The Making of a Mage King: White Star (32 page)

Reluctantly and even grimly, Leto did as his king asked, and they wove their way through the crowd. A lot of women were here; all of them, Sean was sure, were hoping to be married, or have their daughters married, into this family, or even to someone in the royal court. As they walked through the people, Sean watched the young ladies they passed as much as those they spoke to. Not that Leto concentrated on the women, Sean suspected he might be avoiding them, but under the circumstances, he couldn’t avoid too many of them.

The women ranged in age from sixteen, on their first coming out, to women old enough to be Sean’s grandmother, all with eyes only for the young new-come lord and his companion. Leto, who was in his upper twenties, was a handsome man, but his bald head, dark eyes, and permanent frown kept nearly everyone at a distance.

It didn’t take long for Sean to weed out the women who looked at Leto and saw only the demon that lurked over his shoulder. He discarded too those who saw only his title and this palace that he could hand them, and eventually settled on a handful who admired the man. Eventually, he chose a woman who was too shy to speak to them, but watched them with doe eyes whenever they were within sight. She was dressed in her best, and she reminded Sean very much of the Nord woman, she too had been proud even in her poverty, and still willing to pay men to go after the members of her family held by the guild.

After several passes through the crowd, Sean headed for that one. Upon seeing them heading directly for her, her eyes grew large, but she didn’t retreat and her curtsey was graceful and deep. Sean lifted her to her feet and began to lead her in a circle around Leto and himself. Eventually, he got Leto moving too, so that the two of them were circling him confused. “The Dance,” he whispered into the ears of the different musicians around the room, and they began to play, taking a few moments to coordinate and play a unified tune. Under his encouragement, the two of them began to step in time with the music.

Seeing what was happening, the people began to move back as far as the confines of the room would allow. Leto glared at Sean with ill-concealed fury. Sean saw it, but he divided his attention for the young woman, too. She was fascinated and terrified. “Armelle, help me; dance with us. Help me build this fire.”

She appeared, body and soul; he had brought her without really intending to, but despite the piece of paper still in one hand, she joined her hands with theirs and they became a foursome. Face to face, Sean and Armelle turned; their hands grasped the hands of Leto on one side, and the lovely young woman on the other. Their turning guided the other two around in a slow circle.

The sight of Armelle absorbed Sean’s awareness and the magic between them kindled a tiny spark between Leto and the young lady. There had been no introductions, but right now, he didn’t care what her name was. All he wanted was for this to work.

As the dance evolved, Sean and Armelle moved apart, drawing their hands together, bringing the new dancers closer. Leto lost his anger as he fell into the liquid brown eyes of his new lady. He struggled and bucked; he was highly reluctant to resign his loss and allow another to take up the painful end of the tie, but the woman was strong and gentle, holding and petting, turning and preening in all the right places. As select members of the audience played their part, the magic grew strong, especially with the king and queen dancing the Dance too, in an orbit around the new pair.

This painful ecstasy was almost more than Sean could stand, but he was determined to remain detached enough so that he and Armelle would not be the first couple to retire from the dance floor. He wanted his magic…their magic, to feed the flame between Leto and his new wife. He wanted their joining to be every bit as strong as his was; it needed to be strong lest it be eroded by the previous loss.

Despite his struggles, it happened, and helplessly, Leto spun his mate toward the stairs and his room, struggling all the way, making every step a slow resignation.

With that, Sean could resign too. He let the magic consume him completely and was only slightly aware of a servant scurrying in front of them to find them a room. He didn’t notice Laon and Ferris following. Long before they reached their door, he wasn’t noticing anything at all except Armelle’s glowing smile and her laughing green eyes.

Coming back down the stairs the next morning, Sean was certain he was walking on air. He found his men scattered around the hall in various stages of repose, sleep, and awake. He also found Lady Lorraine and led his wife up to her for proper introduction. “Lady Lorraine, this is my wife, Armelle. I must extend my apologies for making so free with your son. I hope he won’t be too angry with me.”

Lady Lorraine greeted Armelle with a deep curtsey, then said, “It looked like he was sorely tempted, my lord. If he’d had his sword on, or if he’d been bold enough to reach for yours, he might have had a go at it. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him so angry, and I’ve seen him throw some serious temper tantrums, young and old.” She took a cup of steaming tea from the tray of a passing servant; Sean and Armelle each took one too.

Armelle turned to take in more of the hall she had only glimpsed the night before and said, “Here he comes now.”

