“Burn him!” The brute stepped closer, eyes lit with eagerness.

“Hang him!” Another slapped the closest leg of the tall wooden tripod. “He’s already built his own gallows.”

The cluster of laborers laughed. This was more entertainment than they had expected, walking down to the river for the first break in their work day.

“So what do you want with our bridge?” The first brute took another pace forward. “Going to perch up there and put an arrow in anyone who doesn’t leave you a toll, is that it?”

Trydek didn’t try to retreat. For a start, his arms were held tightly by two men both taller than he was. Their muscles were as solid as oak, built by a lifetime’s toil in these fields and forests. He made a conscious effort not to tense his own shoulders. Any hint that he was about to fight back would be taken as license to beat him to a pulp.

They might try to do so, at least. If it came to it, they wouldn’t lay a finger on him — but revealing the magic that would save his skin would cause more problems than it solved.

“You’m not from round here.” The self-appointed spokesman glowered. “What’s your business, or do we thrash it out of you?”

“What’s all this?” The man who’d suggested hanging him had found Trydek’s sturdy leather bag underneath the observation platform. He pulled out sheets of parchment, discarding them one by one, all covered with drawings and calculations.

A man with grizzled stubble snatched a page from the dusty grass and stared at it with misgiving. “Is it wizardry?”

That notion prompted unease all around. Everybody looked at Trydek, and now every gaze was hostile.

He wondered what experience they might have of magic. Had some hapless mageborn been driven out of their village, after an untamed affinity for water or fire had caused some death or catastrophe? Had some hedge-wizard who’d barely learned how not to kill himself by accident offered them ruinously expensive services which they dared not decline? Or had some more dramatic demonstration convinced them to pay a stranger whatever scant silver and gold they had hoarded, to save their crops from hail in midsummer or their houses from crumbling into sinkholes? Trydek had heard all those stories and more, as he’d traveled the land through this past half-season.

“I am a geometer working for the Caladhrian Parliamentary Survey.” He kept his voice level and unemotional. “We have Baron Adremin’s permission to journey wherever we must.”

The sharper-witted laborers looked uncertainly at each other. If such humble men never had direct dealings with their liege lord, they had encountered his highway reeves. Even the smallest village was answerable for the condition of their local roads, to ensure unhindered access to the bridges and mills and markets which owed the baron a tithe.

One was even quicker on the uptake. “Who’s ‘we’?”

Trydek spoke calmly, wholly reasonable. “You don’t imagine I strolled up here with those poles and planks balanced on my shoulder?” He jerked his head toward the three-legged observation platform before fixing his level gaze on the brute who stood scowling in front of him. “The others went onwards with our cart to make ready at Nisker’s Cross, and we left more friends at Welmersh. They’re expecting my signal at noon. Kill me, and you’ll be caught before nightfall.”

That made the looming peasant step back. Trydek turned his attention to the man still holding his ransacked bag. “If you’ve damaged my drafting materials or any surveying instruments, you will be held to account.”

The man dropped the bag as though it burned his hands. His brain caught up with his body in the instant before it hit the ground, and he grabbed at the strap to save it. Various laborers went scurrying after parchments scattered across the grass by the breeze.

Looking from side to side, Trydek raised an eyebrow at the two men still holding him. They exchanged a dubious glance and reached some unspoken accord. Releasing him, they retreated, raising open hands in mute apology.

Trydek straightened the sleeveless leather jerkin he wore over his shirt. His clothing was little different from these men’s, though his boots were newer and his breeches weren’t mottled with sweat stains. His coloring and build marked him out as a stranger, though: leanly built with light, sandy curls and freckles like a spatter of paint on his face. Locally, hair evidently spanned a limited range of brown from hazel to chestnut, and eyes were dark while exposed skin tanned easily in the For-Summer sun. Add to that, all these men resembled each other closely enough to be related by blood.

He took a traveler’s sundial out of a pocket and unfolded it to check the sun’s passage. “Very nearly noon,” he remarked. “Well, since this misunderstanding has been cleared up, I suggest we all get back to our work.”

The laborers drifted away. Some were clearly apprehensive that their rough handling of a stranger would have repercussions. Others slouched off, still giving this newcomer suspicious glances.

