Book 3, Chapter 35

 The caravan of wagons and pilgrims rolled into town a few hours after I finished walking Jules back to her home. I knew which wagon the Lightbearers were in, and as they approached the edge of my ward stones’ ranges, I stood up. “It’s time,” I told Jules, who’d been watching me out of the corner of her eye while simultaneously pretending I wasn’t there.

 She rushed out the door without a word while I followed at a more leisurely pace. Unlike her, I knew exactly where I was going, and I wasn’t above cheating to get there. A few shadow leaps let me skip across town with minimal effort, and I beat Jules to the wagon by at least four or five minutes.

Neither of the two women inside reacted to my spells or my presence as I approached, despite the fact that I caught their own scrying spells looking around the town and I was clearly not from around here. My clothes and my darker skin tone immediately marked me as a foreigner. Either they weren’t paying attention, they didn’t care, or they were controlling their reactions remarkably well and possibly communicating via magic.

The enclosed wagon they were traveling in had its own ward around it, one that seemed to repel all sort of physical matter. It was fresh off the road, in the middle of a caravan, no less, and it didn’t have a speck of dust on anything but the wheels. Even reaching out to knock on the door on the back would have required me to weave my way through the kinetic ward, which I could have done easily enough, but not as quickly as just using a bit of illusion magic to mimic the sound of a knock as my knuckles were deflected away from the wood a quarter inch away.

One of the women snorted at the knock. “Funny,” she said as she gestured and hissed a word. The ward unraveled from the door, which swung outward of its own accord. “I don’t recognize you. What are you doing here?”

“That’s a bit of a story,” I said. “Would you mind if I stepped in to discuss it? My name is Keiran and—”

“Keiran?” the other one laughed. “Wow, that narrows it down. Never met anyone named Keiran before.”

“I- pardon?”

Was my name popular in their society? It hadn’t been an uncommon name by any stretch when I was young, but I could still remember when it had become an ‘old person’ name the first time, only to come back around four or five generations later, then cycle out of popularity again. By the time I’d become a world-famous archmage, the name had basically been forgotten. I could vaguely recall a brief spike in popularity among those rich or important enough that they thought they had a chance of securing tutoring for their offspring. Why they thought offering up a child with the same name as me for tutoring would impress me, I never had figured out.

That had been thousands of years though, and I hadn’t heard of anybody with that name since my reincarnation. In fact, I’d had remarks from a handful of people about how strange it was. Considering how many odd names I’d heard over the last decade despite the fact that people were still somehow speaking roughly the same language—even if they’d switched to a different alphabet—it was a bit surprising how many names specifically had drifted in from other languages.

“It doesn’t matter what his name is,” the other Lightbearer said. “What are you doing here? This is our route. And where’s your partner?”

They were obviously under the impression that I was one of them, presumably because of my use of magic. I briefly considered going along with that assumption to see if I could get the location of their home city out of them. If I pretended to be a Lightbearer from another caravan who’d gotten separated and lost, they might buy that I needed some help getting home.

Of course, that lie would unravel almost immediately once people started talking. I hadn’t laid the proper foundation for that, and protecting myself in the long term would require murdering an awful lot of people to keep my secret safe. I didn’t want to do that for a few reasons, namely that I didn’t tend to murder people who were no threat to me on a regular basis. The fact that my sister was traveling with me also factored into that decision.

It was better to go with the truth and hope they were reasonable. If that hope proved to be false, well, that would be unfortunate for the two Lightbearers in front of me. The wagon had come to a stop inside the overlapping radius of two ward stones, both of which I could activate with nothing more than a thought and which would protect me from a wide variety of magic. If those somehow failed to suppress the two women’s magic, my shield ward would function as a backup.

Before I could answer, the first Lightbearer said, “No need to be rude. He’s told us his name. I’m Aphrona and this is Ivetra. It is a pleasure to meet you.”

“Likewise,” I told them. “As to what I’m doing here… The thing is that I’m not a Lightbearer or an Enlightened One or whatever else your people are known as. I’m a mage from far away who’s been traveling and I happened across this village. I got mistaken for one of you because I know how to use magic, and I’m really just curious about the whole thing.”

Both women froze immediately. ‘Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit, oh shit,’ Aphrona thought. Her mind immediately devolved into sheer panic and I couldn’t get anything else out of it, so I switched the target of my mind reading spell to Ivetra.

‘A child of darkness? Here, of all places? Why? How?! We’re not ready for this. He’s going to kill us!’

“Okay,” I said slowly, holding my hands up. “Let’s just relax. I’m not here to hurt you. There’s no need to be scared. Just… tell me what the issue is, alright?”

Surprisingly, Aphrona recovered first. “You’re… not a child of light?”

“I can’t truthfully say I know what that is,” I told her. “I need to stress again that I was born over a thousand miles away from here. I’m an explorer. To the best of my knowledge, I am the first of my people in generations to set foot in this land. I have no pre-existing affiliations with any organizations you might be aware of. This is essentially first contact happening right now.”

