Car smiled and rose. He inclined his head towards the woman. The nine years since he’d last seen her, then an Adept framed for murder as part of a far-too-complex plot against the Crown and Councils, had done nothing to fade her dazzling looks. Her blonde hair was drawn back in braid that stretched down her neck, and her blue eyes still flashed the same intelligence and character that drew those with the sense to look beyond the, admittedly attractive, package they came in.
The woman, no longer a girl, returned his nod with a formal curtsey. Coming from a woman dressed in leather riding clothes who was taller than Car’raen himself, the gesture looked mildly ridiculous, but Car restrained his smile from expanding into a grin with ease, the aftereffects of his Judgment still affecting him.
Tal himself bowed and spoke, “Master Car’raen, the Horse Mage Kel’ijo.”
“I don’t think you need to worry about the formality, kid,” Kel told him, rolling her eyes at his words. “Car and I are old friends.” Car felt her eyes settle on him. “Now what have you done this time that you want me to pull you out of?”
This time, Car’s smile did expand. “I think it has been satisfactorily dealt with, actually,” he told her. “I need you to contact someone for me.”
“Who?” she asked simply.
“The Deoran Citadel Communicator,” he replied. “I want a message passed on to Kelt’ahrn.”
“You don’t play with bit players, do you?” Kel asked with a whistle.
“Have I ever?” Car responded.
“No.” She shook her head. “All right, what’s the message.”
“Jyd’har’s rebellion is over. He was supported by a group of the Fallen. The Fallen have been Judged and executed. Jyd’har refused my Judgment, and is dead. Request that a detachment of the Royal Army be deployed to assist the new Earl of Kahir in bringing the area back under control.”
Kel had acquired a slightly abstracted look. “That’s it?” she queried.
“Yes.” Car confirmed with a nod.
Her eyes closed, but still seemed to flicker behind her eyelids. Her lips began to move, silently mouthing words. She stopped and waited for a moment, then mouthed some more words that Car couldn’t make out. Another pause, then she mouthed some more words and opened her eyes.
“He says he’s informing the High King, and will contact me shortly,” she said quietly.
“Take a seat, then,” Car told her, gesturing to the chairs in front of the desk. As Kel sat, Car glanced over to where Tal was propping up a wall, his hand drifting next to his sword. “That includes you, Tal.”
The youth shrugged, and then removed himself from the wall to a chair, moving with the silent, catlike, grace he’d learned from the Rangers. He settled into the chair lightly, perched on the edge, ready to move.
“You never told me you had children, Car,” Kel said quietly, nodding towards Tal in the other chair.
Car shrugged and glanced over to Tal. Tal nodded slightly to him, so Car spoke. “Tal is adopted. He is my apprentice, and, in every way except by blood, he is my son.”
Kel nodded. She opened her mouth to speak, but stopped suddenly. Her eyes clouded for a moment, and she quickly closed them. Once again, her lips formed silent words.
Her conversation continued for several minutes this time. When she finally opened her eyes again, Car was beginning to look at her worriedly. She smiled softly at him. “Kelt’ahrn thanks you for your assistance and says the troops will be dispatched immediately,” she told him. “He also reminds you that you have been too long away from Deoran, and insists – his word, not mine – that you bring your adopted son and come visit.” Her eyes twinkled. “From the sound of it, his wife was around as well and was the cause of that request.”
“Thank you, Kel,” Car said, then turned to Tal. “Tal, we’ll be leaving in the morning. On horses.” He grinned as he caught Tal’s quiet sigh of relief. “You should go get your things ready.”
His apprentice bowed his way out, and Car turned to Kel. “Once again, thank you,” he repeated. “The ordinary fee, I presume?”
She waved away the concern. “It was a favor for a friend,” she replied. “Besides, I wanted to see that arrogant bastard brought down myself.”
“Nonetheless,” Car interjected.
“No, Car,” she cut him off. “I won’t take a copper from you.”
He spread his hands in surrender. “As you wish,” he acceded.