Trydek ignored them, instead making sure to thank those who’d retrieved his parchments. As they departed with nervous smiles, he checked inside his bag. To his relief, his tightly sealed bottle of ink was still intact, along with his pen box, instrument cases and compass. Tucking the roll of parchments inside, he ducked his head through the strap and edged the weight around to rest in the small of his back. Hands thus unencumbered, he climbed the crosspieces which both braced the triangular frame’s legs and acted as a ladder to the platform.

He settled himself and checked the sun a second time, putting the traveler’s dial on the platform beside him. Truth be told, it was rather longer until noon than he’d implied to those peasants, but he’d wanted rid of them as quickly as possible. He sorted swiftly through his parchments. Breath hissed through his teeth in mild irritation. Several sheets of recent surveys were smeared and creased and must be painstakingly redrawn. He should have left the bag aloft when he’d climbed down to take that piss. Or even unlaced the flap of his breeches up here and relieved himself discreetly into the tree tops.

Perhaps not, on second thought. Those locals could have brought down the whole platform to get their hands on him. Falling in a realistic fashion while still landing as light as a feather would have been quite a test of his wizardry. Then he’d have had to explain how he’d dropped from such a height and escaped any injury.

He glanced down to check the sundial again. Movement below snagged his eye. A woman stared up at him, unabashed. Her hair was as dark as any he’d seen in Caladhria, neatly braided to lie over her shoulder. She wore a rose-pink shawl over her pale green gown, and carried a basket in the crook of her folded arms.

She hadn’t been among that crowd of men who’d accosted Trydek. There was no way he could have missed seeing her, when he’d calculated the odds of escaping. Had she arrived while the mob were debating what to do? Surely that would have caused a distraction as someone explained what was going on.

She must have arrived after the laborers had left. But Trydek would have sworn the roads had been empty, both the route leading here from the shabby little village of Fildre and on the far side of the sturdy redstone bridge. He glanced involuntarily at the placid, rush-fringed river.

When he looked back, the woman was nowhere to be seen. He twisted around to see if she was heading down the road to the village. A violent breeze threatened to snatch away his parchments. Trydek hastily grabbed them and waited for the shimmer of magic in the air to fade. So that’s how she had come and gone so easily. But who was she? How could he find out without betraying her magebirth to those who would beat her bloody for it?

The sundial reminded him of his duties. No time to waste. He unfurled the red silk pennant and wedged its short staff into the socket carved for it. Taking out his spyglass, he used the compass to trace the rough bearing he had been given. There it was: the pennant from Nisker’s Cross, where the road meandering through these villages joined the broader highway running from north to south. Turning, he quickly found the third flag indicating Welmersh with its much admired shrine to Drianon.

Trydek took out a clean sheet of parchment and a pen, and unsealed his ink. He removed the expensive altazimuth instrument from its mercifully well-padded case and began measuring angles with meticulous precision. This surveying work might only be a useful excuse for his journey through Caladhria, but he would still do his allotted tasks to the very best of his ability.

 

~

 

There was still a good stretch of daylight left, but the stableyard at the Nisker’s Cross inn was already crowded when Trydek and Bance arrived late in the afternoon.

“The White Horse.” Trydek gestured at the sign, sardonic. “Again.”

“Has your tally of tavern names reached double figures yet?” Planks and poles rattled in the open cart as Bance reined in their placid gelding. He made no move to get down from his seat as Trydek jumped down to the cobbles.

“Who knows?” Trydek retrieved his bag. “Who cares?”

Burly and amiable, Bance laughed and clicked his tongue, prompting the bay horse to head for the stables where the survey team’s cumbersome gear could be stowed.

Trydek headed for the tap room and discovered it was agreeably airy with wide glass windows and clean, lime-washed walls. Sufficient wealth traveled up and down the high road for this innkeeper to make a handsome living.

Kinet had claimed a long table set against the far wall and already covered with parchments, pens, inks and rulers. As soon as Phimin arrived from Welmersh, they would collate the day’s work between them. For the moment, Kinet was giving a bearded stranger a lesson in triangulation theory.

