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

by Donald Wigboldy

  “My, you are a bit forward, aren’t you?” he said joking with the girl. “I mean, shouldn’t we go on a date first?”

  The older girl’s eyes narrowed suspiciously and she asked, “Have you even been on a date before? You look a bit young.”

  Jeraan started to laugh as he heard the girl shoot his friend down, but gasped in pain immediately. His shirt was in the process of coming off where dark blue skin surrounding his rib area revealed the source of his pain.

  “Well, we farm boys learn faster from what I am told,” Niklaus stated tossing his shirt onto the table before he jumped up at her gesture.

  “Hmm, I am sure you do,” the girl stated before starting to create her spell. Her fingers on both of his hands led the girl through the basics of her healing magic as she mumbled words that the boy couldn’t understand.

  Niklaus wondered why wizards wasted time using some language that no one really seemed to understand when mages could use a simple command in common speech to accomplish their task. When he started to speak the girl shushed him as she tried to concentrate.

  Moment’s later, the older wizard entered and asked, “What have you two determined so far?”

  The male apprentice, Los, stated, “One broken rib and one cracked, bruising of the left arm, bruising to the left knee and more bruising on the left side of his head, Master Hillum. Do you know how to defend your left side?” the apprentice asked Jeraan in a half serious tone.

  “Obviously not,” Jeraan complained.

  “Urda?” Wizard Hillum prompted the girl as the boys settled into quiet.

  “Mostly bruising and cuts, though I think he may have a concussion as well,” the girl replied looking to the older man.

  “Well that might explain why he was hitting on Urda then,” Los replied after the prognosis.

  Jeraan shook his head and said, “Nope, he likes girls and has no shame. He didn’t need a concussion for that.”

  Directing his eyes to the girl’s in front of him as she held his wrist for contact to project her magic into him, Niklaus clarified, “No, I like pretty girls and have no shame.”

  At his playful lifting of his eyebrows at the girl, Urda pushed his forehead with two fingers on her left and shushed him again, though he noticed that the girl blushed. The healer wasn’t quite as pretty as Xara, but she was still worth flirting with, Niklaus thought to himself.

  Wizard Hillum moved to his side distracting the boy from his teasing of the girl as the wizard took his wrist mumbling his spell to center his magic on healing. A moment later and he nodded, “He does have a little swelling near the brain, which would mean a concussion. Tend to his other injuries, Urda. You haven’t trained long enough to test healing on something as sensitive.

  “Though I suppose this cadet might have less to lose, if you injured his brain from what I can see,” the older man joked.

  “Hey!” Niklaus protested with a little humor. The girl’s eyes sparkled as a smile came to her lips, whether it was more from the joke or his attempts to win her over was uncertain for the boy, however.

  Several minutes passed and Niklaus felt the cooling touch of magic fixing his lips and ear. The cuts disappeared and his bruises followed. A slight pressure in his head that he hadn’t even truly noticed over the other damage took a little longer and Urda had released his wrist by then letting the boy know that the full wizard had treated this particularly challenging area.

  Once he was done with Niklaus, Hillum moved over to check on Jeraan. The other apprentice appeared to be slightly older than Urda and perhaps was more advanced in his training, Niklaus mused.

  “Well, does that mean I am done already?” he asked the girl. “Or do you prefer that I wait to put my shirt back on?”

  The girl accidentally let out a giggle at the idea and nodded as she spoke sarcastically, “Oh, yes, I can’t get enough of your boyish frame; but since I am a healer first, I think you can put your shirt back on now.”

  As he pulled on his shirt, Niklaus nodded to Urda saying, “I knew I was wearing you down.”

  Checking on Jeraan, he was told that it would be a minute, so the cadet opened his book again.

  “There’s a reflex spell, Jeraan,” he said drawing Urda’s attention as well as the other cadet’s.

  “You don’t know all the possible spells yet?” the girl asked curiously.

  Jeraan looked at him as if wondering what the spell could do for them against a bigger, stronger opponent.

  “We were only given our books this morning,” he said to the girl and read the description of the mage spell. It was said to speed one’s mind and body to slow down time around them, or more accurately make their bodies move fast enough to make the world seem to slow.

  “Well, you are certainly cocky for a beginner,” she replied. “You’ve been a cadet for less than a day and tried to hit on an apprentice wizard. You know that will never happen. Wizards and mages don’t usually socialize much, especially once your training really gets under way.

  “Our schedules alone would make me never date a battle mage and that doesn’t even get into our differences. I’m a healer and you are going to be trained to kill orcs and such. That’s kind of a hard one to get past.”

  Niklaus looked at her in surprise. “Wow, you really thought this through, didn’t you?”

  Hillum and Los stepped back from Jeraan who looked more tired than when they had come to the infirmary. The wizard said to the young man, “Make sure you get enough to eat. Our magic takes our energy and a bit of yours, so you’ll need more nourishment to finish healing fully.”

  The man passed by returning to the entry room and Niklaus shrugged as he looked at Jeraan, “Well, I don’t suppose there is any magic for heartbreak, so I guess I'll go eat my sorrow away. It is all your fault for crushing me so cruelly,” he finished with a grin and nodded to Urda while Jeraan hurried to follow his friend.

