The following morning, Liv accepted Caspian’s invitation to eat at the high table, with all the professors, at Blackstone Hall. To her surprise and delight, she was served personally by Lambert, who’d cooked her meals during the entirety of her stay at High Hall.
“Local eggs tossed with cheese and reef crab meat; smoked bacon, sourced from wild boars that roam the shoals near Chestnut Hollow; and sweetbread made from Elden flour, with sea salt from our own bay, cinnamon from Lendh ka Dakruim, and honey harvested from the shoals of the meadows south of Courland.” The cook set the platter in front of Liv with so much pride and excitement that Liv half-expected him to burst apart, like an overripe fruit.
“Thank you,” Liv said, giving him a smile and a nod. “I’ve missed your cooking. Please wish Heather, and everyone else in the kitchen, well for me.”
“Of course, Archmagus.” Lambert bowed and withdrew; if Liv knew anything about the lives of those in service, he would be swarmed by every scullion, maid and hallboy at High Hall the moment he returned. The fact that she’d once baked a pie in his kitchen would be bragging rights for the rest of his life.
The fact that Reginald Teck had declined to eat with the rest of the professors on the morning after Liv’s second test only made the food taste all the sweeter.
At her right side, Kazimir Grenfell had an open book, a pot of ink, and a quill with which to take notes. He nodded along every time Lia Every, on his other side, spoke, and for the most part Liv found that she didn’t need to add anything to the discussion.
“--explicitely in both charters that no kingdom has the authority to appoint a guild master or guild mistress,” Lia said, stabbing her finger down at the open book to emphasize her point.
“I’d like the charter to be offered to Lendh ka Dakruim, also,” Liv said. “Tej Mishra would be a good place to start.”
“You really believe there would be interest in the east?” Professor Blackwood asked. “They’ve shown little inclination in the past, and their castes can be rather inflexible.”
Liv leaned across the table and swallowed a bite of egg and crab before answering. The rush of mana on her tongue was invigorating. “Jurian gave us an opening. General Mishra asked for our help because of their friendship, and then Pandit Sharma brought healers to Whitehill to treat the wounded during the war. With Arjun the first Dakruiman member of the guild, I think there’s been enough cooperation in the past couple of years that we have a chance to build on it.”
“Would you welcome more Dakruiman students here, if they were as talented and hard working as Iyuz?” Caspian asked, joining the conversation. “I’m curious as to your opinion, Professor Blackwood.”
“Of course. The college – colleges, I suppose – should accept anyone willing to learn.”
“Good.” The archmagus – the other archmagus, Liv mentally adjusted her thinking – nodded. “I have come to realize, in recent months, that I cannot both serve on the council of regents, and also give this college the time and commitment that our students deserve. I would like you to fill my position here, and take over managing the school, so that I can relocate to Freeport permanently.”
Professor Blackwood paused with a fork halfway between his plate and his mouth, the tines stabbed through two links of sausage. “Chancellor?” he blurted, and from the look on his face, Liv was certain that he’d been taken completely by surprise.
“Yes,” Caspian confirmed. “I think you’re the best choice. It would be a waste to take Annora out of the infirmary, or Norris out of the workshops. Lia is running the new college in Whitehill, and I don’t envy her the work of building that from scratch. You can still teach your advanced course on mana beasts, of course, but you’ll need to find someone to take over for me in terms of V?dic Grammar. Are you interested?”
“I – Yes. Yes, I believe I would be,” Blackwood said, collecting himself and setting his sausage down. “I would like to re-examine certain appointments to our faculty made by the late Archmagus Arundell.”
“That would be your purview, as chancellor,” Caspian Loredan said, with a shrug.
“Congratulations, Chancellor Blackwood,” Liv said. The empty chair marking the place where Reginald Teck should have been seemed to take on a greater presence, in that moment, and Liv couldn’t help but smile. “There are two last things I’d like to talk to you about before we leave,” she told the other archmage, turning back to Caspian. “The first is getting culling teams to help track Ractia down.”
“I presume you have a list that you’re working your way through.”