“You see this side measures three and this side measures four? We can calculate the length of the third side without having to measure it if we multiply each of those numbers by itself. That gives us nine and sixteen. If we add those together that gives us twenty-five. If we reverse that calculation, dividing rather than multiplying, that gives us five.” Kinet handed a small steel rule to the stranger, a prosperous merchant judging by the quality of his clothing. “Measure the third side and see for yourself.”

The man did so. Most people found it easiest to do what Kinet asked. Tall, with dark hair distinguished by silver at his temples, he had a personality as forceful as his pointed beard was immaculately groomed and his tailoring flawless. How he maintained such high standards on their journey was truly a mystery.

“So each triangle gives us the baseline for the next, and so we proceed.” Kinet gestured at his maps, with the spider’s web of inked lines slowly expanding from the main routes to the hinterlands.

Trydek headed for the counter and took a stool, unobserved. Being overlooked was a talent he cultivated.

“Remarkable,” the merchant measuring Kinet’s diagram observed dryly. “Though I doubt that the landscape and its notable features arrange themselves in such convenient fashion.”

“Indeed not,” Kinet allowed, rueful. “Hence our calculation manuals and tables.” He gestured toward the small stack of books.

“Ale, please, a jug.” Trydek smiled as the tapster finished serving his current customer.

“But what’s the point of it all?” A second traveler peered over the merchant’s shoulder at Kinet’s diagram. “Some number of leagues between one town and the next tells you nothing about the state of the road or whether the bridges are passable in the winter seasons. How many days a journey takes is what a man needs to know, and whether that’s by carriage, wain or oxcart.”

“Or if you’d be better advised to send your goods by pack horse,” another man agreed.

Trydek saw the drinkers at the counter were turning around on their stools, to see how this debate proceeded.

Kinet relished an audience. He spread his hands to claim everyone’s attention. “You’ve heard how governance has failed so lamentably in Lescar, ever since the Imperial Tormalin succession was disputed? Each province’s duke has forsworn his fealty and now they fight among themselves in hopes of being crowned high king—”

“I’m in no hurry to pay Tormalin taxes again,” a voice observed dourly.

“Quite so.” Kinet snapped his fingers as though the man had just confirmed some key point. “Which is why your own liege lords have convened their own parliament rather than seek permission by means of Imperial writ as their forefathers were required to do. Now Caladhrians can stand together against any return of Tormalin’s legions, if they should ever come back to demand the Emperor’s due.”

“What’s that got to do with measuring roads?” asked a bemused drinker.

“Our parliament is determined to know the length and breadth of each baron’s holdings and all the towns and villages under every noble’s protection,” Kinet explained. “Then all of you will know who defends your interests whenever the parliament is convened.”

“Every baron will know where to send his tax gatherers, every solstice and equinox,” the man beside Trydek called out.

“What have I done, to be so distrusted?” a man demanded, belligerent with drink. “Who’s been cheating on his tithes?”

Now Kinet spread his hands in appeal. “It’s not a question of tithes.”

“Who’s paying your way?” asked the belligerent man’s neighbor. “For your bed and board and stabling your horse? We pay our tithes to keep the roads passable, not to fund follies like this.”

“Who’s going to see these maps?” The merchant by the table looked at Kinet suspiciously. “Any Lescari peddler or Ensaimin huckster who wants one, to learn where to go to steal the best of our trade?”

Should he speak up to support Kinet? Before Trydek could decide, the door from the inn kitchen opened. He stiffened on his stool. That woman in the pale green gown, delivering a plate of stew and bread to a traveler, was the stranger he’d seen by the bridge. The magewoman.

“Your liege lords have your best interests at heart.” Kinet was clearly affronted, as well he might be. He was a younger son of Baron Tresia, after all. He gestured northwards. “You’d prefer to live in Ensaimin? A tangle of bickering fiefdoms and city states? Making up local laws to suit themselves? Laws enforced by whoever can hire enough swordsmen to impose his will? Bullies loose to claim whatever they might like in coin or women or goods?”

No one had an answer to that. The woman in green paused by the kitchen door. Her voice wasn’t loud, but her words got everyone’s attention.

“There’s wizards in Ensaimin. We’ve all heard the stories. Wizards need to know where they’re going, if they’re to travel by magic.” She nodded toward the parchment-laden table. “What will your work do to help them?”

