Guild Mage: Apprentice

Liv dashed forward in an attempt to catch Miina before she fell. "Arjun!" It was difficult to imagine how even a talented healer could save someone with their throat torn open, but perhaps if they could get to her in time...

But where Liv had expected to see gouts of scarlet blood jetting out from the gruesome wound, instead, her cousin stumbled back one step, raised her hand, and then seemed to hang in place, unmoving. Liv skidded to a halt at the young Elden woman's side, just at the edge of Miina's silent spell. She could feel it - a sort of bubble within which the flow of time slowed nearly to a halt. Drops of blood hung motionless, suspended in the air, and did not fall.

"Can we move her?" Arjun asked, taking Liv by the shoulder with his hand to get her attention.

Liv stretched out her authority, feeling but not touching the magic, and then shook her head. "It feels like she's only just hanging on. I think the moment you touch her the spell will shatter."

"Keep anyone from interrupting me, then," Arjun told her. With his wand of Neem wood in hand, he threw himself forward into the bubble of stilled time. Liv allowed herself to watch just long enough to see him catch Miina and begin to cast, and then she forced herself to turn away.

In the brief time she'd been focused on saving her cousin, a platform of mana had risen to the top of the wall, carrying not regular soldiers, but instead a group of mages, barons and knights that must have represented the elite of the crown forces.

Knights in antique plate, etched with sigils, flickered from one place to another along the wall, moving with the inhuman speed that only came from Vefta. As Liv watched, her great-uncle Eilis raised both hands over his head, and the knights slowed until they were only just moving a slight bit faster than the human and Elden warriors facing them.

Blasts of white light lanced out from the Mountain Home warriors on the wall, but flickering panes of blue coherent mana, striated with veins of gold, snapped into existence, catching perhaps half of the burning beams. The spells that weren't caught melted plates of enchanted steel in an flash: Liv saw enemy knights screaming as metal steamed and boiled off their bodies, the enchantments worked into their armor breaking in an instant.

Behind the knights, Liv recognized several of the nobles who'd met before the wall in a parley only a short time before: Baron Fane, a hunting knife in each hand, blurred from one of the Whitehill soldiers to the next, and in the space of a heartbeat, three men fell, clutching their armpits, where he'd stabbed through the gaps in their armor. The Duke of Carinthia strode forward, off the mana-platform onto the battlement, and the soldiers who confronted him shook their heads, lowered their weapons, and seemed to forget where they were. A storm of silver followed an armored man who must have been Arianelle Seton's father.

Cade Talbot, from behind the other two, simply extended his arms. Half a dozen men and women staggered back, clutching wounds that bled freely. Against his word of power, armor was no protection at all.

Another man, one whom Liv did not recognize, but whose jack of plate was in the colors of House Ward, remained on the pane of mana. His magic reached out to men and women on the wall at an angle to him, and they threw themselves over the merlons and out into open air in an effort to get to him. Half a dozen men and women who Liv guessed must be court mages to one or another of the barons, all wearing guild rings and carrying wands or staves, stayed behind the front line, intercepting attacks with mana shields or throwing blades of mana into the beleaguered northern forces.

Bennet Howe had clearly judged that throwing an overwhelming amount of magic force, concentrating at a single point of attack, would break the defenses atop the wall. Baron Henry would be forced to respond to such a powerful assault with everything he could scrape together. In the meanwhile, the numerical advantage held by the crown's non-magical forces, using ladders and siege towers, could overwhelm the flanks, taking the wall to either side of the gate.

Against any purely Lucanian defense, the tactic would likely have worked, Liv realized. A full dozen practiced magic users, a combination of mages and barons, supported by knights using enchanted arms and armor, was a potent assault unit. The forces of any single house would have struggled to even slow them down; even Baron Henry, Baron Corbett, and what was left of House Grenfell would have been woefully outnumbered and outmatched.

But Howe had clearly not counted on the presence of so many Elden warriors, or perhaps not understood their capabilities. All along the battlements, men and women of House Keria threw handfuls of seeds down off the wall, and then sent their magic to follow, in waves of incantations. Great patches of brambles and briars rose up from the ground, slowing the advance of the levies who carried the long siege ladders and hauled the towers on their wheels. Vines wrapped around men's legs, and thorns pierced their skin.

The Eld from House Däivi focused, instead, on rotting away the wood of the siege engines themselves. Ladders fell apart in the hands of the soldiers carrying them - in one case, the rungs decayed under the very boots of the soldiers climbing to the top of the wall, and they fell screaming down onto their comrades below. Kaija raised a curved wall of ice between Liv and the charging enemy knights. Master Grenfell shouted an incantation, pointed his staff at the enemy forces, and a blast of flame licked out, forcing the enemy mages to raise mana shields to protect themselves.

