Voice of Command (The Spoken Mage Book 2)

by Melanie Cellier

  “Begin,” called Thornton, and I let everything else fade away as I focused in on Natalya.

  We both held our swords loosely in front of us, but at Thornton’s announcement, I tightened my grip and lunged forward. To work one of her compositions, Natalya would need to extract and rip a piece of parchment. I, on the other hand, only had to speak mine. If I could keep her busy defending herself, it might give me the extra edge.

  She whipped up her blade equally quickly, parrying my attack and falling back several steps. I pressed forward, attacking again. This time I spoke as I came, panting out the binding words to begin my composition. I wanted to end this quickly, but I didn’t want to give anyone fuel to say that I was out to punish mages—a theory that had been suggested by my enemies in the past. So I had decided on a literal binding working—I would attempt to bind her arms and legs. With no way to compose or wield a weapon, she would have to yield.

  But I got out no more than three words of the actual composition, thrusting forward with my sword as I did so. Even as she blocked my attack, Natalya’s free hand disappeared up into the sleeve of her robe and reappeared with a small scroll.

  She had little trouble doing so since my lunge had been wild due to the concentration required to both attack, call up a mental picture of the words I needed, and speak all at the same time. And as soon as she had the composition free, she gripped part of the parchment with her teeth and ripped.

  Fire roared up from the ground in front of her and raced toward me. Abandoning my sword, I threw myself to the side, landing hard on the ground, just beyond the flames. They continued across the floor of the arena until they hit the barrier on the far side with a loud sizzle and dissolved.

  I panted for breath, forgetting all about the fire as I felt my own power—held in place by my initial binding words but then abandoned when I reacted to Natalya’s fire—stretch and snap, washing over me in a formless backlash like my very first composition in front of my parents’ store. I had lost focus and control before I could complete the working or end the binding, and my hold on the power had broken.

  For the second time in the bout, the breath was knocked out of me as the solid wave of power made my bones shake.

  Natalya paused for a second, thrown apparently by the unexpected release of my power, before jumping toward me, her sword point reaching for my neck. I scrambled out of the way just in time.

  Pushing to my feet, I ran back toward my own weapon. But when I bent over to scoop it up, I yelped and dropped it again. The fire had swept over it, and it still burned too hot to touch.

  Growling in frustration, I did the only thing I could do. Run.

  “That’s right! Run!” taunted Natalya.

  I went to speak the binding words again, but hesitated before any sounds actually emerged. A quick glance over my shoulder revealed that Natalya already had a second parchment in her hand. Without a weapon to distract her, I had no hope of composing more quickly than she could release her own working.

  So I bit back my words, unwilling to face a second backlash when every muscle still ached from the first. I would have to try good old-fashioned dodging as I had done with the fire.

  But to my surprise, she withdrew a third composition without tearing the second. For a brief moment, our eyes met across half the arena. She smirked at me, and then tore both at once. I barely had time to recognize the bubble of power that sprang up to shield her, before the entire arena floor began to shake.

  The arena shield protected the stands and the rest of our year mates, and Natalya’s own shield protected her. Leaving me the only one to stagger out-of-control across the pitching ground. Several large cracks appeared in the dirt floor, and as I attempted to leap over one, another one raced toward me.

  I landed on the edge of it, tipping forward and twisting, my ankle giving way with an audible snap. I fell, hard, screaming with pain. But it wasn’t over.

  As I lay there, chunks of the now broken ground rose up and began to catapult themselves through the air. Several careened straight toward me, and I threw up my hands to protect my face. Responding on instinct, a short phrase formed in front of my eyes.

  “Shield me!” I screamed across the arena.

  A bubble of my own power formed around me a scant second before the first of the chunks collided with it, pulverized into dust by the impact.

  I collapsed back onto the ground and closed my eyes, breathing through the pain in my ankle as several more chunks hit my shield. Then the ground stopped shaking, and silence descended. My bubble of power burst and fizzled out. Cautiously I opened my eyes.

  Thornton strode into the middle of the arena, his face livid.

  Oh good, said my exhausted brain. For once he’s actually going to reprimand one of them. He did say no lethal compositions.

  But he turned toward me, not Natalya. “I never want to see that again, Elena!”

  Chapter 7

  Wait. What? I pushed myself up on my elbows and glared at him. He was reprimanding me?

  He stopped several steps from me, ignoring the fact that I was still sprawled on the ground, my ankle twisted unnaturally.

  “This is not a game! I never want to see you compose without restrictions like that again. You’re fortunate Natalya’s attack didn’t have more force, or you could have burned yourself out completely.”

  “It felt forceful enough to me,” I muttered.

  He leaned in close, his words quiet. “I can assure you if that had been my composition, it would have carried a great deal more force than that of a second year.”

  Looking at his angry face, I believed him.

  “But better burned out than dead,” I snapped back, too angry to let it go. I knew the more power that was thrown at my shield, the more of my own power it would drain holding itself in place, but surely it was worth the risk. At least in the face of a potentially lethal attack.

