Looking over the worst of the wounded, laid out on stretchers of canvas, their faces still wrapped in enchanted scarves, Liv frowned. With Akseli left out of position because of the need to contact Silica, and Lina killed by one of the wyrms in the undercity, only Kaija and Liv had a tether to Bald Peak. With half a dozen injured soldiers, on top of Liv and her companions, it was going to be difficult to move everyone.
Not for the first time, Liv considered teaching one of her friends how to attach a tether to a waystone. The problem was the mana requirement - even among her entire personal guard, half of whom were Eld, only three had been able to hold twenty-one rings of mana. Neither Arjun nor Sidonie could do it, though Liv resolved to have all of them tested again once they’d returned. If any rift was likely to push someone’s limits, it was Godsgrave.
She allowed herself to examine Keri, where he stood next to Silica, talking quietly. He’d been just short of the power needed, before they set out on the expedition. If anyone was likely to be able to learn the technique, it was him.
This time, Liv had insisted on conjuring herself a platform of mana, which Thora and Miina had then piled with pillows to support her back. Skimming the blue disk along the ground let her at least be in control of her own movement again.
Above them, the immense, rime-encrusted form of Umbris loomed, still in exactly the same position as when Liv had frozen him. Though his body had been battered and wounded, he was still a terrifying threat, and she didn’t have any intention of exposing her injured soldiers to even the slightest risk.
Which was why Kaija was currently arguing with her.
“Of course you should go first,” the head of Liv’s personal guard insisted. “I can thaw the wyrm out. Leave me with everyone who can fight, while you take the wounded to Bald Peak. We’ll follow after you in a few moments. There’s no reason for you to take even the slightest risk here.”
Liv frowned. “I want to make certain he isn’t going to fight Silica before I leave,” she said. “You take the wounded, and I’ll be right after you.”
Kaija’s eye twitched, as if she were a tea pot about to unleash a whistle of steam. Liv was fairly certain that the older woman wanted to scream at her, but instead, Kaija walked over to Keri, interrupting his conversion with Silica.
“Go and talk to her,” Kaija demanded, thrusting a finger out to point at Liv. “She won’t listen to me.”
“I don’t need to be managed,” Liv objected.
For his part, Keri winced. Liv knew that he hadn’t put himself in the middle of this - that was Kaija - so she had a bit of sympathy; but she also didn’t want people to think they could simply send Keri to talk her into whatever they wanted. So, when he walked over, she didn’t bother to conceal how angry she was getting.
“Liv,” Keri began, “can you fight right now?”
“I don’t need to be able to walk to cast a spell,” Liv reminded him, reaching down with her right hand to pat the stormwand which lay across her lap. That was the shoulder she’d done the most work on, so that she could write letters, and it didn’t hurt too badly to move it.
Keri chewed his lip for a moment, then leaned in and lowered his voice. “When I was trapped in that chair, I thought it was going to drive me mad,” he admitted. “I couldn’t fight. I couldn’t walk. They wouldn’t let me ride a horse. I couldn’t even dress myself in the morning. When I had to send other people out to hunt down the Lucanian soldiers camping in the mountains, I’d never felt so pathetic and useless in my entire life.”
“You weren’t, though,” Liv told him, reaching out for his hand. “You just needed time to heal.”
Keri met her eyes, and raised his own eyebrows.
Liv sighed. “Fine. You don’t need to say it out loud. I suppose I really am a fool if I can say one thing to you, and not stand to hear it about myself. I’ll take the wounded back, and I’ll see you all in a few moments.”
“Thank you.” Keri leaned in and brushed his lips against hers.
Once he’d stood back, Liv skimmed her mana platform across the ground and set it down in the middle of where the six stretchers had been arranged, like spokes on a wheel. “I need each one of you to reach your hand up,” she explained, “and to take a hold of me somewhere. It can be my hand, or my leg if you’re at that end of things.” She stretched her arms out to either side, even though it meant wiggling out of one sling, and her left shoulder screamed at her.
“We can’t possibly do that, Your Majesty,” one of the Whitehill men said, averting his eyes. “It wouldn’t be proper.”
“Consider it a royal command,” Liv scolded him. “I can’t bring us all back unless you’re touching me, and it will only be a moment. Come along, now.”
Gingerly, a man and a woman each took one of her hands, while three more soldiers gently rested their palms on her body, as reverently as if they were touching an idol. The last man was unconscious, so the woman next to him grabbed hold of his arm and draped it across Liv’s torso, where it rested, limp.
