The Summoned Mage (Convergence Book 1)

by Melissa McShane

  Loves me, and wants to marry me, he thought. It wasn’t something they’d discussed, and he was a little surprised at her directness, at the way she’d assumed he wanted the same thing. Which he did. I want her to be my wife, he thought, I don’t want to wait any longer to be joined with her, and cast about for something he could say to accept her proposal, wordless as it was. Finally, he said in a low voice, “I dream about you, you know. About this. I have dreamed of you so many times. You have been my foundation, even though you did not know it. My foundation, and my surety in the dark times.” It was the best he could do at an explanation of everything he felt for her.

  She said nothing. He knew she wasn’t asleep, and he began to feel nervous. Dreaming about her when she felt nothing for you, that sounds almost predatory, he told himself, she might take offense, she might be appalled. Please let her hear those words the way I meant them.

  She shifted a little bit. “When I was sixteen,” she said in a quiet voice to match his, “I worked at one of the Thalessian fisheries. There are a lot of them, but this one wasn’t one of the big ones—it doesn’t matter, that’s not the point. There was…one of the workers. He was maybe twice my age, full beard, walked with a bit of a limp. He used to watch me while I worked. I hated it, but there was nothing I could do to stop him, and since he never did anything but watch, I learned to just ignore him.”

  She took a deep breath. “And then one day I was walking home and he came out of nowhere, grabbed me and shoved me into one of these alleys behind the fishery. He…he choked me, held me down while he tore my trousers and undershorts down around my ankles. I was trying to scream, but I could hardly breathe, and he was so much bigger than me. He’d unbuttoned his trousers and forced my legs apart, and I was still trying to scream even though I knew no one would come to help me, and that did something to me, unlocked something inside me.

  “I worked my first pouvra, the fire pouvra, on him, and I think my desperation made it burn hotter—I’ve certainly never been able to repeat it. He burned from the inside…he went black, like a lump of coal, with red lines like fire crisscrossing his skin, and then he was nothing but ash and bone.”

  She shifted in the darkness as if she’d raised her head to look at him. “I was so overwhelmed I just lay there half-naked in the alley, shaking and crying, covered in ash, because I’d nearly been raped and I’d killed a man and I’d done it with magic, and even with all of that I knew I would never stop learning magic, because it was all I had in the world.”

  She went silent then, but it was a silence that held the promise of more words, and Cederic waited for her to decide what those words would be. Finally, she said, “I’ve never told that story to anyone before, Cederic. I’ve never even written it down. But what you said…I’ve never meant so much to anyone before, except maybe my Dad, years ago before he died, and I wanted you to know how much you mean to me.”

  He drew her closer to him, stroked her hair, with his heart so full he felt unable to speak. Finally he said, “If that is what it takes to make a mage in your world, I am surprised that there are any of you.”

  “There have to be others,” Sesskia said, “and I doubt most of them have been nearly raped. But there are other terrors that can make you fight for your life, or for your identity.”

  “True.” He brought his hand up to trace the line of her jaw, gently. “My instinct is to protect you from all harm,” he said. “But that instinct is wrong. You would not be who you are if you were not willing to risk yourself. Even so—allow me a little fear on your behalf, please.”

  “It makes me feel loved, that you want to protect me, and even more loved that you know you can’t,” she said, and turned her face a little to kiss his hand before reaching up to take it in hers. “I love you,” she said.

  “I love you,” he replied, and they lay like that, not speaking, until Sesskia’s breathing changed and he knew she was asleep. He breathed out, slowly, and closed his eyes. They would spend the night together, and wake as one, husband and wife—

  —except he couldn’t, could he? Thanks to the God-Empress’s insanity, their love for each other was a weapon she could use to force one or both of them to do whatever she wanted. He couldn’t walk out of Sesskia’s bedroom in the morning where any of the Sais could see him and spread the word that the Kilios had given a hostage to fortune.

  He squeezed his eyes shut and mentally cursed the madwoman, thoroughly and at length. Then he eased himself away from Sesskia, called up a soft amber light, and began to dress. He looked at her once more before he left her room, his heart aching, then quietly went back to his own room and lay on his bed fully clothed. He was too tense to sleep. He practiced some old familiar relaxation exercises to no effect; his mind kept bringing up the image of Sesskia’s face, peacefully sleeping. Who knew what she might think when she woke alone?

  Finally, after what felt like hours, he couldn’t bear it any longer. He got up and went back to her room, thinking he could at least leave her a message, and remembered she couldn’t read his language just as he arrived at her door and saw light shining beneath it. He knocked, and entered without waiting for an invitation. “I’m sorry, but it’s not safe for me to be seen loitering outside your door,” he said.

  Sesskia looked up at him. Her face was tense and unhappy. “You thought I’d left,” he said.

  “Because you left,” she pointed out.

