Dragon's Mage (An Advent Mage Novel), The - Raconteur, Honor

by Raconteur, Honor

  The councilmen certainly looked happy at the idea of saving money. Mayor Hartmann studied me for a long moment before relaxing into an approving smile. “Yes, that it would. I’ll send up a carpenter to talk things over with you tomorrow night. Have your suggested improvements ready for him by then.”

  That I could easily do. Actually, I could probably rattle off a list right on the spot after living there for over two months. “Of course, Mayor.”

  “Well, Magus, we don’t want to keep you,” Captain Lang said in what he obviously meant as a dismissal.

  I gave them all a half-bow. “Then, gentlemen, excuse me. I’ll get back to work.” I turned and headed back outside but didn’t get more than two feet before Mari called out.

  “Krys!” She came outside with a stack of letters in her hand. “Before I forget to give this to you, again, take it with you.”

  A little perplexed, I took the stack of letters from her hand. Normally I picked up my mail from the main post so why would she have…?

  “What’s this?”

  “Some people weren’t quite sure where you’re living now,” she explained with a warm smile. “So they just mailed it here.”

  Mailed what here? I started looking through them. Oh. Oh. In my hands I held letters, more letters, from the people that I’d helped in Mellor. Some of the letters were thin, simple cards, others were thicker parchment, and still others had a suspicious bulge to them that hinted artwork might be inside.

  “Great good magic, I know I’ve been involved in quite a few fires, but not this many!” I protested.

  Mari’s quirked eyebrow indicated she clearly disagreed. Raising one hand, she started ticking things off on her fingers. “The Segers’ house, the Westbrew Inn, the Bastin’s house, Thiry’s restaurant, the Evrard’s house—”

  I winced at that one. “But I shouldn’t get a thank you for that fire. Their son set fire to the backyard in order to signal Kaya to come play, after all.”

  Mari bit her lip on a laugh. “Yes, the story’s spread everywhere and we’re all getting a kick of it. Especially since Kaya scolded him for it.”

  Yes, and hadn’t that been a sight. A dragon, hunched in front of a crying boy of four, scolding him for playing with fire. It hadn’t gone over well. Especially since the boy’s defense was, But you play with fire too!

  “Small Kryses not do again,” Kaya assured her with a huff. She had been very sure to sit down with all of the children after that and go over the proper way to call her.

  “I’m sure they won’t,” Mari agreed, still fighting a smile. “Regardless, the point is you’ve been more involved than you may realize and we’re especially thankful that you’re so willing to take on all of the other tasks that you don’t really need to do.”

  Work was work. It all needed to be done. I appreciated the thanks, but even if no one said anything to me, I’d still be willing to do it.

  I sorted through them quickly, more or less able to tell which ones were cards or which ones held pictures just by the size and weight of them. But then I came to one that didn’t look like the rest. I didn’t recognize the sender at all, either. Hmmm? Curiosity piqued, I tucked the rest of the letters under one arm and tore into that one first, breaking the simple unmarked wax seal and unfolding the thin parchment.

  I’d half-expected it to be from Strae Academy, as I occasionally got letters from students asking questions. (I think Chatta prompted students to write me. I couldn’t explain this odd phenomenon otherwise.) But this handwriting didn’t belong to a child. An adult had written this. The Solish didn’t quite make grammatical sense, so I had to puzzle it out.

  To the Solian Fire Magus,

  Well, that would be me, all right.

  Greetings. I have heard tales, a great story, of Fire Maguses. It has become clear what needs to be done. I will be like you. I will do the work to become a Fire Magus too. Watch me.

  A scrawled set of initials was at the bottom, but I frankly couldn’t decipher it. I flipped it over to the back to see if I could find which city it’d come from, but it didn’t even have a city-state listed. Just a string of numerical coding that only a postmaster could decipher.

