“Serea? What’s wrong?” I asked.
My beautiful tutor leaned over my bed, her hand resting on my bare shoulder and a lock of reddish hair hanging loose next to her flushed cheek.
It took her a moment to catch her breath.
“It’s Aurus, the Head Mage,” she said. “He’s coming for you. We’ve had a disagreement at the Council and he’s … Look, Toren, there’s no time to explain fully. You’re in danger. If we don’t move now …”
I gave her a sceptical look. “It’s the middle of the night! Surely the Head Mage’s complaints can wait until morning?”
Her face was grim. She shook her head. This must be serious, I thought. I’d spoken lightly as I blinked sleep from my eyes, but when I saw the look on her face, I decided to act now and let explanations wait.
I flung the bedclothes back and leaped from the bed, grimacing as my bare feet hit the cold flagstones. I wasn’t wearing much. Serea reddened and turned away hastily. I didn’t tease her. There had always been a spark between us. We’d never followed it up, but from her grave demeanor, I figured now was probably not the time.
My clothes were scattered on the floor where I’d let them fall the previous night. I hurried them on, smallclothes first, then thick woolen hose, leather breeches, and high boots. As I hauled a leather jerkin over my woolen undershirt I felt grateful for the well-made gear. My gut told me it was going to be a cold night.
I looked Serea up and down. She was also dressed warmly below the shapeless hooded robe all the tutors here at the Mage School wore. I caught a glimpse of a heavy, tight-fitting woolen garment and perhaps even a bit of leather over that. Was it armor? Heavy, fur-lined boots were just visible under the hem of her robe, and she wore black leather gloves on her elegant hands.
“Well?” I said when she still looked at me expectantly, almost impatiently.
“Your sword, too,” Serea answered.
I met her eyes for a moment and nearly asked what was going on, but once more I saw the seriousness and urgency in her beautiful face and those dark eyes and did not ask.
Hanging on a big old iron nail on the wall was my sword belt—a good piece of heavyweight tooled leather with thick brass buckles, solidly built for work outdoors. Attached to the belt were my plain, serviceable shortsword in its scabbard, a sheath knife, and a little bag with some travelling rations and a fire-starting kit. It was standard kit for leaving the sprawling school grounds, which admittedly did not happen all that often. But I was a young man who valued well-made things and who was aware of the fragility of habitual safety, so I kept the sword sharp, the leather and the buckles oiled, and the travelling rations fresh out of long habit.
Serea nodded approvingly at my speed and then turned to lean out of the partially open door. I took the opportunity to snag my best black lambswool cloak from its hanger and fling it around my shoulders.
“Ready?” Serea asked without looking back.
“Ready,” I replied.
She pushed the door open silently, and I led the way out into the empty corridor, Serea following close behind. I glanced back into my cluttered little room for a moment, my hand resting on the outside doorknob. A messy bed, some clothes on the floor, books and papers with quills and ink on the desk, a sticky wine glass and a guttering tallow candle on the bedside table. It wasn’t much, but it was mine. It had been for eight years, ever since I’d moved up to the senior students’ dormitories at the age of twelve.
As I snicked the latch shut, there was no way I could have known that I’d never look into that humble but comfortable little room again.
“What’s bitten the Head Mage, then?” I asked Serea as I matched my pace to hers. “Did he find out I’ve been having double portions at dinner? A man must keep up his strength.”
The lamp she carried flung crazy shadows on the stone walls as she swung toward me.
“Quietly!” she hissed, and the look on her face was deadly serious. “Head Mage Aurus and I had a disagreement in the Council meeting.”
“A disagreement?”
I followed an unresponsive Serea down two flights of stairs and then along another hall, past the kitchens and the sculleries. I wasn’t sure what a disagreement between the Head Mage and the Kinetic Force Tutor had to do with me, but I knew the Council was the select group of senior tutors who were basically in charge of the Mage School. An argument there would be serious, whatever it was about. There would be gossip in the dining hall at breakfast tomorrow.
“Actually,” she finally replied, with the ease of someone who hadn’t just left several minutes between a question and their answer, “it was more of a blazing row than a disagreement. I don’t think he expected so much dissent from one so new to the School, but some of the others supported my position.”
“But you said he was coming for me?” I asked.