“A list and a map, and a key of waystone sigils,” Liv confirmed. “The trips are relatively short, but dangerous. They require people with a high mana capacity – ideally, they should be able to activate a stone to get back even if they lose a few members of the team. People who are trained as scouts are best, but a lot of these places haven’t been culled in a very, very long time.”
“Which means they need to be skilled fighters, as well,” Loredan reasoned. “And I imagine there are extensive risks in terms of mana sickness.”
“I’ll have them trained to deal with that,” Liv promised. “But yes, we have had a few incidents, which Arjun and our healers deal with when they make it back to Bald Peak. A flexible group is best. People who won’t mind working with Eld, or even the Red Shield Tribe.”
Caspian nodded. “I have a few culling teams in mind. Once I’ve spoken to them, I’ll send them along to Bald Peak, with orders to report to you there. The second matter?”
“Do you know Genevieve Arundell’s trick with Aluth?” Liv asked.
“I know it was similar to what you do with ice, in that it involved a more stable, dense arrangement of mana,” he answered her. “I had hoped that she would share it with the guild when it came time for her to present her research to make master, but instead she and Jurian brought back Cei.”
Liv frowned. “You mean she had it even before she came here as a student? No – that doesn’t fit with the Arundell word.”
“While she was a journeyman, Genevieve Arundell was sent on a guild-supervised culling, the same as most of our students who reach that level,” the old man explained. “Hers, unfortunately, was a disaster. Out of a dozen students, three died, another five were so wounded they had to be pulled out by the survivors. Genevieve came out with mana sickness of a severity indicative of exposure to the depths, and once she’d recovered, her Aluth constructs were golden, rather than blue.”
“Would you be willing to share where this culling took place?” Liv asked. “Do you recall the name?”
“I can’t imagine I’ll ever forget it,” the older man confirmed. “The rift is called the Cradle of Storms, and it is on the southern coast. If you believe the priests of the Trinity, it marks the place where Sitia gave birth to Tamiris.”
?
Kazimir Grenfell walked Lia Every and Liv back down the stone steps to the beach below the bluff, trailed by her personal guards, where they all found that her friends had gotten the tents and pavilion packed up while Rei built a castle by the breakers. Ghveris had hauled the canvas, the poles, the cots and camp chairs and all the rest to be loaded on top of the carriages, which couldn’t make the trip over the loose sand of the beach.
They had a second carriage, again, which the two mages had brought from Bald Peak. The students, on the other hand, would have to walk back down the street which led from the campus into the heart of Coral Bay, where they would be transported back to Bald Peak over the course of multiple trips through the waystone.
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Liv and the acting guildmistress waited to one side of the circle of white stone, a list of every student’s name open in a book, and a quill and ink ready to cross the names off as they trickled down from the campus, singly, in pairs, or in small groups. They didn’t come alone: a few days in Coral Bay had been, apparently, enough time for a few friendships to form.
Aura, in her capacity as journeyman, ushered an entire group of first years down with something of the attitude of a mother hen. Her charges included most of the young Eld, such as Mika in his mask. Gamel walked down with young Albert Butcher and Rande, all three of them still wearing their gambesons and looking like they’d found time for morning exercise at the training ground before departing; the two young men were chatting eagerly with a pair of Coral Bay apprentices who had the look of a brother and sister. Semilla Teller exchanged a hug with her cousin, Jasper, who was in his third year and, according to the gossip Liv had heard around the high table, on the verge of testing up to journeyman.
To Liv’s surprise, one of the girls from House Esteri had managed to attract two suitors who walked to either side of her, under the watchful eyes of Elenda Fisher. One of the boys wore Tryon colors, and the other Ryder, and from the way they were competing for her attention, Liv doubted they had the slightest idea that the young lady was just as likely to take them both as to choose one or the other. She was also something like sixty years older than either, another fact that Liv suspected had not yet been made clear.
She waited until the young woman – Nea t?r Levis, it turned out, from the farewells Liv overheard – had vanished in a shaft of blue light, and then rounded on the young men, crooked her finger, and drew them off to one side.
