(II)

His new clarity of mind stayed with him well after he finished his prayer, but it did not eliminate the demands that the rest of the world had on his time. He had threads to pull on, and the first one beckoned from the direction where the one wizard had been so abruptly neutralized before.

Looking around, Richard Angevin was glad to see most of the dead were enemies, his men around him going about securing the few survivors who hadn't managed to flee. After checking on the ladies and reassuring them that the situation was under control – though not necessarily safe, so no, Annari, you can't come out to experience the trauma of the battlefield yet – he set about reassessing the situation while tallying up casualties. Miraculously, only eight men had died, with about thirty more sustaining some manner of injury. Five of them would probably not see the next morning, so he memorised their names and listened to their last wishes. But of the remainder only eleven had a wound serious enough to put them out of action.

If only I knew how my numbers compare to the ones that ran, Richard thought grimly.

Before anything else, a stop by the bodies was in order. His men were well on the way to gathering up the attackers' corpses for a pyre, but since he'd not given leave for looting in order to ensure no important evidence was lost, they were all still unspoiled and intact. Insofar as their manner of death allowed at least.

When he found the mage and removed the man's mask and hood, he could only stare, completely taken aback at the sheer audacity of what was in front of him. "Dolos Vardus." All his tiredness washed away in the face of fury. "May the Light spare no pity or grace for you in the afterlife, you wretched whoreson."

How he wished he was back in Kul Tiras still. All his life, his entire purpose as the third son had been to leverage his family's relatively neglected seamanship interests in preparation of settling back in his mother's homeland. With all the male Ridgeley heirs lost at sea, he would take up her name so her House could continue. He'd been well on the way to doing just that too, despite minor frictions with the Tidesages over his Faith in the Light instead of the Tidemother. Then he suddenly found out he was now the only male heir of his father's family. If not for King Aiden Perenolde's polite 'invitation' to him and his sister, he'd have left her in Kul Tiras and possibly not come himself 'to surely redeem the Angevin name in the eyes of the Realm.'

But no, I wouldn't have lived with myself if I let this injustice stand without the slightest investigation, Richard thought darkly. Never mind the dishonour of my family being not only wrongfully executed, but also dispossessed after such an 'admission of guilt.'

But rage would just exhaust him further, so he forced himself not to throw Baron Vardus' corpse down the ravine. He got up and went to the spot where he died instead.

Once he was there, he began looking everywhere around the spot where the man and his perforated face had been felled. Here, at least, fate didn't work against him. The path was dry and earthy, with barely a blade of grass anywhere. Feeling along the ground eventually let him find a small hole in the path. It could easily have been dismissed as a crack from the many footfalls of the skirmish, but it was clean and deep and straight through solid rock. So deep he had to use his mace to break the stone and then his knife to dig through it. Finally, the sunlight glinted off something smooth and clear.

Richard picked it up and raised it to examine in the light. It was… some manner of projectile. Thinner than an arrowhead, but heavier. Thick and sharp, though also blunt compared to a bolt or arrow. Made of steel. It came down with the sound of thunder. And he distinctly remembered the lack of accompanying lightning. Some manner of projectile shooting spell?

Richard was still turning it between his fingertips when Mercad returned with their defeated foes in bonds and news of his scouts dead. A fair amount of their attackers had been struck down before Mercad and his men got to them, not by battle wounds but various incapacitating ailments. Like burst eardrums. And blindness. Uncontrollable jitters in most of them too. Richard thought back to the blast of steam he got to the face and made an effort not to grimace. Though when he went to see the prisoners, he found most of their eyes looking no worse for wear. Nothing that couldn't have been caused by fighting in a thick cloud of dust and sand for half an hour at least.

"I suppose they must have been too close to the thunder strike."

Mercad disagreed. "Maybe you didn't see it from where you were fighting, sir, but the lightning came down once or twice to help us too, and it didn't boom or scorch the earth or anything. Mostly it seemed to stun the bastards, though the couple who got it head on did get done in. What we did find was alchemical explosives."

"You're saying the lightning only set off whatever they had set up to bury us. Prematurely at that."

"Yes, sir."

"Come with me." Richard led the way to where the rockslide was being slowly dug through by the men in an effort to clear the path. "Tell me, does this amount of rock seem sufficient to you if they really wanted to kill us all?"

Mercad gave the rock pile a more thoughtful look than before. "You think they had a different objective?"