Liv took one last look over at where her friends stood, clustered in a group around Kaija, Silica, and the frozen statue that contained a still-living black wyrm. Sidonie, Miina, Thora, Ghveris, Arjun and Keri were watching her and waiting, and it was now clear to her that they wouldn’t begin the process of thawing Umbris until Liv was gone.
“Nesēmus,” she said, and the light began to build. A moment later, Varuna was gone.
?
It turned out that the queen appearing with half a dozen severely wounded soldiers, and without anything in the way of warning, herself injured as well, caused something of a panicked flurry of activity at Bald Peak.
Liv was surrounded by guards before more than a single snowflake had a chance to fall upon her face, and she did her best to mimic the way commanders like Keri and Soile could command attention and obedience with the tone of their voice alone.
“Every one of these soldiers needs to be taken to the healers,” Liv said, lifting her disc of mana up to chest level so that, even reclining on her cushions, she could look her own guards in the eyes. “Captain Kaija will be coming through momentarily with another group, so those stretchers need to be cleared off the waystone now. Move!”
“Your Majesty,” Piers said. He’d produced a fine white bear pelt from somewhere, probably the guard station, which was now of stone, and he carefully laid it over her. “You’re injured?”
“I am, but it’s been seen to by Arjun, nothing’s going to get worse in the next quarter-bell,” Liv assured him. “I’ll be heading up to the keep as soon as I know everyone else has arrived.”
The aging guard, who’d know Liv since she was a little girl, walked beside her mana platform as she moved it away from the waystone. From the way the others were watching - those who weren’t scrambling to obey her orders, and carry the wounded away - Liv doubted that any of the rest would have been bold enough to be so familiar with her. She didn’t feel the cold anymore, but it also wouldn’t hurt her to accept the pelt, while rejecting it might affect Piers’ reputation among the men and women he served with.
“The rest of the army?” Piers asked.
“On their way back, under Commander Soile,” Liv said. “But it will be a march through the jungle, followed by boats upriver, before they can get to a waystone. I wouldn’t expect the first of them for at least a week. These are the worst of the wounded; Arjun wasn’t confident they’d survive the trip, if we had to take them overland.”
“We’ll make certain they’re all sorted out, Your Majesty,” Piers assured her. He hesitated, and then asked the question they all must have been wondering. “Was it a victory? Or - a success, I mean?”
This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.
“It was,” Liv assured him. “And you can tell that to anyone you wish. We went into Godsgrave and brought out every survivor we could find. They’ve gone with the Red Shield tribe.”
“That’s good to hear.” Piers inclined his head. “I’ll stay by you until Captain Kaija comes through then, if it’s all the same to you.”
“That’s fine,” Liv told him. “And send a bird to Whitehill so that my brother knows we’ve returned. You can tell him I won’t be going anywhere for the foreseeable future - oh! And ask them to bring that big mana stone Master Grenfell uses for testing.”
The waystone began to shine with red light, warning of an incoming group of travellers, and Liv watched it, unable to take her eyes away. She knew that she should have faith in her friends, and should have faith in Silica. After, she’d been the one to make the decision to preserve Umbris’s life. But Liv couldn’t help worry that, without her, no one who’d stayed behind would be able to stop the black wyrm if he wanted to fight, despite his wounds.
A column of light shot up from the waystone into the clear blue winter sky, and when it had passed, Kaija, Keri, Miina, Ghveris, Sidonie and Thora stood on the stone. Liv let out a breath she hadn’t consciously been holding, and relaxed back into her pillows.
“There weren’t any problems?” she called over to them, as they made their way off the waystone.
“We didn’t stay long enough to see,” Kaija admitted. “The moment I broke the spell, I got the tether started.”
“I was watching them right up until the light blocked my view,” Arjun said. “I saw Umbris look down at Silica, and I believe I even heard them start to speak. I don’t think she’s going to have a problem.”
“Still, we should send a messenger to her as soon as we can,” Liv said. “To make certain.”
“There will be time for all that,” Keri told her, approaching the mana disc. “But you and I both know that until Arjun has a chance to look you over in your own rooms, he’s not going to be happy.”
“Fine,” Liv agreed with a sigh. “I suppose I’ll have to put up with being taken care of for a few days, at least.”
?
