The Mage of Trelian (13 page)

Because he needed to know how to fight and defend himself, of course.

But also because he was really, really good at it.

He was still testing the new limits of his ability. The strength of his spells still varied, but there was no question that even his weakest attempts were now much more powerful. Calen knew that Krelig had taught him enormous amounts since he’d been here, but he had thought he was still far behind most other mages. And he was, in terms of experience and practice — those who had been training for years and years, who had started younger than he had and who were much older now, those mages had accumulated a wealth of life experience that no amount of training could replace. And yet all the mages who had arrived to join Mage Krelig so far (and more of them kept coming, nearly every day) seemed slow and clumsy to him. At least, a lot of the time. Calen knew some of this was because of his ability to see the colors — it helped him to react more quickly, and certainly to defend himself more effectively. But it was also because he was much more powerful than they were.

That was sometimes a frightening thought. He wasn’t exactly sure why; he wanted to be powerful, didn’t he? He
needed
to be powerful to be able to help defeat Mage Krelig.

But sometimes he was afraid that he was starting to enjoy these lessons a little too much.

The other mages always got the worst of it in the group lessons, and today’s was no exception. Krelig paired Calen up with Helena against a group of ten other mages. Calen still didn’t like her; she always had something to say and was particularly fond of showing off. She practically crowed anytime she bested one of the others. She was talented, though. He had to give her that. He thought she was the strongest of all the traitor mages Krelig had recruited so far. She and Calen stood back to back, and the other mages surrounded them in a large circle, firing anything they wanted as long as it wasn’t actually lethal. Krelig was quite clear about how he would feel if they killed one another off without his express permission.

Calen and Helena had cast a combined form of shield that was stronger than either of them could cast alone. The other mages were having a hard time breaking through it, although once they started teaming up in their attacks, more of the spells started coming close. Calen tightened his focus as a particularly nasty-looking red spell came hurtling at his face. There was purple mixed in as well, and he could tell that it was meant to cause some kind of painful disfiguring. That was allowed; it was the kind of thing Krelig could fix afterward . . . if he chose to.

Calen knocked it aside but then stared as it circled around and started toward his face again. Somehow the mage who had cast it had connected it to Calen in some way. Made it seek him out even after it had been pushed off course. That was fascinating, but he would have to think about it later. Right now he just wanted to stop it from reaching him. He felt the shield beginning to flicker and weaken as both he and Helena grew more tired. That wasn’t good. Even with his new reserves of power, he couldn’t keep going forever. And he used up a lot of energy in his morning lessons with Krelig. The mage who had sent the targeted spell — his name was Cheriyon — must have sensed the weakening shield, because he grinned and sent a second targeted spell after the first. Calen knocked them both aside again with his own spells, but they continued to turn back to find him every time. He had to find a way to — there!

Deep within the swirl of purple and red was a thread of white — something in that thread was what told the spell to keep trying to find Calen. If he could send a counterspell just at that part, with new information inside it, he might be able to . . .

He knocked the spells off course a few more times as he tried to reason out his approach, then fired his own tight beams of white and orange and purple not at the entire spells, but just at those threads of white. He watched the spells connect, and then smiled, gratified, as they turned as one and flew back at Cheriyon. The mage felt his own spells coming back at him and screamed. Too late, he tried to raise a shield against them, but his surprise and panic made him react too slowly. The spells slammed into him, both at once, and the rest of the mages all stopped what they were doing to watch as his skin began to slide right off his face, as if he were melting.

It looked horrible: painful and disgusting and just — just awful. Calen felt sick knowing how close he had come to being the one who suffered that fate. Sick, and angry. Why would anyone want to do that to another person? Krelig made them practice fighting each other, and he rewarded innovation and creativity, but he hadn’t directly ordered them to be monsters.