“You bind yourself too tightly to your honor,” Kel told him quietly.
“I am a Battlemage,” Car replied, shrugging. “In a sense, I am the Battlemage. I have no choice but to do so.”
Kel inclined her head. “We all are what we are, I fear. Good night, Car’raen.”
Tal stood in the courtyard, holding the horses and waiting for Car to arrive. He watched the guards step their watches along the walls. He’d been here nearly an hour ago, early enough to observe them at the change of watch. The men going up and down the stairs leading to the immense walls had all watched him carefully, a mixture of fear and awe in their eyes.
I guess news got out about who killed those Fallen Magi. Tal sighed. It was unlikely it would have stayed secret long, but the story of an Initiate who’d taken on and defeated ten of the Fallen was giving him a rather unexpected notoriety. And respect. Some of these men have been with Battlemagi who have faced down Fallen Magi in the past, and know what I faced. They respect me.
Respect was something he was unused to. His achievements back home had given the people of the manor great pride, but there was little respect in how the Rangers and other men and women had treated their lord’s son. Care, affection, loyalty, pride, even love – but not respect. Not for a stripling boy who’d never fought.
The sound of boots on stone interrupted his thoughts. Seeing Car striding towards him, saddlebags in hand, Tal swung up onto his horse.
“Are we off?” he asked his father and teacher.
Car nodded, raising a hand over his eyes to block the sun. “Yes,” he replied. “We ride to Deoran. The High King has requested that I speak with him. The High Queen, on the other hand, has had it made quite clear to me that I have kept you away from her for too long.”
“I’m not sure I want to meet them,” Tal admitted, smiling uncertainly.
“They’re good people and good friends,” Car told him. “I think you’ll like them.” He turned his horse towards the gate. “Don’t worry: it’s at least two weeks to the Highlands from here by horse. You’ll have plenty of time to get used to the idea.”
Royalty
Brea hummed contentedly to herself as she poured the water into the stone basin. Water and earth, the elements of a Life Mage. She slowly lit the seven tapers around the pool of water, and then emptied a small bag of sand mixed with certain herbs into the pool.
She glanced over at the book. The ritual had seemed simple enough, but the fact that the spell required a ritual at all said much about its difficulty. Kish’orna, Brea’s teacher, had only smiled and laughed at her when she’d asked the old Mage about the spell.
The old man had laughed, and told her to go ahead. There had never been a Life Mage who hadn’t tried to view their true love, the Mage had said, and even fewer who had succeeded. It took both great power and great will, and those were rare among those young enough to want to cast the spell.
The Princess Initiate Brea’ahrn smiled to herself as she looked into the pool of crystal clear water. The firelight flickered off her green eyes in the reflection. She brushed an errant curl of red hair back, and touched her fingers to the water.
The ripples faded, and she began to hum a specific tune. She let her power flow down through her fingers into the water. She let her humming fade and stared into the water. “Show me my true love!” she commanded.
The water swirled. An inner glow suddenly appeared, drawing her in, and in. The light spread out to suffuse the pool of water, and Brea felt it suck at her mind. Unsure what was happening, she fought it.
She was standing on the stern of a riverboat, watching the shore for… something. Light flared behind them for a moment, and she saw a robed rider come hurtling towards the boat on a panting, exhausted horse.
The rider drew level with the boat, and leaped into the water. He Shifted into a panther, swimming swiftly to the boat.
Brea felt her body reach down and drag the soaked and exhausted beast out of the water. She hadn’t told her body to do so. Something was strange. What was she doing here? As she lowered the dripping cat to the deck, she realized she was wearing the robes of an Adept.
“Fesh’tar and the others?” she heard her voice demand of the panther.
It shimmered slightly, and a still-dripping, light-haired young man lay on the deck. “Dead,” he gasped. “They’re all dead. Swarmmasters gaining on us, three with swarms and a Warrior with warband.”