It was, as it turned out, more than a few days.
Arjun did insist on a thorough examination, and regular applications of his healing spells which were surprisingly gentle. He insisted that the cartilage needed to be healed carefully if she wanted to be able to move right again, and there truly wasn’t anyone who Liv would trust to oversee her recovery more than him.
Her mother came, of course.
Sidonie must have realized it was inevitable before Liv did, for she disappeared almost immediately, emerging only when she had finished creating another one of the enchanted brooches they’d developed together, nearly identical to the one Thora wore. By the time a carriage had come from Whitehill, carrying Matthew and Triss, as well as Margaret Brodbeck, the piece of jewelry was waiting at the foot of the mountain. Little Henriette had been left behind in the care of her nurse, because none of them trusted the brooches enough to bring a human infant into a rift with only that as protection. Though the baby had been born on the ring, she’d been shielded there by the ancient medical enchantments the V?dim had left behind.
Liv had enough warning of the Whitehill party’s arrival that she waited for them in her make-shift solar, comfortably ensconced in one of the same wheeled chairs which had originally been purchased for Baron Henry, so many years ago, and then later been used during Keri’s recovery. Whatever Julianne had spent on the things, the family had more than gotten their money’s worth.
“Livy, dove,” Margaret Brodbeck cried out, as soon as she’d burst into the room, “are you alright? What happened to you?”
“I’ll be fine in a few days, Mama,” Liv assured the older woman. “My arms and legs were dislocated. It’s alright, you can hug me, as long as you’re gentle.” She quite deliberately avoided telling her mother just how the injury had happened.
Still, it was good to be wrapped in her mother’s arms once more. No matter how old she got, Liv didn’t think she’d ever be too old for that. And I won’t have her around forever, she thought to herself, though she pushed that idea away as soon as it came to her.
Once her mother had finally been settled, into a seat on the cushioned bench right at Liv’s side, there were embraces from Triss and Matthew in turn, as well, once her brother had set aside the massive mana stone he carried in under his arm. Ghveris settled in near the window, on the stone bench that had been made just for him, while Thora set out a pot of tea and poured out cups for everyone in turn. Miina and Keri had found seats of their own, while Arjun was, presumably, overseeing the treatment of the wounded soldiers they’d brought back.
“Are you done with adventures for a little while, then?” Triss asked, after she had a sip of her tea. “Or is it right off again the moment you can walk?”
Liv saw that her sister-in-law had allowed her dark hair to grow out, long enough now that it could be pulled back from her face. “I don’t have any immediate plans to leave,” she said. “Oh, I can think of two short trips I’ll need to make in the next year or so. Tephania’s wedding, in Courland; whatever else has happened, I wouldn’t miss that. And once Master Grenfell’s finished negotiating the changes to the Mages Guild, there will be another conclave. Whether it's in Coral Bay, or somewhere else, I’ll go to that. But other than those two things - I think I want to rest for a while.”
“Ractia?” Matthew asked. “You’ve been away, so I’m not certain what you’ve heard, but the Church of the Trinity has been digging cells of her worshippers up all over Lucania. They put the entire Drovers Guild to the question, and they’re burning any cultists they find.”
“She tried to kill me again in Varuna,” Liv admitted. “Sent a wyrm after me. But until we know where she is...” she shrugged. “There’s little we can do but continue the hunt.”
“Wren will be back from Varuna in a few weeks,” Keri spoke up. “Once she’s back, and gets her team back together, she can start working down the list of rifts we got from the ring, again.”
“And we’ll have what culling teams Caspian can spare from Lucania,” Liv added. “But wherever she’s taken herself away to hide, I doubt it's anywhere near us. It could be months, even years, before we can dig her out of her hole.
“It’s not such a bad thing,” Miina observed. “You need time to heal, Liv. Let other people do the work for a bit.”
“So I’ve been told,” she grumbled.
“What did you want this thing for?” Matthew asked, patting Master Grenfell’s mana stone, where it rested on the low table at the center of the room, next to the tea pot.
“We don’t have enough people with enough mana capacity to make a tether,” Liv explained. “But, spending time in a rift has a tendency to stretch that mana capacity, and Godsgrave is one of the biggest rifts in the world.” The only rift in the world with three V?dic corpses leaking mana, she thought to herself. “I’m hoping that that might have pushed someone just enough that they can learn. I’ll want to test both Sidonie and Arjun, once I can get him away from his patients.”
