The Wandering Mage (Convergence Book 2)

by Melissa McShane

  “Not exactly looting,” I said. Then I saw movement up ahead, and I grabbed Jeddan’s arm and pointed. “There.”

  “I don’t see—wait.” We both stopped and stared at the corner of a house where we’d seen something run behind the building. I scanned our surroundings—tidy little houses, and a widening street, and up ahead there were buildings that didn’t look like houses, despite being as low to the ground, maybe shops. Still no other movement.

  “Let’s see what it is,” Jeddan said.

  “It could be dangerous,” I said.

  “An even better reason not to leave it at our backs,” he said, and I had to agree with his logic.

  We went slowly toward the house, wary, trying to look in all directions at once. The house was, like the others, a single-story building with white plastered walls and a thatched roof and two windows flanking the door that made the house appear startled, as if we’d succeeded in sneaking up on it. Still no movement.

  We went around the side, turned the corner, and something growled at us, making us both take a few steps backward. It was just a dog, crouched against a shed; it looked like it was favoring its front paw, and it continued to snarl even though we’d stopped advancing on it.

  Jeddan held out his hand, and I said, “Don’t. It’s in pain; who knows what it might do?”

  “You’re right,” Jeddan said, but he looked regretful as we turned and left the animal to its solitude. We came out from between the house and its neighbor, and suddenly I was picked up off my feet and thrown against the side of the house, pinned there by some unseen force. I couldn’t even turn my head to see what had happened to Jeddan, but I could hear him cursing, and I guessed he was in the same predicament as me.

  “There’s no point in fighting,” a man said, then he came to stand where I could see him. He was younger than me, maybe twenty. He had a lean face that looked as if it had gotten that way through malnutrition rather than nature and, not at all to my surprise, green-gray eyes set deep in his face. “We’re prepared this time.”

  “No point talking, Baltan, she don’t speak our language,” said a woman.

  “I do speak Balaenic,” I said, or tried to say; my jaw was as fast held as the rest of me. Jeddan said, in a somewhat muffled voice, “We’re Balaenic, you idiots. Let us go.”

  “Could be those bandits,” Baltan said, “sending people in to suss out what we got.”

  “We’re not bandits either,” Jeddan said, sounding more annoyed by the minute. I was fairly irritated myself, and not thinking very clearly, because it hadn’t connected that these were mages like us (I realize that makes me sound stupid, but it all happened much faster than it takes me to write it). So I retaliated with fire, looping it around his body in a thick rope the size of my wrist. He screamed, and I fell as his mind-moving pouvra released me. I got up quickly and said—this was when it all fell into place—“We’re Balaenic, and we’re mages like you, so let Jeddan go so we can talk!”

  There were actually three of them, two women and the man Baltan. One of the women, short and with gray-streaked hair, had her hand stretched out toward Jeddan, as if she needed the gesture to work her pouvra. The other woman, who was young and pretty, stood a little ways back and hadn’t done or said anything, so I didn’t know if she was a mage or not, but she, like the other woman, had green-gray eyes, so I figured the odds were good.

  I realized Baltan was still screaming on the ground, so I dismissed the pouvra and, after a second’s thought, extended a hand to help him rise. He ignored it and scrambled to his feet. “What did you do?” he said in a hoarse, terrified voice. “That wasn’t scribbling.”

  “Let Jeddan go,” I repeated, and flicked fire at the woman, not to burn her, just to nip at her feet. She squeaked, and Jeddan fell. “I told you. We’re Balaenic and we can work magic the way you do.” Then I realized what he’d said about scribbling, and I added, “Did some strangers come this way? People who don’t speak our language, and work magic by writing?”

  “They’re with them, Baltan, how could they know that?” the woman said.

  “No, Gismara,” the other woman, the one who’d been silent, said. She came forward and laid a hand on Gismara’s arm. “Didn’t you see? They’re like us.” She took a few more steps forward, extended her hand palm out, and said, “I grant you the freedom of my name, which is Nanissa. Be welcome here.”