  I flipped it back over and read through it again, trying to make heads or tails of it, but it still didn’t make any sense. This definitely didn’t come from a student at Strae, though. That much I knew. Maybe it came within the city?

  “What’s wrong?” Mari indicated the letter in my hand. “You look puzzled.”

  “I can’t figure out who sent this.” I normally tried to respond to people in some way or another, but this one had me confused. “And the contents don’t make a lot of sense either.”

  “Oh?” She stepped around to my side and leaned against my shoulder to read it herself. I held the letter steady, canted slightly toward her, and stayed very still. I couldn’t help but take a deep breath. She smelled amazing—of sunshine and something that was pure Mari. Even through the barrier of her clothes and mine, she felt warm, too. She could stay right there for the rest of the day and I wouldn’t mind a bit.

  “Ahh,” she said in a tone ripe with understanding, “it’s one of those letters.”

  “One of those letters?” I repeated blankly.

  “Occasionally, you get things like this,” she explained with a resigned shrug, taking a half step away from me. “There are people in the world that aren’t quite right in the head, and they latch onto people who are more famous than they are, or just more well-known. They become fans, so to speak. They’re usually rather harmless, just annoying.” She jerked her chin to indicate the letter. “It seems like you’ve been adopted by one of them.”

  I looked at the letter with mixed feelings. “Wonderful.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” she advised sympathetically. “Nothing normally comes out of it. You get the occasional letter or cheap present, but they don’t expect a response from you. Just ignore it and move on.”

  That I could do. Shaking my head, I folded the letter back up and tucked it under the rest. “I suppose I’ll read all of these later tonight. Thanks for giving them to me.”

  “Not at all.” She gave me a playful tap on the shoulder as she headed back toward her office. “Get back to work.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Smiling, I put a foot onto Kaya and climbed aboard. “Come on, we’ve got roads to burn clean.”

  Chapter Nine: Amendments

  It took no time at all to fly around Mellor and make sure that there were no trouble spots. Satisfied, I turned Kaya around and headed north.

  The air carried a slight edge of coolness. Not enough to be uncomfortable, but I knew that if we stayed in the air long enough, I’d be chilled by the time we got home. Fortunately, I’d be using magic a good portion of the time we were airborne, which would help combat the chill.

  I’d already seen areas on our previous runs that were overgrown or going in that direction. So I didn’t have to hunt for spots to burn. I just started at the very edge of the roads leading up from Paswaters Lake and started burning things from there.

  Actually, doing this from the back of a dragon proved to be challenging. Partially just because of Kaya’s speed. I’d never tried to control fire by sheer feel alone—but I had to do that at least part of the time with her, as she flew by the area so quickly that I constantly had to turn her around in order to see the fire I had just started. I quickly cut back on how much area I tried to burn at once, taking it at smaller intervals than I normally would.

  “Too!” Kaya demanded, obviously put out that I was having all the fun.

  I rolled my eyes. “Fine, do the next section!” I called to her over the rush of the wind. “But do a cool burn!” I hastily added.

  She gave me a huff and a sideways look that adequately stated she knew what she needed to do, thank you very much. I held up my hands in surrender and shut up. But I still kept a close eye on her as she opened her mouth and let out a long burst of fire.

  But she really did know
what needed to be done, and the fire she shot was exactly the right temperature and speed to burn the trail clean. I gave her an approving pat on the neck and turned toward the next section of the trail. “This part too!”

  We took turns burning the sections of the road clean. (And I blessed the children for teaching her what ‘taking turns’ meant, too, as she really didn’t want to share the fun.) The next time that I really paid attention to the hour, the sun was directly overhead, and my stomach rumbled for food. It was late afternoon at that point, and by my watch, well past quitting time. So we turned around and flew home, leaving the rest of the work for tomorrow.

  My plans to just go in and cook dinner were truncated when I found a package sitting on my doorstep. Curious, I picked it up and gave it a more thorough look. It was in a tan courier pouch, a common thing in Sol, but this didn’t hold a single message. The package contained a thick stack of papers. Really puzzled now, I pulled the top sheets out and scanned them.

