by Ron Collins
Now darkness was nearing, and he walked with Arianna through a woods stained red by the setting sun. The trees gave the coarse smell of wood, and a dry creek bed ran nearby. The thatch of the winter past scratched a thin tune in the faint breeze.
He left his hair free because Arianna said she was fond of it that way. His shirt and breeches were no defense against the evening chill, but the weight of his pack caused him enough exertion that he kept warm.
She walked with a shawl draped over her shoulders, her gait free and graceful, the skin of her face soft and dark in the evening light.
“Did you have to shatter the entire mug?” she said.
“I admit that was a mistake.”
“Indeed, it was. I thought Evo was going to throw me out.”
Garrick sighed.
“That’s not what I meant. I didn’t mean to actually break the mug at all. I really just wanted to put a hole in it so the ale would flow into his lap.”
Arianna laughed—he liked it when she laughed.
“That was brilliant, then,” she said. “Perhaps you cost me a husband, though.”
“He would not have been good for you.”
“And you—the man who has stood at my counter and boasted of being a lone wolf in the forest, and who has said he could never tie himself to anything—you would be good for me?” Arianna replied.
He swallowed anxiety.
Garrick had never been in love before. He had never yearned to know another person, had never known it was even possible to feel this way. It was hard, after all. It hurt in such a strangely good way. The thought of exposing this desire brought a weird mix of excitement and nakedness that he just didn’t understand.
Did she think of him the same way?
“Perhaps your charms have changed me,” he finally said.
“Gods!”
“I don’t believe in them, and neither do you.”
She cast him a sideways glance as she stepped over a root. “Perhaps they are what have changed you?”
“Now you’re just laughing at me.”
She gave a perfectly wicked smile. “Perhaps a little.”
He turned to her.
“Let’s be serious, Arianna. You know I don’t want to be a mason, or a member of the city league. And I don’t want to be tied to the orders because I’ll not serve another if I can avoid it.”
“No self-respecting Torean would.” Arianna gave an understanding nod.
“You’re different, though. I can’t stop thinking about you—about our last walk. About…I’ve never thought about what might come later…I’ve never…”
He looked for words of poetry here, something befitting the moment, but his tongue was stuck to his mouth. Finally he blurted.
“Would you be with a mage?”
Arianna’s lips curved into a half-smile.
“Come now, Garrick. You are only an apprentice.”
“But you know I will be a mage.”
She gave a playful shrug. “And you would have us live out in the woods somewhere distant? My mother would kill me for moving that far away.”
“I come to town often enough. You could, too.”
“Not often enough for my mother’s view.”
They came to a halt and he put a hand on her shoulder.
“It can be a good life, Arianna. I’ve seen it. Alistair lives free.” A sly grin crossed his lips. “And I wouldn’t have you pay for any mug you broke.”
She hit him on the shoulder. Hard.
“Ow!”
“I’ll be having none of that from my husband.”
“It was a jest, Arianna.”
She looked at him, her eyes softening. “Was it, now?”
“Yes,” he said. “It was.”
He leaned down to kiss her.
She turned her face to receive him, but before they touched she pulled away, giving an un-girly snort of laughter at his expression.
“You’ll have to catch me if you want a kiss.”
She collected the hem of her dress and ran down the path.
She liked him.
He realized it with a rush.
Arianna, daughter of Helene, liked him.
He gave chase, pretending to clutch for her shawl as it trailed behind her, letting her lead him for a bit. He stumbled as she dodged. He was going to catch her, of course. He was going to catch her, and turn her around, and he was going to—
As he reached a hand out to her shoulder, Arianna gave a yelp, then a sudden lurch.
At first he thought it was one of the games she was so fond of, but she fell heavily, rolling down the creek bed and over the stones, leaves, and exposed roots that lined it before landing with a thud below.
“Arianna!” he called as he hurried down the slope.
She did not respond.
Blood welled from a cut at her hairline, and panic gripped him. He pressed his hand to her head, and crimson poured through his fingers. He stripped off his shirt to bandage the wound, but it wasn’t enough.
“Help!” he yelled.
Every bit of Alistair’s teaching flooded into his mind: fire, lightning, telekinesis—but his familiarity was with the simple spells of cleaning and mending, and even if he could cast those more powerful wizardries, none would stop Arianna’s bleeding. He concentrated on his spell gates and he reached for his link. Maybe something would come. Maybe he could create something in the moment. His link opened and raw magestuff poured forward. He set his thoughts, pressed trigger points, and molded the flow until power throbbed in his fingertips.
He had no spell for it, though. The raw magestuff merely pooled in his mind. He poured it directly into the cut, but felt no response. He tried a binding spell but her skin continued to grow ashen.
Still blood poured forth.
“Help!” he screamed again.
The evening’s darkness twisted his voice, and Arianna’s eyes glowed unearthly pale as they rolled to the back of her head. Tears rolled down his cheeks. What had he done? It wasn’t his fault. It wasn’t. He had to fix this, but he looked at Arianna and he saw her dying in his arms and he had nothing for it. Nothing. The musty aroma of mildew was overwhelming. He touched her forehead and felt slippery blood run between his fingers.