They all continued to stand there, staring. No one dared to interfere, of course. Krelig waited a few more seconds and then, mercifully (for all of them — the gargly shrieking was getting hard to take, and Calen was sure he was going to have nightmares about what was happening to the man’s face) sent a healing spell at Cheriyon. Calen watched carefully to see how the healing spell was put together. It wasn’t just yellow energy; there was orange to neutralize the original spell, and green, probably to help regenerate the skin that had melted off. A kinder person would also have included some blue to reduce the pain. Cheriyon screamed even louder when the healing spell hit him, then seemed to pass out. He fell backward onto the floor, his skin still remolding itself into shape around his bones.

The other mages had also watched the healing spell carefully; they all wanted to know what to do if someone ever sent that spell at them! But without the colors, the others had to rely on their varying abilities to sense the magic being used around them, which was more difficult the more complex the spell. It was like they were blind, Calen thought sometimes with pity. And yet from what Calen could tell, Krelig had honed his own sensing ability to be just as sharp as Calen’s. So maybe it was just a matter of power and ability after all.

“That’s enough for today,” Mage Krelig said. “Someone get him back to his room.” He gestured in Cheriyon’s general direction, then turned and walked out. The rest of them looked at one another for a moment, and then Lestern, who had arrived the same day as Cheriyon, sighed and walked over to the fallen man. Calen could still see the last vestiges of Mage Krelig’s spell at work around his face.

Lestern stood there looking down at Cheriyon, frowning. Then purple energy started gathering around his hands. A few seconds later, he pointed his fingers at Cheriyon, and the spell lifted him several inches off the ground. When Lestern turned and began to walk away, the unconscious Cheriyon floated silently after him.

Calen watched them go. That had been odd — the way the purple energy had appeared around his hands so long before he began to cast the spell. Usually the energy appeared only at the moment it was being gathered and cast. Maybe Lestern had just been casting really slowly?

“Those two are a real pair, huh?”

Calen turned to see Helena standing beside him.

“Not friends, exactly,” she went on. “Cheriyon’s too much of a worm to have friends. But they look out for each other all the same. You can see it sometimes. Like now.”

Calen grunted noncommittally. Helena had started trying to have conversations with him lately, but he had no desire to talk to her. He turned to go.

“Wait,” she said. “Thanks for showing me how to do that shield spell today. I’ve never tried anything like that before.”

Calen paused, on the brink of walking away . . . then turned back around. This was the most polite she’d ever been to him. It seemed unnecessarily rude to ignore her when she was thanking him. “It was a good spell, with both of us,” he admitted. “Saved us from the melting skin thing, maybe.”

She raised an eyebrow at him. “It saved us from a lot of things, but not that. I saw what you did. You found some way to turn Cheriyon’s spells right back at him. How did you do that?”

“How much can you sense, when other people are casting?” he asked her in turn, dodging the question. Krelig had forbade him from discussing how he used the colors with anyone else. Not that he had any intention of doing so. Everyone knew he could see them, or that he
claimed
to see them, but he didn’t think they fully understood exactly how he could put that ability to use.

“Not as much as you,” she said grudgingly. “But a lot. More than most of the others. They seem so slow sometimes! I hate when Mage Krelig teams me up with them.” She looked around, as she almost always did when she said Krelig’s name; Calen thought she did it without even realizing it.

“Yeah,” Calen said. “Me, too.” It was true. Helena was really the only one who could keep up in most ways. But he still didn’t like her. He supposed, however, that he could be civil. And maybe he’d be able to learn some things from her as well.

They started walking toward the dining hall; it was getting close enough to dinnertime that it didn’t really make sense to go back to their rooms. After a moment, Calen asked, “Was it hard, getting here from the Magistratum? I didn’t — I think you know that I got here in a very different way from the rest of you.”

She shrugged. “Yeah. I mean obviously it wasn’t something any of us could talk about openly, wanting to come here. And everyone there was getting so paranoid, accusing everyone else of being a traitor. . . . We couldn’t use magic to get out. We spent a lot of nights in the woods, cold and dirty, trying to get far enough away that they wouldn’t sense us casting before we could even light a cursed fire. I was just with Mage Dothier at first. We met up with Chan, Pelerio, and Scoral a few days out.”

