Rise of the Mages (Rise of the Mages 2) (9 page)

Lainey stretched her aching muscles. Would Brant ever stop riding?

She shivered. Only a dim glow illuminated the cloud-covered sky, and a breeze buffeted her. Her bedroll. Everything would be better when she got to her bedroll. She didn’t even want dinner.

Though when was the last time she’d eaten anything besides cheese and cold biscuits? No. Still bed over dinner.

The narrow trail angled sharply upward, leaving a sheer drop off to one side. She angled Cuppy closer to the opposite rock wall. She kept her eyes firmly on the trail as a single misstep could be disastrous.

After several hundred feet almost straight up, the path leveled and widened, and she raised her head. A dark shape to the right startled her. Cuppy balked.

“Watch it!” Xan yelled.

Lainey glanced back. Though normally placid, Honey snorted and danced, drifting close to the dropoff. Xan tugged hard on the reins, but that only riled the horse more. She spun sideways, her hind legs inches from the edge.

Lainey’s breath caught.

Xan urged Honey forward a few steps before wisely easing up. A better horseman would have patted her and whispered soothingly in her ears, but his method of waiting for her to calm herself ended up working. He glared at Lainey.

She shrugged. What had made her flinch anyway?

An enormous oak stood by the side of the path. She shook her head. How tired was she that a tree surprised her? Brant needed to stop soon.

A few minutes later, they passed into a wide, flat area enclosed on three sides by rock, and he called a halt. Scattered pines would provide firewood, and there was even a stream nearby for fresh water.

She dismounted and, with her muscles creaking, bent to unfasten Cuppy’s saddle.

“Leave over!” Xan yelled.

Lainey looked up and groaned. He and Dylan stood face to face ready to hit each other while Brant ignored both of them.

“We should have let you rot—”

“Dylan Samir d’Adreci!” Lainey shouted. Didn’t he realize how bad Xan felt about all this? “You apologize at once.”

“But he—”

“I don’t care what he said or did or didn’t do or might have done. You are here by no one’s choice but your own.” She narrowed her eyes. “Do it. Now.”

Dylan offered Xan a half hearted “sorry” before slinking off. Lainey shook her head but let the weak effort slide. They were all exhausted and starting to get on each other’s nerves. Why did it fall on her, though, to keep the boys from killing each other?

Because it always had.

She groaned. Tempers weren’t likely to improve. They’d be off again in the morning before the sun fully touched the sky—hardly enough rest to keep them going, much less to calm nerves. And with Xan continuously lighting and extinguishing flames on sticks of wood, Dylan would only grumble more.

And what about that practice? Did Xan really know what he was talking about when he assured them the candle-sized fires didn’t use enough magic to be detected? Also, his first experiment had resulted in a fireball. What if something like that happened again, and he or one of the others got hurt?

What if a guardsman got too close? Would Xan break his promise and kill?

After caring for her horse and preparing her bedroll, she glanced at Xan. He looked dead on his feet as he stumbled around retrieving firewood.

Lainey sighed. He needed help if he were going to stay awake all night. Brant had taken the shift last night. Dylan couldn’t even look at Xan without exploding.

So much for her bedroll.

Waiting for Xan to return from attending nature’s call, she sat by the fire. Flickering light cast dancing shadows—ones a lot like those in the stable that night.

She shut her eyes and rocked back and forth. No. Not those images.

Each blast of wind through the trees became the guardsman’s voice. The churning of the stream became the terrible gurgling of blood from his neck.

No. Stop it. She was by a fire in the woods with her friends, not in that stable.

Gravel crunched nearby. Xan. She forced her eyes back open.

“What are you doing here?” Xan said. “Go to bed.”

He thought her weaker than Brant. She didn’t need his protection. “Tough.”

As he grumbled under his breath, something distracted him. He stared toward the northeast and didn’t move for several minutes.

She didn’t see or hear anything moving in the darkness. “What?”

“Ashley. Or, at least, I assume it’s her.”

Lainey still couldn’t believe the girl was real. What kind of relationship did the two of them have? Was it possible that Lainey would actually gain a sister-in-law one day?

Not that Xan would spill any details that were actually interesting, so she didn’t even bother asking. They drank some of Xan’s special tea—which tasted horrible and left a nasty aftertaste but did help her stay awake—and lapsed into a silence. Her mind drifted back to the stable.

