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fly like you're free — original Chapter 7
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After the wards had been updated, nobody bothered to put him back on them, instead telling him to rest up and get ready for the next fight. It left him with far too little to do, but he did manage to catch up on sleep and eat three or four solid meals every day, which did him much better than he could have guessed.
He thought it would be another three weeks before he saw Daine, but it was a mere three days—the very next time their forces were put on the battlefield.
Sent out separately from the army, he barely got a quarter of the way into the forest before she approached him, a gleaming light in her eyes and a hunting knife gleaming in her hand, and launched into an attack with no further ado.
That was one way to get one's blood running in the morning, he supposed.
(It didn't escape him that it felt like a warped-mirror version of the mornings Varice decided that their combined work could hang and dragged him right back to bed—right down to the arousal so intense it made his head spin.)
"To what do I owe the honor?" he asked, terribly casual as she did everything in her power to gut him. "I was under the impression you couldn't afford to lose your insurance."
"Insurance's insurance whether you're bleedin' or dry," she said with false cheer and a gorgeous, furious flush that his mind was all too happy to place between himself and a mattress. Another reckless slash carried her right up to him, her eyes fit to bore right into his soul—and she grinned jaggedly. "And I think I like you bleeding."
She left him with another cut before a signal called her off, and he let her go, waiting until he was sure he was alone to brace his hands on his knees and catch his breath.
...It was a good thing he was forced to wear the robe, he mused. As easy as it was to overheat in it, it hid his physical reactions quite handily.
He had mostly calmed down by the time he found Hadensra—and that was a good thing, too. The man made his hair stand on end.
Arram wondered if he should try to get the other mage to talk, but Hadensra tossed off the first spell before he could think of anything to say.
After a few minutes of nothing but spells, Hadensra was the one to break the silence.
"Clever trick with the wards," he said between incantations. The words seemed to have been dragged out of him with great force.
"Pardon?" said Arram, nonplussed, as he batted away the destruction spell. (He had seen Hadensra do better than that—what was he playing at?)
"Their strength has increased radically in the past few days." It didn't sound like a compliment. "I do wonder how you managed that."
"You learn a thing or two when it's your profession," he replied, trying to hide his wariness. "Wards are quite useful in mine."
Hadensra sneered and threw a wave of glass spell at him, one full of a riotous power that felt like a slip of control, and Arram recited the counterspell in a hurry.
They traded blows, testing, for the remainder of the battle, Hadensra's power spiking out of him from time to time, and when the retreat sounded, he let Arram go without a fuss.
Odd, Arram thought as he delivered a rather dramatized report to his superiors that evening.
Odd that Inar Hadensra seemed about as eager to kill as Arram was. Odd that the man only seemed to want him to talk, when he had certainly had the raw power needed for a deathmatch. Odd that he had gone to all that trouble with his intimidation tactics, and then hadn't followed through.
Odd that Inar Hadensra was answering to Tortall, however temporarily.
He spun that thought around in his mind for the next two days as he rested, watching the sky for Daine.
She didn't fly in those two days, but he barely had the time to worry because, again, she tracked him down as soon as he entered the forest—enraged, but with a gleam in her beautiful eyes that almost seemed... desperate. Manic.
"That new ally of yours seems to be doing you well, magelet," he told her as he pushed away her knife, feeling trembling tension that didn't belong in the grip on a weapon. "Congratulations. I might be in trouble if he's half as good as he seems."
She stumbled. The look that flashed across her face wasn't the one he expected. There was no preening smugness for the concession, nor fury for a perceived slight; her mouth tightened and flattened, anxiety wrinkling the skin between her brows.
"...Serves you right," she grumbled a beat too late, half-hearted, then launched into the attack again.
"Is everything alright?" He tried to make the question sound as condescending as he could, but even that didn't evoke more than a disgusted grimace. "You haven't been out to fly lately."
