Rise Of Empire (14 page)

“You could have mentioned that you knew Arcadius,” Arista told them as they sat down together at the common table, an old bit of furniture defaced like everything else. It wobbled enough to make her glad the wine was in a jug with cups instead of a bottle and stemmed glasses.

“And ruin the fun?” Hadrian replied with a handsome grin. “So Arcadius was your professor?”

“One of them. The curriculum requires you to take several classes, learning different subjects from the various teachers. Master Arcadius was my favorite. He was the only one to teach magic.”

“So you learned magic from Arcadius as well as Esrahaddon?” Royce asked, digging into his pie.

Arista nodded, poking her pie with a knife and letting the steam out.

“That must have been interesting. I’m guessing their teaching styles were a bit different.”

“Like night and day.” She took a sip of wine. “Arcadius was formal in his lessons. He followed a structured course, using books and lecturing very professorially, like you saw this evening. His style made the lessons seem right and proper, despite the stigma associated with them. Esrahaddon was haphazard, and he seemed to teach whatever came to his mind. Oftentimes he had trouble explaining things. Arcadius is clearly the better teacher, but …” She paused.

“But?” Royce asked.

“Well, don’t tell Arcadius,” she said conspiratorially, “but Esrahaddon seems to be the more skilled and knowledgeable. Arcadius is the expert on the history of magic, but Esrahaddon
is
the history, if you follow me.”

She took a bite of pie and got a mouthful of onions and burnt crust.

“Having learned from both, doesn’t that make you the third most skilled mage in Avryn?”

Arista smirked bitterly and washed the mouthful down with more wine. While she suspected Royce was correct, she had cast only two spells since leaving their tutelage.

“Arcadius taught me many important lessons. Yet his classes concerned themselves with using knowledge as a means to broaden his students’ understanding of their world. It’s his way of getting us to think in new directions, to perceive what is around us in terms that are more sensible. Of course, this didn’t make his students happy. We all wanted the secrets to power, the tools to reshape the world to our liking. Arcadius
doesn’t really give answers, but rather forces his students to ask questions.

“For instance, he once asked us what makes noble blood different from a commoner’s blood. We pricked our fingers and ran tests, and as it turns out, there is no detectable difference. This led to a fight on the commons between a wealthy merchant’s son and the son of a low-ranking baron. Master Arcadius was reprimanded and the merchant’s son was whipped.”

Hadrian finished eating, and Royce was more than halfway through his pie, but he had left his wine untouched after grimacing with the first sip. Arista chanced another bite and caught a mushy carrot, still more onions, and a soggy bit of crust. She swallowed with a sour look.

“Not a fan of meat pie?” Hadrian asked.

She shook her head. “You can have it if you like.” She slid it over.

“So how was studying with Esrahaddon?”

“He was a completely different story,” she went on after another mouthful of wine. “When I couldn’t get what I wanted from Arcadius, I went to him. You see, all of Arcadius’s teachings involved elaborate preparations, alchemic recipes that are used to trigger the release of nature’s powers and incantations to focus it. He also stressed observation and experimentation to tap the power of the natural world. Arcadius relied on manual techniques to derive power from the elements, but Esrahaddon explained how the same energy could be summoned through more subtle enticement, using only motion, harmonic sound, and the power of the mind.

“The problem was Esrahaddon’s technique relied on hand movements, which explains why the church cut his off. He tried to talk me through the motions, but without the ability to demonstrate, it was very frustrating. Subtle differences can
separate success from failure, so learning from him was hopeless. All I ever managed to do was make a man sneeze. Oh, and once I cursed Countess Amril with boils.” Hadrian poured the last of the wine into his and Arista’s cups after Royce waved him off. “Arcadius was angry when he found out about the curse and lectured me for hours. He was always against using magic for personal gain or for the betterment of just a few. He often said, ‘Don’t waste energy to treat a single plague victim; instead, search to eliminate the illness and save thousands.’

“So yes, you’re right. I’m likely the most tutored mage in all of Avryn, but that’s really not saying much. I would be hard-pressed to do much more than tickle someone’s nose.”

“And you can do that just with hand movements?” Royce asked skeptically.

“Would you like a demonstration?”

“Sure, try it on Hadrian.”

“Ah no, let’s not,” Hadrian protested. “I don’t want to be accidently turned into a toad or rabbit or something. Didn’t you learn anything else?”

“Well, he tried to teach me how to boil water, but I never got it to work. I would get close, but there was always something missing. He used to …” She trailed off.

“What?” Hadrian asked.

She shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s just that I was practicing gestures on the ride here and I—” She squinted in concentration as she ran through the sequence in her mind. They should be similar. Both the rain and the boiling spell used the same element—water. The same motion should be found in each. Just thinking about it made her heart quicken.

That is it, isn’t it? That is the missing piece. If I have the rest of the spell correct, then all I need to do is …

Looking around for the bucket that Hadrian had brought up, she closed her eyes and took several deep breaths. Boiling
water, while harder than making a person sneeze, took a short, simple incantation, one she had attempted without success hundreds of times. She cleared her mind, relaxed, then reached out, sensing the room—the light and heat emanating from the candles, the force of the wind blowing above the roof, the dripping of water from their wet clothes. She opened her eyes and focused on the bucket and the water inside. Lukewarm, it lay quiet, sleeping. She felt its place in the world, part of the whole, waiting for a change, wanting to please.

