When he saw Liv’s stasis bubble collapse, Keri felt a surge of panic so strong that it seemed his entire body dropped through the stone floor. He’d already sent two of her personal guards to run and fetch healers from the chirurgeons guild, but it would take them time to arrive. It would be difficult, but he was certain that Liv had the strength to hold on, if anyone did. She could see that they were trying to help her, surely, and the more time she gave them, the better.
“They call you an archmage, don’t they?” Keri had been growling at Caspian Loredan, just before it happened. “There must be some way for you to break that spell.”
The old man hardly even turned to look at Liv, or at the corded, frozen spear of wound blood, bone, iron and mana that had come to a stop just touching her chest. His eyes were dull, hardly even seeming to register what was happening in the room. “Anything I do would break both pieces of magic,” he admitted, with a heavy sigh. “This was a mistake. I should never have brought her in here...”
It was the sudden motion in Keri’s peripheral vision that caught his eye, and by the time he’d spun around, it was too late for him to do anything. Ractia’s trap shot forward like the bolt of a scorpion, every bit of speed that had been robbed from it by Liv’s time magic returning in that instant. Before Keri could even realize what he was seeing, the attack hit the wall behind Liv, shattering the limestone and tearing a hole in the structure before continuing out into the dark of night. A cold autumn wind whipped into the room at the top of the Seastone tower, chilling everything.
Keri was moving forward, arms outstretched to catch Liv’s body as she fell. As long as it hadn’t hit her heart, they could get the bleeding under control, keep her alive until the healers reached them. If he had to, he’d cauterize her wounds...
It was only once his mind caught up with his body that Keri realized Liv wasn’t there. There was no blood, no wounded woman crumpled on the ground with blood staining her hair - only a swirling storm of snow and winter wind. Already, white powder was beginning to accumulate on the carpet, glittering by the light of the fire which guttered in the hearth.
“Where is she?” Kaija asked, and Keri heard the same fear in her voice that he felt gnawing at his stomach. Someone had torn a length of cloth with which to fashion a sling for her arm.
Archmagus Loredan finally straightened, taking two steps toward the swirling snow. His eyes grew wide, and he raised an arm. “There,” he said, quietly, and then seemed to gain strength. “She’s there. I can feel her Authority.”
Keri stepped forward, and then he could as well: the fresh, bracing air of a winter morning, with that hint of woodsmoke that lingered on the breeze. The glitter of iced-over branches, shining gold under the light of dawn. An endless blue sky, spread out above the white-capped mountain peaks. It was intensely familiar, and brought to mind his son’s cheeks, flushed red, just after they’d ridden a shield down the slopes of Mountain Home.
“She’s alive,” he said, the words themselves an exhalation of relief. “But -”
“Livara has broken her body down into pure mana, and then dispersed it using her Authority,” Caspian Loredan explained. “We have records, fragments of journals from the war that speak of it. There are a few words of power that seem to have an easier time of it than others -”
“Blood,” Keri answered, recalling the fight with the dowager queen, atop the wall in the pass south of Whitehill. “Like what Wren’s people do. And that word that controls birds.”
Loredan nodded. “Though in each of those cases, we know that it was done with the help of one of the V?dim,” the old man pointed out. “Which may explain why she hasn’t reformed her body yet.”
“Wren does it in an instant,” Kaija pointed out. “Just enough time for an arrow to pass through the blood, and then she’s right back in the fight.”
“Though she’s mentioned that most of her people don’t have that level of control,” Keri murmured, his thoughts racing. “Can she hear us, do you think?”
The archmagus raised his hands helplessly. “Who can say. The only one in the city who’s ever done anything like this, and come back from it, may be your friend Wren.”
“We need her,” Keri said, turning to Kaija.
The captain of Liv’s guard nodded, sending another of her soldiers running out and down the stairs. “I’m going to quickly run out of messengers,” she pointed out. “And the longer this goes without her coming back, the more of a problem it’s going to be.”
