A Touch of Magic

by Gregory Mahan

  “Have a seat by the fire there,” Brody said. Randall noticed that the knife hadn’t left Brody’s hand the entire time.

  After a second, Randall realized that Brody had two scabbards on his belt, one on the left and one on the right. Brody had Randall’s dagger! Knowing where the dagger was gave him fresh hope for his chances for escape. But getting his hands on it had just become significantly more complicated.

  “I imagine you’ve got a powerful thirst,” Brody said. “Side effect of the drink we gave you. I’ll let you have some water, but I have to take that gag out of your mouth to do it. And right now, that little gag is the only thing keeping you from working your devil touched charms on us—which means that you get to drink with my dagger under your chin. If I even think you’re about to make a sound, I’ll slit your throat.”

  “Better to slit his throat now and be done with it,” Declan said while idly tossing twigs into the campfire.

  “Worth more alive, now isn’t he?” Brody shot back. “The boy’s not dumb. He’ll keep his mouth shut.”

  Brody grabbed Randall by the top of the head and jammed the point of his knife into the side of his throat, drawing a small trickle of blood. “Won’t you boy?”

  Randall nodded carefully, his eyes wide. These men had been his friends just yesterday. Today, they were discussing slitting his throat as casually as if they were discussing the weather!

  “Good,” Brody said, satisfied. “See, I asked around town yesterday, looking for Old Earl. I have a lot of contacts, people who know things and keep their ear to the ground. You’ll never guess the crazy story I heard. But I imagine you already know it, don’t you?”

  Randall’s heart sank. He knew his secret was out. His eyes dropped down to the ground, and he found he could not raise them to meet Brody’s gaze.

  “Figured as much.” Brody said, letting Randall’s body language confirm what he already knew. “But let me tell it to you anyway, so we don’t have any misunderstandings between us. Old Earl wasn’t a caravaner at all. He had us all fooled. He was a devil touched Mage.” Brody spat into the fire, as if merely saying the words left a bad taste in his mouth.

  “Good riddance,” he said, wiping the spittle from his lips with the back of his hand.

  “I still say we should kill him,” Declan said, nodding in Randall’s direction. “Too much risk keeping him alive.”

  “How many men is he supposed to have killed?” Tobsen asked, interjecting into the conversation, sounding a little nervous.

  “Five,” Declan said flatly. “Plus his whole family.”

  “Shut up!” Brody interrupted loudly. “We’re not hick yokels playing soldier! We know how to handle his type. It’s not like this is our first time, now is it? And this one’s worth ten times more alive!”

  Declan just shrugged and continued playing with the campfire, while Tobsen rubbed his forehead and looked worried.

  I didn’t kill five men! Randall thought to himself in protest. I didn’t kill my family, either! But someone must have killed them. It had to have been Aiden, and he was getting the blame! The memory of the Mage raising his wand and invoking fire flashed through his mind. Tears welled up in his eyes as he imagined Aiden calling fire to rain on his helpless family. Tears turned into great wracking sobs.

  “Yeah, this one won’t be giving us any trouble at all, I don’t think,” Brody said with a smirk, mistaking the cause of Randall’s tears. “He knows he’s caught good and tight.”

  After Randall cried himself out, Brody loosened his gag and let him drink several long drinks from a wineskin. And, as promised, Brody’s knifepoint stayed under Randall’s chin the entire time. Every time he swallowed, he could feel his larynx push painfully against the point of the dagger. He didn’t utter a sound.

  The drink in the wineskin tasted like a bitter herbal tea. He recognized the flavor from the nasty coating his tongue had on it the previous night. They were drugging him again. That suited Randall just fine. His nerves were raw, and he didn’t want to think about his family just yet. He looked forward to the bliss a drugged sleep would give him.

  “No food for you today.” Declan said after Brody replaced Randall’s gag. “You’d probably just throw it up anyway.”