  It was nearly meal time, though the dining hall was capable of serving students most of the day. The two cadets headed there and figured their friends would find them eventually.

  Chapter 16- The Curse

  “Very good work, Cheleya,” Wizard Saenic pronounced with a smile. The woman was of middle age and well positioned within the healer wizards of White Hall. She was one of several wizards charged with mentoring a rather limited number of wizards. Healers were among the rarest talents found on the wizard harvests. “You seem to heal wounds very naturally. What kind of magic have you been taught in Mar’kal before this?”

  The dragoness smiled back brushing a lock of blonde hair over her ear while taking the compliment. “My first few years were spent trying the various elements. Fire and water were both manageable as was air. Earth and nature unlike your school were considered a similar class, but I went on to dragon magic instead. It is actually kind of funny that I should skip something with earth magic.”

  Looking curiously at the pretty, petite girl, who moved to the sink to wash off her hands, Saenic’s green eyes followed the foreign wizard. Their patient, a pig borrowed from the nature wizards’ zoo, was contentedly sleeping. Saenic was a master of healing and had used her spells to put the animal to sleep, but had asked Cheleya to numb a section of the pig’s belly to make a cut deep enough to then require healing.

  While some might complain that practicing on live animals was inhumane, the healer wizards used their magic to prevent any pain and magic wiped away any damage done. Since they slept through everything, the healers believed that there was no harm for the creatures to remember. Nature wizards protected their animals like zealots and used their magic to make sure that the healers kept their charges safe.

  “Why would skipping an element like earth be funny?”

  Cheleya dried her hands on a towel before tossing it into a bin to prevent contamination as she had been instructed over the last week. The girl looked to her instructor and replied, “I didn’t know it when I was younger, but my father is a master of earth and nature. He retired after he married
my mother. She doesn’t like magic at all, which is part of how I wound up here actually.

  “My magic ability apparently comes from my father, but I never really felt a calling to use the same magic as he did. So I think that is odd or funny depending on what word would best describe it.”

  The girl had a slight accent to Saenic’s ears and supposed that not all common words would be in Cheleya’s vocabulary, but believed that she had chosen the proper wording. Nodding, the elder woman replied, “Then I suppose that it is a little of both, though there are certainly those wizards, who have had parents or grandparents that transferred the ability to their lineage, that have felt a calling to use differing magic.

  “We see fewer siblings with magic, but I hear that we currently have a pair of twins, though one is a wizard and the other only has enough magic to be a battle mage. So even there, their magic differs.”

  “Piotr and Niklaus have different personalities as well,” Cheleya nodded knowing that the woman spoke of her friends gathered along the way, “though Piotr managed to share part of his spell with his brother and another novice. I wonder if there is any other connection for them, since I have heard of few mages being able to work with a wizard very well.”

  “On the contrary,” Saenic countered, “battle mages work with wizards some times. Sharing their power to strengthen a wizard for a spell has been used often enough in the past.”

  Shaking her head, the dragoness replied, “But I mean other than using each other as portable magic storage, how often has an air wizard shared wind riding with a mage or an earth wizard their ability to sense things in the earth? Other wizards share power for big spells, but usually it is just one casting the spell.”

  Unable to answer the question thoroughly, the healer said, “Maybe we will have to ask them to let us research any magical connection between them while we have twins to experiment with. I would have to look up if it has even happened before.

  “There have been siblings, of course, and children of parents with magical ability like I said. Wasn’t one of the novices you came in with the sister of a battle mage?”

  “Katya is the younger sister of Sebastian, the battle mage who competed in the wizards’ tournament in Hala.”

  “Oh yes!” the wizard replied as if suddenly remembering the facts. “And he was the one who discovered and sent her to the school in the first place. Yes?”

  Cheleya nodded. “Their skills are quite different as far as I can tell. Certainly Katya’s inherent magical strength is much greater than her brother’s, though I watched him adjust his strength during the tournament.”

  “Adjusted?” the healer started to ask, but they both turned hearing footsteps in the hallway outside.

  A familiar face to Cheleya peered through the open doorway and smiled, “Good afternoon, ladies. Am I interrupting?”

  Cheleya waved Darius, the high wizard of Eirdhen, into their room saying, “We finished just a little while ago. Mistress Saenic had me practice my magic healing a wound, but the pig is healed and sleeping now.”

  The man with the silver hair and tightly trimmed beard looked older at first glance, but looking closer at his face, he could be confused for a young man of twenty if he were to dye his hair. There were no wrinkles around his eyes, but there was still something that somehow told her he was an ancient immortal. Even by che’ther standards, the wizard was old at around seven hundred years.

  “I came by because Katya had asked me to see if I could help you with your problem. Have you asked the healers here to try and fix it?”

  The man remained ambiguous in his questioning leaving Saenic to have to ask, “Is there something wrong with you?”

  Cheleya’s face looked pained from the question. She had tried to hide her strange ailment caused by Malaketh’s curse, but she supposed that letting a healer know shouldn’t be a problem. Confessing slowly, the dragoness answered, “I had an amulet shattered and bonded to certain bones in my body. It locks me into what I look like now.”

