Magician Prince (23 page)

He pulled magic from the world around him.
The method that he used was only slightly different from the one
that Xander used. Unlike Xander who absorbed great flows of magic
from the life-forces of individuals, often killing them, Byrn took
a little bit of the ambient energy that flowed from the world and
its inhabitants, so that instead of robbing one person of their
very existence he took a small bit from thousands of sources in
amounts that were so small that the effect was barely noticeable.
This energy was transformed into an aura of invisibility. It would
not last for very long, but Byrn hoped it would be long enough to
get him past these men.

His feet moved as quickly and quietly as they
could, but it was still an infuriatingly slow pace and Byrn had to
give his full attention to the invisibility spell to keep it from
dropping too soon. He held it close to him, but it was losing form
and Byrn had to constantly work to keep the framework of the spell
from falling apart.

Four soldiers rushed past him to one side and
he pressed up against a wall so that they would not run into him.
Three got by without incident, but the fourth’s foot collided with
Byrn’s own causing him to stumble forward. Byrn barely stopped from
crying out in surprise, but he thought he was discovered when the
soldier turned around and looked right at him for a moment before
he realized that the man was trying to figure out what caused him
to trip. One of the other guards commanded, “Hurry up already! What
is the matter? Walking on your own two feet too hard for you?”

“No, sir,” replied the one who had tripped
with a barely contained flare of anger in his tone, but he fell
back in line.

Byrn let go of his held breath and hurried
his way to the workshop. The door was open, but no one was inside.
Making sure that no one was looking from the hallway, Byrn shut the
door and released the invisibility aura.

He scavenged the room and looked for any
runes that Alia might have left lying around. She always had
magical devices and trinkets scattered about, but there were none
of the little wooden runes to be found. Now what was he to do? He
was too tired to use the invisibility spell all the way to the
private quarters and there was no guarantee that there would be any
runes there either. Sneaking out of the castle and past the army
outside was even more ludicrous. He paced the room back and forth,
trying to figure out what to do when he caught the gleam of
something gold out of the corner of his eye. It was the control
collar that Alia said she had deactivated. Byrn looked at it with
his special vision for traces of magic and found none before
snapping it closed around his neck.

The door flew open and a quartet of soldiers
entered the room. Upon seeing Byrn the first two raised their
swords to strike him down, but another commanded them to stop.
“Look at the collar,” he said, pointing at Byrn’s neck. “He’s one
of ours. What are you doing in here?”

Byrn stammered as he tried to come up with
something plausible. “I- I was ordered-“

“All right. All right. We know you were
‘ordered.’ Just get back to your unit. The rest of the wizards are
outside.”

The soldiers parted for Byrn and he walked
past them without a word and purposefully kept his face turned down
to avoid eye contact, guessing that this was the way the other
collared magicians might act after all of the mistreatments they
must have endured.

The main doors of the castle had been broken
down with a battering ram. Most of the heavy wood lay on the
ground, but clumps of it were still attached to the massive hinges
that the door swung on. Outside there were staging groups of
soldiers, Kenzai, and magicians. Byrn headed over to the magicians
and was almost stopped a few times, but was allowed to pass without
being questioned once the soldiers took notice of his collar.

It was only the other magicians who ranged
from children to the elderly that paid him any mind and recognized
him as an outsider, but no one said anything. Whether that was
because they were ordered not to speak or because they did not wish
for any of the normal humans to take notice was unclear.

There were about forty magicians among his
unit who stood at attention in case they were ordered to go in.
Byrn was the only one without a staff and hoped that no one else
would make that distinction of him. He looked around to try and get
an idea of the kingdom army’s size and makeup. Certainly, he
couldn’t see the whole of the army from his vantage point. There
were others inside, in town, and probably on the outskirts, but it
was a bit concerning to discover that his unit was the only group
of magicians within view. Surely there had to be more of them left.
He wished he could ask some of the men around him, but did not wish
to draw attention to himself. If this was all that was left of the
hundreds of magicians that lived in the domains, then Byrn could
not allow them to remain as prisoners. For now finding Xander and
reclaiming his body would have to wait.

Hours passed and Byrn began to feel more
comfortable as the magicians were ordered by one of the Kenzai who
commanded them to return to their camp. The magicians moved at a
slow pace that suited Byrn just fine and it was another hour before
they came to a stop at the designated camp where they could rest
for the night. A handful of Collective magicians were added to the
unit with active collars around their necks and if they had looks
of despair on their faces when they first arrived that look grew
ten times worse when they saw Byrn and believed that Xander Necros,
their leader, had been taken prisoner too. They joined Byrn one at
a time believing that if something was to happen their best bet of
escape would be at their leader’s side. He wondered if he should
tell them the truth, but could not risk talking while the camp was
in utter silence.

At some point the army would have to disperse
and as Byrn thought about it, he guessed that these other
Collective magicians would be questioned. It was a guarded secret
that magicians could travel great distances at ease, but Janus knew
that and he would surely have shared that bit of information with
his generals. They would probably figure out that the resistance
was so light, because most of the magicians fled the battle. They
would want to know where those Collective members went to and what
they had planned for their next move. The captured magicians would
be compelled by their collars to answer any questions truthfully as
best they could and they would tell the inquisitors that the
Collective planned to strike the capital and the army would move
out. They had no hope of getting to Mollifas ahead of the
magicians, but they would try anyway and when that happened Byrn
would take the surviving magicians into the wilderness where they
could hide.

“He can’t be dead!” Alia denied the news
brought to her by Tomlin and Riona with the same certainty that she
would have had of seeing the sunrise on the morrow, if they had
told her that it would not come.

