Guild Mage: Apprentice-Chapter 165. The Sins of the Mother

“Good evening, Liv,” Kazimir Grenfell said.

Liv saw, at a glance, that they were seated in her old teacher’s study at Whitehill: she at her old desk, with a slate in front of her, and Grenfell at the front of the room. The walls were still lined with bookshelves and cabinets, which led Liv to the strangest observation.

Each one of the titles on the spines were familiar, like old friends - but only when she looked at them directly, and focused her attention. The rest of the time, the lettering swam indistinctly. Even the massive hunk of mana stone - though Master Grenfell would insist on the formal word in Vædic - was in its appointed place, glittering with an inner light.

“I had a guess what that broken piece of stone might do,” Liv told him, unable to keep from smiling. “Clever.”

“The product of years of experimentation,” Grenfell said, with more than a hint of pride. “I call them dreamstones, but I haven't presented the concept to the guild quite yet. With the way things are going, I may keep it just between us for now. You’ve gotten somewhere safe?”

“Yes,” Liv assured him. “We went up into the mountains north of Valegard, and found a minor rift in the peaks. We had to kill a few mana beasts, but less than I expected. I don’t think they’ll be able to find us before flood season.”

“Good.” Grenfell nodded. “Don’t give me any more information than that, just in case I’m questioned again. I waited to use my stone until we’d reached Whitehill again safely; I hope I didn’t worry you by the delay.” He leaned back in his chair, and it creaked the exact same way it did in the waking world.

“I honestly didn’t even get a chance to sleep with the stone for the first few nights,” Liv admitted. “I was using mana to heal my injuries.”

“The Elden technique your father taught you.”

Liv nodded. “So. How did things go at Valegard? Was Julianne able to put them off?”

Grenfell laughed. “When they asked her if she’d taught you Luc, she went on a tirade. She was insulted, how could they question the honor of a duchess, did they have any evidence at all, it was quite amusing to watch. And when that Baron - I’ve never trusted the Erskines - asked her where you could have learned the word, she didn’t even have to lie. She just shrugged and told them you’d made several trips to Elden lands without her, where teaching words was not illegal.”

Liv exhaled in relief. “I was worried about her. And Matthew and Triss, they’re alright? Thora?”

“Sliding right into the role of Lady Beatrice’s maid,” Grenfell assured her. “They’re all fine, though there was nothing the duchess could do about the other charges against you. Multiple murders.”

“It disgusts me how willing to lie they are,” Liv said, and couldn’t keep her lip from twisting. “Genevieve killed Jurian, not me. And anyone who got in between the two of them fighting was committing suicide by means of archmage.”

“Regardless,” Grenfell said, “we’ve had your horse delivered to Al’Fenthia. That young officer, Howe? He isn’t stupid. He’s sent a detachment to the trading quarter of the city, to watch the waystone.”

“I figured that he would,” Liv said. “But how do you know?”

“His dreams obsess over you,” Grenfell said. “At first I thought it was only because of those rumors he was courting the princess, but I fear the grudge runs longer and deeper than that, Liv.”

“I don’t even know him,” Liv protested.

“His mother is Lady Mirabel Howe,” her old teacher said. “Who, it turns out, married Baron Elias some years ago. His second wife, after the first died.”

Liv felt as if her mind had run into a wall, and for a moment all she could do was blink. Two other desks shimmered into view at her side, each with a young girl seated there, before vanishing again. “But she’s only -” Liv paused, doing a quick bit of math in her head. “I guess she’s thirty-seven now. She must have wed young. How old is he?”

“Nearly twenty, just about a year younger than the princess,” Grenfell explained. “I’ve done a good bit of digging into his background, as best I could. You’re the second person I’ve given a dreamstone to: the first was my nephew. He’s rather more involved with the court scene at Freeport than we are, and he has a good set of ears on him.”

“So between his mother and the princess whispering in his ears, and then whatever Genevieve Arundell has told him, he must think I’m about the worst monster in Lucania,” Liv said. “He won’t give up, then. Not unless I stop him.”

“I’d recommend not killing him unless he gives you no choice,” Grenfell told her. “Better to simply disappear into Elden lands, if you can do that. He won’t be able to follow.”

“Can your nephew get a message to the Elden ambassador?” Liv asked. “Sakari ka Edvis?”

“I suspect that he could, yes,” Grenfell confirmed. “What do you want to say to him?”

“Tell him that I only killed one person, and it was in self-defense,” Liv said. “Let him know they’ve got soldiers hunting me, and as long as that’s the case, there’s no reason for House Syvä to be selling to the merchant guilds. I’m sure he’ll be able to do something with that. And he can get word to my grandmother.”

“I will pass your words along,” her old teacher assured her. “Now. There is one other thing I want to be certain to do while you’re still asleep, and I don’t want to miss the chance while we’re talking. Genevieve Arundell has opened a door for us, and we had better take advantage of it.”

“Cei,” Liv said, smiling.

“Just so.”

“Can you do it through a dream?” Liv asked him. “I would have thought you’d need to be in the same place as me.”