The atmosphere in the tap room changed for the worse as surely as if the fireplace had started smoking. Trydek moistened his dry mouth with a long swallow of ale. What was the woman up to? She was mageborn, and she’d let him see it. So why stir up the ignorant fear of wizardry that was surely as much of a threat to her as it was to him?

“From everything that I have heard,” Kinet said stiffly, “magecraft can only carry someone mageborn to a place where they have already been in person. I’ve no reason to believe that looking at a map would enable a wizard to go where he wished. Whether or not that map was accurate would be, so to speak, neither here nor there.”

His hopeful smile invited others to appreciate his witticism. No one laughed.

“But you don’t know for certain, do you?” A burly yeoman scowled.

Then the door from the stable yard opened and Bance strolled in with a handful of other men who’d been seeing their horses settled. Stools shifted and tables were swiftly cleared of empty tankards. Voices rose all around. The tapster refilled jugs of ale, and maidservants appeared from the kitchen to serve those eager for food.

The woman in green was nowhere to be seen. Trydek took advantage of the bustle to slip off his stool and head for the closest outer door. He cut around the side of the inn to find the kitchen yard. The door stood ajar, and he could hear the clatter of plates and pans within. Trydek moved to see a little more clearly. The woman in green was slicing bread at a table to one side of the great range.

How to get her attention? Did he want to get her attention? Could she even have the answers he sought? Or had she been warning him off, stirring up that hostility to wizards? Trydek rubbed the back of his neck to ease unexpected tenseness.

Well, he wasn’t going to leave here without knowing. He’d traveled so long and so far without finding what he sought to pass up the least chance. A moment’s concentration and if he wasn’t precisely invisible, he was no more than a shadow in the thickening dusk. Concentrating to stifle any hint of magelight, he shaped a twist of elemental air. Now all he had to do was cast this trivial spell across that crowded kitchen without anyone blundering into its path.

There! Trydek seized his moment with a flick of his fingers. For an instant, fragments of bread on the crumb-dusted table made a model of the Fildre bridge. In the next blink of an eye, it collapsed.

The woman stood motionless. Then she took up her knife and resumed cutting the bread as though nothing had happened at all.

Trydek frowned. How long could he lurk out here before Kinet sent Bance to find him? What explanation could he offer without drawing unwelcome attention to the magewoman? Just then, she paused and examined her bread knife. She said something to the cook standing by the great range, who nodded as she ladled stew into bowls.

The woman came out of the kitchen and crossed the flagstoned yard to a range of outbuildings. She entered one, leaving the door open. Trydek followed, to find she was looking straight at him. Only magesight could see through his spell.

He shed the concealment. “Good evening.”

“I’m relieved you weren’t expecting me to walk all the way to the bridge.” She stood beside a substantial grindstone.

“Shall I sharpen that for you?” He nodded at the knife, wondering how to assure her she needed no weapon against him.

“Thank you, but I can do it myself.” She used the pedal to set the whetstone spinning in its frame and began honing the steel.

“Is there somewhere we can talk, some time when you won’t be missed?” Trydek glanced over his shoulder to see if anyone had come in search of him yet.

“If you’re an early riser.” She concentrated on her task. “I can meet you by the bridge at first light.”

“By all means.” Trydek nodded, relieved. “Can I—?”

“Save your questions,” she said curtly. “For both our sakes.”

 

~

 

Trydek slept badly and woke with the dawn, tense with apprehension. Well, at least he had an excuse for getting up at first light. Bance snored like a braying donkey.

He went downstairs and out through the stableyard to the privy. After that, he stuck his head under the pump to wash away his weariness with cold water. A pinched-faced little maid was carrying ash to the midden and fetching kindling to lay the day’s fires. A solitary horseman led his mount out of the stables, handing a yawning groom some pennies for his trouble so early.

Good. Trydek took a spyglass out of his pocket and used it to look here and there before referring to a page of notes. A surveyor going about surveyor’s business. The horseman headed north, so Trydek walked southward. He soon found a footpath cutting between two fields, toward a coppiced wood. A swift spell to enhance his hearing made certain that no one was busy there with axe or saw. Taking the path, as soon as the hazels hid him from the highway, he stepped all the way to Fildre bridge in a single, magic-borne stride.

