The Avatar's Flames (Through the Fire Book 1)

by Benjamin Medrano

  “Yes, you may go,” Master Mara replied, looking thoughtful again as Ruethwyn turned to leave.

  Chapter 17

  “Hold this, please,” Ruethwyn said, and Sella readily reached up to hold the end of the twine in place. The thread was marked at regular intervals, which would make it easier for her to properly measure Sella for her dress. The biggest problem was holding the thread in place to get the measurements, but at least Sella could help with that. The two of them were in Ruethwyn’s room, which gave them enough privacy for Sella to be comfortable.

  “Thank you again, Rue. I didn’t realize how expensive tailoring in the capital was until we went out to get the materials,” Sella said, her voice soft as she held the twine. “I don’t think I could’ve afforded both the cloth and having the dress made.”

  “I suspect that we could have found someplace that could have done the job, given a bit of time. One of the problems with being in the academy is that we’re associating with the upper class,” Ruethwyn replied, checking which mark she was looking at as she finished the measurement in question. Once she was sure she had it right, Ruethwyn marked down the distance on a slate, then re-wrote the number as she realized her hand hadn’t been quite stable. “It might have been harder to find someone who could’ve made it in the time we have, though. Still, it isn’t a problem. I’m happier that the magic is more useful than just darning holes in my stockings.”

  “True enough. I was more surprised about how Master Mara reacted when he heard what you were doing,” Sella replied, giggling as she let go of the twine, allowing Ruethwyn to move downward. Ruethwyn couldn’t help a smile at the memory, too. “I didn’t expect him to be surprised by a sphere of cloth!”

  “Even the most powerful magi tend to have blind spots, according to my old teacher,” Ruethwyn replied, her smile fading slightly at the memory of Sinera. The pain had diminished slightly, but she doubted it’d ever go away entirely. “Something as simple as a sphere of cloth… what ambitious mage would truly focus on that? It’s too mundane for many of them, like a sphere of… of cultivating or the like. Not plants or nature, just a sphere of growing crops. My father never wanted to be a powerful mage; he just liked weaving fine cloth and making clothing. That doesn’t mean it isn’t useful to other magi, as evidenced by Master Mara’s interest, but it certainly isn’t something which will make most magi world-renowned.”

  “I guess so. It’s just a bit funny to me,” Sella admitted.

  “On that we entirely agree. I was startled as well,” Ruethwyn said, taking another measurement and pausing to read off the ones she had. After a moment, she nodded. “I think that’s all I need. I may be forgetting one or two measurements, but we can get those if they come up.”

  “Alright, I’ll get dressed again,” Sella said, quickly grabbing her robe and slipping it over her undergarments. She was fairly pretty, Ruethwyn noticed, but firmly stepped on her faint attraction to Sella. She liked Anara, and it wasn’t as though Sella would be interested in Ruethwyn anyway. Not after what had happened to her. Sella had just settled her robe when she paused, seeming to hesitate.

  “Hmm? Is something wrong?” Ruethwyn asked, rubbing out the illegible number.

  “I just… I was curious what sort of elemental you were planning to summon. I thought it was rather unfair of Master Mara to put you on the spot like that, especially since you’ve been injured,” Sella said, shrugging uncomfortably. Ruethwyn looked up to see the other woman was biting her lip as she explained. “I know it really isn’t my business, but I can’t help but wonder.”

  Ruethwyn paused, pursing her lips for a moment before sighing and asking gently, “Sella, why does it really matter? You’ve seen how everyone regards me. Until yesterday, Master Mara seemed to prefer ignoring me in class, allowing me to get by on a bare minimum of work. Madeline may hide it well, but she hates me, and where she goes, Yalline follows. You have a bright future ahead of you, with an innate mana core and a good understanding of the various spheres. Me? Unless someone kills the dragon… well, I don’t have high hopes for my future. I’m not going to sit back and feel sorry for myself, but I have no illusions about what has happened.”

