Pentandra felt like shouting that she didn’t want any kind of honor from Lady Pleasure, but that would have been politically difficult to explain. Instead she nodded serenely, smiled and tried to have good posture.
“An excellent plan, Father. Though . . . I was wondering if it would be possible to scheduled a . . . tournament for the occasion. Nothing fancy,” she hurriedly added, “but while the archery and such during the Wildflower Festival was popular, the nobility would appreciate the spectacle of even a modest tournament.”
“That’s . . . a surprising suggestion, coming from a mage,” Anguin observed.
“Not at all, Your Grace,” Father Amus informed his young sovereign. “Lady Pentandra is quite correct. There are usually three or four tournaments in or near to Vorone during the summer, so that the visiting knights from Enultramar and Falas can cross lances with their Wilderlord cousins. For many in the Wilderlands it is the only time such opportunities present themselves. And the common people do love the sport.”
“Some of my men could use the practice,” conceded Count Salgo. “Particularly in the garrison. Some of those sots haven’t couched a lance in practice in years, and many more have never crossed one on the tourney field.”
“I . . . I loathe jousting,” Anguin said, shaking his head. “But I can see the utility of the plan. There are still plenty of Wilderlords who have offered more excuses than oaths in support of my reign. A tournament would help lure them to town to pay homage.”
“And we can offer one of the many - many! - abandoned estates as a prize,” suggested Amus. “Anything to get them productive again.”
“Make it happen,” Anguin ordered with confidence. “It might be short notice, but it’s also less likely to draw a more professional element. As much as I hate jousting I suppose I can manage an afternoon in the stands, as long as it’s not me on horseback. And gods know we need the revenue,” he added.
“Thank you, Your Grace,” Pentandra bowed. “I am certain it will be a most educational entertainment,” she assured him, smoothly . . . while inside her head she was spinning cartwheels. Anguin had agreed to the tournament.
Her plan was in motion.
Chapter Forty
Attack On The Palace!
The days that followed the announcement of the tournament at summer’s end were bleak and gloomy, as a summer haze set in over Vorone and refused to let up. Though the river valley the town lay in was protected from the worst of the Wilderland’s famous winters, they also had a tendency to trap the summer humidity. While the temperature was lower than a summer back home in Remere, the water in the air made everything feel that much hotter.
Apart from the heat, however, the town seemed to be thriving. Despite the presence of her mother, Countess Shirlin, and a vengeful sex goddess haunting the court, Pentandra actually got a good amount of work done.
The list of candidates for journeyman and master certifications was settled, apprentices were registered, dues were collected and the Mirror array was in fine working order.
She even managed to get in a little instructional time with Alurra. She had occupied her time with trying to discover a way to help teach the blind girl to read - it was nearly impossible to master the basics of Imperial magic without understanding the runic expressions of pure thaumaturgical thought the way human magi had done since the first Archmage.
Pentandra finally hit on a solution, of sorts. Alurra was clearly sensitive in the same way many people who lost a sense overcompensated. Her fingers were adept at picking up minor variations. So Pentandra had one of the palace seamstresses create a special “text” using soft Gilmoran cotton cloth and rough jute thread. Each of the runic letters was large enough for Alurra to decipher by touch, alone. With some patient instruction and careful explanation, her apprentice slowly mastered the first six runes of the initial series.
It took far longer than Lenodara had taken, but Alurra seemed to pick up on the concepts once she broke through the barrier of writing.
Of course Pentandra couldn’t translate the entire traditional curriculum into cotton and jute, but the breakthrough gave Alurra a basis on which to build. By the end of the first week she had undertaken to master the entire first series, and Pentandra had every confidence that she would.
Their lessons gave Pentandra an intimate look at the girl’s mind, as she parsed through the complicated lessons made more complex by the need to work around her disability. But all of that changed at the end of the week. Arborn was deployed to the north, once again, to introduce the 3rd Commando’s officers to the perils of the Lumber Road, and Pentandra was focused on explaining the electromagnetic spectrum to a girl who couldn’t see a rainbow . . .
. . . when Minalan appeared out of nowhere.
Dead drunk.
“Why don’t you call it an evening, Alurra?” Pentandra suggested, gently, as the Spellmonger stumbled toward the chamberpot and threw up. Lucky the Raven eyed the puking mage with interest from her shoulder.
“Yes, I suppose I should. You must be the Spellmonger,” she said, respectfully, handing Minalan a towel to wipe his mouth.
“And you must be . . . must be Alurra,” he said, straightening. “Pentandra’s new apprentice. Thanks,” he said, gesturing with the towel. “The Ways always make me a little ill.”
“I’m sure that’s it,” Pentandra said, unconvincingly, as Alurra bid them both good night. “What the hells are you doing here, Min?”
“I needed to talk,” her old friend admitted, sprawling in Arborn’s favorite chair by the bed. “Do you have any wine?”
“I’ll get some . . . and some water,” she decided, heading for the buttery. “Don’t move.”