“He is, but not just yet. He suspects that something has been stolen from the School, and he’ll be getting Ogruk out of his bed and checking the reliquary first. I think we still have a little time.”
“Something stolen? What gave him that idea?”
“The Seer predicted it.”
“But what has that to do with me, I’ve stolen nothing!” I bristled at her.
“No,” she said, “but you’re about to.”
She glanced up, and to my surprise she was smiling enigmatically at me. It was enough to make the world seem to stand still, though we were keeping up our pace. Her eyes were very large, and it was always hard to tell their color; they would be bright green in the light of a fire, as pale blue as ice on a cold winter’s day, or sometimes a shifting turquoise in the soft glow that accompanied the preparation of some magical spells. Her lips were lush and full, bright red even in the flickering light of the lamp.
She was in earnest, but my disbelief showed on my face, if what I felt even slightly shone through in my expression.
“Well then, what am I going to steal?” I asked.
“I have no idea,” Serea answered. “But I know where to find it, and it’s not in the reliquary. Let’s hope that Head Mage Aurus wastes enough time there to give us the chance we need.”
There seemed to be nothing else for it. I shrugged my shoulders.
“I guess we’d better hurry,” I said.
She heard the trust in my voice and gave me a look of pure gratitude. I said no more, maintaining pace with her and staying alert for any signs of pursuit. I was a good judge of character, and I did actually trust Serea. Strange as this incident was, I was content to follow it through and see what came of it.
We moved quietly through the corridors of the upper floors and past stone walls hung with faded tapestries, past closed doors, along open galleries, and round silent corners in the labyrinthine edifice that was the Mage School. Here and there a torch burned in a sconce. The School was asleep at this time of night. We passed a bank of high stone windows, and I caught a glimpse of the moon and the stars sailing high above the dark land.
A finger of chilly wind sought me out. I shivered, snugging my cloak up around my neck and increasing my pace as Serea led us down a long flight of spiral stairs.
I’d never really gotten on with the Head Mage. After Serea had mentioned his involvement, I had tried to think my way around this fact, but it was simply true. I wasn’t sure what it was. He was too aloof, perhaps, and I definitely didn’t like the harsh way he treated the younger pupils. I’d never gone so far as to outright rebel against him, but I was always a bit wary of him and the clique of sycophantic Mages he kept around him.
What could he have predicted I would steal? How would Serea, a new member of the Council, know enough about it to fight with him over it? And how did she know where we needed to go? I wondered, whatever else might be going on, if he had taken offense at my friendliness with Serea. She would often stay after hours to help me with my Kinetic Force studies, and that was not normal practice for the tutors? Perhaps he suspected we had given in to the lust which so often scented our workroom after the others had retired for the day? Such relations between staff and students were strictly prohibited.
Perhaps he had made up some kind of story that would allow him to punish me indirectly? But from the way Serea was acting, there was more going on than the jealousy of one old Mage, however arrogant he might be.
I looked again at the intent woman beside me. Her hood was up, casting her face in shadow, the lamplight glinting in her eyes. There had always been a hint of mystery surrounding Serea. She was unusual, to begin with, because she was a young and beautiful woman. Most of the tutors were dusty, bearded oldsters, but Serea could not have been older than her late twenties when she arrived. I could understand anyone being jealous of her attention, especially that entitled old Mage.
She had been teaching here for just over a year, and there was a rumor that strings had been pulled to get her into the School and onto the Council. Some said she had connections to the King’s court at Kyris, the biggest city in the land of Enril, others that she had some secret magic she did not reveal, and that she was here to enact an ancient prophecy.
Ancient prophecies. I shook my head in amusement at the thought. I didn’t have time for this kind of gossip—the School was crowded, but it was in many ways a small community, and a woman like Serea in a place like the School was bound to attract rumors. There was no denying that despite her obvious skill in her specialism of Kinetic Force magic, the older tutors did not approve of her. As far as I was concerned, the rest was nonsense. Still, everybody in my all-male dormitory had striven to impress her. We were all young men aged between 18 and 20 years, and so the presence of a beautiful woman was exciting. We vied for her attention and her praise, but I was the only one with whom she really connected. At first, our relationship had been focused on our studies and collaborative work, but as time passed, there were moments when it felt like we were crossing over into genuine friendship.