“Dammit,” she heard herself mutter. Swarmmasters? What it going on here? she demanded of the inside of her head. Nothing answered.
She felt her body twist to face a young man in the uniform of a Kingsman. “Captain, is there anything you can do?” she asked.
The soldier looked haggard. “Highness, I have thirty men,” he said bluntly. “At a guess, there are at least five hundred Swarmbeasts out there, with Magi to support them. We cannot win. We must run.”
Brea’s vision swept back across the boat, turning back to the river. A few glimpses of motion showed themselves in the trees. “The only problem is that the Swarmbeasts run faster than we can sail,” she realized aloud.
Suddenly the woods lit up with blue flame. Even hundreds of meters away, Brea felt the hair on her arms stand up as energy filled the woods with Death. For a few moments, the woods lit like an inferno, then quieted.
A hawk slowly winged its way out of the woods, to settle on the boat’s deck. Brea stared at it for a moment, then it shimmered, and a man appeared where the hawk had rested. A black cloak completely encased his body and shadowed his face, leaving none of him visible.
“Who are you?” Brea heard her voice demand.
“I am the man who saved you,” the figure replied. “I am the Black Lord.”
She’d never heard the voice before, yet she recognized it and her lips moved to form a name, then the vision suddenly faded, leaving Brea in a dark place. What’s going on? Is the spell working? Which of those was supposed to be my true love?
Then a maelstrom of light, similar to the light in the pool she’d used in the ritual, swept her away into another vision.
She recognized where she was this time. She was in Deoran, standing at the gates before the city. A man stood next to a horse, clad in black on black robes. The man was tall and fair, blue eyes piercing everything.
“No, Brea, you cannot come,” he told her sternly.
The voice was different. Somehow, this man was the Black Lord – but was not the man from the last vision. She heard her own voice speak in response. “If you leave, I will follow.”
“No,” the Mage Lord said, “You will not.” He gestured to the black-clad Battlemage with him. “Kij’nikar will be your guardian. He will prevent you from doing anything foolish.”
There was love in the man’s voice, but also condescension and arrogance. Brea felt herself wilt and wondered how she would ever allow a man to treat her so. A laughing caw distracted her, and she glanced up on the wall. A crow whose feathers were so deep a black as to be purple perched there, its caws seeming to laugh at her.
She turned back to the Mage Lord to find that he had mounted his horse. “Trust me, Brea,” he told her gently. “The Chaos Master is no threat to me.” As he rode away, the crow’s caws followed him, laughing, and the light swirled around him, taking Brea to another place.
Bare rocks surrounded her. Thin soil and hardy plants provided a light ground cover. Massive walls of rock, broken and shattered by catastrophe, bounded the pass on both sides.
This time she had no body, merely a viewpoint. Flashes of fire drew that view to a thin line of Magi, standing against an immense Swarm. They stood alone, fire flashing along their line.
In the center of the line was the fair-haired Mage Lord, guiding his people in the fight. Death swirled out in front of the line, killing Swarmbeasts by the hundred – by the thousand.
Chaos fire retaliated, lancing out from dozens of Swarmmasters within the horde. It shattered upon the shield, but the Battlemagi took one involuntary step backwards.
Her view suddenly shifted to a place behind the Swarm, where a single man stood alone, watching the attack with cold eyes. Despite the lack of a cloak – he was dressed only in an inconstantly purple robe- she recognized him as the man who’d been in the first vision.
His cold eyes rested on the line, waiting for his perfect moment. Then it came, a gap even Brea’s detached viewpoint missed, and a single lance of pure chaos plucked the fair-haired lord out of the line, sending his body crumpling to the ground in death.
With their leader gone, the Battlemagi wavered, and the Swarm attacked. Fire blazed out, suddenly swirling around her… and the battlefield was gone.
A similar field, but different. The High Royal banner flew over an army of knights, accompanied by hundreds of Life Magi. Brea found herself standing with a group of several others, dressed in flowing white robes – the robes of a full Mage.
