The Wandering Mage (Convergence Book 2)

by Melissa McShane

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Map

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Things to study

  Glossary and Pronunciation Guide

  Bonus Scenes

  About the Author

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  I feel I should acknowledge the debt I owe another series, the Touchstone trilogy by Andrea K. Höst, which is also told in diary format. Convergence languished for over a year, not going anywhere, until I had the idea to use this format—and then it almost wrote itself. I’m pretty sure Touchstone gave me the idea, and I shamelessly ran with it. I strongly recommend reading Höst’s series, comprising the books Stray, Lab Rat One, and Caszandra; they’re truly excellent.

  A glossary and pronunciation guide appear at the end of this book.

  Chapter One

  BOOK SEVEN CONTINUED

  Probably 17 Coloine

  I feel so much better now I’m not half-naked, even though my left palm still stings where the skin is missing. There are a few patches where more than just the surface tissue is gone, but those are small enough I’m not worried about infection. Fortunate, given that I didn’t have any way to bandage it until now.

  It’s funny how I’ve gotten used to using the walk-through-walls pouvra, when it used to terrify me. I mean, I’m never going to love the feeling of my bones and organs sliding through stone or wood, but I sort of take it for granted now, and not just because it seems to have saved two worlds. But while I was rummaging through that woman’s dresser looking for something to wear, I realized I’d gone through her bedroom wall without thinking twice about it. Maybe it was just that I was anxious about wandering around in nothing but my breast band, but I think after what I went through in the convergence kathana, it’s a pouvra I feel more or less comfortable with.

  I still don’t really know what happened. I mean, it’s clear the worlds aren’t destroyed, but since this is a Balaenic village in the far southwest, judging by the stars, it’s possible Castavir was destroyed and I was somehow transported back to my own world, which was spared. But I can’t bear the thought of Cederic, of all my friends, being dead.

  So I’m going to assume the worlds came back together successfully, the damage was minimal, and Cederic is still, for the moment, in Colosse. What’s worrisome is that it’s going to take me a couple of weeks to walk there from where I am right now, and who knows where he’ll be by then?

  Time for a list, so I can calm down and stop panicking about whether I’ll ever find my husband:

  1. I am, as I wrote, somewhere in southwestern Balaen. Probably.

  2. This is where Viravon is, in Castaviran geography.

  2a. Who knows what the consequences of 1 and 2 might be?

  3. I have no money, but I think I can sell Audryn’s hair clips (sorry, Audryn) and get enough to speed my trip along.

  4. I still have these books, though this one is filling up fast. It’s the one Cederic gave me, so it’s doubly precious.

  It took me two days to reach this town, which fortunately for me lies on a well-traveled road running north and south through the forest. I don’t want to think about what might have happened if I’d been well and truly cast out in the middle of nowhere, because it’s been a long time since I’ve had to live off the land, and this time of year it’s hard to find ripe fruit that hasn’t either been harvested or eaten by birds. As it is, I was starving by the time I reached this place.

  I scouted around the outskirts, very carefully, until I found a house whose owners were out. Then I did the walk-through-walls pouvra and helped myself to some food and a shirt that’s a little too big for me, but better than nothing. They had some clean rags I used to bandage my hand after I washed it really well. I waited until nightfall to do all that, since I’ve learned it’s bad to rely too much on the concealment pouvra. Although this isn’t a big town, closer to a village really, there were still a lot of eyes that might be able to see past the pouvra’s compulsion to look elsewhere. So I’m going to sleep in the woods again, more comfortably this time, and go into town openly tomorrow to find someone who’ll pay me for these clips (sorry again, Audryn).

  It’s late in the season, but I might be able to find a ride at least some of the way toward my goal. But I’m not counting on it. I doubt a town this size has anything worth hauling two weeks’ east to the Myrnala River and the handful of settlements along its banks. Handful of Balaenic settlements, I should say. I wonder what people thought when Colosse appeared out of nowhere? Not that I know that’s what happened.

  I’ll see what I can learn from these villagers tomorrow. They might not know anything’s changed, because this place doesn’t look as if the convergence touched it at all. There’s certainly no activity of the kind you’d expect after a disaster, no broken buildings, nothing out of the ordinary. It’s just a typical village like you find all over the borders of Balaen, out on the frontier: houses of wooden beams with plaster between them and thatched, peaked roofs, mostly single story except for a couple of buildings near the center of town, like the inn—oh, that’s good news, I hadn’t thought about it, but if they have a building for hosting travelers, they’re likely not as suspicious and xenophobic as some of the places I’ve been to.

  This one’s also more cheerful than most because so many of the houses have brightly painted doors and shutters, and I saw flowers growing around the ones on the edge of town where I did my scouting. So I feel fairly positive about my chances of learning something valuable. And who knows? Maybe I’ll find someone heading north who’s willing to give me a ride.

