Glamour of the God-Touched (3 page)

“Would you be with a mage?”

Arianna’s lips curved into a half-smile.

“Come now, Garrick. You are only an
apprentice.”

“But you know I
will
be a mage.”

She gave a playful shrug. “And you would
have us live out in the woods somewhere distant? My mother would
kill me for moving that far away.”

“I come to town often enough. You could,
too.”

“Not often enough for my mother’s view.”

They came to a halt and he put a hand on her
shoulder.

“It can be a good life, Arianna. I’ve seen
it. Alistair lives free.” A sly grin crossed his lips. “And I
wouldn’t have you pay for any mug you broke.”

She hit him on the shoulder. Hard.

“Ow!”

“I’ll be having none of that from my
husband.”

“It was a
jest
, Arianna.”

She looked at him, her eyes softening. “Was
it, now?”

“Yes,” he said. “It was.”

He leaned down to kiss her.

She turned her face to receive him, but
before they touched she pulled away, giving an un-girly snort of
laughter at his expression.

“You’ll have to catch me if you want a
kiss.”

She collected the hem of her dress and ran
down the path.

She
liked
him.

He realized it with a rush.

Arianna, daughter of Helene,
liked
him.

He gave chase, pretending to clutch for her
shawl as it trailed behind her, letting her lead him for a bit. He
stumbled as she dodged. He was going to catch her, of course. He
was going to catch her, and turn her around, and he was going
to—

As he reached a hand out to her shoulder,
Arianna gave a yelp, then a sudden lurch.

At first he thought it was one of the games
she was so fond of, but she fell heavily, rolling down the creek
bed and over the stones, leaves, and exposed roots that lined it
before landing with a thud below.

“Arianna!” he called as he hurried down the
slope.

She did not respond.

Blood welled from a cut at her hairline, and
panic gripped him. He pressed his hand to her head, and crimson
poured through his fingers. He stripped off his shirt to bandage
the wound, but it wasn’t enough.

“Help!” he yelled.

Every bit of Alistair’s teaching flooded
into his mind: fire, lightning, telekinesis—but his familiarity was
with the simple spells of cleaning and mending, and even if he
could cast those more powerful wizardries, none would stop
Arianna’s bleeding. He concentrated on his spell gates and he
reached for his link. Maybe something would come. Maybe he could
create something in the moment. His link opened and raw magestuff
poured forward. He set his thoughts, pressed trigger points, and
molded the flow until power throbbed in his fingertips.

He had no spell for it, though. The raw
magestuff merely pooled in his mind. He poured it directly into the
cut, but felt no response. He tried a binding spell but her skin
continued to grow ashen.

Still blood poured forth.

“Help!” he screamed again.

The evening’s darkness twisted his voice,
and Arianna’s eyes glowed unearthly pale as they rolled to the back
of her head. Tears rolled down his cheeks. What had he done? It
wasn’t his fault. It wasn’t. He had to fix this, but he looked at
Arianna and he saw her dying in his arms and he had nothing for it.
Nothing. The musty aroma of mildew was overwhelming. He touched her
forehead and felt slippery blood run between his fingers.

“Help!” He screamed into the nighttime sky.
“Anyone! Help!”

The moon glowed above.

“Anyone,” he whispered, his throat raspy,
his head sagging limply to hers. “Anything. I’ll do anything.”

A strangeness filled the ravine then, a
sensation unlike anything Garrick had ever experienced before.
Energy rolled over the ground with a scent as sharp as a summer
storm. It was high sorcery. Wizardry more powerful than even
Alistair was able to use.

The hair on his arms rose. He was
mesmerized, confused but oddly thrilled.

A voice spoke from inside his mind.

Would you truly accept responsibility for
the power of life and death?

Fear rose inside him, but Arianna’s weight
was dead in his arms and her slack cheek reflected the new
moonlight with a chalky sheen. Her hair trailed over his wrist to
seek communion with the black soil below.

“Yes,” he said aloud. “I would do anything
to save her.”

And in that moment he knew it was true.
Garrick would do anything to save Arianna, anything to save their
future, anything to care about something as much as he cared about
her.

A perfect silence grew in which even
Garrick’s breathing seemed to halt. The wind died. Leaves hung
toward the ground with silver-backed limpness.

“Anything,” Garrick whispered again.

So be it
.

A new power filled him.

His heart pounded with unworldly drumming.
Fluorescent flames danced on his fingertips and burned Arianna’s
blood from his skin. He cradled her head in one hand and rubbed her
temple with the other. Glorious energy flowed, sorcery fed from
somewhere deep inside his being, blue and green and blue again. The
smell of warm honey grew omnipresent as a river of power seeped
into Arianna’s wounds to bring torn tissue together, mend damage,
and give life.

He felt intertwined with her. He felt deeply
together
.

Then it was over.

The wind whispered. Trees creaked, and tears
dried on his cheeks in the nighttime chill.

Arianna took a shuddering breath, then
opened her eyes.

He had never seen anything more
beautiful.

