by V. St. Clair
“Nope, sorry kid. Try not to work yourself into a frenzy though; even Calahan isn’t demented enough to harm innocents just for being your friend. It would start a wave of outrage throughout the magical community that would be impossible to contain.”
“If people actually found out about it. Why would he tell them the truth when he can just lie and say whatever he wants?”
“Because some of us know the truth, and we would see justice done on her behalf,” Laurren explained coolly. “No one wants to see the day where our leaders capture and abuse people without just cause.”
Hayden did feel marginally better after that, but he would still worry horribly until he could verify for himself that Tess was alright.
She’s tough, and far from defenseless, he assured himself. Remembering her knife skills, perhaps it was the Council members he should fear for.
“Hurry up and eat your breakfast; we’re already late for our training as it is, and I actually have other things to do today,” Laurren motioned Hayden along as soon as the plate was set in front of him.
Hayden shoveled food into his mouth as fast as possible without choking to make up for lost time, abandoning his plate when it was half-empty and asking Zane if he wanted to watch him get his butt kicked by Laurren.
“Sure, I haven’t seen a really good fight in a while,” he answered with enthusiasm, tagging along as they moved towards the back lawns.
“Don’t be so pessimistic,” the Master said fairly. “You may not get your butt kicked this time around; you’re really getting much better these days.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Hayden said with a raised eyebrow. “You’re one of the strangest people I know, and weird people always win fights.”
Laurren and Zane both laughed at that, though the former said, “Thank you for the compliment—I think. What about Asher?”
“He’s also one of the weirdest people I know, which is probably why I’ll never defeat him in a duel either,” Hayden admitted.
Hayden checked his belt for weapons and then moved to the opposite side of the makeshift arena to prepare himself. He tried to push his worries to the back of the mind and ignore the fact that his best friend was going to watch him fight one of their teachers. He wanted to be impressive and instill confidence in everyone that he was going to be a real asset in the battle against his father, so he needed to be on top form at all times.
Ultimately he didn’t do terribly against Master Laurren, though he did technically lose the bout. The Master of Abnormal Magic could no longer use prisms due to his color-blindness, but he was still deadly with the other arcana, and courtesy of his new area of expertise, he knew a lot of obscure magic that Hayden had never heard of or encountered before. Hayden limped over to the bench where Zane was sitting after their time was up, desperate for a drink of water and a short reprieve before his next bout with Master Kilgore—who was already here and waiting for him.
“Wow, you don’t get much of a break between rounds, do you?” Zane remarked in sympathy, squinting against the brightness of the rising sun.
“Not until I’m done with fighting for the day. I’ve got Kilgore and then Mandra before I can take a break. Apparently it’s supposed to help me build up stamina, on the off-chance I find myself dueling my father for three hours straight at some point.”
He drained a glass of water and set it aside, getting back to his feet and preparing to meet the Master of Elixirs in battle.
“I don’t suppose you can answer any of my questions about Tess?” Hayden greeted the gruff Master, who looked strange without his red Mastery robes on. Hayden had always been of the opinion that Master Kilgore looked more like a blacksmith than a Master of the arcana, and today the effect was highlighted, as the man was dressed entirely in black.
“As a matter of fact, I do know a little bit about her whereabouts,” he explained evenly.
“What?!” Hayden perked up immediately, fresh energy flooding him. “Where is she? Is she okay? Is she coming here? Tell me!”
Kilgore held up a hand to silence him and said, “Knock me off of my feet and I’ll tell you what I know.”
Stunned with disbelief, Hayden said, “You’re holding information about my girlfriend’s wellbeing as ransom?”
That was the sort of petty behavior he expected from the Council of Mages, or Master Sark, perhaps, but he had always gotten along very well with Kilgore.
I must have done really badly on that Elixirs final for him to be this angry at me…
“I want to see how much willpower you can bring forth when the occasion calls for it,” he explained easily. “Asher says you hold back as long as you don’t feel you’re actually in danger—or unless you have a reason to go all out. I want to see what you can do when you flex your willpower to its fullest.”
Nettled, Hayden said, “I don’t hold back on purpose. I’ve been giving it my all this entire time, just ask Kiresa.”
“Your training with Kiresa is the one time I believe you actually did give it your all since you got here,” Kilgore countered flatly. “And that only because you genuinely believed he was trying to hurt you. Since you know I have no intention of inflicting permanent damage upon you, I need something else to draw your power out. So, if you want to know how Tess is doing, show me what you’ve got.”
Hayden attacked without warning, charging straight at the man—who probably outweighed him by double—and casting Push on himself as he lunged. The result was that he tackled Kilgore much harder than he would have been capable of unassisted, the Push spell giving him the force and momentum of a large boulder.
The Master of Elixirs was caught off guard by the physical attack, but managed to slap Hayden with a scripture as soon as they hit the ground together, which caused Hayden to soar up into the air like he had been shot out of a slingshot.
Weightlessness, of course.
He used one of his wands to slow his fall, watching the Master coughing and trying to catch his breath from having the wind knocked out of him.
You want to see how much willpower I have? Fine, let’s play.