That got a reaction, her pretty face paling and her pretty throat working and her dark eyelashes all the more notable for it, then launched herself at him with all the viciousness of a cornered animal, even though she still had all the space to flee as she could want.
"Don't see how it's any business of yours," she snapped through clenched teeth as she tried her hardest to hurt him.
He caught her wrist and twisted it again, leaning in close to murmur, "Is it Hadensra, perchance?"
Her falter told him he'd hit the mark.
Then she jammed her foot into his knee, a wide flail of her knife cutting through a few layers of his clothing across his shoulder. "He seems to have the valley all looked at," she said stiffly, with pale lips. "No need for a bird's eye anymore."
He hummed, then deliberately turned away from her to study the rip. "It's a shame you're so determined to hide your talents from your own people. Matters of life and death are hardly the time to be coy."
She went on the offense again, and no more words were traded between them that day.
No words were traded between him and Hadensra either, for all that they allegedly fought.
Not a direct mage duel this time, no, but a variant of the spell he had used during their initial contact. Hadensra's was (unsurprisingly) more violent; the stone spears were designed as weapons, rather than annoyances, and Arram found himself freezing and pushing back rock spear after rock spear as they attempted to skewer him where he stood.
They weren't designed to be mobile the way his had been—on the whole, their construction was simpler and more practical for the purpose they had been designed for—but it was still easy enough to hijack the power behind them and place them back where they belonged before they hurt anyone.
Allegedly, they fought.
Hadensra wasn't trying to kill him, and it was making Arram nervous.
He talked up the incident to the generals, making sure to let them know of how extremely powerful and dangerous the enemy was; they took his ripped clothing to have come from that standoff, and he had no intention of disabusing them of the notion.
Daine still didn't fly.
Knowing Hadensra was the cause of the silence left Arram's mouth tasting bitter, antsy under his skin. The thought of Daine trapped in such close quarters with that sort of dangerdangerdanger was upsetting on a deep, visceral level.
Not that the battlefield she nearly lived on was safe, but at least the battlefield she could walk away from.
(—thorns, screams, the shared look between the king and champion's faces, knowing the blood, knowing the form, knowing knowing knowing and still failing—Princess Kalasin had never stood a chance—)
It was making him pace through his tiny stateroom, covered in a few short strides despite its relative size. The magical hearth sat there, flickering; an invitation and a trap.
One easy spell and—maybe he could hear Ozorne's voice again. Varice's. Lindhall's. Sebo's. Dagani's. Ramasu's. Anyone's.
Hadensra had looked through his scrying spell with that ruby eye, and the only reason Arram wasn't dead was because of the way he'd braced it.
He couldn't risk any of the people he cared about like that.
He still came very, very close to throwing good sense to the wind and contacting them anyway before he was sent out again.
This time, it wasn't Daine who found him first, but the Lioness—who was quickly backed up by Hadensra.
But only backed up.
There was something very, very wrong about seeing Hadensra standing slightly behind the Lioness and pretending to be compliant. Even the spikes of caustic power were kept carefully under control, his incongruous amicability only a few shades short of jovial. Calling him a wolf in sheep's clothing felt like an insult to wolves and sheep both.
"What pleasant company you keep, Lioness," Arram tried, just once.
She made a face where her 'pleasant company' couldn't see her and then fixed Arram with a black look. "I didn't come here to chat, Draper."
Arram mocked her with a bow, then backed up in a hurry as her sword slashed a bit too close.
It was a strange comfort to know that whatever Hadensra had said, it hadn't been enough to convince her of his sincerity.
The Lioness continued to try to kill him and Hadensra continued to hold back, and Arram's own reluctance to try to neutralize her when Hadensra was right there meant that the battle dragged out longer and longer, a work of attrition as Arram stayed on the defensive and the Lioness picked her moments carefully and Hadensra refused to put in any more effort than the two of them.
Finally, the signal for retreat was called—or, rather, shot.
A long arrow dug itself into the ground in between the three of them.