Ivetra leaned forward and said, “That would make you something completely outside our awareness. How can we know you’re telling the truth?”

“I’m not sure what proof I could possibly offer you,” I admitted.

The two women exchanged looks, and it wasn’t hard to guess their thoughts even without magic. They didn’t know either. I’d gotten the impression that they were both young when I’d first scried them, but I hadn’t been willing to trust it. With magic, it was entirely possible to be a hundred and look twenty. Our conversation, brief though it had been so far, had strongly reinforced my initial assumption. These two were inexperienced.

“I’d like to visit the Sanctum of Light,” I said, trying to shift the conversation around to what I really wanted and with my mind reading spell firmly targeted. I could only hope one of them would think about how to get there. “I’ve heard from some of the townsfolk that you come from there, that it’s a place of miracles.”

Ivetra scoffed. “Miracles, sure. As in it’ll be a miracle if my boyfriend isn’t sleeping with someone else by the time I get back. I just had to get drafted for this stupid supply run.”

“So… not quite as religious as the locals believe,” I remarked. “I’ll assume you’d prefer me to keep that to myself.”

“Yes, please,” Aphrona said while shooting a glare at her partner. “Look, I’m sorry to be rude, but this really isn’t something we’re equipped to address.”

She was doing a remarkably good job of giving a calm appearance, but she was still screaming in fear in her head. It was clear that she still felt her life was in danger from me – which to be fair, it was, but only if I didn’t get what I wanted. But she was expecting me to launch a spell at her in the next few seconds and was trying to subtly cast a warding spell without my noticing.

Her shroud wasn’t nearly good enough to hide her mana core, let alone an active casting. As long as the spell remained defensive, I was inclined to let it slide. It would probably make her feel better, and the quicker she got calmed down, the quicker this conversation could become productive.

“I understand that I’m springing this on you, and I’m sorry for that,” I said. “It really wasn’t my intention to cause any problems. I’m simply an explorer seeing what’s out there, and your home city sounds interesting.”

“Not to be rude, but would you mind giving us a minute to discuss this?” Aphrona asked.

“Of course. I’ll just step out for a moment,” I told her. I paused, one hand on the door, and said, “You should probably expect to hear from the local priestess about me soon. Her name is Jules. She’s convinced that I’m some sort of apostate because I know magic. Sorry about that.”

Aphrona’s face took on a pained expression, but Ivetra just laughed. “I am so glad you have to deal with the local clergy and not me,” she told her partner.

I departed the wagon and landed amidst the speculative glances and whispers of the pilgrims, all wondering who I was and what I’d done to be allowed into the Lightbearers’ presence so easily. I ignored them and paced off twenty feet or so to get out of people’s way while I focused on the scrying spell I’d left undetected inside their wagon.

“What do we think?” Ivetra asked, the levity she’d displayed during our conversation completely gone now. “Should we just kill him?”

“Do you think we can? If he’s a real child of darkness and this is some sort of elaborate trick, I doubt we’re going to make it out alive.”

“That’s why we should ambush him first. I’m not saying we can win in a straight fight, but a good sneak attack might do it.”

Frustratingly, I hadn’t been able to pick up anything about what a child of darkness actually was from skimming their thoughts, and I’d had to be careful not to push too hard with my spell to make sure they didn’t notice. Whatever else they were, I was confident the two were actual mages and that any overt attempts to pry information from their thoughts would be immediately detected. There was only so much I could get with light brushes.

“If he’s not a child of darkness, we’d be making an enemy for no reason,” Aphrona pointed out. “And there’s still a chance he could kill us.”

“Yeah, right. If he’s not from the city, then all he’s got is the rudimentary magic these bumpkins sometimes stumble across. That’s no threat. We’ll just go along with this apostate thing the local priestess has stirred up, execute him, and get on with our life.”

“I… don’t like that idea,” Aphrona said. I had to get her some points for empathy. Ivetra was completely fine with cold-blooded murder to remove an inconvenience, not that I could condemn her for it. I thought my threshold for what warranted killing someone might be a tad bit higher than hers, though.

“Okay, well, if we’re not killing him and we don’t know if he’s a child of darkness, what are we doing?” Ivetra asked.

“Maybe we can just point him to the city and send him on his way,” Aphrona said. “If he’s actually a child of darkness, it’s not like he doesn’t know where to find it anyway. I can’t really figure out what his angle would be asking that.”

“Deflecting suspicion,” Ivetra suggested.

“Maybe? It doesn’t feel right. I think he might actually be what he claims to be.”

Before the conversation could continue, Jules marched into view. She zipped straight to the wagon and tried to knock on the door, only to be repelled. The two Lightbearers knew she was there anyway, of course. Aphrona just sighed and said, “I guess we know he wasn’t lying about that part.”