Merlin could find was a bottle of white paint. The snow was as deep as my knees by then and was still coming down in large flakes. We made the best hole in the snow we could,
painted the portal, and then covered it. By then, I was shaking.

  My robe protected me from the wind and repelled the cold of the snow clinging to it, but snow had gotten under it, melted, and reached every bit of my body. It weighed me down. My panting breaths came out as fog in front of me, as if it was stealing away my air somehow. The cold stung my nose and breathing too deeply hurt my lungs. My hood protected my ears, at least, but my hands were so cold I could no longer move my fingers.

  “We need to go inside now,” Merlin said. “You need dry clothes before you get hypothermia, if you have not already.”

  “What’s that?”

  He sighed. “I am surprised you have not read about it in your books.” On the way inside, he described it to me.

  As it turned out, I had heard of it, but it was a northern sickness and it had never been something I’d had to worry about before… especially in the summer. Once inside, eager to warm my hands by the fire, I ignored Merlin’s warning to take it slow. I would not make that mistake a second time.

  Fortunately, with as many cousins as I had, there were some clothes in the house that fit me, and they were made for cooler weather. Nevertheless, I felt naked without my robe, which was drying by the fireplace.

  Kille joined me in the living room. “We have decided to go through with the plan to release Ilvera. If she defeats the Painter and survives, we have agreed not to imprison her in the syrus again.”

  “She can’t be left free on Caldaca.”

  “No. I will take her to another world where she can rule until I have use of her.”

  “We can use the syrus to trap the Painter in,” I said.

  “Nonsense. We will kill him.” My father’s tone told me it was not up for discussion, but I couldn’t stand Merlin’s pained expression.

  “Merlin said that the Painter was---”

  “We are sorcerers,” Father interrupted. “We kill our enemies.”

  Merlin looked at the fire. I stood up… literally and figuratively. “Well, I’m not a sorcerer. I’m a Sjau. I’m whatever I want to be. I wouldn’t let Ilvera control me and I’m not letting you, either. You can kill him if you get to him first. I’m going to do what I can to trap him in the Syrus.”