Barbed, sanded clean, fletched with a hawk's feather, and obviously of high quality.
He didn't look towards the direction the arrow had come from. Didn't drop his shields to check on the warmth of her magic. He looked at the arrow and then only scanned the ridge she might have been (wasn't) on.
"We're done," she called, quiet and clear across the battlefield.
He caught her eye as his opponents escaped—or as much as one could catch another's eye across a good forty feet of distance.
She hesitated, then turned and silently followed her superiors.
He gazed after her, thinking, and then realized there was a chance of someone seeing him just stand there, so he turned and left as well.
It was in that state that he returned to his room after a very brief debriefing.
He didn't have enough information on Hadensra, and now it had become quite obvious that he wasn't going to get it from Hadensra himself.
He left his stateroom almost as soon as he entered it, heading to the mages' workroom to pick up a handful of materials—it looked like no one had found a use for the opal dust yet, so he took half of it with him—then walked back to his rooms.
Pulling the magical fire out of the hearth, he set next to a wide, long piece of parchment, then took an oil pencil to the surface of the latter, drawing off the circle he had created before to build a rather complicated brace for a communication spell.
Eight-sided this time, to better solidify a barrier and sustain the muffling properties, all the overcomplications based in swirls so they would force any interrupting power to spend itself in the tracts before infiltrating or burning the communication. Another circle outside of the first ensured that the parchment would eat itself before any harm could come to anyone on either side of the spell—braced and obfusticated in much more opal dust than most knew how to deal with, though Hadensra was familiar enough with the material, Arram supposed—and still other bits of magic to render any speech that was overheard incomprehensibly scrambled.
He spent the next hour doing everything he could to make sure the communication spell was as magically unnotable as possible, and then, finally, he activated it.
He reached out for Ozorne first.
(There was an ephemeral storm of questions he wanted to ask his friend. He didn't know how to word any of them; all he knew was that most of them began with why.
Maybe he wouldn't have to ask. Maybe seeing his friend's face would be enough. Maybe that would be all that was needed to his doubts at ease, just the way it used to be.)
"Ah, Arram!" said Ozorne, when Arram found him seated in his study. He looked well; as extravagantly dressed as he always was, meticulously groomed and bright-eyed. He was an age and a day away from a war, and it showed. "There you are, old friend."
"It's good to see you well," Arram replied with a tired smile. It hurt more than it didn't, though—that jarring ill feeling at seeing how very... well the emperor (conqueror) was. He was vastly moreso than anyone Arram had seen in many months, and he didn't like the claws that locked over his heart at the thought.
(It was because of Ozorne that Arram was here, and Arram still wasn't allowed to do anything so undignified as healing slaves.)
"And you look terrible." Irrepressible, as Ozorne was. "When was the last time you got any beauty sleep?"
"Been a bit busy for it, is all—wars are hard work," Arram said dryly, then sighed. "Listen..." A hundred questions leapt to his tongue, and abruptly, he found that he had no intention of asking them.
Ozorne rested his cheek on his fist—between the pose and the kohl and the gold, he was the perfect image of a wealthy, indolent, and apathetic ruler.
(As a teenager, Arram had thought he was putting on airs. A decade late, he wasn't so sure.)
He shook his head to the subtle acridity, put on a realer smile, and said, "I won't disturb you much, but—have you any information on Inar Hadensra? I'm afraid the Tortallans have gained a powerful ally, and leaping in without proper preparation sounds a bit... unwise."
Ozorne laughed, abruptly, loudly, discordantly jovial. "Oh that is just like you—a black robe mage, acclaimed by all, and of course you think you couldn't just blast your way through a shaman mage like Inar Hadensra. So you come to me!"
Arram swallowed down bile. "You know me indeed."
"Well, friend, I'm afraid I can't help you there—oh, don't look so glum. You'll be fine. Look, I've got a meeting with the nobles just about now, so I can't chat, but if you're so worried, contact someone at the university. Surely one of those old gossips knows a thing or two about him, if he's all that."