“Good morning.”

The woman in green stood in the shadow of a large oak. His magesight caught the fading glimmer of the spellcraft that had carried her here.

“Good day to you.” He bowed. “May I know your name?”

“Vidella.” She walked forward. “Let’s talk on the bridge.”

There were niches in the redstone parapet, offering a refuge for walkers whenever broad wagons or overhasty carriages claimed the roadway over the river. Vidella stood in one and turned to face Trydek.

He took the next niche along, noting how this kept him safely beyond arm’s reach of her. “How did you know I have magic?”

Her mouth twitched with the hint of a smile. “You used your talent with the elemental earth to steady that platform of yours as you set it up yesterday.”

How long had she been watching him, standing beneath that oak tree unseen? “Do you turn your magesight on every stranger?”

“Yes,” she said simply. “Just in case. I like to know who I’m dealing with.”

“Then you know my companions haven’t a spark of magic between them.” Trydek folded his arms. “So why did you test Kinet with talk of our survey somehow helping mages?”

“I wanted you to know that wizardry finds no friends here at all, not just among the ignorant peasants.” Unapologetic, Vidella rested her hand on the parapet. “Now you can answer my question. Why is a wizard helping survey Caladhria?”

Trydek noted the hint of green magelight woven around her fingers. He guessed her elemental affinity was with water. What inventive ways might she have to drown him, if he proved to be a threat? He decided to see what she made of the truth.

“I am looking to found a sanctuary for the mageborn.”

Whatever she was expecting, that came as a surprise. “You think wizards need protecting?”

“Even wizards have to sleep,” he retorted. “You say people here have heard the stories from Ensaimin? Do you know what really happened in Peorle or in Algeral?”

“They say powerful wizards sought to enslave the folk of those towns,” Vidella said cautiously. “Somehow the lords who had been ensorcelled broke free to lead an uprising against those mages.”

“You know as well as I do that wizardry cannot make puppets of people.” Trydek didn’t hide his scorn. “I passed through those towns not long after. Those wizards, Mercel and Frelt, they took gold from those local lords, promising to use their spellcraft to extend each town’s domains. They did just as they’d promised until their masters’ ambitions clashed.”

“Then everyone in that region learned first-hand what a wizard war means.” Vidella challenged him to deny it. “Homes burned, people died, crops were laid waste and herds perished. Yet you want to offer such mages a sanctuary?”

Trydek wasn’t about to yield. “You don’t think that all wizards would fare better, if we could find honest use for our talents, to earn our coin like other skilled men or women? Instead of having to turn brigand or battlemage?”

He raised a hand to forestall her response. “I mourn the dead and I regret such destruction, of course I do. But do you know how those mages died? Even wizards must sleep, and guards paid for their loyalty can always be bought for a bigger bag of coin. In Algeral, Frelt was found with a spear through one eye, pinning his head to his pillow. The good folk of Peorle paid some bold swordswoman to play the whore and cut Mercel’s throat. So the gossip goes, she sliced him from ear to ear while he was actually tupping her.”

“That has nothing to do with me.” Vidella shook her head, obstinate. “I keep my magic to myself and give no one any reason to suspect it.”

“Well done.” Trydek clapped slow hands, sarcastic. “Congratulations on whatever chance or circumstance allowed you to hone your own talents until you could take care of yourself. How did you learn to manage your affinity with water? Piecemeal, by trial and error, or did you find some mentor? Wouldn’t you have preferred to have known there was somewhere to go, to find teachers with greater understanding, who could save you from dangerous mistakes?”

He gestured: an all-encompassing sweep of his arm. “What of any adolescent mageborn hereabouts? Have you helped them? I don’t deny that they’re a danger to themselves and to others, no matter how hard they might strive to contain their untamed wizardry. But should that accident of birth be a death sentence, through their own unsought magic or at some frightened mob’s hands? I know of a dozen young men and women who live in daily fear of discovery or of hurting some loved one if their hold on their wizardry slips. How many have you encountered? How many have you known die?”

Vidella flinched, and he knew he’d hit a nerve. She didn’t admit to such a loss, though, throwing his first question back at him instead. “How did you learn your wizardry? What makes you so confident such skills can be taught? You’re not from Caladhria or anywhere close. I can see that plain in your face and hear it in your voice.”

