Magic Claims

7

I walked the top of the wall. The sun was setting fast, and the woods looked ominous in the encroaching twilight. After my meeting with Jushur and Rimush I wanted some solitude. I told them they could stay in the house and escaped.

I stopped between two towers and leaned on the stone.

Heather Armstrong walked up the stairs onto the wall and headed toward me. The interim chief of the town guard moved fast and looked strong, her frame broad and sturdy. Her dark red hair was put away into a braid that looked a lot like mine.

She nodded to the guard in the tower near the gate, an elderly man with a cane sitting in a chair, and strode toward me.

I really wanted some alone time to sort things out, but it was clearly not in the cards.

Heather leaned on the wall next to me. “What can we expect?”

“Trouble. As soon as the magic hits.”

“I understand that. I meant what can we expect specifically?”

“I don’t know. You have more experience with these woods than we do.”

She sighed. “What if they launch another pod like the one that destroyed the town square?”

“We’ll deal with it.”

“How?”

I had a very good idea how. I just didn’t like it.

“You’ll see if it comes to that. But I don’t think there will be another pod.”

Heather frowned. “Why not?”

“Because you don’t kill the cow that you’re milking. You all keep giving the forest people. If it kills you all or frightens you enough to risk leaving and dying, its source of human tributes dries up.”

The line of Heather’s jaw hardened. “We don’t have a choice about it, you know.”

There was always a choice. I would’ve fought to the bitter end, past any reasonable point. That’s why a man I respected once told me that I made a terrible leader. I had trouble with trading one life for many.

And now I had both shapeshifters and my father’s former advisers to take care of. I wasn’t suited for the job.

I nodded at the guard tower and the elderly man inside it. “There was a teenage kid here before.”

“Foster. He finished his shift. He’s due to come on in the morning.”

“He keeps running out of the tower. I keep telling him to stay in, and every time I look, he’s out from under that roof on the wall.”

“He’s a kid. Lots of energy.”

“How old is he?”

“Seventeen.” Heather squared her shoulders. “I know what you’re asking. Why put a kid on the wall, right? Let me tell you about Foster. He isn’t stupid or really smart. He’s average. He doesn’t like school. He could get apprenticed to some of the businesses in town and learn a trade, but he doesn’t want to do that either. He’s a crappy hunter, and he doesn’t have the patience for fishing. He has to do something to earn a living. The wall is it. It’s not big money, but it’s a steady paycheck and the benefits are good.”

Right.

“He’s a good guard. He doesn’t play around too much, and if he sees something, he’ll ring that bell. We’re not like you. We’re not soldiers and shapeshifters. We’re just townspeople who made a militia because we had to. Take Ian over there. He’s in his seventies. He worked all his life. Now his knees are worn out, his hands swell up, and his back hurts. He can’t do much of anything anymore, but he still wants to work. It’s not just the money. It’s his way of living.”

Heather frowned. “If you want the truth, neither of those two were supposed to be on the wall when the forest came. I’ve got a better team that I rotate between the gates. But those bastards showed up a month early. If I break the schedule and rotate them out, I’ve got to rotate someone in. Either way, someone’s son, someone’s mother, someone’s spouse ends up on that wall. How do I decide to trade one life for another?”

I had no answers for her.

“I’ll talk to Foster,” she said. “Tell him to stay in the tower. I hope you’re ready for whatever comes because we aren’t.”

She walked away from me.

I watched her go. The house where we were staying was lit up, the windows glowing gently. The shapeshifters had slept and now they were getting ready for a late dinner.

As if on cue, the balcony door swung open. Curran stepped outside. Our stares connected. He smiled and went inside. Checking on me.

I turned back to the forest. Heather was in her twenties, but she seemed older. Putting people in harm’s way tended to age you. I’d meant to ask her why she was the interim chief. Something must’ve happened to the original chief. Oh well. Next time.