  19 Coloine

  Well, that was interesting.

  It’s—honestly, I don’t know where to begin, so much has happened in the last two days. Except that’s stupid, of course I should begin at the beginning, when I walked into the village yesterday morning.

  I’d debated whether to enter early, when there would be fewer people around to be suspicious of the stranger, versus mid-morning, when business would be in full swing and I’d have more options for selling the hair clips and therefore might get a better price. I decided on mid-morning, because the village was big enough I figured they’d be accustomed to visitors and I wouldn’t attract as much attention.

  Hahahaha.

  I attracted all sorts of attention when I came strolling down the main street—unfriendly, fearful attention. The sort of attention where you can tell people are nerving themselves to accost you. By the time I realized how universal this attention was, I was a good way into town and had to decide what I should do, other than pretend I wasn’t aware of the whispering.

  No one had actually attacked me, so I casually veered over to inspect some apples in a bin outside a store, making the owner take a few steps back over the threshold and shut the door in my face, then sauntered back the way I’d come.

  Or tried t
o. I’d only gone a few paces when I saw people moving in on both sides of me, trying to act casual, but they were so tense I started to feel afraid. It’s true I can turn the walk-through-walls pouvra on other people now, but only one at a time, and with physical contact. Besides, after what happened at my nearly-disastrous “wedding” to Aselfos, I’m more than ever convinced that trying to walk through a person could be seriously fatal. And there were a lot of people moving in on me, maybe fifteen or twenty, some of them much bigger than me.

  I stopped walking and surveyed the crowd, looking for a place I could summon fire that might get me out of this. The group of men encircling me stopped about ten feet away, close enough that I had to keep myself from panicking. Other villagers were coming up behind them, watching to see what might happen, making me feel more panicky because they represented one more obstacle I had to get through.

  So I held my hands away from my body, spread wide to show I wasn’t holding anything, and I said, “I don’t want any trouble,” which is clichéd, but getting eloquent in a situation like that is the sort of thing that gets people dead.

  Then the strangest thing happened, and even now, knowing why they reacted that way, it still strikes me as odd. The crowd backed away, the way you do when you’re surprised, this sound like wind rushing over ripe corn rose up as every one of them took in a startled breath, and then they grabbed me.

  I fought and shrieked and kicked, and I know I hurt at least a few of them, but there were too many for me to escape—so many that they could carry me away rather than dragging me. Now I can be grateful for not being dragged, but at the time I was terrified. I kept shouting at them to put me down, but that only made them move faster. In no time they’d wrestled me into a shed, where three of them held me still while others searched my pockets and took the hair clips and the books. That’s when I lashed out with fire because the thought of losing those books terrified me more than the thought of what they might do to me.

  This made them all start shouting, and one of them hit me hard in the side of my head, which made me lose control of the fire so it went out. I don’t remember much after that, but when I finally regained my senses, I was alone in the shed, my hands and feet were tied, and my things were gone.

  I lay there for a while, trying to become calm and figure out what to do. My first instinct was to burn my way out of there and run, but that would mean leaving the books behind, and that wasn’t going to happen. On the other hand, they now knew I could do magic, so it was possible they were planning my death, and staying in the shed might be a bad idea.

  On a third hand, though, they hadn’t killed me outright, which meant…what? That they weren’t sure what to do with me? True, there aren’t any actual laws requiring mages to be put to death, but the fear of them is so widespread, particularly in small towns like these, that no one in authority so much as blinks if somebody executes vigilante justice on someone proven to be a mage. Assuming anyone in authority ever finds out. So it was strange they’d locked me up instead.

  I decided to untie myself, at least, because the floor of the shed was mucky and smelled bad, and lying on it was disgusting. Manipulating the ropes with the mind-moving pouvra wasn’t too hard, though it did take time because the ropes were thin and the knots were tight. Then I got up and explored my cage.

  It was about ten feet square, with a roof of wooden shingles about six feet high, no windows, just an old door hanging on leather hinges. I could see three ways of escaping that didn’t even require magic. They were probably as panicked as I was, to resort to confining me here. I sat down, thought better of it, and stood to lean against the back wall. I stared at the door and made a list. I don’t remember exactly what it included, but this is my best guess:

  1. I can either leave now, or wait for them to come for me.

  2. If I leave now, I get away clean, but I leave my things behind, which is unacceptable.

  3. If I wait for them to come for me, I might not be able to escape again.

  4. If I leave now, I can search the village for my things…which could take forever, and I can only stay concealed for so long.

  5. If I wait, I might be able to find out why they attacked me and why they didn’t just kill me when they saw I could do magic.

  Much as I wanted to run away, I decided I would have to take a chance on staying. It was reckless and dangerous, but I think I’ve said before that I hate not knowing things, and in ten years of traveling through tiny, hostile villages, I’ve never once been attacked simply for walking into town. It was strange, and it bore investigating. So I stood there and waited.

