The Abjurer: Chapter 26-27

This brings us to the end of what I had already written, and just over the halfway point of the novel. I want to try and keep doing two chapters on Tuesday and Thursday, but depending on my schedule, I may have to occasionally only do one chapter. 

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The rest of the party moved with surprising alacrity. The new king and representative of the Vernal Court had much less interest in harassing me than his predecessor did, and many of the fae gave me a bit more respect, actually listening when I turned away their commissions.

There was one thing that I had left to do before I could give Medb the ley line and sword, and we’d be free to go, though.

Just as Garnet had suggested, I found them near the training rooms.

“Honored Huntsman,” I said, “I’ve come to speak with you.”

The sovereign that the Wild Hunt had sent was tall and thin, with spidery limbs that were just a bit too long, and fingers just a bit too sharp to be those of a normal human. They wore a mask that seemed to be woven of shadows, but their eyes were visible through the shade. One glowed bright red, and the other glowed a toxic green color.

“Hello, little Lord of Creation,” they said. “You may call me Gwyn, if I may call you Evan.”

When they said my name, it sent a shiver through my body, and I had to take a step back, but I still nodded.

“Certainly,” I said.

“Good. What did you want?” Gwyn asked.

“I wanted to bargain with you in the name of the great Queen I represent,” I said. “She desires safe passage for her court through the territories of the Wild Hunt.”

As I spoke, Oracle began to shiver and shudder. Osheen and I glanced at him, but after a second, I realized that he was connecting with the Silver Queen, becoming her voice for the negotiation.

“Come, spar with me in the name of your Autumn Lady,” they said.

“Queen,” Oracle said, speaking in the soft, sultry voice of the Silver Queen.

“I said what I said,” Gwyn said as they drew the blade from their side and entered the training ring. Green and red flame erupted across the blade, and they pointed at me.

I let out an annoyed breath and gave Osheen a kiss on the cheek, but before I could step in, Osheen shook his head.

“No, I’ll do it instead.”

“You don’t have to do that. Just because I got hurt in one duel for you,” I said, but I was interrupted by him holding out his hand.

“Give me the sword and scabbard,” he said. “I know I don’t have to, but you’ve stuck out your neck for me too many times. I need to earn my keep, even if it’s minor.”

I hesitated for a moment, but then unbuckled the scabbard and passed it to him.

“Do you want my cloak too?” I asked.

“I’ll be fine,” Osheen said, smiling. “I helped with these. I couldn’t use the cloak. That’s your power, I’ve no claim to it.”

“Well spoken,” Gwyn boomed, dropping into a ready stance as Osheen buckled the scabbard to his belt and drew out the sword.

Osheen stepped into the ring, and the battle-argument began.

“Your demands of free passage for your entire court are absurd,” Gwyn said, slicing their sword out in three strokes. Osheen was still too far away for the blade to even be in reach, but the strange fire arced through the air in long, thin slices.

“Then why not counter-offer?” the Silver Queen in Oracle’s body said.

Osheen held his hands up and spiky runes built around his fingers. He caught the fire with one hand and it dissipated.

I frowned as I studied closer. I expected Osheen to be using abjuration in some regard there, to break apart the spell. It would make sense, after all. As long as it was purely a fire-focused abjuration spell, he’d be able to cast it.

But instead, he was manipulating the fire itself, leaving the spell intact.

If I could integrate some of that into my defenses…

Osheen released several bolts of force at Gwyn, whose sword spun wildly and sliced through each bolt.

“I think I shall,” Gwyn said. “But we’ve yet to even discuss payment. What can you offer me, Queen?”

They used some sort of movement technique to burst in close to Osheen, who activated his own force enhancements and caught their blade with his own. Runes built around Osheen’s head, and he opened his mouth and released a breath of fire.

I hadn’t even known he could do that, but it was visually impressive. It struck Gwyn’s shadow mask and burned some away before they managed to slip aside. The pair fell into a flurry of swift blows after that, exchanging blade attacks with a speed only possible due to magic.

“I offer much. The thirteen silver rings of Queen Aratur.”

Gwyn fell into a crouch before lunging like an animal at Osheen’s throat. Osheen brought the blade up to intercept and skewered towards Gwyn’s throat.

Liquid shadows streamed around Gwyn’s hands and they caught the blade, then shoved back, hoping to force Osheen back.

Instead, Osheen let go of the blade and drove a punch right into Gwyn’s face. Backed by the force magic of his tattoo, it was shockingly powerful, and tossed Gwyn back into the air.

“Impossible,” Gwyn said the moment they landed. “Nobody’s seen those rings in ten years. And they’ve searched.”

“Not as well as I did,” the Silver Queen said. “Nor as soon as I did.”

