Fury Lingers: Book One of The Foreseen Trilogy

by Ethan Spears

  Weakening the rune would be risky, for while Vanna and Teresa hadn’t been told why they needed to place these runes, they knew the runes had to be powerful. So instead, she let her senses wander, probing the edges of the sanctuary she and Vanna had created with this ring of runes. Her magic found the limits easily enough. She was almost embarrassed that she had thought this level of presence was acceptable. The barrier practically screamed its existence.

  She pulled a stick of chalk from a pouch and wrote out a second and third rune, one above and one to the right of the original. The order and placement had to be precise, because apparently magic cared deeply about syntax. When she was done, she had a proper defying rune and cloaking rune in place. Those would reject magical probes and hide the magical signature of the other runes, respectively.

  Satisfied with the linework, she placed her hand over the chalk sketch and chanted a short phrase. When she removed her hand, the chalk lines were gone and in their place were shallow etchings that held the same blue glow as the first rune. Now the runes would be far more difficult to detect, invisible to casual observation altogether. Only an extremely thorough search would turn them up, and chances were slim if the mage was weaker than she was.

  She moved on to the next tree, then the next, adding the two runes to each tree Vanna had marked earlier. It was tedious work and she didn’t know why it was important, but there was no doubt about its importance or she wouldn’t have been ordered to make them.

  “Tessy!” She turned to see Vanna pointing at one of the elves. He stirred feebly on the ground.

  “I see him, thank you,” Teresa said, floating toward him. He appeared disoriented still from the blast that had knocked him unconscious. His head lolled and he moaned, but he made no attempt to stand. Teresa wasn’t skilled with mind magic; otherwise, she could just lull him back to sleep. Instead, the extended a finger and a miniature version of the purple bolt sped from her finger and sank into his chest. He stiffened a moment, then relaxed back into unconsciousness.

  “He should be out for a good while, now. That struck his heart so the effect will be stronger.”

  “That’s good,” said Vanna, looking relieved. She was still young and inexperienced with using magic on others. It was why Teresa had been ordered to protect Vanna; while Vanna’s marks of protection were artful in their perfection, the girl didn’t have the wits to fight. “All the runes are in place, by the way.”

  “Good. I’ve been adding—”

  “—defying and cloaking runes,” Vanna finished. “Yes, I could feel them activate. A good idea. I added them to the last few trees. We should make another circuit, I think, make sure we get them all.”

  Teresa nodded her approval of the idea. Vanna looked down at the elves. “Should we put the other one in a deep slumber as well?”

  “Might as well. Better safe than sorry.” She strode over to the elf. His eyes still stared straight upward, unfocused. She stood over him and extended a finger, reciting her spell.

  He stirred suddenly. His hand shot up and pulled the knife from his belt. He sat up and swung at Teresa. She was too surprised to react, but too far for the elf to reach anything vital. The knife cut through flesh and slid across bone. He was already halfway standing before Teresa screamed and fell back, clutching at her wounded arm.

  The elf had his bow out, pulled an arrow, nocked it, and loosed in a second. Teresa threw her head back, her fighting sense taking over and saving her life as the arrow sped overhead so close to her face that the fletching struck her in the eye. She kicked her leg and started to roll to her feet when a second arrow hit her squarely in the side of the abdomen, the elf catching her unprepared with a quicker shot than expected. She cried out in pain and saw the next shot being readied.

  As the third arrow loosed, a shimmering field appeared between her and the elf. The shaft skid along the surface and deflected off to the side. He turned immediately toward Vanna, knowing Teresa couldn’t be the source of the defensive spell. He fired again, but his arrow collided with another barrier in front of Vanna. The girl screamed as the arrow deflected mere inches from her face.

  The scout shouted something and swiped his hand like he was dispersing smoke. Vanna was dragged from her feet as a strong gust of magic struck her in the side, tearing her defensive shield to ribbons. She fell to her hands and knees, looking up teary-eyed at the elf as he readied his next shot.

  A moment before he could loose, the air split open with a terrifying peel. Vanna was forced to look away. There was a sizzling, crackling sound and the smell of burning flesh, then a body fell heavily to the forest floor. Vanna lay there shaking, afraid to open her eyes lest she find the elf still standing.

