Guild Mage: Apprentice-Chapter 162. Among the Peaks

It was not the cool light of dawn in the mountains that woke Liv, but the smell of bacon cooking over a campfire. She had been dimly aware, in the night, of being pressed between Rosamund and Sidonie for warmth, and now it took a moment of bleary eyed rearrangement of limbs to extract herself from the pile of her friends’ bodies.

Liv had raised a hemisphere of adamant ice a few paces from the fire, once it had become clear that Wren would not be returning before sleep took them all, complete with a low arched opening that she’d melted out using most of the waste heat generated by the spell. The rest had gone into warming their bodies. While the shelter had shielded them from night wind, they had no blankets or bedrolls, no furs or pillows, and the only thing other than crushed grass for her and her friends to burrow into had been each other.

Eventually, she pulled herself out of the entrance to the shelter, brushed dirt from her skirt, and joined Wren by the fire. The grass outside the shelter was wet with morning dew, so Liv remained standing. “I see you brought a bit of food back,” she said quietly, so as not to wake her friends yet.

“Just what I could carry,” Wren said, but she nodded. A lattice of woven branches rested above the smoking coals, balanced unevenly on three large rocks that had been set at the edges of the fire. Thick strips of smoked bacon were stretched across it, sizzling and dripping grease down as they cooked.

Wren handed Liv a loaf of bread, not fresh but also not more than a day old, along with a hunting knife, and Liv set to work slicing it. There were two apples, as well, which Wren quickly cut into thin wedges with her second knife. By the time the other three had stumbled out of the shelter into the morning air, the two women had assembled quick meals of apple and bacon between slices of toasted bread.

“I don’t know if it's because I’m so hungry,” Rose said, in between bites, “or if cooking over a fire just makes everything better, but I think this is the best breakfast I’ve ever eaten.”

“It’s being hungry,” Arjun said.

“Now that the food’s cooked,” Liv broke in, “were you able to find Master Grenfell, Wren? And did you learn anything about what Benedict’s army is planning?”

“Yes, and yes,” Wren said, licking her fingers. “Grenfell first. I knocked at the old man’s window until he woke up and let me in, and you can thank him for making a trip down to the castle kitchens. If I could have carried more, he would have loaded me down with all sorts of supplies: I had to refuse blankets and all sorts of other things. Here.”

The huntress reached into her belt pouch and removed something small, which she handed to Liv. It was smooth, she felt: or at least, most of it was. Liv opened her hand, and looked down at a nearly flat, oval piece of mana stone. It looked like something that had been taken from a river, honestly - worn smooth by decades spent under the constantly flowing water. Or at least, it looked like half of such a stone, because it had clearly been broken down the middle. Then, someone had carved Vædic sigils into both sides of the oval. Liv doubted it had been Grenfell himself: his hands had already been getting weak, and prone to trembling, when Liv had left for Coral Bay. Still, the work was good.

“I don’t recognize this word, here,” Liv said, tracing her finger over the sigils.

“May I see?” Sidonie asked, and Liv passed it over. “Something about joining, or connecting, I think.”

“He said you should sleep with it tonight,” Wren explained to Liv. “That he’d use it to talk to you. He also promised to take your horse back to Whitehill, and said that Thora would be going with Triss.”

Liv smiled: she hadn’t wanted to take Thora into danger anyway, so that was good news: but she couldn’t help feeling sad at leaving Steria behind. “I’m glad to see he hasn’t wasted twenty-five years.” The thought led her on naturally to a memory of Jurian, much younger, promising to imprint Grenfell with the word of dreams, and her smile fell away. “And what did he say about the soldiers?”

“Well,” Wren began, “They’re blaming everything on you. They say you’ve murdered Anson Fane, along with two court mages and Jurian.”

Despite the fact that she’d been expecting something of the sort, Liv felt like the words lit a fire in her belly. “Jurian? Are they serious? My own teacher: not to mention, do any of them seriously think I could kill an archmage?”

“Well, if any of us could, it’d be you,” Rose pointed out.

“But I don’t think the truth is something they’re really concerned with, at this point,” Sidonie said. “The more mud they can throw on your name, the better for them. If you’re a murderer and a traitor, everyone will be afraid to help you, after all.”

“I did kill one of them, though,” Liv muttered. “Fane. But he attacked me.”

“In any event,” Wren said, “the king’s spy is down there, along with that officer, Howe. They’ve got a hundred pikemen and scouts besides.”

“Bennet Howe, and Galleron Erskine,” Liv said. “Erskine tried to grab me while Jurian and Arundell were facing off, and I managed to cut his arm.”

“Erskine’s word is dangerous,” Sidonie mused, finally handing the broken piece of mana-stone back to Liv, who put it in her pocket. “It allows his family to avoid being noticed. It means the troops could have scouts we won’t see until it's too late: and he could have brought his son, Rowan, from Coral Bay.”

