364. A Thread of Fire
A sudden pounding on the door of the bedchamber woke Liv.
Her eyes felt like they were filled with grit, and her first, half-conscious thought was that she’d only just got to sleep. Keri was pressed up against her back, his hand on her bare belly, and when he stirred it was to bury his face into her hair with a groan, rather than to get up.
“What is it?” Liv called, trying to keep her voice low. A small bed had been set up for Rianne in the front room. If the small suite had been set up for a professor, she would have called it an office; but in the rooms used for guests, it was more of a sitting room that could be used as servants’ quarters in a pinch.
Lenota opened the door, but it was Miina who pushed her way in. Liv’s cousin had only half-fastened the buttons on her Elden coat of silk brocade, and her hair had been pulled back into a loose knot rather than combed out. “Look out the window,” she said, crossing the carpet to throw the curtains back.
A warm glow, like firelight or summer sun, fell into the bed chamber in an angled beam. Liv squinted against the light, slipped out from beneath her husband’s arm, and padded barefoot across the room to the paned glass. She had to hold a hand up to shield her face and squint in order to get a good look, and even then the glare forced her to look away after only an instant.
A thread of sunlight stretched from beneath the western horizon, across the night sky to the moon. It half-lit the world in the most bizarre fashion, and the closest thing that came to Liv’s mind were the days at the height of winter, in the far north, when day never truly came at all - only a sort of dim grayness, which seemed to wash all color away.
“What is it? Lenota Grenfell asked. She was still wearing her linen shift for sleeping, and her dark hair tumbled loose across her shoulders.
Not for the first time, Liv missed Thora. Her former lady’s maid had stepped into the shoes of a steward quite well after Basil had retired, and for the most part having three ladies-in-waiting accomplished the same end, but her old companion would have already known exactly what Liv needed and had her armor out.
“Something utterly impossible to miss,” Liv said, echoing what Wren had told her when her friend had confessed Ractia’s offer. “Dress me in my armor.”
“Get mine, as well,” Keri said, rolling out of bed. “Is Venla awake?”
“She’ll see to the princess,” Lenota answered.
“Thankfully, the girl sleeps like a glacier in winter,” Miina remarked, already pulling the wardrobe open. They hadn’t really expected to need their armor, but given that they didn’t know when Ractia would make her move, and that the Lady of Blood had a long history of using distractions to put her enemies out of position, both Liv and Keri had made certain that it was all packed, anyway.
Lenota grabbed a wooden comb and stepped up behind Liv.
“Just quick, tight braids,” Liv instructed. “Don’t even bother working it all out. I just need it to fit beneath my helm.” She turned back to the window, and had to squint before. “It isn’t stopping,” she said. “It just keeps right on going. Keri, can you get a better look at it? I think I’m going to hurt my eyes if I try.”
Her husband crossed the room in only three steps, and looked out the window without flinching. “It’s sunlight,” Keri said, with immediate and decisive confidence. “More than sunlight, actually. That has to be at least as hot as what I use in battle. Probably even more destructive. I think…” His eyes fluttered, half closed, and he reached a hand up to the glass in a movement that Liv suspected was at least half instinct.
“What?” Liv asked, as she raised her arms to let Miina settle a skirt about her hips.
“It’s going to sound absolutely mad if I say it out loud,” Keri said. “I think she’s stealing part of the sun. Dragging it through the heavens to where she can put it to use.”
“Mana batteries and capacitors,” Liv muttered. “I suppose now we know how she’s going to power whatever machine she’s built.” She could feel each individual pin sliding against her scalp as Lenota secured her hair into place. “And if it’s all headed toward the moon -”
“Then that answers the question of where she’s set herself up, and why we couldn’t find her,” Keri grumbled. He turned away from the window, found himself a pair of breeches, and pulled them on. “Did we even look for waystone that weren’t on our world? I never even considered the moon.”
Miina dropped a padded gambeson over Liv’s head, and she closed her eyes just long enough to let it settle onto her shoulders. “It never even occurred to me,” Liv admitted. “I knew there was one on the ring, of course, but the map Aira showed us was just the planet. I wonder if it was something her mother never told her about?”
“It’s going to be a rusting pain to get troops there,” Keri grumbled. He found himself a linen shirt, but just as he had it over his head, another pounding came on the door out to the hallway. Barefoot, he left the bed chamber.
“Keep going,” Liv instructed Miina and Lenota, as they worked to buckle her breastplate of enchanted steel on. It was the same piece she’d gotten from Mountain Home years ago, kept well-oiled and polished. She trusted her husband to deal with whoever was at the door.
“Are you just getting in now?” Keri demanded, his voice half a whisper and half a shout. “Where were you?”
