Moonstone, Magic That Binds (Book 1)

by Guy Antibes

  She wondered if she could apply that kind of thinking to her strategy. Perhaps concentrate the magicians… Restella called the leader of the small group of magicians that were about to set out directly south to Gensler while she would turn east towards the border of Happly.

  “Talk to Lieutenant Mistad about concentrating your efforts into groups rather than spreading them thinly around.”

  “We will, princess.” He bowed to her. “It’s time to depart, if we have your leave.” She didn’t like the look in the wizard’s eye and wondered if her message would reach Lotto. The man didn’t seem too respectful of her rank.

  “Certainly. Good luck and we will see you in Happly.” Restella never could get wizards to call her by her rank of Captain-General, even if they had been assigned for years to the Valetan army.

  Lotto. She wished his mission well, now that his face didn’t trouble her dreams. She resisted touching the Moonstone to check his location. She considered that a personal weakness and refused to do it again unless she needed to know from a strategic standpoint. She had gotten over the hurt and the misery of their last encounter. Restella only found peace when she thought of Lotto as a friend. As long as she regarded him as a comrade and not a romantic interest, her emotions settled down.

  Two weeks later, she arrived at her camp. Everything seemed in order, but the army had definitely grown. She sought out Silver.

  “Where did the men come from?”

  “And greetings to you, Captain-General,” Silver said with the monotone he used ever since the Oringian debacle.

  Restella unsuccessfully tried to repress a blush. “I’m sorry. I had a difficult time in Beckondale.”

  “Lotto Mistad?”

  Silver knew her too well, so she merely nodded. “I’m focusing on our mission, here.”

  “We’ve had a few visitors in our camp while you were gone. A band of merchants with a few wizards for guards came by and here comes the big surprise.”

  A tall blond man with short curly hair walked up.

  “Councilor Lessa, this is Captain-General Restella Beecher. Ma’am, this is Councilor Lessa of Prola. He has brought twenty-five hundred men and ample supplies to join us. I’d now call us a proper army.” She had expected Silver to show a bit more excitement, so perhaps he didn’t feel well. Regardless, she now had reserves, even without the men from the Oringian front.

  This Lessa had a roguish cast to his face and the hint of a smile as they waited for orderlies to set up a table and chairs in front of her tent.

  “I understand that Captain Mistad is under your command?” Lessa said.

  Restella grunted. Lotto, again! Could she not rid herself of him? Friends, she chided herself. She forced a smile and said, “Lieutenant Mistad leads a small force of rangers and battle wizards assigned to harry the Duke of Happly’s forces and reduce the number of mages at the duke’s disposal. They will enter Happly from Gensler. Why have you come to help us?”

  Lessa waved his hand and tilted his head. That smile of his broadened and Restella didn’t know if a man with such a casual attitude could be trusted. “I tired of leading the reconstruction of Prola. I’m a military man, always have been, and since Lotto saved us from a bad, bad king, I thought I would repay the favor. Mander Hart asked me to join you in Happly. I thought I’d have to chase you south, but I see you haven’t invaded yet. I’m more than pleased to help since Prola is better off without my bureaucratic ineptitude for a while.” His face turned deadly serious. “I know what you are up against. You fight a dark empire from across the sea and they don’t even have to use their own army, but Bessethian soldiers as puppets. I’m no puppet, Captain-General, I assure you.”

  Lessa’s intensity nearly blew her over. She marveled at his personal power and had to change her instant opinion of him. The man likely ran roughshod over his council and yet he withdrew to join her forces. Restella looked into his blazing eyes overlong and pulled away. What kind of spell did he just cast?

  “Captain Silver has told you of our strategy?”

  Lessa looked at the Happly map on the table. “Without our forces, your chances of success relied solely on Lotto’s efforts. Now you might have an even chance. My men are not rangers, but they are here and yours to command. There are only a few potential battlefields in Happly since the terrain is mostly forested hills. The Duke can fortify those battlefields, lay traps along the way; do all kinds of mischief.”

  “General Lessa,” Silver said, but Lessa waved his words away.