“In the interests of preventing misunderstandings,” Liv said, before either young man could introduce himself, “I won’t prevent you from writing to her. But before I will permit you to visit Bald Peak, I would like you both – either separately or working together – to submit to me a report showing that you’ve researched and adequately understood the joining conventions of the Vakansa. You should at the very least be able to elaborate on the difference between kwenim and daiverim, as compared to husband and wife. Am I understood?”
“Yes, archmagus,” the young men echoed her, practically a chorus.
Liv dismissed them by nodding her head toward the bluff where the campus stood, and then watched them disappear among the foot traffic on the street.
“Given the amount of trouble you got into as a student, I find this new, responsible Liv very, very amusing,” Wren commented, coming up on Liv’s left hand side.
“I wasn’t responsible for anyone else back then!” Liv protested. “Now, if anything happens to them, I’m going to have to explain it to their families.”
“And now you understand how you made all of us feel,” Lia Every chided her. “I’m convinced that you alone were responsible for at least six of my gray hairs.”
“Is that all of them?” Liv craned her neck to look at the list. Each and every name had been crossed off. “Wonderful. Let’s get on our way, then.”
Miina waited with her on the waystone while the two carriages and the teams of horses moved onto the white stone. Keri and Thora were keeping Rei occupied in one, while guild mistress Every got into the other. Wren, Ghveris, Kaija and the guards circled about around the perimeter of the stone, keeping watch while Liv and her cousin activated the sigil for Bald Peak.
Light built beneath their feet, and then they were gone.
?
Half the sky above Bald Peak was awash in gray clouds, heavy with snow, while fat white flakes danced down around the waystone. The air was shockingly cold after a Coral Bay winter, and Liv could see that everyone but her was shivering at the sudden change. Students huried away, arms wrapped around themselves, as they scurried back to the promised warmth of hearths and blankets in their rooms.
The carriage which carried Lia Every set off immediately, tossing snow and ice up behind the wheels as the horses pulled it to the college campus. Keri and Rei, on the other hand, immediately piled down out of the second carriage.
“I’m going to get him back to Mountain Home,” Keri told Liv, keeping one hand on his son's shoulder to prevent him from running off to play in the snow.
“Do you want me to come with you?” Liv asked, walking over to join them. She wasn’t particularly interested in seeing his aunt, nevermind Rei’s mother or Sohvis, but Liv also knew that Keri himself wasn’t very comfortable spending time there anymore.
“Would I like you to?” Keri smiled. “Yes. But I suspect that you’re only moments away from being swarmed, after having been gone this long.”
“You’re probably right.” Liv sighed, then squatted down so that her eyes were level with Rei’s. “Did you have fun seeing some of Lucania?” she asked him, in Vakansa.
The boy nodded. “I liked swimming at Coral Bay, and the play in Freeport, and I really liked watching you knock all those ships over. Can you teach me that spell when I’m older?”
Liv had to make quite an effort not to smile too broadly at that question. “We’ll see. You’ll need to have three words of power to learn it, because Savel isn’t part of the incantation at all. Would you like a hug?”
Rei nodded, so she wrapped her arms around him and pulled the boy against her chest. “Thank you for coming on this trip with me,” she said. With one last squeeze, she let him go and stood.
“Don’t take too long,” she told Keri, and then leaned in to kiss him. Finally, she stepped off the waystone, and watched until they were gone.
“What’s the next order of business?” Wren asked, when the light had died back down. “You want me scouting more rifts?”
“Yes, but not immediately,” Liv said. “I don’t want to send you out on that kind of mission until this one’s enchantments are fixed.” She reached out to pat Ghveris’s newly forged chestplate. “And that’s going to take a bit to set up. In the meantime, I want to get ready for whatever culling teams Caspian sends us. They’re going to be under your command, so figure out how you want to coordinate things. And now that the trip to Lucania is done, I have a promise to keep. More than one, really, but helping House Kaulris is going to be the work of years.”