  I placed my palm against hers in greeting and said, with no hesitation, “Sesskia. And this is—” I caught myself before I usurped Jeddan’s right to privacy. I’ve decided that, for good or ill, we mages have something very personal in common, and I want the connection sharing praenomi gives, but that doesn’t mean I can make that decision for Jeddan. But I think he reasoned the same way I did, because he said, “I’m Jeddan,” he said. “Thank you for the welcome, Nanissa.” Then I had so many questions I didn’t know how to begin, but Nanissa began for me.

  “You’ve got a lot of control, for only having a couple of weeks to learn,” she said. “Fire…that’s frightening.”

  I exchanged glances with Jeddan. “Maybe we should have the rest of this conversation indoors,” I said, and not because the wind was picking up and I was cold. If they assumed we’d only been mages for a few weeks… I started going over possibilities in my head, all of them tangled and confusing.

  Nanissa gestured down the street toward the rest of the town, and I realized we had an audience. Men and women and children peered out from practically every doorway, some brave souls even venturing onto doorsteps. Nanissa called out, “It’s all right, they’re not dangerous.”

  “That’s not a given,” Baltan said, glaring at me. (He was so antagonistic he almost made me regret my decision about praenomi.)

  “I’m sorry I burned you, but I didn’t feel like hanging there all day until you realized we’re not a threat,” I said. He glared harder.

  The other woman, Gismara (poor woman, I bet she’s been teased all her life—or maybe that story isn’t as widely known as I think) said “We can’t trust them on the basis of all of us having the same kind of magic.”

  “You’re right,” Jeddan said, surprising her. “We could still be enemies. But isn’t it worth that risk to learn more about yourselves?” Gismara tightened her lips and said nothing more. It was frustrating they were so suspicious—I know, Jeddan was right that even if we were the same kind of mages, we might still want to do them harm, but with Balaen in general being so fearful of magic, don’t we have a…maybe an obligation?...to band together? Or is that me indulging in a rare fit of optimism? I don’t know.

  Nanissa took us to a tavern and asked the woman behind the bar if we could use the private room. She looked at us skeptically, but nodded, and we all went into this dark, low-ceilinged room that probably would be more cheerful in summer, when the small windows let in a brighter sunlight. Just then it seemed dreary. Nanissa sat down and said, “What can you do?” to Jeddan even before he’d taken a seat.

  He blinked at her abruptness. “I can pass through things,” he said, “and see inside things.”

  Nanissa’s mouth fell open. “You have two magics,” she said. “How is that possible?”

  I put my hand on Jeddan’s wrist to keep him from speaking. “First I have to ask you a couple of questions,” I said.

  “We get to do the talking,” Baltan growled.

  “All of this will make more sense if you just answer two questions,” I said. “Please. Then we’ll tell you anything you like.”

  Nanissa hesitated, then nodded. Baltan rolled his eyes and sat back in his chair. Gismara, to my surprise, looked like she was actually listening instead of stubbornly resisting anything we might say.

  “First question,” I said. “There was an…event…about two weeks ago, 15 Coloine or so. Felt like being pulled hard in different directions. Did you develop magic when that happened? Or right afterward?”

  Nanissa looked puzzled, but nodded. “We all did. But you already know that, if it happened
to you, so I don’t see the point of that question.”

  “You will,” I said. “Second question. Did something else happen to each of you, something other than the con—the pulling? Something traumatic, like being trapped in a burning house, or almost drowning?”

  Nanissa looked at the others. “No,” she said. “Why?”

  “So it was the convergence that did it,” Jeddan said to me. “How? Or is it ‘why’?”

  “Time for you to talk,” Baltan said. “No more stalling.”

  “All right,” I said. And before Nanissa could start asking questions, I told them everything.

  I explained how Jeddan and I had become mages well before the convergence and that we’d been studying pouvrin for years, which is why we had several. I explained about the worlds coming together and how the convergence had triggered something in them that woke up the magic—something related to the color of their eyes.

