The Queen of Mages

Whoever the mage was behind Penrose, he was intercepting Amira’s beads as fast as she could throw them. Warden Penrose ignored her completely and swung his sword at Dardan instead. Her husband barely parried the first strike. The second one caught on his sword edge-on and sent him sprawling.

  Liam darted in behind Penrose, but the Warden seemed to sense him coming and spun to block the valo’s attack. When he did, Amira could finally see the mage out in the hall: Lord Chyros, smirking as ever, his arms folded before him. “Well, well.”

  His nonchalance drove Amira into a fury. She formed new beads as quickly as he intercepted them, but she could not break through to him, or to Penrose. All it would take was a moment’s inattention, and she could hit him somewhere, and then her next bead would kill him. But he did not falter.

  Amira scrabbled her hands on the desk behind her. She found the smooth heavy starstone that Count Razh used as a paperweight, and ran across the room toward Chyros. She heaved it into the air just as Penrose noticed her approach and withdrew back a step from Liam. The valo had taken at least one mailed fist to the face, judging by his bloody nose.

  The stone sailed through the air. Penrose swatted at it and grazed it with his fist, changing its angle enough to make it crack uselessly against the doorframe. Chyros didn’t even have to duck aside, and his beads did not slow. He could not detonate one, not in here, not without risking Amira’s death, which might mean his own at Edon’s hand. But he seemed able to hold her off indefinitely.

  If Penrose cared for Amira’s health, he did not show it, for he swung his fist back at her. She dodged away and it scraped her cheek where she’d been cut by a flying chip of stone up on the city wall. Pain blazed across the wound and she stumbled back, falling onto her rear.

  Dardan was on his feet again and shouted incoherently as he swung his sword at Penrose. The Warden circled around him, putting Dardan between him and Liam, and then with three quick strokes forced Amira’s husband back. On the third stroke he twisted low and hit the grip of Dardan’s sword. Dardan shrieked as blood flew, and he dropped the sword, lurching away. Liam leapt into the gap, half-crashing into Penrose and carrying him back toward the wall. Penrose was bigger and heavier, but he could not match Liam’s rage.

  All the while, Chyros grinned down at Amira, holding his bead ready whenever she paused in her attack. “Surrender, my dear,” he chortled.

  A perverse notion gripped her, and Amira shoved to her feet. She picked up Dardan’s sword—he rolled on the ground, clutching at his hand—Liam had slammed Penrose up against the wall, and was trying to pummel his face—and she ran screaming toward Chyros.

  He blanched, and started to reach for his own sword, but it tangled in his cloak. He backed down the hall, away from Amira’s charge.

  She hadn’t a tenth of the strength or practice needed to wield it properly, but she didn’t need to hit him with it. She just needed a distraction. She got it when Chyros tripped over his feet while still trying to untangle his sword. He cursed and put out an arm to stop his fall.

  His concentration broke. Amira slipped her bead under his and plunged it into his heart.

  At the same instant a thunderclap sounded above her, and she was knocked to the floor by an avalanche of debris. When she regained her senses, she looked around. Chyros lay motionless, eyes staring sightlessly upward, and the hall behind her was half-choked with rubble.

  She scrambled to her feet and looked past the broken stones. A figure, armored in dented silver, dashed into the hall, glanced in her direction, and ran off. Penrose. She clambered over the debris—the corridor above had partly fallen in, presumably from Chyros’s mis-aimed strike—and went back into Razh’s office.

  Dardan sat on the floor, his back against the desk. Liam knelt beside him, huffing madly and wrapping a torn length of curtain fabric around Dardan’s right hand.

  “What happened?” Amira said, gulping down air and coughing at the dust. Little phantoms flickered in her vision. “I got Chyros, but I saw Penrose running off.”

  “M’lord cracked him on the head with that paperweight. That Warden must be made of stone. He knocked us both down and ran off once he saw you and Chyros were gone.”

  She knelt beside Dardan. “Are you all right?” Somewhere in her mind she knew she should be watching for another attack, but right now her husband needed her.

  He held up his hand. The pale cream curtains were already soaked red, and wrapped around his fingers oddly. “I may need to learn to write with my left hand.”

  Amira sobbed. She felt guilty at her dismay over such a small wound, when so many men had died today. She wanted to unwrap his hand, to see what Penrose had done to him, but he began to lever himself to his feet. “What can you see out there?” he said hoarsely.

  She wiped away tears she hadn’t known were present and looked at the walls. She saw sparks of silver here and there. Not as many as she expected. “It’s hard to say. Perhaps we should find allies and help them.”

