Book 3, Chapter 31

We settled into an easy routine over the next six weeks. In the morning, I would instruct Senica on the various aspects of magecraft. I wanted her to have as well-rounded an education as I could provide, given the resources we had available. That meant her fixation on conjuration magic in general, especially fire spells, had to be broadened to include all of the other disciplines as well.

She didn’t resist the idea, but it was plain to see where Senica’s interests were. Conjuration was her first and only love, with invocations and, surprisingly, transmutations being distant runner-ups. As far as enchantments, invocations, and alchemy went, she performed adequately for her level of skill, and that was the best I could say about that. Divinations were a sad weak point for her, one that I was unable to remedy in the short time we had.

After the lessons, Senica would practice until her mana ran dry. Unfortunately for her, that didn’t take long. Even with me handling everything else, setting up and tearing down camp, charging her shield ward, providing the mana for her flight spell, literally everything, she still didn’t generate nearly enough mana to practice for more than half an hour.

Once she’d exhausted the bulk of her mana, we practiced the various techniques that didn’t require mana to function. She’d already been working on silent casting before the trip even started, but I added remote casting and counterspelling to her training schedule. I even provided rune constructs for her to practice against.

After two hours of morning lessons, we’d fly until we broke for lunch in the afternoons. I didn’t have a specific goal or direction in mind; the point of this mission was to see what all was out there, and other than reaching the lands the former kingdom of Ralvost ruled. Considering our most recent encounter with the brakvaw, I quickly opted to abandon their waypoint network.

Lunch lesson was runes, an essential skill for any mage. Despite Senica’s lack of interest in inscription, runes were literally the language with which magic was written, and gaining a firmer understanding of them could only benefit her. She complained, repeatedly, but she kept at it and I was proud of the progress she made.

If mornings were for lessons, and lunch was for technique, evenings were for lattice work. Senica’s biggest problem was her lack of mana, and while I ultimately planned on spreading the lossless casting technique, it was too advanced for where she was at. Tripling her mana output would be a good holdover for now.

I didn’t expect her to put a lattice together before we returned home, but I was hoping to lay enough of the foundation that she could finish hers without my oversight. If we got that far, I’d call it a win. As the weeks went by, she met and exceeded my expectations in that department, proving that she’d been working on this project long before we’d set out and far harder than I’d realized.

While she worked on that, I kept threading new strands of mana through my boulder. Senica was impressed by the scale of the project, but once she figured out that making a bigger mana crystal was exactly the same as a smaller one, only with more mana involved, she quickly lost interest.

Our final activity of the day was to pull out my scrying mirror so we could reassure our parents that we weren’t dead. I’d hesitated to let them know about the brakvaw attack, but on the off-chance that the birds tried to take their vengeance on Sanctuary, I decided it was prudent to keep them up-to-date on what was going on.

To say our parents were unimpressed would be a severe understatement. They tried to pressure us into coming back immediately, but neither of us wanted to and there wasn’t really anything they could do to force us, so they reluctantly dropped the issue. As the weeks went by with regular check ins and no further near-death experiences—not that the brakvaw attack had been anything of the sort—they stopped worrying.

Senica’s skills improved day by day and we kept heading west. I left a trail of teleportation beacons hidden behind wards in our wake, just in case our exploration took us to a dead end and we decided to head back in a new direction. The beacons were good for about four months, which was longer than I expected we’d need any of them, but I had the mana to spare now.

We’d grown used to our routine, but there inevitably came a day when things had to change.

  *

Senica and I approached the town on foot. I didn’t have much idea what to expect at this point. We were over a thousand miles from home, and we hadn’t seen another human being in all the time we’d been out here. Most places were a far cry from the desert I’d been born in, but we’d yet to see anything truly lush.

This particular town was situated on the bank of a river in a relatively temperate area and had a lot of farmland surrounding it. The roads were dirt, well packed and wide. One went north out of town and the other west, and beyond the farms to the south was a great stretch of trees. I’d spotted signs of logging on the edge. At a guess, I’d say the timber had been used to construct the town itself.

Not knowing how we’d be received or even if the townsfolk would speak a language I understood, I’d decided that hiding my magic was the way to go. Senica couldn’t quite fully shroud her mana core, but that was fine. If anything, it’d probably feel more natural if a bit of mana was showing from her core. I loosened my own shielding up enough to match what I could feel from her, then added a little bit more to account for my apparent age.

We were going to stand out, no matter what. I had an invisible scry spell active in the middle of the town, which appeared to be preparing for some sort of event or festival, and our clothes looked nothing like what the locals were wearing. White was the most common color back home, in part because the plants used to make cloth were naturally that color and in part to help combat the heat. Our clothes were also loose fitting, tied at the waist and ankles.