“Well, I’ve never actually made the attempt before,” Grenfell admitted. “Are you willing to be part of the experiment?”

Liv nodded. “The worst that happens is that it doesn’t work, right?”

Grenfell stood from his chair, approached her, and reached out to lay his hands on her head. “I don’t think we have enough knowledge of Cei to speculate on the worst that could happen. Still, I believe it is worth the attempt if you are willing to take the risk. Shall I proceed?”

Liv took a deep breath. It shouldn’t have mattered, because she was in a dream, but she did it anyway. “Do it.”

“Dō Cei,” Grenfell incanted.

Liv’s eyes fluttered, and she felt a great weariness in her bones. She slumped forward, but instead of falling, she felt as if she were floating up, weightless. A great darkness consumed her, and she fell into the oblivion between waking, a place where there was no consciousness or passage of time.

Just as it was impossible to pinpoint the moment she fell asleep each evening, Liv could never have said the exact instant that Cei took root in her mind. If Cel was a sleeping beast, and Luc the calm before a storm, Cei was a vast, deep ocean that concealed things of both beauty and terror, calm for the moment, but capable of immense turbulence and power.

When she opened her eyes, Master Grenfell’s study was gone, as was the old mage himself. She was curled up on one of the padded benches in the command center of the mountain rift, in a chamber lit only by the glowing, colored sigils of the long absent Vædim. Her friends were scattered about the furniture, slumped into chairs or stretched on cushions, breathing slowly and gently.

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Liv found that she could feel each one of them - or, more accurately, their dreams, at the edge of her awareness. Flashes of bright color and the scent of spice told her that Arjun was dreaming of his home in Lendh ka Dakruim. The wet, earthy scent of petrichor from Wren reminded Liv of the vast Varunan jungle she had seen only once, in a vision. Sidonie was having a nightmare: something about being chased - perhaps through a rift?

Before she could think better of it, Liv slid down off her bench onto the cold floor, then padded across the room in her stockings. When she reached the other journeyman, she put her palm on Sidonie’s forehead. “Ceiēs Fea Belim,” Liv whispered, and shaped her intent into a dream. Beneath her hand, she could actually feel her friend relax into a dream of wandering through an alpine field littered with blue columbines, all gloriously in bloom.

Finally, Liv walked over to where Rosamund was stretched out along a padded bench. The dark haired girl’s dreams were - oh. Liv paused, and felt her cheeks flush. She stepped away, then headed out of the control room and to the shaft, where a mana disc coalesced to bring her up to the topmost floor of the ruin, where she could step out onto the empty rock ledge and look up at the stars.

Liv knew she wouldn’t be able to get back to sleep anyway, so she sculpted herself a flower of ice, and used the waste heat to keep her body warm. Then, she enjoyed the mountain slopes and valleys stretching out far below her, illuminated in the pale light of the great ring above.

☙

When the sky grew bright with dawn, Liv built a small fire with wood they’d saved from the immense eagle nest that had once covered the entire rock ledge. She lit it with the spark charm, set strips of smoked venison to warm on a lattice of branches, and wished that she’d carried a teapot with her on the raid into the Foundry.

She’d first considered just trying to heat a wine-skin over coals, and then even contemplated using her boiled leather helm. Besides the potential for making her hair smell of chicory forever after, Liv had been hesitant to risk setting anything they might need in the future on fire. In the end, she’d had to use the same technique that had gotten them through the door: Liv made a bowl of pure mana, using Aluth. Objects conjured of mana blocked heat just as easily as they did anything else, so she couldn’t simply boil snow in the bowl using the coals.

Instead, Liv sculpted flowers, swords, and statues of people she missed, then sent the waste heat handfuls of snow that she packed into the bowl. Once that was melted, and then bubbling, she added the chicory and made a sort of tea. That got poured into an empty wine-skin, and then she brought everything inside to share with her friends.

“I spoke to Master Grenfell last night,” Liv said, once she judged the others awake enough to understand what she was saying. “Through the stone you brought, Wren.”

The huntress blinked, as if the words had gotten muddled somewhere between her ears and her brain. Liv noticed that the purple streak in Wren’s hair had nearly entirely faded, and grown out several inches besides. “What did he say?” the other woman eventually asked.

“They’re all safe back in Whitehill, first of all,” Liv told them. “Like we guessed, Bennet Howe has sent soldiers to Al’Fenthia to watch the waystone. And it turns out I’ve got a bit of a history with his mother, who was a real piece of work when we were younger.”

“Wait,” Arjun broke in. “You knew his mother?”

Liv nodded. “She was nasty - and I mean, really mean. I finally trapped her in ice in her father’s garden, and they left town after that.”

“You just can’t resist putting bullies in their place, can you?” Rosamund asked, but she was grinning and her eyes twinkled.

Liv shrugged. “He’s going to pass a message to Ambassador Sakari for me. And Sidonie, I think you should sleep with this tonight - I’ve never imprinted a word on anyone before, but he can give you Cei.” She passed the broken piece of mana-stone to her friend.