  By the time Declan and Brody manhandled Randall back into the cart, his vision had started to swim and his stomach began the same nauseating flip-flopping that it had done the night before. He only had to wait a few moments before the sedative drove consciousness from him.

  Randall awoke some time later. The sun burning through the thin cloth of the wagon top told him that it was probably just after lunchtime. He wasn’t sure how long the tea was supposed to keep him unconscious, but it only seemed to knock him out for three or four hours. He imagined that if it weren’t for the healing talisman, he would have been out for much longer.

  Nobody came in to check on him as the cart bumped along the ground. In the brief time that he was let out in the morning, he didn’t notice a discernible trail or road, leaving him with no indication of where the men might be taking him. Lying in the wagon with nothing else to do, Randall couldn’t help but think about how Aiden must have killed his family.

  The tears came freely, but he tried to stifle his sobs. He didn’t want any extra attention from the caravaners. Plus, it wouldn’t be good to have them wondering why he wasn’t staying drugged for as long as he should. He swore to himself that if he could find his way out of his predicament, he would find a way to make Aiden pay for his crimes.

  Randall couldn’t help being born with his power. There was no reason to kill anyone over it! Especially not his family! Joshua was just a little kid! At the thought of Joshua being slaughtered, a fresh wave of grief washed over Randall, and he silently sobbed in the back of the wagon. Underneath the grief, where he could barely feel it, was a slow-building anger. He would make them pay!

  Eventually, Randall’s grief and anger both ran their course, and he fell back asleep. He woke up several more times that day, but the boredom was overwhelming. He tried to keep his mind occupied by thinking of his plan for escape, or by recalling his lessons. When he grew bored, he tried to take an interest in what Berry was doing inside the wagon, but the donnan showed no interest in Randall’s predicament whatsoever, coming and going as he pleased. Ultimately, he spent most of his time sleeping to idle the time away.

  Randall spent the next few days in captivity following the same routine. He would usually be allowed to stretch his limbs, drink, and sometimes get something to eat. He would always be drugged before being put back into the wagon. He was pretty sure that his captors didn’t realize that the drugs didn’t keep him sleeping for very long. On the third day, as he was getting placed back in the wagon, he decided to test a theory he’d been mulling over.

  Whatever drug they were giving Randall took a few minutes to take effect. Usually he would lie in the back of the wagon and let the drunken wooziness overtake him until he passed out. This time, instead of waiting for the drugs to take effect, he tried to summon magic from Llandra. He hoped the power would come quickly. If he failed, he’d have to wait until the next time he was let out to try again. But he had never tried to do it while drugged! Fortunately, just as the waves of dizziness began to crash into him, the power came.

  And Randall had a purpose for it. His captors were right: he couldn’t really say any words of power with a wad of rag in his mouth. But there was something else he could do—something he had seen Master Erliand do once before. Randall took the power he was gathering and pushed it down into the talisman still hidden under his shirt.

  A tiny trickle of magic flowed into the talisman, but it wasn’t anything like what Randall was expecting. When charging a rune for the first time, it was almost as if the artifact sucked out as much power as it needed to start functioning. But the healing talisman didn’t greedily suck up the power. Instead, it pushed back. He could force power into it, but it didn’t go willingly. He pushed harder, trying to break through the
resistance.

  It worked! Randall felt the talisman grow cold on his chest as it accepted more power. The harder he pushed, the more energy trickled into it, but it was a herculean struggle. He pushed with every ounce of his will, but was only able to get the artifact to accept a tiny fraction more. Still, he felt all of the cobwebs in his brain being swept away. The healing talisman was fighting the effects of the drugs, just as he had hoped!

  The act of powering up the talisman was much more difficult than Randall had imagined it would be. That was a valuable learning experience, and it meant he’d have to take that into consideration in the plan he was forming. He remembered how exhausted Master Erliand had looked after he had charged the healing talisman, but had originally thought it was because doing so took so much power. Now he realized that Master Erliand’s weariness had more to do with the sheer effort involved.