I frowned, annoyed. I had no idea at all what these rings were. Something to do with the Fae, obviously, but beyond that? It was impossible to tell.

“You sneaky little cheat,” Gwyn said, snapping and conjuring several blades of flame and shadow, which began to launch themselves at Osheen. Osheen held his hands out and runes spun outwards, catching the fire and tearing it away from the shadow, which caused the spell to break apart.

“Cheat I may be,” the Silver Queen said, “but the winner writes the history books, as you’d well know, Nudd-son.”

Gwyn growled, but was too busy dodging a set of six sweeping flame lances to respond. When they finally had a moment, their voice came out short and panting.

“Well, if you truly have all thirteen… I’ll trade you a year and a day of free passage through all our territories in exchange.”

They swept their arm out then, and red light began to gather. Several ghostly figures that resembled hawks burst out, and Osheen grinned, then reached down to his waist and drew out the second blade there.

Dual wielding was difficult, and took a lot of training. If I’d been the one in his stead, I’d have had to drop the first sword to draw Rowan’s.

But Osheen had been trained in swordsmanship from birth, and he made the motions look elegant. As he swung, his aura rushed down the blade, lighting the foci up.

Causality was a force I didn’t understand much about. It held a great deal of significance within the theory behind sympathetic magic, but I’d always been more about practicality than theory.

But I knew enough to understand what Osheen was going to do, and I couldn’t help but grin.

Rowan’s blade was enforced on one idea: the ability to cut.

I’d wager it could cut through a magma titan.

And when used against a flock all conjured by the same spell?

Osheen sliced through one bird, and cut the spell structure itself. All of the birds began to fall apart, and Osheen quickly advanced, the glowing red blade and shining silver one slicing at Gwyn’s neck.

“No… Ten years and ten days, but only passage through forty-nine of your hunting grounds.”

Gwyn turned to oily black smoke and boiled up into the air before reforming and diving down at Osheen, their blade extended. Osheen caught their blades in an X shape and twisted, but Gwyn’s strength was too great.

Until he unleashed a barrel sized Immolation spell right at their chest. They flew backwards, Osheen enhanced his body, and he began to sprint towards them.

Gwyn turned to smoke a second time and flowed under Osheen’s legs, then reformed behind him and struck out with their blade. Osheen’s force armor glowed brightly, flaring until it was almost a crimson color.

But it held long enough for him to spin and bring both swords at Gwyn.

Gwyn danced back and responded to the Silver Queen.

“Seven of our hunting grounds,” they said.

“Deal!” the Silver Queen cried.

Gwyn froze mid lunge, sheathing their blade and bowing to Osheen.

“You have fought well, Lord of Fire. My commendations. I would like to bestow upon you a mark of our approval.”

I glanced at the Silver Queen, still inhabiting Oracle’s body, and she nodded.

“It is not a debt, nor does it incur such a debt. Indeed, it will not leave enough trace on your aura to disrupt your shaping of flame,” Gwyn said. “You will owe me nothing. It is merely a mark we place upon human warriors who have shown some skill in battle. Such things are not uncommon among our kind.”

“Then…” Osheen said. “Yes. I am glad to have earned your commendations.”

Gwyn bowed deeply and purple fire lit in the air between the two of them, then slowly slid its way into Osheen’s Aura.

“Should either you or your husband wish for a place, your loyalty to our court would allow us to bestow upon you the rights and titles and power of Dual Kings of the Hunt. I would be honored to have you,” Gwyn said. A moment later, shadows swirled around them and they were gone.

The Silver Queen in Oracles body turned to look at the two of us.

“Well, I should commend you two. You’ve well met my expectations. As long as you conclude this party without dishonoring my court, I think it’s fair to say that the debt between us will be cleared.”

“Good,” Osheen growled, and I reached down to take his – slightly sweaty – hand. “Evan’s already thrown away his magic and possibly his humanity for your cursed party. If you’d tried to claim another debt, then there would have been a reckoning between us.”

“Careful, Lord of Fire,” the Silver Queen said, her eyes flashing. “Loyalty to your husband is good, but not to the point of creating enemies needlessly.”

I tensed. The last thing we needed was overprotectiveness leading to a mistake that couldn’t be undone.

Then there was a flash of silver light, and the Silver Queen was gone. Oracle let out a disgruntled squawking noise and started to groom his feathers, and I let out a sigh of relief.

“That…” Osheen said, then shook his head. I squeezed his hand again.

“It’s okay. I promise.”

Osheen let out a long, tired sigh, and then knit his eyebrows together.

“Don’t we need to present our gift to Medb soon?” he asked, and my eyes grew wide.