“You’ve got what - your fourth word, then?” Sidonie asked her. She accepted the dreamstone, as Master Grenfell had called it, and tucked it into her pocket.

“Cel, Aluth, Luc and Cei,” Liv agreed. “And there’s one more to learn from my grandmother, actually, though she may make me wait a bit.”

Rose whistled. “I’m not sure Archmagus Loredan even has five.”

“I feel like it's going to take me years to really learn to use them all,” Liv admitted. “But I suppose I shouldn’t complain. Rose, can I talk to you for a moment?” She stood up.

“Sure.” The dark haired girl rose and followed Liv over to the shaft, where Liv led her onto the mana disc. It rose through the darkness, carrying them up to the top level of the ruin, where Liv had watched the end of the night.

The sun was high, now, and its light fell upon the land below them. Liv doubted the day would get much warmer than it was now, and sculpted a blue columbine just to have enough heat to channel into both herself and Rosamund. For the first time since they’d first met - more than a year - Liv felt words getting stuck somewhere in her throat.

“Why were your parents so upset with you?” Liv blurted out.

“My parents?” Rose asked.

“You never want to talk about them,” Liv said. “But you will talk about your brother. You didn’t want to go to the coronation. And you said you had to beg your brother to imprint your family’s word on you, but your parents should have done that. So there’s obviously something wrong, isn’t there?”

For a moment, Rosamund just looked at her. “It’s obvious, though, isn’t it? I mean, I’ve never exactly tried to hide it, have I?”

“Matthew said -” Liv faltered. “I mean, I’ve never once seen you interested in a boy. Even Teph asked me about Arjun once.”

“That would have been a disaster,” Rose told her, with a grin, but then, she got serious again. “I’ve never been interested in boys because I’m not, Liv. And yes, that’s why I don’t get on with my parents. My father would like to make a nice political marriage with me, and my mother just wants a normal daughter.” Her voice took on a tone of bitterness that Liv had only ever heard come out when Rose talked about her family.

“So you - um,” Liv sputtered.

“I like girls, yes,” Rose said. “Did you need to hear me say it out loud?”

“I think I did,” Liv told her, after a moment. “Am I just an absolute idiot, for taking an entire year to realize?”

“You really are from the country,” Rose said, but she smiled to soften the words. “I mean, I sort of knew, but this?” She waved an arm to indicate the wide open sky, and far below the land spread out beneath them. “It wasn’t ‘till I saw the kind of place you grew up that it really sunk in, I think.”

“In the cities - even the small ones - there’s more people. More types of people,” Rosamund explained. “Which isn’t to say it’s accepted, exactly; but at least people kind of know. So and so the old women who have lived together their entire lives, and no one comes out and says it out loud, but it's obvious. There was no one like that, in Whitehill?”

Liv shook her head. “Not that I knew of, anyway. How long have you known?”

“Basically forever,” Rose said. “Though it was pretty set in stone when I kissed one of the barmaids right around our sixteenth birthday. Jasper and I, that is. I think we both liked her, but I got the kiss and he got a hangover.”

Liv took a deep breath. “And do you like-” She faltered.

“You?” Rose’s voice was low, almost a whisper.

Liv nodded.

“Yes.” The dark haired girl took a step toward Liv, then reached out and took her hand. “You made quite an impression, you know? Walking out with an arm we’d all just watched break, demanding someone duel you. I thought right then, this girl’s something special.”

Liv looked down at their hands, folded together, and thought of the other girl’s fingers on her scalp, to help her sleep; of riding on the back of a conjured gyrfalcon, pressed together. “You know why I put Cade off,” she asked.

“Because he wanted to own you,” Rose said. “Necklace like a collar? How he deserved to be in the room since you were going to be his bride? Yeah, Sidonie told me about that.”

“That was part of it.” Liv nodded. “But not the whole thing. With everything that’s happening - I just know that I’m not going to be able to be what he wants me to be, and it’s better I don’t pretend,” she said. “I can’t imagine taking twenty years to raise a few children while there’s a goddess of blood walking around in the west.”

“I’m not asking you to give me babies, Liv,” Rosamund told her, with a grin.

“What do you want?” Liv forced herself to meet the other girl’s eyes.

“I’d like to kiss you,” Rose said.

“I don’t know,” Liv said, after a long moment. “I don’t know, Rose. You’re my friend. You’re beautiful - I’ve thought that since I first met you. But you said you’ve known forever, and I never even considered marrying anyone but a man. And there’s more, too,” she said. “To be fair to you. You know I’m almost twice as old as you? If Keri and my father know what they’re talking about, I’m going to live to be well over two hundred. Even if you can do that, I’m not certain I could. It would be bad enough to watch a friend die, nevermind a -”

“Lover,” Rose said.

Liv nodded.

“So what, then?” Rosamund asked her.

“Thank you for telling me outright,” Liv said. “At least it's all on the table now, so to speak. As to us - I don’t know. But I do know, at the very least, I don’t want to lose you as a friend.”

“You won’t,” Rose promised, but Liv wasn’t so certain.