Keri couldn’t help but scowl. The burned and stained rugs were all that was left of a heretic princess; somewhere in the city, Wren and Ghveris had burned a guild-hall, if the glow they’d seen on the horizon was anything to go by; and the woman who had become the figurehead of the entire northern alliance couldn’t talk to them, show herself, or even give a signal. The night had turned into a disaster more quickly than anyone could have imagined.
There was a small part of him that wanted to point out that he’d been right when he warned Liv not to see Milisant, but that urge was outweighed by his terror at the thought that she might never be able to come back. Keri tried to remind himself how talented Liv was, how terrifyingly clever about everything when it came to magic, but the longer snow and wind whipped about the room, the less comforting that thought was. If she could have figured it out on her own, surely she would have by now?
?
The chirurgeons arrived first, and rather than let any of them actually see what has happened on the highest floor of the Seastone tower, Caspian Loredan convinced Kaija to descend to the third floor, where she and the other wounded members of the guard could be treated. Keri agreed: the longer they could contain word of how the princess had died, and of what had happened to Liv, the better.
By the time Wren and Ghveris arrived, the entire tower complex was surrounded in a raging blizzard. They’d had to shutter the windows and use the heavy drapes from Milisant’s bed to cover the gaping hole in the tower wall, because with the wind howling in it had become impossible to keep a fire burning. And without that source of warmth and heat, none of them would have been able to remain for long.
Wren and Ghveris looked just as bad as the rest of them, Keri realized, once Wren had slipped into the dead princess’s prison, and the war-machine had maneuvered his body up through the stairwell. It had taken him a great deal of scraping, accompanied by the horrible sound of steel dragging against stone, but he’d managed it.
Wren’s face was blacked with soot, and her clothes, as well. There was half dried blood on her face, making a sticky mess in her hair, and especially on her hands and clothes. Ghveris had somehow managed to utterly ruin the armor plates of enchanted steel that protected his torso: they were deformed by heat, cracked in many places, and even crumbling away at the edges, leaving jagged openings that revealed glimpses of the machinery beneath.
“What did the two of you do?” Keri asked, looking them over in astonishment. “You look like you’ve been through another war.”
“I could say the same about all those wounded guards below,” Wren shot back. “It stinks in here - like burned bodies.”
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“We caught the cultists beneath the guild-hall,” Ghveris explained, his voice sounding slightly odd, perhaps from the clear damage which had been inflicted on his mechanical body. “They fought -”
“Which was not the problem,” Wren grumbled. “The problem was that one of them got past us and burned the whole place down while we were still inside.”
“You took captives?” Caspian Loredan asked.
“Falkenrath’s handling that,” Wren told him. “They even dragged most of the corpses out, so I’m certain he’ll learn something. But it’s all they can do to keep the fire from spreading. They’ll be fighting it for hours, yet. Now what happened here? Where’s Liv?”
Keri crossed to the drapes, pulled them aside, and let the winter storm blast in, carrying a fresh flurry of snow with it. “Out there,” he said. “Which is why we need you, Wren. When you take your blood form, how do you turn back?”
“We believe,” Caspian Loredan broke in, “that she collapsed her body into the storm you now see outside the tower, as a way to keep herself alive when Ractia’s trap was sprung.” He held up one hand when Wren opened her mouth. “The details don’t matter, at this moment. Milisant was a trap, and the Lady of Blood attacked through her. Liv saved herself, but it doesn’t seem like she’s ever done this before. I don’t think she knows how to come back, on her own.”
“Blood and shadows,” Wren swore, poking her head out the hole in the tower wall. After a moment, she ducked back inside and pulled the drapes back in place to cut off the wind. Then, she walked over to the bed and sat down on the mattress, smearing soot and blood all over the luxurious blankets.
Keri followed her across the room, and both Caspian Loredan and Ghveris came with him. Once all three men were gathered in a half-circle in front of Wren, the huntress began to speak.
“I can tell you how I learned from my father,” she said. “But I don’t know if that will work for Liv. In fact, Ghveris may actually be able to explain it better than I can.”
