I looked around quickly, trying to pick out the gray-clad girl. I found her sitting with her back to a rock, red staining her uniform. But as I watched, Saffron approached her and withdrew a parchment from her sleeve.
Leila gave a pained grimace which melted into a look of relief as Saffron ripped the composition, flicking her fingers at the injured soldier. They exchanged several inaudible words, and then Leila’s searching eyes found me on top of the gully. I stepped swiftly back, out of sight.
Dariela’s gratitude I could take, but I did not want Leila’s awe. Not for something like this.
“Spoken Mage.”
I turned slowly to face Colonel Jennica. Her eyes held the awe I had been trying to avoid, but with an edge of greedy calculation that made the shock on Leila’s face pale by comparison.
“I had heard stories,” she said. “But I didn’t realize…” She shook her head. “It’s different to see it for myself.”
Her words drove back the horror that had been making everything around me hazy, turning it instead into unreasoning anger.
“Yes,” I snapped. “And I counted five of our own dead down there. Perhaps some of them would be alive now if you had listened to me and let me approach from the beginning.”
The colonel stared me down, her expression cool and unflustered.
“If I had comprehended your strength, I might have chosen differently, it is true. But perhaps not. We did not know the situation when we arrived.” She looked me up and down. “It is the job of an officer to do more than consider individual lives. It is our job to see the broader picture. This gully has no strategic value. It lies far from our troops, our headquarters…” She glanced back toward it with narrowed eyes. “It is not even near any farming land.”
“That was no raiding party,” said Lucas quietly, referencing the small squads of soldiers who regularly attempted to break through our line of defense to wreak havoc on the kingdom beyond.
“No indeed,” said the colonel. “Too large and well-equipped for a raiding party, too small for an invading force. An officer must consider what their purpose could be in preparing an ambush in such a place.”
Her eyes lingered on me for a moment before looking over my shoulder where I could feel Lucas’s presence.
“Perhaps it has not occurred to you, Spoken Mage, but I can assure you it has occurred to me that ours was the patrol intended to traverse that gully. And it just so happens that our patrol contains a number of persons of very great interest indeed. Perhaps you can say with any certainty that it was me the enemy was after, and not you or the prince. But I cannot. And since you are both in my care, I hardly intended to let you any closer to danger than absolutely necessary.”
She gave me a disgusted look. “I hope you will ponder on that before questioning me again. I am not new to war, youngster.”
Shock had dissipated my anger, and I could think of nothing to say. Turning, she strode to the edge of the ravine and called for the prisoners to be brought up.
I swallowed and turned to face Lucas, swaying again. It was hard to think clearly through the fog that filled my mind, and I had no idea how I would manage to walk back to camp. I intended to ask him if he thought it possible one of us had been the target, but my words died in my throat at the burning anger in his expression.
“All of them, Elena? At once? Really?”
I winced and tried to think how to explain there had been no time for subtleties. He leaned closer to me, gripping one of my shoulders. A spark jumped between us, clearing my brain slightly.
He dropped his voice low. “Do you have any idea how many compositions I’m carrying on my person? Of the stored strength I currently possess?”
When I did nothing but blink at him, his expression darkened.
“Stored power, Elena. The kind that won’t exhaust me. That carries no risk to me whatsoever. We were both instructed to deal with the soldiers. You didn’t need to target them all at once.”
One of the royal guards called for him, and he let me go abruptly, striding away before I could point out that the pre-prepared compositions he carried were, by necessity, broad. The time it might have taken him to come up with a strategy and choose the best ones to use was time Dariela and Leila hadn’t had.
Only once we had begun the slow trek back to camp, prisoners in tow, did it occur to me that I hadn’t had the chance to ask either Lucas or Jennica the most important question.
If that had been an ambush lying in wait for one of us…how had the enemy known which patrol we had joined or what our route was to be? For that matter, how had they known we were to be away from Bronton today at all?
How long before someone acknowledged out loud that we had a traitor at work among us?
Chapter 14
I was stumbling before we made it more than a few minutes. The ground ahead of us stretched out agonizingly far, a seemingly insurmountable distance. But when I tripped over a small stone, sturdy hands steadied me, surprising me with their strength.
“Here, lean on me,” Leila offered, slinging my arm across her shoulders.
I considered protesting but didn’t have the energy. She nodded at another soldier I didn’t recognize, and the older woman moved forward to prop up my other side. Together we moved faster, my whole concentration focused on putting one foot in front of the other.
At some point we passed Saunders, Thompson, and our female soldier with the suppression team. Vaguely I heard them reporting that the working they had investigated had been harmless.
“A decoy, perhaps,” the distant voice of Jennica said. “To reduce our squad’s numbers by the time we made it to the gully.”
I didn’t hear any more, and I couldn’t bring myself to care enough to try. Not until I had some sleep.
As we approached camp, however, I finally put my finger on an off feeling that had been niggling at the back of my mind.
Leila. She was so quiet. Had battle finally done what army conscription had not and quashed her bubbly positivity? A worse idea occurred to me. Had Saffron done only a partial healing?