“I don’t know that we have much of a defense against a word like that,” Arjun said, frowning. “I can treat just about any wound that doesn’t kill one of us outright, but I don’t like having to hope an assassin fails with their first attempt.”

“What about the Howes, Sidonie?” Liv asked. “They’ve been close allies of Benedict for at least the past seven years, and they have close ties to the guilds, as well.”

“Barons of Lingdale,” Sidonie answered. “Their word is Vær, to heat or warm. It’s made them a lot of money in licensing to the guilds - that’s how all those enchanted pipes that fill baths with hot water get made. But it’s not exactly a fighting word.”

“You’d be surprised,” Rose said. “I can think of a few uses. Heating up someone’s sword hilt until they burn their hand and have to drop it, for one.”

Sidonie rolled her eyes. “It doesn’t have the flexibility and immediately applicable uses of what I would categorize as a true combat word,” she argued. “You would absolutely annihilate Lord Howe in a fight, Rosamund.”

“So we’ve got them in terms of raw magical power,” Liv broke in, before a true argument could start. “That’s no surprise, honestly. Other than Wren, everyone here has at least two words, and guild-training. If we had powdered mana-stone, I could lay down wards when we camp, but I’m not sure what else we could do to defend against scouts we won’t even see. What’s their plan, Wren?”

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“I don’t know exactly,” the huntress admitted. “But according to Grenfell, they were marching out at dawn.”

Liv looked to the east, where the sun had now well and truly come up above the horizon, and felt a sudden urge to hurry them all deeper into the mountains.

“They can’t possibly get up here in an hour,” Wren pointed out. “But we shouldn’t linger.”

“I suppose it's time to see whether or not I can make two flying constructs work, then,” Liv said. “Have you gotten enough blood to fly again, Wren?”

“I’m going to need to hunt tonight,” the other woman warned her.

“Alright.” Liv stood up and drew her wand from the leather sheath that hung at her hip. She walked away from the fire and her friends, then set herself facing an open expanse of grass where she judged there to be enough room for two enormous birds.

“Aluthent’he Dvo Aviam,” Liv incanted, shaping her intent clearly before allowing mana to flow down her arm, to focus in her wand, and then to work her will upon the world. Not one, but two gyrfalcons coalesced on the grass, pawing at the earth with their talons and stretching their great wings.

“I would feel more comfortable about this if they had saddles,” Sidonie muttered, pushing her spectacles up on her nose with one finger.

“I keep meaning to come up with a way to do that,” Liv admitted, “but you’ll be fine if you hold on tight.” She walked over to the bird on the right, and climbed up onto its broad back. Rose followed straight on her heels, settling herself behind Liv with the air of someone who had clearly achieved a great expertise by virtue of having ridden this way once before. She wrapped her arms around Liv’s waist, and the two of them waited for Arjun and Sidonie to sort themselves out.

In the end, Sidonie rode in front, with Arjun behind her. Liv waited until she was certain that her friends had a good grip, and then nodded to Wren.

“What am I looking for?” the huntress asked, kicking dirt over the firepit.

“Head north to begin with,” Liv told her. “And look for any sort of minor rift you can find. I’d like to hunt a few mana-beasts, if we can, while we’re in the mountains.”

Wren nodded, shifted into her batform, and beat her wings. Once she was above them, Liv sent the gyrfalcon constructs up into the sky. They made a wide arc as they gained height, giving her a chance to look down at Valegard, where she could see a small column of troops marching out from the town and up into the mountains.

“They look like a line of ants,” Rose shouted into her ear, over the whipping noise of the wind.

They completed their turn, with Sidonie and Arjun on the second mana-construct just behind and to the left, where Liv could keep an eye on it. Then, they set off after Wren. It was clear to Liv, very quickly, that the huntress was deliberately keeping close at hand, and also that she had no intention of leading them very far above the slopes. It was a good thing, because the tiny shape of a single black bat would have been very easy to lose sight of against the trees below - especially with the tears in Liv’s eyes. The wind forced them back along the top of her cheeks toward her ears, and she was constantly blinking and squinting to see. Liv wondered whether Sidonie’s spectacles had any effect as a shield.

They flew all morning, until the sun was high in the sky to the south, at their backs. Liv had told Wren to find a minor rift if she could, but in truth, Liv wasn’t aware of one nearby. Just south was the wreckage of the Foundry rift, of course; and north by northwest, the Bald Peak rift near Whitehill. Yet farther north, near Al’Fenthia and the pass that led to Elden lands, she knew there was another rift, which Airis ka Reimis and his family took responsibility for, though Liv had no experience of it herself.

