Gruin and I did not get our heads cut off and waved around in the air to ward off evil spirits, which was quite a nice outcome given we’d ended up encountering, judging by the rate of arrow-fire at least, roughly twice the number of orcs we’d been planning to. That was about the end of our good news.

  “Can’t believe we didn’t get to die fighting those bastards,” Gruin spat, glaring up at me like it was my fault. Which, in the most technical sense, I suppose was true.

  “Some of us actually like living,” I sighed.

  “Bah, no bloody wonder you lanks can’t work together for anything. You’re all too scared of dying.” He said the last part in a deliberately high-pitched voice, mocking, I believed, the very concept of survival instincts.

  Which really just left me without anything to say. How do you even retort to that? What combination of words makes someone who says that reconsider his position? I just kept walking.

  We reached Arvharest quickly, at least. Walking with only Gruin again was a nice change of pace, and made me realise just how much Vara had slowed our group down. I thought about the best and most infuriating way I could inform her of that fact as we made it past the gates and headed to our current set of rooms in the city.

  Despite his anger, Morlo hadn’t actually killed our landlord. The consequence of this was that we now had our run of the property for as long as he remained convinced the Thaumaturge would do it otherwise.

  Granted, I am to this day fairly sure he would have. The end result of this is the same either way, we were living as comfortably as I ever had—including before my father kicked me out.

  I made the most of this luxury by eating my fill every meal without exception, having spent just long enough with no money to appreciate that I now had a functionally endless supply again thanks to Morlo.

  Of course we had to tell Morlo exactly what had happened, mainly because I still found myself too scared to lie to the mad Thaumaturge more than I strictly had to. The old man would know, somehow. In any case he was actually pleased by the news, which itself disturbed me more than most of what I’d seen him do.

  “This is splendid,” he grinned, “we’ll have a massive attack raining down on the city soon, if it’s true.”

  I failed to quite see the positivity in that, and gave voice to as much.

  “What exactly do you think the orcs will do to people stuck in this damned city?” I asked him.

  “Oh, try to savagely kill and eat them and all that,” Morlo cackled, “which everyone’s going to be scared of, which means we’ll get a great deal of influence and gratitude racked up for helping to stave the attack off.”

  I didn’t bother hiding my scepticism at that notion.

  For some context on how big a deal tens of thousands of orcs was, this was not so far after King Hengrys’ Anglysh unification. One of the first things our new King had decreed was to begin forming the first ever Army of Anglyn, a standing force made to serve and defend our country from foreign threats, or so he claimed. Realistically I imagine it was more to help him put down any rebellions that might follow his own unsteady seizing of power.

  Either way, it’s a good benchmark for how fucked we were. The Army of Anglyn had been founded about ten years prior, and its numbers were taken from every region and county in the whole country. Its numbers had recently hit a total of twenty eight thousand.

  That sounded fine to me, like it would enjoy rough numeric parity with the ‘tens of thousands’ of orcs if they were to meet. Only one problem, the Army of Anglyn was scattered halfway across the fucking country deployed in a dozen other battles.

  I voiced this concern to Morlo, who didn’t seem shaken at all.

  “Oh, we won’t be needing the Army.”

  That left me somewhat stunned and, briefly, incapable of speech, blinking and staring at the old man in my stupefaction, trying to find the right words only for them to slip from my tongue’s clumsy grip time and time again.

  “We’re being attacked by fucking tens of thousands of orcs!”

  Morlo snorted at that.

  “Relax, we have magic, a few thousand men-at-arms of our own…” his lip curled, “cannons and some of the most sophisticated walls in Anglyn—maybe the world. This will look nice and impossible, but in the end it’ll be a fairly mundane defence and you can soak up a lot of credit and fame by being noticeably involved in it.”

  The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  Hearing it said like that did actually calm me down, but only a bit. I threw myself back into practice while Morlo headed off to do Morlo things—presumably terrorising young people or burning down buildings—and left the rest of us alone. I didn’t even know where Gruin was, but imagined he was doing nothing good.

  Vara, though, was with me in the quarters.

  We were practicing Thaumaturgy, as I’d begun to almost compulsively do since finding out about the army. Let me tell you, having magical powers is a psychological safety blanket unlike any other, and I was eager to work until mine had finally become not-shit. That looked to be a while away, though.

  “You really are learning this fast,” Vara told me as we went, “Morlo said I was one of the quickest students he’d ever seen and you’re about my equal.”

  That actually stung my ego, ridiculously enough. I knew—or thought I knew—just enough about Thaumaturgy to have already decided it was a man’s game, but kept the fact to myself. No doubt, she picked up on it.

  ++”I did, it wasn’t exactly hard.”++

  By now I was capable of basic Thaumaturgy, a few apprentice-grade tricks. One of the ones I’d been practicing was to take two roughly equally-heavy objects, leaving one on the ground and lifting another up into the air. Then I dropped the one I lifted.