We turned a corner and climbed down yet another flight of stairs, walking briskly, side by side. She glanced over her shoulder once or twice and I was listening carefully, but so far there was no sign or sound of pursuit.
Pursuit? Here in the Mage School? How quickly I’d accepted the idea of being in danger! It was so hard to believe that we were, but another glance at Serea’s determined face was enough to convince me that I’d be wise to set my disbelief aside until I knew more.
What could have prompted this? I was not exactly a powerful Mage whose talents might need watching. I certainly wasn’t a pupil who gathered others around him and threatened the authority of the Tutors and the Council. In fact, it was exactly the opposite. The other students in my group raced ahead of me in their magical studies, and though nobody was immediately unkind, I often found myself alone. I would walk the school’s warren of corridors, halls, and viewing galleries, or spend time reading the books in the library. I read everything I could get my hands on and learned a great deal: metalworking and leatherworking, hunting, cooking, and healing, but also history and myths, languages and legends, and the many contradictory accounts of what lay beyond the Great Guardian range, the impassable mountains that bordered the land of Enril upon every side.
These were not wasted hours, but they were lonely ones. The librarian always seemed pleased to see me, when he was awake, but he had no tongue to speak with and his ancient hands were too arthritic to be able to write any more, so we had no way of communicating in any depth. He spent his days snoring quietly in a hammock by the fire, and mostly we were happy to let each other be.
Could it be that I was caught up in some plot or conspiracy that I knew nothing about?
I thought of Gerdir. He was the only other person at the Mage School who I was really close with. Gerdir was a battle-scarred foreigner, dark-skinned, gray-haired, with a long beard and deep eyes that gave nothing away. Nobody knew where he came from, and he didn’t like to talk about it either. He taught the mages the basics of how to fight with the spear and the sword, and he was good enough at it that most people seemed ready to forgive his silent demeanour. When a man is that good with a blade, people tend to let him be.
Gerdir took a liking to me, perhaps because I was the only student who showed a genuine interest in non-magical combat, and perhaps also because I was the only one who didn’t care about the wild rumors which gathered around him like moths around a candle. Could it be that he was involved with some inexorable spiral of events, which was now drawing me and Serea in? The School could be a cold, hard home for people who didn’t fit the norm; perhaps his isolation had caused him to make some kind of power play against the School? In that case, my connection to him could be a reason for this night-time escapade.
I did not like that thought. Gerdir was my friend, in his way. The traditional, non-magical combat which he taught was the only other skill I had somewhat mastered during my years at the school. While the other pupils focused on their magical studies and viewed drilling with a sword and spear as a dull task to be hurried through, I relished the opportunity to do something which came easily to me—because magic, to my shame, did not.
Serea and I made our way across the hallways and through the school, and I thought about my training; from Serea I had learned a great deal of the theory and some of the practice of the Kinetic Force arts, and from Gerdir I became more than proficient in the use of shortsword, spear, and bow. From the other tutors I learned the basics of the other common magics—the manipulation of fires, lights, and winds, and diversion spells. In the library, I learned about the outside world, and from the other students I learned about what set me apart from my peers.
“This way,” said Serea.
After the seemingly endless succession of corridors and stairwells, we were now hurrying through the younger boys’ dormitory. These were mostly third or fourth sons, sent to the Mage School by rich merchant fathers from Kyris. First sons were heirs to their fathers’ businesses, and second sons were kept in reserve in case the first son showed himself a fool or a madman, or managed to get himself killed.
Third and fourth sons went to the army if they were brawny, or stupid, or showed an aptitude for fighting or for command. If they were cunning, physically weak, or bookish—or all three—they often ended up here, at the Mage School. At the age of twenty-one they would often return to the city, hoping to find work as advisors or councillors to the wealthy landholder class of Enril. Sometimes they would go on the road, looking for adventure or seeking their fortune.
Then there was me.
I was not a merchant’s third son, nor one of the talented beggar children who sometimes found their way here. As far as I knew, I came from nowhere, and had nowhere to go to when the others would go back to seek their fortunes at twenty-one. Everyone knew the story—I had been found as a baby, wrapped in a bundle on the steps of the inn in the town below the mountain on which the school was built. I had been brought up to the school by the innkeeper.
