“No luck,” the rogue woman said, returning to my position half an hour later. “This request is impossible with the resources we have.”

“Ah,” I said. “Thank you for trying.”

She frowned at my slumped-down figure. “Is it time we return to the temple?”

I stared at the cracks in the pavement. I guessed this was it, then. I had failed. My team had disappeared, leaving me alone with the royalty for the better or worse. Darko had purposefully sacrificed himself just to make this all happen.

What choice did I have, but to return to the temple? If I wasn’t about to end my life for a second time right here and right now, what else could I do but get to the damn King’s crib to deal with my future?

Really, my life was far from over. This wasn’t the first time I had lost friends. Hell, I had barely known the team for a couple of days. During those days, their company nearly drove me to suicide. What reason did I have to attempt a reunion?

I opened my wavering mouth to admit my defeat when I spotted something beside the exit of the alley. A wagon that looked oddly familiar. I paused.

Then, before I knew it, my body resparked its hope. I sprung to my feet and rushed out of the alley, onto the highway.

There it was, slowly inching out of the city, towards the capital. The very same wagon I had slept in days prior. The burly driver, the horses, I recognized all of them. Immediately, I took up running.

“Hey!” I called to the driver, rushing after him. “Stop!”

The driver took a puff of his pipe and paused the horses, turning to me as he blew the smoke.

“Are they in?” I asked, already gasping for breath. “The mages? Remy, Shena?”

“Are you a constable?” the driver asked.

“No?”

“Then get lost,” he said. “This wagon carries vegetables and bread, nothing else.”

“No, please!” I shouted. “I’m the same guy, remember? The outsider mage. From Darko’s group. Are the mages still with you?”

The driver studied me for a moment. He took another puff, thinking of what to answer.

The tarp behind him peeked open. From within, I spotted the reddened eyes of my teacher.

My heart nearly exploded. I ignored whatever nonsense the driver was about to spout and ran around the wagon. I pulled the back tarp out of the way and hopped in. Out of breath, I stood between the entrance. Two pairs of eyes landed on me.

We stared at each other in bewildered silence. Shena appeared shocked to see me alive. Remy was more than just shocked. Her face had opened wide. A tear flowed out of her eye, and she made no effort to hide or stop it.

I couldn’t read her at all. My own eyes blurred, and I realized I couldn’t read my own emotions either. Too many sensations washed over me at once, and I didn’t know what any of them meant. My heart was about to kill me.

“Sorry,” I said and turned around. “I’ll leave.”

I took half a step out, when something grabbed my left arm. Remy’s reddened face tackled my royal robe. She clung her arms around my stomach, blocking me from moving.

“Liar!” She sniffled. “You stupid liar… You never needed my lessons at all!”

In a panic, I looked at Shena. She offered a wry smile, then pretended to look away, ignoring us two. Behind us, the driver glanced inside, then deemed the situation not his problem and left us alone.

Remy pounded me lightly in the chest. “Liar!” she repeated and continued for what felt like minutes. All the while I stood still in utter confusion, my instincts in scrambles. What could I have done but let her cry?

Eventually, Remy’s pounding calmed to weak taps. Her tears calmed down. She stood, her eyes glued to the floor. “Sorry…” she said.

“Remy, I—”

“Don’t speak,” she said, then wiped her eyes. “I’ll cry again.”

This was a request I would gladly follow and would have followed regardless. My emotional intelligence wasn’t at a high enough level to deal with the situation.

“What she means to say is,” Shena said, “‘Thank you for saving our lives.’ Fantastic trick you pulled, Cillian. Whoever you really are. You have my thanks.”

“You aren’t mad?” I asked.

“Mad?” Shena asked. “You presume I would have rather let the cultists torture me for their experiment? No, that is not the case. I am not mad in the slightest.”

“But… You left me?” I asked.

Shena glanced at Remy, then back at me. “I think we have a lot of talking to do. Cillian, if I am allowed to ask, where exactly have you been? What happened?”

***

After calming down, I told my side of the story. How I woke up in the Sacred Priest’s nursery, and how the Association’s Mrs. St. Clair came to check out my mana chords. How they read the contract and gave me no choice but to sign it.

I hesitated on my words with the next part. A large portion of me was still deathly afraid of revealing the system’s presence. Could I really reveal the extent of my powers?

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“Seeing as you’re here,” Shena said, “you must have escaped from the Association. How?”

“I… Well, as you could probably guess, I’ve been lying a little bit to everyone,” I admitted.

“You aren’t actually a beginner mage at all, are you?” Shena asked. Remy looked away, hiding her eyes.

“I am a beginner,” I said. “That much is true. It’s just, uhm, my magic doesn’t work like everyone else's. My spells… I don’t cast them by myself. It’s as if I gain outside assistance.”

“Interesting,” Shena said. “That makes absolutely no sense.”

“I’m sorry.” I spoke the next part in a near whisper, just in case the royal spies were somehow eavesdropping. “I can’t tell you more. Partly because I don’t fully understand my powers at all. Just know that I am not an actual master mage. A trickster would be a more fitting term.”

“I see,” Shena said. “Regardless, you must have somehow proved your control over mana.”

“I did,” I said. “And the Association let me go. Then I had to meet the King.”

I laid out a rough summary of how the conversation with the King went. I mentioned the bomb of debt given to me and outlined the King’s final offer of involving me in the quest to hunt the cultists.

“A thousand gold pieces…” Shena repeated, looking troubled.

“Is that a lot?” I asked.

“Do you remember Darko’s sword?” Shena asked. “The one he spent seven years saving for. It cost a hundred gold.”

“Oh,” I said.

