Moonstone, Magic That Binds (Book 1) (36 page)

There were certain niceties she had been forced to follow, being the lone female among men, she thought, as she walked back to the tiny alcove that made up her personal quarters. She lay down and took the shortest of naps.

She returned to find Lessa entertaining Silver and Workman with a story. The laughter and the story stopped abruptly when Restella approached. Something unfit for a princess’s ear? Armand exuded a studied masculinity along with his jolly demeanor. Her heart began to pound a little harder even if the man might be barely old enough to be her father.

“Workman,” Restella rubbed the sleep out of her eyes and began as she sat down. “I’d like you to help us with a strategy to break down our army into smaller groups as we move through Happly. A column a mile long will leave us awfully exposed.”

Workman smiled with a look of relief. “I happen to agree with you.  We don’t have enough scouts to protect a column as long as what we have now. What do you have in mind, ma’am?”

“Can we break down into smaller units? I don’t know what an appropriate size would be. Perhaps Captain Silver can help you with that. Captain Lessa can travel with me and go over tactics for when we get to Happly Keep.” Restella noticed her own hesitancy in trusting Silver’s strategies alone.

“Of course, ma’am. Workman, let’s stroll to your part of camp and talk to your men. They will have to train Lessa’s officers as we proceed. We don’t have the time to stay here much longer.”

Restella nodded and turned to Lessa. She brought out another map of the capital city, Happly Keep.

Lessa put his hand to his chin. “An odd defensive strategy. There are no straight roads in the town, but that’s not particularly novel. The largest ones are defended by towers.” He pointed to the squares with the big x’s inside. “The city fills the space from the walls to the castle itself. I wouldn’t call that a keep, at all.”

“I look at the buildings as a moat. There is no room the lay siege to the castle itself.” Restella said.

“But in another sense, we have superb cover all the way to the actual walls of Happly’s residence. The buildings can work both ways. Mountsea’s castle has a cleared ring of two hundred yards around it on the three accessible sides”

“And it fell easily,” Silver said.

“No. We captured the castle because of two things. I held the army’s loyalty, so we drew them away from the castle and convinced them that they were on the wrong side,” Lessa said.

Restella could easily see Lessa being able to convince any soldiers to follow him. He had been their standard bearer and Lotto had just followed on the man’s force of personality.

“The second and more important factor ended up being Lotto’s Affinity. He froze the gate open. Imagine that, the gates could not be closed. I’ve never heard of such a thing and then he destroyed the gate defenses of hot oil. Strategically, men defending the castle could rain down rocks and arrows, but that defense had been totally thwarted when Lotto burned the skins, making the upper walkway an inferno. Our losses and Valetan’s losses under Captain Applewood would have been significant otherwise. Lotto is quite a man and to top it all off, after while he barely recovered from fainting from the loss of his magical power, he followed us into the open gates and slew our evil king.” Lessa smiled and shook her head in amazement while the images must have played out again in Lessa’s mind.

Suddenly, Restella found herself stiffening up in her chair. Could she not rid herself of Lotto Mistad? Who really led her army, the Captain-General or Lotto? She took a deep breath to get herself a bit more centered. Jealousy could not rule her.  Lotto’s exploits with both Lessa and Princess Sallia had ruined her concentration.  She could not let that happen.  She looked up and found Lessa in his own mind as well.

“So what do you recommend?” She disturbed his thoughts.

“What? Oh, excuse me, Restella. I keep thinking of those days, nearly a year ago.”

“Your idea to send the army out in groups.” He put the Happly map on top and looked at the scout’s version of the terrain. “We will have to spread out, but find a way to stay in contact, as if we were walking through a thick fog.” Lessa waved his hand in front of his face. “Tori and Gully will come up with something, I’m sure.”

Tori? Gully? Restella furrowed her brow and realized he talked about Silver and Workman. She didn’t feel too comfortable with the casualness that Lessa lent to her leadership, but perhaps that was what attracted her to him. Did she just think that?

Lessa stood up. “I need to get back to my men. I eat with them every night and continue to convince them of the merits of fighting in a foreign country for another foreign country. He bowed and took Restella’s hand and kissed it, “Princess, may I be excused?”