“Help!” He screamed into the nighttime sky. “Anyone! Help!”
The moon glowed above.
“Anyone,” he whispered, his throat raspy, his head sagging limply to hers. “Anything. I’ll do anything.”
A strangeness filled the ravine then, a sensation unlike anything Garrick had ever experienced before. Energy rolled over the ground with a scent as sharp as a summer storm. It was high sorcery. Wizardry more powerful than even Alistair was able to use.
The hair on his arms rose. He was mesmerized, confused but oddly thrilled.
A voice spoke from inside his mind.
Would you truly accept responsibility for the power of life and death?
Fear rose inside him, but Arianna’s weight was dead in his arms and her slack cheek reflected the new moonlight with a chalky sheen. Her hair trailed over his wrist to seek communion with the black soil below.
“Yes,” he said aloud. “I would do anything to save her.”
And in that moment he knew it was true. Garrick would do anything to save Arianna, anything to save their future, anything to care about something as much as he cared about her.
A perfect silence grew in which even Garrick’s breathing seemed to halt. The wind died. Leaves hung toward the ground with silver-backed limpness.
“Anything,” Garrick whispered again.
So be it.
A new power filled him.
His heart pounded with unworldly drumming. Fluorescent flames danced on his fingertips and burned Arianna’s blood from his skin. He cradled her head in one hand and rubbed her temple with the other. Glorious energy flowed, sorcery fed from somewhere deep inside his being, blue and green and blue again. The smell of warm honey grew omnipresent as a river of power
seeped into Arianna’s wounds to bring torn tissue together, mend damage, and give life.
He felt intertwined with her. He felt deeply together.
Then it was over.
The wind whispered. Trees creaked, and tears dried on his cheeks in the nighttime chill.
Arianna took a shuddering breath, then opened her eyes.
He had never seen anything more beautiful.
Chapter 3
Elman Rigtha, a mage of the Lectodinian order, sat on his roan and waited for the Koradictine captain to finish his preparations. The night had grown dark, but the moon was bright enough to see by.
Six Koradictines and six Lectodinians prepared for their mission, whispering to themselves and playing through spell work as they tightened the binds on their mounts. Leather saddles squeaked and a sword rasped against its sheath. A horse gave an impatient nicker. They had been working together for eight days, yet the oddity of mages from the two orders casting spells side-by-side had not worn off.
The Torean House should be scoured quickly, though, then they would deal with the Koradictines once and for all.
That had to be the plan, right?
They smelled, after all. These Koradictines. They were pompous, and overbearing, and out of control—far too willing to take risks. A group totally without discipline, without a finger of respect for the art of their spell work itself. You couldn’t rely upon them to throw a decent spell if Hezarin herself were to do the casting. Just the idea of his Lectodinians taking seconds from the Koradictines made Elman’s stomach clench.
So, yes. Lectodinian leadership would eventually turn to the Koradictine problem. He was as sure of this as he was about the fact that the night chill was growing uncomfortable.
He glanced toward Dorfort. It was unlikely the city’s guard would patrol this far away so late at night, but it was better to be wary than be taken by surprise.
“Come on, Oldhamid,” he said. “Let’s not waste the evening.”
Oldhamid, the Koradictine captain assigned to this mission, finally spurred his horse to Elman’s side. He wore a maroon tunic, black cloth breeches, and a floppy-brimmed hat that made him look like a farmer. A slim dagger glinted from his belt.
“Are your men ready, yet?” Elman asked.
“Patience, my friend,” Oldhamid said with enough spite that Elman knew the Koradictine shared his feelings toward their working arrangement. “This Torean is strong, and he’s not going anywhere. He will be just as dead by morning, regardless of when we begin. It will go best if we are properly prepared.”
Elman hid his grimace. Had he sunk so far as to be lectured by a Koradictine?
This whole fiasco had done nothing for him beyond searing the true depth of differences between the Koradictine and Lectodinian orders into his mind.
Not that he needed the lesson.
The orders had split in the days after Corid de’Mayer’s rule—when the two most powerful mages of the time, Koradic and Lectodine, couldn’t agree on how to control magic. Lectodine wanted a hierarchy that monitored mages closely, and he proposed even to tax the triggering of each wizard as they came of age. Koradic had no respect for such structure, preferring each superior make decisions to trigger mages on their own but being held accountable through severe punishment for errors of judgment whenever such was discovered.
And that was just the beginning of their differences.
The Koradictine approach was obviously insane. It was sloppy.
Elman saw that in the Koradictines surrounding him today. Their magic was powerful, but their training was all over the map—meaning they cast their spells with such variability it made your head spin.
If the stories Elman heard were true, the orders were working together now only because neither one trusted the other enough to remove the Torean problem by themselves, and because neither one wanted to give the other the advantage of any new sorceries discovered in the process. That story made as much sense as anything.
“Have you briefed your mages on the plan?” Elman finally said.