If I had to be in charge of choosing people to guard the wall, I’d never sleep, because if a real threat came, it wouldn’t matter which one of them was on the wall. None of them would be able to do much. Not with this enemy. They would die where they stood.

Curran was better than me at that. He had the steel core needed for it. He never wanted to lose anyone, and when he did, it bothered him, but he also accepted it. It punched me harder. A couple of weeks ago Conlan and I were talking about Roland, and he told me that his grandfather had failed as a king because he couldn’t handle not being able to protect everyone. It was a very smart observation.

Perhaps I had inherited more from him than I realized.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw a figure in dark gray clothes drop from the second-floor window of our house. He landed without a sound, ran up the stairs, light on his feet, and slipped past Ian. The old man never sensed he was there.

The figure approached like a shadow. I let him get within fifteen feet.

“Is there something you need, Jushur?”

“Sharratum,” the spymaster said. “Your senses are as sharp as ever.”

He came closer and hopped onto the edge of the wall, dropping to sit, cross-legged, with the agility of a man forty years younger. I had no idea how old he really was. Fifty? Sixty? Eighty?

“I get that your heart is set on helping Rimush with my approval, but pledging yourself to me was a bit much, don’t you think?”

He looked at the forest. “It was not my plan.”

I looked at him. “Then why are you here?”

“We came because this is a turning point for you. As the chroniclers of your journey, we must witness it.”

“A turning point?”

“Surely, you feel it. Even now, when the magic has ebbed.”

Oh, I felt it. It was very weak, but it was still there, shivering between the blades of grass and coating the stones, thin like a spiderweb. And it annoyed me. So much.

“This is the moment you reclaim your heritage.”

“You seem very sure of that.”

Jushur shrugged. “I may be wrong. Alas, I’m not infallible. But should it happen, we must not miss it.”

“Then why not just say that? Why the kneeling and the pledging?”

“I changed my mind.”

“Why?”

Jushur smiled. “Your father gifted me coffee a few times, as a specific reward in appreciation of my service and loyalty. In all of the time I served him, he never personally handed me a drink in the way you offered me coffee.”

I raised my eyebrow at him.

“He has never forgotten the chasm between us. He was Sharrum. He stood upon an apex of the tallest mountain and saw me as a servant below. It would never change.”

“He is set in his worldview.”

“You see the shapeshifters as your allies. You happen to be in charge of them, but they are not your lesser. The way you spoke to my son tells me that you view him in the same light. I decided it might be interesting to connect my life to yours. Also, your discomfort was quite amusing. We shall have to work on that. If something as trivial as a person kneeling before you can disturb you, it will be easily utilized by our enemies.”

I opened my mouth. I needed to say something smart that would knock him down a peg.

“You will need allies, Sharratum, and we are very useful. We will be your eyes and ears. I have brought you something. A small token of what we’re capable of.”

He reached inside his clothes, took out a rolled-up piece of paper, and offered it to me. I took it and opened it. A shockingly beautiful blond woman looked at me from a photograph. She wore a grass-green gown, and despite the mane of golden blond hair cascading down her back, the Shinar blood was unmistakable. Was this some sort of cousin my aunt neglected to mention?

There was something familiar about her eyes and the expression. So famili— Julie. It was her. The face wasn’t hers, the hair was the wrong color and texture, the eyes were green, the body seemed too muscular, but it was her. It was my kid.

“How?”

“She was dying. Erra went into a deep sleep with her for nine months to heal her. When they woke up, Julia looked like that.”

And they didn’t tell me. Why? There must have been a very good reason. Both Erra and Julie told me everything, from which enemies they fought to a detailed review of chicken nuggets they had for lunch.

Anxiety punched me, rolling over me in an icy rush. “Is she okay now?”

“She’s healthy and strong. Her powers have grown, and she fights in the way of the old kingdom, with magic and blade.”

Nothing short of a catastrophe would have stopped them from telling me about Julie nearly dying. What had happened?