  “I… I just…” Sella’s eyes went wide, and she glanced back and forth before she continued more hesitantly. “It’s just… that’s not right! I know you were injured, but that can’t be the end of things. I’ve heard of people recovering from nearly anything, even inherited curses or the like! They may not have found it easy, but I know it’s happened.”

  “What?” Ruethwyn asked, blinking in surprise, her curiosity kindled. “How could they break a curse that’s inherited? I’ve heard of some as potent as mine, but I don’t think anyone in Selwyn could break them.”

  “You reminded me of the story yourself, though,” Sella said, frowning. “Don’t you remember? You talked about the fair folk of the Frostglades and their city. It explained everything to me!”

  “Sella, I have no idea what you’re talking about. I only heard a few stories about Valisair from my teacher, and I don’t remember anything about that,” Ruethwyn told Sella pointedly, frowning as she considered how vague Sinera had been about what she’d experienced in the fair folk city. Finding tomes that referenced it was proving to be almost impossible, too.

  “But—never mind, it doesn’t matter, I guess. I heard stories from my father; he knew another knight who’d inherited a nasty curse that slowly turned his family line into stone by the time they reached two hundred. He said that Maldin was starting to turn gray by the time he was a hundred and seventy-five, so in desperation, he decided to trek into the Frostglades to search for a cure,” Sella explained, shivering as she clutched her arms. “Dad said that it was a particularly bad winter, and he thought Maldin had died in the forest. The next spring, Maldin came out of the Frostglades, right as rain and without the slightest hint of being petrified. Maldin didn’t tell my father what happened, aside from the fact he promised not to share how he went about breaking the curse, and I even met him a few times. I thought it was a bit mysterious, but if there’s a fair folk city, maybe they have a really powerful curse breaker?”

  “That’s… a distinct possibility. It’s also one that I hadn’t really considered. As long as your father wasn’t making things up, that might just be possible. I’ll admit, I’ve been planning to look into the Frostglades, but for a completely different reason,” Ruethwyn said, her thoughts racing.

  She’d initially been planning to do research on the fair folk because she thought that maybe Essryl had been suggesting that she could find allies among their number, but what if that wasn’t why Essryl had been making the cryptic hints that she had? What if she’d known that someone in Valisair could heal Ruethwyn? It was a possibility that gave Ruethwyn hope, and she felt as though someone had thrown her a rope in the midst of drowning.

  “Rue? Are you alright?” Sella asked, snapping Ruethwyn out of her thoughts.

  “Oh, I’m fine. I just… that’s a possibility that hadn’t occurred to me. The thought… oh, I hope it’s real. If it isn’t, that’d be horrible, but even the chance…” Ruethwyn paused, taking a deep breath, then letting it out. “I had no idea it was even possible, at least in our region. The best place I’d heard of for getting something like this cured is in Devaran, and that’s too far away, especially with the horrible things that I’ve heard about the nations in between.”

  “Devaran? Yeah, isn’t that, umm… several hundred miles away? And across one of the branches of the Thorned Wood, too?” Sella looked slightly uncertain. “I mean, I’ve heard that they have powerful clergy, but they’re also humans, and I heard the empire they’re a part of hasn’t been around for that long.”

  “About three hundred years, if I remember correctly… but be as that may, it’s too far away, at least unless I found an airship to take me. I doubt that’ll happen, though,” Ruethwyn said, sighing. “I’ll have to look into the Frostglades further. Thank you, Sella.”

  “Yo
u’re welcome, but, umm…” Sella hesitated, then said, “You still didn’t say what type of elemental you were going to be summoning.”

  Ruethwyn smiled and replied, “I intend to perform it in front of the class, but I’m not afraid to tell you that I’m planning to use the sphere of ice. Isn’t it ironic that the focus I ordered is likely coming from the Frostglades?”

  Sella stared for a moment, then broke down into laughter as she spoke. “Oh! That is ironic, isn’t it?”

  Ruethwyn couldn’t resist some of her own laughter. It helped her feel better.

