White Hall (The High King: A Tale of Alus Book 10)

by Donald Wigboldy

  As they walked, the noise of the assembled students in the dining hall reached out into the hallway. Katya glanced towards the doors of the healer’s hospital and wondered how soon Cheleya would be going there to begin her real training. The girl was already so far beyond any of the novices that she would likely be classified as a full wizard by Southwall’s standards. She was only seventeen and considered a baby in her race’s terms, but with around four years of study she was merely playing at being a novice, Katya thought.

  “Do we continue to learn together for awhile?” Katya asked her mentor. The class was so diverse. Half were battle mages. The wizards all seemed to have differing predispositions towards certain elements, though a couple remained undetermined so far as well.

  “This afternoon the mages will take their students to the field behind their building and begin other skill training. Their kind has also been as much soldier as wizard. In fact, the earliest mages were trained as soldiers and then taught how to cast like wizards. It wasn’t a good marriage of skills, so most preferred to use their swords and shields.

  “When the first true mage, Hurst, created battle magic, the battle mages finally had a direction that would form them into what they are now.”

  Cheleya noted, “You seem impressed by battle mages.”

  The older woman looked surprised. Since the general consensus of wizards was that power ruled, battle mages had always been considered second rate wizards. Thinking that their lesser cousins were impressive would seem to be a rare opinion indeed.

  As the three took their places in line, the wizard seemed to notice all the extra ears around them at first and lowered her voice slightly. “The stories coming from Windmeer about how battle mages prevented its destruction should make wizards begin to take them seriously. Your brother’s performance in the tournament just adds to the fame he has begun to pick up especially with the other mages.

  “Sebastian works with wizards and learns their spells. Those spells go to the battle mages, or so it went; but now Magnus says the spell he used last night was passed to him by a battle mage. I would be curious to see how a battle mage using such a spell would fare against any wizard using their elements.”

  Piotr and his mentor were within listening range apparently and the wizard in green countered, “I would still put a wizard with the same spell as ahead of a mage. Their power just doesn’t lend towards believing any other way.”

  Looking annoyed at the statement, Katya defended battle mages and her brother saying, “That thinking made a lot of wizards lose to my brother. He’s just a battle mage and finished fourth. While he pulled out because he was exhausted, that was probably the only way he could have been beaten by a wizard. Even Magnus wants to take him on because he didn't feel like he had truly won without beating Sebastian. He said so in Hala.

  “Ask him if a battle mage can defeat a wizard.”

  Piotr’s mentor looked fairly young, though to a thirteen year old girl he was still old. Perhaps his youth let him see the possibility of such things as he said, “I guess I will have to talk to him. Having the champion here is certainly a good asset to have. We can learn more from him at least.

  “I’d have to see your brother to believe the hype though.”

  Wanting to growl at the wizard for daring to dispute her, Katya managed to rein in her anger and even managed to smooth her face. Speaking evenly and without heat, the girl replied, “Believe what you wish then. Two of his mages from the tournament are here as well. They know the same spell as Magnus, if you wish to test out your theory.”

  That seemed to come as a surprise to the young man. After a moment he nodded and stated, “Perhaps I will.”

  As if Ylena thought the two would continue to argue, she led Katya and Cheleya to a different table on the pretense of needing to speak to the girl on what they would work on individually for the rest of the day.

  Piotr had listened to the argument between Katya and his mentor, Zieran. The wizard was fairly young, certainly a few years younger than Katya’s mentor, Ylena. With a light frame, brown hair and blue eyes, the man wearing a green tunic and outer coat, even inside the dining hall, would look rather unassuming to an average person. He wasn’t tall, just a few inches taller than Piotr in fact, and was neither fat nor really thin. He was fairly plain, the boy thought but not in a disappointing way.

  He was easy to talk to and spoke more than Piotr, who had never been a particularly outspoken boy. Piotr preferred watching, whether it was nature or people going about their business.

  “So is that girl your friend? She came in with your group from the east somewhere, didn’t she?” Zieran asked before biting into a carrot with a loud snapping noise. It was nearly spring and beyond the growing season by two seasons. Somehow the school had managed to keep the vegetables crisp and fresh looking even after all that time.

  He chalked it up to magic and answered the question, “She is a friend, but I only met her when her people stopped in Delanne. From what Katya has said, her brother found her and took her with him to Hala for the tournament. I guess that he had planned to take her to White Hall himself, but got assigned a mission before he could.

  “That wizard they call the high wizard did him a favor and brought Katya here for him.”

  “She’s kind of pretty, huh?” the wizard asked searching the boy’s eyes for confirmation.

  “Sure,” he replied with a shrug.

  “Not good enough for you? Do you have a girlfriend already? You’re kind of young, but I can see your twin does pretty well with the girls,” he gestured to a table filled with the mage cadets from the morning class.

  The two girls sat on either side of him and appeared infatuated with Niklaus, Piotr thought; and wondered if that should be a surprise. Like two sides of a coin, he and his twin seemed nearly opposites though they had always gotten along pretty much from birth. Seeing his brother starting his separate path through the schooling of White Hall, Piotr suddenly realized that there was a certain finality to coming to the school that he hadn’t realized at first.