When she returned she made Min drink the water first, and then sip the wine slowly. She could tell he was already three miles downriver from sobriety and headed into a tempest of drunkenness, if he wasn’t careful.
“It’s Alya,” Pentandra stated. Minalan looked up and nodded at her, miserably.
“You just don’t know, Pen,” he said, shaking his head. “The kids crawl into her lap, she doesn’t even feel them. I can kiss her . . . nothing. Say her name, tickle her feet, poke her in the ribs . . . nothing. She can crap and eat, and that’s about it. Her mind is . . . gone,” he admitted, with a sob of despair. “It belies the very gods, Pen. Briga, Ishi, even Herus took a look. They’ve done what they can to make her comfortable, but . . .” he trailed off, shaking his head.
“Hells, how many gods have you been hanging around?”
“They like me,” he shrugged. “I dunno why. Not that it helps. They still can’t fix her.”
“Then we’ll find someone who can,” she promised. “There are powers on Callidore we’ve never even heard of, Min. Someone, somewhere, will be able to help.”
That Pentandra had no idea who that might be didn’t bother her. She couldn’t bear to see Minalan suffer like this, and if giving him false hope was the only salve she had, she did not mind using it.
“I’ve talked to the Alka Alon,” he said, dejected. “They’re sympathetic, but not even Onranion could reach her through songspells. There were murmurs about other techniques, but if Onranion can’t fix her . . .”
“. . . then we will go to the Sea Folk. Or even Sheruel, if we have to. Min, somewhere the magic exists to put Alya whole. I just know it!” she said, a little more desperately than she intended.
“Pen,” Minalan said, his eyes wild, “I can’t.”
“You can’t . . . what?” she prompted.
“I can’t . . . live. In a world without Alya. I just can’t,” he insisted, burying his shaggy head in his hands.
Once Pentandra might have chided his friend over his shortsightedness -- after all, people got married all the time, fell in love all the time, took new lovers all the time. The idea that there was only one person intended for you by the gods and the fates was sheer lunacy.
Yet now she understood how he felt in a way she never could have guessed. In a way that
made her suddenly anxious about Arborn on the road, though there was no reason to. The thought of a life without her husband in it was . . . horrifying.
She imagined what it would be like if he was returned to her without his mind, and shuddered involuntarily. Love, she realized, was a far more potent force than she’d given credit. It galled her to even think it, but perhaps Ishi was correct.
But Alya was not gone, and Minalan had to realize that.
“Min, she’s still alive,” she pointed out, taking his head in her lap. “There is hope. She’s still alive when by all rights she should be dead. Ishi saw to that. Your love for her literally preserved her life,” she reminded him, stroking his hair.
“But she’s not really there,” he moaned.
“She’s just lost,” she insisted. “She’s lost, and you’re the only one who can find her.”
“How?” he demanded, weakly.
“With determination, effort, guile and magic,” she proposed, boldly but sympathetically. “And we’ll make a bunch of shit up as we go along, like we always do.”
“How can I when I feel so miserable?” he sobbed.
She indulged him for a few moments, letting the tears roll out of him as the sobs shook his body. Pentandra’s empathy was inflamed, making her feel physically sick as she watched her friend in turmoil and grief.
Human emotion was a powerful thing, she reminded herself. Perhaps it was a good thing that Min didn’t have a powerful witchsphere hanging around at the moment. That much unfiltered, raw emotion could have been devastating filtered through the medium of irionite. He carried a witchstone, of course, one of the Master’s Seven like her own, but it didn’t have as much capacity for random manifestations of internal emotional trauma as that damned witchsphere had been.
As it was, she quietly reinforced the wards on her chamber. She didn’t want to be disturbed without warning, and more importantly she didn’t want Minalan to attract every mage in town, if he should experience a moment of magical flux.
But Minalan didn’t seem like he was inclined to destroy the place . . . he was wallowing in grief and self-pity. It broke Pentandra’s heart to see him that way, but after all he had been through she decided that if anyone deserved a moment of weakness in the face of an outrageous fate, Minalan did. For the longest time she just sat there, his head in her lap, and stroked his hair while he sobbed.
Eventually he fell asleep, and she carefully disentangled herself from the snoring mage as carefully as she could. She needn’t have bothered. Minalan was out cold. Just to be sure, she indulged in a good, solid sleeping spell to ensure that he got the rest he so clearly needed.
Then she contacted Terleman, mind-to-mind, to let him know his old war buddy was passed out, distraught and drunk, in her chambers. He wisely skipped all of the obvious jokes and promised to come retrieve him and settle him into a guest room somewhere at the earliest convenient time.
Then she contacted Dranus, Minalan’s own baronial court mage, and let him know where he was. Apparently everyone back in the Riverlands barony was concerned about the Spellmonger’s behavior since his lady wife fell at Greenflower. The entire land was grieving, he informed her gravely, and no one knew what to do. He was trying to keep things functioning as best he could until Sire Cei returned from that little territorial spat on Sevendor’s borders, but the place needed real leadership, soon.
