The trip downriver took only three days which, according to Keri, was about twice as fast as it had taken he and Liv’s father to paddle upstream with their troops, when they’d first come to Varuna.
“It was miserable,” he admitted to Liv, during their second day on the canoes. “We had a few people from fishing families at Cold Harbour, but even they were used to the ocean, not breaking our backs to fight the river.”
“This is better, then?” Liv asked him, from where she’d used her pack to make a sort of pillow, between his legs and her back, for her to lean back on.
“You can’t even imagine how much easier.”
Indeed, he and the others who sat at the backs of the canoes seemed to use their oars more to steer the boats than to actually propel them forward. If it hadn’t been for the bugs that swarmed them day and night, the enormous lizards that slipped in and out of the water, either sunning themselves on the banks or lurking with little more than their eyes visible, and the flesh-eating schools of fish, Liv might even have called it peaceful.
Though everyone had been warned, repeatedly, about how the biting fish – Wren called them ‘Pir??a’ – could strip the flesh from a man’s arm down to the bone in a matter of moments, that didn’t stop a few of the soldiers from making experiments of their own. None of Liv’s personal guards, thankfully: but she was quickly getting a lesson in just how much trouble idle infantry could get up to.
Two Whitehill men and, to Liv’s astonishment, an Elden woman from House Asuris, had gotten ahold of a fallen branch, wrapped it in strips of dried jerky, tied it with twine to keep it on, and gone ‘fishing.’ The moment they had a few biting fish latched on tightly, they’d retracted the branch from the river and gotten the Pir??a into their canoe, which was when Liv and everyone else had first become aware of what was happening. The shouts and shrieks which had accompanied the three soldiers clubbing the fish to death, while very nearly overturning their canoe into the remaining swarm of Pir??a still in the water, had been impossible to conceal.
Keri had assigned those particular soldiers to digging the latrines that evening. As an apology, once the biting fish were grilled over a fire, one was offered to Liv. She didn’t find the taste too different from what could be pulled out of the Aspen, if a bit salty and tough. Once Wren mixed it with peppers and a few herbs and spices she’d gathered from the jungle, the meal improved substantially.
Once they began cutting their way southeast on the fourth day, her soldiers no longer had any time to waste.
Soaring Eagle had found them, by that point, and the chief of the Red Shields was not alone. He brought a hunter named Condor, as well as the two scouts Wren had captured, Little Crow and Wildcat. The four of them, along with Wren herself, ranged out around the line of march, scouting the best path forward toward Godsgrave. While they were out, they gathered herbs, spices and fruit where they could find it; brought back game to be roasted in the evenings; and searched out campsites with access to fresh water, either from a stream which would join the Airaduin? downriver, or one of the cenotes scattered throughout the jungle.
On the first day, after sending the canoes back with a single soldier to paddle each, they tried clearing a path through the jungle entirely by hand, using axes and saws to fell trees, short chopping blades to clear brush, and shovels to even and flatten the earth, which was then packed down by the boots of the men and women doing the work. With eighty of them labouring together, Liv had thought it would go quickly - but her inexperience in such a project quickly became clear, when reality didn’t match her expectations.
“How far did we get?” Liv asked that evening, once everyone had collapsed around their campfires and set to cooking a meal.
“A hundred and forty yards,” Sidonie told her, open notebook in hand.
Li frowned. “And how far do we have to go?” she asked Soaring Eagle.
He and Wren spoke for a moment quietly, apparently translating Red Shield units of measurement to Lucanian. “About fifty miles,” Soaring Eagle said, finally.
“At our current pace, that would take us six hundred and twenty-eight days,” Sidonie said. Then, she paused, and corrected herself. “Not counting today. Six hundred and twenty-seven.”
“That isn’t going to work.” Liv sighed. “Tomorrow, we try magic.”
They set a watch, even though the Red Shield scouts insisted that they hadn’t come anywhere close enough to Godsgrave for mana beasts to find them. There were still threats from natural animals, such as the cougars that dragged their prey up into tree branches after a successful hunt, or the enormous, constricting snakes that could break a grown man’s ribs as easily as a soldier might snap a branch over his knee. For the most part, however, even predators avoided their camp, frightened off by the cook fires and the constant bustle of activity.
Once it was light, and she’d gotten something to fill her belly, Liv made her way to the furthest edge of their new road and drew the stormwand from its sheath at her hip. Behind her, the soldiers had crowded around to get a good look, as if she was performing tricks on a market day.
“The spell you used at the Well of Bones?” Arjun guessed, from where he waited to one side and just a few steps behind her, along with the rest of her friends.
“Oh, I like that one,” Wren said, brightening.
“That was my plan.” Liv nodded, and spoke her invocation. It was a spell she’d only ever used once before, and she didn’t trust herself to cast it silently – particularly since she intended to use a different word of power as the base, this time. ““Aluthent’he Dvo Kveim o’Mae.”