  “Better than staying here,” Liam said, helping Dardan up. “Penrose might come back with reinforcements.”

  They went into the corridor, probing along. Amira saw no silver light near, though it wouldn’t be hard to miss someone in all this chaos. She heard more shouts and another thunderclap in the distance. They came to the end of the corridor, where there was a locked door. She could open it, but someone might be hiding in there—maybe Penrose would ambush her when she went through. She turned back toward the main hall.

  From the stairs they could see down into the entry hall and the vestibule beyond. Two large holes had been smashed in the front wall of the castle, admitting shafts of sun that illuminated the dust. Sprays of stone littered the floor below. Someone covered in a black cloak sprinted across the hall and disappeared through a servants’ door, but Amira could not tell who it was, or even whether it was a man or woman.

  Quick, booted steps sounded below. Amira ducked down behind the balustrade. Dardan and Liam followed suit, farther back and out of sight of whoever was below. She peered between the uprights and saw three figures emerge into the hall at a trot, from the same door the cloaked figure had exited. But one of them glanced up and then came to a halt.

  It was Edon.

  His golden armor was dented, his hair mussed, but he had no visible wounds, nor did the two women with him. All three were mages, and two of them could kill without bringing the room down around them.

  “Come out,” Edon called. He could not know who she was; the silver light looked the same for all mages, as far as she or her students had been able to divine. But her blood froze when Edon said, “I see you, Lady Amira. You cannot hide.” He stopped at the foot of the stairs and clasped his hands together.

  Amira glanced back at Dardan. “They don’t know you’re there,” she whispered. “Stay back. Surprise them. Somehow.” If they’d had bows, they might be able to shoot the two women, but Amira didn’t know where they’d find such weapons up here.

  She waited a pair of heartbeats and then slowly stood. Edon was staring straight at her. “I’ve made peace with the Caretaker,” she said, trying to sound convincing. She must look an awful mess. “I did not expect to survive the day. Your mages have nearly killed me three or four times already.”

  “I should punish them for that, were it not the ordinary course of battle.”

  “There is nothing ordinary about this.”

  “I suppose not.” He took a slow step onto the lowest stair. Amira had a firm grip on her ember but had not pushed it out into a bead yet. The two women below both had beads at the ready, floating inches before their foreheads. They must know who she is; they would only defend their king, not kill her. But if they saw Dardan or Liam, Amira could not save them. She could not fight three mages, not by herself.

  Edon climbed another step. “I have moved heaven and earth for you, my dear. You should never have run. The realm cannot survive if its king allows rebellion to flourish.”

  “Self-defense is not rebellion.?
?? Amira had to will her feet to hold still. She would not back away from him. The two women stayed at the bottom of the stair, watching her intently.

  “Come with me and all will be forgiven. I will even pardon that traitorous husband of yours as a gesture of good will.”

  “I don’t think you understand what ‘good will’ means, your majesty,” she spat at him, unable to keep the venom from her voice. She had always been able to charm any man, but she would not waste an ounce of that on him.

  Another step, and another. He was almost halfway up to her landing. “You have no other mages up there. It is only you. Surrender, and this can all end. You hold the fate of all your friends in the palm of your hand. Why will you not save them? Is your pride so much more important than their lives?”

  She saw clearly now. He was not a man; he was only a monster, pure and simple. Everything she had done, she had done protecting herself from him. “On the contrary, it is your pride that—”

  The shape that unfurled from the shadows below was no ghost in her vision. It moved with purpose, silent, and then the black cloak slipped away, revealing a man wearing only simple gray linen, clutching a pearl-pommelled sword in one hand, and bearing a shock of white hair atop his head.

  Mason Iris closed the distance so swiftly, and swung so viciously, that the first mage’s head parted from her body before she had even begun to turn at his whispered footsteps. The second woman cursed aloud as she realized what had happened.

  Mason would never reach her in time. Amira took one step down and leapt into the air, aiming to land squarely on Edon. Aspect of Sacrifice, Aspect of Courage, Aspect of Wrath, guide me true. Her body would hit the king, but her bead shot forth and intercepted the other woman’s just before it reached Mason’s chest. The woman squawked when the beads winked out, and then grunted as Mason’s sword plunged into her stomach.

  If she formed another bead before she died, Amira didn’t see it, because she collided with Edon’s vambraces as he held them up to fend her off. She grabbed onto him with all her strength. She was only half his weight, if that, but gravity had done the work for her: they tumbled down the stairs, alternating which one of them impacted against the stone steps.

