Chapter 4: Mana-cles

As the sun neared the horizon, the landscape finally started to switch from the endless fields and farms separated by occasional woods and to the first of the lakes that lent their name to the Lake Country that lay northeast of his village. Miro knew of it from an old yellowed map he’d found rolled into a tube among Sierra’s belongings when Bondook was purging them shortly after she passed. At the time, it looked like something that was worth saving, and Miro would study it by candlelight every evening before bed, until Bondook discovered him at the task and used the same candle to burn the map into ash.

The grand lake was without a doubt the most beautiful sight he had ever seen. The sun reflected with gold off the surface, its vastness spreading in every direction where at its edges it was nuzzled by gently sloping hills covered in thick forest. All Miro wanted to do then was to stop and stand at its shores for the remainder of the daylight, contemplating the unimaginable beauty that must have been contained in every inch of his old map.

“Are we planning on stopping soon?’ He asked. “Because I’m so tired I’m just going to slide off this horse and have a nap here by the side of the road and even though I have no idea what a saddle sore actually is, I’m pretty sure I got one.”

“Too much light,” came the curt response.

“What’s that?”

“We have to wait until dark. Otherwise someone might spot us.”

“Alright, well for when we do stop, can I recommend something scenic? Like the lakeshore that we passed by a minute ago?”

“No.”

“Why?”

Miro was answered with silence and he gave the rider a few moments to reconsider before saying, “Listen, I have no idea how many times I can repeat ‘why?’ without tiring but I certainly have the time to find out.”

Miro thought he could hear the grinding of teeth ahead of him.

“Someone might see the fire from anywhere on the lake. We need to go into the woods.”

“You guys are absolutely the most joyless things imaginable. And don’t get me wrong, I’ve realized this a long time ago. I just figured you needed the occasional reminder.”

True to their word, when the sky turned a deep shade of indigo and Miro could hardly make out the horse ahead of him, they veered from the road and cautiously navigated through the forest, breaking for camp only when they reached the bottom of a small dip in the terrain. As they set up, the riders left Miro to his own devices, either because he was not actually the prisoner that he suspected himself to be, or they accurately estimated that he was not the kind of idiot to attempt to escape on foot through a dark and unfamiliar forest. What they failed to accurately estimate, however, was his ability to get off a horse unaided. After swinging his leg over, he’d lost balance and dropped hard on his side onto a blanket of fallen pine needles. After hearing their scoffs, Miro propped himself against a log and watched them work, finding no small pleasure in seeing them struggle with the fire. A thought struck him. There was no Bondook, and there was no way to tell how much, if anything, his travelling companions knew of his powers.

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The task took no longer than it had the day before, and out here in the wild so far away from home, it almost felt easier, as if this wasn’t just something he dabbled with on the side but rather the thing he was born to do. As the flames caught and the campfire started with Miro’s clandestine assistance, the woman rider glanced in his direction and squinted, but he tried his best to look completely disinterested in their fussing about. It had been enough – with a satisfying smirk he watched the progress bars for both his overall experience and for his incinerate spell increase ever so slightly. All he needed now was patience and time.

Dinner was just as disappointing as lunch, if not more so because he knew what he was in for. The other two had skewered their bars of pressed oat and jerky on sharpened sticks and held them over the fire. Miro refused to participate in this charade of treating the dried atrocities as if they were real food. In any case, he was quite content to sit by his log, and to set fire to the pine needles around him, quickly patting down the flames after he got his experience so the others wouldn’t see.

It was slow going, but within the half hour he’d made enough progress to believe that if he kept it up this consistently for a couple of months, he would finally be able to leave his current level. With hope though, came a lack of vigilance and when he brought to life another one of his small fires, he heard, “Hey! Hey! What do you think you’re doing over there?” The woman had already gotten up and marched towards him, glancing back at her companion, “I told you we should have manacled him.”

“I figured he was just a kid.”

“You know damn well he’s more than just a kid,” she snapped at the other rider, and then at Miro, “Now get over here.”

She roughly grabbed one of Miro’s arms, and he made a cursory effort to keep her away from the other one, but having recognized that any true struggle was entirely pointless, gave in and found himself handcuffed by two wide iron bracelets that had been fused together into a figure eight.

“Let’s see you try pull any of your magic tricks now,” she said, crossing her arms as she loomed over him.

She was right. Try as he may when he concentrated on his spell, nothing happened. Miro had been stripped of his powers.

“Hey what did you do?” he demanded, trying to summon outrage that had a hard time showing through his terror.

She laughed before responding, “Oh calm down, it’s only temporary.”

The male rider stepped out from behind her and added his own sneer to the humiliation.

“They’re not just manacles, they’re mana-cles,” he explained. “They block your mana flow so you can’t summon any of your fancy spells. I hear they hardly have any effect on stronger mages but you … well, here you are.” Although the male rider would have likely preferred the equivalent restraint for Miro’s mouth, it didn’t seem like he enjoyed the situation any less for it, if his continued wicked smile was any indication.

Miro stared past his shackled hands at the pine needles under the boots of his captors. The spell was still there, he could see it if he reached out into his mind but he couldn’t access it. He wondered if this was how Pakz felt – a boy from Miro’s village, a couple of years his senior – after getting kicked off a bull he had no business trying to tame and losing his ability to walk; seeing the legs that were there but unable to command them into motion.

“Better get some sleep, we ride with first light,” the man said.

“And I wouldn’t try anything funny if I were you,” the woman rider added. “There’s worse than wolves in these woods.”

Miro swallowed hard as every sound coming from the forest took on a new sinister quality. Lying down, he felt the full brunt of his exhaustion and fell asleep feeling relieved for the first time to be in proximity of the riders’ swords.