In the time it took for Arjun to catch Miina, and Liv to slip a parchment thin pane of solid mana beneath them, the top of the wall had become a swirling, mad chaos of spell and counterspell, conflicts of Authority, and falling corpses. It was too much, too fast, to even track - so Liv didn't try. She trusted Kaija and Ghveris to protect her, and turned away from the fighting to lower the platform down off the wall, setting her friend and her cousin down on the ground where they would be outside the fighting. Only once she was certain they were safe did she allow the platform to dissolve into motes of mana, and turn back to the fighting.

A stroke of lightning fell from the sky, blowing Kaija's wall of ice apart into steaming chunks that skittered across the stone of the rampart. The Duke of Carinthia stepped through the breach, with Baron Fane at his side. Ghveris raised his right arm, and the blade housed there extended, then lit with enchanted sigils. At his side, Kaija raised her spear, levelling it at Fane's chest.

Liv glanced at the man holding two blood-streaked daggers in each hand, and dismissed him. Instead, she turned to Duke Richard. "You've learned Luc," she guessed.

He nodded, content for the moment, it seemed, to speak with her. "My price for supporting the crown in this matter. It is my birthright, in any event; the blood of House Loredan runs in my veins, as much as your bastard duchess."

"You shouldn't rely on a word you've only just imprinted," Liv warned him, unable to keep a grim smile from curling her lips. She'd used only three rings of mana in rescuing Arjun and her cousin; that left her with plenty to spare.

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"I won't be lectured by a bastard born commoner," Richard spat. "Lucet Æ'Mania."

Liv felt the ice crystals in the clouds overhead shift, but she allowed it to happen. Holding the duke's gaze, she drew in a deep, slow breath, and allowed her Authority to surround her, cracking out across the stones at her feet in traceries of frost. She was surprised at how weak Richard and Baron Fane were: compared to the shadow of Celris, to her grandmother, even to Calevis kæn Iravata, they felt like they'd hardly trained at all. Perhaps her standards were becoming unreasonable.

The lightning bolt that Duke Richard called down from the clouds overhead did not strike Liv. She eased its path aside so that it hit a stone merlon to the right of the two men, which exploded, showering them both with jagged shards of broken granite. A wisp of mana lingered in the wake of the casting, and she pulled it to her.

"That's fine," the red-haired baron whose son she'd killed growled from beneath his helm. "I wanted to do this with my own hands anyway." He leaned forward, set his boots on the stones beneath him, and for just a moment looked, in the lines of his body, just like Anson Fane. Then, the baron blurred, moving so fast that the eye could hardly even track him.

Before Kaija could react, her spear had been cut into two pieces at the haft, and she was flung aside by a boot so forceful that it left a crumpled indent in her boiled leather cuirass. She skidded across the stone of the battlement and hit the inner wall, which stopped her from falling down to the ground below.

Ghveris fired, the spinning barrels mounted on his shoulder launching projectiles that seemed to move even faster than Fane. The sharp bark of his weapon, each percussive blast following the last in turn so quickly that they became a single roar, had at least one result: a puff of blood, and then Fane staggered backward, bent over with pain. The Antrian war-machine didn't give him time to use his word of power to attack again: Ghveris surged forward, bringing his blade down in a savage cut, pressuring the man into giving ground. He blurred out of the path of one swing, then another, leaving Liv to face only Duke Richard, who drew a long sword with Vædic sigils etched into it.

"If you think I haven't prepared for this, you're a fool," he said, holding the blade up so that it caught the light. "I don't enter a fight I'm not confident I can win, and I have the wealth of an entire duchy behind me."

Liv glanced at the sigils, and recognized them instantly. "Both Vere and Vefta. Got that done in Lendh ka Dakruim, did you?"

Richard nodded, then fell into a high guard, the tip of his blade raised above his head at an angle. "My grandfather did," he admitted. "I already had the edge in reach and size. There's no way you can possibly match my strength and speed, now. Surrender, and I swear to treat you as a noble-born hostage. It's a better offer than you'll get from Aldred Fane."

"You're right," Liv said. "There's no possible way I could best you with a sword. So I won't even try. Aluthent Aiveh Dvo Fetim Æn'Mæ." Her wings coalesced on the downstroke, lifting her up into the air above the wall even as Duke Richard surged forward, moving nearly as fast as Baron Fane did. She soared up above the wall, and with a thought, six swords of ice froze into existence, three to either side of her shoulder.

"Twenty-two," Liv murmured to herself. The wings and the sword had been a significant investment of mana, but now that she had them cast, they were all she needed to stop the assault on the wall in its tracks.