  The heading of the first page read Terms of Employment for Mellor.

  Ah. The infamous paperwork I had to fill out before I could be hired. Mari must have sent this to me. I never could seem to sit down with her for more than ten minutes without some emergency drawing one of us away.

  Shrugging, I tucked it under my arm and went into the house.

  I made a very unexciting dinner, turned Kaya loose so that she could fish for hers, and then sat down with the paperwork while eating. What I thought would take a few hours turned into a few days.

  Becoming a full-fledged employee to the City of Mellor, and by extension, the Empire of Sol, required a lot of paperwork. And I mean a lot of paperwork. Selling your own child wouldn’t take this much effort!

  A lot of it was in legalese that I had to wade through. My Solish wasn’t always up to the task, either. I invested in a Chahirese-Solish dictionary and it saw a great deal of use for several days straight as I slowly worked my way through the pile. I didn’t want to sign something that I didn’t even understand.

  Turned out I was wise to be cautious.

  Most of the employment specifications didn’t hold any surprises. The terms and conditions for being a firefighter were straight forward and predictable. Most of the terms for being a border patrolman were the same way. There was just this one clause that gave me pause.

  If any emergency or battle situation arose that required my expertise, I was required to give it. In other words, if they felt like having a Fire Mage would be handy to tackle a certain mission, I had to go.

  I didn’t know how I felt about that.

  I did not believe for one second that Mari would ever order me to fight without a very good reason. If she knew how I felt about this, she’d probably not order to me to go at all unless it was a true emergency situation. But she wasn’t the only one with authority over Border Patrol. In fact, she was really only the coordinator for it—there were a good three or four people with more power than her. It was them I didn’t trust.

  I knew magicians fought when the time called for it. I wasn’t naïve enough to think that I could avoid all conflict, especially with my abilities. When people think Fire Mage, the first thing that popped in their head was mass destruction. But I didn’t want to spend the rest of my career going around torching things.

  Maybe I needed to rethink the position of the border patrol.

  But would it really matter if I signed that contract or not? If I knew that they needed my help, that a great many lives would be saved if I went, wouldn’t I go regardless? If not, that oath I swore on the Isle of Strae to serve and protect the people around me would be pretty meaningless.

  If there was a good, clear-cut choice to be made here, I didn’t see it.

  ~*~

  “Mari, have a minute?” I paused just inside her doorway, looking in.

  She turned away from the map on her wall and gave me a questioning look, left eyebrow raised, head slightly slanted. Unlike some days, today she looked well rested and crisp in her city uniform. No emergency seemed to be brewing, which was a blessing.

  “Yes, why?”

  “How about an early lunch?” I offered. I wanted to talk to her one-on-one, in an unofficial capacity, but I couldn’t do that here in the office. I figured the best way to approach it would be to take her elsewhere.

  Her eyebrows rose in surprise at the invitation, but she readily nodded in agreement. “All right. Have a place in mind?”

  “Not really. I don’t know the best places to eat in town yet. So I’ll let you choose.”

  She amiably went along with this plan and stood. She didn’t get a full foot away from her desk before she doubled back to it and picked up a stack of letters on the desk.

  “Another wave of them came in for you.”

  Probably because of the shipyard fire two nights ago. Considering we were actually in that area, Kaya’s nose had caught the scent of the fire very quickly and we’d put it out before most people had even known the danger. I took the letters from her and tucked them into my coat pocket as Mari led the way out of the office and onto the open street. Without any hesitation on her part, she took me to this little out of the way place on a street that I’d overlooked. The smell of food wafted outwards and while I didn’t recognize any of the scents, the aroma set my mouth watering.

  The place was tiny, barely able to hold four tables in the front room. The back had a counter where an older woman took our orders. The place gave a sense of age, despite being spotless. If someone told me that it had stood here for a hundred years, I would’ve believed them.

