He landed seconds later and found his footing. Theola was still beside him, holding his arm and smiling. James took a moment to look around: they were in the centre of a grassy clearing barely half a dozen metres across, tall straight trees growing in a ring around its edge. It seemed vaguely familiar from somewhere.

“I’m sorry,” Theola said. “I couldn’t think of a way to warn you without the others noticing.”

“Where are we?” James asked. They had to be within the City limits, unless Theola’s teleportation had no regard whatsoever for wards – in which case surely Crelt would have fallen directly after Clirith River – but green spaces within the City were scarce and hard to find.

“The woods behind the two palaces. You know them?”

James did. He’d explored these woods with his friends when they were young, traversed every inch of them and discovered their every secret. That must be why he remembered this clearing. Hadn’t they picnicked here once? “Yes. But why – “

Theola sighed. “I can’t live the way they want me to. I have to escape sometimes. I thought you might like to join me.”

He narrowed his eyes. It felt like a trap; too good to be true. “Why me?” he asked, because Jacob would have had that same thought. “Why am I special?”

She shrugged. “Everyone else has been assigned to me. I chose you myself. And you’re an interesting man, Jacob. I want to learn about you.”

Another round of interrogation, then. He could deal with it.

“Are you hungry?”

“Yes,” James admitted.

Theola took a few steps over to the nearest tree and crouched down beside it, reaching downwards into the ground besides its roots. After a few seconds she emerged with a picnic basket in her hands.

That, he wasn’t sure he could deal with. Not so soon after seeing Georgie again. Not in a place where they’d made happy memories together.

Theola returned and set the basket down between them, then flopped down onto the grass. James sat down, cross-legged, and laughed. It was bizarre. She was Felix Blackthorn’s greatest asset, possibly the five-hundred-year-old chosen of the stars. He was King Charles’s closest friend and advisor, here specifically to discover her secrets and strike her down.

And here they were, picnicking in the woods like a pair of teenagers.

“How are you finding it here?” Theola asked.

“It’s… very different to what I’m used to,” said James carefully. In one sense it wasn’t, because two great cities playing host to great armies were much the same. But in another sense it was very different, because no-one respected or feared him here. The name of Jacob Winter meant nothing. “But it’s a privilege to serve you, my lady.”

“Call me Theola,” she said.

“Theola,” he repeated, a little awkwardly. He felt he needed to give her something back, but she was already calling him by his first name, so – wait, hadn’t he decided – “Jay,” he said.

“Jay?”

“Yes. It’s my nickname.” He hesitated. “My friends call me Jay.”

She smiled a little. “You consider me a friend?”

“We barely know each other. But… I think, someday, I’d like to. I have questions, if you’ll permit me to ask them.”

“Of course.” Theola busied herself opening the basket and setting out the food and drink. Sandwiches, mostly, with a little fruit, and a bottle of what looked like quite expensive wine. It seemed a good picnic.

“What’s it like? Being… well, so different from everyone around you. Being immortal.” Immortality is a myth. He had to pretend it wasn’t, though; showing doubt in her would ruin everything.

She hesitated, passing him a wineglass. “A privilege. A burden. A blessing.” Another brief pause. “A curse.”

“I must seem very young to you,” James said. He wasn’t quite sure what his goal was, whether this was deception or reality. He was just working on instinct and hope. It had got him this far, after all; why should it fail him now?

“In a way, yes. You have a lot to learn yet. Though I don’t feel weary of the world in the way perhaps I should. I’m as young as you at heart.”

James narrowed his eyes. “Forgive me for asking, but… how exactly does your immortality work? Are you just… never going to age?”

She shrugged. “I haven’t in the last five hundred years. It might be that some day my years will catch up with me, or that I age far slower than you.”

“It’s unfair.”

“What is?” Theola uncorked the wine bottle with a satisfying pop.

If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

“That in fifty years I’ll be an old man and you’ll still be… you. The same.”

“The power comes with a great burden,” she said. “Would you take it, if you could?”

Would he want to be a Mage? Want to be chosen of the stars, with all that entailed? Have the kind of power Theola had shown at Clirith and since? Stars, of course he would. Who wouldn’t?

Then he thought about Felix, and how he had treated her. As a political tool. That, he didn’t want. But maybe he could find a way to have both power and freedom. If he was strong enough, no-one would be able to make him do anything he didn’t want to.

“I think I would,” he said. And then, because it felt right to reciprocate, “Would you put down your burden, if you could?”

She was silent for a long moment. He feared for a second he’d gone too far. Then she spoke: “No, but… perhaps I would choose to bear it in a different way.”

She wasn’t happy with the way things were; she wasn’t happy with what Felix gave her. “More freedom?” he guessed.

Theola nodded once. “I understand why it must be this way. But sometimes…”

“Sometimes you just can’t take it any more,” finished James.

The feeling was not an unfamiliar one. He’d never been able to stay put in the safe houses in that dreadful year on the run with Charles. It had nearly got them both killed more than once. But the alternative felt like death too, in a way.

