Chapter Text
The Lioness was a fierce opponent.
The generals had warned Arram of her, of course, but engaged with her here, truly and fully, he thought they had rather understated the issue.
She was a fiend with a blade, striking with the precision and practicality of talent honed by long years of practice, and while she didn't have his education in the Gift, what she did have was field experience. Lots and lots and lots of field experience.
After a month spent on the Northern shore, Arram was finally starting to stomach hurting others with his magic, but he still reached for brambles where she reached for fire, and the difference in efficiency was wearing him down.
Not too quickly, thankfully—he'd spent his whole Gift on a single attack the first day he'd arrived on the field and been confined to his bunk for three days while he recovered—and he was getting used to watching her blade so he could bat it away before it connected. The metal of it seemed to shear through spells just as easily as it sheared through cloth and flesh, though, so he had to be careful what side he hit it from, and how.
He had finally started to turn the tide unambiguously in his favor, picking a spell of Staghorn's and enveloping the small knight in a thick, clear slime that worked on the mind as well as immobilizing the body, when something clipped off the barrier he had been holding up over his back.
An arrow sank deeply into the trunk of a tree to his left, quivering with the force of the shot.
Even his barrier hadn't been able to skew its trajectory much, he noted with a chill; if it had, the arrow would have missed the tree entirely.
Keeping a grip on the spell that held the Lioness, he looked to his right for the archer.
They—he—she?—was crouched on a ridge fifty paces off and about fifteen feet above the ground, built slight and distinctly feminine, yet wearing breeches and a tunic under her heavy cloak as she knelt with another arrow at the ready, pulled back to her shoulder with a marksman's eye.
He had only a split second to shift his barrier, and then she loosed it.
Softening and broadening his shield, he focused on bringing inertia to bear on the arrow instead of deflecting it. He intended to halt it before it reached him, but it was traveling too fast, and he was forced to catch it barehanded to keep it from making contact, the wood sizzling from the magic it had been submersed in.
He looked up in time to catch a frustrated grimace, and then she notched a third arrow. Actually stopping the momentum of her shots was going to take much more energy than it was worth, he could see now, so when the bolt flew, his shield simply directed it off course. The fourth and fifth shots went similarly astray, and it was only then that he remembered the Lioness.
He found that the knight had worked her way free of his spell—inspiring momentary terror (two opponents would have been fine if one of them hadn't been an infamous sorceress as well as a famous knight and the other an unknown but highly skilled archer) until he found that she was making a quick retreat into the forest that surrounded them, the linen of her breeches and the leather of her boots clinging to her legs as she charged.
Upon seeing her ally make a successful getaway, the archer turned and vanished into the underbrush.
Arram stood alone in the clearing.
It was then that he finally, finally let his magic drop, panting.
His senses trickled back in, letting him know that he had a burn on his hand from the arrow and he was shaking from the inside out like he hadn't since his very first fight here. The taste of spells he'd never thought he'd have to use soured his tongue; the sight of dead soldiers littering the ground had burned into his eyelids; the stench of stormwings on the wind as they heralded the end of the skirmish clogged his nose. He swallowed down the nausea.
Whatever Ozorne thought, the blood on a battlefield was vastly different from the blood in a clinic.
He was only here for a bit, he reminded himself. Ozorne wouldn't need him here for long. Just until the war was done. Then he could go home, and hold Varice, and check on his pets, and see if Imiary Adona had finally published her fifth novel.
He would be fine.
It would be fine.
Maybe not now, but—soon. It would be fine.
(There were hundreds, thousands of soldiers that wouldn't be, though. Those stormwings weren't rolling in daisies. And here Arram was, giving them the drip-drip-drip of power that let the slaughter continue on and on and on...)
The arrow was still in his hand, he noted distantly, and raised it to inspect it. Too recently made to be of any use to him personally, he found, and free of any magic. Barbed and sanded clean, fletched with a hawk's feather. Obviously of high quality.
He should take it back to the army. Arrows were important to an army.
An image of the archer falling to the very arrow she'd loosed flickered across his mind, and he swallowed again, chilled to the bone.
With a press and flick of power that stung his tingling hands, he lifted all the arrows in the clearing and snapped them in half, making sure to let them splinter, and left them in a litter around the mage-warped fighting grounds.
An arrow spent was an arrow spent, and it should stay that way.
Sitting in his cabin that evening, Arram gazed into the hearth with his hands loose in his lap, head and body unnaturally empty and exhausted and an odd pain simmering in his belly. Being placed in a stateroom of the biggest of the fleet, the fire burned hot without destruction—a tool or a luxury, depending on its occupant.
It would be easy to feed a little of his power into it to communicate with Ozorne, with Varice, with any of his associates and fellow scholars back home.
Easy, and very, very stupid.
It was his power that was supporting the backbone of their army's wards, now—heavy threads of his magic permanently linked to the crystal hub in this ship's hold to strengthen the soldiers—and to direct that same power into a connection to those he loved would be to paint targets over their backs for any mage that may be watching. It didn't matter how much he missed them; he couldn't do that.
(Ozorne, theoretically, was well-protected enough that it wouldn't matter, but Ozorne...
Well, Arram wouldn't want to interrupt his responsibilities, was all; the emperor of all of Carthak was a busy man.)
He should go somewhere else to meditate, he thought. It would help his concentration not to watch the flickering promise in the decorative piece, perfectly at home in his beautifully decorated quarters.
He thought of the wounded and dying, and how it felt to turn his back on them, unable to administer so much as a mercy kill while the battle around them raged on and on and on and on...
The phantom pain that gripped his gut surged again. He felt sick, immobilized.
It was better—easier, somehow, to embrace the pain than it was to turn away. If nothing else, it was what they all deserved.