In the bathroom of her prison, Sery splashed cold water on her face, deliberately missing spots as she towelled dry to hopefully look like sweat on her forehead. She blew her nose forcefully several times and rubbed her eyes until they were red and irritated before heading back to bed.
During her overnight reflections – in what almost felt like Foria’s wry voice – she had realized that if she were going to pull a deception, she might as well go all the way and be smart about it. The perfect solution to making Tristane back off with physical contact while lowering his guard about her attempting to escape was to come down with a fake illness.
Illness was not something that she had dealt with since coming to Eterna; it was rare for mages of any power to contract minor ailments like colds unless they had seriously depleted their enna stores. However, she had plenty of experience with it in the days before that, weathering winters with indifferent clothing and barely adequate food, with a captor who would not waste money on healer’s fees.
Sensing Tristane’s presence just outside the door, she started a coughing fit just as he entered.
His reaction was exactly what she wanted: Concern, for her, and for himself. “Sery! What’s wrong?” he asked, walking in but not sitting down next to her as he had the last several days.
“I think it’s just a cold,” Sery whispered, disguising the fact that her voice would sound normal at full volume. She shrank back as he reached to feel her forehead. “You might get sick.”
He let his hand flutter uselessly away. “I’ll get a healer – Oh,” he trailed off lamely as he realized he could do no such thing. “I’ll have to find medicine or something. Here, eat, I’ll be back with supplies.” Leaving the food tray he had brought, he left the cell.
Floating with elation and relief, Sery settled down to eat her first undisturbed meal in days, her appetite far better than it had been since she had been kidnapped.
***
Veltyen and Magewhisper travelled down the road at a ground-eating canter, a pace that the stallion could sustain without drawing on his slowly recovering enna stores. They were in the area where they suspected Sery was being held, but the area was so vast that without her trick of the resonance, they would have no hope of finding her.
A wave of magic inundated him, swelling his enna to an unimaginable size. He had almost gotten used to the surge at this point, though random, unintentional magics still escaped him from time to time.
“Mage,” he said, alerting his partner. Magewhisper quickly turned off the road and stopped so he could dismount and retrieve his map and compass.
Closing his eyes, he turned until he was facing in Sery’s direction as precisely as possible, then looked at his compass and read its bearing. Using the closest road markers as a guide, he found his current location on the map and carefully drew a dotted line in the correct direction with his magic.
It had been Magewhisper’s idea to try and triangulate Sery’s location. Veltyen had tried arguing with the stallion when he first took a road nearly perpendicular to Veltyen’s sense of Sery’s direction, nearly forgetting the intelligence the stallion had demonstrated in their long years of partnership in his state of agitation. There was a particular trick to working with an animal partner with such high intelligence but a limited ability to communicate exact messages, one that required keen observation and inference skills. It was something that Veltyen was usually good at, and the incident reminded him that he needed to get himself under control if he wanted all of his skills available to help find Sery.
The surge had not faded, and Veltyen mounted up to continue down the road. They now had six lines that intersected imperfectly around an area that was known to cater to nobles on outings to the countryside, full of cottages, hunting lodges, and lakehouses; his measurements were too imprecise to get an exact location.
Consulting his map, he directed Magewhisper along the most direct route to the town of Dova, an outpost that provided goods and services to the hundreds of privately owned cottages nearby. Foria was searching through the records of ownership and recent sales in the area, but unless she found a clue, it would mean hours or days of laborious zig-zagging searching as he continued using the periods of resonance as a guide.
Thankfully, Sery’s skill was improving exponentially. She had managed four periods of resonance the day before, each lasting for over half an hour. It would make the search much easier.
Unlike him, her talent shone through even in this level of adversity. She had no one to praise or encourage her, no one to help iron out issues with her technique, no library to reference about the theoretical fundamentals. She was all alone, and she was still working to help them find her, using her formidable mind to escape whatever cell they had trapped her in.
Her strength reminded him not of stone or steel, but of a living tree. It might bend in the wind but never break, its roots growing deeper and its branches reaching higher every year.
They were close now, very close. His sense with the resonance gave him some measure of distance as well as direction, though he had had to travel closer before he had a frame of reference for the feeling of distance.
It had been over two hours before he arrived in Dova, but the resonance still had not faded. The sun was setting and he expected the resonance to end soon, so he looked for an inn with stables to rest for the night.
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The resonance did end around dinnertime, but to his surprise, it returned within a quarter hour and then lasted long past dinner and well into night, fading only as he prepared for bed.
It appeared Sery had mastered the trick of maintaining the resonance as long as she was not actively distracted or asleep. Counting the interminable days, it had been a week since the first connection, ten days since she had been taken.
As far as her absence went, it was an eternity. As far as mastering an almost mythical magic technique, it went beyond genius.
Smiling, he murmured into the darkness. “Goodnight, Sery. You always exceed our expectations.” He would have to increase his efforts to match. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” he promised.
***
Sery breathed slowly and deliberately as she opened her eyes while maintaining resonance. When that was successful, she slowly stood and walked around the room, working on her ability to do other tasks while maintaining the connection. She recited the alphabet in a hoarse voice – it turned out that if you did enough fake coughing, you would get a real sore throat.
Hope and anticipation were growing as Sery’s sense told her that Veltyen was here, as close as if she were at Eterna’s guild headquarters and he at the construction site at the edge of town. His path was meandering and indirect, but he was getting closer every hour.