“It is true,” Riona consoled, “I saw it
myself.”

“What exactly did you see?” asked Alia,
petulantly. Her cold stare must have unnerved Riona, because she
could only open and close her mouth wordlessly so that she looked
like a fish desperately gasping after it was yanked out of the
water.

“It all happened so fast…” Riona tried to
explain, but could add nothing else.

“Byrn was there too,” added Tomlin hoping to
change the subject to something a little more pleasant in the face
of his friend and master’s tragedy. “He was with us at the end, but
left separately.”

Alia did not ask where Byrn went. She had had
enough and was not entirely sure that she cared about him at that
moment. She was driven from her home, forced to live once more with
the day-to-day worry that came with not having a place to call
one’s own. Her father was dead, as were many of her friends in a
futile effort to protect that home, which was quickly abandoned in
favor of enacting her father’s plan to seize control of the
capital- a plan he could no longer see fulfilled. It all suddenly
seemed so pointless to continue this struggle.

“Where did he go?” It was Kaleb.

Tomlin looked to Riona and she answered with
a raised eyebrow. “I do not know, but it must have been important,”
he finally said when the necromancer did not answer.

Kaleb looked as if someone had just kicked
his puppy, but suffered in silence.

Ryonus interjected, speaking only to Alia,
“This must be hard for you to accept, but why would Tomlin and
Riona lie to you?” He gestured to the pair that sat at the table
opposite them. Upon returning to Lion’s Landing via the
transportation rune, the magicians met up at the Hasty Rider Inn
located near the northern wall of the port city. Alia and Ryonus
were the first ones to arrive and rented a large enough room should
any other magicians show up.

None did, except for Tomlin and Riona who had
just arrived. Still there was some hope that others would join
them. No more than a few hours had passed since Wolfsbane was
evacuated, but Alia feared that they were all that was left of the
Collective. Other magicians were supposed to be scattered about the
kingdom, converging on the capital to enact Xander’s plan to seize
the throne. She had assumed that his ultimate plan was to take
hostages of the royals and other noble families, forcing them to
submit to Collective rule, but he was never specific about how he
intended to achieve that. Now she may never know and whatever they
were to do would now fall on her shoulders to see it through. That
was assuming that anyone else showed up when they arrived in
Mollifas.

“I just… I know they would not lie to me,
but…” Alia clenched her fists in anger. A sudden desire to hit
something or scream came over her and she had to resist the urge to
do either. Not only because, performing either act would make her
look like a crazy woman, but Avelice was also sleeping peacefully,
cradled in her arms. “It does not seem real,” she tried to explain
calmly.

She got up from the table and looked out the
window at the stables below. The stable master was tending to some
horses with his child apprentice who looked to be doing most of the
hard work under his master’s instruction. Farther out was a series
of shops and stalls a few blocks away. At this time of day the
streets were fairly packed with people.

“I need some time alone,” she said without
looking away from the view.

“Of course,” said Ryonus as she had expected.
None of them would try to stop her. She had a reputation, rightly
or wrongly, of being considered ruthless and in her current state
they might be afraid of what she would do. Alia could not blame
anyone for thinking that way about her. It was an image that she
spent some time crafting to maintain her control over the
Collective before eventually giving up the command with the birth
of her daughter.

Alia wandered out onto the street amidst the
throngs of people, but instead of getting lost within the crowd she
turned towards the northern gate with Avelice in tow. As she got
closer the crowd started to thin out until she was the only person
on foot leaving the city.

A guardsman called to her as she was leaving.
“It is not safe to be traveling the road alone! There are bandits
about!”

“There are always bandits!” she told him, but
did not turn and only quickened her pace. “If they are lucky, they
will stay far away from me,” she added when the guard was out of
earshot.

***

The cabin was falling apart. She thought that
it might have been torn down or burned following the massacre that
stole her mother’s life as well as the lives of her students. That
was the night that she first met Byrn. She had arrived late to the
fight and he was the only one she could save. Alia never came back
to this place after that… until now.

Her boots crunched against the broken pieces
of wood that still littered the path leading up to where the
entrance had been- now just a gaping hole in the front of the
cabin.

She lived here as a child along with her
mother. They shared the cabin with Mother Truthsayer and her two
daughters: Minnie and Melani. They were all dead now and only
Avelice was left- left to grieve over them and carry on without
them.

“How can I keep going?”

Avelice cooed as if to remind her that she
was not truly alone.

“I still have you, don’t I, sweetheart?”

The baby smiled at her and Alia returned her
grin even as tears began to blur her vision.

The crack of a tree branch outside snapped
Alia out of her thoughts, reminding her that she was not the only
predator that roamed these woods. She unhitched the staff at her
back and adjusted Avelice so that she could hold her child securely
with one arm and cast magic with the staff. A fire spell came to
mind and she whispered a mantra of focus as she readied her mind
for casting. A shadow passed over the doorway. It was long and
thin. Human. Perhaps it was one of the bandits that the guard
mentioned or a Kenzai scout patrolling the area. Alia unconsciously
turned her body so that Avelice was held opposite the passageway.
Her staff was ready to strike at the first glimpse of the shadow’s
master.

She was halfway through the motion of making
a flame spew from the staff when she pulled up short so that only a
trickle of fire flew forward and with a whip of the staff the flame
shot up and to the right of its target.

Kaleb shrieked and dodged behind the half
demolished wall he had just stepped out from when he saw the
approaching flame. “Stop it, Alia!”

“Gods, Kaleb! I’m sorry,” she apologized, but
felt like her words were not enough to make up for almost flash
burning him. “I didn’t know it was you. Please come out.”