Arista began to hum, letting the sounds follow the rhythm that spoke to the water. She sensed its attention. Her voice rose, speaking the few short words in a melody of a song. She raised a single hand and made the motions, only this time she added a simple sweep of her thumb. It felt perfect—the hole that evaded her in the past. She closed her hand into a fist and squeezed. The moment she did, she could feel the heat, and across the room steam rose.

Hadrian stood up, took two steps, and then stopped. “It’s bubbling,” he said, his voice expressing his amazement.

“Yeah, and so are our clothes.” Royce pointed to the pieces of wet clothing hanging on the line, which were beginning to hiss as steam rose from them.

“Oops.” Arista opened her hand abruptly. The wash water stopped boiling and the clothes quieted.

“By Mar, that’s unbelievable.” Hadrian stood grinning. “You really did it.”

Royce remained silent, staring at the steaming clothes.

“I know. Can you believe it?” she said.

“What else can you do?”

“Let’s not find out,” Royce interrupted. “It’s getting late and we’ll be leaving in a few hours, so we should get to sleep.”

“Killjoy,” Hadrian replied. “But he’s probably right. Let’s turn in.”

Arista nodded, walked behind the wall of blankets, and only then allowed herself a smile.

It worked! It really worked.

Lying on the little cot without bothering with a blanket, she stared at the ceiling and listened to the thieves moving about.

“You have to admit that was impressive,” she heard Hadrian say.

If Royce made a reply, she did not hear it. She had frightened him. The expression on his face had said more than words ever could. Lying there, looking up at the rafters, she realized she had seen that look before—the day Arcadius had reprimanded her. She had been leaving his office when he had stopped her. “I never taught curses in this class, boils or otherwise. Did you cause them by mixing a draft that she drank?”

“No,” she recalled saying. “It was a verbal curse.”

His eyes widened and his mouth gaped, but he said nothing more. At the time, she had thought his look was one of amazement and pride in a student exceeding expectations. Looking back, Arista realized she had seen only what she had wanted to see.

A
s Amilia watched, the playful flicker of candlelight caught the attention of the empress, which briefly replaced her blank stare.

Is that a sign?

Amilia often played this game with herself, looking for any improvement. A month had passed since Saldur had summoned her to his office to explain her duties. She knew she could never do half of what he wanted, but his main concern was the empress’s health, and Amilia was doing well in that regard. Even in this faint light, she could see the change. Modina’s cheeks were no longer hollow, her skin no longer stretched. The empress was now eating some vegetables and even bits of meat hidden in the soup. Still, Amilia feared the progress would not be good enough.

Modina still had not said a word—at least, not while awake. Often when the empress slept, she mumbled, moaned, and tossed about restlessly. Upon awakening, the girl cried, tears running down her cheeks. Amilia held her, stroked her hair, and tried to keep her warm, but the empress did not seem to notice her presence.

To pass the time, Amilia continued to tell Modina stories,
hoping it might prompt her into speaking, perhaps to ask a question. After telling her everything she could think of about her family, she moved on to fairy tales from her childhood. There was Gronbach, the evil dwarf who kidnapped a milkmaid and imprisoned her in his subterranean lair. The maiden solved the riddle of the three boxes, snipped off his beard, and escaped.

She even recounted scary stories told by her brothers in the dark of the carriage workshop. She knew they had been purposefully trying to frighten her, and even now the tales gave Amilia chills. But anything was worth a try to snap Modina back to the land of the living. The most disturbing of these were about elves, who put their victims to sleep with music before eating them.

When she ran out of fairy tales, she turned to stories she remembered from church, like the epic tale of how, in their hour of greatest need, Maribor sent the divine Novron to save mankind. Wielding the wondrous Rhelacan, he defeated the elves.

Thinking Modina would like the similarities to her own life, Amilia told the romantic account of the farmer’s daughter Persephone, whom Novron took to be his queen. When she refused to leave her simple village, he built the great imperial capital right there and named the city Percepliquis after her.

“So what story shall we have this evening?” Amilia asked as the two girls lay across from each other, bathed in the light of the candles. “How about
Kile and the White Feather?
Our monsignor used it from time to time when he wanted to make a point about penance and redemption. Have you heard that one? Do you like it? I do.

“Well, you see, the father of the gods, Erebus, had three sons: Ferrol, Drome, and Maribor; the gods of elves, dwarves,
and men. He also had a daughter, Muriel, who was the loveliest being ever created, and she held dominion over all the plants and animals. Well, one night Erebus became drunk and raped his own daughter. In anger, her brothers attacked their father and tried to kill him, but of course, gods can’t die.”

Amilia saw the candles flicker from a draft. It was always colder at night, and she got up and brought them each another blanket.

“So, where was I?”

Modina merely blinked.

“Oh, I remember, racked with guilt and grief, Erebus returned to Muriel and begged for her forgiveness. She was moved by her father’s remorse but still could not look at him. He pleaded for her to name a punishment. Muriel needed time to let the fear and pain pass, so she told him, ‘Go to Elan to live. Not as a god, but as a man, to learn humility.’ To repent for his misdeeds, she charged him to do good works. Erebus did as she requested and took the name of Kile. It’s said that he walks the world of men to this day, working miracles. For each act that pleases her, she bestows a white feather to him from her magnificent robe, which he places in a pouch kept forever by his side. On the day when all the feathers have been awarded, Muriel promised to call her father home and forgive him. The legend says that when the gods are reunited, all will be made right, and the world will transform into a paradise.”