In an effort to keep Tristane away as much as possible, Sery feigned a worsening illness, acting too weak to get out of bed and coughing up any medicine he tried to give her.
In her distraction, she misjudged how much worry she was causing and Tristane’s reaction to it.
Tristane came into the cell, not with more medicine, but with a necklace with a large piece of mana crystal in the pendant.
Sery’s blood ran cold and she lost the resonance for a moment before desperately pulling herself back into it. “What’s that?” she croaked, though she knew the answer.
“It’s your necklace. I asked them to deliver it before all the decorations are done so we can take you to the healer’s. Come, put it on and we’ll go.”
Sery shrank back. “I don’t want to.”
Tristane made an annoyed sound. “Don’t be childish. We can’t have you getting any sicker.” He moved forward, crystal in hand.
Sery curled up and wrapped her blanket around herself, using it as a barrier to keep the magic shackle away from her skin. “No!”
“Sery, like it or not, you need a healer today. We’re going.”
His hands pried at the blanket but she squirmed and twisted and held on with a grip borne of pure fear.
His patience was limited, and after only a few attempts, he shouted at her. “Sery! I’m trying to help you!”
What he was trying to do was seal off her magic and then move her to a different location, one that Veltyen might not be able to find. She had no idea if the resonance would still work with whatever artifact they had designed to bind her. Combined with her past history with magical shackles, she was not at all rational as she shrieked, “No!”
Tristane cursed. “You leave me no choice.”
Suddenly, the blanket burned away to nothing, leaving her skin scalded but largely unharmed.
She stared at him for a second that stretched on much longer than it should. He reached for her with the hand not holding the necklace.
In a final, desperate gamble, she lunged forward and grabbed him, pushing the largest pulse of magic she could manage into his enna.
***
“Wait, something’s wrong.”
Veltyen paused and scanned the horizon as the resonance cut off, not in the controlled fashion he had come to expect over the last few days, but more like the uncontrolled attempts of the early days.
A few minutes later, an explosion rocked the peaceful countryside.
Magewhisper took off at a dead run without prompting.
Veltyen did not need the resonance; he could feel Sery again the normal way, though the ambient magic was low, so low. He prayed she had not been hurt in the explosion.
When he finally saw her running towards him, his heart leapt and sank at the same time. She was not wearing any shoes, and there was blood on the ground. The right side of her face and her right arm were scalded an angry red, and as they drew closer together, he could see blisters starting to form.
He threw himself out of the saddle and she ran headlong into his arms. He tried to be gentle, mindful of her injuries, but she burrowed into him, heedless of any damage she might be doing to herself.
“Sery.” The word was a confirmation of her presence, of relief, of gratitude that she was alive. All was not yet right in the world, but it was starting to right itself.
“I kn-knew you would find me.” Her voice trembled as it did when he first met her.
He kissed her uninjured cheek. “You made it easy.”
He had almost forgotten about Tristane until Sery turned her head to look at the way she had come, expression fearful.
The energy mage’s robes were in tatters but he was far less injured than Sery, his expression twisted in fury rather than fear. “Veltyen! She’s mine!”
Veltyen’s rage was cold, hard, and endless. He lifted Sery onto the saddle with one arm, drawing his sword with the other and dissipating Tristane’s lightning attacks with the ease of long practice.
They had fought many times as boys in the Academy, Tristane’s petty, ugly jealousy growing each time he lost.
The older man had made Veltyen’s life miserable for three years until he finally graduated, devastating Veltyen’s heart as his last act of malice. Veltyen had never thought that their lives would intersect again.
But Tristane was no longer a petty misery; he had harmed a treasure he did not even have the right to look at.
“Sery, can you put us in resonance again?” he asked quietly. “Don’t worry if you can’t; I’ll have no problems dealing with him either way.”
Sery nodded and took a breath. Veltyen’s enna expanded to an endless ocean.
He stalked forward, not bothering to raise his sword as the air itself hardened around him and repelled any and all energy attacks.
There was quite a lot of magic in those attacks, Veltyen noted dispassionately. Sery must have refilled Tristane’s enna doing whatever she did to cause the explosion.
When Veltyen was three steps away, Tristane drew his sword and attacked. Veltyen did not bother to parry, the sword sliding off the hardened air just as the energy attacks had.
Veltyen reached out and grabbed Tristane by the throat.
There was one lesson taught to materials mages from the very beginning: Never try to alter the properties of living tissue.
It was a non-issue for most mages, requiring an extraordinary amount of magic to even try, but when it was successful, it always resulted in the death of the tissue being manipulated.
Tristane’s eyes bulged in shock and his mouth gaped as he tried to gasp for breath. Veltyen let go and he fell to the ground, his belly heaving at he fought desperately for air.
Not a whisper of breath passed in or out.
Veltyen got into Magewhisper’s saddle behind Sery and they set off for Dova.
“What did you do to him?” Sery asked quietly.
“I removed the elasticity from his lungs,” he answered just as quietly. “Does that scare you?”
She shook her head and her acceptance pulled him back from the cold rage.
He confessed the rest of his sin. “I plan on saying that I had poor control of my magic because of the resonance. It has the benefit of being true, but it had nothing to do with why and how I killed him. Does that bother you?”
She shook her head again.
He wanted to kiss her so badly that he thought he might go insane. But she was tired and injured and did not even have shoes to walk away if she wanted to leave him. He settled for kissing the top of her head.