"I will," Arram promised; the default smile felt strange and painful on his face.
Ozorne heaved a sigh and pushed himself up. "Well, I don't think the less of you, but I did think this war would be over once I sent you. I suppose that not even you are invincible. Ah—I'm called." He raised a hand to Arram, and Arram only had the time to raise his own hand in reply before the connection vanished.
Arram blinked at the fire as the contents of the brief interaction slowly sunk in.
'Go ask someone else' and 'I'm disappointed'.
Arram had killed the next oldest royal child, devolved into an unhealthy obsession with a teenage girl, sabotaged the one thing that would have won them the war at the cost of the lives of thousands, tortured an innocent soldier, let plenty more on both sides die by turning his back...
And Ozorne, sprawled on his throne of gold, was disappointed.
Things looked simple from where he was, Arram supposed. Numbers and maps and the only problems to be found were the kind that could be solved with enough money.
Buy more soldiers to die. Buy more weapons to kill. Buy more healers so your soldiers lasted longer, and you wouldn't have to buy quite so many. Buy more mages—they were nothing but particularly effective foot soldiers, weren't they?
Ask a favor from an old friend, one of the most powerful mages of them all, to be one of the number. After all, the more powerful and certified a mage was, the higher their destructive power.
It must seem like a board game from that golden throne.
(Exhausted jokes about pretty pleasure slaves, desperation everywhere you looked, infirmaries stuffed to the brim and overflowing so Arram had to step over the bodies at times...
The Queen's Riders had never been terribly old, but 'at least fifteen' had become 'at least fourteen' at some point, and the ability to read and write had dropped out of the list of requirements entirely. Sometimes Arram thought that if he saw one more child on a battlefield, he was going to be sick.
For as often as he thought it, his bile hadn't escaped him yet.)
Part of him wanted to hope, to believe that if Ozorne only saw the war for himself...
He never would. He didn't like getting his hands dirty. He didn't believe in exposing himself to undue danger.
King Jonathan had been in the muck when Arram killed his daughter right in front of his eyes. In the whole time she had been here, the Lioness hadn't missed a single battle, not to illness nor injury nor plain rest. Queen Thayet defended Corus against the forces that wiggled past the defenses with a sword in her own hand, or so the spies told them.
And Ozorne sprawled on his throne of gold, disappointed.
Arram entertained a brief, crazed fantasy of defecting, and then nearly laughed aloud at the thought.
He had killed the king's daughter in full view of everyone who mattered. To defect would be to impale himself on the business end of the Lioness's magic sword, no matter what view Carthak took of it.
(Ozorne hadn't suggested catching up, which had been the bare minimum of what he'd always suggested before, and Arram couldn't help but wonder if that was because he didn't want to hear about what Arram was going through, or because he didn't want to tell Arram what he had been up to.
Either seemed as likely as the other, and Arram... wasn't surprised.
Disappointed, hurt, wrong-footed, but not surprised.
...Why wasn't he surprised?)
He sat with that question for several seconds, unable or unwilling to arrive at an answer, then pushed it back and activated the working again.
Even if Ozorne wasn't concerned about Hadensra, Arram was—a thorn right next to Tortall's heart (a snake in Daine's bed), and he didn't know when or how it was going to dig in—and if his oldest friend wasn't going to provide the information he needed, then, well... someone else would.
He tried Lindhall next.
"Goodness, Arram!" said his old mentor, paling from 'sun-tanned northerner' to 'ghostly' as soon as he laid eyes on him. "What on earth happened to you?"
"War," said Arram simply. For Lindhall, he didn't need much more than that.
Lindhall's face softened. "Indeed, lad. Is this a social call?"
"Alas, it is not." Then, scrubbing his jaw, he had to ask: "Do I truly look so terrible?"
"A bit of sleep and a few meals would do you well," said Lindhall, wryly sympathetic, though his eyes were sober. "At the moment, you look a bit like an unfortunate lich."