  Pain struck at random across her body, but she would not let go. They rolled to a stop at the bottom of the stairs. He struggled to push her off, and almost succeeded, then froze when the bloody tip of Mason’s sword came to rest against his neck. “Your majesty,” Mason said flatly.

  Edon huffed for breath, as did Amira, but none of them moved. Edon could not use his power against either of them without risking his own death. “Dardan!” Amira shouted, once she had enough air in her lungs. She slapped a hand over Edon’s eyes. He jerked at that, but then fell still again.

  She heard her husband’s footfalls as he and Liam came down the stair. “Black spirits,” Liam muttered.

  “Are you not going to kill him, as you swore you would?” Mason asked.

  Amira realized that she could. Edon could never stop her in time. But to murder a man, a king, even Edon, at this close range, was suddenly a much greater burden than she’d thought it would be.

  Her contemplation was interrupted by Edon speaking, so quietly that she hadn’t realized it was him. “If I die, the city burns.”

  “What?”

  “I ordered my men to put the city to the torch if I die. There are still hundreds of them out there.”

  Liam glanced out the entry, half-hidden by dust and rubble. “Even if we killed all his mages, we’d still never be able to stop the soldiers in time.”

  Perhaps they should kill Edon, and work up some ruse to trick his men. Perhaps they could get him to order his men to leave the city, and then kill him. There were too many possibilities. “We need time to think. Dardan, Liam, find a blindfold or a sack to cover his eyes, and something to bind his hands with. And a gag.” They stumbled off to search.

  While they were gone, two more people arrived in the hall, emerging from the formal dining room: a mage and a Warden Amira didn’t recognize. Mason shouted that they held King Edon and that any attempt to rescue him would result in his certain death. The mage and Warden stopped and stared. “Go outside, or he dies, and then you die,” Mason said. The two men glanced at each other, and slowly sidled out into the daylight before the castle.

  Amira’s arm hurt from twisting to cover Edon’s eyes, on top of all the other pains up and down her body. Nothing felt broken from the tumble down the stairs, but she’d look one giant bruise tomorrow. If I survive to tomorrow. The prospect seemed a little less bleak than it had a few minutes earlier.

  Dardan and Liam returned with an empty potato sack, a roll of twine, and a rag. They stuffed the rag in Edon’s mouth none too gently and tied twine around his head to hold it in. Liam slid the sack over Edon’s head—it went halfway down his torso—and rolled him over, tying the twine firmly around his wrists, although they had to unbuckle and remove his vambraces first. Liam suggested taking his armor entirely off, which was accomplished with a great deal of clanking and cursing. Amira reminded the king frequently that she was still right next to him, lest he get the idea to lash out with his power in the hopes of distracting or harming the other men.

  When that was done, they got Edon on his feet and marched him to the castle’s front door. The mage and Warden who had come through earlier waited near the gate with a dozen other knights and soldiers. Amira saw no one who looked like a mage, aside from the one man. She nodded to Liam, who lifted the sack off Edon’s head.

  “Your king is our prisoner,” she shouted. “We will not harm him so long as you all leave Elland and return to Callaston.” She gestured to Liam, and he replaced the sack.

  “You expect us to simply surrender?” the mage below called out. “We outnumber you a dozen to one!”

  “I’ve spent months wanting this monster dead,” Amira nearly screamed. “You will leave, or I will get my wish!”

  “How are we to know you would not kill him anyway?” the mage said.

  She ground her teeth. They’d won! Why should this part be so difficult?

  Before she could speak, Dardan stepped forward and shouted. “I swear on the name of House Tarian of Hedenham County, King Edon will remain unharmed so long as all his forces leave the city and march for Callaston at once. After you are gone, his majesty will be released safely.”

  “Why should we trust you, traitor?”

  This seemed to affront Dardan. He drew himself up. “House Tarian has ruled Hedenham County justly and fairly for centuries. Until his majesty decided to attack us unprovoked, we had never once entertained any thought of rebellion. Our honor is unsullied.” He raised his sword to Edon’s neck. “And besides, you have no choice.”

  The idea of letting Edon go turned Amira’s stomach. But she could not see another way to save the city. She hoped Razh was alive to appreciate the sacrifice.

  The mage down below conferred quietly with the Warden, and then they both turned and strode over to the other knights waiting beyond. Some intense discussion followed. After a minute or two they returned, having somehow become the emissaries of Edon’s army. “We will leave if the king so orders it.”