  “Vanna,” Teresa called weakly to her. “Get up, you silly girl. I’m dying.”

  Vanna’s head snapped up, she saw Teresa laying there, one arm covered in blood, the other in burns, and two charred, smoking elf corpses between them.

  Vanna stood shakily. “Oh, gods, Tessy! What have we done?! We weren’t supposed to kill anyone! We’ve ruined everything!”

  “I had to,” said Teresa. “We weren’t finished yet. We couldn’t afford to die. Now come help me.”

  Vanna stumbled past the two corpses, retching at the scent, and kneeled near Teresa. She looked helplessly at the arrow sticking from her companion’s side. “I don’t know what to do, Tessy! Tell me what to do!”

  “Calm,” said Teresa. “Calm. Create a fire. Take the elf’s knife and leave the blade in the fire, making sure the handle is without, then gather some wormleaf, sage, spice birch bark”—she named a dozen such items—“then return. Quickly.”

  “I’m on it!” cried Vanna, jumping up to obey orders. She created a rune of fire, lit it, placed the knife within, then sprinted off for the herbs.

  Teresa waited. She was no healer, but she used what techniques she was capable of to keep her blood from escaping. She didn’t know what organ had been pierced, whether her intestines, stomach, liver, or kidney, but she felt a pain she had never experienced before and knew what it must mean.

  As for her left arm, she couldn’t risk drawing her focus from her mortal gut wound to staunch the knife wound. Her right arm she had used to summon lightning without readying to handle the magic she flowed into it, but she didn’t have time to both prepare herself and save Vanna. Now it hung limp and useless. She tried to tell herself that she had saved Vanna because they still had a mission to complete, but it was impossible to deny that, despite Vanna’s troublesome, childish nature, Teresa had grown fond of her. Seeing her die would have been worse than her own death.

  Vanna was back within five minutes. “Gods, I hope I have the right herbs,” she said, verging on hysterics.

  “Calm. Just follow my instructions,” said Teresa. Though every word hurt, she walked Vanna through creating a basic poultice. It would barely be useful, but the plants available here didn’t offer many choices.

  She then walked Vanna through drawing a rune of mending on her side and arms. “You will have to draw the runes using the hot knife,” she said.

  “The knife?” Vanna grew pale. “I can’t do that, Tessy.”

  “You must, or I will die.”

  “There has to be a better way.”

  “Many, yes, but we don’t have the tools. The knife is all we have. It’s silver. If we didn’t have silver, I wouldn’t know what to do, and I would die.”

  Vanna began to hyperventilate.

  “I’m sorry,” said Teresa. “I’m scaring you. Don’t worry, Vanna. You’re an excellent runesmith and you’re strong enough to do what needs to be done. Just give me a rag to bite down on and know that I may pass out from the pain.”

  Vanna looked ready to pass out herself. “I’ll try,” she said meekly.

  “And act quickly. If the knife cools down before you finish—"

  “—you’ll die!” Vanna shouted over her, cramming a rag into Teresa’s mouth and picking up the knife. “Larrick help me, I get it already!�
�

  Teresa could almost laugh. Larrick, god of knowledge, was also known as ‘The Clumsy One,’ an unfortunate choice given the circumstances.

  Any thought of laughter died as soon as the metal touched her flesh.

  ***

  When Teresa awoke, it was still light out. Or, more likely, light out again. She doubted it was the same day. She attempted to lift her arms but found them incredibly tender. At least she had some feeling in them, which she could not say before she lost consciousness.

  She lifted her head slightly, trying to examine her wounds. Both arms were covered in bandages from under which mossy green goop seeped. Her shirt had been cut away while, her bare stomach likewise bandaged. The cuts were angry red and the burns purple and blue and everything hurt, but at least she no longer felt like death was fast approaching.

  She chanced sitting up, but no sooner did the skin on her stomach begin bunching than she realized that was not going to happen. Her wounds felt ready to burst open at the slightest provocation. She lay back down with a groan.