If there was going to be trouble between them, Sean didn’t want everyone to see, so he strode across the room and snagged Leto, leading him outside and away from the others, leaving his new wife to make her own way through these new waters. Once the doors were closed, he faced Leto. “You can hit me if you want. Maybe I deserve it, but I couldn’t see you wasting away. I feel it just being at a distance; it must be so much worse…” He couldn’t bring himself to put it into words, not with Armelle standing so close for a change.

“I could kill you for what you did, but I feel much better now. The pain is still there, but…” A look of embarrassment crossed his face. “I don’t even know her name. How could I…? I have just…” He looked back at Sean. “She takes very good care of her end of the link, so the pain will ease in time. I do have to thank you for that. The desire to die from the loss is very strong. The will to live can only win the battle for so long without help.”

They clasped hands and Sean said, “I think you better go back in there and meet you wife, don’t you?”

Leto laughed. “I guess I really should. Tell me something, since you’re such a good matchmaker…how do you meet someone you’ve already married and spent the night with, doing things you wouldn’t imagine…well, maybe you would. Was that
your
wife?”

Sean was laughing now too, pleased that Leto was not too angry with him. “You walk in there and take her hand and say, ‘Hello, my name is Leto Lorraine, and you are…’ Come on, we’ll make it a full round of introductions. I’ll introduce you to my wife, too.”

As comically uncomfortable as it was, Leto did exactly as Sean suggested and learned that his new wife’s name was Mishelle Nancy, from a prominent, but poor family to the south. In the hopes of finding a wealthy husband, she had come to court and was given the position of handmaiden to the previous lady of the house, much to her regret. She was unwilling to discuss the particulars about that relationship, and her face colored at the very idea. Well, that was something between her and her new husband; there were no secrets under the Dance.

After their introductions, Lady Lorraine said, “You will all stay for breakfast. I insist.”

“Fine, on one condition,” said Sean.

“And that is?” she asked with raised eyebrows.

“That it’s only a meal. No music or dancing this time,” Sean said with a grin.

Leto nodded, then grinned at his new wife.

After breakfast, Armelle filled Sean in on the latest. “Twenty demons arrived from Nord last week. Apparently, the Nord district had four garrisons. Two were along the northern border, guarding the river and two were inland. It wasn’t clear why there were so many, but the district is rather large.”

“Twenty? Well, do what you can for them. Dad told me you were housing them in the dungeon. I suppose there’s nothing better.”

Afterward, painfully, Sean sent Armelle back to the palace. Sending Armelle back was the worst part of the morning, and as a result, Sean’s departure from the city was almost hasty. He didn’t see Leto’s look of sympathy. He had never had to deal with the bond at extreme distance, but he knew, just the same.

Under gathering clouds with temperatures above freezing for the first time in over a week, Sean and his army headed east in files of two soldiers with their packhorse between them, and Seth and his men bringing up the remounts in the rear. Sean set a grueling pace. He had saved gouts of time by learning how to gate halfway across the country, but that didn’t mean that he, therefore, had time to spare. He just felt he had a better chance of getting out of these mountains before the snow trapped them – not a terrific chance, just a better chance – and languishing in a mountain cave, wounded for more than a week had just taken a chunk out of whatever time he had saved.

Every mile that slid under his horse’s hooves ate at Sean in a way he couldn’t describe, except to say that he was running out of time, and no one seemed to understand. They understood better when he said he was trying to beat the snows, especially now with winter licking at his heels, but they still didn’t understand his worry. It felt like a giant hand was pushing him between his shoulder blades and pulling all his nerves and muscles into a hard fist in the process.

Moving along the road did indeed ensure that Sean was
seen
marching under the White Star banner. Not only was the road well-used by all manner of people going about their business, but the countryside around them was littered with small farms. Everyone seemed to have massive gardens, all bare now, and there was a large assortment of livestock providing meat, wool or milk.

The people they passed, whether on the road or in the villages, watched them gape-mouthed. Some waved tentatively, but not many. Sean remembered that the stories about the White Star were not stories of peace and prosperity; they were stories of destruction and fear. It was no wonder the people weren’t overly happy to see an army, small though it was, marching under it.

Most of the time, Sean managed to find them deserted places to camp for the night, then they were off again early in the morning. The only hot meal he allowed them was the stew the girls made for them while they set up camp at night. If it wasn’t for them, he might not have bothered with even a fire, so it was probably a good thing that women had come along.

Every evening, before trying to find some sleep, Sean would scout ahead. He was determined to skip miles where he could, but he also knew that Manuel was right, and Ferris had agreed. He would travel the road within five miles of any farm, town or village.