Two walls of shining blue mana coalesced in front of Liv, angled together so that they met at a point, making the shape of a sort of arrowhead, ten feet tall and thirty to either side. Liv stepped right up into it, between the angled wings, pressed the tip of her wand right into the angle where the walls met, and then shoved it forward.
At first, she walked; then, as the walls of mana plowed forward, snapping trees off and shoving them aside, scraping the ground clean and evening it in the wake of her passage, Liv sped up, rushing forward so that she didn’t lose momentum. The walls rumbled and crashed ahead of her, throwing everything in their path aside. Birds burst into flight, fluttering up though the canopy of the jungle and then into the sky, desperate to get out of her way.
It was exhausting, but it did work. Liv used every scrap of mana she had, even what she had stored in her guildring and the set of bracelet and rings she’d won from Millie so many years before. By the time she was utterly wrung out and exhausted, she’d worked for about three quarters of a bell, and cleared three miles of trail. When she finally staggered off to one side, the soldiers cheered.
Keri held out a waterskin to her, and Liv gratefully put it to her lips, through her head back, and drank in great gulps. Finally, when she’d caught her breath, she turned to Arjun and Sidonie. “Think you can both do the same?” she asked.
As it turned out, they could – though not for quite as long. Still, by the time the three guild mages were done using Aluth, the entire group was five miles further from the river than they had been that morning. The remainder of the day was spent with work crews of soldiers doing clean up work: burning brush, digging up stumps, and making camp off to one side of the new road.
The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
It wasn’t going to be anything fancy: there was no time to pave it with stone, and Liv wouldn’t have known where to quarry it, on the western continent, even if she’d wanted to. The mountains around Nightfall Peak, perhaps, though how they’d get it all so far would have been its own issue. When the rainy season came, she had no doubt their road would become a sucking morass in which wagon wheels would be regularly trapped. But if they could keep up their pace, another nine days of work would see them to the shoals of Godsgrave, and hopefully give them enough of the dry season to work with that it wouldn’t become a problem.
That initial hope proved to be optimistic: they were held up for an entire day bridging a tributary of the Airaduin? that crossed their route. It was neither terribly wide, or deep, and anyone who was reasonably light on their feet could make their way across by hopping from one dark, slick rock to the next. But they needed to pull heavily-laden wagons from the riverbank to their eventual base outside of Godsgrave, and so they needed to build a bridge. The good thing was that they had plenty of fresh, strong wood to work with, from the trees they felled, and that Soile had been training the troops for just such a need. Still, the process delayed their progress by an entire day.
Two days out from Godsgrave, another seventy soldiers joined them, having made their way downriver using the same fleet of canoes until they reached the place where the new road began. They’d left thirty of their number behind, on the banks of the river, where six large rafts, made of trees which had been felled and lashed together, had been used to transport the first wagons and horses, as well as an initial load of supplies. The final twenty had been assigned by Soile to take the canoes – and the rafts roped to them – back upriver to the dam and the waystone, where the next group of wagons, horses, and supplies would be waiting.
For Liv, the best part of the expedition was the evenings. Once the army had made camp, and dinner was cooking over a fire, she could almost pretend that she was once again with her friends: travelling through the high desert, and their first meeting with Silica, perhaps, or in the mountains between Valegard and Al’fenthia. There were no meetings on tax policy, demands from Ambassador Ridley, or pestering from the guilds who wanted to operate in Alliance lands just as they’d gotten used to doing for generations. She was able to put aside the queen, however briefly, and simply spend time with her friends.
Kaija and her guards stood sentry, keeping just anyone from approaching their cook fire and tents, and it was possible to find a few hours of quiet and companionship each evening. Ghveris would drag a few logs over – though he could never sit on one himself, or he would simply break it – and they would gather around, exhausted and aching after a day’s labour. The woodsmoke helped to keep the bugs away, and when it came time to sleep, they used hanging drapes of cheesecloth to let the air move, while shielding their skin from the biting insects.
The addition of Thora and Miina was more comfortable than she might have expected. The lady’s maid had long since perfected the art of somehow always being present when Liv needed her, and otherwise unnoticed, lingering somewhere off to the edge of the group. Given how much Liv had come to rely on her, it was strange to think back on just how much she’d resisted the idea, when Thora had first been hired by Julianne and Henry, in Freeport.
Miina was, somehow, the cousin that she’d never had, but always longed for. With anyone else, it might have been awkward, only meeting once they were both adults: but Miina was so full of excitement and mischief that it only ever felt natural. Just how much trouble the other woman could be was made clear when Wren led them, the night before they were due to reach the shoals, to a cenote a quarter mile from the road.
“If we get eaten by one of those enormous snakes, Wren, I’m never going to forgive you,” Sidonie complained. She kept one hand up in front of her face, to ward off snapping branches and brush.
Liv, walking beside Keri and close enough that her long shadow was cast outward by the orb of light he’d summoned, laughed. “Unless a wyrm comes out of the trees, Sidonie, I think you’ll be safe.” Her headaches had returned, after so long out of a rift, but at this point it was easier to continue on then to try to make her way all the way back to the dam.