  Confused by that information as well, the wizard asked, “You look like a girl. You may be above average for beauty, but you look like a normal girl. What is it that the pieces prevent you from doing?”

  Darius closed the distance and gestured for Cheleya to hop up on an empty table and asked, “Are you familiar with shape changing amulets, wizard?”

  “My name is Wizard Saenic. What makes you think that you are an expert at fixing her condition?”

  Noting the woman dodging his question, the man held out his hand and stated, “I am High Wizard Darius of Eirdhen, the head of Aerwold.”

  While Cheleya didn’t know two of the words he used, Saenic’s eyes widened in surprise. “I didn’t think he still lived.”

  “What good is being called an immortal if you die?” he chuckled though his eyes showed a little pain at the idea. “Since I have traveled Alus researching magic beyond my own little part of the world, I have discovered things that might make me knowledgeable about the magic used to bind her in this girl’s form.”

  “What are you?” the healer asked again more demandingly of her healer’s apprentice. Having been assigned to the girl by Alum and High Wizard Herrol meant that Cheleya was special, but now the wizard wondered why. What had they hidden from her?

  “I was born che’ther,” the pretty little blonde answered keeping her seat, but looking almost like a patient child awaiting the doctor on his table. “My amulet let me shed my larger form so that I could become human and use our magic to fly. I am sure by now that rumors have reached you that a mar’goyn’lya and a human girl flew over the school a little over a week ago.”

  “I thought it was just a fanciful rumor.”

  “Maybe later I can show you my wings. There isn’t much room to summon them here.”

  Darius opened his left hand as if inviting the wizard to join him. “I was told that the stone fragments had been attached to your bones and that has prevented you from turning back into your old self. Maybe Wizard Saenic would like to assist in the examination?”

  Pulling away instinctively a moment, Saenic began to recover her nerve and her curiosity began to get the best of the woman. She stepped towards the high wizard and Cheleya, who smiled pleasantly at her. Noting a sweet scent to the air, Saenic felt more comfortable with the situation and wished to help the girl, even if she was a dragon in hiding.

  Saenic held the right wrist calling her magic to examine Cheleya even as she moved into a more professional tone with her voice. With more than two decades as a healer, the woman just naturally used her bedside manner to get to the bottom of the problem and to ease her patient.

  To the healer’s surprise, Darius cast his spell but did not bother to use contact to examine the girl as Cheleya replied to Saenic’s question, “An earth wizard pointed the pieces out to me, though no one else has mentioned their location since. One was bonded to my forehead, two are part of my collar bone, one sits in the center of my chest, four are part of four different ribs and the last is somewhere on my spine. Since I don’t have magic which can examine them for myself, I have had to take her word for it.

  “Ambassador Theress tried to help, but said there was nothing that he could do to remove them. We’re not even sure just removing them will actually change me back.”

  Darius nodded while Saenic seemed more engrossed as her magic moved to the points mentioned and quickly found the irregularities.

  “There is a possibility that separating them or otherwise destroying the shards grafted to your bones will not have any affect on your transformations. Have you tried using a second amulet to override the first’s transformation?”

  “Yes, I used Kel’lor’s and a second one was given to me since then, but neither could supersede the first’s control,” the girl offered. Her friends from Staron had suggested the idea weeks ago and still she was trapped as a human. “Kev’Theress managed to connect the pieces to a point to enable a temporary change for emergencies, but I have only tried it once.
”

  “And it worked?” Darius asked as she watched his eyes move from one point to another on her body. The study of both wizards made her feel a bit self conscious which was rare since she normally didn't worry over other people’s attention.

  “In a way,” Cheleya confessed looking at Saenic warily. “When I needed it and was angry enough to fight the man who did this to me, I managed to turn into a black dragon to drive him away.”

  Darius lifted an eyebrow at the comment and asked, “And is that your true form?”

  Shaking her head the girl responded, “No, I am small for my kind too. I have scales more like the color of a morning sky and I am just a che’ther.

  “This was a true black dragon. Others said that they felt the fear the legends say a dragon can emit just by its presence. It had giant black wings, could breathe fire and I was much larger than my father’s che’ther form.

  “It didn’t last very long. Kev’Theress said that the further the pieces were from each other, the shorter the transformation would last. The dragon only remained for maybe thirty seconds or so.”

  “Interesting,” Darius replied even as Saenic released the girl and looked at the man like he was insane.

  The healer’s eyes betrayed her thoughts. She feared the idea of a che’ther loose in White Hall, certainly, but a giant black dragon breathing fire could destroy the city in that short time before the magic wore off. Cheleya was a weapon that could destroy them all even if she seemed like a sweet girl normally.

  “Why is that interesting?” Saenic asked the man and Cheleya’s eyes seemed echo the question.

  “Well, if I am correct, and Cheleya can answer if I am not; the amulet is only supposed to act one way. She changes from che’ther to human and human back to che’ther. She has no true reference for the black dragon, yet the magic of the amulet, Kev’Theress, Cheleya, or a combination of all three made for the creation of a black dragon.”