This story was fanciful at best; for one thing, everyone knew the animosity which the townsfolk felt toward the Mages. Years before, a Mage student had gone down to the town and got roaring drunk. He got into a fight and ended up rampaging through the town flinging fire spells. Many homes were burned, and two whole families were killed. Since then, people down there had developed a healthy dislike of the School and its inhabitants. The idea of a baby left abandoned on the step of the inn was not hard to believe, but the idea of the innkeeper carrying the child up to the School for care was ludicrous.
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And, yet, it was the only tale I had ever been told. With the blithe acceptance of the very young, I had taken it as my origin story. By the time I was old enough to seriously think about it and see the massive hole at its center, I was also old enough to feel that I didn’t really have anyone I could ask and trust to tell me the truth. Once, I’d tried to ask Gerdir about it, but he’d simply shaken his head.
“Don’t ask me, lad,” he’d said, “for I don’t know. The story of the basket and the innkeeper is the only one I’ve ever heard, and if it’s good enough for me, then it should be good enough for you.”
So, I’d grown up in the School—officially known as the Honorable Institute for the Study of the Arcane, though no one ever called it that. It was a big, rambling building which covered several floors and basement levels built into the body of the mountain behind it. Each floor was a rabbit warren of corridors and rooms, but I’d grown up there with all of a boy’s curiosity and not much of a watch kept on my activities, so I would have said I knew it fairly well.
Until tonight, of course.
Tonight, Serea had led me to a part of the building I had never been to before. Once we passed the smell of rising oatbread in the great kitchens, we seemed to have left the inhabited parts of the building behind us.
Just how old was this structure? How many secrets did it hold? It struck me then, as it had never done before, how strange it was that in all the histories, technical manuals, and fanciful tales collected in the big library on the upper floors, I found nothing specifically about the School itself. Its history, its founding, the construction of this enormous stone edifice that housed it—all of these things were as much a mystery to me as my own beginnings. Perhaps it was even more mysterious, because I didn’t have a myth to fill in the blanks.
As we crossed an empty, stone-flagged hallway, we passed a bank of high windows looking out over the great curve of the land beyond. I slowed my pace and looked out.
The huge Blackwood forest stretched like a dark sea all the way to the foot of the Great Guardian Range. There, the moonlit peak of Zirik, where the Dwarven Kingdom lay, glinted like a spear tip in the distant moonlight. Snow gleamed like polished crystal on the mountains and lay like thick cream on the forest’s deep black veil far below the window.
The view was familiar, but my current vantage point was not. This was definitely a part of the School I had never visited before.
Serea had pressed on while I had been looking out at the windows, and she had disappeared from view. A few quick paces took me round the next corner. She had stopped and was kneeling on the floor. She seemed to be doing something with one of the flagstones, and when I got closer I saw that she was tapping it with a knuckle.
“Here,” she said, “it’s this one. Listen.”
I listened, and heard the hollow sound as she tested the stone. “There’s a space underneath.”
“I’m going to raise it. Just a moment—this is detailed work. You might have to help me.”
Serea took a deep breath. Moonlight bathed the scene as she knitted her brows and extended her hands over the flagstone.
And it began to rise. There was a grinding noise which echoed hollowly in the space below as the edges scraped up, then the flag was four inches in the air. I was impressed by her skill, as always. Kinetic force magic dealt in big forces—lifting a slab accurately like this was very detailed work. Anyone could fling a rock, but it took a real master to lift a stone carefully and precisely.
The flagstone hovered above the gap, wobbling slightly. I heard her sharp intake of breath.
Time to step in.
I reached over and grabbed it. She let her magic withdraw from it. Training with Gerdir had made me strong, but I still grunted with the effort and felt the muscles in my back and shoulders strain as I took the weight. As carefully as I could, I set it down to one side.
“Thank you,” Serea said, and wiped a sheen of sweat from her brow.
We looked down together. Only blackness lay below the stone.
When Serea lowered the lamp, the ruddy light revealed a narrow stone corridor about my height. It was apparent at a glance that the stonework was older and very different in style than the rest of the School.
I looked up at Serea, and she met my eyes. Her face was very near to mine.