Calen hesitated, then asked what he really wanted to know. “But why? I came because I had to, and while I’ll admit now that it’s been worth it”— he sent a silent apology to Meg for the lie, or maybe for the fact that he wasn’t entirely certain it really
was
a lie —“I never would have dared to come on my own, I don’t think. What made you . . . ?”

“You don’t know what it was like, after you and Mage Serek disappeared,” she said. “Things went a little crazy. People accused Mage Brevera of killing you, then accused you and Mage Serek of . . . well, all kinds of things. And I started to realize that it was only going to get worse. The council had lost control; everyone was forming these little groups, traveling in packs. . . . it was awful. And then . . . Mage Krelig started sending us dreams.”

“Dreams?”

“Recruiting dreams, I suppose. I don’t know if everyone got them; it wasn’t the sort of thing you felt comfortable talking about. He spoke to us. To me. About how the Magistratum was dying, and why did I want to be a part of it anyway, when I could be so much more . . .”

“That sounds like him,” Calen agreed.

“Finally Dothier told me one night that he was thinking of coming to join Mage Krelig. He claimed that he thought the accusations against Krelig might be as false as some of the other ones, for all we knew. I don’t know if any part of that was true, but either way . . . we could see that the Magistratum was falling apart, and if Mage Krelig was going to end up winning anyway, why not join him now, when it could do us some good? Come over as allies instead of conquered enemies?”

“That . . . makes some sense, I guess,” Calen said.

“Yeah,” Helena said. She didn’t sound entirely like she believed it anymore, though, Calen thought.

“How did you know where to come? If everyone knows where we are, why haven’t they attacked us already?”

She shook her head. “Not everyone knows. In fact, hardly anyone does.
We
didn’t know, not for a while. Once we got out, we started trying to reach out to Mage Krelig magically, to let him know that we wanted to join him. Eventually he must have heard us. Suddenly Scoral just knew which way to go, and then in a few more days we were here.”

They walked in silence for a little way. Then Helena stopped and looked at him.

“He’s — he’s really crazy, though, isn’t he? It’s not just that he’s so much more powerful than the rest of us. The way he gets when he’s angry, the way he gets carried away with the discipline sometimes . . .”

Now Calen had to fight the urge to look around. It wasn’t safe to say things like that out loud. You never knew who was listening, even when there wasn’t anyone nearby. But it wouldn’t be safe to tell her that out loud, either. Calen looked at her as significantly as he could. He held her gaze steadily as he said, “No, he’s not crazy. He’s just . . . different from the rest of us. You’ll see. You just need to do what you’re told, and learn as much as you can. He’s going to lead all of us back to where we belong in the end.”

He kept looking her right in the eye. He didn’t know why he was trying to warn her. She must know, anyway, that it was dangerous to talk that way. He knew she was terrified of Krelig; she had been ever since that first day that he’d reached out and cut her, so casually. She’d never quite regained that same overconfident swagger that had so immediately annoyed him.

She looked back at him, wide-eyed. Then she nodded. “Of course. You’re right. I just . . . find him so intimidating, I guess. I’ll just keep trying to learn, like you said. I’ve already learned so much.”

“Yeah,” Calen said. He started walking again, and she fell into step beside him. “Me, too.”

That night the crow appeared again on his balcony.

This time when it spoke his name, it was Serek’s voice that he heard. Calen was a little disappointed, although he knew that was stupid. And mostly he was ecstatic to know that his message had reached them. But it had been so good to hear Meg’s voice that first time. He wanted to hear it again.

This message was longer than the first; it looked like they’d used another version of his own message-spell this time. Mostly the message just said that they were glad he was all right and that they were working on a way to get him home. He thought they must not have gotten very far, though, because they asked what his one idea was. He’d been afraid of that. His idea made him very nervous. But they didn’t have a lot of time. He suspected that Serek and Anders knew that as well as he did.