  Except it didn’t fall, instead it remained suspended as the one lying on the wooden boards of our floor slid along them to hit the far wall, then started grinding along that.

  And then the first one dropped properly.

  “Eleven seconds, I counted,” Vara told me, “new record.”

  I just grumbled, having her sustained this essentially without end.

  “When do I get to throw fireballs?” I asked.

  “You should focus on force more, you’ll get more utility out of it,” she chastised. I just snorted at that.

  “Right, I remember all the bruising and broken bones on those men who tried to stab you last week.”

  I thought she might explode in anger at that, but instead I was quite surprised by a snort of laughter from her. I couldn’t help but join her in it.

  Then things got awkward, Vara’s face fell, and I got the impression she had something important to say.

  Now, you can probably imagine many things Vara had seen and done that would’ve inspired this sort of reaction. No doubt you’re wondering about how she took the attack on our village, her near-death at the hands of those home invaders, her time spent travelling alone with Morlo, any number of other things. I, being my young self, drew something of a different conclusion.

  And braced myself for her to confess a secret infatuation.

  Well you can imagine my surprise when she chose to speak about something that was not Kyvaine, a topic of conversation that I was not quite mentally prepared to have it would seem.

  “Do you ever think about the people who died back at Sheppleberry?” she asked me.

  “Uh, yes,” I lied.

  She glared at me.

  “Liar,” she truthed.

  I just shrugged. “Scorpions and toads, what are you meaning to say?”

  Vara apparently decided that it wasn’t worth getting into an unrelated argument, and just continued as I’d indicated.

  “For a while I was blaming you for it, kept telling myself you should’ve kept from touching that seal in the Dungeon, or other things. But it was my idea to go down there, wasn’t it?”

  I didn’t quite follow. “You’re a woman,” I said, stupidly.

  Vara just bristled, but not at me.

  “Yeah, so nothing is ever my fault, because I’m basically just a big child aren’t I? Need everyone else to bend over and watch me in case I exercise some freedom and create an inevitable disaster. I always hated that, and I always got a lot of mileage out of using it to my advantage. What does that tell you?”

  If you know a person who’s less suited to have this sort of conversation than I was, do let me know, I’d like to study them for science. I barely understood the gist of what she was saying, let alone the nuances, and so I just shrugged and grunted out some idiocy about male protectors. That more or less closed the topic, for the time being at least.

  “You’re coming along better with fire, then?” Vara asked, changing the subject so abruptly I was left stumbling after for a few moments.

  “I think so?” It came out as a question, damnit, but I was actually quite certain. She seemed certain enough, too.

  “Most people are.”

  “Right, Morlo told me it was the easiest thing to control.”

  “Manipulate,” she corrected me. I just grunted. As patient as ever, Vara continued. “That’s easiest for most of us, based on your progress with that you should be using it in combat soon.”

  Soon. For a Thaumaturge, even a Thaumaturge-in-training, soon could mean a year. I doubted it would be that long, going by Vara’s performance after a mere few months, but it still wasn’t nearly as close as I’d have liked.

  Not as close as the damned orcs, it was looking like.

  “What do you think our chances are of surviving this?” Vara asked me abruptly.

  I just stared at her.

  “How should I know?”

  She glared.

  “You’ve fought in battles before, right? Against those cave-creatures, and in an actual army as well when you stormed that castle.”

  I had genuinely forgotten about that until she reminded me just now, and realised, with all due embarrassment, that I’d not actually learned anything from either incident.

  “I…think we’ll be fine,” I grinned, “we have a fortified position here, the cannons will do a mile of good, and our troops are well trained and fighting in familiar ground.”

  Vara studied me for a moment.

  “You’re just parroting something Morlo told you,” she guessed.

  “I am,” I admitted. Vara sighed, but whatever she was about to say got swallowed up by the sound of a door opening.

  I was somewhat relieved, myself, still feeling flayed from the embarrassment of knowing so little about something I’d experienced so relatively much. My sole consolation was knowing that, however humiliating the lack was, only a handful of people actually knew about it, and its damage would be limited to giving them some fuel to make fun of me.

  Morlo strided in with a broad grin on his face, looking as demented and evil as ever.

  “Good news, Kyvaine,” he announced, “I just got you a nice little job teaching some of the new levies in Arvharest’s defence about how to fight orcs, given you just saw off a group of them and have so much time battling other magical beasts under your belt already. You have the chance to show off all your experience.”

  I studied the Thaumaturge, scrutinising him for some hint that he’d read my mind and engineered this as some form of deliberate torture. As always, I found nothing given away in him.

  Just a smile that didn’t reach the eyes, and a sense that many known things were not being shared with me.

  Explore more of our books — begin your journey here: