by Dante King
Amelia half closed her eyes in concentration again. “It feels easier this time, I think I’m getting a feel for it.”
“That’s amazing,” I said. “For someone who’s only just acquired Mana, you’re picking this up really quickly.”
Amelia opened her eyes and looked at me again. “You’re a great teacher.”
I chuckled. “Now, let’s see what you can cast.”
Amelia’s hand started to turn blue. She gasped.
“It’s ok,” I said. “Can you feel any cold? It shouldn’t be able to hurt you.”
“You’re right,” she said, surprise in her voice. “I can feel the cold, but it doesn’t hurt. Is that what it’s like when you cast fire? Do you feel a heat sensation?”
“Yes, I can feel the heat, but it doesn’t burn me. Now, send in some more Mana, see what you can cast.”
“It feels like I’m draining my Mana empty, like water from a jug,” Amelia said.
“You might feel a bit lightheaded if you use it all, but the feeling doesn’t last.” I said. “I suspect it’s normal for it to get low. You obviously don’t have much available just yet. Mine has increased from fighting with it a few times.”
She nodded, thinking as she channeled her Mana. “Yes, that’s how I think it works. Feeling it in practice is so different from just knowing about it in theory.”
Amelia’s hand continued to turn blue, and ice started to accumulate on her palm. The ice continued to grow and lengthen until it grew into a long, thin projectile, with a wickedly cruel, sharp point.
“It’s a spear,” I said. “See if you can throw it.”
Amelia drew back her arm and hurled the spear into the darkness. It crashed against the boulders. It was obvious that she had done some spear-throwing before, just from her technique.
I summoned a ball of fire in my hand to illuminate the area as we walked over to look. A broad patch of ice had spread against the rock face.
“Wow, Amelia. You could probably freeze a whole pack of monsters with this, if you hit them right.”
Amelia said nothing but stared in awe at the snowflake pattern splayed out over the rock face.
“Congratulations,” I said. “You just cast your first spell.”
Amelia turned to look at me. The firelight glinted against tears in her eyes. “You have fulfilled a dream I never dared to hope for.”
She walked slowly over to me and looked me fully in the face dropping her arms to her sides. When she reached me, she looked me right in the eye.
Suddenly, with a convulsive movement, she flung her arms around me. I didn’t hesitate. I reached up to put my arms about her and embrace her.
“Thank you, William,” she said into my shoulder.
“My pleasure, Amelia,” I replied.
Chapter Five
It was time to get back to the wagons. They were pretty close now. Amelia and I were both hungry; we had delayed our journey back to the road and spent time tattooing. Now we were both keen to get on the move.
“It’s dark away from the fire,” said Amelia, looking up at the sky.
“Yes, but there’s a good moon. Come on, it’s not far. Your eyes will adjust. Anyway, there might be more monsters about. We don’t want to attract too much attention if we can avoid it.”
We carefully extinguished our fire by piling loose earth over the embers, then we gathered up our few belongings and headed out, taking a bearing from the position of the north star.
When we got out of the hollow where we had sat and done our tattooing, we found that the land sloped steadily downward. The bright moon hung low in the sky, casting inky shadows across the swaying grasses. Amelia and I moved silently through the forest toward the road, and I noticed that she stuck close to me, glancing nervously around at the shadows. Less than half an hour had passed when we found ourselves looking down on the dark shapes of the slavers’ wagons by the side of the broad road.
“No sign of anything having been disturbed,” I said quietly to Amelia. “Let’s go down.”
There was no sign of the oxen which had drawn the carts. A quick examination of the dangling harnesses showed that the animals had kicked their way out of their reins and wandered off into the woods on the other side of the path.
“Probably long gone now,” I said. “Good luck to them, I guess.”
The slavers had moved the wagons to the side of the road before heading into the woods after us. In one, the body of Boris still lay face down in a pool of congealed blood. I wanted nothing more to do with him, but I grabbed Amelia’s white fur cloak from the seat where Boris had been using it as a cushion.
Amelia had raided the other wagon.
“My cloak!” she said, reaching out to take it from me. “Thank you!”
She was clutching a rough canvas sack, but she put it down as she snugged the cloak round herself. “I put everything that might be of use into that sack,” she said. “Some food, a bottle of wine, some water skins, some simple tools and a few gold coins. There was a fire-lighting kit, too, and I grabbed it even though I guess we don’t need it. It’ll also be useful for carrying my spellbook. You want to have a look in the wagon for yourself?”
“I trust you to have found everything of use,” I said, smiling. I glanced around. “Let’s go back under the cover of the trees. I don’t want to sit beside the road and eat; it doesn’t feel safe. If people came along and found us sitting beside a wagon with the body of a dead slaver lying in it, they might have awkward questions to ask. Come on, I’ll take the sack.”
The canvas sack Amelia had filled felt promisingly heavy as I slung it over my shoulder. Wrapped in her white fur cloak, Amelia followed me back under the shade of the trees. We walked away from the road for a few minutes, then I heard something.
“Running water!” I said. “There must be a stream nearby.”
Ten minutes took us to a dip where a fast-moving stream had cut a deep channel through the woodland. The ground dropped steeply, and Amelia and I slid clumsily down the mossy embankment, laughing as we went. The water was cold and sweet, and very welcome.
Once we had drunk our fill, we stood up and looked around us. Not far off, upstream, there was a flat grassy spot backed by twenty feet of nearly sheer rocky bank. We glanced at each other, smiling.
“That looks promising,” Amelia said, and I nodded. We would be entirely hidden from view there, unless someone came down to this exact spot. It was a safe spot to camp.
When we got there, we found that the stream had obligingly cast up lots of deadwood over the years, so I gathered this together to make a fire. Amelia had taken a small trowel from the wagon, and I used this to dig a bit of turf out and make a small hollow for the fire to sit in. A few river stones made an edge for my firepit. Amelia went down to the stream’s edge to fill the waterskins while I applied some carefully controlled magic to get the fire going.
I found that with concentration, I could direct a small amount of flame onto my hand and hold it there, carefully feeding a flow of Mana to power the spell. When it was time to finish the spell, I just had to withdraw the Mana back to my pool, and the spell winked out.
When Amelia came back, I had a welcoming little blaze going. The flames danced merrily in her large blue eyes as she stood smiling down at me.
“Shall we eat?” I suggested.
Amelia had found provisions in the wagon; nothing fancy, but very welcome all the same. There were sun-dried apples, chewy and incredibly sweet, and salty jerked beef. The trollmen seemed fond of a kind of hard biscuit with raisins through it, and though this took a bit of getting used to, it tasted very good to me after long days of stale bread rations while I had been a captive.
It was not a cold night, but it was pleasant having the warmth of the fire against our bodies as we sat and recovered from one of the most active days I could remember. Once we’d filled our bellies, we drank the wine we’d discovered in some of the skins in the wagon. Amelia had found two glazed ceramic cups in the wagon,
and we filled these to the brim, enjoying the fruity taste and the heady feeling as the alcohol flowed through our veins.
The fire was giving off a strong heat, and I lay on my side, propping my head up on my arm and staring into the thick bed of glowing embers as I enjoyed the satisfaction of a full stomach and a cup of good wine. Amelia sat with her knees drawn up to her chest beside me, gazing into the fire.
“So,” I said after a while, “it seems pretty unusual for a scholar to be sent from Astros all the way out here. How did that happen?”
“I guess the Librarians chose me because I’m young,” Amelia said. “A lot of the other scholars are so old that they are barely able to walk the halls of the library now. And the Librarians are too busy with their experiments and things to go themselves. They sent me to investigate reports of trouble near the northern mines. They didn’t say it explicitly, but I’m sure they knew that there had been a monster escape.”
“Right, and we know what that’s about now. The monsters we saw today must have come from the mines.”
“Yes. I’m supposed to work out what has happened and report back to the Librarians.”
“Do they not trust whoever is in charge of controlling the mines?” I asked. I wasn’t sure who exactly ran the mines, but I knew they worked for the Arcanists of Astros.
“Well, whoever is in charge just let a whole lot of monsters out. I wouldn’t be surprised if an Arcanist were involved.”
I chuckled. “I guess the scholars and Librarians don’t get along with the Arcanists?”
“You could say that. The Arcanists believe only in arcane strength; they care little for scholarship or anything behind powerful enchanted weapons and those who wield them.”
I didn’t understand much about the politics of magic users in the Kingdom, but I was willing to trust Amelia. If she said the Arcanists were a bad bunch, then I’d believe her. After all, the stories I’d heard of them seemed to confirm this truth.
“If I were one of the Librarians, I’d be sending someone to investigate the monsters, too,” I said. “It can’t be good that the Arcanists aren’t willing to look into things. How are you going to go about getting answers?”
Amelia sighed. “I haven’t really figured that bit out yet. The mines are a long way from Astros. When I set out, I had no idea what I would find here. I guess I was just planning to show up and ask around a bit.”
“Well, you made it this far north, at least. Although I don’t suppose you expected to come half the journey in a slavers’ wagon.”
“No, I didn’t expect that.”
“Now that you’re free, can you use whatever sway the Librarians hold in the north to find us lodgings? You may not be a Librarian yourself, but you’re on a mission from them.”
“I’m afraid not. I was given strict instructions to be very careful who I disclosed the nature of my mission to. The Librarians might not be Arcanists, but they’re not well-liked in the north, either.”
“It sounds to me like someone sent you on a suicide mission.”
“Those were my thoughts, too.”
“Then why did you go?”
“Because I wanted to see the world outside the Great Library. Thousands of books fill its shelves, and they all speak of such great wonders. I wanted to see some of those wonders for myself. I didn’t care what dangers the land beyond Astros might have posed.”
“Well, look, Amelia, I don’t have anything better to do. If you’d accept my company, I’d like to help you find out what’s happening with the monsters leaving the mines.”
Amelia smiled broadly at me. “That would be kind of you. I wanted to ask but I wasn’t sure how... ”
“Don’t mention it!” I said gallantly. “It will be a pleasure to me to accompany such a beautiful woman on such an important quest.” I spoke lightheartedly, but I was not joking. She turned her face away. I couldn’t be certain in the firelight, but I thought she did so to conceal a blush.