  He came to take her hand. “No one can know what we are to each other,” he said. “If the God-Empress finds out, she will use or threaten one or both of us to try to control the other. So I could not be seen coming out of your room this morning. I shouldn’t even be here now, but I went back to my room and lay awake in my cold bed, cursing the God-Empress for keeping me from you when you should have woken to find me next to you.” She smiled at him, and his heart lifted. “So I had to come now,” he continued, “so you would not misunderstand me. I would have stayed, if not for that danger, you understand?”

  She smiled more broadly, and nodded, and he felt a little dizzy, realizing the step they’d taken. Actually spending the night together was a technicality as far as he was concerned; in his heart, they were married. She was his wife. Denril’s scorn was nothing beside that.

  He kissed her, and left the room before he could become distracted by her body, still naked with the coverlet wrapped around her loosely so the shape of her breasts and her legs were visible. Sleep was out of the question. He would go to the circle chamber to study Denril’s work, and see what he could make of it. Yes, he’d been proud, and it had led him to blindness with regard to the research the two of them had done together, but he was still Kilios, and he might yet see possibilities Denril had overlooked. And he wasn’t alone anymore. Who knew what he and Sesskia might accomplish together? Maybe she was right, and they’d save the world after all.

  Denril, you persist in being sloppy, he thought as he surveyed the walls where his “old friend’s” work was written. Cederic would not make the mistake of disregarding Denril’s work out of pride again, but it wasn’t pride that made him irritated with the lack of organization displayed on the boards. He found his slate and some blank papers and started putting everything in order, defining th’an combinations and linking them to the conclusions Denril had formed. At least he hadn’t made any mistakes that Cederic could see, despite the disorder, though he’d repeated himself once or twice and had misused a couple of th’an in a way that unnecessarily complicated the kathana.

  The conclusion was obvious: the worlds were coming together unstoppably, and Denril’s plan was to create pockets of isolation centered on Colosse that would be…shielded was probably the best word, though it was far more complicated than that, necessarily complicated. It would save their country, most of it, and obliterate civilization almost everywhere else, but it was the best they could do. It made Cederic ill to think of it.

  He stepped back when he finished reorganizing Denril’s work and scanned the wall. There were a fe
w pieces he hadn’t been able to integrate, and his first thought was to ignore them. No more pride¸ he told himself, and examined them more closely. Just because he couldn’t immediately see a use for those facts didn’t mean they didn’t have a purpose, even though it seemed Denril didn’t know what to do with them either.

  They reminded him of the failed summoning kathana that had brought Sesskia to Castavir, which made him smile in memory of how she’d looked when he left her an hour ago. He would need to figure out a way for them to be together secretly; being unable to share her bed at all would be torture. He closed his eyes tightly and willed himself to focus again on the th’an.

  When he opened his eyes, the pattern fell into place. He caught his breath in astonishment, stepped back a few paces, and looked at it once more. In that first, failed kathana, they’d inadvertently defined Sesskia’s world rather than the reality that the Codex Tiurindi occupied, and all those loose pieces…extra pieces…

  Cederic tore away the pages he’d been writing on and began again. Missing pieces, that’s what Master Peressten had said, but they couldn’t simply be missing, they would have left…call them holes, they would have left holes in this world. Places for those missing pieces to fit into. The worlds weren’t trying to obliterate each other, they were trying to meld.

  He set his slate down on a table and rubbed his eyes, then looked at the rest of Denril’s research. He’d come so close to the truth—only a few adjustments would make everything clear. Cederic went to rub out an incorrect hypothesis, but stopped before his sleeve touched the wall. No. Denril didn’t understand this, or he would have seen what Cederic just had. And Cederic knew Denril well; the man was as proud in his own way as Cederic, though his pride was tied closely to his need for adulation. He would resist any changes Cederic suggested, would insist on using his kathana, and the worlds would be destroyed.

  If I do not take charge, he thought, it will mean the deaths of hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions. That was not pride, but plain fact. Pride had been telling himself that because he was Kilios he was the superior man; honesty was knowing that being Kilios meant being the superior mage, something objective, something measurable. There was no more time for him to pretend to be Denril Vorantor’s subordinate. He would have to take control while still letting Denril believe he had power, and that would be a very fine line on which to dance. But he remembered Sesskia, and the love that was in her eyes when she looked at him, and he felt his confidence returning. She was his foundation, and from that foundation he could do anything.

  He scrawled a pair of th’an on the slate that flashed the time at him. Nearly six o’clock, when the mages would be waking, so he had very little time. He ran out of the circle chamber and bounded up the stairs to the Darssan mages’ wing. He needed an ally. He needed Master Peressten and the Codex Tiurindi. Or rather, he thought, amused, I need what it does not say.

  ***

  He sat wearily on the edge of his bed, too tired to remove his sandals. He couldn’t remember when he’d last slept—more than a day ago, and he was starting to feel the effects. He wasn’t twenty anymore, able to remain alert and awake for forty-eight hours at a time. But it had all been worth it.