He answered with the brutal truth. “I come from the north, the far north beyond the mountains and forests beyond Ensaimin. In Mandarkin, mageborn are enslaved as soon as they show any hint of affinity with air, earth, fire or water. Doubtless you’ve learned for yourself that pain can see magic run riot, but do you know how swiftly wizardry weakens if you’re kept more than half-starved? If you’re always cold and short on sleep? Oh, you may very well still kill yourself, on purpose or by accident, but it’s very hard to turn your magic on your captors. Especially when you know if you do, your home, the entire village where you were born, will be razed to the ground. What might remain of your family and any other survivors will be sent in chains to be worked to death in the mines.”

Trydek broke off when he realized he was rubbing his wrists, as though his long-faded scars were still raw weals left by manacles.

Vidella stared at him, abruptly lost for words.

He managed a crooked smile. “It was a long time ago and far away. I’ve been travelling in search of something better ever since. Or at least hoping to find a place somewhere out of the way where I might build a refuge for the mageborn.”

“You thought to find that in Caladhria?” She was startled into disbelief.

Trydek’s smile softened into genuine amusement. “Why not? No one’s interested in Caladhria. The great princes of Tormalin are enmeshed in their own quarrels. The Lescari are busy cutting each others’ throats. Where the towns and fiefdoms of Ensaimin aren’t squabbling over half a league of land, they’re busy swindling their neighbors out of their coin.”

“But now you’ve learned that Caladhrians are always interested in each others’ business.” Vidella wrinkled her nose. “And just how closely incomers are watched.”

“Quite so.” He paused. “Including you?”

“My father,” she said briefly. “A Tormalin leather trader who settled in Claithe and found a local wife.”

Trydek nodded. That explained the curl in her black hair, and her burnished complexion.

She looked at him, thoughtful. “How long have you been in Caladhria?”

He saw no reason not to answer. “Nigh on two years. I was hiring myself out to tutor noblemen’s sons when I heard this survey was proposed by the Parliament. I secured a recommendation to Kinet.”

“Then you’ll have seen how thoroughly well-bred Caladhrians approve of an obedient girl knowing her place,” Vidella said, caustic. “You were wondering how a magewoman hereabout learns to control her wizardry? That comes a great deal easier when you’ve been raised to never assert yourself, to never insist on your right to hold a contrary opinion, to never betray your anger or frustration when a man with half your wits is considered an unquestioned authority on all things in your life.”

Now Trydek was surprised, though a moment’s thought stung him with his own blindness. He’d never been hired to tutor a nobleman’s daughters, had he?

“Will you help me?” If not, it was time he headed back to the inn. “To find a place where mages can gather in safety and seclusion. Where we can discover what each of us can do with our separate affinities, without prompting fear and hatred if our magic is so much as glimpsed. Where we can teach those youths and maidens who have no one to help them, when they stumble across their affinity, haphazard and unexpected?”

“Where we can keep our own in check,” Vidella mused, her eyes distant, “so that one wizard’s greed or fury doesn’t poison the air we all must breathe, if we’re to live in peace alongside those who don’t share our talents.”

There was some untold story there, too, but Trydek didn’t dare ask and risk this new accord. He felt the blood pulse in his throat. Did she truly understand what he sought? “You have somewhere in mind?”

“Perhaps.” She approached and held out a hand. She frowned as his fingers closed around hers. “What is your elemental affinity?”

Trydek shrugged. “Earth and fire and air.”

She was astonished. “I never knew that was possible.”

He shrugged again. Perhaps, one day, he’d tell her how surprised Mandarkin’s mage-slavers had been. They’d never imagined such a possibility, either. Still less, that he’d be able to escape them. But that was the past. Now he wanted to secure the future. “What do you want to show me?”

Vidella didn’t answer. A shimmer of green magelight wrapped around them. The trees, the track, the redstone bridge all disappeared as the radiance strengthened. The light’s color deepened to dazzling emerald. Trydek could no longer feel the roadway beneath his feet or hear the woodland’s insouciant birdsong. Wizardry swirled around him, buffeting him like the eddies in a great river’s flow. He concentrated on the sensations of holding Vidella’s hand. He was wholly at the mercy of her magic. If she released him, he would be lost.

