“Et voila,” Master Warin said as he and Rosamund appeared in a flash of light, briefly illuminating the ring of standing stones around them. “The stones answered the dragon’s roar—I want to know more. But from here, we will not want to teleport but fly near. I trust that your new broom will suit; here, you may accustom yourself to it while you wait.” The bearded archmage slowly drew a long birch staff out of his sleeve.
“You wanted me to ferry you about broomback? That’s why you brought me here?” The hedge witch sniffed as she took the staff, eyeing the ends dubiously. “Isn’t a broom without any head. How’s the magic to know which end is which?”
“Does it really matter that it doesn’t have a head?” Warin gestured, and the length of birch began to float. “It has been properly enspelled, I assure you. Enchantment may not be my specialty, but a flying broom is a fairly simple matter. Considerably less complex than a carpet.”
Rosamund grabbed the staff and hefted it experimentally. “It needs twigs.” She pulled a hunk of twine-wrapped white quartz from her bag, tapping it against the birch; it flickered for a moment before lighting up. “I suppose grasses could do,” she added with a sigh, glancing over at the bearded archmage.
Master Warin said nothing, the diviner’s eyes already closed as his hands ran along the surface of a fallen stone, lips moving in a silent mutter.
Rosamund frowned. “We will be back in time for the wedding, won’t we?”
“Yes, if you don’t keep pestering me,” Warin said with an edge of exasperation. “This is delicate work, woman; let me focus.”
Rosamund rolled her eyes, then looked down at the soft, muddy ground. Grasses will have to do, she thought to herself as she took in the surrounding fields, then hung the magelight on her belt. She walked quietly around, cutting and gathering grass using her knife, then paused when she saw a footprint.
Woman, or a young boy. But we’re a good way from the nearest village, and they were barefoot, so probably a curious young boy. The tracks lead to one of the trilithons, but not away; circling the trilithon revealed no corresponding set of tracks away. A boy came out here but didn’t return. His mother must be worried sick. As she mulled over the puzzle, her own memories of Marcus’s childhood coming to the fore, she folded stalks of grass over a length of twine and then wrapped the birch staff seven times with the twine, trying to make a decent excuse for a broom out of the plain enchanted stick.
Rosamund shook the newly fletched broom once, twice, and a third time, then swung her leg over to straddle it. Her first time on a broom, she’d tried riding it sidesaddle, worried about preserving her virtue; she was lucky she hadn’t broken her neck with such foolishness. With a quick jerk of her hands, she pulled the broom up and leaned forward, steering into an upward spiral before looking down at the lintel stone of the trilithon.
No lost boy stared back up at her. She’d hoped to find one stuck up there like a cat in a tree, bold enough to climb up but still afraid of the trip back down. Rosamund frowned, steering the broom in a slow, low circle around the standing stones, cupping her magelight in one hand to try to see better. When she returned to the first trilithon for a closer look, she saw muddy footprints on the lintel stone. She cautiously flew to the north of the ring, landed, and called back. “Be careful, wizard; I think these stones make people disappear.”
“Poppycock,” the archmage shouted back. “They’ve been studied by at least half a dozen generations of scholars and students from Oxford. In none of those studies has anyone detected any trace of a functional portal, much less stepped through it.”
“I’m not staying here any longer,” Rosamund called out. “If you don’t come out right away, I’ll just start the long flight back home, wherever that is.”
“North. It’s north.” There was a long pause, and then the archmage started walking towards her. “Fine. The stones are being stubborn in any event. They’ve been sleeping a long time, and I’m not convinced Aurelius woke them up all the way.”
Rosamund held her new birch broom in one hand and tapped it with the other impatiently. “You don’t have to try to impress me with nonsense, old man.”
“My name is Warin,” the old man puffed. “I’ll also accept ‘Master,’ ‘Archmage,’ or—if you feel particularly formal—‘Archmagus.’”
“Names have power, old man,” the witch said. “And you never know who might be listening.” She wiggled a hand.