As we reached the first of the tents, I stopped, lurching forward when my two supporters took an extra step to halt themselves. Separating from them, I peered at Leila.
“You’re awfully quiet. Are you injured still?”
Leila shook her head, unshed tears shining in her eyes.
“I suppose…I suppose you didn’t have a chance to look at the…” She swallowed. “At the bodies. You never came down into the gully.”
“I’m sorry,” I said quickly, but she jumped over me.
“No, that’s not a criticism. What you did—” She exchanged a look with the other soldier. “You saved us all.” She looked back at me. “I just mean that you probably didn’t see…”
She drew a shuddering breath, making an effort to pull herself together.
“They got Jason. An arrow to the throat. None of the mages even had a chance to try to…” She looked away, her face deathly pale. “We enlisted in the same batch and both got our first posting to the training barracks. I know this is a war, and soldiers die, but…”
“Your first friend to die is always the hardest. Nothing can prepare you for it, not really,” the other soldier said in a quiet voice. “We’ll drink to him tonight at dinner, but it doesn’t do much to heal the ache.”
She glanced over at me. “Our small version of an ashes ceremony. His family back home will have the real one, of course.”
“Oh. His family.” A stifled sob shook Leila.
We all stood in awkward silence, unsure what to do to help until she looked up with a martial light in her eye.
“It’s all the fault of that—”
“Hush!” The older soldier jumped in quickly, silencing whatever insults Leila had been about to utter. Her face dropped into sympathetic lines. “Some truths can’t be safely spoken,” she said more softly.
I looked back and forth between them, noting the rebellious light still in Leila’
s eyes.
“Whose fault?” I asked.
The woman looked at me warily, and I tried to look as approachable as possible.
“I may wear one of these,” I plucked at my white robes, “but I’m as commonborn as you, remember. I’ve cursed the mages myself, often enough. I’ll carry no tales.”
The soldier didn’t look entirely convinced.
“We need them, Leila, just remember that,” she said. “We’d all have been dead back there without Captain Matthis. He kept us together when the attack hit.” She nodded at me. “The trainees, too. I almost enjoyed watching that Lady Dariela at work. Never seen death look so elegant.”
She nodded again once and strode away into the camp.
Leila sighed. “She’s right about Captain Matthis. For all his early morning humors, he’s as solid as they come. I’d heard as much, and now I’ve seen it for myself.” Her expression soured. “It was that lieutenant.”
I stepped closer, encouraging her to drop her voice. I wanted to hear what had happened—the real account—but I didn’t want her getting in trouble for it.
“What happened?”
“He’s new. Only graduated from your Academy last year and only just got posted to doing patrol. Our previous lieutenant was capable enough, but he got promoted, thus how we ended up with a fresh one.”
She paused and ran a hand over her eyes.
“Jason tried to tell him we were off our route. And that—” She broke off and looked around before modifying whatever she had been going to say. “That lieutenant gave him latrine duty for a week for questioning orders. Even so, when we reached the gully, Williams tried again. Tried to tell him something didn’t feel right, that we shouldn’t go in. Only made the officer angrier, and he insisted we increase our pace.”
Her color still hadn’t returned, and I could see her reliving it in her mind.
“They sprang out from nowhere. They’d concealed themselves behind boulders and trees using blankets covered in dirt and branches.”
So that’s how they had evaded our lieutenant’s composition. They hadn’t been using power to disguise their presence at all.
“Jason tried to tell him, and so did Williams.” Leila’s voice hitched. “And now they’re both dead. But that lieutenant’s still alive. When that attack hit, the first thing he did was pull out a personal shielding composition.”
I frowned. Cowardly, of course. But I couldn’t help thinking of Clarence or Araminta. That could be them in two years’ time. For all I knew, it was the first time the mage had ever even seen a Kallorwegian, let alone battle. It didn’t change the fact that things should have gone differently, of course. That they could have gone differently if he’d recognized his inexperience and listened to his squad.
“Williams was the oldest veteran on the team,” Leila said. “He’d been doing this longer than some of us have been alive. Knew the ground, knew the squad.”
She didn’t say any more, but she didn’t need to. Williams should have been in charge. Everyone would still be alive right now if he had been. He should have been the lieutenant, and the mage the private. She knew it, I knew it. But nothing could be gained by saying it.
“Go get checked out properly at one of the healing tents,” I said. “I’m sure Saffron did her best, but she’s not exactly a trained healer.”
Leila nodded a little absently and insisted on seeing me to my own tent before she would obey my instruction. I didn’t stop to watch her go, too eager to talk to Saffron and Coralie and reassure myself that both my friends had returned unharmed. Who knew what dangers Coralie’s group might have run into?
But their patrol had been uneventful, as it turned out. Coralie and Lavinia sat on their cots, listening with wide eyes to Natalya tell the story of the attack. Araminta, Dariela, and Saffron made small additions, but no one tried to correct a narrative that gave Natalya far more of a central role than in reality. In fact, for a moment I couldn’t remember seeing her there at all. Only when I thought back did I realize she had been the third trainee fighting off the breakaway group with Saffron and Dariela. Calix had been on the other side of the gully with Matthis.