An instant or, perhaps, an eternity later, he felt solid ground beneath his boot soles. The vivid green light faded and Vidella released her hold. Now he heard a rhythmic susurration. He took a step and nearly fell over. Still dazzled by the magelight, Trydek rubbed his eyes, blinking till his vision cleared.

He stood on coarse, grizzled sand, cluttered with pebbles and dark lines of twiggy debris. An undercut ridge of turf ahead was dotted with dull green furze bushes. Tangles of thorn trees were stunted and twisted by the incessant breeze he could feel on his back. He turned slowly around to see a vast expanse of water, somewhere between blue and grey, and striped here and there with creamy foam.

“This is the first time you’ve seen the sea?” Vidella was amused, though not unkindly so.

Trydek shook his head, searching for the right words. “It’s the first time I’ve felt so much sea. I’ve stood on the shores of the Gulf of Peorle, on the Bay of Teshal, but this—”

Those vast expanses of water were nevertheless still bounded by the great curves of the coastline. Here, there was no sense at all of any farther shore, however distant.

She nodded. “There’s no land out there, not that we know of yet, anyway.”

Trydek stared out across the ocean. He was looking westward, his mage-sense belatedly told him. “Where are we?”

“The southernmost tip of Caladhria.” Vidella came to stand beside him. “You’d have taken half a year to get here measuring every league of the roads.”

“We’d never have come here,” Trydek said frankly. “These coastlines have long been charted, to save merchants’ ships from the rocks. It’s the highways and byways that no one’s ever mapped.”

“Have you seen any of those mariners’ charts?” Vidella stooped to kilt up her skirts, and kicked off her shoes.

“No.” Trydek wondered what she was doing.

Barelegged to the knee, the magewoman walked cautiously into the shallow water. “Take off your boots and come here.”

He did so, shivering at the cold kiss of ripples on his shins.

“Tell me what you feel.” She took his hand, and her touch offered the insights of her mage-sense.

Trydek closed his eyes, the better to concentrate on the sensations coursing through him. “The currents—”

“There are islands out there. The biggest is as large as a minor baron’s holding, and a scatter of smaller ones surrounds it. They’re all ringed by such vicious rocks that ships shun that whole reach of the sea, as best they can. No one has ever claimed the islands. Any outpost would be too isolated for the Tormalin Empire to be interested, and no Caladhrian wants to venture so far offshore, not when there’s no safe anchorage, as far as anyone knows.”

He opened his eyes. “You know different.”

“I believe so,” Vidella said, guardedly.

“Then you will come with me, work with me?” Trydek tried to curb his growing hopes.

“I will come with you to see these islands, to see if they’re fit to live on. But we have to get there first,” she said repressively.

Trydek gazed out to sea. “Wizardry could keep a ship off those rocks. So where can we get a boat?”

Because there was still no way for magic to carry them to those islands, sight unseen. Those stories about all-powerful mages had no idea of the true limits of their talents.

Though perhaps, Trydek speculated, he had reached the end of one journey only to begin another. Who knew what ways a group of wizards might find to overcome the limitations of their magic, as they explored their elemental affinities? Who knew what new possibilities they might discover: unsuspected, subtle powers or awe-inspiring elemental might?

Then maybe, one day, wizards would return to the mainland and deal with its peoples on their own terms.

 

 

 

 

Juliet E McKenna Biography

 

Juliet E McKenna is a British fantasy author living in the Cotswolds, UK. Loving history, myth and other worlds since she first learned to read, she has written fifteen epic fantasy novels, from The Thief’s Gamble which began The Tales of Einarinn in 1999, to Defiant Peaks concluding The Hadrumal Crisis trilogy. Exploring new opportunities in digital publishing, she’s re-issued her backlist as ebooks in association with Wizard’s Tower Press as well as bringing out original fiction. Most recently, Shadow Histories of the River Kingdom offers readers a wholly new and different fantasy world to explore. In between novels, she writes diverse shorter fiction, reviews for web and print magazines and promotes SF&Fantasy by blogging on book trade issues, attending conventions and teaching creative writing. Learn more about all of this at www.julietemckenna.com and on Twitter @JulietEMcKenna