Jushur frowned. “We don’t know the details and, most importantly, we don’t know why this happened. We will find out, Sharratum. I give you my word.”

Magic skimmed my skin, as if a cold, clammy hand brushed me with its fingertips. My eyes snapped open. The bed next to me was empty. Where was my husband?

The magic thickened around me, like a fresh spring that broke through the ground’s surface and was now quietly bubbling up, flooding the area. The sky was still dark. The clock said 5:03 a.m. Sunrise was about two and a half hours away.

Medmagic took a lot out of the body, and I had gotten two intense treatments in one day. I could barely keep my eyes open once the sun had set, and around 3:00 a.m. or so, I’d gone back to bed. When I had gone upstairs, Curran was on the second floor, eating and watching Jushur and Rimush interact with the pack. Now he was gone.

If something urgent had happened, Curran would’ve woken me up, so whatever took him away likely wasn’t too alarming. The dense currents of magic swirling around me definitely qualified as an emergency, however. I couldn’t tell if the magic wave just started or if it had happened while I slept. Either way, the source of this sudden magic influx was up to no good.

I slipped out of my bed and stepped onto the balcony.

On the wall, Ian was asleep, slumped over in his chair. To the right of him, on the wall, Andre and Hakeem were passed out, Andre draped against the stone and Hakeem curled up. The chances of them both naturally falling asleep where they stood at the same time were about a million to zero. Magic shenanigans were afoot.

Beyond them, about a hundred yards from the wall, a lone figure waited. A priest-mage, like the other two, dressed in white and red and holding a staff. A mask obscured the top half of the face, a part of some sort of strange animal skull with two scimitar fangs that were turned upside down and attached to the skull like horns. Clay-covered face and hands again. I couldn’t tell by the silhouette if it was a man or a woman.

The figure pointed at me and waited.

It didn’t feel like a challenge. More like a request to parley.

I’d killed two of them already. This one was by themself. Even if they were magically skilled, I could take them down. Besides, this was my chance to find out what happened to the people they took.

I stepped back inside and pulled on my clothes. The belt with pouches filled with herbs, Sarrat in a sheath on my back, a couple of knives, hair put up, and I was good to go. I went down the hallway.

Wait. I’d have to communicate somehow.

I did a one-eighty, grabbed a notepad and a pen from the night table, and then padded down the stairs. The house was empty. Everyone had gone somewhere, and Curran must’ve left Hakeem and Andre to guard me while I slept.

I unbarred the gate and walked out into the open.

The priest-mage didn’t move.

I got to about fifteen yards from them, pulled a knife out, and nicked the back of my arm. I’d need my own blood for this. The red fluid ran down to the tip of my index finger. I turned, letting it fall in a circle around me, and activated it with a burst of magic. A blood ward surged to life, flashing ruby red, then turned transparent. I sealed the wound and sat inside the ward cross-legged, my saber on the grass in front of me.

Let’s see what you have to say.

The priest-mage spun, weaving a complex pattern with their staff. Back and forth, and turn and spin… A kind of ferocious ballet, aided by magic.

Black vapor streaked through the air, trailing the staff.

The priest-mage pirouetted one last time and planted their staff in the grass. A pulse of black shot from it and settled into a glowing circle about eight feet across. Some kind of relief, shaped with pale and dark vapor… Oh. It was an aerial view of Penderton, surrounded by woods.

They had something that could fly. There was no other way for them to get this image. Bad news.

The priest-mage stared at me, waiting.

“Can you speak?”

No response.

I pointed at the map. “Town.” Penderton was a long word. Town was easier to say.

No response.

I pointed over my shoulder at the wall. “Town.”

The priest-mage jabbed the staff at the map and then at Penderton.

I nodded. “Yes.” Yes, I got it.

The priest-mage took a step forward and drew a horizontal line through the town, cutting it in half. The north half turned red; the southern half remained the same.

The priest-mage pointed to the red half with their staff and put their left hand on their chest, fingers splayed out.