  We took a seat at a scarred table that had seen better days, waiting for the food to arrive. The atmosphere of the place was hardly romantic, which I appreciated, as I only now realized how my invitation could have been taken. But Mari clearly knew I didn’t intend for this to be a date.

  She slung into a mismatched chair with an air of familiarity, as if she had been in that exact chair hundreds of times before. For all I knew, that might be the case. She hadn’t even looked at the menu posted on the wall before ordering. This was probably a favorite haunt of hers.

  Settled, she looked up and caught my eyes. “All right, what’s wrong?”

  I took in a breath and let it out slowly. “You’re sharp. Or I’m obvious.”

  “A little of both,” she responded dryly, eyes crinkling. “You’ve been sitting on that contract for almost six days. I’m guessing you have an issue with some part of it.”

  Clearly, I could not underestimate her. The sideways approach that I had mentally planned would not work, so I tossed it aside and asked bluntly, “Is the border patrol really called in to support the military operations of Osmar?”

  She didn’t so much as blink. “I just knew you were going to ask that question. Magicians don’t normally fight, do they.” It wasn’t a question.

  “No, we do,” I corrected, rubbing at the back of my neck. “It’s just…Mari, how much did you hear about what happened in Jarrell?”

  “That crazy magician that set fire to the city, you mean? I heard so many versions of that story that I lost count.”

  Didn’t surprise me. Rumors did that. “All right, let me tell you what really happened. You’re not going to really understand my hesitation otherwise. There was a Fire Mage, Remcarparoden, who went insane shortly after Chahir announced the new set of laws dealing with magicians.” At the words Fire Mage she went very, very still and seemed to almost hold her breath. I grimly continued. “He truly was mad. No one was attacking him, or threatening him, he was just setting the city ablaze for the sheer fun of it. He was intoxicated by his own power. The Dom of Jarrell had to call in for help just to stop him. Garth and his team were the ones to respond—in fact, it was Garth that battled him. They destroyed a whole courtyard before Garth could subdue him. Ever since then, no one has really trusted the Fire Mages.” That, actually, was the largest understatement of the year, but I left it at that.

  “You’re afraid that if you start using
your abilities to fight with, that the fears associated with Fire Mages are only going to be validated,” she summed up quietly. “You think that no one will believe that a Fire Mage can do something besides destroy.”

  She’d struck the nail precisely on the head. “That’s it exactly.”

  Mari lifted a hand to her eyes and rubbed at them with her fingers, releasing a long sigh as she did so. “I didn’t think of that. I thought you were hesitating for a different reason entirely.”

  Different reason? What had she imagined? “What’s that?”

  “You’re a gentle soul, Krys,” she told me with a crooked smile as she lowered her hand. “In fact, you’re probably one of the most gentle men that I’ve ever known. I had a hard time picturing you on a battlefield.”

  Well, she wasn’t wrong. “I’d never choose to fight, not if there was another recourse. But magicians do fight, Mari. We’re prepared for that the day that we finish our training. I just don’t want to be dragged into a situation where my superiors are constantly using me to fight when it’s not strictly necessary. It’s a slippery slope that I don’t want to walk on.”

  She clearly understood what I meant and her brows furrowed thoughtfully. “I can’t say your concerns are groundless. We might want to revise the terms of the contract a little to make it clear that they can only call you in a true emergency. And even then, you should have the right to decide if you should go or not.”

  “Can you do that?” I asked with as neutral a voice as I could muster. “Wouldn’t it be easier to just take away the border patrol part of the job? I don’t really need it.”

  She was shaking her head before I even finished. “No, you’re a tremendous help to us in that area. I don’t want to lose you. And frankly, it wouldn’t really help. You’re in a military city-state, Krys. Citizens are required to fight if we need them to. You can’t avoid fighting entirely by giving up a job. In fact, it would actually protect you better if we just amended the contract.”