Between these three points, however, Liv had never seen anything but the mountain range marked on a Lucanian map. A greater rift would have been impossible for anyone to miss, spilling out mana beasts into the surrounding valleys until it became a problem that someone had to deal with. But it was possible that a small rift might not have ever been noticed, and might have escaped becoming enough of a problem that a Baron would be stationed to oversee it.

In truth, it was more of a hope than a plan. Liv wanted a safe place for her friends to practice the Elden technique for entering a rift without suffering mana-sickness, until she was completely confident they’d mastered the trick of it; and she wanted to hunt mana beasts. Their brief sessions in a rowboat on Coral Bay weren’t enough for her to feel comfortable bringing them to the Tomb of Celris, nevermind some of the places they might need to go in Varuna.

When the attack came, it was from above.

The eagle dove with the sun at its back, silent until it hit Liv’s mana construct, knocking Rose and Liv off the conjured gyrfalcon’s broad shoulders. By the time its enormous claws had sunk into the shining blue mana, Liv was already falling, already screaming.

Somehow, Rose managed to keep her arms tight around Liv’s middle, and they fell together, tumbling through the sky. The wide open blue sky and the trees below them whipped by so fast that Liv could only get fragmented glimpses of an enormous eagle ripping apart the gyrfalcon construct. A part of her mind realized that they’d found a mana-beast, but it wasn’t going to do them much good if she died when she hit the side of the mountain.

Cel woke in the back of Liv’s mind, roaring to life like a sudden blizzard scouring the frozen plains far to the north. She reached out, shaping her intent to something familiar, and Liv and Rose hit a chute made of ice. The impact sent a flash of pain through Liv’s ribs, and she lost her hold on Rose as they both shot downward.

Liv curved the chute around, bringing it in toward the side of the mountain, building the ice of the slide ahead of their bodies just fast enough to keep something solid out in front of their bodies as she and Rose accelerated. At the same time, another piece of her attention steered the remaining gyrfalcon construct, the one that carried both Arjun and Sidonie, down to land among the boulders and trees. She had no idea where Wren was, and she’d lost track of the eagle.

When the mana beast came in again, its talons tore the span of the chute between Liv and Rose apart into frozen chunks that tumbled down to the slope below. This time, there was no chance for Liv to catch them: they were too close to the ground. She lost track of Rose and everyone else as she hit, tumbling through the stiff, woody shrubs and greenery. Mountain Mahogany, she realized as it tore her dress to pieces and ripped off one of the pieces of her armor skirting.

Liv felt like something was stabbing her in the side, and even once she’d stopped rolling downslope, she gasped and struggled for breath. Instead of dulling with time, the pain only built, and she reached a hand to her side.

“Arjun,” Liv had asked, when she’d woken in Lendh ka Dakruim, “what happens if one of my bones breaks?”

“Then the sigils are ruined, and the bones in that part of your body will start to warp again,” her friend had answered.

Beneath Liv’s fingers, she could already feel the bones of her ribs crawling, warping, and tearing at her body. She screamed, her back arching like a cat’s, lifting her body entirely up from the dust and rocks of the mountain slope, supported only by her shoulders and legs.

A shadow passed between Liv and the sun, and the eagle landed in front of her. For the first time, she got a good look at the mana beast that had pulled them down from the sky. It was a golden-eagle, brown feathered wings spread wide enough to encompass an entire house, talons dug into the earth to support its weight. The head twitched on the great feathered neck, and for a long moment it looked Liv in the eye.

Her vision swam, then faded, and Liv felt a rush of heat through her body. She lost sight of the eagle, and focused on a cloud passing overhead. Cel still raged deep inside her, and she reached out to the crystals of ice far above, building a charge.

The eagle leaned low, as if examining Liv. Perhaps the bird wasn’t certain whether she would be good to eat, or not.

“Lucet Aiveh Avia,” Liv gasped, hardly able to fill her lungs enough to speak at all. The eagle reared up above her, pinning her leg beneath one talon, opened its beak, and prepared to rip her belly open. Liv squeezed her eyes shut.

The world turned white, and even squeezing her eyes shut wasn’t enough to keep it from hurting. The lightning hit the eagle, and it was all Liv could do to wrestle it with her intent, channeling its destructive power down into the earth beneath her, instead of her own leg. Heat was all around her, the weight of the eagle was gone, and a spray of earth covered Liv’s face.

A heartbeat later, thunder rolled from the clouds above.

Liv opened her eyes again, thrashed enough to get a glimpse of the smoking, cooked corpse of the mana beast, and then fell back down. Her broken ribs crawled beneath her fingers, and her vision dimmed around the edges.

She had time to think that Lord Howe and Baron Erskine would make for the peak where the lightning had struck, and that they had to move, but Liv didn’t know where her friends were. She didn’t even know if they’d survived.

Liv’s eyes fluttered, and the world went dark.