When it came to my involvement, Natalya attempted to gloss over it. But Dariela looked up and saw me. Immediately she cut in on the tale.
“Elena saved us all. She certainly saved my life, at any rate. Worked a composition that killed every one of the attacking soldiers. Every one.”
She crossed over to me and raised her hand in the air in front of her, its back toward me. Hesitantly, I twined my arm around hers so I could grip her hand. Squeezing it, she thumped the back of my hand once against her chest.
“I, for one, am grateful. That’s twice now. I don’t intend to forget it.”
Natalya humphed, sticking her nose into the air. “There’s one thing, for sure,” she said, “my father isn’t going to be pleased to hear that Calix and I were put in such a dangerous situation. That fool Jackson had no idea what he was doing and could have gotten us all killed. He was always useless, even back at the Academy. Matthis should have stepped in. At least the captain seemed competent.”
Dariela stepped away from me and looked back at the Devoras girl. She raised an eyebrow but didn’t actually disagree.
“If the general sees fit to reassign Lieutenant Jackson, it would no doubt be better for everyone. Perhaps the Armed Forces has other roles that would better suit his strengths.” Her tone made it clear she rather doubted that.
Coralie rushed over to me, ignoring their discussion of Jackson. I dragged her into a corner and gave her the real story. Saffron and Araminta quickly followed, backing up my less varnished version.
“Honestly, though,” said Saffron, “when it came to it, I was glad to have Calix and Natalya there. I mean, not as glad as I was to have Dariela—or you, Elena, when you arrived—but they fought well. And it took all of us to hold them off. I don’t know how much longer we would have lasted without your assistance.”
She looked pale and shaken, and on impulse I pulled her into a big hug. She returned it, looking a little teary when I pulled away.
“Thank goodness for Captain Matthis. He moved faster than I would have thought humanly possible when they sprung the ambush. He had a shield up, all of us hiding behind boulders, and had cut down one of the enemy mages while the rest of us were still trying to absorb what was going on.”
“I get the impression they’ve assigned the best to watching over us, at least,” I said.
Coralie nodded slowly, still looking shocked at the news of our eventful patrols. She met my eyes across Araminta’s head.
“Lorcan’s going to be furious, though, isn’t he? I mean, our first day, and this happens. One of you could easily have been killed or captured.”
I nodded. I needed to sleep. But once I had, I intended to give that possibility a great deal more thought. It seemed to me vitally important to know which of us the enemy had tried to capture or kill. Second only to the need to discover how they had known so much.
I slept for the rest of the day, waking only once dark had fallen. The sleep had finally settled my stomach, and it growled at me, complaining at being so empty.
I slipped out of bed, whispering to Coralie that I was off to find some food. She made a half-hearted attempt to get up, but I told her to stay put. From the looks of it, most of my year mates were just falling asleep, so it must still be evening. I didn’t need company.
I made it only two steps from the tent when a shadowy figure fell into step beside me. I flinched.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you,” said Lucas.
I didn’t reply. He hadn’t scared me—his presence was too familiar for that. But I still didn’t trust myself to be alone in the dark with him.
We walked in silence between the tents until I finally spoke.
“What were you doing there?”
This time it was his turn not to reply. Had he been waiting for me to emerge? It must have been a long wait.
/>
“I’m sorry I spoke to you like that back there,” he said after another pause. “What you did was incredible, and I should have…” He sighed and ran a hand through his hair, the dark locks falling back into perfect place afterward. “You scared me. When I heard your composition, I feared…”
“You’re right, it was reckless.” I spoke quietly. “I’ve never been in a situation like that before. Dariela and Leila were both about to be killed. I just…” I spread my arms helplessly. “I reacted. Like I always do. And then I did it again with Colonel Jennica.”
“No one can predict how they’ll respond the first time they see battle,” he said. “There are worse ways you could respond.” My mind flew to Lieutenant Jackson and then to Lucas himself.
“I suppose so…” I thought of the way the prince had intervened to prevent our own patrol walking into what had turned out to be a trap. Somehow his responses always possessed a subtlety mine lacked.
“I’m still afraid for you, Elena,” he said.
I glanced sideways at him. Was it the darkness hiding our faces that made him so open all of a sudden?
“For me or of me?” I asked, the memory of all those motionless bodies making me shiver.
He turned slightly, reaching out a hand that he quickly let drop.
“For you. Always for you.” He paused while a soldier passed in the other direction. “I’ve been thinking on what Colonel Jennica said. They were coming for you, Elena, I’m sure of it. And now they’ve seen what you’re capable of. Next time they’ll bring two platoons and a dozen mages.”
“We can’t know that,” I said quickly, trying to hide the shiver that ran through me. “They could just as easily have been after you. How long has it been since a member of the royal family was within striking distance of the front lines? Perhaps they hoped to hold you to ransom, to force your family to cede something.”
“Perhaps…”
The darkness hid his eyes, but I didn’t like what I heard in his voice. Was he thinking of his delegation to the Sekali Empire? Thinking that his family would not sacrifice any part of their kingdom for him?
Voice of Dominion (The Spoken Mage Book 3) Page 14