“A thousand is an absolute scam from the Sacred Priest,” Shena said. “Twelve hours of risk-free work can never be worth so much, no matter how skilled. The King has ripped you off.”

“I guessed so,” I said. I looked down and paused. Then I asked, “What about you? Where’s Jordan and Rigrith? What happened after I passed out?”

“Darko ran after you, as you can likely guess,” Shena said. “We left Rigrith’s body and the fallen cultists at the church. They were all gone by the time we came back. As for Jord, we have no idea. By the time we arrived at the scene, you were practically dead, and Jord had disappeared.”

“I don’t know what happened,” I said. “I tossed the daze powder at his feet, then blasted him with a fire… ball. That’s the last I remember. He simply disappeared.”

Shena bit her lip. “Odd.”

“What happened next?” I asked.

“Darko begged me to heal you after he dragged you out of the cloud of daze powder,” Shena said. “I thoroughly failed. My apologies. Your body… It’s a miracle that you’re alive. The excess of daze powder immobilized your lungs, clogging up every part of your esophagus and everything below. That combined with the burns, I would not have recognized you had Darko not insisted the corpse was yours.

“After my failures… Darko insisted you had to be saved. He said his final goodbyes and rushed to the Royal Temple in hopes of convincing the Sacred Priest to perform her miracles. He somehow succeeded, which is a miracle in itself. But he also got himself arrested in the process. A dozen or so crimes were charged against him. Some old and some fresh as yesterday. It’s safe to say his plan is ruined.”

“Ah,” I said, a slight wave of relief washing over me. The situation was clearly still dire, and my fate was in questionable hands, but somehow, I felt warm inside. For once in my life, my fears had proved themselves wrong. My friends didn’t hate me. Darko had sacrificed his own skin to save mine. An awful decision on his part all around, but I was thankful.

“Thank you,” I said. “I’ll say this while I can. Thank you so much.”

Shena avoided eye contact. “Don’t thank me. I was ready to accept you for dead.”

“I was dead,” I said. “Which is why I’m now in one hell of a debt. Honestly, I couldn’t care less. What do we do next? That’s what’s important. We have to free Darko, right?”

Shena bit her lip. “That would be stupid. The plan is over. We will move our separate ways.”

I paused. “But… Really?”

“I will continue to search for Rakash and the Gorthorns,” Shena said. “I may not be their kind, but I am a part of their tribe. I’ll take the remains of Darko’s plan and apply it where I can. You two are free to help, but for the sake of your futures, I don’t recommend it. Remy should likely go home. This is by far the smartest decision.”

Remy kept her face hidden toward the wall. She clearly wasn’t happy about the idea.

“Cill, take the King’s offer,” Shena said. “As long as royalty doesn’t force you to a slave contract, the King’s proposal is by far the best chance you have at clearing your debt.”

“What about Darko?” I asked. “He’s imprisoned? Don’t we have to help him?”

Shena snorted. “This is his fault. He wouldn’t want us to help him. He broke laws, nonchalantly so, and now he has to pay consequences. His life is practically over, but I don’t think we can help him. Freeing him would mean busting through the temple, which is just about the stupidest idea we could attempt. Diplomatic methods will tangle us in his mess, too. Freeing him simply isn’t realistic. Darko’s plan has failed.”

What is this? I thought, a sore taste in my mouth. He didn’t want to be saved? What the hell did that mean? Of course he wanted to be saved. Who would want to spend their lives tucked away in a cell?

“Haven’t you been together for a long time?” I asked. “You’re going to forget him, just like that? What about the plan? You’ve prepared for a lot longer than I’ve been here. You can’t just forget it all now, can you?”

Shena shifted her position, clearly uncomfortable with the topic. “I would save him if I could. Darko is a good man, stupid or not. The problem is politics. Neither of us has the slightest chance of ever freeing him from his own crimes. We have no choice but to abandon the plan. This is what happens when your idiot leader insists that his grand plan is going to work, and that secondary ideas are unnecessary.”

“His crimes are all small offenses, are they not?” I asked. “He hasn’t killed anyone. Except cultists. Everything he has done has been for the greater good, no?”

“Sure,” Shena said. “Unfortunately, the royalty’s sense of justice is only mildly less skewed than Azetoth’s.”

“There is a way to get him free,” I said. “I know it.”

Shena let out a laugh. “Just yesterday, all of us nearly died while following Darko’s plans. He convinced you into this, promising protection and safety, and look at us now. Why would you want to save him?”

“Darko is a friend,” I said. “Is he not? He helped me rise from my lowest. He truly wished to train me to be a better man. I feel this, and I have been with him for three days. How long have you been his companions? Months? Years? Is this how quickly everything is forgotten? You would simply let his plan go to waste? We have to at least try to help him, don’t we?”

Shena scowled, raising her voice. “If you’ve got ideas, I will hear them. But from the way you speak, it sounds to me as if you haven’t got the slightest of clues. Forget it, Cill.”

I paused, taken aback by the change in tone. “Sorry…” I said.

“Ah, no, I didn’t mean that,” Shena said with haste. “These last few days have made me skittish. I’m sorry. I have no reason to get annoyed with you. Believe me, I do agree with your sentiment, to some extent. It’s just… Life isn’t always as simple. We can’t save people when we want to. The most we can do for Darko’s good is to imprison ourselves with him. And as good of a man as he is, I cannot do that.”

“I’m sorry for arguing,” I said. “Thanks for saving me, all of you. However, I will ask you to stop the carriage.”

“Why is that?” Shena asked.

“You asked me if I’ve got ideas for saving Darko,” I said. “I believe I have multiple.”