  Randall imagined that if he weren’t holding the talisman himself right now that he would be much worse off than his master had been. Luckily, the talisman itself seemed to be keeping the exhaustion at bay. That was another helpful piece of advice which he filed away for later consideration.

  Half an hour later, Randall wished that he had let the drugs take effect. Laying in the wagon, looking at the canvas walls was mind-crushingly dull. And being full of vim and vigor from the effects of the talisman, he couldn’t even get himself to fall asleep to pass the time. Still, being awake for an entire day meant that he got a good measure of his captors routine. They traveled constantly, taking a rest every couple of hours before switching riders and pressing on.

  Randall had delivered a fair amount of flour with his mother, and so he had a good idea how much a cart horse could travel in a day. While it might seem like the men were taking a leisurely pace, he knew that they were pushing their horses too hard. He thought that the horses must be close to the end of their endurance, especially taking into consideration that the trio was traveling all night, too. At this pace, they were probably making thirty or forty miles a day, which had to be murder on the animals. He assumed that they had to be close to their destination, wherever that was, because there was no way the horses would last much longer under these conditions.

  Later in the day, the wagon came to a stop earlier than Randall expected. Even though he was trussed up in the back of the wagon, he could hear Brody talking to someone whose voice he didn’t recognize, and could also hear the sound of running water. Soon, the wagon started up, but they traveled only for a few feet before stopping again. Then the wagon lurched and slid smoothly sideways and began to bob steadily, pulling Randall’s stomach up into his throat

  They must be on a ferry! That gave Randall a pretty good idea which direction the men were heading. The only river he knew of near Paranol was the Great Red River. The Great Red River came pouring out of the Ironpike Mountains and bisected Tallia, neatly separating the East and West coasts. After that, Randall’s knowledge of geography failed him. In his mind, anything east of the Great Red River was faraway and exotic. He assumed that they were traveling in the direction of Ninove, the capital, but he had no idea how much further they had to travel, or what stops they might make along the way.

  It took a long time to cross the river, longer than Randall would have expected. At one point, he feared that he had guessed incorrectly and that they might actually have gone to the coast instead and had smuggled him onboard a seafaring vessel. But after a little over an hour, the ferry touched down on the far shore, and the wagon began moving again.

  Shortly after reaching dry land, the wagon stopped and Randall could hear Brody and Declan arguing heatedly. Soon their voices were carrying loud enough for him to make out what they were saying.

  “I’m telling you, Brody, we need to take the normal route! We don’t know what the country’s like the way you want to go!” There was concern in Declan’s voice.

  “Yeah, and if we go the normal route, it’ll be nearly three months before we reach the capital,” Brody shot back hotly. “I would like to get paid before then. It’s only four weeks if we cut around north of Red Lake.”

  “No towns that way, either,” Declan retorted. “Which means we don’t get paid for half of our run.”

  “And I told you that the boy’s worth more than triple anything we’d make along the regular route,” Brody shot back quickly. “And there’ll be nobody around to stick their noses into our business.”

  “Fine. Have it your way. But we take six weeks. And that’s pushing it,” Declan said firmly, his voice sounding resigned. “We can’t keep riding the horses at this pace, Brody. They’ll founder! Then we won’t be going anywhere!”

  “Fine!” Brody retorted. “Six weeks! I’ll abandon the whole damn cart if I have to. You know the boy’s worth the cost.”

  That seemed to be the end of the conversation, as Randall heard no more from either man. It was the most he had ever heard Declan speak in one sitting. He had no idea how many times the men had carried out this particular argument before, but it sounded like one that they had rehashed many times. If he had not used the healing talisman to ward off the effects of the sleeping draught, he would have likely missed it this time, as well.