  “Katya and Cheleya are both pretty enough, but they are just friends,” he said.

  “I hope you don’t have a girlfriend back in your hometown. The amount of time we get to return home to see family and friends is rather limited. Besides, a girl without magic probably won’t want to stay with you anyway. It is one of the curses to being a wizard,” Zieran stated as if from first hand knowledge.

  “I don’t have a girlfriend in Delanne,” the boy stated with a sigh and looked at his brother’s table again. There was Iris, he thought, but did she count as a girlfriend or just a girl who was a friend like Katya and Cheleya?

  It didn’t really matter and he wondered why the wizard would bother to ask. Unfortunately his choice of words made the older man lean in with a grin, and ask, “Oh, that sounds like you already have one here. Are you a quick one like your brother?”

  “I’ve always been more alone. Bonds with animals are easier, especially now that my magic has come in,” he replied leaning on his left arm while using his fork to lift a bite of meat to his mouth. The other wizard’s plate had no meat and was simply filled with various kinds of vegetables.

  The wizard nodded letting some of his goofiness slide away. “That isn’t surprising. You’re a nature wizard or you wouldn’t be in my charge.

  “Depending on what kind of nature wizard you are, you either bond with nature as a whole or pick a side. Some love animals and other wizards prefer working with plants, though most nature wizards will learn to do both.

  “So your magic has let you build bonds with animals, you say. How?”

  Piotr still didn’t really have the trust needed to share secrets with the man, but figured that it was a question given him by a teacher of the school. Some things needed to be answered, though the new novice didn’t have to volunteer what he didn’t want to either, he supposed.

  “One of the things I can do is send my thoughts into an animal’s mind. I c
an ride along and let it do what it wants or take over to make it move where I wish. I’ve calmed or eased their pain too,” Piotr explained the main bits of magic he had discovered on his own.

  The older wizard nodded looking impressed, “That is pretty good for a wizard on his own. I can see a wilder picking up those skills because their magic leads them to do the connections, but from what I can tell you don’t really seem to fall into that category.”

  A sudden smile crossed his face and Zieran asked, “Do you want to go see our zoo after lunch? Our activities are supposed to be more orientation specifically relating to the nature guild. It doesn’t get much more specific than that, I think.”

  Piotr looked at the grinning wizard, who had seemed to be trying to convince himself of the idea as much as his student. A shrug was his answer, and shortly after lunch, the boy was led past the healing hall to a corridor running along the outer wall of the school.

  A different smell from the predominant scent of stone or even food from the dining hall came to his nose as they moved deeper into the hallway. It was the scent of animals of a variety of kinds.

  “Do you just share with animals like cows and horses or can you work with birds as well?”

  “Both,” Piotr replied in a word.

  There was a door at the end of the hall and Zieran turned the knob leading into another room. Noise as if from a barn carried to his ears immediately.

  The older wizard smiled and said, “You probably thought that the stables were the only place where we kept animals around here. Nature wizards work with plants, stone and even other elements in our courtyard; but for novices like you, this might become your favorite place in the school.”

  To his surprise, there were cages with various kinds of animals lining the walls. Birds chirped or squawked, dogs, cats, mice and other small creatures were in cages stacked over some larger animals.

  Piotr frowned seeing one of the smaller mountain cats in a cage. It was a creature of the wild. While the lynx wasn’t as large as the bigger mountain lions, the boy was surprised to see wizards who were supposed to be close to nature caging such a creature.

  A strange grunt and growl from a larger cage drew his eyes next. A brown bear, most likely a few hundred pounds, was there rooting through the dried grasses at the base of the cage.

  “Why do you have a bear or lynx in a cage like this? Aren’t these supposed to be in a forest or in the mountains living like they are supposed to?” he asked feeling a bit of anger at the treatment of such creatures.

  Snorting at the boy, Zieran scoffed, “Are you really looking at the creatures or just putting your beliefs in the fore of your mind, novice? We tend nature and can train your skills with mice, cats and dogs, which would be comfortable in our care true, but we don’t just bring in creatures we want to work with selfishly. Look at the lynx closer before you judge.”

  Piotr squatted before the cage looking at the big cat. In turn, the lynx looked at him suspiciously giving him a warning growl. It paced back and forth. While it had a small stub for a tail, it looked natural to the creature. He looked to its paws and face trying to see what the wizard meant.

  Finally, the boy sat with crossed legs and looked through the triangle formed by his fingers. His mind crossed to the lynx as he looked for the reason closer. A pain from its rear leg made Piotr wince in his body. His mind tried to understand what was wrong with the cat and realized that its leg was trying to mend from an injury.

  Releasing the link, Piotr looked up at Zieran and asked, “How was it hurt?”

  “One of our wizards found him last fall with his team while searching the mountains. They were there making sure that nature was managing to care for itself, but sometimes we need to use our magic to help things along.

  “Lyras here was found at the base of a cliff. Apparently the rock had given way on him. If our team had found him much later, he would have been a corpse. Unfortunately Lyras had been suffering for days. Though no other animal had happened upon him, he couldn’t walk to find food and water either.