Hayden cast Bind, hoping to freeze Kilgore in place and win the fight early, but the Master reacted quickly and threw a cloud of powder at him as he fell, which not only made him choke as he fell through it and got a lungful of dust, it also exploded and changed his trajectory, launching him backwards through the air.
Hayden was deafened by the sound, only the ringing of his own ears echoing around his head as he flew backwards. Furious, he twisted his prisms around and compounded Stop to halt his fall. In his anger, the spell was so powerful that it dimpled the ground in a crater around him as he alit gently on the grass, turning his focus back to Kilgore, who consumed two elixirs in rapid succession from his belt.
Hayden cast Break at his remaining elixirs but the spell was deflected at the last second. He followed immediately with Stun, not waiting to see if the spell connected. He was already turning his prisms around to compound Pierce. Both of his spells were blocked, but he was casting so quickly that Kilgore didn’t have time to retaliate; he was barely able to protect himself from Hayden’s spells as is.
Determined to beat him and find out what happened to Tess, Hayden cast compound alignments as soon as he saw them, not even caring about strategy or planning. His Heat compound was so powerful that Kilgore was only able to partially-deflect it; his shirt began to smolder and the grass around him shriveled up and died. Kilgore threw another cloud of blue powder to absorb Hayden’s next spell as he downed a third elixir and drew some scriptures from his robes.
Hayden tried freezing him, binding him, launching him through the air, and causing him unendurable pain within the next minute, but Kilgore managed to shield himself from the worst of the attacks.
Stupid Mastery Charm. If I get close enough I’m going to rip it off of his throat and then we’ll see how good his defenses are.
Blind with rage, ears still ringing and possibly bleeding, Hayden looked through hi
s compounded prisms and felt his eyes take a foreign path, scanning and interpreting and reacting to an alignment more complex than anything he had ever tried to use before, so complicated that he didn’t even register what colors he was processing as the arrays entered his eye. With a burst of raw power, Hayden screamed and felt his body subtly transform, his skin becoming hard and unyielding, like diamond. The sun reflecting off of it caused a weird halo effect around him so that it looked like he was glowing, or on fire, and he felt invincible, impenetrable, like stone.
As soon as the feeling came it was gone, and a flash of light burst behind his eyes so intensely that it was like staring directly into the sun itself. Hayden cried out in pain as he went blind and his Foci burned, the correctors growing hot on both wrists as he fell to the ground.
He wasn’t sure how long he lay there, rolling around on the grass in pain, clutching his eyes, but it couldn’t have been more than a minute or two before the pain began to ease and the dancing spots of light disappeared from the inside of his closed lids. It was then that he realized Master Kilgore and Zane were leaning over him, shaking him by the arm and asking if he was alright. The Master of Elixirs looked whey-faced and worried, drawing a healing elixir from his belt and forcing it into Hayden’s mouth.
He tried to ask, “Where’s Tess?” while drinking, which made him cough and sputter. He felt tired and wrung out, like an overused sponge.
“Don’t die, Hayden, you’re going to be alright,” Zane’s anxious face was hovering above him now, blocking out most of the sunlight, for which he was grateful. Those two thoughts seemed sort of contradictory to one another—if Hayden was fine, then why was Zane telling him not to die?—but he didn’t feel well enough to question it just yet.
“Get off me,” Hayden insisted, forcing himself into a sitting position and ignoring his own slurred words. “We’re not done fighting until I knock you on your butt so you can tell me where Tess is.”
“Hayden, you knocked him over as soon as the fight started,” Zane grabbed his arm to prevent him from reaching for a fresh prism—both of his had been consumed in that final spell. “Don’t you remember?”
Stunned, Hayden finally let his brain wind down enough to process the fight itself. Now that he thought about it, he had tackled Kilgore right at the outset and knocked him onto the ground.
“You mean we could have stopped there and you would have told me?” he asked in disbelief.
“I would have said as much, but you knocked the wind out of me and then you never slowed down long enough to give me the chance,” the Master explained in his usual gruff tone. “Well, I know I asked you to give me all the willpower you’ve got, but I didn’t expect you to give yourself light-sickness.”
“Light-sickness?” Hayden was momentarily diverted, reflecting on the feeling of all those colors and arrays shoving their way into his mind and how it felt like a sun bomb exploded behind his eyes afterwards. He looked down at his arms to check for obvious signs of damage, but his Focus-correctors were still intact, though his Foci tingled slightly.
“I thought you were trying to kill Master Kilgore,” Zane said seriously, face still pale with worry. “You were throwing out spells like crazy and wrecking everything in sight, and then you did that crazy thing where you started glowing and turned into some kind of super-warrior…”
Hayden blinked a few times to clear his head.
“I don’t know what that was. The alignments just hit me all at once—I don’t even remember what bands of colors I saw, or how many. I felt weird though, like I was made out of something indestructible.”
Kilgore scowled and said, “You’re lucky you didn’t cripple yourself—or worse. Messing with untested alignments that are powerful enough to cause light-sickness is no joke.”
“I wasn’t doing it on purpose,” Hayden argued.
“Nevertheless,” Kilgore cut him off, helping him to his feet. “You’re not to do any more magic today, not until you’ve recovered. I’ll tell Mandra that he’ll have to reschedule your training for another day.”