  Six weeks! That would be an eternity trapped in this wagon the entire time! He would have to find an opportunity to escape soon, but there was still time enough to refine his plan. If he could get his elven dagger away from Brody, he thought he might even have a chance of defeating the men in combat, if it came to that.

  After the argument, the caravaners traveled at a much gentler pace than they had been taking. Breaks were longer, and the group no longer traveled at night. That suited Randall’s purposes nicely, as it gave him more opportunities to survey the inside of the wagon while the men were away building campfires or foraging for food. If he was going to escape, he would have to figure out how to get out of these bonds, for sure!

  Each time Randall was drugged and placed into the back of the wagon, he would summon magic to charge up the healing talisman under his tunic before the drugs had a chance to take effect. It was good practice, and with his newfound sense of purpose, he found that he preferred to be awake and ready for any opportunities that presented themselves.

  Randall had already located several nails and pegs inside the wagon that thought he could use to leverage the gag out of his mouth, but he still hadn’t found a good way to get out of his rope bonds. There was a crossbow that Brody kept lashed to one of the crossbeams holding up the wagon’s roof, but the weapon was of no use to him until he got free of his bonds. He just didn’t have enough mobility to reach it, and the crossbow bolts probably weren’t sharp enough to cut through his ropes in any case.

  Randall tried to get Berry interested in his bonds, but immobilized and gagged, there wasn’t much he could do to influence his friend. Occasionally Berry would pluck at Randall’s gag, or examine the rope knots as if he found them interesting. Whenever that happened, Randall would nod furiously and try to say “yes” to encourage Berry, but the donnan always grew bored quickly and skittered away, presumably to find something more interesting to do.

  The little creature seemed to have a natural distrust for the three caravaners, though, as he never grew comfortable enough to reveal himself to the men. Every time one of the caravaners was near, the sprite would immediately fade from view and quiet down. Randall was glad to see that his friend had not lost its wild instincts. He had no idea what would happen if one of the men happened to catch a glimpse of the donnan.

  Still, bound as he was, Randall used his time productively. He would spend his days planning his escape, as well as practicing magic. He spent most of his time drawing power from Llandra, though, as there was little other magic he could do while trussed up. Eventually, he learned to consistently draw power at different rates. He could draw power in quickly, like a whip crack, or draw in very small amounts, slowly over a long period of time. The latter ability would come in handy if he needed to draw power stealthily, without being detected
by other Mages or Seers.

  Likewise, Randall became proficient at utilizing his power in smaller increments, as well. He had never practiced much at conserving power before. Previously, every spell he had cast or rune he charged had sucked all of the energy out of him at once, leaving him spent. But since charging the talisman was slower work and took more effort than spell casting, he had the luxury of being able to analyze the sensations as they happened, and soon learned to regulate how much energy he doled out, and how much he was able to keep in reserve.

  One morning, Randall heard the men talking agitatedly at the campfire shortly after they had put him away after breakfast. They never were really close enough for him to make out much of what they were saying, but he could sense that something was wrong in the manner in which they spoke. They sounded upset, but they weren’t yelling at each other. Rather, they spoke in hushed, clipped tones.

  Then, without further warning, Randall heard all of the men scrambling wildly. One of the men leapt into the front of the wagon, though he was not in a position to easily see which one. Whoever it was, he spurred the horse with a loud yell, and Randall could hear the crack of the reins as the driver laid them into the horse’s flanks. The horse immediately broke into a gallop, throwing the contents of the wagon from side to side, Randall included. He could hear the other men following closely on horseback.

  Whoever was driving the wagon did so with reckless abandon. The vehicle bounced hard as they ploughed into ruts and clumps of earth. Randall bounced along with it, like a sack of flour, tossed this way and that, slamming painfully into the bottom of the wagon with each jolt. He hoped that one of the men had decided that he had a change of heart about kidnapping a child, and was making a run for freedom. More likely, though, one of the men had decided to double-cross the other two by spiriting their captive away and claiming the reward for himself.