  “Tessy!” Vanna seemed to appear from nowhere. “Thank every last god!” she sobbed, tears already running down her cheeks. She looked like she’d barely slept.

  “I told you you could do it,” said the wounded woman, her voice weak. “Two days?” she asked.

  “Almost. I thought for sure more elves would come this way or you’d die before you woke up or I’d go crazy or something else awful!”

  “Calm,” Teresa admonished. “The worst of it is over. We should be fine for now.”

  Vanna stood up. “We need to get out of here as fast as we can. Can you walk?”

  Teresa smiled at her naïve colleague. “Not for another week, I’m sure.”

  “A week?!”

  Now Teresa openly laughed, though the pain it caused in her stomach quickly stopped her. “Gods, that stings. You’ve never seen anyone hurt this badly, have you? I’ll need plenty of rest. Even then, you will have to support me on the way back.”

  Teresa fell silent, her head falling back. She let herself soak in the sounds of nature, just thrilled to be alive. She had been close to death before, but never that close.

  “Tessy?”

  “Yes?”

  “What do we tell the Order?”

  “You mean about killing the elves? I don’t know.” She stared up as the treetops rustled in the wind. “Did you bury them?”

  “A bit away from here, yes. We weren’t supposed to—”

  “I know.”

  Silence.

  “I don’t think we should tell them.”

  “Really?” Vanna’s voice was fearful.

  “If killing the elves doesn’t change anything, then there’s no need to worry the others in the Order. Or anger Ezma.”

  “And if it did…?”

  Teresa sighed. “Then we’ve doomed the world and it doesn’t matter.”

  Chapter 6

  Awe and Command

  Mergau sank to her back. Sweat was pouring from places she didn’t know could sweat, her arms, legs, every muscle crying in protest. She threw a beseeching look at Ezma, who stood on Mergau’s feet, pinning them to the ground, but she might as well have kept her eyes closed. There was no mercy to be had from Ezma.

  “Two more,” her mistress said impatiently, digging her heel into Mergau’s toes. Mergau winced, but bent her torso, pulling her body upwards, her stomach burning with the effort.

  “N-n-ninety-nine,” she said, touching her shoulders to her knees and falling swiftly back again, landing hard on the hands tied behind her back. She was already at the point where she could barely breathe, all the air running straight to her muscles, but she started her last sit-up, shaking violently the whole way up. Her shoulders barely brushed her knees before she fell back again, gasping “One hundred!”

  Ezma looked down at the panting girl, stepped off her feet and thrust a waterskin into Mergau’s open mouth. Mergau breathed in the water, choked, but didn’t pull away, greedily gulping down the liquid even as her body racked with coughs.

  “You’ve improved much in two weeks,” Ezma said, and it was the truth. They had shaved a full four minutes off their five-stretch runs, had expanded from one set of one hundred sit-ups a day to five sets, and increased her push-ups from zero to fifty. The amount she could lift over her head had nearly doubled, though she couldn’t lift much to begin with.

  “Potion?” Mergau managed between coughs.

  “Hush, child,” said Ezma sternly. “You must hydrate first. Rest for a few minutes.”

  Mergau lay back, her own stench making her dizzy; Ezma had said they would only have time to bathe if Mergau got her five stretch runs under twenty-five minutes, and they were closer to twenty-nine still, so Mergau was coated in nearly two weeks of exercise sweat. She didn’t understand why Ezma used human measurement scales, but she realized that three hands were roughly equal to one orcish foot, a field to one hundred hands, a stretch to one hundred fields, and that she was never good at math. It wouldn’t be as bad if she could wear shoes, but Ezma told her she needed to toughen her soles and palms to be better magical focal points, which Mergau didn’t understand well enough to argue with. Either way, thanks to the punishing pace and the unforgiving ground of her homeland, it was a week before she finished a run with any skin still on her feet.

  The regimen was also human, from what she could gather. Orcs trained their strength against other orcs, but of course Ezma wasn’t going to engage Mergau in wrestling and throwing, so lifting, flexing, and running it was. She thought this ‘sitting-up’ and ‘pushing-up’ was a laughably stupid way to exercise at first but, if her soreness was any indication, they at least worked.