  (It’s getting harder to deny the eye color is related to magical ability, even though it sounds so stupid. Such an insignificant thing on which to hang such power. And poor Terrael. If he’s lost his magic…it makes me want to shout and scream at whoever or whatever set up this stupid rule—one of the four false Gods, maybe? Or is it just the way the world is? I still hope I’m wrong.)

  Lost track—okay, I told them the reason each of them only had one pouvra is that when the magic wakes up inside you, it has to take shape somehow, and that shape is a pouvra that meets your need. After that you have to learn to bend your will to the magic if you want to gain more pouvrin.

  I hope that wasn’t a lie. It was just something I realized after remembering my own experience, and hearing Jeddan’s story, and watching Cederic sweep the God-Empress’s soldiers across the room, and knowing each of these “new” mages only had one pouvra…anyway, it feels right, but I’ll keep looking for more proof. And we showed them our pouvrin, as many as we could. Baltan and Gismara both have the mind-moving pouvra, and Nanissa has the walk-through-walls pouvra.

  By the time I was finished (I probably told them more than that, little things I’ve forgotten now) they were all staring at me like they’d been slapped in the face by a slab of rock. Jeddan said, in a low voice, “I think you overwhelmed them.”

  “They deserved to know,” I said, feeling stung.

  “True,” he said, “but it’s a lot to take in, all at once.”

  I nodded. Baltan said, no longer antagonistically, “How many more of us do you think there are?”

  It was such a logical question coming from someone I’d pegged as hopelessly irrational that it caught me off guard. “I don’t know,” I said. “Your town doesn’t have more than a thousand people, does it? And there were three of you.”

  “Nanissa and I came here from other towns,” Gismara said. “I frightened so many people in my home town I had to leave or risk being torn apart by a mob. I feel lucky to have found this place.”

  “So one out of a thousand,” I said. “Though that might not be normal.”

  “Are there any other people with those eyes in this town who didn’t develop magic?” Jeddan said.

  “No,” said Baltan. “I’m the only one.”

  “And I found maybe ten people in my journeys with those eyes,” I said. “Ten people in ten years. Granted, I wasn’t interacting much with others, but that’s not many.”

  “We’re just guessing at this point,” Jeddan said.

  “True,” I said. But I was thinking of Venetry, which has a population of over a million people, and wondering how many of those were green-eyed mages now. Even a tenth of a percent of that population was an unbelievably high number. The city might not care about an invasion; it might already have torn itself apart. But Jeddan’s right, and that’s all guessing. It’s not like we can do anything about it.

  “It sounded like you’ve had attacks by strangers who don’t speak our language,” Jeddan said. I think he was intentionally changing the subject.

  “Yes,” Nanissa said. “There’s a town about two miles from here that wasn’t there before the convergence. They’ve sent fighters against us, and some of their scribbling mages, four times now. The first time they hurt a lot of people before we drove them off. We’re better prepared now. We don’t know what they want. It’s not as if we’ve done anything to hurt them. They came after us.”

  “Remember from their perspective, you’re the ones who appeared out of nowhere,” I said. “Not that I’m excusing their behavior, but they might just be afraid of what you might do to them.”

  “Or they have someone in charge who’s aggressive. Or thinks he or she is justified in defeating you on the God-Empress’s behalf,” said Jeddan.

  “Who’s the God-Empress?” Baltan said. So I had to explain something about Castaviran politics, and the coup, though I didn’t say my husband is a Castaviran mage—no sense giving them more questions to ask—and I didn’t go into any detail

  Oh no. I’m such an idiot. That town is right on the Royal Road the God-Empress’s army is going to take once they’ve conquered Calassmir. They’re all going to be slaughtered.

  We have to go back.

  Chapter Six

  29 Coloine

  I’m so sick of talking to people. I’m no diplomat and I’m sure as hell no leader, but I’ve done more talking in the last two days than any human being should be expected to do. And we’ve delayed our journey by a day, which has made me tense and irritable, but what else could we do?