“Yes, yes we do,” I said, then turned on my heel and started running towards the large banquet hall.

~~~


Luckily, the line of people delivering gifts for their court was so massively and absurdly long that it didn’t seem like we were late. People filed in behind us, and occasionally sidhe servants slipped up and down the length of the line, offering relief and refreshments.

Osheen took a glass of water from one of them, and I kept watch and guard over him as he did his best to handle the memories imbued deeply into the material.

Idly, I considered that the food and drinks Medb was serving would probably make for decently powerful components. They weren’t the richest in terms of raw aura, but they had deep and powerful significance, and that could be just as important, if not more so.

I also needed something to serve as a better form of basic attacks. My staff was excellent – well, it was passable, at the very least – for large and powerful attacks, but it was sometimes like trying to kill a fly with a warhammer.

My knives were good, but they weren’t able to stand up to the power of an archmage… I needed something that wouldn’t be nothing, but also wouldn’t take so much power that it was halfway to an artillery spell.

In the back of my mind, I had to shove down the voice that was telling me that I might never get the chance to enchant that way again. That I should give up and just accept becoming a fae.

Wouldn’t it be easier?

No. I wouldn’t allow myself to think that way.

I… Couldn’t.

As the line steadily moved, I was able to get a look at the process of giving the gift from the court.

At the end of the long hall was set a pair of pure black double doors. They looked like they were made of ice, but also slightly like metal, and they were coated in faerie wards. The person at the front of the line waited for the doors to swing open and for the person who had been in before to step out, then they stepped in themselves, along with whoever was in their entourage.

Each meeting only seemed to last a few seconds, and I had to wonder if more temporal dilation was at play, or if it was really just that swift.

Thinking about temporal dilation made me think about Tara. She no doubt would have been able to speculate about the powerful charm magic that allowed the fae to alter the flow of time on such a powerful scale.

Would it have been better to bring her, though? And that was if she even wanted to go.

“What are you thinking about?” Osheen asked me.

“Just about the magic of the castle, and how Tara would probably like it,” I admitted. “Hell, it’s given me some ideas for my own magic.”

“Oh, absolutely,” Osheen agreed, and I gave him a curious look. He let out a low, rumbling chuckle.

“One of the more advanced applications of sorcery is activated rituals that work alongside your own power,” he said. “Remember the bubble that the assassin trapped you in? That’s a great example. By offloading some of the aura drain requirements onto the ambient aura, you can do a lot more with your attacks.”

“And the castle inspired you?” I asked.

Osheen pointed to the spinning circles of light and shadow overhead.

“Those. They’re opposing, but also, not really. They’re a gradient. Shadow is the lack of light, but… It’s not like there’s really no light in most real shadows. The same thing is true of heat, it’s all just gradients. If Bridgette and I can work out something that treats the gradients of heat as components, we can use her recharge to empower spells really directly.”

I raised my eyebrows, nodding. It was easy to think of sorcery as the warrior caste of the magical world, just using their magic to blow things up, but it seemed there were more complexities than I’d given it credit for.

“That would definitely work,” I said. “If you were able to sculpt thin ribbons of flame into the right shape within the attack…”

We spent a while talking about his heat gradient idea until it was our turn to enter.

The ice black doors swung open onto a void of darkness. Osheen, Oracle, and I stepped inside, hand in hand, and allowed the dark to consume us.

There was nothingness, an absolute void. A death that was complete and true beyond any level of mortal reckoning.

Then… Light.

A pale blue light shone round about us, and we were both afraid. The mental defenses of my cloak engaged and were brushed aside like cobwebs, leaving nothing at all.

For a moment, I was worried that the light had purged away the enchantments themselves, but… No. They had just been deactivated.

The light faded and I found myself kneeling on the ground, which was a thick sheet of black and white ice. Beside me, Osheen was doing the same, and even Oracle was doing his best attempt at a courtly bow.

“Rise,” came the voice of Queen Medb. “And be not afraid.”

The fear vanished, or at least the supernatural aspect of the fear did. If anything, that made the real fear even worse, as I was made acutely aware that I was in the presence of a true apex predator.

Winter, the cold, the creeping death… They had claimed countless lives over the course of human history, and they would claim more. There was no escape from the cold, not truly.

Flames, warmth, and even the burning light of the sun?

Such things were temporary.

The dark and cold was eternal.

I slowly forced myself to my feet, and my hand found its way into Osheen’s. I wasn’t sure if he’d grabbed onto me for support, of if I’d grabbed onto him, but either way I was glad to have him here with me.