"There will be time for that later, I suppose," Arram said with a sigh. At least, he thought, he could likely stand to shave more often. "Right now, I need to know what you know about Inar Hadensra."
Lindhall was slightly more informative than Ozorne had been.
The university kept an eye on Hadensra, even after he turned down the offer of a black robe; 'war' seemed to be his middle name, and he had made many appearances to that effect for Scanra. He still answered solely to the Council of Ten as far as anyone could tell, and his bloodlust had been noted by many.
Not much of it was anything new to Arram, but Lindhall directed him to some of those who had worked with him, and they vindicated his worry—apparently, Hadensra had started out caustic and murderous, and then upgraded to venomous and genocidal after swapping his eye for the ruby.
Everyone else was as surprised as he was that Hadensra seemed to be answering to Tortall—even moreso, it seemed, because two out of three initial reactions were, what does the Council of Ten have against Tortall? and the third was, Tortall's using focuses now?—but they had much more solid estimates of his Gift and specialties, and even a few guesses as to how he had gotten his ruby eye and its associated powers.
He always had been greatly fascinated with Uusoae, goddess of chaos.
Why the Dread Queen herself would give him power in exchange for an eyeball was a highly worrying question in all sorts of ways, and Arram desperately wished he had unlimited access to the university's library to figure that out, but probably got his power directly from the divine mistress of Violence, Discord, Slaughter, Malady, and Starvation and the chances that he isn't currently attempting to shred Tortall to tatters from the inside out are slim to none were useful (if terrifying) bits of information in themselves.
He thanked them all, and then made his spell burn itself to ash.
It was a pity he couldn't reach Enzi through anything so trite as a mortal working. The crocodile god had no great love for the northern lands, but even less love for Uusoae. Maybe he would have known something helpful.
As many ideas and questions and thoughts as spun in his mind now, Arram fell asleep quicker and slept more soundly that night than he had in months.
The emotion that splintered his heart when he saw Daine next, two days later, was not the emotion he expected.
It felt like he had—resurfaced somehow. Reality had come into sharp definition since his conversation with Lindhall and the others. The breath of fresh air in the small taste of the life he had left behind and the presence of a puzzle to be solved, one of the things he did best, left him feeling like he was standing on solid ground for the first time in a very long time—
And Daine was stunning.
Hurting, furious, young, and stunning.
He faltered over her face, her eyes, his heart doing something... odd—and then she was at his throat with a knife. Again.
(—the look on her face, in her eyes, when he pinned her down in that clearing, her fire vanishing for nothing but fear and the way the crystalline reality of it shattered over him like a sheet of ice—)
(Lindhall would have loved her.)
He twisted out of the way of the blade, a sharp ache in his chest.
"Oh, you're a fine coward," she snapped as she overbalanced, a strange drag in the words.
He blinked. There were plenty of people who had cause to think he was a coward, and none of them were her, at least as far as he knew.
The knife swiped past his nose again, his spine tingling at how close it had gotten to his eye.
"Bastard," she spat between slashes. The insult held tremors that couldn't be excused by the exertion. "Hag take you, Dread Queen's filth—"
Something was wrong.
He caught her wrists; her movements were so desperately careless that it was much easier than it should have been.
She curled her lip at him, but it couldn't disguise the muffled panic on her young features.
He searched her face for a long moment, until she snarled, "What?"
"Admiring the view," he said absently, placating, then tightened his grip as she struggled and thrashed against it. This was so very similar to trying to figure out what was wrong with a predator in possession of a critical flesh wound that he couldn't see it as anything else. At least she hadn't bitten him yet. "What happened?"
He didn't expect her near-apoplectic rage, though he should have. She wrenched herself free with adrenaline-punched strength and twisted her knife at the right angle to drag the tip of it from his jaw to his cheekbone, then staggered back, panting like a bellows, then threw her slight form at him even harder than before.
