The Kingdom of Eternal Sorrow (The Golden Mage Book 1)

by C. G. Garcia

  He looks like an angel of death…

  And still, the expected blows didn’t come.

  Instead, he sighed dramatically, a stricken look on his face, as he pointed his finger at a sheathed dagger that hung from a belt she had not spotted earlier and shook his head firmly.

  Her confusion deepened. What is he trying to tell me? He hadn’t tried to speak to her again after she had bolted, so he must have figured out that she couldn’t understand him. She considered the dagger. It being a weapon, was his gesture meant to tell her that he wouldn’t hurt her?

  —or was it wishful thinking?

  Abruptly, he extended a hand over her forehead. Allison eyed it suspiciously, half-expecting him to strike her with it. Had she been capable of it, she would have flinched. However, he merely waved it across her face in a fluid pattern that didn’t once touch her.

  To her astonishment, she felt her limbs instantly begin to tingle with a strange sensation, and the hair on her arms stood on end. A few seconds later, they came alive again, no longer feeling like dead weights attached to her body. She moved both her arms and legs cautiously, not ready to believe that he had cured her paralysis with literally just a wave of his hand, but they moved freely at her will, showing no signs of resistance. Inexplicably, her overwhelming fear also left with her paralysis, leaving only a deep sense of curiosity.

  Allison timidly chanced a look at her strange companion and saw that he wasn’t even looking at her. He seemed to be deep in thought, his pale eyes staring out at nothing in particular. As he stood there, motionless, he suddenly reminded her of a statue of a Greek god she had once seen.

  God, he really is beautiful…

  He seemed to sense that Allison was looking at him because he immediately turned to lock eyes with her until the heat of his gaze was too much for her to bear, and she quickly looked down at the coverlet, her heartbeat speeding up.

  In the next second, she felt him place his hand on her forehead. It was warm to the touch and had a surprisingly soothing effect on her. Remarkably, she didn’t flinch away. She risked another glance into those searing, pale-violet eyes, and that was the last thing she remembered seeing before a rising darkness came to take her away from all her confusion and fear.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  After the sleep spell that he had placed on the girl had taken effect, Aidric immediately set out to speak with King Diryan. He didn’t want to give himself enough time to back out of his decision. The young woman had too much power at her disposal, power that could easily destroy them all, especially if used untamed. They had to find out where she had come from and why.

  If she was indeed the Golden Mage of their prophecy, the fate of Lamia depended on how they handled the situation. One wrong move and they could all perish, squashed like bugs under the sheer force of her power. He knew he would do everything in his power to prevent that tragedy from ever coming to pass. Everything, that is, except destroy her.

  That’s what I’m really afraid of, Aidric thought as he concentrated on weaving a shield around the door to his suite that would prevent anyone except himself or a mage more powerful than he from entering. I guess that’s why I’m so reluctant to reveal her presence to anyone. If they believe her to be the Golden Mage as I do, I’m not certain how they would react to the knowledge that the old prophecy is true, how Diryan will decide to act.

  All was still silent as he made his way down a branch corridor of the Mage Hall, and for once, he welcomed the silence. The emptiness of the Hall often reminded him of the loneliness he carried within his soul, so treading down its corridors was not something he enjoyed doing under normal circumstances.

  The good luck he had been experiencing thus far expired when he reached for the handle to the door leading to the palace’s large, indoor garden and was promptly bowled over onto his rump as it suddenly swung open before he could even touch the handle.

  Cursing, he looked up at whoever it was that had knocked him over, ready to give him or her a piece of his mind and suddenly bit back whatever words he had been ready to spat out at the offending person when he saw who it was.

  Damn, Aidric thought with a groan. Just my luck, the one person I needed to avoid most of all.

  “By Aidius, Aidric, I didn’t mean to knock you on your ass like that,” Selwyn said apologetically, “but I thought that everyone had left the Hall by now and didn’t bother to probe.”