“I’m asking you to trust me now, Toren,” she said with a shaky voice. She was not joking.
For the first time in this strange escapade, a flicker of doubt troubled me. The School was all I’d ever known, and the Mages all the family I’d ever had. This woman, for all her attractions and her obvious skill in the Kinetic arts, was a relative newcomer whom I had only known for a year. It was clear now that this wasn’t some frivolous moonlit escapade that would cause us nothing but giggles in the morning. Serea was in deadly earnest. If I trusted her, it meant I trusted her to lead me into the unknown. The dark opening yawned below me, and I felt that if I climbed down, nothing would ever be the same again.
But there was no denying the truth.
“I do trust you, Serea,” I said.
She nodded gratefully and smiled. In that dark space, and in the peril of that moment, her smile was like a sunbeam in a shadowy forest glade.
“Thank you,” she said. Then she placed the lamp by the edge and swung herself down into the corridor below.
Once I had passed the lamp down to her and swung down myself, I saw that the low corridor curved round, out of sight of the hatch through which we had come. The walls were made of rough-hewn stone, and here and there it looked as if the bedrock of the mountain made the wall, not worked stone. We had walked for only a few minutes when, on our left, we came to a squat door deeply inlaid into the ancient masonry. Beyond it, the corridor continued, curving round and away into shadow.
“Here,” said Serea, a little out of breath. “It’s in here. Come on, we don’t have much time.”
To my surprise, she took a heavy iron key from a fold of her robe.
Her face was flushed and the soft skin of her delicate hand felt hot as she pressed the key into my calloused palm. Once more, our faces were very close. Like iron to lodestone, they were always finding their way to each other. Magic and lust thrummed between us like a plucked harp string. I saw her big, almond-shaped eyes widen a little and knew that she felt it too.
“Toren!” she said, trying to use her best tutor’s scolding tone, “now is not the time!”
But she couldn’t resist the small smile that crept up her full, sensuous mouth. I answered her smile with one of my own, then turned to the door and thrust the key into the lock.
The heavy key clanked and clicked stiffly as I turned it. Serea, standing beside me, quivered in anticipation as I put my shoulder to it and heaved it open. The hinges groaned; the room had obviously not been opened for a very long time. I braced myself for the smell of dust, of damp and mold—but the smell was different. It was a clean smell, like hot metal or fresh snow, or a woman’s hair, or …
I blinked twice, trying to pull my attention away from the now less overwhelming crisp, amorphous smell as Serea held up the lamp and we both peered inside.
The little square chamber was empty but for something that stood at its very center. I couldn’t tell what it was at first. I took two steps into the room and examined it more closely.
It was a tall pole, about my height, made of some dull metal and topped with a stylized representation of an upraised hand. It was a hand of bones, the knuckles showing rigidly as the fingers splayed. They looked as if they should be holding some spherical object. The empty hand was big, maybe twice the size of my own hand, and yet the fingers looked as if the sphere they were meant to grip was too big even for them. The sight gave me a vague feeling of anticipation.
There was heavy, dark fabric wrapped around the length of the pole, several layers thick, bound up with leather cords. What was most striking, however, was that the whole thing seemed to be standing upright in the center of the room with no support. I looked more closely at this strange phenomenon. The base of the pole was shaped into a sharp spike, like the tip of a lance. And sure enough, the point hung about a foot from the floor. There were no supports. The strange object was suspended in mid-air, hanging perfectly still.
I’d read stories of ordinary objects that were infused with magical power, but I’d never seen one. They were very rare. Even in the Mage School’s reliquary there were only a handful of such items: a crystal ball no larger than a raven’s egg, a dagger with an edge that never dulled, and an enchanted tome which could communicate across great distances to another tome, identical in likeness. The reliquary was forbidden to all students, so I’d never been this close to a magical item.
My heart thrummed in my chest as I turned and faced Serea. “What is it?” I asked her.
“It’s your birthright,” she replied, still standing outside the room.
“My … birthright?”
A birthright, my birthright? I was the poor foundling, the kid with no parents, no lineage, not even a name beyond “Toren”—and that had been given to me by the old Head Mage, who died not long after I arrived. Most kids had second names derived from their parents’ line of work—Smithson, or Weaver—or names relating to their skills, like Silvertongue, or Strongback.