"Even if it caught us full on, at most it would have split us. Their forces weren't significantly more numerous than ours either, and this place is not ideal for that sort of objective in any case, the path is easily narrow enough that we were able to form a chokepoint. Numerical superiority would have been useless regardless. For a while at least."

"… But it could have sufficed as a decapitation strike."

"It could have. Except the strongest forces concentrated on the rear."

"Where we were," Mercad concluded. "You think they were after the Ladies' wheelhouse."

"I don't doubt my head would have been a fine bonus, but no. I am certain this was about taking hostages." Baron Vardus might have joined in a misguided attempt to get Annari despite my rejection, but who was the real mastermind? Who was the sorceress? And I'm a Duke, there is none higher in status than me save the King himself. "I don't much like what this is pointing to."

A raven cawed nearby. Richard turned around and spotted it on the top of his own carriage that he only ever brought along as a decoy. It was hard to tell since ravens tended to look alike, but Richard rather thought it was the same one his sister had spent the prior day playing with. Maybe he should have taken it as an omen. "You won't be feasting on our corpses today, damned bird." Though the 'bandits' might be a different matter.

The raven didn't care. It groomed its wing, then croaked once more and looked straight ahead, past him to where his men had finally dug a path to the other side of the rockslide. It would take another couple of hours to clear the whole mess, but that was fine. Richard could use the excuse to rest. The time to plan what to do next. Move on. Stay here. Go back.

Defeat in detail.

Whatever served to fill the time most usefully while his Lieutenants tallied the dead's belongings. He'd let Mercad do his interrogations later, possibly leave him behind a ways so Annari couldn't 'happen' upon the sight. Once they were sure the threat was truly past.

Giving truth to his worries, his wife and sister couldn't take being cooped up in their carriage anymore and came looking for him. Whatever questions they had were answered by their own eyes well before they found him though.

"I-I'm sorry, Big Brother, if I hadn't insisted on a last meet-up in the city, this wouldn't have happened."

Richard sighed. "Don't be ridiculous, sister, not being allowed to say even goodbye to your only friends is no way to live."

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Annari didn't seem convinced. "Well… they're not all my friends."

Richard didn't have it in him to follow through on that conversation. Women may not be that hard to understand, but that didn't necessarily mean that what you understood was always pleasant. The ladies of Alterac were every bit as venomous as the men. To Annari's tragically belated horror, unfortunately.

There was a creaking.

Richard frowned and looked forward. What was that noise? It was the strangest sound he'd ever heard, like the bastard child of a drawing bowstring and a creaking floor board, except it never ended. He quickly had his wife and sister escorted back to their carriage at the rear of the convoy. Mercad drew his sword. His men formed around him, weapons drawn.

It appeared from beyond the bend.

… It was a single man.

"What the hell?" Mercad forgot himself next to him.

Richard could understand why, though. It was a man riding the most bizarre contraption he'd ever seen. Two wheels, impossibly thin and even thinner spokes, stuck to a frame one ahead of the other. The man was… spinning them forth by a pair of pedals? It was so thin and fragile, the thing's profile was not even half a palm's width thick if you ignored the front handles, what kind of balance – how did he not crash?

"What the hell is that thing?" Someone muttered before falling silent under Mercad's glare because pot, meet kettle.

"Halt!" Mercad barked when the newcomer didn't skip a single stroke on spotting the carnage. "Who goes there?"

The man – no… That was no man, that was a boy, the boy… the boy from his vision! The boy… rode? Rode his contraption through the fresh split in the rockslide and turned to a stop just out of weapons reach. White shirt unbuttoned at the neck, dark leather jacket, masterwork boots made of the same, brown suede trousers, the fairest skin Richard had ever seen, blond hair that gleamed in the sun, blue eyes that scanned them and everything around with mildness seemingly born of impossible experience. More than anything, though, stood out his unnatural stature. At least by mainlander standards. This boy has Kul Tiran in him like me. It was the only explanation, he was almost as tall as Richard already but it was obvious he was still growing. With good food he might even grow to match Mercad, which was saying something, the man was well over two meters tall. And those weapons. It was something he'd only ever seen on a dwarf, and never up close. Boomsticks, three of them, a small one on his hip, a double-piped monstrosity sheathed on his… contraption. But the thing on his back. Wood and steel polished to a sheen, long and deceptively unthreatening. Richard gripped tight on the projectile in his hand.