  The Prolan nodded to Restella, “While with your forces, I subject myself to the Captain-General’s command. You could refer to me as Captain Lessa, but we are friends, are we not? I am Armand. Captain Silver is Tori and you, if I may be so bold, are Restella. Please suffer me this one affectation to call you by your given names.”

  Restella cleared her throat. “Certainly… Armand. Carry on,” she looked at Silver with raised eyebrows, “Tori.” She had never, ever called Silver by his first name. Not ever, but Lessa… Armand… requested it so gallantly, how could she refuse? She looked for a trace of the usual amusement in Silver’s eyes, but found them without emotion. Perhaps the failed Oringian battle had affected him differently than it did her.

  “We have been training the men for more informal fighting as we penetrate the forests on the other side of the Fargo. Our scouts have seen no evidence of the enemy for four leagues from this fording spot,” Silver pointed to the map, “If we just march in, the Happlyan army can just pick us off from the sides or set traps that the entire army will fall into.”

  “Groups.” Restella thought back to the farmers. There were strengths in acting as a group, but her mind expanded to think of all Valetan and there must be tens of thousands of farmer-groups bringing in the harvest. She called for an orderly. “Bring Lieutenant Workman here, please.”

  “I have met Workman before. He traveled with Lotto. A competent man,” Lessa said.

  Restella rose from her seat and stretched. “Perhaps I can rest for a few minutes. Today’s ride was a bit overlong. We can assemble back here in a quarter of an hour.” She didn’t like the way Silver and Lessa looked at each other, like two gaming cocks, one smiling and the other serious. To blazes with them.

  There were certain niceties she had been forced to follow, being the lone female among men, she thought, as she walked back to the tiny alcove that made up her personal quarters. She lay down and took the shortest of naps.

  She returned to find Lessa entertaining Silver and Workman with a story. The laughter and the story stopped abruptly when Restella approached. Something unfit for a princess’s ear? Armand exuded a studied masculinity along with his jolly demeanor. Her heart began to pound a little harder even if the man might be barely old enough to be her father.

  “Workman,” Restella rubbed the sleep out of her eyes and began as she sat down. “I’d like you to help us with a strategy to break down our army into smaller groups as we move through Happly. A column a mile long will leave us awfully exposed.”

  Workman smiled with a look of relief. “I happen to agree with you. We don’t have enough scouts to protect a column as long as what we have now. What do you have in mind, ma’am?”

  “Can we break down into smaller units? I don’t know what an appropriate size would be. Perhaps Captain Silver can help you with that. Captain Lessa can travel with me and go over tactics for when we get to Happly Keep.” Restella noticed her own hesitancy in trusting Silver’s strategies alone.

  “Of course, ma’am. Workman, let’s stroll to your part of camp and talk to your men. They will have to train Lessa’s officers as we proceed. We don’t have the time to stay here much longer.”

  Restella nodded and turned to Lessa. She brought out another map of the capital city, Happly Keep.

  Lessa put his hand to his chin. “An odd defensive strategy. There are no straight roads in the town, but that’s not particularly novel. The largest ones are defended by towers.” He pointed to the squares w
ith the big x’s inside. “The city fills the space from the walls to the castle itself. I wouldn’t call that a keep, at all.”

  “I look at the buildings as a moat. There is no room the lay siege to the castle itself.” Restella said.

  “But in another sense, we have superb cover all the way to the actual walls of Happly’s residence. The buildings can work both ways. Mountsea’s castle has a cleared ring of two hundred yards around it on the three accessible sides”

  “And it fell easily,” Silver said.

  “No. We captured the castle because of two things. I held the army’s loyalty, so we drew them away from the castle and convinced them that they were on the wrong side,” Lessa said.

  Restella could easily see Lessa being able to convince any soldiers to follow him. He had been their standard bearer and Lotto had just followed on the man’s force of personality.