  He offered his hand to Aidric, who grabbed a hold of it and hoisted himself up onto his feet again.

  “No harm done, my friend,” Aidric assured him, forcing himself to smile, “except maybe my pride, but I guess everyone needs to be knocked on their ass every once in a while to help keep them grounded. Remember that the next time you go to open a door.”

  “Promises, promises,” Selwyn said with a grin. “All joking aside, what are you still doing here? I thought that His Majesty gave you a few sand-marks off today. Don’t tell me that you’ve wasted most of them on sleep!”

  “Hardly,” Aidric replied dryly. “You know well enough that my name and sleep are never associated with each other. I have been up and about well before you even began to think of dragging your lump out of bed, thank you very much. I only returned because—because an urgent problem arose that had to be dealt with immediately.”

  When that last sentence was out of his mouth, Aidric was instantly sorry. He hadn’t meant to reveal so much about what he was doing there, but it had just slipped out as usual. He never had been the type of person who could hold back anything, much less in the presence of his best friend who always seemed to be able to weasel anything out of him before he even knew there was something to weasel out of him.

  “Oh?” Selwyn said, his eyes immediately lighting up with interest. “What’s happened now? Is that where you were off to before I so graciously knocked you on your backside?”

  “I—” Aidric began uncomfortably, searching his mind for something to tell Selwyn other than the truth, but when he looked into the honest face of his friend, he knew that he couldn’t lie to him. Yet, he couldn’t bring himself to tell the truth, either. Inexplicably, the fear that everyone would want to destroy the girl when they learned her likely identity burned strongly within him as if the fear of another.

  That gave him pause. Was he still somehow connected to the girl’s mind and the fear hers? The thought was unsettling. He had been extremely careful with his mind-probe. If any connection between their minds remained, then it had to be a result of something she had done…

  “I—cannot tell you—just yet,” Aidric said, alarm adding a tinge of impatience to his tone. “This is something that I must discuss with the king first.”

  Selwyn’s eyes suddenly narrowed. “Aidric, what wrong?” he demanded. “I sense fear in you, and don’t you dare tell me I’m wrong. What could possibly be so dire that it would frighten you?” He folded his arms against his chest stubbornly. “I’ll not allow you to leave until you tell me.”

  Aidric cursed creatively in his mind. Distracted and unsettled as he was, a little of his fear must have managed to leak out through his shields, which of course the strongest empath in Lamia had no trouble sensing, damn his ability. Aidric sighed heavily and glared at the redhead. He knew that it was pointless to argue with Selwyn. Once his friend made up his mind about something, it was almost impossible to change it. What was even more irritating was that he had no one to blame but himself for this one.

  “All right,” Aidric said reluctantly, “but I insist on telling Diryan along with you. I have come across something today that is so amazing, and yet so frightening as well, that we all must act quickly and wisely. To do that, Diryan must be informed at once.”

  Selwyn paled a little at the severity of Aidric’s words and nodded stiffly, allowing Aidric to lead the way to the Council Room while he silently followed.

  Why did I have to run into him? Aidric thought irritably as they walked across the palace’s magnificent indoor garden and into the central court
yard. The garden might as well have been a barren wasteland for all the notice he took of its beauty. The fewer people that know about this, the better. Seni knows that the first thing Selwyn will do is run home and fill Raya in on all the gory details. Aidius, and what a mouth that woman has!

  King Diryan was currently in a meeting with his councilors over the issue of whether to send more troops over to Kemos to aid them in their current troubles with Mihr, the kingdom bordering Kemos to the south. It seemed that Mihr and Kemos was all anyone talked about these days.

  For the past two decades, King Roderick of Mihr had been fighting a silent war against Lamia, lusting for the power of their Mage-field. Protected by a magical shield that had proved in the last few centuries to be indestructible, Lamia was well beyond Roderick’s reach. Thus, he had begun a long campaign of attacking the kingdoms in which Lamia was sworn to protect with no end to his tyrannies in sight, hoping to force King Diryan into a position Aidric did not like to contemplate.