"Who are you?" Mercad barked, his own hand tense around his weapon hilt. He was wise not to drop his guard just because of the boy's age. "State your business."

"My name is Ferdinand." Ferdinand. That was… it was a name fit for a king. "I sensed a disturbance in the Light." A disturbance in the Light? What was he talking about? "You're not anything I expected, but of course, I'm not going to ignore when such a plight crosses my path, mister…?"

A name fit for a king or a saint, he certainly had the voice of one.

But Mercad didn't relax. "Mind yourself, boy. You are before his noble grace, Richard of House Angevin, Duke of Hillsbrad."

"I know who he is, I was asking you. But it's fine, I can wait a while for the power of friendship to yield its returns." The absolutely insolent young man gave them and their still grimy and bloody appearance a cursory examination. Then he looked at Richard. "Apologies for the substandard lightning." The air came together in nine spheres that revolved like a great wheel behind him, arcs of blue shooting from one to the next like a nimbus of lightning, before they faded as fast as they appeared. "The little ones learn fast, but there's only so many ions they can handle at once even with the most exacting leverage of potential difference. They're still babies, you see. They kick up a mean dust cloud though."

Sword arms slackened. Mercad gaped. Richard stared. Some distant part of his mind wondered what the boy was even talking about because he didn't understand anyth-

The boy raised a hand glowing gold-

"Hah!" Mercad lunged forward with a wordless shout, but it was too late, the sphere of light-

The Light brushed Richard's cheek on the way by like a soothing caress. A well of refulgent splendor erupted behind him, drawing startled shouts, cries of amazement, voices intermixed everywhere with sighs of relief. Wonder. One weak, single gasp of a man who thought he'd breathe his last only for fortune to decide otherwise at the last moment. In that one instant between a blink and the next when the Light coursed through him, Richard felt it all.

In front of him, the boy reached up to push aside the blade pressing against his shield of golden radiance. The Light poured forth to envelop Mercad, the men, Richard himself, everyone around…. The cuts and developing bruises on his sentries disappeared. The bolts sticking out of Mercad's armor fell out. The giant man staggered back, mortified. The agony in Richard's arm vanished as the bone realigned and fused back into proper place. His aches disappeared. His weariness dispersed like it was never there.

The Light… has the Light not forsaken me after all?

Richard looked at the impossibility facing him and asked himself if he should kneel. ".. So it was you."

The boy dismounted his… contraption but did not reply.

"You were the one who ruined the ambush, if you hadn't… are you a priest?" Are you a holy man? Either that or some manner of nobility himself, influential one too. Not even the best connected guildmaster could obtain such exotic equipment, those boomsticks could only have come from the dwarves, and last Richard heard they still weren't sharing. Kul Tiras had been badgering them to help make cannons a reality for decades to no luck, how did this boy come by them? Why did he need them? How was he here? Did… Did the Light send you? But his words caught in his throat, he couldn't-

"Only coincidentally I'm afraid." The lad dismissed both his and their role in events with a bizarre mix of unrepentant chagrin and complete lack of humility. "I wouldn't call what led me here a vision, exactly, and I'll freely admit I initially assumed you were my goal, but apparently not. It's that bird."

What?

Turning around, Richard only met the sight of the same raven as before. "The raven?" What?

"Yes, it surprised me as well."

The raven flew down from the carriage to land on the boulder nearest the lad, dark fathomless eyes peering at him. But somehow, impossibly, Richard knew with absolute certainty that the raven didn't understand anything either.

The lad gave it a sandwich.

The raven greedily snatched it from his hand and proceeded to gobble it up.

"That settles that then."

That settled what? "I… don't understand."

"The scrum was large, there's even a couple of bodies your men missed, and a bunch that rolled down the slopes back into the forest. If this were a normal raven he'd already be down there somewhere, gobbling up eyeballs. But instead he's here, eating my lunch. It's clearly a familiar." The lad scratched the bird's chin.

The raven seemed to enjoy it. It even paused in its savage feasting to bask in the boy's touch in full, what in tarnation?

"So which are you, Huginn or Muninn?"

The raven croaked.

"Who?" Richard asked numbly.

"Huginn and Muninn. You know, Odyn's ravens that he uses to gather news from the rest of the world."

Richard stared at the holy man who called on the Light as easily as he commanded the spirits of nature itself to do his bidding and had a single question making rounds in his head.

Who the hell is Odyn?!