“So, you have never left Astros before now?” I asked.
Amelia shifted her position where she sat, stretching her legs out and reclining in the heat of the fire, as I was doing. “Not really,” she replied. “My parents used to go out into the villages sometimes to help people, but back when they were alive, I was still too young to help.”
She wasn’t looking at me. Her gaze was thoughtful, fixed on the glowing fire. From her words, her parents had been dead a long time. I wanted to know what had happened, but I wanted to be careful around this subject. Having recently lost my foster-father, I knew how much this topic could hurt.
“I’m sorry, Amelia. You lost your parents when you were very young? What happened to them? You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”
“I’ve never really spoken of it,” she said quietly, “but I believe it would help.”
I nodded and looked into her eyes. “I’m listening.”
“My parents were killed during one of their trips to the villages. They were there teaching some of the villagers new farming techniques when a band of slavers showed up, looking for captives.”
At the mention of slavers, my knuckles tightened around the stick I’d been fiddling with, and I snapped it in half with a sharp noise. Slavery had always been an accepted practice in the Kingdom, and though it was something of a gray area in the law, both the Arcanists and the King’s guards turned a conspicuously blind eye to it. In theory, the mines were worked by prisoners—criminals from the cities or bandits captured in raids who were transported by trollmen to the mines. In reality, the bands of trollmen were little better than bandits themselves, making raids on isolated villages and homesteads with impunity, looking for Elemental Sensitives and strong laborers to transport to the mines. Countless times I had seen the pain that this practice had brought to families and villages, and all to keep the supply of Beast Cores flowing to the Arcanists of Astros, the power behind the King. The injustice of it made me furious.
Amelia was staring at me, and I realized I had sat up and was clenching my jaw and my fists.
“Sorry,” I said, taking a breath and deliberately relaxing. “I’m not the biggest fan of slavers either. Please, go on.”
Amelia nodded slowly, then turned back to stare into the fire again. “I can understand that. My parents tried to stop the slavers from taking some of the younger children. The slavers were testing for anyone with Elemental Sensitivity and taking them away. When my parents tried to interfere, they were clubbed to death, then the slavers left with a caravan of folk they’d been collecting in the area.”
Amelia broke off. I looked at her. She didn’t seem to be crying, just sitting in silence.
I shifted round to be beside her, put my arm around her shoulders, and let her lean her slender weight against me. I stayed silent as I put my other arm around her. Still, she didn’t cry, but she melted into me, clearly taking comfort in the closeness of our bodies.
Her voice was calm and steady when she carried on. “When it happened, I was staying with Jacob and Fiona, friends of my parents. I always stayed with them when my parents went away to help people in the local farmlands. When a few days had gone by after they were supposed to return, Jacob and Fiona sent someone to investigate. They found out from the villagers what had happened.”
Amelia paused again.
“You don’t have to continue if you don’t want to,” I said.
“Not at all. It was all a long time ago. I just feel a bit helpless when I tell this story. Jacob and Fiona enquired with the authorities in our district of the city and were simply told that there was nothing that could be done about it.”
I scoffed. “Nothing they wanted to do about it.”
“Exactly. They told us if we wanted any more information, we would have to file a report with some department on the other side of the city and wait for a response. Of course, we did that, but we never heard anything again. Jacob brought my parents’ bodies back from the village, and we had a small funeral after that. Tha
t was 15 years ago now.”
A sudden anger swept through me at the endless injustice, and a desire to do something about it flared up in my heart. “I will find a way to help you get justice for your parents,” I said fervently.
“I’m afraid they could have been killed by any one of the slavers who roam the lands,” Amelia said. Her voice was resigned, but she smiled sadly at me. “I wouldn’t be able to tell you which slaver killed them, or where he could be found.”
Amelia’s gaze was on me, the fire glinting on her face. Her expression had been sad a moment ago, but now it was fierce. “But if we can do something to stop this hideous trade, that would do justice to my parents’ memory. They always tried to help poor people, less fortunate than they were themselves. To see how many of the poor folk of the Kingdom get torn away from their homes and forced to work in the mines, oh, it would break their hearts.”
I nodded. I fully understood that. “You said poor people. Were your parents rich, then?”
“I suppose you could say that. They did live in one of the wealthier districts in Astros, and they could afford to go out and help people in the villages for no profit. They were both from noble families.”
My experiences with nobles were not exactly positive. I’d see them when I would visit the town near my foster-father’s farm, and the interactions were mostly relegated to paying taxes, offering our choicest cuts of meats, or accepting their scorn with a cool smile. In all honesty, I couldn’t stand the local nobles, but Amelia seemed very different.
“I always thought of the noble families as greedy plunderers,” I said. “I never thought any of them would go out to help people.”
“Some of them are like that, but not all of them. Both my parents and Jacob and Fiona were always generous to people they could help. Jacob and Fiona continued to look after me for several years as well. I don’t know what would have happened to me if they hadn’t.”
“So, you went to the library soon after your parents died?” I asked.