With a sigh, Pentandra closed the connection and went to find her apprentice.
Alurra was in her tiny room, studying, of all things. Not that a passerby could have told that -- she appeared to just be sitting in a chair with her eyes closed. But a cursory inspection with magesight showed Pentandra that the blind girl was making a valiant attempt at building a second-order spell, one that combined elements of three runes to produce an effect.
“Strengthen the jyrex rune in the predicate,” she advised, without announcement. “Remember, there’s a difference between desire and will. Desire is what you feel. Will is what you demand. You might want the rune to manifest terribly much, but if you don’t demand that it does, it won’t be powerful enough to provide support to the others.”
“That’s . . . hard!” Alurra said, nervously.
“It gets easier with practice,” Pentandra assured her. “Which you may stop, now -- and don’t forget to ground your power. I don’t need a grumpy apprentice sulking around the palace.”
“Too late,” Alurra grumbled, allowing the spell to fall and returning the excess power to the magosphere. “I heard about Lady Alya. That’s terrible!”
“How did you hear that?” Pentandra demanded.
“There’s a mouse in your chambers,” Alurra said, shrugging. “I call him Little Arborn. He lets me know if you need anything,” she said, anticipating Pentandra’s objection.
“You, uh, don’t linger in there, do you?”
“To watch you and Lord Arborn spark? Not bloody likely!” she snorted.
“Language, young lady. Good. It’s nice to know I at least have the illusion of privacy. So, little mouse, what can you tell me about . . . Lady Alya?”
Alurra’s face instantly fell. “I’m . . . not supposed to say anything. But you knew that.”
“I knew that,” Pentandra agreed. “But now I need to know what happens to Alya. She’s a close friend of mine, Alurra, and if there is any chance that she can be healed . . .”
“There’s a chance,” the girl admitted, grudgingly. “That’s about all I know. But it’s not bloody-- it’s not very likely,” she amended.
“A chance is all I need right now, little mouse,” she sighed. “Any chance. If the Spellmonger fails . . .”
Alurra shuddered involuntarily at the thought. “Don’t even joke, Mistress! If you suspected how important the Spellmonger is--”
“I do,” Pentandra agreed, calmly, “which is why I’m doing everything in my power to aid him! Right now he’s passed out in my chambers, drunk as a monk, wallowing in self pity and despair. He’s damn near suicidal, Alurra, because he has no hope. If I’m going to help him . . .”
“You are helping him,” the girl stressed, grouchily. “But you have to be careful. Help him the wrong way, and it could be disaster.”
“So help me help him the right way,” Pentandra encouraged, ignoring the surly attitude. “What do I need to do?”
“He . . . you . . . oh, this is so frustrating!” she said, biting her lip anxiously. Then she took a deep breath and collected herself. “From what I understand, the Spellmonger needs to be miserable right now - no way to help that. It’s his despair that sets him to action.”
“I understand that,” Pentandra agreed, patiently, “I just need to have a general idea of what direction that might be.”
Alurra thought hard, and Pentandra was genuinely upset that she was putting the girl in this position. On the other hand, there was too much at stake to allow one thirteen-year-old-girl’s feelings to determine the course of the entire duchy’s destiny.
“He will need to go face the Necromancer, in the City of Rainbows, Anthatiel,” she finally said, although it was a great effort of will. “That’s what the story Antimei told me says. There’s something in the city - under the city - that can help restore Lady Alya, I think. But . . .”
“But what?” Pentandra asked impatiently.
“I’ve said too much!” she said, blushing. “Really, I shouldn’t have said this much! The Spellmonger already possesses most of what he needs to restore her, but there is one thing that can only be found in the City of Rainbows. I don’t even know what that is,” she added, miserably.
“I do,” confessed Pentandra. “It used to be a magnificent citadel of the Alka Alon, at the headwaters of the river Poros, in the Land of Scars. But two years ago the goblins sacked it, drove the Alka Alon away, and the place was a soggy ruin guarded by a brain-damaged dragon, the last time I saw it.”
“You’ve . . . been there?” Alurra asked, surprised. There was respect and a bit of awe in her voice.
<
br /> “Believe it or not, the life of a wizard isn’t as boring as most make it out to be,” Pentandra chuckled. “But yes, I’ve been there. And it looks like I’m going back. But what is this thing he needs?” she pressed.
“I know not, Mistress,” Alurra said, miserably. “Antimei was very scant with those details. But they’re written down in her book,” she added in a low voice.
“The book . . .” Pentandra said, realizing that whatever book this was, it was the thing the undead minions of the Necromancer were seeking so diligently. If it foretold of how Minalan prosecuted his war against them, it would be invaluable intelligence.
But it was also prophecy, and this maddening conversation was one reason that prophecy was eschewed, as a rule, by the Imperial system of magic. It was just too fraught with potential disaster to mess around with.
Court Wizard (Spellmonger Series: Book 8) Page 82