“Something’s bothering you,” he said. “Now’s a good time if you want to talk.”

Lainey must have been acting really off if Xan had noticed. Even for a boy, he wasn’t all that perceptive. She had to get her act together.

“So?” he said.

Should she just tell him? It would feel good to talk to someone about it.

But she couldn’t imagine saying the words. And how would he look at her when he found out?

She had to say something. “Can you teach me to do that stuff you were doing with the flames earlier?”

He recoiled from her, clearly surprised.

She had no idea where that question had come from, but why shouldn’t she gain a measure of power? “You’re going to be this big magic user. Brant’s a soldier. Dylan knows more than any of us about traveling. What about me? What use am I?”

“You’re my sister.”

She drilled him with a dirty look.

“You’re either born with the ability or not,” Xan said, “and it’s not likely you were.”

“You were. Why not me?”

“It’s rare.” Xan stared at the campfire for a long time without speaking. A tongue of flame turned from yellow to blue and flared a few feet up before returning to normal. “In the entire town of Eagleton, statistically, only around twenty people have the ability to become mages.”

She shrugged. “It was unlikely for you to be one, but you are.”

“It’s a bad idea.”

Lainey waited. There wasn’t much that Xan would refuse her on a normal basis, and he owed her at the moment. Silence stretched between them.

“If you become a magic user, you’ll be under a death penalty.”

“I already am,” she whispered.

“What?”

“Helping you escape,” she said. “I imagine we’re all in big trouble.”

A fleeting expression of pain crossed his face. “We’ll figure out something. I swear I’ll keep you safe.”

Putting the rest of them in danger had to be killing him. What would it do to him if he found out how much his escape had cost her? She could never tell him about the stable. “Teach me.”

He sighed and took her hand in his. “Stare at one of the big logs in the fire.”

Flames licking upward from one of the larger branches mesmerized her.

After a moment of concentrating intensely, Xan started. “Interesting.”

“What?”

With the hand not holding hers, he snatched a pebble from the ground. “Focus on the movement when I throw this.”

She wanted to throttle him. He always got so focused on the problem that he ignored everything else, especially her questions. Her eyes followed the small stone through the air.

“The fire again.”

She bit back more questions and stared at another burning log.

He broke her concentration by releasing her hand. “You can be an alchemist like me.”

Huh? “But you said …”

He shrugged.

What was that supposed to mean? She glared at him.

“It makes no sense,” he said, “but what I felt between you and the fire sure seemed like what the manual described.”

Was it a good or a bad thing? She’d asked, but still. A mage. The law. A death sentence. “Can you teach me?”

“Maybe.”

The only explanation was that he wanted her to strangle him. She hooked her arms around her knees for restraint. “Give me more than that.”

Xan exhaled sharply. “You have to surge.” He launched into a lecture involving tubes being plugged and water pressure. Something about a giant ocean.

She had to cut him off, or he’d have gone on all night. “Great. What do I need to do?”

“Imagine you have the ability to become a kineticist—”

“A what?” Hadn’t he said alchemist? Why couldn’t he ever just be straightforward?

“One day, you’re hiking in the mountains and decide to climb a rock wall, but near the top, you slip. You grasp franticly for a handhold but can’t reach any. That’s it. Your life is over. Desperate, you picture yourself floating gently to the ground. The magic surges through you, and you hit the ground like it’s a soft mattress.”

Lainey nodded slowly. “We need to put my life in danger in a way where my using fire will save it? How?”

“Absolutely not! I will not put you in more danger.”

“Xan—”

“We’ll figure out another way.”

She didn’t like the look in his eyes. “What did you have in mind?”

Xan ran his hands through his hair. “Are you positive you want to do this? Once it’s done, it’s forever.”

The catcher would already want her dead for killing the guardsman. What was the downside? “I want it.”

“Think about it carefully. You might never surge naturally. Right now, they have no reason—”

She glared at him. “I said I want it.”

He looked defeated, which made her feel a tiny bit bad.

“Concentrate hard on willing this to light.” He handed her a stick.

She stared at the stick, barely even blinking, for a long time. “I feel silly.”

“You look silly, too.”

She stuck her tongue out at him.