Ghveris shifted, walking around to face Liv. Snow had already begun to pile up on top of his pauldrons, and some of it, suddenly shifted by his movement, tumbled down and fell to the ground. “Is it time?” he asked, and though the rumble of his voice was only an approximation of human, Liv was certain she could detect the excitement in it.
Liv nodded. “Just about all of the fallout from the war against Lucania is managed, and the school here is well enough established that I can step away now and again. Master Grenfell will handle the negotiations to heal the guild without me; he knows what I want. Wren, I’d like you to go and invite Soaring Eagle to come and visit us here at Bald Peak.”
“We’re just coming into the dry season now,” Wren pointed out. “It’s the best time for an expedition to the jungle, and if we hurry we’ll have nearly three months before things start to turn. Even mid-spring, here in Lucania, isn’t bad. But if we wait for summer, you’ll start getting into the rainy season, and that’s going to make things more complicated.”
“By that point last year, we were already in the mountains,” Liv recalled.
“And Feic Seria never got much in the way of rain,” Ghveris said.
“Four months for an expedition, then,” Liv said, feeling out the timeline. “We’ll want to get scouts there as soon as we can, and we’ll need to set up a base to operate from, preferably one with a waystone.”
“It’s a pity that Calder’s Landing doesn’t have one,” Wren complained. “It’s the closest settlement to Godsgrave, by far, and between the Airaduin? and the coast, it's easy to move around by ship.”
Once again, Liv considered whether it might be possible to rip a waystone out of the ground and move it. It was something she’d been planning to explore for months now, in fact nearly a year – ever since Elder Aira had shown them the true extent of the waystone network, up on the ring. Reluctantly, she put the idea aside: it would be wiser not to begin a new experiment with such a limited timeline.
“The bridge rift it is, then,” Liv decided. “We’ll use the waystone there at the dam, and shuttle supplies and people downriver by canoe. I have Jurian’s memories of Godsgrave, which should give us a place to begin getting ready. How soon can you be ready to leave?” she asked Wren.
Her friend’s grin was infectious. “For this? I’ll go today. I don’t want our people to stay there a moment longer than they have to. Just give me a quarter bell to grab a few things, and then send me along.”
Liv nodded, and watched Wren dash away into the falling snow. Ghveris stood next to her, the steel of his armor already spiderwebbed with hoarfrost.
“Thank you,” the Antrian said. His voice was jarring: the falling snow had nearly blanketed the world in silence, now that all the students had gone, and the carriages had been taken away.
“Thank you for being patient.” Liv looked up to meet his burning blue eyes. “I know it must have been difficult to wait through everything else I’ve had to take care of. But now it’s time.”
Godsgrave had broken Jurian’s team, leaving half of them dead and the only survivors lifelong enemies – but they’d gone with only four people. Liv intended to bring the entire might of the alliance down on the rift, and to rescue every one of the people who’d been trapped there.
Liv looked up at the clouds, and allowed the snowflakes to drift down onto her face while she waited.
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. Keeping promises. [35 Rings of Mana, not counting mana stored in items.]
Blackwood, Master - Professor of Beasts Chancellor of the College at Coral Bay. Going to be cleaning house. [19 Rings of Mana]
Caspian Loredan, Archmagus - Head of the College of V?dic Grammar, serving on the Council of Regents for Lucania. Casually dropping important plot points. [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. Has been patient. Very patient. [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. Needs one of those apps for shared custody that helps you arrange drop offs. [20 Rings of Mana.]
Lambert — Head cook for High Hall at Coral Bay. Has all the bragging rights forever.
Lia Every - Acting Guildmistress, former Professor of Guild Law & History. Determined to never have that particular problem again. [20 Rings of Mana]
Rei ka Inkeris k?n B?lris - Son of Keri and Rika. Has only modest and resonable magical ambitions. /s [4 Rings of Mana]
Wren Wind Dancer - Daughter of Nighthawk, cousin of Calm Waters. "Look at you, all grown up and responsible! Does this mean you're going to stop doing reckless stuff, Liv? Didn't think so."