She had to smile, she just couldn’t resist. “You may, Captain Lessa.”

“Armand,” he said.

“Captain Lessa.” She looked him in the eye.

“Of course.” He bowed again and left her. She had an orderly roll up the maps and went into her tent for another quick nap before dinner but she couldn’t sleep as she tried to characterize Lessa. He certainly was more flippant than Mander Hart, but he shared a similar intellect and concern for his country and he loved his life. She could see that the man was open as well. She wished more males that she interacted with were like that.

Lotto crept into her mind and she rejected a comparison. Could Lessa be the man to make Lotto jealous? Lotto’s familiarity with Princess Sallia had made her miserable. She stamped her foot on the carpeted floor of her tent bringing up a puff of dust. How did Lotto become so effective at putting her in a bad mood? Now he made her think of using Lessa to get him mad. A fool’s goal. She would banish Lessa out of her mind as a man and show Lotto her superiority. Her thoughts sounded so rational, yet why did they bring tears to her eyes? Restella sat down hard on her cot and cried as silently as she could. Damn that Lotto!  He defies me at every turn.

~~~

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

~

“
I
’M GOING TO SHOW YOU WHAT
I
CAN DO
and I want you all to think about how I can use it on the Happlyans,” Lotto said to his fellow scouts. “Stand back.”

They stood in the middle of a glade that had grown around a deserted farm. The forest had reclaimed most of the land, but the stone walls still stood upright in a meadow of knee-high grass. The warmth of summer seemed to wash over Lotto in bands of warmer and cooler air. It reminded him of the forest close to Heron’s Pond.

“Here is what I used in Mountsea.” He turned a rusty hinge a bright red and then let the glow fade and then he turned to rock wall and made the earth shift until the wall tilted over. “I’m not removing dirt but making it more compact on one side.” He took his sword and poked into the soil on one side of the all, plunging it in six inches. He walked to the other side and couldn’t get more than an inch deep.  “If I tried to move the dirt, I’d be lying on the ground in a faint, but making it more dense, involves moving the dirt together and that takes less power. The key is using techniques that don’t sap power, but achieve the same results.”

Miro laughed. “But what do you do if the foundations are twenty feet deep or on bedrock?”

That question had bothered Lotto at first, but he had worked out an answer. “I can’t do this from a distance.” Lotto knelt down and put his hand at the bottom. He cast a spell to make particles in the rock vibrate against each other. The sound that he sought began to reach his ears.

“What’s that buzz?” Pillo said, his brows furrowing. “The ground isn’t shaking.”

“Vibrating,” Morio said, “Like a shiver.” Morio shimmied his shoulders getting laughter from the group.

Lotto stood up and pushed the wall over with a slight push.

“How did you do that?” Pillo said, but then he knelt down and grabbed a handful of what looked like sand. “You ground the rock like a miller grinds wheat into flour.”

That made Lotto grin. “Exactly. But the farther I get from the rock, the more power is drained.”

Morio squinted at Lotto. “What’s all of this about preserving power? If you’ve got it, don’t you just use it?”

Lotto shook his head. “It’s not about me. It’s about the power. A person can store only so much with their Affinity. Once it’s all used up, you have to wait to absorb more from the earth.” He wouldn’t get into the concept of the magical nexus. A lecture of that type would put them to sleep and it wasn’t time for a nap yet.  “What do you think? Will that work on the walls?”

Creeden Halfround’s eyebrows went up. “What about punching a hole in the wall. Happly castle is right against the city. If we could get all of you magicians to make a hole in the walls, or at least work on the mortar…”

“Mortar?” Lotto put his chin in his hand. “That should disintegrate even faster.” He walked over to the farmhouse wall built with mortar. He stood in front of it and put out his hands and muttered a spell. In just a moment, he saw the mortar fall like sand from the wall. “Look,” he said with a grin on his face. He pulled out the rock and others fell out as well. “Great idea!  That will work. One more thing, this is more traditional for a battle wizard. He stood in front of a tree and it fell where Lotto pointed. “One thing that will work in the woods. Again, I moved the soil away from the root ball so the tree couldn’t stand up. That is less taxing than the traditional method of splintering the trunk.”