  The last silent war Lamia had endured was with Rathtyen, a kingdom to the northeast of Mihr, and it had occurred during Diryan’s great-grandfather, King Palles’s reign. It had ended with the death of the Rathtyen monarch. Now, nearly two centuries later, it was happening again, but this time with Mihr. It was also beginning to look as though this silent war would not end until Roderick was condemned to the same fate as the Rathtyen king.

  Aidric hated to interrupt, but he felt that his current dilemma was more important to the safety of Lamia than the Kemosian-Mihran border squabbles.

  “I must speak to the king,” he demanded firmly to the guards posted outside the Council Room door.

  Without blinking, the guard on the left replied, “Milord, Mage-general, the king has ordered that he is not to be disturbed for any—”

  “I understand,” Aidric interrupted sharply, “but I must insist. The matter I wish to discuss is urgent, else I wouldn’t wish to interrupt their discussion.”

  “But I have my orders—” the guard insisted uncomfortably.

  “—which I’ll take full responsibility for making you disobey them,” Aidric assured him firmly. “You must understand that the matter I wish to speak of is far more important than the skirmishes they are now discussing.”

  “Very well,” the guard said reluctantly. “Wait here, and I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Aidric said politely, sympathizing with the guard’s unhappiness of being forced to disobey direct orders from the king.

  He knew that this abrupt interruption would not anger Diryan too much, if at all. The king knew that Aidric would not insist on interrupting an important meeting unless what he had to say was equally, if not more, important. The others, however…

  Through the closed door, Aidric could hear Lord Ion, the king’s Seneschal, angrily demanding to know the reason behind the guard’s interruption.

  Poor man. I must remember to apologize to him again later.

  A few moments later, the king appeared, lines of worry etched across his forehead that told Aidric that the meeting had not been going well. Not surprising, really. His councilors never seemed capable of agreeing on anything.

  The king took one look at the seriousness in Aidric’s eyes and said, “Come. We shall speak in my study. I have a feeling that what you are about to tell me warrants that level of privacy.”

  Aidric nodded and he and Selwyn followed their king through the palace to the royal suite in silence. Diryan’s stiff gait told him that the king expected nothing short of a disaster. Everything from his shoulders to the blankness of his expression radiated tension, and he kept rubbing his left temple as if he had a headache coming on, which Aidric suspected he probably did. As of late, not a day passed that Diryan did not suffer a headache.

  Not for the first time, Aidric wished that he dared to probe the king’s mind to see what he was thinking, but stealing one’s thoughts without their consent was a crime punishable by death in Lamia unless it was done to an enemy or a person behaving suspiciously such as the girl that now lay in his bed.

  Once they reached the royal suite, Diryan ushered them into his study after threatening the guards with being relieved of their duties if they allowed anything to disturb them.

  “It’s good that there aren’t two of me or else I would feel very sorry for the poor soul who had to disobey your orders at my request with that threat hanging over his head,” Aidric joked to relieve some of the tension while he turned to cast a spell of silence over the room.

  Diryan smiled thinly. “There could only be one of you, my dear lad, and thank the lord, Seni, for that.”

  It took Aidric only a few moments to spell-silence the room. He called upon and directed a bit of the energy particles from the Mage-field into his bodily channels, silently chanting the proper incantation, bending the energy to his will as it flowed from his hands. He placed the invisible force almost effortlessly across every wall and the ceiling of the study to form a seamless barrier to the outside rooms. No sound, no matter how loud, would escape the room until he willed it so.

  “Now, tell me what it is that has you so worried, Aidric,” Diryan commanded once Aidric had turned to face him again.

  Aidric sighed and said, “It’s that obvious, huh? Well, there’s no sense in prettying it up with jewels is there, but I do think the both of you had better sit down, first.”