  Amira had been holding Edon’s arm, and she felt him tense suddenly. The air was still; she could hear him breathing under the sack. She went up on tiptoes and whispered to him. “The city might burn, but you would certainly die.”

  She felt him turn a little, and saw his silver light flash by as he did. He grunted, unable to speak behind the gag. Amira reached up under the sack and loosened the cloth. “Go,” he shouted. “Return to Callaston.”

  ———

  It took two days for the army to completely withdraw. They had to collect all their living and their dead, and deal with roving parties of townsfolk who, on a few occasions, started fights with the royal soldiers.

  The townsfolk had started to emerge from their homes and shops when all had been quiet for a few hours, as the news spread that the battle
was over and that Edon’s army had been repulsed. Teams of men were drafted into clearing rubble from the streets and at the wall where Edon’s mages had breached it.

  Razh, Francine, and Jeffrey had survived the fighting in the castle, along with a few of the mundane defenders. Once Edon had been taken and the terms negotiated, Amira and Mason marched him through the castle, calling out that they’d captured Edon and for the other mages and Wardens remaining to surrender. It turned out only six of them were still alive; Francine had killed three of the search parties by herself, and Razh another. Jeffrey, while dueling another mage, had demolished a twenty-foot section of exterior wall; they were lucky the whole castle hadn’t come down.

  Edon was kept bound and gagged and blindfolded, seated between two female mages at all times. At first, that meant Amira and Francine, and Amira felt a growing sense of revulsion at spending so much time in close proximity to the man.

  If he’d ever tried to summon a bead, either of them could have snuffed it out at once, but he never did. The castle had old, rarely-used dungeons, and it was here they kept him. Edon was not stupid, but still Amira reminded him that using his power would likely result in him being buried under tons of rock. He said nothing.

  By the end of that day, Cora and Sophie turned up, mostly unharmed. They took a turn watching the king, giving Amira a chance to rest, if only for a short while. She had her wounds cleaned, compresses applied, bandages wrapped. Someone handed her a mirror, and after a calming breath she looked into it. The gash on her cheek would certainly scar, and could not be easily hidden with powder or color. She gave the mirror away hurriedly.

  The roster of the dead came as well. More than half the students at her school had been killed. Vincent. Emma. Benton. Edith. Garen. A dozen others. A few of the castle servants had gotten caught out; but mostly they’d hidden in the cellars, as instructed. Patric had kept them safe, a shepherd watching his flock.

  The cellars also held the answer to another mystery, Amira learned, when Mason came into the formal dining room where she sat sipping cold broth. Evening had fallen; this brutal day was finally nearing its end. The Warden came to attention a few feet away. He’d put his armor on again, she saw.

  “Please, sit.”

  “I prefer to stand, m’lady.”

  “Sit. Down.”

  Mason met her eyes for a moment, then looked away. He circled the table and sat opposite her.

  “What happened to you?”

  “After we… spoke… I thought to leave the city, but instead I wanted solitude, to pray. I left my belongings here and went to a temple a few streets away. I prayed for hours, then spent the night in a borrowed cell there.”

  “And what did you learn from your prayers?” Amira interrupted.

  Mason chewed on his lip for a moment, but ignored the question and went on. “The steward awoke me this morning with the news that the city was besieged. He’d only just heard, as he hadn’t gone out the previous day at all, and no one had come by to tell him. I came back to the castle to get my armor and sword. I went to the top of the keep and could see forces approaching the castle. I could have gone out to meet them, but there was no one to protect the servants here.”

  “Gone out to meet which group?” Amira asked.

  Mason winced a little. “I… I don’t know what I would have done if I’d gone outside, m’lady. But I didn’t. I stayed here. I started gathering the servants down to the cellars, and a little while later Count Razh’s valo came to help. He told me you’d returned. I came back up and watched from the servants’ stair; I saw Edon and his mages and my brother Wardens enter. I could not make myself go to them. I hid, and realized my armor would slow me down and protect me not at all against mages. So I took it off. Then a pair of Edon’s men found me, and I led them on a chase. I suppose it is a miracle I was not killed.”

  “The Caretaker had a purpose for you,” Amira said quietly.

  Mason glanced away again, his fingers tapping on the table. “I lost my initial pursuers, but then came across Edon and the two… women,” he said, quietly, “in the great hall. I fled from them, through the entry, but then I heard Edon call to you. I circled around, and… you saw the rest.”

  “You saved me.”