  “The second and more important factor ended up being Lotto’s Affinity. He froze the gate open. Imagine that, the gates could not be closed. I’ve never heard of such a thing and then he destroyed the gate defenses of hot oil. Strategically, men defending the castle could rain down rocks and arrows, but that defense had been totally thwarted when Lotto burned the skins, making the upper walkway an inferno. Our losses and Valetan’s losses under Captain Applewood would have been significant otherwise. Lotto is quite a man and to top it all off, after while he barely recovered from fainting from the loss of his magical power, he followed us into the open gates and slew our evil king.” Lessa smiled and shook her head in amazement while the images must have played out again in Lessa’s mind.

  Suddenly, Restella found herself stiffening up in her chair. Could she not rid herself of Lotto Mistad? Who really led her army, the Captain-General or Lotto? She took a deep breath to get herself a bit more centered. Jealousy could not rule her. Lotto’s exploits with both Lessa and Princess Sallia had ruined her concentration. She could not let that happen. She looked up and found Lessa in his own mind as well.

  “So what do you recommend?” She disturbed his thoughts.

  “What? Oh, excuse me, Restella. I keep thinking of those days, nearly a year ago.”

  “Your idea to send the army out in groups.” He put the Happly map on top and looked at the scout’s version of the terrain. “We will have to spread out, but find a way to stay in contact, as if we were walking through a thick fog.” Lessa waved his hand in front of his face. “Tori and Gully will come up with something, I’m sure.”

  Tori? Gully? Restella furrowed her brow and realized he talked about Silver and Workman. She didn’t feel too comfortable with the casualness that Lessa lent to her leadership, but perhaps that was what attracted her to him. Did she just think that?

  Lessa stood up. “I need to get back to my men. I eat with them every night and continue to convince them of the merits of fighting in a foreign country for another foreign country. He bowed and took Restella’s hand and kissed it, “Princess, may I be excused?”

  She had to smile, she just couldn’t resist. “You may, Captain Lessa.”

  “Armand,” he said.

  “Captain Lessa.” She looked him in the eye.

  “Of course.” He bowed again and left her. She had an orderly roll up the maps and went into her tent for another quick nap before dinner but she couldn’t sleep as she tried to characterize Lessa. He certainly was more flippant than Mander Hart, but he shared a similar intellect and concern for his country and he loved his life. She could see that the man was open as well. She wished more males that she interacted with were like that.