Six swords of adamant ice shot down at Duke Richard. None of them moved as fast as his enchanted blade allowed him to do, but they sliced at him from a half dozen angles at a time. He parried one, slid in between two more, and then took three wounds: one along the back of his right knee, one on the inside elbow of his sword arm, and the last a stab through his left armpit.

The swords spun back up in a whirling column, leaving the Duke of Carinthia splayed out on the rampart, groaning and bleeding. Liv sent them down to finish Baron Fane next; he was distracted by Kaija and Ghveris, who'd been only just managing to hold him back by working together, and he didn't even see the blades coming in from behind him as they swooped down like a flock of birds. She took advantage of the opening and left him with both arms and legs severed at the joints, the stumps spurting blood in such violent eruptions that she doubted he would last long enough for anyone to save him.

"You were supposed to hold back," Kaija pointed out, calling up to Liv.

"I am," she answered, and then beat her wings and flew toward the mana platform which supported the court mages, along with the man in Ward colors, and Cade Talbot. Her swords accelerated out ahead of her, but rebounded off half a dozen mana shields.

"Æ'ea Venet," the armored man at Cade's side called out. It was an incantation that Liv was intimately familiar with: she'd spend months regularly tied into a chair while Celestria, almost bored, murmured it over and over.

The familiar Ward magic crashed into her, borne along the cresting wave of the man's Authority. He did look rather handsome in that armor, Liv had to admit; the sort of striking pose that one might encounter in a portrait, hanging at the royal palace. She felt her heartbeat accelerate -

-and flexed her Authority. The temperature plummeted around her, and scattered flakes of snow began to fall from the sky. The hostile spell crumbled away, and all she saw through the eye-slit of the man's helm was someone who looked old enough to be her father, with tired wrinkles around his eyes.

She turned to Cade, waiting for him to cast a spell. Instead, he simply shook his head.

The court mages were still keeping her swords at bay, though Liv suspected they would run out of mana to maintain those shields sooner, rather than later. Rather than wait for it, she pressed them down with the weight of her Authority, as Ractia had once done to her.

The men and women in their robes fell to their knees. Some clutched at sigil-carved staffs in an effort to remain upright. Their mana shields dissolved, and then so too did the platform upon which they stood.

Half a dozen mages, a man who must have been Baron Ward, and Cade Talbot fell, tumbling through the air. They passed out of Liv's authority, and she turned away: one of them, at least, would be thinking quickly enough to catch them all with Aluth, but she doubted they would return to the fighting immediately, after being so thoroughly outclassed. She beat her wings and banked in a circle over the wall to take stock of the battle.

The knights who had looked so fine in their Vefta-enchanted armor were piled about the ramparts like snowdrifts. Some of their armor was melted by the heat of Savelet, the word of light; others had been pierced from within their armor by grasping, thorny vines. Many carried only the rusted remnants of swords, now useless, with broken enchantments. The man who'd led them floated back away from the wall, his arms and body cradled in loops of silver that carried him to safety. Beneath him, chains of silver supported the bleeding body of Duke Richard; the man was either unconscious or dead, because he hung limply.

With the point of the enemy's assault beaten off, the troops on the wall - both human and Eld - were pushing back the levies who'd raised ladders. Liv caught sight of Master Grenfell consuming one siege tower in a jet of flames; the wood caught quickly, and burning soldiers flung themselves out, screaming, only to fall like meteorites back down onto the crown forces who'd reached the base of the wall.

Lightning continued to strike the enemy army intermittently, from the dark clouds above, and Julianne stood at her husband's side, still, with her wand raised. Henry himself seemed to have been pressed at some point in the chaos, for Liv saw two desiccated bodies heaped before him.

Keri and Sohvis had their shoulders set to a siege ladder, and as Liv watched, they pushed it off the wall. The ladder, with a dozen men and women clinging to it, fell backward into the press of the crown army.

Rosamund, a streak of blood on one side of her face, raised both her hands in front of her chest, and pulled at the empty space in front of her as if parting the curtains of a window. The ground beneath her, amidst the press of the enemy army, opened as easily as if it were only gauzy fabric, and dozens of men fell down into the crevice she'd created, crying out in fear, before she slammed her hands shut again. The earth closed on the falling soldiers with a great, thunderous crash, and their screams were heard no more.

It was that, Liv saw, which finally broke the levies. Men and women from all across Lucania, who'd simply been pressed into service by the local baron - whether Ward, Fane, Talbot or Howe - turned and ran. Many of them dropped their weapons, leaving pikes scattered on the ground before the wall. The fear spread as fast as fire in the dry brush of autumn, and all at once the entire crown force was in full retreat.

Liv watched them go, her shining wings of blue mana beating slowly, the six swords floating at her shoulders. But wherever she looked, she saw no sign of Genevieve Arundell.