The Lich Without a Soul Vessel

That evening Evan climbed above the tree house and lay in the fork of branches with his hands behind his head, looking at the stars. The camp below was still active — he could hear Andrea's voice and the sounds of someone getting the better of someone else in a sparring match, and laughter.

He had been in this world for close to a year. The thought arrived without drama. He had come in as an eighteen-year-old boy carrying a dead necromancer's memories, and whatever he was now, it wasn't that. Nicholas Andrew's experience had been useful. The months of actual living had changed things that experience alone couldn't change.

He thought about longevity, as he sometimes did. A lich without a soul vessel wasn't truly immortal — his body would fail eventually, as all things did. But the body was changing in ways that shouldn't be possible, and the unnamed technique kept running its quiet cycles through him. He didn't know what the endpoint looked like. He had decided, at some point during the month in the forest, that he was interested in finding out.

Something landed in the branch beside him.

Cecilia sat with her feet hanging and looked at the same stars he'd been looking at.

"Thank you," she said. "Andrea is very happy."

"So am I." He meant it — the day had been unexpectedly pleasant. "Robin is impressive. An operation this size, this well-organized, this hidden. He has real talent. How did he come to be here?"

"Do you know his family name?"

Evan shook his head.

"Robin Taemir."

A pause. "He's royalty."

"Yes."

"Not a failed bid for power, then. He's too useful where he is." Evan looked at the darkness between the stars. "Taemir has sent competent soldiers after him, I assume, but never their actual capable commanders. That's not incompetence. That's deliberate. Which means someone in the Taemir court wants him exactly where he is — mobile, active along the borders, deniable. A piece on the board that moves without being seen to move." He thought about the Liya Demon Forest and the cannon that had appeared so conveniently. "The trip into Liya territory. That wasn't coincidence."

Cecilia's expression said he had landed somewhere accurate.

"You should have been harder to read," he said.

"Most people aren't looking for it." She shifted on the branch. "You're a death magic practitioner wearing a wandering adventurer's clothes. Evan Wang is a cover identity. I've been trying to figure out who you actually are." She listed what she'd noticed: the instinctive death-magic aura, the complete absence of foundational sword knowledge when he first appeared, the slow improvement as Andrea taught him. "A real wandering adventurer doesn't start from nothing on basic guards."

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"You're observant."

"I have elven blood. It helps." She tilted her head slightly. "I haven't been able to place you in anything I know. You're not from any record I have. Which means either you're genuinely unknown, or you're someone who became known under a different name."

"The first one," Evan said. "I spent a long time in places where no one was keeping records."

She considered this. "You helped Franklin and disappeared. You don't seem to want recognition for anything."

"I'm going to Hollingburton Academy in Nabos. I have a letter of introduction." He said it simply. "That's where I'm headed."

Cecilia sat for another moment, then rose from the branch in a single fluid movement and was gone between the trees before he'd finished registering that she was leaving.

He lay back and looked at the stars. The exchange had been the most interesting conversation he'd had in weeks. He found himself genuinely uncertain whether she had learned more from it or he had.

At dawn someone knocked. He opened the tree house door and found Andrea with the sword on her back.

"I've been thinking," she said, and pulled him downstairs without waiting for a response. "I'm going to teach you more advanced forms. You helped me, and I want to return the favor. Don't argue."

"You're my teacher," Evan said. "Helping a teacher isn't something that needs to be repaid."

"That's very good," she said, "but I also want you to make me a set of throwing weapons."

He stopped walking.

"What?" she said. "What happened?"

"Nothing. Small stone." He started walking again. She had completely bypassed any awkwardness about what she was asking and gone straight to assuming it was already agreed. He found he didn't particularly mind. "What kind of throwing weapons?"

"A boomerang. Three of them."

He understood immediately — a curved blade that returned on a stable throw. Useful for an archer-type fighter who needed options at close range.

At John's forge, the iron was shaped and edges set. When the three boomerangs were finished and cool enough to handle, Andrea sent one spinning at a tree and it arced back to her hand.

Evan took one of the others and threw it experimentally. His form was entirely wrong but the mechanics were interesting. He handed it back.

"The wind-element array would help," he said. "Add a gathering circle and a wind-flow modification to the basic inscription. The throw becomes more stable and the return arc becomes more predictable. You'll need refined mithril and wind-essence stone powder." He examined the engraving pen from yesterday. "And this pen needs a new fire core — the old one's nearly spent."

Materials were found. He worked. The inscription went in, the wind-essence powder followed it into the cooling metal, and a brief storm of localized wind rose and settled. He melted a gold coin over the surface to conceal the arrays, the same method he'd developed for hiding magical work in plain sight.

Andrea threw one of the finished boomerangs at a nearby oak. It made a circuit of the upper canopy and came back, and the canopy came down with it, the treetop sheered clean. People nearby scattered from the falling wood. The boomerang landed in her outstretched hand, trailing a faint edge of wind-colored gold.

She was still exclaiming over it when Robin arrived, drawn by the sound of a falling tree. He saw the boomerang, saw the damage, started to say something. Cecilia appeared at his shoulder and said something quiet to him instead, and his expression smoothed out.

He was still formulating a response when the scout's horse came through the stockade at a run.

"Count Normandy. Three thousand soldiers. Coming this way."