Xan shrugged. “I didn’t expect it to be that easy.” He got that gleam in his eye again. She was about to get payback for forcing him to teach her. “What did you bring from home?”

“Clothes, personal items, some jewelry, nothing much. We needed to travel light.”

“That green hair ribbon?”

She didn’t have many things left that had belonged to her mom. What did he have in mind? “Yes.”

“Go get it and some rope.”

After she returned to the fire, Xan led her to the woods. At the edge of the trees, he tied one end of the green silk to a low hanging limb and left the other end dangling several feet above the ground. He propped up a dead pine branch using rocks, so its brown needles rested a half foot below the fluttering streamer.

“What are you going to do?” she said.

“Don’t you trust me?”

“Some of the time.”

Her unease only increased when he bound her tight to the tree with her facing the ribbon.

“Can you get free?”

She struggled against the rope. “Not quickly.”

“It’s dry wood, so it won’t take long to burn. Extinguish the fire to save your ribbon.”

It was as bad as she’d suspected. “Xan!”

“What? This is perfect. All you lose if it doesn’t work is an old piece of silk.”

“Choose something else.”

“If you’re not willing to risk an old hair band, I don’t think you want this enough.”

She gritted her teeth. “Light it.”

Xan fidgeted and cursed under his breath as he stared at the branch. After a long while, the base burst into flame. The wood caught fast, and fire shot up the stick, growing by the second. Beads of sweat dripped down her forehead.

She strained at the rope, but it held tight.

In little more than a minute, the blaze reached the dry needles and flared. Its tips licked her precious ribbon. She couldn’t let it burn.

The flame danced upward. Only a fraction of an inch separated its tongues from the ribbon. Lainey desperately willed the blaze to die.

The fire surged again, but a breeze blew the hungry tongues just to the right of the green silk.

That had almost singed it. Losing it would be like losing a piece of her mom.

She fixed the flames with a withering scowl and wished with all her might for them to go out.

Something blossomed inside her like an enormous flower opening. Energy infused her body. As she delighted in the feeling of power, a force poured from her and drained the life from the fire.

“I did it!” Sometimes Xan actually did know what he was talking about. Not that she’d ever tell him that.

A sad look flickered across Xan’s face. “Congratulations. I declare you Lainey the Alchemist.”

Shouts woke Brant.

He opened dreary eyes and looked around. On a bedroll a few feet away, Dylan stirred but rolled over instead of getting up. No sign of Lainey or Xan. Brant sat up.

Well away from the camp at the edge of the trees, Xan had Lainey tied to a tree. What the blast? Brant rubbed his eyes. No. Still the same picture.

He pulled his cloak tight around him. Just go back to sleep. That was what he should do. But he couldn’t. He had to know.

Brant dragged his ragged butt off the ground and marched across the campsite. “What the rads?”

Lainey said she was sorry for waking him, but the grin on her face didn’t soothe him in the least. As Xan explained about Lainey wanting to learn magic, Brant ground his teeth at every word.

The little sister of the group was more dangerous than him? The little sister and the bookworm were both more dangerous than him? “How strong is she?”

Xan shrugged. “It took relatively little effort for her to surge.”

Brant reached for the hilt of his sword, but he’d left in his bedroll. “Test me, too.” What the blast did that mean? Sounded like he meant pretty powerful.

“Dude, I’m tired,” Xan said, “and it’s a waste of time.”

“Test me.”

Xan yawned. “The chances of three random people all having magical ability are on the order of one in eight million. It would be pointless.”

“I don’t think you heard me.” Brant’s glare and tone would have sent any of the militia recruits running. “Test me.”

“Fine. Follow me.” Xan walked back to the campfire and, after they all sat, grabbed Brant’s hand. “Concentrate on the flames.”

Brant stared at the fire growing bored until Xan asked him to watch a thrown rock.

Xan shook his head. “Concentrate on your breathing, on feeling alive.”

Brant had no idea what was going on, but he knew how failing a test felt. He’d encountered it enough in school. “Anything?”

“I told you it was a long shot,” Xan said.

The best swordsman in the duchy outmatched by a little girl and a guy who had spent his life playing with plants. Brant clenched his fists. “Is that it?”

“There are ten types. I’ve only tried three.”