Liv exchanged a glance with Miina, and stepped out into the sitting room herself. Sure enough, Rei, still wearing the clothing he’d come to the funeral in, was standing near the door. His boots, Liv saw at a glance, by the light of the oil lamp that someone had lit, were crusted with sand.
“I was at the camp-fires of the culling mages,” Keri’s son answered, his tone that of a young man who was much put upon. “I was perfectly safe, there isn’t anyone in the mages guild who would do anything to me. A decent number of them were up telling stories all night - well, until that happened.” He waved a hand at the window, where a burning thread of brilliant light still hung, blotting out the nearest stars.
“We are going to speak of this later,” Keri promised, with a scowl. “What’s happening out there? And help me buckle my breastplate on. At least make yourself useful, now that you’re here.”
Rianne gave a small groan, and the entire room froze as she turned herself over, cocooned in a bundle of blankets, before settling in again. Seated in a chair at the little girl’s side, Venla looked at Liv with wide eyes and raised eyebrows.
Liv held a finger up to her lips. “Whisper,” she told her husband and her adopted son. “And give me the crown, instead of the helm,” she told Miina.
Rei hung his head, then leapt to work helping his father get on first a padded gambeson, and then his breastplate. “It’s madness out there,” the boy admitted. “As soon as the light came, people began to panic. The culling mages are all arming themselves and getting ready for a fight. And something happened at the waystone.”
Love this story? Find the genuine version on the author's preferred platform and support their work!
Liv felt the knowledge drop into the pit of her stomach, like a cold stone plucked from a snowbank. She kept her arms out, so that Miina and Lenota could secure her vambraces. “What?”
“Auntie Wren’s there,” Rei said, while he worked at the buckles and straps of his father’s armor. “And there’s some kind of - well, I don’t know. Some construction of blood and bone. People are talking about trying to destroy it, but no one had quite worked up the courage yet when I ran by.”
“Meet me there?” Liv asked Keri. She stepped over to the bed to kiss her daughter’s forehead, then straightened and held her hand out. Miina placed the stormwand that had once belonged to Julianne into her palm, while Lenota settled the silver crown from the Tomb of Celris on her brow. She barely waited for her husband’s nod before she pushed the door aside and strode into the hallway. People were frightened - for good reason - and when people were frightened, they tended to act without thinking the consequences through. Liv needed to get down to the waystone immediately. Fortunately, she knew Blackstone Hall quite well - and though the upper stories had been completely rebuilt after the ill-fated fight between Jurian and Genevieve, all of the new construction had been done to the same plans as the original.
She took the stairs up to the ramparts two at a time. Liv had just long enough, on her way up, to appreciate the irony: this was where she was supposed to have stayed, to help defend the school, when Ractia’s forces had attacked the rift. Instead, she’d followed Jurian down to the beach, where she’d ended up facing Keris.
The moment she was out into the cool night air, Liv flung herself through the crenellations, summoned wings of coherent mana with a whisper of her intent, and dove down. She let the wind rush past her face, nearly bringing tears to her eyes, as she skimmed the waves that crashed against the long beach.
Rei had been right: what had been a sleepy encampment only hours before was now full of frenetic activity, with culling mages helping each other pull on mis-matched pieces of armor by the strange light of the line of fire across the sky. A spray of water kicked up behind Liv, so swiftly did she fly, and she got glimpses of faces turned towards her in surprise, heard fragments of sound: her name among them.
A crowd of mages - and not a few townsfolk, Liv saw, as she soared in - had gathered in a semi-circle around the waystone. Wren was there, back to some sort of pulsing bulb of flesh and bone. Liv could actually see the arteries running through thin membranes, stretched between support struts of bone, somehow lit by a ruddy light from within, and the entire horrible thing was secured to the waystone by grasping blood vessels which looked like nothing so much as a tree’s root structure.
Discarded atop the white rock to every side were pieces of Ghveris’s armor plating.
“I said stay back!” Wren shouted, enchanted daggers in her hand.
“Why?” Harold of Bexbury asked. Liv recognized the man by his voice and his face: he was old for a culling mage, but she supposed he must never have found a baron to take him into their court.
“Because it’s foolish to assault something you don’t understand, particularly when you don’t have a plan,” Liv shouted, as she tucked her wings and landed, her boots finding purchase on the stone. She let her wings, shining blue with veins of gold, flutter out to either side of her body, and scanned the faces in the crowd.
“No one touches this thing, or uses the waystone, until I’m confident that it’s safe,” Liv declared. “Is that clear?”
“Yes, archmage,” the first voice came, from out of the crowd, and within the space of only a few heartbeats it was echoed into a chorus.
“Good.” Liv pointed her wand up at the line of fire piercing the night sky. “That is the work of the Lady of Blood. We believe it is the sign that she has finally activated the machine she’s been building all these years. You will all be needed,” she told them. “Get back to your tents and prepare yourselves.”