  Chapter 18

  “Keep your back straight, Cyra. I don’t care how exhausted you may be, so long as you’re in public, you’re to keep your posture as perfect as you can,” Essryl said, her voice calm as she walked among the trainees, her tail lashing like a metronome behind her. Glancing to her right, she added, “Vella, your feet are too far apart.”

  The elven women were gathered in a small dance hall that Essryl had set up years before. Resvarygrath had grumbled at the expense of the dozen fine mirrors set into the walls of the room, but the smooth wooden floor and bright lights were ideal for teaching both dancing and proper poise to the women she was in charge of. None of the captives had the same spark of defiance that Anara had, though most hadn’t fallen into despair yet, and none of them had the sheer force of will that Ruethwyn possessed, which disappointed Essryl.

  Even so, Anara had impressed Essryl. The elven woman had submitted after Essryl’s threats, but she still had that spark in her eyes that indicated that she hadn’t given up. If the dark elf wasn’t mistaken, she’d likely told the others about what Essryl had said about Ruethwyn, since not long after that, the other women had grown more cheerful, and just the tiniest bit less cooperative. That wasn’t the best for them, but Essryl was doing what she could to correct their minor rebellions.

  “Why does our posture even matter?” Anara finally snapped out, standing almost perfectly as Essryl had directed, her legs close together and hands clasped in front of her. All the elven women had relatively tight clothing to allow Essryl to see their precise posture more readily, to better correct them.

  “An excellent question, and one which I felt one of you should’ve asked an hour ago,” Essryl replied, smiling as she glanced over to Leticia, the woman standing by the door. Unlike the others, her posture was perfect, and she looked demurely intrigued as she watched them. “Leticia? Why don’t you tell them? You have the voice of experience and can tell them what to expect.”

  “Of course, Mistress Essryl,” Leticia replied pleasantly, bowing her head respectfully for a moment. Turning to the seventeen women in the room, she spoke calmly, her tone of voice what one might expect if someone was discussing the nice weather outside. “Lord Resvarygrath doesn’t care about us. We’re trophies and servants, if even that. In most ways, we’re regarded in much the same way as the furniture of the palace, save that he has us perform for guests or the like. That being the case, he has extremely particular standards as to our behavior. If you wish to ignore Mistress Essryl’s directions, she’ll allow you to do so, but it will be to your detriment. If you raise your voice in his presence without reason, lose your poise, or otherwise break his view of how one of his trophies should act, Lord Resvarygrath won’t correct you. Instead, you’ll follow in Beatrice’s footsteps, a fellow woman who came with me and was eaten for ignoring the posture training.”

  “He what?” Cyra said, her eyes going wide. It didn’t escape Essryl’s notice that she still hadn’t fully straightened, and the dark elf’s eyes narrowed slightly, since it looked like the woman was trying to follow her directions.

  “He ate her. In a single bite while I watched,” Leticia said, her eyes surprisingly calm as she met Cyra’s gaze, continuing in her pleasant voice. “I was among the first group of women Lord Resvarygrath captured nearly a century ago, and there were twenty-seven of us. Two others are left. Of the rest… eight were human and died years ago. The others primarily died in the first year after our training or grew complacent over the years.”

  “O-oh. That’s horrible…” Anara said, looking shaken at last. “But we’re… we’re not going to…”

  “If you’re relying on the idea that someone is going to rescue you, you’re being even more foolish than I expected, even for an elven peasant from a backwater border town,” Essryl interrupted bluntly, circling behind Cyra as the others flinched. “You have no guarantee that someone will rescue you before your training period is over, a training period which is only two years long and we’ve already used four months of that. That’s assuming Lord Resvarygrath doesn’t decide that he’s going to visit to check on your development, which would go poorly for any of you who don’t show enough progress. Even being given leeway for being in training only goes so far. I would suggest you focus on actually performing your training properly, as it’s the only chance you have for survival in such circumstances. Speaking of which, why have you not straightened properly, Cyra?”

  None of the women looked happy about Essryl’s words, and from the looks they exchanged, Essryl felt her certainty that they’d been slacking grow. Still, if this didn’t do the job of convincing them, she wasn’t going to stress too much in the future. One couldn’t cure foolishness without even more skill in mind magic than she possessed.