Xan’s voice took on a tone that reminded him of their schoolteacher, and Brant’s mind wandered, daydreaming about sword fights as his friend droned on.

“You have, of course, heard about the massive explosions that created the blighted areas.”

Brant’s ears perked up, but Xan skipped right onto something else. “From the vague details found in the pages Master Rae gave me, another mage controls a force that draws metal together.”

Only Xan could make magic boring.

Brant held back a groan. He just wanted to know if he was a mage, not get a lesson.

“Also, regarding an attraction between—”

“Are there other types you can actually test me for?” Brant said.

“Oh yes,” Xan said, “several. One based on potential energy is quite common.”

For a wonder, he didn’t seem like he planned to continue on forever about what that meant.

Lainey had to open her mouth. “What does that mean?”

Brant couldn’t stop his groan that time.

“That you don’t know is another reason to despise the nobles,” Xan said. “Just because it’s obliquely related to magic, schools aren’t allowed to teach such a fundamental concept.”

Lainey raised her eyebrows.

“According to Master Rae, the term refers to energy stored in a system.”

Brant knew his eyes were completely blank, and Lainey didn’t look like she understood any better.

Xan sighed. “Energy is the ability to perform work. If I dropped a stone onto the head of a stake, it would pound the stake into the ground.”

Lainey snickered. “You’d drop it on your foot.”

Xan ignored her. “It would perform work on the stake just like Brant would using a hammer. The higher I lift the rock and the more it weighs, the more work it could perform.”

Lainey nodded. “And if you lifted a rock onto a ledge, you’d be storing that energy, storing potential.”

“Exactly. Though the magic, from what I read, only deals with the mass and not the height.” Xan turned to Brant. “Ready for the next try?”

Brant nodded.

“Concentrate about your weight and how your body presses against the ground.”

Brant rolled his eyes. Was he really supposed to think about his butt? How stupid was that? But he did it.

“Think about the fire again.”

Brant did.

After a few moments, Xan said, “Okay. Your weight.”

“Why do you go back and forth like that?” Lainey said.

“The contrast makes me positive. I felt nothing when I tested him for fire, but I did for potential. Now I’m sure he’s a masser.”

Had Brant heard right? He replayed the comments in his head. Just like Xan to slip the best part in at the end. “What did you call me? What can I do? How strong am I?”

Xan snorted. “Did you listen to a word of my explanation?”

Brant shrugged.

“Basically, you can manipulate how much things weigh.”

What kind of shit was that? Xan and Lainey could set things on fire. “That’s all?”

“Picture an army charging.” Xan made broad, sweeping motions with his hands. “You unleash your magic into the soldiers’ uniforms. Their clothes grow heavy. Really heavy. Tons.” After flattening his palm, he placed it on the ground. “Can you see it? The entire army is crushed. Those that didn’t die can only lie there struggling to breathe.”

Yes. That might have some potential. Brant sniggered at the pun. At the very least, he would never lose a sword fight.

Lainey frowned. “Why the uniforms and not the men themselves?”

Xan launched into a long explanation, something about “eschewing flesh” and how it took him forever to figure out what some line in a book meant. After about a million words, it boiled down to mages not being able to hurt people directly. If Xan wanted to burn someone, he had to catch their clothes on fire instead of their bodies.

“What now?” Brant said.

Xan stroked his chin. “The problem is how to induce you to surge.”

“You just wished for something to happen, right?” Brant said. “I’ll do it like that.”

Xan stuttered and stammered for a moment without saying anything.

“What? Spit it out.”

“That’s not going to work either.”

“Why not?”

“The stronger your connection to the magic is, the easier it is to surge. It took Lainey a lot more effort than me.” Xan hunched his shoulders. “It’s subjective, but I don’t think you’re as powerful as she is.”

“You’re wrong!” Brant would not be outdone by either of them. “Set me a task. I’ll show you.”

Xan sighed and placed a small stone on top of a large, dry leaf. “Make the rock crush the leaf.”

Brant stared at the pebble and willed with all his might for its weight to increase. His muscles tensed, and he shook from the effort. Minute after minute passed, but he didn’t give up. He blocked out all chatter and movements and kept trying.

Become heavy, you lousy excuse for a rock!

Nothing happened. He would not be beaten by the task. Xan couldn’t be right.

Brant gritted his teeth and tried again.