He also trained with Laon, and even with little Kendal, before moving off to try and tire himself out the rest of the way with his own exercises, and every night he tried to sleep with only marginal success. Breaking camp at first light and not stopping until the sun touched the western horizon, they managed to cover nearly forty miles a day.

Every day the clouds pushed up behind them, growing thicker and darker, seeming to cut into Sean’s desire to leave early and stop late by robbing the necessary light to do so.

Sean resented the gathering storm. He resented the need to be seen. He resented the miles that sped by under his horse’s hooves, and he nearly came to blows with Ferris, Cordan, and even Larry as they all struggled to keep him grounded and sane.

On the fourth evening, Sean waved Laon away and Kendal had sense enough to be satisfied with lessons from Ferris. Sean made his way to a ridge overlooking the camp. He was sweating from exertion that wasn’t accomplishing what he wanted when he heard a rolling boom of thunder somewhere to his right. He looked back at the camp behind him and saw that everyone there had looked too. Sheet lightning tickled the peeks uncomfortably close to their position.
I picked poorly this time; we’re exposed on this ridgeline. I didn’t think of lightning.

Sean looked back along their trail; the last place they had passed about four miles back had been a sizable goat ranch. Sean was planning to gate over these peeks in the morning, covering the next twenty miles in a blink, putting them out a couple miles before the next homestead along the road. He was going to scout the site that evening, but now he fervently wished he had moved them already. The storm had finally gathered enough to become angry and it would catch up with them all too soon.

He stood there above camp and watched the storm approach. More than one patch of bushes or dry grass were set alight by lightning strikes that succeeded in reaching the ground, then they were quenched by the sheet of rain that combed across the landscape in a vast curtain of water. The water didn’t worry him so much, but they were completely exposed to the lightning, and there was no chance of outrunning it now.

Desperately, Sean gathered himself. Ignoring Ferris and Cordan, who were running for his position, he pushed a shield across the whole camp. He only peripherally noticed Seth and the rest of the men trying to keep the horses from getting too upset and bolting; he noticed them only because of his desire to keep them contained under his shield.

Whether it was his use of the magic or the inevitable, Sean never knew, but the lightning that reached for his encampment hit his shield, skittered across it and found him. The outpouring of magic turned Sean into a living conduit and he drank at the lightning like a dying battery, using it to feed the shield that seemed to draw even more of the lightning.

When the freezing rain finally reached them, the lightning had gone on and Sean was left staggering and shaking. He barely noticed Ferris and Cordan picking themselves up from the ground and covering the rest of the distance between them. He lifted his shaking hand in front of him and started to laugh, knowing that he sounded demented, but finding that funny, too. He saw afterimages in spectral flavors and the rain felt like green and blue, it was all so very funny and he couldn’t stop giggling.

Ferris reached him first and stopped Cordan from touching him. “Sean, are you all right?” he asked, watching him closely.

“Never better,” said Sean, his words were slurred and quivering with mirth. “Did you know that green tastes like parsley? Or that red smells like a rose; I like roses.” He became suddenly serious. “I gave a rose to Jenny once; I wanted to give it to Armelle, but she was so far away.” He struggled to focus on Ferris, and saw Cordan. “Mattie is a good woman,” he said, and a tear slid down his cheek; maybe it was the rain. “I would have married her.” Then he started to giggle again. “She has such long legs.”

Ferris was franticly racking his brain for the right thing to say. “Lightning, Sean. What do you do with lightning? How do you protect a house from lightning?” He could think of nothing else. He had no idea if it would work.

“Lightning?” Sean repeated, easily swayed by the change of subject. “I made it storm once, remember? I made it go away too.” He looked at the camp below him; it was barely visible through the downpour. “I protected the camp from lightning.” He swayed trying to think of something that he seemed to have forgotten. Then he brightened and giggled again. “I forgot to ground it. You protect a house by grounding it. You take a piece of metal and poke it into the ground…” He drove his sword into the boulder at his knee and the resultant discharge pulverized the boulder and rock shelf beneath it for nearly a quarter mile around them, lifting and then dropping the whole section anywhere from a few inches to a couple feet.

When Ferris and Cordan picked themselves off the ground again, they were appalled to see Sean sprawled near his blackened sword that was still sticking out of the ground. They were relieved to see that his eyes were still open, but he was utterly stunned. He moved feebly as they carried him down to the camp where Mattie met them. With the near panic in the camp, she had been unaware of Sean’s problem until she saw them carrying him down the hill.

“What happened?” she asked, as soon as she reached them.

“I watched it,” said Cordan. “I saw it all, but I still don’t know what happened.”