  This time he answered loudly, no doubt for the benefit of the rest of the class. “Burning out could very well mean death. When a mage crafts a composition, he is careful to put only as much energy into it as he has available in the moment. That finite power in the stored composition then costs the mage nothing upon its release. With a careful accumulation of stored compositions, the limits to a mage’s power can be endless. And there is good reason we do it that way.”

  He glowered around as if someone had disputed him before continuing.

  “There are some who have composed workings in such a way that, when released, they would draw further from the mage’s strength. Many of them died. Some compositions will continue to drain you of energy even after you lose consciousness—as you nearly did, Elena.”

  I frowned at him, and then remembered how I had closed my eyes and sunk back against the ground. My movement had been due to my ankle, not exhaustion, but it seemed Thornton didn’t realize that. Did he think I had burned out, and that my shield was drawing from my unconscious body? Had he thought for a moment that his class had killed one of his students—a trainee valued by the Academy Head and various other people of importance for her research potential?

  Reluctantly I felt a small burst of understanding for his anger. I was all too aware of how strong an anger fueled by fear could be. It had driven far too many people to seek my death the year before.

  Thornton kept speaking, clearly continuing to lecture the class as a whole.

  “When composing a shield, you need it to carry enough strength to be effective. Otherwise a strong attack will burn through its stored power, causing it to fail and leave you defenseless. Since you cannot build endless power into it, you can build in various limitations to achieve your aims. For instance, you can shape it to ward only lethal blows, conserving its power for when it is most needed.”

  His volume lowered as he looked down at me. “It could also be made to shut off at a single word, so that you can collapse it as soon as help arrives. There are any number of ways to protect yourself from both attack and burn out. I suggest you learn th
em. And don’t try a trick like that in my class again.”

  He turned to stride away while I was still grasping for words. It was the first time an instructor in one of my classes had actually given specific advice to me. Advice that only really applied to a verbal composition, since there was no advantage to shutting off a stored composition to save power. With the composition released, the power could not be retained and re-stored.

  I didn’t know quite what to make of it. But I did know that his fear didn’t make what had happened here all right.

  “I thought you said no lethal compositions,” I yelled after him, loud enough for everyone to hear.

  He paused mid-stride, although he didn’t turn back to me. After a second of silence, he nodded once.

  “You will limit yourself in future, Natalya.” His gaze swept over the small cluster of second year trainees in the stands. “That goes for all of you.”

  And then he resumed his progress back to his seat.

  I slumped back down. I guess I would have to be happy with that. At least the smirk had disappeared from Natalya’s face as she resumed her own place beside Lavinia and Calix.

  Coralie and Finnian raced across the now uneven ground of the arena, kneeling down beside me.

  “Are you all right?” Coralie’s face looked as white as mine felt.

  “Well enough.” I sighed. “It’s my ankle.”

  Finnian grimaced down at the appendage in question. “I’m going to be honest. It doesn’t look great.”

  “Thank you for that wisdom.” I groaned. “Are you going to help me up or not?”

  They each took one side, heaving me to my feet, while I carefully kept my injured ankle suspended above the ground. It still hurt like anything, and I had to bite back a scream.

  “There’s good news,” he said as they helped me hobble off the arena floor. “You don’t need to go all the way back to the Academy building. Apparently old Thornton knows to expect trouble on the first arena day. Either that or he just knew you were going to be in class.”

  “Smile at me one more time, and I’ll poke your eye out,” I growled at him.

  He just laughed, helping me to sit on a section of seating some way around the arena from the rest of our year mates.

  “With that foot? I’d like to see you catch me.”

  Acacia popped up beside us, looking almost as cheerful as Finnian, so I growled at both of them.

  “Cheery as always, I see, Elena,” she said, bending to examine my ankle. “Why am I not surprised to find you’re my first patient?”

  “Because Thornton and half the class have it in for her?” My ever-loyal friend glared at both of them.

  “What she said.” I gestured weakly at Coralie.

  Acacia just shook her head and withdrew two separate curls of parchment from her purple robe. I eyed them greedily, wondering which was the pain-numbing one.

  Two rips sounded, and then a cool mist settled over me.

  “Ahhhh…” I closed my eyes and let the absence of pain wash through me, ignoring the unnerving pop from my ankle as it shifted back into place.

  When I opened them again, she was watching me with a rueful grin. “Anything else that needs attention?”

  I shook my head. The pain-numbing composition had dealt as effectively with the rest of my body as with my ankle.

  She shook her head. “I don’t know how you do it. You have far more energy than seems natural.”

  I shifted uncomfortably. Had she been watching the bout, then?

  “Funny,” I said, “you didn’t say that when I was out for two whole days at the end of last year.”

  She gave me an odd look. “You were out for two days because I worked a sleeping composition. I knew you would have been up on your feet too soon otherwise.”

  “Oh.” I avoided her eyes, not sure how I felt about that.