Elman Rigtha, a mage of the Lectodinian order,
sat on his roan and waited for the Koradictine captain to finish
his preparations. The night had grown dark, but the moon was bright
enough to see by.

Six Koradictines and six Lectodinians
prepared for their mission, whispering to themselves and playing
through spell work as they tightened the binds on their mounts.
Leather saddles squeaked and a sword rasped against its sheath. A
horse gave an impatient nicker. They had been working together for
eight days, yet the oddity of mages from the two orders casting
spells side-by-side had not worn off.

The Torean House should be scoured quickly,
though, then they would deal with the Koradictines once and for
all.

That had to be the plan, right?

They smelled, after all. These Koradictines.
They were pompous, and overbearing, and out of control—far too
willing to take risks. A group totally without discipline, without
a finger of respect for the art of their spell work itself. You
couldn’t rely upon them to throw a decent spell if Hezarin herself
were to do the casting. Just the idea of his Lectodinians taking
seconds from the Koradictines made Elman’s stomach clench.

So, yes. Lectodinian leadership would
eventually turn to the Koradictine problem. He was as sure of this
as he was about the fact that the night chill was growing
uncomfortable.

He glanced toward Dorfort. It was unlikely
the city’s guard would patrol this far away so late at night, but
it was better to be wary than be taken by surprise.

“Come on, Oldhamid,” he said. “Let’s not
waste the evening.”

Oldhamid, the Koradictine captain assigned
to this mission, finally spurred his horse to Elman’s side. He wore
a maroon tunic, black cloth breeches, and a floppy-brimmed hat that
made him look like a farmer. A slim dagger glinted from his
belt.

“Are your men ready, yet?” Elman asked.

“Patience, my friend,” Oldhamid said with
enough spite that Elman knew the Koradictine shared his feelings
toward their working arrangement. “This Torean is strong, and he’s
not going anywhere. He will be just as dead by morning, regardless
of when we begin. It will go best if we are properly prepared.”

Elman hid his grimace. Had he sunk so far as
to be lectured by a Koradictine?

This whole fiasco had done nothing for him
beyond searing the true depth of differences between the
Koradictine and Lectodinian orders into his mind.

Not that he needed the lesson.

The orders had split in the days after Corid
de’Mayer’s rule—when the two most powerful mages of the time,
Koradic and Lectodine, couldn’t agree on how to control magic.
Lectodine wanted a hierarchy that monitored mages closely, and he
proposed even to tax the triggering of each wizard as they came of
age. Koradic had no respect for such structure, preferring each
superior make decisions to trigger mages on their own but being
held accountable through severe punishment for errors of judgment
whenever such was discovered.

And that was just the beginning of their
differences.

The Koradictine approach was obviously
insane. It was sloppy.

Elman saw that in the Koradictines
surrounding him today. Their magic was powerful, but their training
was all over the map—meaning they cast their spells with such
variability it made your head spin.

If the stories Elman heard were true, the
orders were working together now only because neither one trusted
the other enough to remove the Torean problem by themselves, and
because neither one wanted to give the other the advantage of any
new sorceries discovered in the process. That story made as much
sense as anything.

“Have you briefed your mages on the plan?”
Elman finally said.

“Such as it is.”

The rounded slope of the hillside rose
before them, its ridge giving way to the Torean’s manor. Oldhamid
was right about the mage—he was known to be strong, but he would
also be tired after a long day. With twelve mages at hand, this job
should be easy—if, that is, the Koradictines carried their
weight.

“Be sure your men break the wards,” he said.
“And let them know there’ll be blood to pay if they don’t set a
reasonable blaze along the stables. I don’t want to lose his
apprentices.”

Oldhamid nodded. “We understand.”

“Good. Let’s move.”

Elman motioned his men to join him. Oldhamid
did the same.

An invisible weight lifted from Elman’s
shoulders as the mission began. It was good to be doing
something.

He would be glad when the Torean wizard was
dead.

Something was definitely wrong.

Garrick sat at the dinner table, wearing an
over-large work shirt Arianna’s brother had given him to replace
the one he had torn. He gnawed on a turkey wing Arianna’s mother
had prepared.

He wanted to be happy.

He
should
be happy.

But Garrick felt something terribly,
terribly wrong happening inside him. It was something different
every moment—skin-crawling revulsion, then shivers, then a bout of
nausea that left him breathless.

Arianna’s home was everything he had once
dreamed his own might one day be—made by her father, cut from
lumber from the woods, sealed tight with pine pitch and mud. A fire
blazed in the hearth, and the kitchen was filled with the smell of
cornbread, chicory, and roasted fowl. It was a rambunctious
table—her brothers and sisters ringing around it, elbowing each
other and sampling from each dish as they passed dinner around.

The closeness of this family hurt him in a
physical way.

Its intimacy burned inside his chest.

He wanted to breathe, he wanted to be alone.
He wanted this gnawing ache inside him to go away, but despite
having eaten steadily for the entire meal, he was still as hungry
as he could ever remember.