“The lightning strike,” said Ferris. “He took in the lightning then let it go into the rock.”

“He did
what
?” asked Mattie. She looked at her husband and he just shrugged and nodded, puzzled.

They carried him into his tent, where they stripped him of his sodden clothes that had grown stiff with the cold, then they wrapped him warmly in several blankets. He muttered and tossed while Mattie forced her medicinal teas down him. She had found nothing wrong with him when she tried to heal him, and the effort had only left him shaking. Eventually, near dawn he fell asleep and was quiet.

Sean woke to the sound of rain drumming on the tent. He didn’t remember coming down from the hill. He remembered worrying that the lightning would start a brush fire, but the sound of the rain drowned that worry. He rolled to get up and found his body strangely uncooperative; he also saw Mattie sitting at his table watching him. “Time to break camp. I forgot to scout our destination; I need my map.”

“You’re not going anywhere today,” said Mattie, as she came over to him and pushed him back down without much effort.

“Mattie, I know it’s cold out there, but we can’t just huddle in our tents because it’s raining. I don’t have the time.”

“We’re not staying because of freezing rain. We’re staying because you nearly killed yourself last night, or at least I think you did.”

Sean pushed himself up again. “I’m fine. We need to move on.”

“Fine,” said Mattie, defiance dripping from the word. “If you can dress yourself and walk out of this tent under your own power, we’ll go, but if I have to pick you up just once, anywhere between here and the fire, we stay here at least until tomorrow.” She tossed his pants and shirt onto the bed and stood there watching him with her arms crossed.

He looked at her.
I’ve crossed one of her lines again, but I can’t be easy on myself just because I screwed up again.
He managed to get his shirt on with only little difficulty, but the task came close to convincing him that she might be right. “Turn around while I put my pants on.”

She scoffed. “I’ve seen it,” she said, but she turned her back anyway.

Sean, however, found the simple task of putting his pants on quite beyond him. As soon as he stood to pull them up, he wilted to the floor in a dead faint.

He woke again to find himself back in bed. As soon as he identified Mattie’s concerned face he said, “We stay.” He was going to ask what had happened, but he fell asleep before he could get the words out.

He did make it out of the tent under his own steam late that afternoon, to find Ferris talking to Laon by a fire that surely took magic to keep burning. “So, the living lightning rod walks among us mortals again,” said Ferris. “I almost forgot what it was like to travel with you. Did you order this?”

“Care to explain what happened?” asked Sean as he pulled his cloak closer against the cold rain. “I don’t remember much.” He didn’t remember any of it, but he didn’t want to admit that to anyone.

Ferris explained it all to him, along with his understanding of what had occurred. Sean had never been high before. In his opinion, abusing drugs was such a stupid thing, and that opinion had not changed, especially if the aftereffects were anything like what he was going through now. Even though he was moving on his own, he felt fogged and detached, almost as if a delayed reaction of about a second was happening with everything he said and did.

As soon as he learned that he had driven Soran’s sword into rock and used it as a ground, he ran back up the hill to find it. When he reached the spot, he noticed glaring differences in the landscape. The sword, which he now clearly remembered driving into a boulder, was imbedded in coarse sandy ground.

Dreading what he would find, Sean grasped the sword and pulled it up out of the sand. The leather wrapping of the hilt disintegrated under his grasp. The blade came out of the sand in one piece, but it was blackened, warped and heavily coated with melted sand. “No,” said Sean, as he sank to his knees holding the ruined blade.

“I’m sorry, Seanad,” said Ferris, meaning it. The loss of such an artifact was like losing a piece of history.

“Can you fix it?” asked Laon.

“Maybe, but I’m not a blacksmith. I don’t know how; it’s not just bent up,” said Sean, feeling far more emotion than he ever would have expected in connection to an object. “Making a straight, clean strip of metal is different than making a sword, and I’m thinking this needs much more than just straightening.”

“Maybe the magic knows what you do not,” suggested Laon.

“I have to know something.” Sean searched his memories. Had any of his ancestors been blacksmiths? There were too few of those memories where he needed them to know the answer to that question. Soran had watched the sword being made, but watching wasn’t the same as learning how. He turned to Ferris. “Did my father know anything about blacksmithing? Or
his
father? Any of them that you know of?”

They were in camp by now and Ferris shook his head. “No, Seanad, none of them that I know of.”

“I can’t do anything about it now, and Mattie would skin me alive if I spent any more magic just now. I’ll just have to wait until I find a good blacksmith willing to work with me.” He turned to his tent feeling dejected and more than a little tired. “We gate at first light,” he said over his shoulder.