Okay.

They pointed at the southern part and then at me.

Ah. Mine and yours. They wanted to split the town down the middle. We’d scared them. Good.

I shook my head. “No.”

The priest-mage waved their staff. Spheres formed above the smoke version of Penderton and plunged down, exploding on impact into fountains of smoke. The priest-mage opened their mouth and hissed. The dark smoke swirled around their head, forming a big phantom skull, its jaws gaping in a silent scream.

Do as we say, or we will kill everyone.

I crossed my arms over my chest and shook my head. No. Won’t happen.

The priest-mage stabbed the staff in my direction and pointed it at the ground, then clapped their chest again and raised the staff all the way up.

You are down there, and we are up there.

I rolled my eyes, pointed to myself, put my hands together, rested my cheek on them, and closed my eyes for a moment to indicate sleeping. Then I pointed at the mage-priest, pantomimed walking with my index and middle fingers, and spread my arms.

If you are so mighty, why did you come here and wake me up?

The priest-mage glared at me. Or at least it seemed like it. The skull kind of made it hard to tell.

I took my notepad and pen, drew the line of ten stick figures on it, and showed it to the priest-mage. Then I ripped the piece of paper off, slowly, deliberately tore it into pieces, and tossed them into the air.

You’re not taking any more people.

The priest-mage pointed at me and drew a line across their throat. Okay, that one was clear. But more importantly, I got a good look at their hands, especially their thumb. The fingers were long, with thick nails that looked like claws.

Hmmm.

The priest-mage was waiting for my answer.

I motioned to them with my right hand. Bring it.

The priest-mage thrust their hand into a small bag hanging from their leather-cord belt and hurled something at me. The object expanded in midair, and a car-sized rock smashed into my ward and bounced off.

The ward flashed crimson and held.

I yawned. Let’s see what else you’ve got.

The priest-mage hurled a second rock. Another bounce.

I can do this all day, buddy.

Dark smoke boiled from underneath the priest-mage’s feet. They stumbled back, suddenly unsure. The smoke coiled around them like tentacles. The priest-mage spun around, frantically trying to break free. Sounds came out of their mouth, foreign, strange words that sounded like begging.

The smoke snaked to their neck. The priest-mage dropped their staff and clawed at the coils with their bare hands. Their fingers slipped through the smoke.

It jerked them up, off their feet, shackling their wrists. The smoke forced the priest-mage’s right hand up, into their robes, and dragged the arm back, forcing the priest-mage to pull a large bulb out. It looked like an onion but with a thick, crusty outer skin.

The priest-mage flailed, trying to get away from it.

The smoke shoved the bulb into their mouth.

The priest-mage’s skull exploded into bloody mist. The headless torso jerked about in midair, flopping like a rag doll, and deflated like an empty water bag, as if all of their organs and bones had been turned into liquid and evaporated.

The Penderton tributes from the previous years were dead. All of them.

The bag of skin that used to be a person inflated once again and exploded without making a sound. Brown powder showered on my ward. It swirled and settled on the grass in an even semicircle, held back by the magic of my blood.

“I will find you.” The power in the forest probably couldn’t understand me, but I needed to say it. “I will eradicate you. You’re done.”

The forest watched me in silence.

A chorus of birds serenaded me in stereo, some from the woods and others from the town behind my back. I didn’t think there would be that many in October, but here they were, singing away without a care in the world.

Logic said that they were establishing and defending their territory so when the breeding season came in the spring, they were ready for mating. They were screaming, “My spot! Mine! Stay away!” But it was still lovely.

Curran walked out of the gates and strode toward me. “There you are.”

“Here I am. Might want to stay away from the dust. I think this is what they bombed the town square with.”

He stopped about fifteen yards away. “Are you going to be okay?”

“Yes.”

He looked at the crescent of brown powder and the spray of blood on the grass. “Blood ward?”

“Yep. They came to negotiate.”