“The Lord specifically told us not to come to his aid,” she heard her father’s voice speak. “We shouldn’t even be here.”
“He is my betrothed,” Brea heard herself say. “He needs us.”
The other woman there, who Brea suddenly recognized as the Eldest – the leader of all Life Magi, nodded. “Death is only half a whole. The Hawk Lord cannot fight alone.”
Her father sighed and nodded. “All right, find him.”
Brea began to set up the instruments for a Viewing, only to find it suddenly forming in the air before her. It took her a moment to recover from the surprise, but she looked deeply into it.
She somehow knew the man in the image was the man from the barge vision. He stood with a line of Battlemagi against the Swarm. Brea looked up to see her father nod.
“We will do as we must, I guess,” he said quietly, then turned to the man with him. “Trumpeter, sound General Advance. We must break the Swarm. If we win, we win forever!”
The light off ten thousand lancepoints swirled up into Brea’s eyes, and the army faded.
Brea came to with a jolt, her face almost touching the water of the basin. The water was cool, with no light or magic in it now. Only the faint smell of herbs suggested what had happened moments before.
What had happened? she wondered. She remembered a bunch of visions, showing different paths, different men. If the spell had worked, which one of them was her true love? She tried desperately to remember the visions, but nothing detailed came. All she had was a vague sense of foreboding.
Somehow, she was not sure how, she knew what the visions meant. The Time of Prophecy was coming, and, for some reason, she seemed to be in the middle of it. She knelt upon the prayer mat. She would pray. Pray to all the Gods, for she would need every ounce of strength she had if she was to overcome.
A knock on the door roused Brea from her sleep. She sat upright in her bed, rubbing sleep from her eyes. “Who is it?” she demanded.
“Lela’irn.”
Brea sighed at the sound of the woman’s voice. Her childhood nurse had become her teenage maid, and had caused the Princess grief ever since.
“Enter,” Brea commanded.
The portly woman entered. “You must hurry and dress, dear,” she told Brea busily. “Your father has summoned you to meet the Hawk Car’raen and his apprentice at the gates. They will be here soon!”
Brea eyed the woman sharply. “When, exactly, did my father summon me?” she asked softly
The older woman wrung her hands. “You needed
your sleep, dear,” she replied.
“When?” the Princess demanded.
“An hour ago,” the old nurse admitted. “But you did…”
“Shut up,” Brea snapped. “I’ll be late now, damn you.” Despite Brea’s words, the nurse came over to help her dress as she stood. “Get out,” Brea ordered. “I can dress myself.”
The nurse retreated, looking confused and hurt. Brea sighed, and got out of the bed. The sheets fell away from her tall, lithe, form. Her nightgown swirled around her ankles as she crossed to the wardrobe.
She was going to be late, again.
After two weeks of riding, Tal’s horse followed Car’s without any commands from its rider; allowing Tal to gaze around at the immense towers of Deoran City. The highest towers in the world, they housed many of the main centers of the merchant houses, as well as the instruments of ruling that immense nation.
Nonetheless, Tal couldn’t shake a sense of foreboding, of some kind of wrongness. Somehow – he wasn’t sure how – he’d seen these towers before. More than that, he’d seen them burn, burn in the flames of a sack as an immense Swarm ravaged over the city below.
His mind knew that the city had never fallen – could never fall. The immense fortifications below would absorb all the efforts of the greatest army or the mightiest Swarm. Had, in fact, done both during the height of the war against the Four, before the Riders had gone to the west to build the shek’maji’hil – to make themselves immortal.
Yet, despite that knowledge, Tal somehow knew that the city could fall. Every so often, an image of a given tower in flames, with Swarmbeasts running away from it gleefully, would flash into his mind. The city could be taken – and somewhere in the back of his head was the feeling that he could do it. The feeling that, somehow, he already had.
The worries and thoughts were driven from his head as they came past the last set of towers, and Tal’raen gazed upon the glory and strength that was the High Citadel.
Children of Prophecy Page 9