So who was I? Toren Nobody?
Sudden anger gripped me. Despite my friendship with Serea, this couldn’t help feeling like some kind of cruel joke. Was she trying to trick me into stealing from the School for some reason of her own?
“What are you talking about, Serea?” I almost shouted impatiently when she struggled for words. “I have no birthright, I don’t even have parents! What is this? Some kind of test? A joke?”
She came in, put the lamp down by the door, and stepped close to me, taking my raised hands in hers. In the lamp’s dim light, I saw nothing but sincerity in her eyes.
“Toren, I’m sorry,” she said, and her voice rang with feeling. “I’d explain it all to you if I could, but I can’t. I couldn’t explain it all even if we had time to spare, and we don’t. All I know is this: the contents of this room are yours by right. I was … sent here, to see that you got whatever was hidden here. I’ve spent most of my time here trying to find out where it was located. Now I’ve found it, partly through the Head Mage’s blundering. I don’t know what it is, or what it does, or why it’s yours. All I know is that it’s essential—essential—that you get it, and that you take it away from here. Now, tonight, before anyone sees you. The Seer had a premonition that an item would be stolen from the School this evening. They are already searching the reliquary. The very next place they will come is here.”
“Who sent you, Serea? This is all—”
“No time!” she interrupted me, all but trembling with agitation, but she couldn’t help looking at the item with fear and wonder.
Well, I could stand here and ask questions, or I could accept that I would understand more in time. And I had said that I trusted her, hadn’t I?
I took a step toward it.
“Hold up the lamp,” I said.
She did so, and the ruddy light fell on the thing. It seemed dull and lustreless, the metal matt, the fabric dusty. The heavy leather thongs binding the fabric looked like they’d need to be cut with a knife to get them off.
And the thing called to me. I felt it deep inside my chest, a groping connection, like two hands fumbling for each other in the dark. My anger was gone as if it had never been.
I reached out and grasped the item. It came away from where it had been suspended above the stone-flagged floor with a slight, springy resistance, as if I was pulling it out of thick mud.
From Serea’s stance, I could tell she had expected some fireworks, but the only thing I noticed was that the pole was remarkably light for its size. I looked up and down the length of it. The metal was stylized, I now realized. I couldn’t see very well in the dimness of the room, but I could feel the figuring in the metal, like serpents intertwining under my hands. A sudden shiver took me off guard as I was struck with revelation.
“It’s a battle standard,” I said, and as soon as I said it, the truth of the statement rang through me like the gong of an Oracle Monk. In my soul, the two fumbling hands found each other and grasped tight.
I knew this—the wrapped fabric was a pennant which, when unfurled, would blow out in the wind. It would be planted to claim a hilltop, or raised as a rallying point for beleaguered soldiers. It would represent the honor and glory of an army, of a people.
Like a snapping cord, the world fell apart.
The little room faded, and I became aware of myself suspended high in the air, looking out over a wide view. My body was a phantom, transparent, and my awareness spread lazily out like an incoming tide over flat sand. A light breeze stirred my hair. Sunlight warmed my skin. Below me was a grass-covered landscape, green and lush with the glut of high summer. Little patches of woodland were scattered across it and streams twinked and glittered in the low places. Smoke rose from the chimneys of distant villages and cattle grazed in paddocks near the simple houses.
It was all as neat and satisfying as a detailed child’s toy, but I knew intuitively that it was only a small expanse of the region over which I could reach out my hand, if I so desired.
At the back of my awareness I could feel, beyond the landscape I was viewing, a vast continent bounded by sea on every side. I turned my attention to it, and immediately it was laid out before me.
Mountain ranges, like the rumpled satin of a woman’s carelessly discarded dress, gently cut the land into sections. In the south of the land lay a great desert, and to the north was a white region, icebound and dusted with snow.
Then I noticed something else crawling insidiously throughout the whole landscape: a spreading darkness. Threads of it extended like burrowing worms through the vision, lacing their way under the mountains, across the desert, and into the icebound northern lands. Revulsion and anger rose in me like forces of nature, but I pushed them down, feeling strongly that there was something else requiring my attention.