She turned toward Keri, and couldn’t help but grin. “Why don’t you go ahead and do it now?” Liv urged him. Out of all her friends, he was actually the one she had the highest hopes for. He could already hold twenty rings before they’d gone into Godsgrave, and he had enough V?dic blood to make a difference.
Keri blinked a few times, and looked around the whole room, clearly a bit surprised to find everyone watching him. “If you like,” he said, and leaned forward to touch his hand to the stone. A few faint wisps of blue and sparkling gold danced around his fingers, and then he nodded. “I think that’s about all I can take. I need a ring.”
“Take mine.” Liv yanked her guild ring off her finger, held it for just long enough to empty it, and then thrust it at Keri. She felt her cheeks get hot, and wondered whether she’d ever stop blushing at the least convenient times. When Keri reached out to take it from her, their fingers brushed against each other. It was a small thing - they’d kissed, more than once, after all, but none of that had been with her mother in the room.
One ring at a time, Keri emptied his mana reserves, while the rest of them counted. After he emptied her ring the twentieth time, she held her breath. When he filled it again, Liv couldn’t help but grin. It was the last, as it turned out, but that would be enough.
“Twenty-one,” she said, accepting her ring back and sliding it onto her finger. “Now I don’t need to be moving people around all by myself all the time.”
Keri settled back into a seat next to her, once he pulled his mana back out of the stone. “What about you, then?’ he said, carefully nudging Liv in her side. “Why don’t you show us just how monstrously talented a mage you are?”
Liv shook her head, but her friends and her family urged her on until she finally relented. “Alright, alright! I’ll do it just so you all stop,” she grumbled. “I doubt there will be much of a change. Caspian Loredon said he couldn’t think of much that would still push me,” she warned them.
Still, not everyone in the room was aware of quite how much mana Liv could could. When she passed Keri and went right on filling and emptying rings, with no sign of stopping, the questions began.
“When’s the last time you were even measured?” Matthew asked, and Liv had to admit that she couldn’t quite recall.
“Maybe after the Well of Bones?”
“No, it was when we had our first little guild meeting at Whitehill,” Triss corrected her. “I remember it.”
After thirty five rings, Liv was still going, and despite herself began to hold her breath, curious just how far this was going to go.
“Thirty-six,” Miina counted aloud.
At thirty-seven, Matthew and Triss joined her.
When Liv filled and emptied her last ring, the entire room had joined in the chorus, chanting “thirty-eight!” loud enough that Kaija opened the door and poked her head in from the hall to see what the commotion was about.
volume nine is off and running!
here. I am more available there than I am here.
Dramatis Personae
Livara T?r Valtteri Kaen Syv? - Archmage, former scullery maid at Castle Whitehill, the bastard daughter of Maggie Brodbeck and Valtteri Ka Auris. Mountain Queen, and Lady of Winter. Is literally the most frustraing patient in the world. [38 Rings of Mana, not counting mana stored in items.]
Arjun Iyuz - Journeyman Guildmage from Lendh ka Dakruim; his jati specializes in healing magic. Would have liked to stay and hang out with Silica a bit. [19 Rings of Mana]
Beatrice 'Triss' Summerset (Formerly Crosbie) - Daughter of Baron Arnold of Valegard, Wife of Matthew, sister-in-law of Liv, sister of more brothers than anyone could ever want. Knows her sister-in-law quite well, as it turns out [17 Rings of Mana]
Inkeris "Keri" ka Ilmari k?n B?lris - A young warrior of the Unconquered House of B?lris, father to Rei. "Hello, pot, this is the kettle speaking." [21 Rings of Mana.]
Kaija - Former Armorer at Kelthelis, captain of Liv's personal guard. Appealing to the boyfriend. [22 Rings of Mana]
Margaret Brodbeck - Mother of Liv, Cook at Castle Whitehill. Because when you aren't feeling well, there's nothing like having your mother take care of you.
Matthew Summerset, Duke of Whitehill - Henry and Julianne's son, husband to Beatrice. Brought the rock! [14 Rings of Mana]
Miina t?r Eilis, of House D?ivi - Daughter of Eilis, niece of Eila, cousin of Liv, Lady in Waiting. Has somewhat of a longer view than her cousin. [23 Rings of Mana]
Piers - Waystone Guard, husband of Sophie. Used to these kinds of shenanigans by now.