  The king merely raised an eyebrow but said nothing as he took a seat in the large, thickly-cushioned chair behind his cluttered desk. Documents, several maps, and personal letters littered the top in a carefree fashion, giving the room a lived-in appearance instead of the impersonal formality of all the other rooms in the king’s chamber.

  This was one room that the king had forbidden the servants to enter unless specifically instructed. Diryan had once told Aidric that it was the only room that made him feel as if he was just a normal man and not a man that carried the lives of thousands of subjects on his shoulders.

  Selwyn followed the king’s example by taking a seat in one of the chairs next to the desk, looking as giddy as a young child waiting for a promised surprise to be revealed to him. Aidric had to smile despite himself. It seemed as though anything could arouse excitement in his friend, and Aidric was envious of that particular trait, though he would never admit it to Selwyn.

  Once both were situated and gazed back at him expectantly, he became nervous. A thousand “what ifs” ran through his mind about what could possibly result in his revelation, and unfortunately, none of them were good. Typical, since Sel often joked that Aidric could make even the worst pessimist seem like an optimist. More than a life of a maiden was at stake here. He could not screw this up.

  Aidric looked into the smoky-blue of Diryan’s eyes and was comforted by the kindness and promise of understanding in them. He swallowed with some difficulty and banished all the dire thoughts from his mind.

  He then looked sharply at his friend. “Sel, what is said in this room must be kept strictly confidential until His Majesty deems otherwise. What I am about to reveal has the potential to create great chaos within the kingdom if mishandled.”

  Selwyn merely stared back at him innocently, his eyes asking “who me?”

  “I don’t want you to run home and tell Raya,” Aidric elaborated. “She will know in good time, I’m sure.”

  Selwyn opened his mouth as if to protest but quickly held his peace when he saw the glare Aidric was directing at him.

  “All right,” he grumbled. “I give you my word that I’ll keep whatever you say in this room behind my teeth, even under the most horrible torture.”

  Aidric didn’t even crack a smile, which he was sure had been Selwyn’s intention. “Good,” was all he said, making Selwyn blink in surprise.

  As he locked his eyes with Diryan’s again, he felt that same wave of strong reluctance wash over him, the one that he was not altogether certain came completely from him.

  What are you thinking? Aidric scolded himself with disgust.
Diryan would never hurt her, you fool! You know that! Sure, he might fear what she symbolizes. Hellsfire, I fear it, but you know perfectly well that he would never order the execution of an innocent woman!

  “Aidric?” Selwyn inquired with worry via thought-speech.

  That jolted Aidric out of his troubling thoughts, and he turned his eyes from Diryan’s to Selwyn’s. Worry etched itself across his friend’s usually passive face, and he no longer fidgeted with impatience in his chair.

  “Sorry,” Aidric sent back with forced cheer. “I guess I was just woolgathering.”

  “Your Majesty,” Aidric voiced suddenly, breaking the uncomfortable silence in the room and startling the king, though he was trying very hard not to show it, “you are familiar with all the prophecies of Lamia, are you not?”

  “Yes…” Diryan replied slowly.

  “So you know the Prophecy of the Golden Mage very well, I presume?”

  “I do,” he answered, then demanded, “What are you hinting at, lad?”

  Aidric hesitated for a moment, grasping for words on how to reveal his find to the king as delicately as possible but then deciding that there really was no sense beating around the bush about it.

  “I believe that I have found her, that very Golden Mage, and she is now, as we speak, lying unconscious in my bed by the sleep spell I cast over her,” he stated bluntly.

  Silence.

  Aidric shifted uneasily on his feet. This was not the reaction he had expected from them. He half-expected Selwyn to burst out laughing and call him a daydreaming fool, but instead, Sel looked completely dumbfounded, his mouth actually dropping in shock.

  As for the king, he had expected immediate questions, even skepticism, but Diryan expressed neither. The shock and fear that now reflected in the eyes of the king was enough to almost make him lose his composure.

  “Are you certain, Aidric?” Diryan finally managed to ask after a prolonged silence.