“You haven’t lost your touch, clearly.”

“That was all them. I didn’t do a thing. I talked to them a bit and then their negotiator self-destructed. Not voluntarily.”

“I’ve negotiated with you before. That tracks.”

“Ha. Ha.”

“What do I need to safely get you out of there?”

“Burn the dust. If we could get a small sample, that would be great, too.”

“Sit tight. Don’t go anywhere.”

My husband, the funny man.

Ten minutes later the shapeshifters came out of the gates, flanking two sleepy-looking people. Troy carried very long tongs that probably came from a smithy and a plastic cup with a lid. The shapeshifters wore almost identical pinched expressions. Andre and Hakeem clearly wanted to find the nearest deep hole and crawl into it.

Troy held his breath, used the tongs to clamp the cup, scooped some of the powder off the grass, and then covered his nose, and carefully snapped on the lid. He backed away, and the two sleepy people waved their arms around and summoned two conical flame jets. Fire mages, the modern answer to magical hazmat.

It took the firebugs another ten minutes to thoroughly torch all the powder. By the end, I sat in a semicircle of blackened grass.

The shapeshifters drenched the burned area with water just to be on the safe side. I broke the ward and stepped out.

“It’s good to see you safe, Consort,” Keelan told me.

“It’s good to be safe. I need that plastic cup.”

Troy handed it over.

Jynx, who’d been rummaging through the shredded robes of the priest-mage, trotted over, and offered me a small cloth bag covered with red glyphs. I hefted it. The outline told me another one of those spheres was inside. Opening the bag was out of the question. Pulling out a rock and then being crushed under it as it expanded wasn’t on the agenda today.

“Thank you.”

I took the bag, and Curran and I walked back to the house.

“Where were you?” I asked.

“We did a perimeter run. I wanted to see if there were any other places they could hit us from.”

“I don’t think complex tactics are their strong suit.”

“Agreed. The wall is the boundary. One side defends it, the other attacks. Nice and simple.”

I reached for his arm and wrapped my own around it. A little reassurance.

“I left two people to watch you,” he said.

“What about Rimush and Jushur?”

“Jushur is in a trance, meditating. Rimush ran with us.”

Hmmm. “How did he do?”

“He kept up.” He flexed a little, squeezing my hand in the crook of his arm. “I came back, my guards were asleep, and you were gone. I followed your scent trail. How’d you end up out there?”

“Pretty simple really. I felt something. Maybe the magic coming back, maybe a sort of call to the wall. The guards were out and one of the high-level magic users waited at the edge.”

“So you went alone?”

“Everybody was asleep or gone.”

“Fair enough.” He squeezed my hand again.

“It’s not Andre and Hakeem’s fault. It was very strong magic.”

“We’ll stagger the sentries. One on the wall, another some distance away.”

I told him about the priest-mage conversation, the exploding head, and the dust.

Curran smiled. “It’s worried. It offered a half-assed peace treaty. It probably wouldn’t have honored it. It wanted to buy time to study us and prepare.”

“We’re not giving them half of Penderton. Not one person more.”

He stopped and looked at me.

“They’re dead. All the tributes are dead. It sent one of its higher-ranking humans to negotiate. The priest-mages are not wearing collars. They are skilled and valuable, and it killed that person, just like that. Like it was nothing. It already tried with rocks and didn’t get anywhere, but it threw a person away anyway on the off chance that the dust would penetrate the ward.”

“Human sacrifice,” Curran said. His expression was hard, his gray eyes dark.

I nodded. “I need to speak with my father.”

“Go. We’ll hold down the fort.”

“I’ll try to be quick.”

Curran chuckled. “You haven’t spoken to your father for three months. The only thing he loves more than talking is lecturing. He’s going to keep you there as long as he can.”

“It will attack as soon as it regroups. He can lecture all he wants, but I decide when I come and when I go. Thirty minutes.”

He nodded. “Have a safe trip.”