  “The wizards took care of him and did what they could to tend his injuries, but magic used so long after an injury requires a longer healing time. Magic can do many things, but we couldn’t just send him back out on his own right away.”

  “His back leg still has a lot of pain. Couldn’t a healer fix it by now?”

  Giving the boy a sad look, Zieran shook his head, “Even healing magic has its limits. Hopefully in a month or so, Lyras will be well enough to return to his mountain home; but for now he is our patient and a subject of study for novice wizards like you.”

  Piotr stood and pointed to the bear asking, “And what about her? Was she injured too?”

  Shaking his head, Zieran moved closer to the cage and the boy felt some of the wizard’s magic reaching out to the bear. “Bo lost her mother as a cub. We’ve tried releasing her into the woods, but she always winds up trying to come back to the school.

  “Not every animal we help is helped the way we hoped. She’s been half raised in White Hall for five years now, but Bo refuses to leave for good,” he chuckled as the bear moved close to the door of the cage and blew some grass onto his boots. She whuffed and seemed ambivalent to his presence, so Piotr wondered why Zieran needed his magic.

  “What are you doing to her?”

  Zieran looked at him in surprise, “I thought I was being too subtle for a novice to notice. Well, I am just trying to eliminate some of my scent. Reducing it and sending out neutral waves of emotion will hopefully help keep her from bonding on me as well.

  “She’s very social with humans, and that is kind of the problem.”

  Piotr sat to try his magic on Bo and sent his mind to the bear. Exerting a little pressure, he made the bear turn and move to the back of the large cage. She sat for him and the boy thought that the animal would do whatever he wished. While the bear was bigger and intelligent to a point, his will could certainly make her go away if he needed to.

  Releasing his magic, Bo continued to sit and looked at him as the novice stood back up again. “She’s pretty easy to control. I’m surprised no one used their magic forcefully enough to make her go away.”

  Zieran shook his head. “Sending her away from the safety of the school isn’t the point, Piotr. She needs to have the instinct to survive out there on her own. Bo simply isn’t aggressive enough to catch her food and doesn’t know enough to stay away from humans that might want to kill her. She doesn’t understand things like that, so basically she has become a resident of White Hall.

  “We’ll try releasing her again in the spring, but she’s pretty obstinate. I would expect you’ll have years to get to know her as well,” he laughed.

  Aside from the handful of wild animals he would not have expected to see caged in the school, many of the other animals were more common to the humans of cities and towns. “Do you let them out for exercise somewhere?”

  Zieran led him to another door and opened it letting in cold air. The wizard led him into a snow covered courtyard and Piotr noted the high walls around them. Trees without leaves, coated in snow and waiting for spring to bring back the warmth of the sun; dotted the courtyard in surprising numbers. Needled pines were represented in smaller numbers, while a couple ponds broke up the area in a different way.

  “This is our courtyard. The animals get brought outside regularly to enjoy the weather, though most prefer the warmth of our zoo area right now. Winter just doesn’t want to end around here. The Dimple Mountains tend to extend it a little longer than Delanne.”

  “Aren’t they days to the west?”

  Zieran nodded, but added, “True, but the winds they create affect us here still.”

  Rubbing his arms, the wizard gestured towards the door they had exited. “Well, unless you want to get your coat, I think maybe we had better get back inside.”

  Piotr followed the wizard and wondered what activities they used the large courtyard for or if it was mainly for the animals’ exer
cise. He figured that he would learn more in time, but rubbed his arms as the boy agreed with Zieran about the cold.

  Chapter 15- Shaping Dirt

  The warmth of the dining hall and school in general was quickly lost even wearing his coat gathered from his room after lunch. Niklaus and the other battle mage trainees were brought to a courtyard attached to the mage quarters where just a handful of other boys and a girl were dressed in gray and sparring with wooden weapons.

  “Catch,” his mentor, Falcon Elijah, called his attention back to the immediate area of the courtyard. A hardened leather breast plate was thrown to the boy and the mage nodded to him saying, “You’ll want to put that on.”

  The others in his group were being passed similar protective gear brought from inside by the falcons. Niklaus nodded to those across the way and noted forearm guards and gloves, but no other protective gear.

  “They’re not wearing armor,” he noted, but Elijah didn’t even turn his head. The falcon had a large sack and was already pulling the next piece for him.

  “They’ve also been here since last summer, so they have six months to a year of practice on you. We all start with gear or you’d wind up giving the novice healers a lot more practice than we want. Stop wasting time and put it on.”

  The leather chest plate had straps to go around his neck and waist to hold it in place. There was no backing. It wasn’t like they were truly gearing up for battle after all.

  Thigh guards, wrist guards, gloves with hardened plate for the backs of their hands and fingers, two more upper arm guards, and finally a leather helmet filled with extra padding were all passed to the cadets to put on for training. It was heavy and felt restraining by the time the helmet was put on his head and the boy asked, “Is this really necessary? I can barely move.”

  “It isn’t that bad,” Elijah replied as he patted and pulled on the pieces making sure everything was firmly bound to his charge.