I twisted the view below me. It came instinctively; I knew how to do it without knowing how I knew. There was a momentary rushing sensation around me, and I found that I had moved. Instead of the peaceful scene which I had previously been looking at, I now found myself gazing down upon a castle under siege. The castle occupied a hilltop which dropped away steeply to a fast-moving river on three sides, but with a gate and front wall facing a long, green slope edged with thick woodland.
An army dressed in red and black was crashing like a sea against the long outer wall of the great castle. The roar of men and the clash of weapons rose up to fill the air around me. Arrows flew from the walls, and others rained down upon the defenders.
The men inside were dressed in white.
As I watched, the men assaulting the castle gate began to break and flee, back down the slope. Corpses lay thick on the ground around the gate; many had fallen on both sides. In the same way as I had changed the view before, I dropped toward them until the fight at the gate filled my vision. Here, the white-clad defenders, emboldened by the retreat, were now spilling outward, pursuing their fleeing enemies.
The men in red and black were mine.
I could not have said then how I knew it, but I did. Like the fog-wreathes of a half-remembered dream, I sensed a story here, a great tale which stretched off into the distant past behind me, and on into the future. On some level, I was aware that this was not actually happening right at this moment. On another level, I knew that a huge fate depended on the victory of the red-and-black-clad army and the taking of this castle. I knew that it was down to me to secure that victory.
In the woods off to the right of the castle gate there was a belt of trees, and in the trees a wing of heavily armored lancer cavalry was hidden, dressed in the red and black tabards over coats of heavy mail. As I turned my attention to them, my view zoomed in to where they stood. The sun glinted on their mail and on the points of their lances. They wore open-faced helmets of polished steel. Their faces were grim—older men, I realized, weather-beaten and scarred. Their horses shifted and whickered in the long, lush grass. A man coughed, another shifted in his saddle. I looked closer at the figured design on their tabards; it was a twisting dragon, red on black.
The army of the Dragon. A thrill of excitement ran up my spine.
At the gate, the broken elements of the black-and-red-clad Dragon army were scattering away from the castle, pursued by fierce but disordered men in white. From the castle gates, the rest of the white army was coming out in better order and forming up into lines. Their spears were in front, units of mail-clad swordsmen behind. Further down the hill, blocks of fresh Dragon swordsmen were moving into position to meet the threat.
The Dragon infantry were outnumbered, and as I watched I saw the last of the white army exit the castle. Their plan was clear: having beaten off the assault on the gates, they would meet their enemies on the field and finish them off rather than give them the opportunity to continue the siege, and possibly to reinforce.
It made sense, but the Dragon army was mine, and this castle must be taken. The time had come to release the hidden heavy cavalry reserve.
It was marvelous; with a touch of my will, I took the intention of the entire cavalry wing in the palm of my hand. They began to move as one, trickling out of the woods at first, and then forming into a line, three deep, their lances forward. I could look closely at them, seeing the detail on their scarred and battle-hardened faces and the beautiful figuring on their armor, while at the same time retaining my awareness of the entire battlefield.
I waited until all the men of the white-clad army were fully engaged with my swordsmen. They had the advantage in numbers, and they came on heedlessly, thinking the battle already won. When I decided it was time, I loosed the cavalry like an arrow from a bow. There were two thousand men and horses, but to me it was as easy as lifting my hand to swat a bug.
Mud flew up from the horses’ hooves as they picked up speed.
The thunder of hooves came hard down the hill, and blood filled the air as the cavalry crashed with incredible force into the enemy’s exposed flank. The castle itself was empty, the gates standing wide. It was a massacre; the men in white died in their hundreds between the lances of the cavalry and the swords of the infantry, and soon the remainder of the men on the walls fled in despair.
Using the same twisting motion I had used earlier to change my view, I surveyed the field all around the battle and saw a detail I had missed before. On a low hilltop behind where my army fought, a small group of people stood, clad from neck to foot in plate and chainmail, but with their heads bare. They were women, four women, all tall and beautiful, with long flowing hair that tangled and mingled in the wind; black, blonde, brown, and red. They stood close together, radiating an unbreachable togetherness and mutual respect. There was might in their bearing.
And before them, with its spike hovering about a foot from the grassy ground and the great pennant of the black and red cloth billowing out in the wind was something I recognized: it was the Standard.