“You wanted to see willpower—well, you got it,” Hayden told him, getting to his feet and steadying his balance before attempting to walk. He still felt a little queasy from the burst of light-sickness, and was relieved that he was excused from doing any more magic for the day. The last thing he needed was to warp his Foci even worse than they already were. At some point they would become damaged enough that he couldn’t cast magic through them at all, and then he would be doomed.
Unless my father is feeling charitable and fixes them for me, like he did for Isla Strauss. His father’s behavior on that day still bothered him.
“I was pleased with your level of willpower, but underwhelmed by your ability to control it and give it direction,” Kilgore explained in response to his assertion. “If you really want to impress me, learn to come to every fight with that level of energy without letting it run away with you.”
There’s no pleasing some people.
“I did what you wanted—mostly,” Hayden sighed. “Now tell me what you know about Tess.”
The Master of Elixirs made a huffing noise and said, “She’s under a sort of house arrest, guarded by one of the Council’s lackeys at all times. Her father is less-than-pleased with the arrangement, but there’s not a lot he can do about it without running amok of the law himself. She’s been placed in Binders to prevent her from using magic—or from having it used on her—to escape.”
Hayden’s stomach lurched unpleasantly.
“They’ve got her in Binders?” he asked in horror, remembering how unpleasant it was being forced to wear them for two solid years, and that was even before he had known he had magic. It had somehow been even worse during his third year, when Fia Eldridge briefly forced him into the Binders and locked him in an empty classroom, to feel his magic shut away inside of himself, unable to access it even to save his life. The thought of Tess suffering the same thing on his behalf was horrible.
“It was the best arrangement we could manage for her, given that Calahan has been bleating about treachery and saying that he should have locked up all of your friends from the beginning so that they couldn’t join you in your plot to join up with your father and overthrow the Council.” Kilgore rolled his eyes at the notion.
“What about Conner, and Tamon, and my other friends?” Hayden asked belatedly, wondering how many people were going to be punished on his behalf.
“They’re still being watched, but Tess has the worst of it so far. Binders aren’t pleasant, but it’s far better than being imprisoned or—otherwise harmed,” Kilgore said cautiously.
Hayden nodded.
“I know, I just wish there was a way to get her out of there and bring her here where it’s safe.”
“We’re working on it, but we have to be more careful than ever. If we could have gotten to her before the Council showed up, we would have, but we still have to be very careful about our own movements, as Calahan is looking everywhere for signs of traitors. Don’t worry, Frost, we’ll think of something. Now get inside and take it easy, or Asher will have my head on a platter.”
Zane chuckled at the image that invoked, but Hayden still didn’t feel well enough to be properly amused.
As soon as Master Kilgore left them, they settled into the library and Zane said, “Well, now that you’ve managed to score a day off…tell me what’s been going on.”
8
The Crumbling Alliance
Having Zane around made things more enjoyable for Hayden in the following days, once his friend learned that living in the headquarters for a secret resistance group wasn’t nearly as exciting as it sounded like it should be. Since Hayden was under house arrest—lest the Council or his father get their hands on him—he now had another refugee to spend his time with while everyone else was away on their various assignments.
Due to its members frequently being unable to come together at the same time and place, Zane didn’t get to attend his f
irst actual meeting with most of the group for over a week after his arrival. He and Hayden had been researching a spell that would make an opponent’s eyes cross in the library, but Hayden could tell that his friend hadn’t been paying attention for the last quarter hour, constantly checking his chrono to see if it was time for their meeting.
When Hayden set his book aside and said, “Why don’t we just give it up for today and go get good seats at the table?” Zane agreed enthusiastically.
“Lorn’s probably furious that he’s been kicked out of his own house for months so that you can live here instead,” he pointed out cheerily as they made their way towards the formal dining room. Despite being forced to work together when the occasion called for it, there was no love lost between the two of them and Lorn Trout.
“I imagine so,” Hayden agreed lightly, “and I feel a little bad for it, but he’s probably safer staying far away from me anyway—everyone is.”
Zane frowned at that, possibly realizing that he himself was in as much peril as Hayden at this point.
“I hope everyone has good news to report. It’s going to be a huge letdown if we just go in there and everyone says, ‘Nothing’s happened.’ ”
Hayden nodded agreement.
“The last time we had a big meeting was when Mrs. Trout’s friend came barging in to tell us my dad is actually a swell guy. Talk about a weird night, since we’d already spent weeks plotting out ways to kill him by that point.”
Zane looked at him sideways and asked, “Are you okay with that?”
Hayden was surprised by the concern in his voice as much as by the question itself.
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
“Well, I mean…the man is your father. Are you actually going to be okay with fighting him to the death when it comes down to that?”
“You know,” Hayden raised his eyebrows with interest, “you might be the first person who has actually stopped to ask me that question.” He smiled faintly. “Honestly, I’m not that upset about it—though the thought of fighting someone to the death doesn’t appeal to me in general. He didn’t raise me, he doesn’t know me, he certainly doesn’t care about me; in all the ways that matter, he isn’t really my father at all.”