  Master Peressten had done his job well, once Cederic had gotten him to stop apologizing for his role in Cederic’s temporary downfall. He had looked incredibly guilty when Cederic caught him sneaking back to his room, and Cederic had taken a look at the doors and drawn the astonishing conclusion that he and Master Peressten were both happy newlyweds that morning. He sensed Sesskia’s hand in bringing her two friends together; Cederic had thought Master Peressten and Master Engilles would never overcome their fears that their respective loves were unrequited. But he concealed his smile so as not to embarrass the young man, who had understood immediately why Cederic was asking him to lie about the contents of the Codex, or at least some of its contents.

  Then everything had played out as he’d intended. It had been very enjoyable to see Denril scramble to maintain his control over the mages, more enjoyable to see his awareness of what Cederic had done and his impotent fury at being outmaneuvered. Since Cederic was obeying the letter of his oath, Denril had no way to challenge him except by breaking his, and Cederic had left the room at the end of the day knowing that the mages’ allegiance was his now. He couldn’t take it for granted, of course, and he would have to work hard to maintain that control, but he felt strong now in a way he hadn’t when he was still operating on pride and arrogance.

  That part had been easy. What had been hard was spending the day in Sesskia’s presence and maintaining the friendly but distant attitude to her he’d perfected in the early days when he was falling in love with her and needed to conceal it. She, for her part, treated him with the same casual friendliness she always had, though once he caught her looking at him and saw her blush, just a little, before looking away. They shouldn’t have to hide, they should be celebrating, publicly, the way Master Peressten and Master Engilles were, congratulated by their friends over a raucous midday meal. Cederic couldn’t even think of a way to spend the night with his wife.

  He leaned wearily over to remove his sandals, feeling exhaustion seep into his joints and muscles. He could at least go to Sesskia’s room and bid her good night; that was a habit everyone was aware of, not something that would give either of them away. He eyed his sandals. He shouldn’t have removed them, and now it seemed like an impossibility to put them back on. He lay back on his bed and sighed with pleasure. He would rest just for a minute, then visit Sesskia. Maybe she had come up with a plan his tired brain had overlooked. He blinked, closed his eyes, and slid into sleep.

  He had strange dreams in which he was manipulated like a puppet and forced to remove his robe, one creaking joint at a time, and then he was sailing through clouds that made slopes he slid down the way he’d sledded down the hills behind his parents’ house during winter as a child, and bouncing from peak to peak of the clouds, except the snow was black and pebbly and then he was swimming through it like a dog, paddling with his hands. It all seemed so real that he was disoriented when he woke, and then startled to discover that he wasn’t alone in his bed. He jerked in surprise, and Sesskia lifted her head blearily and rolled over to face him. “Is it morning?” she said.

  Panic at first made him unable to speak, filling his mind with images of the God-Empress dragging them both away to be tortured, probably in front of one another. He was about to say This wasn’t worth the risk when another memory surfaced, Sesskia dropping like a stone through the floor of the Sais’ wing, Sesskia standing concealed while he and Denril talked, and he laughed at himself and put his arms around her. “I wasn’t thinking very clearly last night, was I?” he said.

  “You were not, but I think you had a good excuse, what with everything that happened,” Sesskia said. Then she scowled at him, an expression whose impact was blunted somewhat by her laughing eyes, and added, “And you should be ashamed of yourself, taking advantage of an ignorant otherworlder who had to find out she was married from someone else.”

  Cederic closed his eyes and groaned. He’d made a huge mistake. Of course Sesskia had no idea of Castaviran marriage customs. Probably spending the night with a man meant nothing in Balaen. She must have been furious that he’d made what to her seemed like a unilateral decision. He opened his eyes. She didn’t look furious. She looked mischievous again, that expression that made him want nothing more than to tear the clothes from her body and make her cry out in pleasure. “I take it you decided to forgive me, since you are here now,” he said.

  She grinned at him, and ran her fingers over his chest—hadn’t he been clothed when he fell asleep? “I decided you were worth being married to,” she said, and he pulled her close to kiss her and discovered she wasn’t wearing anything either. How convenient.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Melissa McShane is the author of the Crown of Tremontane series, beginning with SERVANT OF THE CROWN, and The Extraordinaries ser
ies, beginning with BURNING BRIGHT. After a childhood spent roaming the United States, she settled in Utah with her husband, four children and a niece, three very needy cats, and a library that continues to grow out of control. She wrote reviews and critical essays for many years before turning to fiction, which is much more fun than anyone ought to be allowed to have. You can visit her at her website www.melissamcshanewrites.com for more information on other books.

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  Copyright 2017 Melissa Proffitt

  Published by Night Harbor Publishing

  All rights reserved

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any way whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Night Harbor Publishing

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  Cover design by Fiona Jayde Media