"My country was invaded by you blasted Carthaks and there's rat's filth right'n front of me," she said with another wild attack that sent her staggering far past him when he dodged. "Dunno what could be more happenin' than that!"
His cheek hurt, drops of blood tickling as they made their way down his neck, the forest quiet and loamy but for Daine's gasps for air, but somehow, his chest ached worse.
"Carthaki," he corrected thoughtlessly, then, ignoring the way her expression contorted, he went on, "Certainly, we are a pox, but something has changed. What is it?"
"You're awful presumptuous." The accusation tried to be venomous and ended up at scared. "You think my country bein' taken's not enough?"
"No," he said, then dodged another wild swing. "Daine—"
"Don't you dare," she cut him off. She was trembling again; the tip of the knife was shaking as she pointed it at him, and her eyes... "You're a monster. Don't you dare pretend you're not."
He raised his hands in surrender, showing her that they were empty. Whatever goodwill he'd earned for helping stop the bloodrain was forgotten now.
Then, studying her tremors more closely, he realized that it wasn't forgotten. Just buried.
Testing, he spoke with pointed carelessness as he said, "Ah, my apologies. I simply couldn't stand to leave a child alone to her tears. Far be it from me to ruin my little magelet's facile fantasies."
That was laying it on thick, but he could see her cling to it like driftwood in a storm. Her eyes lit in a steadier blaze, glowing ice and an uncentered need. "Can't make up no stories about what's in front of my nose," she said almost cheerfully, and threw herself back into the fight.
She'd already gotten him once; he managed to keep her from getting him again, tossing out goading remarks every now and again. She relaxed and focused with each of them, and he did his best to keep his emotions off of his face.
The masochism born of desperation and helplessness was uncomfortably familiar.
He caught her wrists once again as he heard the Tortallan signal for retreat, her sweet, vulnerable mouth and fiercely proud chin less than a foot from his own, and held her gaze.
"It's Hadensra, isn't it."
Her beautiful blush drained white.
He held her there for another moment, waiting for a reply, then let her go when the second call sounded. "Go on," he said with a mild smile. "Your friends will be missing you."
She spat a quiet tch in disgust, then turned on her heel and snatched up her bow and quiver as she strode from the clearing.
Hadensra came soon after, either sent out after the retreat or truant, and that was the easier fight of the two.
Now that Arram knew more of the man, engaging with him was vastly less stressful, no matter the wrongness that crackled over his mind when he saw his magic. It seemed that Hadensra was reluctant to unleash what he had gained from his demon's deal, which was good for Arram; it meant that the defensive spells needed were less draining.
They traded blows for a bit, drawn out by long chants and deliberation, and then Hadensra glanced at the sky, his ruby eye glowing. He threw one last spell at Arram, and left while Arram was still detangling it.
He didn't bother to heal the cut before he returned himself, and when the generals fixed their eyes on it as they interrogated him about his fight with Hadensra, he didn't bother to tell them of its source.
He didn't bother to agonize over whether to contact anyone once he got back to his rooms, either—he pulled out a fresh sheet of parchment and a pen.
He wasn't sure what he was hoping for when he attempted to contact Ozorne again. Answers, yes, but...
The wards around the emperor were too thick. Arram was stonewalled at the gate, and no amount of metaphorical knocking would change that.
After several minutes, Arram gave up, and instructed the working to burn itself to ash.
(It wasn't a surprise.
Why wasn't he surprised?)
Again, the fantasy of defection crossed his mind, and again, he dismissed it. Hadensra had something up his sleeve, and he didn't know where Tortall stood on it. Without him keeping an eye on the other mages, there was no one trustworthy to delay any further attempts at brewing bloodrain. If he left, he would never be welcomed back onto Carthaki soil—which meant no more Varice, or Binta, or Lindhall, or any other close friends.
He wouldn't make a move until he figured out what that move should be, and it was unlikely to be defection.
In the meantime, he healed his cheek and got ready for bed.
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