“Such as it is.”
The rounded slope of the hillside rose before them, its ridge giving way to the Torean’s manor. Oldhamid was right about the mage—he was known to be strong, but he would also be tired after a long day. With twelve mages at hand, this job should be easy—if, that is, the Koradictines carried their weight.
“Be sure your men break the wards,” he said. “And let them know there’ll be blood to pay if they don’t set a reasonable blaze along the stables. I don’t want to lose his apprentices.”
Oldhamid nodded. “We understand.”
“Good. Let’s move.”
Elman motioned his men to join him. Oldhamid did the same.
An invisible weight lifted from Elman’s shoulders as the mission began. It was good to be doing something.
He would be glad when the Torean wizard was dead.
Chapter 4
Something was definitely wrong.
Garrick sat at the dinner table, wearing an over-large work shirt Arianna’s brother had given him to replace the one he had torn. He gnawed on a turkey wing Arianna’s mother had prepared.
He wanted to be happy.
He should be happy.
But Garrick felt something terribly, terribly wrong happening inside him. It was something different every moment—skin-crawling revulsion, then shivers, then a bout of nausea that left him breathless.
Arianna’s home was everything he had once dreamed his own might one day be—made by her father, cut from lumber from the woods, sealed tight with pine pitch and mud. A fire blazed in the hearth, and the kitchen was filled with the smell of cornbread, chicory, and roasted fowl. It was a rambunctious table—her brothers and sisters ringing around it, elbowing each other and sampling from each dish as they passed dinner around.
The closeness of this family hurt him in a physical way.
Its intimacy burned inside his chest.
He wanted to breathe, he wanted to be alone. He wanted this gnawing ache inside him to go away, but despite having eaten steadily for the entire meal, he was still as hungry as he could ever remember.
It was this hunger that was most definitely wrong.
It was deep and chilling.
It was the haunting presence of an owl on the hunt, the raw odor of wood fire in the open forest. It was the sensation of bone scraping bone.
Arianna was still blathering on, blissfully unaware of the severity of her accident.
She had chittered and chattered incessantly on their way here. Garrick had merely nodded and grunted at certain points while he fought the ache growing in the pit of his stomach.
“I don’t know what happened, Mother. We were walking along the path and I must have tripped over a root. Next thing I knew, I was falling and falling. It was terrible…”
The hunger soared.
You have given, a whisper echoed inside his head. Now you must take.
He felt…energy. Power. Desire. Fear rose within the swell. His eyes grew dry, a film of sweat formed on his upper lip, and he felt suddenly dizzy.
What was happening to him?
He tried to focus on what Arianna was saying, but her words slipped away.
“…then I opened my eyes and saw Garrick.”
She gazed at him with wonder.
“You don’t look good, son,” Arianna’s father said. “Maybe you should go lie down?”
“Yes,” he tried to say, but he was uncertain if the word actually left his mouth.
He had to get away.
Garrick didn’t know what was happening, but he no longer trusted himself.
He staggered from the table to lie down on a small cot in the back room.
For one blissful moment, things grew quiet.
Then came movements from outside. Muted voices rumbled through haze. Arianna’s father lit his pipe, and the smoke’s odor burned like fine grains of sand against Garrick’s mind. He tried to push them away, tried to clear his
thoughts, but the more he pushed the stronger each sense became.
“It’s about time you settled, Arianna,” her father said. “I had nearly given up hope your dowry would be claimed.”
Shayla, the youngest daughter, was playing with her doll just outside the room. Garrick felt her curiosity, sensed the questioning glances she cast his way. His head pounded. Shayla’s doll seemed to peer around the cracked doorway. He clenched his eyes to ignore her, but the vibrant beat of her heart pressed against him.
Her life force was strong and pure.
He wanted it.
No! He pressed his fists over his ears.
He picked himself off the cot and staggered out the back door, buckets and brooms clattering behind him. The nighttime darkness was as thick as pudding. The fire in his belly yearned for the pure life force of Arianna’s family in their cabin, but he stumbled and ran into the night.
“Garrick?” Arianna called as she chased after him.
Her sweet aroma tinged with energy and blood tantalized him in horrible ways.
He wanted to stop. He ached for them, and he could take them all. Arianna. Her parents. Her brothers and sisters. He could devour them.
It would feel so good.
The idea scared him, and through it all, he understood only one rational thought—he could not let Arianna catch him.
He ran harder, crashing through the nighttime forest.
Normally, the woods would smell of mildew and dampness, normally the moon’s reflection would give the leaves silver edges, but these sensations were muted tonight, colors dimmed to grays and indigo blackness, odors blunted to blandness. Garrick tripped, but somehow found himself still running. His lungs ached. A supple branch sliced his cheek, but the wound did not run with blood.
A small tavern loomed ahead, music and laughter coming from within.
Arianna’s footsteps drew nearer.
He dashed into the tavern.
The door slammed behind him.
Tallow candles smoldered at each table, casting thin shadows throughout the room. The handful of patrons glared at him in sudden silence.