  Ezma went to the big jug near the far wall of the hut. Aside from Mergau’s bed things, it was the only item that stayed in the hut. She produced a tin cup from the air and tipped the jar. Ezma offered Mergau the cup, now filled with dull yellow liquid, which her student hurriedly drank down. With every gulp, the burning in the muscles lessoned, cuts and bruises vanished, and some of her energy returned so she wasn’t on the brink of physical collapse. Every day ended with a cup of this potion, allowing Mergau the benefits of a full day’s exertion without the aching body the next day, which was great in theory, but also meant that Ezma could dramatically increase the regimen every day.

  At least the potion was delightfully sweet.

  Even with the potion, however, she was exhausted. Every day she would arise and find Ezma already awake—though Ezma had no bed in the hut, so Mergau wasn’t even sure where, or if, she slept. The days broke down into breakfast, six hours of exercise, potion, dinner, a few hours of study, then eight hours of sleep, meaning they were as frequently as not working at night and sleeping during the day. It was hard work with no room for niceties like baths.

  Ezma offered Mergau a hand to lift her up, which she took gladly. “You’ve made excellent progress,” she said. “At this rate, we’ll reach the ideal regimen within a month. For now, dinner.” A flick of her hand and the fire pit at the center of the hut, a moment ago burning low, burst into vibrant, smokeless flames.

  “Why work so hard?” Mergau said in broken Krik over their meal. Ezma only allowed her to speak Krik, saying that learning the language would help her with her magic, which Mergau embraced without question—though partially, truth be told, because she couldn’t form questions very well.

  “There is much to teach you and we can’t be wasting time with your physically unfit body,” Ezma answered likewise in Krik, causing Mergau to not understand most of the answer. Nevertheless, Mergau nodded.

  “Not only must you be in peak physical condition, but you must learn an entire language—two if you count the language of magic—and magic itself. Control is also a key part of this training, as is patience, and keeping the proper temperament about you at all times. As you are now, you’re horribly unfit to handle spells and of no use to me.”

  Mergau nodded again at the incomprehensible jumble of
words Ezma spoke. She asked the same question every day and understood the answer a bit better each time Ezma recited it. By the tone, she could tell Ezma was being critical of her, but about what she couldn’t pinpoint. She at least recognized the words ‘spells’ and ‘magic,’ two of the first words she became familiar with.

  She finished her bread and soup hastily and grabbed one of the three books that Ezma kept around. She had pulled them from the air—from what Mergau took to calling ‘the other room,’—and left them for Mergau to read. They were meant for human children learning language for the first time and contained simple stories about dogs getting lost and searching for their owners or foxes outwitting hunters or other things like that. They were silly and trite, which made it all the more frustrating when Mergau struggled with them, especially as she had no idea what a dog was supposed to be. There was an ugly picture of a four-legged creature on the cover that she could only assume was the dog: a goofy-looking face with a large snout and a big, toothy smile, tongue lolling to one side from its open mouth. She often wondered why Ezma even owned such books, but she inevitably fell back to trying to differentiate ‘leash’ from ‘laughter’ and wondering why so many letters were silent.

  ‘It’s good that you know how to read Orcish already,’ Ezma had said that first day. ‘Teaching you Krik would be hassle enough without adding reading to the list of chores. Use this sheet here to help you with your pronunciation. Read aloud and sound it out. We move on to more complex material in a week.’ And that was the last time Mergau had heard Ezma speak a complete sentence in Orcish. From then on, especially during their exercise regimen, Ezma would speak in nothing but Krik and demand the same from Mergau. She was learning the language slowly but still faster than she would have thought possible.

  The sheet she had been given contained all thirty-one letters of Krik and all forty-four letters of Orcish. Though many of the Orcish letters had some equivalent in the Krik alphabet and many Krik letters could be sounded out multiple ways, she found that there were still gaps. She noticed that choome, the throat call, and pagra, the gargle, were unrepresented on the chart because the humans apparently didn’t use those sounds. It seemed like a waste of perfectly good sounds.