  Mason did not dissemble or explain. “What Edon… I… what he did…” He shook his head, agitated. “I betrayed him.”

  “He betrayed the realm first. Thank you for doing what was right.”

  His head came up, and Amira saw a fire blazing in his eyes. “Right? Right?” Mason shot to his feet. “M’lady, forgive me, but you are as monstrous as Edon.” He shoved the chair aside and stormed from the room. Amira saw only then that his pauldrons no longer bore the device of the Wardens of Aendavar. The balance scales had been hacked off, leaving only a tangle of scarred black iron.

  She did not see Mason again. Razh’s house major informed her within the hour that the Warden had collected his things and ridden away.

  ———

  Katin reappeared the day after the battle. She’d found shelter in a temple, of all places, down near the docks. She’d seen neither mages nor soldiers, and listened in rapt horror as Amira described the battle. Amira could feel only a little relief that Katin, and the growing life within her belly, had come out entirely unscathed.

  Edon’s army was soon gone over the horizon. Razh had sent riders to shadow them and confirm that the army showed no signs of turning back. After a few days they returned, but Amira still waited three days longer before releasing the king. A small honor guard, half a dozen men—with no mages among them—had been left behind to escort Edon home. Their captain came to Tal Vieran each morning to complain to Amira that Edon was still held captive despite the army’s departure.

  “I said I would release him after the army was gone, Captain,” she reminded him. “I did not say how long after.” The man sighed and bowed, and went away grumbling.

  When they finally did release Edon, Amira had him brought out of the dungeon and put in the back of a cart, the potato sack still over his head, and driven to the west gate. Dardan, Liam, Katin, Razh, and all of Amira’s remaining mages attended. Finally they removed the sack and untied him. His golden armor was returned to him, but he would not take it, giving no explanation.

  Amira felt an urge to simply kill him now, but Dardan had given his word, and she would not betray that. She held his left hand. His right was maimed; his little finger had been shortened by one knuckle, and his ring finger by two, by Penrose’s strike. Still he wore his plain gold wedding ring on the stump of the finger.

  Penrose had not been seen since that fight. He had probably fled the city and was already on his way back to Callaston. Somehow, that distant threat loomed over her more than Edon, who stood not five yards before her.

  Surrounded by hostile mages, he was harmless. He glared at Amira again. A week of confinement under that hood had not dimmed his haughtiness. A light beard had begun to grow in, everywhere except on the shiny patch on his cheek. Paired scars. She’d looked at hers again when a few days had passed. It did not look like his; hers was a cut, not a burn, but it was an obvious vee-shaped mark that she would bear the rest of her life.

  His eyes lingered on it. She expected him to say something, to threaten her again and promise retribution, but after a few seconds he swung up onto his horse and rode away.

  Hundreds of eyes watched him go. City folk had crowded onto the wall over the gate. When Edon and his men disappeared behind a stand of trees, Amira felt all those eyes fall to her. For once she did not appreciate the attention. She tugged on Dardan’s hand and led him into the city.

  They had horses to bear them back to the castle. The city would be in repairs for weeks at least; the wall needed to be rebuilt, many of the roads repaved. Jeffrey beamed with pride every time they passed a section of road he’d torn up.

  “Our time in Elland is coming to an end,” she said to Dardan as they rode.

  “You knew we’d never be able to stay
here forever.”

  She nodded. “It is a hard thing to admit.” She looked at the faces of the townsfolk she passed. They watched her with some combination of fear and awe. It should have inspired her, but it only made her feel grief for all the lives lost. “I do not want to seem bloodthirsty, but I wish there had been a way to honorably kill Edon.”

  “Killing Edon would likely have spilled a great deal less blood than what is to come, even if he had burned the city. But I swore an oath.”

  What is to come. They would need to gather support. Dukes, counts, barons. They would probably be able to turn some of the royal garrisons to their cause. The news that King Edon had attacked and invaded a city of his own realm would earn him the enmity of many of his subjects. Would it be enough? Could they defeat him? Would civil war sweep the realm, just to serve the ambitions and pride of a few mages?

  Amira realized that she had long been looking forward to a return to Callaston. She had thought that all their adventures were merely a series of detours before she could go back to her manse and resume the life she’d been living. No, of course not; she was married now, she was a mage now, a leader, a warrior. Men had died and would continue to die at her word. When had she gained such power, such responsibility?

  She felt the enormity of it all crashing down upon her. The spire of Tal Vieran came into view around a bend in the road as Countess Amira Tarian began to weep.

  EPILOGUE