  It actually wasn’t as hard as I’d feared to convince the three mages the God-Empress was an imminent threat. And once I did, they started coming up with plans on their own—setting up a semi-permanent camp in the nearby hills, sending people to observe the siege of Calassmir who would return when they saw the army move in their direction so they could evacuate—and they seemed confident, like this was something they could handle.

  What I wasn’t sure they could handle was a possible attack by Castaviran villagers while they were in their camp, which was meant to be secluded rather than defensible, given that there’s no way they can keep the army from overrunning them if they’re found. So once we were sure they understood the situation, we bade them goodbye and headed straight for that Castaviran town.

  Like I wrote, I’m sick of talking to people. And I’m even sicker of the unrelenting fear and suspicion both countries are displaying toward each other. I realize it’s a normal human reaction, but really, is everyone’s first reaction to encountering the strange and unknown going to be violence? People can’t take a moment to learn what kind of strange and unknown thing they’re facing? This is the way the world is now, Balaen and Castavir lying cheek-by-jowl with one another, and it’s not going away, damn those long-ago mages and their arrogant belief that they had the right to make decisions for everyone around them.

  Last night I lay awake, sleepless, not thinking of Cederic for once but of the possibility that our civilizations are going to destroy each other and the survivors are going to claw their way out of the wreckage and still go on fighting each other. It made me so angry I finally had to go for half an hour’s walk before I could calm down enough to sleep.

  Anyway, the point of all of this is Jeddan and I marched across the fields (there’s no road to the Castaviran village, not yet, maybe not ever) out where anyone could see us, no trying to hide. It’s a walled town, so a little bigger than…I don’t know what Nanissa’s village is called. I can’t believe it never came up. Anyway, the farms outside the walls were all deserted the way they’d been in that village, and when we were close enough we could see the defenders huddled up at the gate, not sure what to make of us.

  The minute I could see the boards two of them were clutching, I let loose with a huge sweep of fire, bigger than anything I’ve ever managed before, made it circle them without burning (yet) and shouted “Drop your weapons!”

  It took them a second or two, but drop them they did. “Boards too!” I shouted, and the two mages were much quicker to respond. One o
f the boards cracked in half when it hit the frozen ground. I kept the fire going until we were about twenty feet away, then dismissed it and stood facing them with my arms crossed over my chest.

  “Who speaks for this town?” I said. I scared even myself at how angry I sounded, but I was tired and frustrated and heartsick and afraid we wouldn’t reach Hasskian in time, and I didn’t much care if I frightened anyone, because we didn’t have time to waste.

  “Our mayor,” said one of the women.

  “Get him,” I said, and waited for the woman to duck past the growing crowd and run for the mayor. Why he wasn’t with the defenders—no, I know why he wasn’t with the defenders, he’s a coward and a bully. But it doesn’t matter now. We stood there, waiting, watching each other. The mages looked like they might go for their boards if I gave them a chance, so I sent a couple of fierce glares their way. We waited some more. I started to feel the anger wearing off, replaced by anxiety. They would only stay cowed by my display of magic for so long. If that mayor didn’t return quickly…I didn’t know what I would do next.

  But the woman came back in less than five minutes, bringing with her a tall man who moved more slowly than she did, trying to exert control over the situation and, by extension, over me. “How dare you threaten us?” he called out when he reached the front of the crowd. “We haven’t done anything to you. Leave now before we kill you.”

  The men and women around him looked nervous at that. Well, he hadn’t seen the fire-summoning pouvra. “That was just to get your attention,” I said. “I want to talk to you about the village about two miles down the road.”

  “The invaders?” he said. “What about them?”

  “You need to stop attacking them,” I said, trying to be reasonable even though his tone of voice irritated me. “They haven’t done anything to you and they’re only interested in living in peace.” That was mostly true.

  “They are foreign invaders and represent a threat to the Castaviran Empire,” he said. “It’s our duty to eliminate them.”