“You might not know. I, however, am a master diviner.” Archmage Warin cocked his head, frowning. “Someone has just begun to watch, however.”
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“Is that—” John leaned forward. “It’s Archmage Warin, Your Grace. I think I found the source of the cross-scry.”
“Eh?” Duke Robert de Lancaster looked up from his own crystal ball and over at his court wizard, the flickering orange light therein illuminating his face strangely. “It was an archmage’s cross-scry you picked up? Well done. Perhaps you should be qualified as a master diviner after all.”
“It’s a rare thing to catch another scry sideways, true,” John said. “But what’s stranger is that he didn’t go elsewhere or set up a ward in the half a bell’s time between when I caught someone else looking at Stephen and when I narrowed down the location. Surely, if I picked up the cross-scry, he must have as well. He must not care about being traced.”
As Robert peered over at John’s crystal ball, the little robed figure walked to the edge of the circle of stones; the scene suddenly blurred, then the crystal ball dimmed and cracked. Robert sighed heavily. “And there’s a scrying ward,” he said, shaking his head. “Warin must have wanted us to know it was him before blocking us from seeing anything else.”
A manservant standing in the doorway quietly cleared his throat, discreetly seeking permission to interrupt his master.
“You may speak,” Robert de Lancaster said, not taking his gaze off the broken crystal ball.
“Young Master Stephen has arrived,” the servant said. “I showed him to the great hall with the others.”
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
Robert grunted. “Go and tell them that John and I will be down shortly. Wait—have pots of tea brought out. You do not need to outright refuse Stephen and the others wine if they request such, but any pitchers brought out should be well-watered. We have much to discuss, and I do not want to deal with wits muddled by too much drink.” He sighed and turned to look at the intact crystal ball with its tiny orange and black diorama, flickering with lights. “John—can you hold the link on that ball open while you carry it downstairs?”
“Probably,” the court wizard said. “If not, though, I can reopen it after bringing it downstairs. At that altitude, it’s above routine interference.”
Robert nodded. “It is not even especially important for me to watch the fires at this point, but I think it is worth showing to the others, simply to ensure that they do not misunderstand the urgency of the matter at hand. Even after this dragon is dealt with—a show of weakness in the defense of London like this is the greatest threat to the integrity of the Empire in forty years.”
“Forty years—I thought you said London was burning. Are the Irish making another attempt to take and hold a beachhead in Wales?” Stephen’s curious voice sounded from the doorway.
“I doubt it, though I suppose they might try once they hear London has been burned.” Robert looked over at his grandnephew. “We were about to head downstairs. I’ll explain later; I’d rather not repeat myself explaining to everyone separately.”
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Raynagh spilled out of her hammock with a start, bare feet landing cat-quiet on the cold boards of the deck before she knew what had caused her to wake, After sixteen decades as a corsair—seven as a first mage and two as a captain—she had learned to trust her reactions, and the bare blade of a basket-hilted broadsword was extended in front of her before she considered the cause of her wakefulness. The ship had shifted; as a beached ship ought not to shift very often, the motion was worth attending to.
Is it the tide? It felt as if it was nearly the right time for the water to reach its way up the mile-wide mud flats she had grounded her ship on, and the waves sounded near. Then she heard a shout: “Awake! Boarders! Boarders!”
She rushed out of the captain’s cabin, her open right hand flexing in preparation for a spell. A four-armed humanoid, at least seven feet tall, was pulling itself over the prow of the ship, seeming hardly slowed by the axe blows being aimed its way by two wakeful crewmen. The clangor of metal on metal sounded as steel axe blades struck its cold body. A golem—a lesser one, perhaps, but not a familiar design. Made of metal, which made it a poor choice for marine combat, if not for the fact that the ship was beached.
Raynagh began to chant, pointing with the sword in her left hand as the nimble fingers of her right hand worked double-time. Then there was a sudden blow to her shoulder, her chanting replaced by an uncontrolled vibrating exclamation as electricity wracked her body and she fell to the deck. A young human—perhaps a tenth her age—stood over her, raising a copper-clad staff. Men-at-arms, armored and armed in a northern English style, rushed past her fallen body.