The Antrian war-machine shook his head. “When Ractia changed our people, she gave us the ability to turn ourselves into bats, and to take forms from the heartsblood of the animals we hunt,” he explained, his voice echoing off the stones of the tower. “But in my time, these things were new. She empowered us late in the war, and this trick of half-shifting, stopping as blood instead of merely passing through that stage, is a thing we had not discovered.”
“Over a thousand years passed between the end of the war and Ractia’s return,” Caspian observed. “That is more than enough time for the Great Bats to have experimented with the magic that Ractia gave them, to push the boundaries of her original intent.”
“In any case,” Wren said, “we have the advantage of having already moved through that form every time we shift. As Ghveris said, it’s natural to us. The trick is learning not to form yourself a new body right away, to linger in the blood form. It’s a bit terrifying, actually, the first few times, because you can’t help but worry something will go wrong - something just like that.” She waved at the hole in the wall. “That you’ll get stuck. Everyone wants to rush back to a form that feels familiar. But once you get comfortable with it, if you practice, you can learn to do what I do - just let attacks splash through you, and then reform when they’re gone.”
“Can she hear us?” Keri asked. “See us?”
“If it’s like what I do, yes,” Wren said. “But then again, I’m not doing this on my own. I’m using something that Ractia designed my people to do. We’d make for pretty bad scouts if every time we changed forms we lost track of what was going on. I can’t tell you whether she made changes to the magic in order to make certain that wouldn’t happen.”
“How do you come back from it?” Keri pressed.
Wren sighed. “My father taught me that if you ever weren’t certain you could get back into a physical form, you wanted to concentrate on concrete things,” she explained. “Things that you could smell, or taste, or hear - something distinct, that you could use as a focus to pull you back. Something that connects you to the rest of the world. The smell of wet earth, the sound of a bird call. If you shut out everything else, and follow that one thing back, you’d make it.”
“Can you talk her through it?” Keri asked. He heard the scrape of boots on stone, and turned round to see that Kaija had made her way back up from the make-shift infirmary that had taken shape on the floor beneath them.
“Maybe?” Wren said. “If she can hear me, and if she’s paying attention, and if she isn’t too terrified and panicked to listen.”
“Wren, you’re not the one who’s going to get her attention,” Ghveris said. “You know what you need to do, don’t you?” he asked Keri.
He blinked. His thoughts were scattered, and whenever he tried to put them into some sort of order that made sense, Keri kept coming back to the fear that Liv would drift away and be gone forever. “I don’t -” he began to say, but then he did. He did know what Ghveris was talking about.
When Keri had lost himself, when his body was on the verge of death, he’d drifted down to the world below, descending from the ring to be blown, lost, aimless, on the winds of mana. It had been almost exactly like the coming of age ritual, save that there’d been no one to bring him home - until there was. Liv had reached out for him, had touched his Authority with her own, and in that moment of enveloping each other, he’d seen some of her memories.
The mingling of Authorities wasn’t completely unknown to him; he knew that his father and mother had been able to do it, before she’d passed away. He’d never managed it with Rika, but at the time he’d assumed it was the sort of intimacy which couldn’t be forced, which would come eventually as they grew to know each other. There’d been no rush. And nothing about Authority had ever come particularly easy to Keri; he was more comfortable practicing with his spear in the yard, or riding.
Yet with Liv, it had been as effortless and natural as breathing.
That had been frightening, in and of itself, and neither one of them had pushed to make any sort of experiment or to attempt to do it again. It was as if, by mutual consent, they’d agreed to speak no more of what had happened - and then, of course, they’d been apart immediately after, with her going to Varuna, and Keri stuck in Whitehill recovering.
“I’m not certain if I should,” Keri admitted. “It is a thing that is normally only done between lovers, and - I don’t want to push her. My aunt’s tried to bargain for a marriage -”
“Her and practically everyone else,” Wren grumbled. “But if you’ve got a way to touch her, Keri, you need to do it.”
He sighed. “Do the stairs continue up to the top of the tower?” Keri asked Caspian Loredan.