  Lotto crept into her mind and she rejected a comparison. Could Lessa be the man to make Lotto jealous? Lotto’s familiarity with Princess Sallia had made her miserable. She stamped her foot on the carpeted floor of her tent bringing up a puff of dust. How did Lotto become so effective at putting her in a bad mood? Now he made her think of using Lessa to get him mad. A fool’s goal. She would banish Lessa out of her mind as a man and show Lotto her superiority. Her thoughts sounded so rational, yet why did they bring tears to her eyes? Restella sat down hard on her cot and cried as silently as she could. Damn that Lotto! He defies me at every turn.

  ~~~

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  ~

  “I’M GOING TO SHOW YOU WHAT I CAN DO and I want you all to think about how I can use it on the Happlyans,” Lotto said to his fellow scouts. “Stand back.”

  They stood in the middle of a glade that had grown around a deserted farm. The forest had reclaimed most of the land, but the stone walls still stood upright in a meadow of knee-high grass. The warmth of summer seemed to wash over Lotto in bands of warmer and cooler air. It reminded him of the forest close to Heron’s Pond.

  “Here is what I used in Mountsea.” He turned a rusty hinge a bright red and then let the glow fade and then he turned to rock wall and made the earth shift until the wall tilted over. “I’m not removing dirt but making it more compact on one side.” He took his sword and poked into the soil on one side of the all, plunging it in six inches. He walked to the other side and couldn’t get more than an inch deep. “If I tried to move the dirt, I’d be lying on the ground in a faint, but making it more dense, involves moving the dirt together and that takes less power. The key is using techniques that don’t sap power, but achieve the same results.”

  Miro laughed. “But what do you do if the foundations are twenty feet deep or on bedrock?”

  That question had bothered Lotto at first, but he had worked out an answer. “I can’t do this from a distance.” Lotto knelt down and put his hand at the bottom. He cast a spell to make particles in the rock vibrate against each other. The sound that he sought began to reach his ears.

  “What’s that buzz?” Pillo said, his brows furrowing. “The ground isn’t shaking.”

  “Vibrating,” Morio said, “Like a shiver.” Morio shimmied his shoulders getting laughter from the group.

  Lotto stood up and pushed the wall over with a slight push.

  “How did you do that?” Pillo said, but then he knelt down and grabbed a handful of what looked like sand. “You ground the rock like a miller grinds wheat into flour.”

  That made Lotto grin. “Exactly. But the farther I get from the rock, the more power is drained.”

  Morio squinted at Lotto. “What’s all of this about preserving power? If you’ve got it, don’t you just use it?”

  Lotto shook his head. “It’s not about me. It’s about the power. A person can store only so much with their Affinity. Once it’s all used up, you have to wait to absorb more from the earth.” He wouldn’t get into the concept of the magical nexus. A lecture of that type would put them to sleep and it wasn’t time for a nap yet. “What do you think? Will that work on the walls?”

  Creeden Halfround’s eyebrows went up. “What about punching a hole in the wall. Happly castle is right against the city. If we could get all of you magicians to make a hole in the walls, or at least work on the mortar…”

  “Mortar?” Lotto put his chin in his hand. “That should disintegrate even faster.” He walked over to the farmhouse wall built with mortar. He stood in front of it and put out his hands and muttered a spell. In just a moment, he saw the mortar fall like sand from the wall. “Look,” he said with a grin on his face. He pulled out the rock and others fell out as well. “Great idea! That will work. One more thing, this is more traditional for a battle wizard. He stood in front of a tree and it fell where Lotto pointed. “One thing that will work in the woods. Again, I moved the soil away from the root ball so the tree couldn’t stand up. That is less taxing than the traditional method of splintering the trunk.”

  The five scouts scooped up the fine dirt that had once held the tree’s roots in the ground.

  “No explosion, the tree just topples and that particular technique just requires line of sight,” Lotto said. He wanted the scouts to see what he could easily teach the wizards. The pressure hadn’t let up since he left Beckondale. Valetan couldn’t allow a H
apply army of any size get out into the farmland of Valetan. Every day meant more grain harvested and processed for winter and that meant that people wouldn’t starve during another fighting season. General Piroff spanked Oringia, but the Red Kingdom, once Histron had consolidated his armed forces with Happly and Oringia, represented a serious threat to both Valetan and Learsea. Sally had told her that Unca had worried about that happening and Lotto had no reason to doubt her.

  Lotto and the scouts spent the next few days, waiting for the wizards by returning to the glade and practicing with their weapons. None of them had ever seen Lotto in action and had all lost to him no matter what weapons they used. They all gave him a good accounting of their skill, though.

  “How did you get so good?” Pillo asked as they headed back to the inn.

  “I had a good teacher,” Lotto said.

  “I caught some odd techniques. Sort of exotic for a fighter from Valetan,” Morio said.

  “My weapons master came from Serytar.”

  “Where your parents were from, right?”

  “Right. Kenyr actually worked for my father and checked up on me as I grew up in an obscure village up in the northern part of Valetan.”

  “You’ve never talked about your growing up.”

  Lotto felt his face warm. “I didn’t have a normal childhood. Kenyr looked on, but I was an orphan and a bit of an urchin in Heron’s Pond. I’ve learned most of what I know in the last few years in Beckondale.”

  Morio clapped Lotto a bit too hard in the back. “Brought up as a commoner. I wouldn’t have thought it. You learn quickly.”

  “Hey, I’m a commoner, you noble pig!” Pillo said. They all just laughed.

  Indeed Lotto picked up a lot of information quickly, but then his head hadn’t been filled with much of anything while he grew up, so he guessed he could absorb more than most. Morio’s commoner comment bothered him. He thought of Sally and wondered what she would think if and when she found out about his early years. Lotto couldn’t explain away his childhood and he shivered when he thought of where he had found his food as a half-wit. He wished he could have said the experience made him better, but the Moonstone had rescued him from the memories of a miserable life.