Maybe that was why he’d refused a formal place in the chain of command, why he’d never married. So that if he ever wanted to just leave, he could.

He didn’t want to leave, though. He still wanted to serve and support Charles, however he could. Just… in the way he chose, without anyone giving him orders.

“Precisely. Hence: this.” She waved her hand in a vague gesture that encompassed the picnic, the clearing, him. “Wine?”

He held out his glass to her. “Please.”

Theola poured steadily, filling two glasses with the deep red liquid. He almost asked what vintage it was before realising that plain Jacob Winter would know next to nothing about wine. It would have to be a surprise, then.

She lifted her glass. “To freedom.”

“To freedom,” James repeated. They clinked glasses and drank. It was good wine: just the right amount of sweetness. “Out of curiosity, can you get drunk?”

“There’s nothing in my nature preventing it,” she replied. “But I do happen to know a few spells to purge the influence of alcohol from my body.”

James couldn’t help perking up at that. It sounded a very useful spell to know. “Is that something you could teach me, or…”

Theola shrugged. “There is nothing preventing mortals from learning it. Much of my power is a product simply of having had hundreds of years to practice.”

“How long did this one take you?”

“A decade or so,” she replied, shrugging. If she was lying, she was doing a good job of it. But then anyone with the talent and sheer nerve to impersonate a Mage would naturally be an extremely good liar.

“Continuous work, or…”

“More time than you could afford to devote to it while maintaining your combat skills.”

Well, so much for that idea then. He’d just have to avoid getting drunk the mundane way. That was a pity.

“Tell me about your family,” Theola said.

James swore to himself, and then decided to resort to the time-honoured strategy of making it up as he went along. “My father is a blacksmith,” he said, “and my mother bakes. I have a sister, two years older than me. She’s always convinced she knows best.”

“You must miss them.”

“I – yes. Yes, I do, very much. But I don’t regret my choice.” He put it together mid-sentence: his fictional cousin had been killed fighting for Charles’s forces, so his equally fictional relatives would not have been pleased that he was joining the opposing side.

“I suppose we can at least be glad of that.”

“What – what about your family? I suppose – “

“They’re long dead?” Theola’s face clouded; he regretted asking, even if she was lying as much as he was. “Yes. That is the greatest reason immortality is a curse.”

James took another sip of wine, hesitated, and then said the words he wanted to: “So we are both alone.”

Theola nodded. “But,” she said slowly, “perhaps…”

James suddenly realised what was happening. Picnicking alone in the woods, sipping wine together, talking about how alone they both were. The way she was looking at him, at once bold and tentative.

Sacred stars. Maybe that was why Theola was interested in him; he was just that handsome.

Getting into a romance with a woman who might be five hundred years old and who he might have to kill seemed like the worst of the long list of terrible ideas he’d had. He should stop this here and now. Could he invent a girlfriend waiting for him?

But. If that was why she was interested in him, she might just discard him when she found out he wasn’t willing. And without her, he was just another magician in Felix’s army, without the connections he’d need to get answers.

Maybe it was easier to think of it that way, because it was better than thinking of how perfectly beautiful she was, how inviting her lips were. Because it was easier than admitting that somehow, despite everything that should have stood in the way, some part of him wanted this too.

“Perhaps…” he echoed in the same slow, careful way, glancing up from his wine to meet her eyes.

“Perhaps we could be alone together,” Theola said, and reached for his hand.

It was wonderful. It had been too long since James had kissed a girl, and he’d forgotten how intoxicating it could be to lose yourself in someone else. He was drunk more on that than wine. He had to be careful, though. This couldn’t be anything more than a passing fling. Actually getting attached would really be the worst mistake he’d ever made.

But one perfect afternoon? What was the harm in that?

They stayed in the woods for two or three hours, but agreed reluctantly that they had to return to reality before it came looking for them. No-one could know what they had been doing. They were once again Mage and bodyguard, weapon and spy.

They made themselves presentable, packed away the remains of the picnic and rose to leave. She offered him her hand; he took it.

“We should do this again,” Theola said.

No. There were only so many times he could afford to do this without getting attached; he wasn’t completely heartless. “If it is your wish, my lady.”

She shook her head. “Don’t. Please.”

“You are – “

“In public, I am. In private? I would like very much for us to be just Jay and Theola.”

His treacherous mind wanted to replace Jay with James. It was only a slight addition to the syllable, yet it was the difference between truth and lies. And he couldn’t say it. “Very well,” he said. “Theola.”

And she pulled them away from their isolated clearing and back to reality.

James finished the rest of his shift in awkward silence. He didn’t tell Christopher or Will where he’d been and what he’d done. It was the Lady Mage’s secret to keep and he was loyal to her above all else, or so he said.

That done, he ate with the others, still keeping his silence, and then returned to his room to have time to think through the day’s events in private.

The stars did not see fit to grant him that luxury. There was someone sitting on his bed.

He hadn’t made a mistake with the wards, he knew he hadn’t, so how had they got in? How –

“Hello, James,” said Georgie.