The old man nodded. “You’ll need this.” Caspian removed a ring of keys from his belt, selected one, and held it up so that Keri could take it in his hand.
Keri strode across the room, through the doorway which led to the stairwell, and turned left instead of right, continuing up the close, stone steps. The walls were tightly curved, in order to make it more difficult for attackers to fight their way up into the tower, and it meant that he couldn’t see the final door until he was upon it.
The key stuck for a moment, refusing to turn, and Keri wondered how long it had been since anyone had gone out onto the roof. He jiggled the key in the lock for a moment, and just when he had made up his mind to break the door down with his shoulder, the tumblers inside clicked over.
As soon as the door swung open, a frigid wind chilled Keri to the bone, driving a blinding spray of snow into his face, forcing him to raise one hand as a shield and close his eyes. The stones atop the tower were ice-slicked and covered in a fine white powder that blew back and forth with each gust from the winter storm which had enveloped it.
And that storm, if the archmage was to be believed, was Liv.
He edged a boot out from the stairwell and nearly slipped, forced to clutch at the door to keep himself upright. Keri squinted into the snow, but it was coming down so heavily that he couldn’t see anything - not the crenellations of the tower, not the stars in the sky or the moon or even the ring above. But I don’t really need to see, do I? He realized.
Keri pushed his Authority outward, just like he’d practiced with Pandit Sharma. It had been difficult, at first, to encompass others and feel the truth of their words. He’d failed more often than he’d succeeded, in the early days, chiefly because Savel wasn’t a word that relied on the use of Authority, and he’d never had to work at the skill before.
It still wasn’t something that came easily to him, but a bubble of warmth expanded from Keri, turning aside the howling winds and the driving snow. This was how you pushed back against someone else’s magic, forced it away from you, denied their Authority any grasp upon you.
That wasn’t what he needed, though - not tonight.
“Liv.” Keri closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and relaxed. He wasn’t here to be a wall - he was here to be an open hand, extended out for her to grasp. He let the memories come, trying to choose one that she would recognize: their dance earlier that evening, lying next to each other on the bed at Acton House, just before Rei had come running into the room - the moment she’d emerged from House Kaulris’s test, flung herself at him, and they’d kissed.
Something gave; sunlight mixed with winter, and Liv’s memories rushed into Keri as their Authorities mingled once again, enfolding each other, wrapping around and within. He saw her, upon a frozen throne, wearing the crown of Celris, looking down on the icy statues of the people she’d once cared about, and he saw himself there among the dead.
There was a terrible fear to the memory, a desperation that he tasted and knew was hers. It made him want to wrap Liv in his arms and hold her close, and he reached out -
The storm died, and she was there, swaying on her feet, once more as solid as anything else in the world. Before Liv could fall onto the hard rock of the Seastone Tower, Keri caught her, and carried her back down the stairs.
here. I am more available there than I am here.
Dramatis Personae
Livara T?r Valtteri Kaen Syv? - Guildmage, former scullery maid at Castle Whitehill, the bastard daughter of Maggie Brodbeck and Valtteri Ka Auris. Mountain Queen, and Lady of Winter. Mostly appearing in this chapter as a force of nature. [35 Rings of Mana, not counting mana stored in items.]
Caspian Loredan, Archmagus - Head of the College of V?dic Grammar, serving on the Council of Regents for Lucania. Would be fascinated by all this, if he wasn't so traumatized. [26 Rings of Mana]
Ghveris, the Beast of Iuronnath - Formerly a Great Bat in service to Ractia, now the remains of his body form the heart of an Antrian juggernaut. "Go for it, Bro." [Mana Battery: 10 Rings]
Inkeris "Keri" ka Ilmari k?n B?lris - A young warrior of the Unconquered House of B?lris, father to Rei. Caught the storm when she fell. [20 Rings of Mana.]
Kaija - Former Armorer at Kelthelis, captain of Liv's personal guard. Banished to be treated for injuries. [21 Rings of Mana]
Wren Wind Dancer - Daughter of Nighthawk, cousin of Calm Waters. Expert.