  It was boring. I went over plans for escaping, plotted a journey to the Myrnala, wondered why the kathana hadn’t returned me to Colosse and if Cederic was going out of his mind with worry yet, thought about pouvrin and whether I could create one based on a kathana or at least part of one. There are so many things I’d like to do with magic, now I know how th’an and pouvrin are related—the enhanced hearing pouvra, for one, and the memory one so I don’t have to feel bad about making up bits of the conversations I record because I don’t remember everything exactly.

  I also practiced the binding pouvra, the one I’d learned just before the convergence that was based on th’an from Vorantor’s original kathana to bring the worlds together. I still have no idea how to make it do anything, but it’s the first pouvra I’ve ever created, and knowing that made me feel confident even though everything else around me was uncertain.

  It must have been two or three very boring hours before the door opened, slowly, and someone stuck a pitchfork through the narrow gap, pointed at where I would have been if I’d still been tied up. I waited.

  Gradually the head of the pitchfork was followed by the man holding it, who was followed by two other men. All three of them were looking down, squinting the way you do when you go from a bright room into a dark one, so I cleared my throat and then had to swallow a laugh because the pitchfork swung up fast, and the three men all tried to move in different directions at once. Then it was less funny because the one man thrust the pitchfork at me, abruptly, and I had to step to one side because I didn’t want to reveal the walk-through-walls pouvra by letting it pass through me. “I’m not going to hurt you,” I said, raising my hands again.

  In hindsight, their reaction was funny—they looked as if they’d just heard a dog comment on the weather. At the time, it was baffling. The man with the pitchfork said, “How do you speak our language?”

  That confused me so much all I could say was, “What?”

  “It’s a trick,” one of the other men said. He had very short brown hair, as if he’d had his head shaved and it was only just growing back. “She only knows a few words.”

  “What else can you say, outsider?” the pitchfork man said.

  I looked the three of them over. They didn’t look like farmers—the pitchfork man was definitely not familiar with his “weapon.” But they also didn’t look like aldermen or councilors or whatever it was this town had for government. People like that have an air about them that marks them as different. I looked past the trio and saw a crowd gathered behind them, but no sign of anyone holding a position of responsibility. So I said, “I want to talk to your mayor.”

  The pitchfork came a little closer to my nose. “That sounds like memorizing to me,” said the third man, who was shorter and skinnier than the other two and had a nasally whine to his voice.

  “I was born in Thalessa,” I said, “I’ve spoken this language all my life, and I don’t know why you’re so afraid of me, but I—” I was about to say I haven’t done anything you should fear and then I remembered the fire, so I shut my mouth.

  “She’s a sorcerer,” the brown-haired man said. “We should kill her before she does like the last one did.”

  “You’re from Thalessa?” pitchfork man said, ignoring his friend. “I was there once.”

  “I haven’t been back in ten years, but yes,” I said. Actually, I was born in Venetr
y, and when my Dad lost his rank and his surname when I was two, we moved to Thalessa, but this man didn’t need to know my tragic history.

  “She looks like them,” the short man said. “It’s a trick.”

  “And even if it isn’t, she’s still a sorcerer,” the brown-haired man said.

  Pitchfork man chewed his lip in thought. Then he said, “Yakon, go get Riona. She’ll have to make the decision. You—” He jabbed the pitchfork at me. “You may be Balaenic, or you may not, but either way you’ve got magic and I’m not letting you out where you can use it on folks.”

  I nodded and kept my hands high. The short man ducked away into the crowd, which parted for him but otherwise stayed put. I guess this was more entertainment than they saw around here all year.

  “So, how long ago were you in Thalessa?” I said, though I didn’t think I’d get a response. Sure enough, he grunted and wouldn’t meet my eyes. So I stood there and ran through more escape plans—conceal myself, step backward through the wall of the shed…which still left me without my books. I’d just have to see where things went.

  Eventually the crowd parted in reverse, and the short man came through, bringing with him a woman who looked to be nearly two feet taller than he was. I don’t think that’s an exaggeration. She was maybe ten years older than I am, with short brown hair, and she had a dusting of flour over the neck of her dress, just where an apron wouldn’t have protected her. She moved with an air of authority that told me whatever else she might be, she was used to being in charge. I wondered why she hadn’t been at the front of this attack, but she said, “I thought I told you I’d deal with her once the rest of the council members got here,” which answered some of my questions.

  Pitchfork man had the decency to look embarrassed. “Thought she might try to magic her way out,” he muttered.

  “I told you if she wasn’t going to burn down the shed, she wasn’t going anywhere,” Riona said. “Sorcerers got only one magic in them.”

  That was interesting, and I rated my chances of getting out of this alive much higher at that point, because they wouldn’t be expecting me to have any other tricks at my disposal. But then pitchfork man said, “Outsiders might have any number of magics. Who knows what they can do?”