Finding a good pair of traveling boots had been low priority to me, but I’d still managed to come up with something. Senica’s shoes were the more typical open-toed sandals commonly worn back home, proving that she’d learned nothing from her encounter with that black ooze. Her shield ward had probably spent more energy sheltering her from the cold air that streamed past us as we flew than from actual threats.

“People are starting at us,” Senica said out of the side of her mouth as we walked past the first houses at the outside edge of town. The adults were being a bit more surreptitious about it than the kids, who were pointing and running off to spread the news, but just about everyone spared a few seconds to look us over before returning to their business.

“Maybe they don’t get many strangers,” I said. “Or maybe they just think our clothes look funny.”

“Everyone is so pale,” she said. “Are they sick?”

“No, no, nothing like that,” I laughed. “It’s a regional thing. Sometimes people just have lighter or darker skin and hair.”

Senica gave the townsfolk an appraising glance, then shrugged. “Well, they look sick to me, but nobody’s acting like it. So I guess it’s fine.”

“Hoy there, strangers!” a woman called out. “You’re a few days early.”

I looked over to see a stout, matronly woman wearing a leather apron over a white blouse. Thick gloves that matched the apron covered her hands. She looked to be forty or fifty, with the accompanying wrinkles and skin a fair bit ruddier than the other townsfolk. Her hair, a chestnut brown with strands of steel gray running through it, was tied back into a bun behind her head.

“Well, that settles the language issue,” I said. Senica and I changed directions and approached the woman, who stood on a porch with her hands on her hips. We stopped in front of her and I said, “Sorry, early for what? We’re new to the area.”

“For the Blessing of the Light, of course. The Lightbearers aren’t going to be here for a week or so. We’re barely getting the festival started.”

“Who or what is a Lightbearer?” I asked.

I could think of a few monsters that might have been described that way and a master mage or two who’d made enough of a specialty of light-based spells that they might have some claim to a title like that, but the odds that anything like that was still alive after however many thousands of years were slim.

The woman’s face scrunched up with incredulity. ‘Is this some kind of joke? If so, it’s not funny. But they do both look really weird. What’s going on with them?’

Oblivious to my mind reading spell, she said out loud, “They’re angels. They come once a year and accept a tribute from our harvest, then they bless the town to keep it safe.”

“Is that so?” I said neutrally. Something in my face must have clued the woman to my skepticism, because her friendly demeanor started getting colder.

“That is so,” she told me. “Pilgrims will be here soon, following the Lightbearers path from town to town to sing the angels’ praises and bask in their holy radiance.”

I didn’t want to rush to judgment, but I sincerely doubted these angels were anything of the sort. They sounded like powerful mages who placed enchantments on the town in exchange for a ‘tribute from the harvest’ since magic couldn’t make food. I wasn’t sure how big the tribute was, but if the angels were going from town to town collecting it, it was a safe bet that they were acquiring food to sustain themselves through the winter months.

That hadn’t been much of an issue back home where we didn’t really have winters, but I could see enough of a seasonal variance that a mild winter wouldn’t be out of the question here. Something was suspicious about this whole setup, but the truth of it was that this wasn’t really my problem. I’d already liberated one region from a magocracy and I wasn’t eager to repeat that.

The best thing to do in this situation was smile and nod, ask a few questions about the area that any traveler would be interested in knowing, and move on well before these Lightbearers showed up. There was no sense in upsetting the locals or attacking their religion, especially since we were still a few hundred miles south of Ralvost’s former territory.

“That sounds like a scam,” Senica said. “We had a group of people who did something similar back in our home village until my brother got rid of them.”

Damn. So much for keeping our mouths shut.

“It’s no such thing!” the woman declared loudly, drawing the attention of her neighbors and, more importantly, a duo of armed guards. “Watch your tongues, blasphemers.”

“What’s going on her, Jules?” one of the guards asked as they approached. I gave them a brief glance to size them up before dismissing them. Steel spearheads on straight wooden shafts were no threat to me, and neither was making the slightest effort to shroud their cores, which were relatively full but looked to still be dormant as a casual glance.

“These two foreigners are disparaging the Lightbearers,” she reported. “And right before the Blessing of Light, too! Might be they’re a test from the angels to ensure the town’s piety!”

“Might be,” the guard agreed. He looked over at his partner, who nodded back. The man straightened out his jerkin and said to me, “We’ll be needing you to come with us, strangers. The captain’ll decide what to do with you.”