The five scouts scooped up the fine dirt that had once held the tree’s roots in the ground.

“No explosion, the tree just topples and that particular technique just requires line of sight,” Lotto said. He wanted the scouts to see what he could easily teach the wizards. The pressure hadn’t let up since he left Beckondale. Valetan couldn’t allow a Happly army of any size get out into the farmland of Valetan. Every day meant more grain harvested and processed for winter and that meant that people wouldn’t starve during another fighting season. General Piroff spanked Oringia, but the Red Kingdom, once Histron had consolidated his armed forces with Happly and Oringia, represented a serious threat to both Valetan and Learsea.  Sally had told her that Unca had worried about that happening and Lotto had no reason to doubt her.

Lotto and the scouts spent the next few days, waiting for the wizards by returning to the glade and practicing with their weapons. None of them had ever seen Lotto in action and had all lost to him no matter what weapons they used.  They all gave him a good accounting of their skill, though.

“How did you get so good?” Pillo asked as they headed back to the inn.

“I had a good teacher,” Lotto said.

“I caught some odd techniques. Sort of exotic for a fighter from Valetan,” Morio said.

“My weapons master came from Serytar.”

“Where your parents were from, right?”

“Right. Kenyr actually worked for my father and checked up on me as I grew up in an obscure village up in the northern part of Valetan.”

“You’ve never talked about your growing up.”

Lotto felt his face warm. “I didn’t have a normal childhood. Kenyr looked on, but I was an orphan and a bit of an urchin in Heron’s Pond. I’ve learned most of what I know in the last few years in Beckondale.”

Morio clapped Lotto a bit too hard in the back. “Brought up as a commoner. I wouldn’t have thought it. You learn quickly.”

“Hey, I’m a commoner, you noble pig!” Pillo said.  They all just laughed.

Indeed Lotto picked up a lot of information quickly, but then his head hadn’t been filled with much of anything while he grew up, so he guessed he could absorb more than most. Morio’s commoner comment bothered him. He thought of Sally and wondered what she would think if and when she found out about his early years. Lotto couldn’t explain away his childhood and he shivered when he thought of where he had found his food as a half-wit. He wished he could have said the experience made him better, but the Moonstone had rescued him from the memories of a miserable life.

Who would have thought he’d be leading men older and much more experienced than he? But he never detected anything other than the normal give and take these men gave each other. They had accepted him without question. The sparring had established him as the more formidable with weapons, but he respected their knowledge and after the magic show in the woods, they had freely given him some additional ideas of ways to use the magic.

As the six of them approached the inn, horses were being led into the stableyard. The redheaded groom brightened when he saw Lotto and thrust a message in his hand that had come in by bird. He hoped the magicians had arrived and as they walked in, five men huddled together in the common room.

“Are you men of Valetan?” He walked over to them. The oldest man, perhaps approaching fifty stood. “Lotto Mistad? You match the description Fessano gave us.”

Lotto didn’t like the pinched look of the man’s face. He put out his hand for the man to shake, but the battle mage didn’t take it. The others barely met his eye. Not a very good beginning. He’d never worked closely with battle mages and wondered if they were all this surly.

Lotto grabbed a chair from another table and sat down with them. He looked at Morio, motioning for him to take the scouts to another table. The wizard’s leader eyed them as the other men sat down.

“We are not happy to be here. I, for one, don’t believe that you are qualified to lead us. You’ve barely studied with the Court Wizard for three years and then only part time.”

Lotto put a flame on the unlit candle in the middle of the table.

The leader snorted. “I learned to do that when I was a boy.”

The comment didn’t faze Lotto. He’d been studying the folio, which talked about manipulating techniques, something that Fessano’s books never did and he had done a bit of practice. He lifted his hand and the flame followed his hand, rising into mid-air. He whispered spell after spell, changing the color of the flame and finished making it burn upside down and then he clapped his hands and the flame disappeared. They were still little more than creative parlor tricks, but perhaps the battle wizards wouldn’t realize it.