  She shook her head and told us to return to our year mates, and the three of us trudged off. Araminta and Clarence, two of our year mates from minor mage families, had already begun their bout. Araminta was the weakest trainee in our year, and Clarence was useless with weapons, although with the amount of time he spent with his nose in a book, he was significantly better at composition. I had no doubt he would be attending the University after his stint on the front lines—on track for an academic position, no doubt.

  Their bout was far from impressive, with none of the dramatics of my own. Araminta managed to produce a wind to push Clarence back, and he responded with an effective shield. Since Araminta wasn’t prepared for that, he managed to knock the sword from her hand, forcing her to yield.

  Thornton made some comments about being prepared for our opponent to respond to our compositions and not being thrown off when they did so, but I wasn’t really listening.

  “Hey,” I said quietly to my friends, “the arena’s been fixed.”

  Finnian glanced over at me. “A lot of power goes into maintaining the arena. At the beginning of every year the instructors all work together to refresh the shield around it. And again later in the year, if it’s taken enough of a beating to need it. And every senior mage in the creator discipline is expected to contribute at least one composition a year to restore the arena to its pristine condition. Old Thornton has a whole stash of them, ready to be whipped out and used at need.”

  “Well, that’s good to know,” I muttered. Just how many times was I going to be expected to bout like that?

  Both Dariela and Lucas went for subtle, tricky compositions, rather than showy ones, and both easily won their bouts. There were no lightning storms, or earthquakes, but a frozen sword arm and legs that collapsed at just the right moment had disabled each of their opponents just as effectively. Especially when the other trainee hadn’t seen it coming.

  Thornton praised them both highly, pointing out to us that we should strive to achieve our goals with a minimum use of power. He didn’t mention that the more finesse the composition required, the harder it was to compose in the first place. I doubted many of my year mates were up to producing the compositions Lucas and Dariela had used.

  Which put me in mind of something that had been bothering me. As I wandered back up to the Academy for lunch, I asked my friends about it.

  “Did those compositions seem rather powerful to you?”

  “Which ones? Dariela’s was impressive, I thought,” said Saffron. “The timing was so exact.”

  I shook my head. “I mean Natalya’s. That was a lot of brute force she used. I can’t see her replacing them in a hurry.”

  Finnian grimaced. “She might have gotten them from someone else, but she would get herself in a lot of trouble if she did that and the instructors found out about it.”

  Mages could choose to craft compositions so that anyone could work them or so that they could only be worked by the composer.

  Finnian sighed and rubbed the back of his neck. “You’re probably right that she didn’t compose them this week, though. No doubt she’s been receiving extra training throughout our break. She’s probably come back with a store of combat compositions ready to go. Everyone knows we bout this way in second year.”

  My shoulders slumped. Of course she’d been working on them for weeks. I had tried to keep up my combat conditioning, not wanting to return to the position of last in the class again, but my efforts had been useless. And even if I’d had a tutor and opportunity, I had no way to store my compositions. Having unnatural strength to compose did me little good if I didn’t have time to get the words out.

  The only good thing about the arena was that it was only allocated for use by the second years once a week. The rest of the week we would spend doing our normal exercises under the same set of junior instructors who had watched us the past few days.

  The one other bright spot was that our arena day fell directly before our rest day.

  “So I’ll be able to recover after each pummeling,” I said to my friends, as I poked at my dinner. “Which is something I suppose.”

&n
bsp; All three grimaced at me, and even Finnian didn’t offer any upbeat words. No doubt they had all realized my fatal limitation. They certainly spent the rest day doing their best to cheer me up, and eventually their efforts succeeded. After all, I still had six more days until I had to face the arena again.

  On the first day of the second week, Redmond announced the beginning of our discipline studies. Discipline studies happened in the second afternoon session after composition—the one first years had free. The three higher year levels all studied two disciplines of their choice out of the eight options—law enforcement, seeking, healing, growing, wind working, creating, the Armed Forces, and the Royal Guard.

  Trainees worked in the library, largely on their own but under the supervision of the head librarian, Walden, and his assistant, Jocasta. Plus the occasional visiting lecturer from the discipline in question.

  Since trainees were permitted to either change disciplines every year or study the same ones for more than one year, the classes were mixed, with beginner and advanced assignments given based on how long the trainees had been studying the discipline.

  My friends seemed to alternate between dread at the extra work and interest in their potential choices, and Finnian and Coralie had spent the last week debating which two disciplines they should choose for second year. I had expected Finnian to be firmly set to follow in his father’s footsteps, but he intended the same as Coralie—to change his studies each year to cover as many disciplines as possible.

  “You never know where my aptitude may fall,” he told me when I asked him why. “I wouldn’t want to limit myself.”

  All trainees were required to do at least a year’s study in healing plus a year’s study in the armed forces discipline as preparation for the front lines. I had chosen those two for my voluntary studies during first year with exactly the same reasoning. I hadn’t actually studied for the whole year, though, so I wasn’t sure my previous studies would exempt me from needing to do them again.