  “I… I can’t, Mistress Essryl. I’m trying, but… but it hurts when I do,” the woman replied, swallowing hard as she glanced down at the floor. “Am I going to get eaten, then?”

  “Perhaps, but let’s have a look at you first. If you’d said something before, you might have been able to avoid whatever discomfort you’re going through,” Essryl retorted, watching Cyra flinch.

  Stepping up behind the elf, Essryl murmured the words of an incantation, flicking her fingers through the gestures before she ran one hand down Cyra’s spine. Her touch prompted a shiver from the woman but Essryl ignored it, frowning as she sensed the woman’s back and the myriad problems afflicting it.

  From the outside, Cyra looked like she was in perfect condition, but that wasn’t true. Two of her vertebrae were fused, and tiny shards of bone were slowly working their way toward her spinal cord, which could be disastrous. Worse, her spine had a slight side-to-side curve to it, which was why she couldn’t quite straighten the way she needed to. Essryl could fix it, but doing so would take a little time, time she wasn’t spending in the middle of their session. Instead, she pulled her hand away.

  “You have multiple problems with your back, Cyra, and fixing them right now would take longer than I’d like when sixteen other women need directions,” Essryl explained bluntly. “If you come to my room this evening, I’ll deal with your problem, or you can just live with it. The choice is yours.”

  “A-as you say, Mistress Essryl,” Cyra replied, swallowing hard. “I’ll be by this evening.”

  “Good. Now, the rest of you, let’s see some effort. Only half of you are even close to meeting My Lord’s standards,” Essryl said, stepping away from the young woman and looking the others over.

  A chorus of affirmatives came in reply, and Essryl smiled slightly. At least they seemed to be taking it seriously now.

  Cyra let out a gasp as the last changes took effect, and Essryl smiled at the sensation of the vertebrae popping into place under her hand. It likely wasn’t terribly pleasant for the elven woman, but now there wasn’t any chance of those bone shards cutting her spinal cord and she’d be able to stand up straight.

  “There we are; that should pretty well solve your issue,” Essryl said, pulling her hands away from Cyra. “Stand and test your back.”

  “Yes, Mistress Essryl,” Cyra said obediently, slowly standing, the thin shift she wore swirling around her as she did so. The woman gingerly straightened, and then her eyes went wide in surprise. “I… I don’t hurt at all! After how the healing felt, I thought I’d hurt afterward, at least for a little while.”

  “Of course it hurt. Two bones in your spine had fused t
ogether, and you had bone shards that might’ve paralyzed you eventually, so healing it was either quick and painful or exceedingly slow. I chose the former,” Essryl said bluntly, frowning. “You should have told me you were in pain and I could’ve solved this earlier.”

  “I’m sorry, Mistress Essryl… I won’t let it happen again,” Cyra said, her gaze lowering guiltily, and Essryl let out a soft sigh.

  “It’s fixed now, and that’s the important thing. Go back to your room, Cyra,” Essryl ordered, then paused and added, “Also, please let the others know that if they have injuries or difficulties with their health they need to speak to me. While you’re here, my task is to ensure that you’re capable of fulfilling My Lord’s desires.”

  “Oh, of course, Mistress Essryl. I’ll do that right away,” Cyra said, bowing her head again, then quickly heading for the door. As Cyra opened it, Essryl caught the scent of someone else outside and she listened closely, then smiled.

  “Come in, Anara,” Essryl called out, and a moment later, the door opened and Anara stepped inside, looking worried.

  “How did you know it was me?” Anara asked, looking around the room dubiously.

  “Your breathing is quite distinctive, as is the way you walk. Identifying each of you is quite simple, Anara,” Essryl replied and smiled as she asked, “Did you notice something interesting about my room?”

  “I’m just… I’m a little confused by it. You’re obviously powerful, and the… the dragon values you greatly, yet your room is even simpler than ours are. Why?” Anara asked, gesturing around the room.