“For what?” Harold, who’d gone by Harry when Liv had spoken to him years before, asked her.
“Prepare as if you’re going into the worst eruption you’ve ever seen,” Liv said. “Get something to eat, so your bellies aren’t empty when it's time to move. Break camp, and pack your things. Everyone who isn’t a student or a professor is coming with me to Bald Peak. We’ll mount our assault from there.”
Twenty years before, it would have been inconceivable that the guild would simply listen to Liv’s orders, and then do what they’d been told. She’d been nothing but a bastard girl, a first year student at Coral Bay, with enough talent to get herself in trouble. She’d tried - at the conclave, when Genevieve Arundell made her move to take control, Liv had looked into the eyes of the men and women around her, placed her faith in them to do what was right, and been disappointed.
But she was no longer an apprentice: she was an Archmage. The older culling mages here had seen her testing, many of them, and the younger ones had heard the stories. She’d founded a second college, and scattered among the faces in the crowd, Liv recognized half a dozen of her former students. Now, they looked at her with the same trust they’d placed in their teacher. If she’d never quite managed to win over the last generation of the guild, the current crop proved an entirely different matter.
“You heard the archmagus!” Harold of Bexbury shouted. “This is what the guild was founded for! To your camps, and prepare!”
Liv watched them go, peeling off first singly, then in pairs or small groups, until the crowd which had menaced Wren had disappeared. Then, she allowed her wings to dissolve into motes of mana, which drifted up into the sky. A flex of her Authority, and she sucked the scraps of ambient mana back in, conserving her power as much as was possible. Then, she turned to Wren and lowered her voice.
“You did it?”
Wren nodded, though she looked away rather than meet Liv’s eyes, and sheathed her daggers at her belt. “He’s in there, Liv. All that’s left of him, anyway. I don’t know how long it will take.” She hunched her shoulders in, as if bracing for an argument, or an assault. “I’m sorry that I didn’t tell you, first…”
“You did,” Liv said. She sheathed her wand, reached out and wrapped Wren up in an embrace. “You came to me, remember? And I told you that I couldn’t make this choice for you? I chose to trust you, Wren, and to trust your choice.” She stepped back. “It would have been nice to have just a bit of warning, though,” Liv admitted.
She released Wren and stepped over to the mass of flesh, blood and bone, nudging the base of it with the toe of her boot. “Right. We can’t have anyone using this waystone to come or go until he’s out of there,” Liv muttered, as much to herself as to her friend. She reached up to touch one finger to the crown on her brow - the Key of Celris. The physical contact wasn’t really necessary, but she’d gotten into the habit over the years as a way of signalling to the people around her when she was using it.
Awareness of the waystone, and the root of mana stone which stretched out from it beneath the floor of the bay, to the ancient ruins that had been overgrown with coral, bloomed in Liv’s mind. She found the enchantments she needed, and with a thought barred any activation of the waystone.
“People won’t be happy about that,” Wren pointed out. She took a deep breath, clearly trying to get ahold of herself.
“Better a few angry nobles than Ghveris dead,” Liv shot back. “They can always complain to me later. Now that’s taken care of, the first thing is this: you cannot tell anyone that you did this. We’ve spent decades burning heretics, Wren. I can truthfully say that Ractia’s cast a spell on Ghveris and trapped him in there, and let’s hope everyone takes my word for that and doesn’t ask any questions.”
Her friend nodded. “I can do that.”
“As soon as he’s out, the two of you are going to Varuna,” Liv declared. “The sooner we get you both out of sight, the sooner people will forget about it - or at least forget to think that it’s anything more than just one odd thing among the rest of what’s happening.”
Wren shook her head. “I can’t. If you’re going to fight her, Liv, I need to go with you.”
“No, you don’t,” Liv said. She stepped back over to her friend, reached out, and took Wren by the back of her head. Liv leaned forward, so that their temples touched, and neither could look away. “You’ve taken yourself out of play, Wren. I can’t have you up there, nor Ghveris either, when I don’t understand what she’s done. It isn’t safe - not for you, not for me, and not for anyone around us. You’re out. You made your choice, and now you have to live with it. You’ll stay here with Arjun and make certain Ghveris comes through whatever’s happening in one piece, and then you’ll go to Varuna.”
“But I’ve been with you through all of it,” Wren protested. “Who else can you trust to keep a knife out of your back?” The huntress’s lip trembled, and her eyes shone with wetness. Now that their faces were this close, Liv could see that her friend had already been crying.
Liv forced herself to laugh, though already her friend’s absence was as painful as a missing limb. “My husband, perhaps? Don’t worry about me, Wren. When I get to Ractia, it won’t be alone. I’ll be coming with an army.”