She found the cenotes fascinating - some of them were near perfect circles, as if someone had punched a hole down into the very earth and rock on which the jungle was rooted. When she thought back to what Silica had described, she realized that was very nearly the truth. Liv tried to imagine how big a chunk of rock would have to be, to produce something thirty, forty, even sixty feet deep – and just how catastrophic the impact must have been, when a piece of the orbital ring struck the city of the V?dim. It wasn’t easy to picture.
This particular example had partially collapsed along one side, leaving a slope of jumbled rock, interspersed with foliage, which led down to the water below. Under the light of Keri’s hovering glob, which he sent up into the air above the cenote like a miniature sun, the water sparkled a beautiful blue, like shimmering Dakruiman dyed silk. The round edge of rock along the rest of the cenote dropped twenty feet straight down.
Wren paused at the rim, turned around, and addressed the group of them, while Kaija quietly set half a dozen sentries to surround the cenote. “It’s been two weeks since we left Bald Peak,” the huntress began. “And all of us have put in a lot of work. I thought that, before we reach Godsgrave, you all deserved one night to relax a bit. And to get yourselves clean – most of you stink!” She elbowed Ghveris who, at her side, was an obvious exception. Then, Wren unslung a pack from her shoulder and dumped out half a dozen bars of soap.
“Don’t have to tell me twice,” Miina exclaimed, and immediately began stripping off her clothing.
“We will wait for you all to be done,” Keri said, turning away from Liv’s cousin. Arjun and Ghveris joined him, and the three men found themselves a few large rocks to sit on.
While Liv, Sidonie, Thora and Wren picked their way down the slope of rocks, Miina simply threw herself, pale and naked in the light of Keri’s magic, over the edge. She whooped and pinwheeled her arms and legs as she fell down to the water, hit with an enormous splash, and then came up with a broad grin on her face.
“This feels amazing!” Miina shouted up to the other women. “It’s like an entire cloud of dirt, sweat, and much just came off me all at once. Get down here!”
“You’re insane,” Sidonie chided her, once they were close enough not to shout. “You didn’t even wait for us to check how deep the water is. You could have broken your neck!”
“But I didn’t.” Miina shrugged, and sent an enormous splash of water at them with the swipe of one hand. Liv could only shake her head, but she was smiling while she did it.
They made the men wait nearly an entire bell, while Liv and the rest of the women first scrubbed and then swam under the warm rays of a magical sun. She’d always had a preference for the hot springs beneath Castle Whitehill, but even Liv had to admit there was nothing quite so bracing as cold water on a hot day – and the jungles of varuna were warmer than even the height of summer in the mountains.
After they’d had their fill, they wrapped themselves in the towels they’d brought, and Liv settled herself on one of the rocks above the cenote while Thora combed out her hair. Keri and Arjun’s voices occasionally drifted up from the water below, and even the rumble of Ghveris joining their conversation from time to time, but Liv didn’t try to listen. She did, however, notice Wren frowning at the sound.
“What is it?” Liv asked her friend.
“It just makes me so angry,” Wren admitted. “It’s one more thing he can’t do, because Ractia and Celris and the rest of them would rather have a weapon than a man. He has to watch us eat, he has to sit off to one side while his friends swim. He doesn’t show it, but I know how much it hurts him.”
Liv reached her hand out, and clasped Wren’s. She didn’t have any idea what she could possibly do to help, but at least she could be there for her friend. That night, after they all made their way back to the camp, Liv was certain that she wasn’t the only one who slept soundly.
The next morning, it was Arjun and Sidonie who pushed the road forward first. Everyone had agreed that they wanted Liv ready to cast when they finally reached the shoals, and they could already see dark clouds gathered ahead. Sidonie took the first shift, and Arjun the second, so that any mana he had left when he was finished would be available for healing spells.
It was midmorning when the last screen of trees fell, revealing an enormous crater, miles across.
volume eight is finished!
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. Skinny-dipping before the dungeon. Jurian's spirit is laughing at her. [36+ Rings of Mana, not counting mana stored in items.]
Arjun Iyuz - Journeyman Guildmage from Lendh ka Dakruim; his jati specializes in healing magic. "Oh, oh! I've seen this nonsense before!" [18 Rings of Mana]
Inkeris "Keri" ka Ilmari k?n B?lris - A young warrior of the Unconquered House of B?lris, father to Rei. Would vibe real hard with a bunch of Vietnam war films. [20 Rings of Mana.]
Miina t?r Eilis, of House D?ivi - Daughter of Eilis, niece of Eila, cousin of Liv, Lady in Waiting. Mistress of cannonballs. [21 Rings of Mana]
Sidonie Corbett - Guildmage. All the math. [19 Rings of Mana]
Soaring Eagle - Husband of Calm Waters, father of Blossom. Red Shield Tribe. Does not use the imperial system, but I probably won't ever say what the Red Shields have instead.
Wren Wind Dancer - Daughter of Nighthawk, cousin of Calm Waters. Might have exaggerated just how bad the piranhas are - but also might have not. This is a fantasy world...