Raynagh froze, unable to move.
“Hold—I have her, Flyntex,” said a tenor voice. A halfling stepped into view, the little man barely taller than her seated form. “This is the captain; at worst, she is worth a ransom, but at best, she will know valuable information.”
Raynagh’s arms moved behind her back, seemingly of their own volition. As she was bound with rope, the half-blooded galley captain watched helplessly and wordlessly. One by one, the skeleton crew that had stayed to watch the ship surrendered, died, or fled, jumping off the deck into the lapping waves of the incoming high tide. The doughtiest fighters had all gone inland to assault Castle Burgia, but the speed of the defeat of her skeleton crew was still demoralizing and disappointing.
She’d thought herself unlikely to see action after volunteering to wait behind with the ships and watch over the fleet beached on the mud flats; she had been wrong, and wrong in one of the worst possible ways. A mage light illuminated the deck. The young man who had knocked her to the deck with an electrically charged blow looked younger in the clear light, with a puff of brown curly hair and scraggly growth on his chin that announced he was barely able to grow a beard; the golem proved to be copper with a light tracery of verdigris suggesting it was neither old nor magically insulated from the elements.
The golem pulled up the anchors; a scarred man who the others called Sir Bryan directed the men-at-arms in pushing at the sticky, wave-lashed mud with oars, the ship sloshing into motion. The youthful lightning wizard cast a lightning bolt at the next ship in line, which smoldered threateningly; then a foreign-looking woman with glossy black hair waved away the youth and stepped forward, both arms waving. A minute later, a sheet of flame danced out over the waves, igniting ship after ship.
The unseen force that had taken control of Raynagh’s body disappeared; she knew the moment it happened because she had been trying both to scream and break free of the ropes. The former action was successful; the latter only abraded her arms uncomfortably.
For her pains, she found herself grabbed and shaken, with a rag stuffed in her mouth before she was dragged back into her cabin and tied to a chair. While she could no longer see anything other than the wall of her cabin, she could feel the ship move, the uneven lurching announcing the inexperience of its new oarsmen. She dozed off for a little while, then woke when she heard voices.
“Think of it this way, Sir Bryan—they would not have landed in the bay with a hundred galleys if they did not mean to try to take Cornwall.” The first voice was familiar, the same tenor that had declared Raynagh worth a decent ransom.
“One hundred twenty-four,” interrupted an impetuous bass voice.
“Quiet, please,” responded an accented alto. “Lord James—please do continue; I am as curious as Sir Bryan. Why was it so urgently necessary that I burn as many ships as I could? As most were completely uncrewed, merely preventing pursuit would not have required that level of destruction. Great magics carry a price.”
“We have forced them to commit in full by making withdrawal more difficult,” said the tenor voice—Lord James. “Since the Prince of Cornwall is dead and his men are in disarray, a firm commitment will leave them likely to succeed. Captain Raynagh here has confirmed that they hoped to seize the peninsula—it is not merely a raid in force, though it could easily become one if they had a full fleet to run back to.”
It took effort for Raynagh to stay still, pretending continued unconsciousness in spite of the shocking statement. She could not remember being questioned at all.
“Lord James, I understand, but—it strikes me as dishonorable to strike at my enemy’s enemy in the dark of night. The next time your cousin asks you to act as a cat’s paw, leave me out of it.” Logically, the gravelly baritone had to belong to Sir Bryan.
“The kings and corsairs of Ireland are not our friends, even if they are our enemy’s enemy. I agree it smacks of dishonor, but it is a dishonor I am willing to accept. And it is mine to bear alone. My cousin knows nothing of this—other than the fact that I have dealt with the Prince of Cornwall,” Lord James replied. “If an imperial investigation arrives in York, I would prefer he did not have to dissemble. But between the dragon we woke from Glastonbury Tor and what is in motion in Cornwall, I hope there will be no imperial interference in my cousin’s reign until he has had the chance to fully consolidate his position.”