I wasn’t looking forwards to delivering the personal gifts before Medb alone.

As I rose, for the first time, I got a look at Medb.

I’d seen Queens of Faerie before. I’d bargained with several in the past few days alone, and the second truly powerful being I’d seen had been the Silver Queen.

All of them had an unearthly beauty, from Awell’s motherly and kind energy, to the burning creation of the Vernal Queen, to the distant all seeing eyes of change.

None of them compared to Medb.

I wasn’t attracted to women, but I was able to recognize when someone was attractive, and Medb was attractive in the extreme. She appeared as a middle aged woman, with hair in a tight knit bun. I would have struggled to place her as any of the mortal races, but at the same time, she could have been any of them.

She had the kind of cold beauty that people wrote stories about, but it was a sharp beauty, not a soft one.

Medb was, to her very core, a being of death, and it radiated with every fiber of my being. She was no kindly matron, she was a warrior goddess, leading an army to tear an enemy nation to nothingness.

“Before we begin,” she said, and each and every word caused the ambient aura in the room to pulse. It wasn’t quite the same as when I used my aura to enact a ritual, but there was so much determination and meaning behind every word that it was halfway to being one.

“There is a matter I need to address.” Medb continued. “Osheen, Lord of Fire, you were attacked by the Insect Court. Per the laws of engagement, you are owed a favor by the sovereign of that court. However, in response to the attack, I imprisoned their current sovereign. As such, the debt has fallen onto my shoulders to resolve.”

“Cure Evan,” Osheen said without a moment of hesitation.

“I cannot,” Medb said. “The scope of the debt you are owed is insufficient to allow me to ply my power that way… Even if I wish it so.”

Osheen frowned.

“You’re… So powerful, though. I can feel it. If you and my father got into a fight, you could kill him without even trying. What do you mean, you can’t do as you wish.”

I half expected Medb to ask him to pay for that information, but perhaps she was able to speak on such matters more freely than the Silver Queen.

“Yes,” Medb confirmed. “Mortals have so much freedom, they oft forget that the truly powerful must sacrifice all of their freedom in exchange. If it is a cure you seek, however, there is something I can do. I can freeze away that part of his aura. Hold it in stasis for a year and a day. In such time, he will be as a mortal spellcaster. Afterwards, it shall be his choice if he wishes to depart from mortality and onto a more powerful path, or to hold to freedom.”

“Wait,” I said. “I don’t need this, Osheen.”

“Do you not?” he asked. “If we attack my father so soon, it will cause a war. They’ll blame it on Zheren, no matter what we do. At least this would buy us time.”

I paused, thrown off.

“Wait, was this part of why you were so reluctant?”

“I figured you’d already figured it out, so I didn’t bring it up,” Osheen said. “I agreed to do it, but if we can buy time, all the better.”

“I…” I shook my head, then smiled. “I want to marry you, one day. Properly.”

Osheen turnend red and stared at me.

“What? Where did that come from? I mean, I want…”

“Enough,” Medb said. “Do you accept a year and a day?”

“Yes,” Osheen said, his attention snapping back to her.

“It is done,” she said. “Present your gift, Emissary of the Silver Queen.”

I blinked.

Just like that?

Every other Faerie Queen I’d dealt with had exerted their power in a far more obvious matter. Even the most subtle ones had been noticeable.

I had felt… nothing… when Medb exerted her power. Nothing at all.

That, more than any of the displays of power I’d seen in her castle, terrified me. To be able to freeze away part of my nature so solidly without any effort at all?

I shuddered and gathered myself before speaking.

“Honored Queen Medb, I present to you the gift of the Silver Court, control over one of the Yesgol ley lines.”

As I spoke, I felt the strange attachment to my Aura detach and float over to Medb’s hands.

A sphere of silvery power hovered in the air over Medb’s finger, and she nodded concisely.

“It is acceptable.”

The sphere vanished, and Osheen and I were plunged back into the absolute void again.

Before I knew it, we were stumbling out of the doors, breathing hard.

We had to move quickly in order to not block the access to the doors, but as soon as we were a little bit away, I looked at Osheen. I pulled him in close, wrapping my hands around his waist and pulling him into a soft, gentle kiss.

“Thank you,” I said, after I broke away from him. He shook his head.

“No, you’re always the one risking yourself for the betterment of others and for me. It’s really the least I can do. And could you say that you wouldn’t do the same for me?”

I smiled.

“Seeing as I’m not a fae… Yes, I can say that. It would just be a lie.”

Osheen started to laugh. It wasn’t even that funny, but I found myself laughing too. For a long time, we just stood there, holding eachother, and laughing.

Finally I pulled away and smiled.

“Still, thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” Osheen said.

I glanced around, looking for the nearest waiter.

“Now, I want to see just how much water I’m able to procure within the bounds of propriety…”