Sworn To Transfer

and rain would come through the holes and rip across the deck in a fury. As people started to stumble back and forth, they began to murmur disparagingly about the talents of the hired Weather Mage.

Ciardis was more worried about his health than talent. Any mage under this much stress, battling Mother Nature herself to force calm when the weather was anything but still, would need to be an excellent practitioner, powerful and prepared. And this man seemed to be anything but ready for the task. As Ciardis watched the planks across the decks tremble, she noted that the Weather Mage seemed to be losing his grip. Whatever Linda was going to do, Ciardis hoped she was able to do it fast.

Meanwhile, a second roar shattered Ciardis’s focus on the Weather Mage and brought it back abruptly to their oncoming guest. Staring at the dragon Ciardis saw the most curious thing. It was hovering. Its wings weren’t moving and neither were its legs. How the massive beast was staying in the air was a mystery to her. But she decided to file that away for another time. It was still vocalizing its displeasure.  Ciardis wasn’t exactly sure what the dragon was roaring about. She spoke Sahalian, thanks to a certain Companion, but this roar wasn’t in the dragon tongue of the Sahalian courts with the fluid language and subtle hisses of its consonants. No, this was primal. The roar was the natural language of one dragon to another, and something that no other being could translate. That didn’t mean she didn’t understand anger when she heard it.

And then suddenly it was moving again. The dragon banked its wings and prepared to land on the water. Incoming with its wings spread like that, it looked like it planned to grab onto the ship with the claws and rend it to pieces or so sink it, whichever came first. No one on the deck looked anything but calm. Ciardis tried to emulate their serene, well-practiced looks, but she wasn’t a convincing liar on her best days. In fact, she’d been told quite a few times that the only reason she hadn’t been outright assassinated was because her enemies were convinced she couldn’t manipulate herself, let alone someone else.  She’d like to keep it that way. She had enough problems as it was with people trying to kill Sebastian without adding her own assassination to the list.

Then the dragon began to glow.

Ciardis went pale. He was about to cast a spell. Secret glances at the honor guard around her, including three battle mages, told her that they weren’t worried. Their visages were calm and steady, each stood with hands folded in front of them, and all courteous attention was being paid to the dragon envoy. That didn’t mean she wasn’t worried. Then suddenly a small ball of blue flame winked into existence at her feet and winked out again just as quickly. Ciardis was certain she was the only one who had seen the flame appear and disappear.

She glanced over at Linda’s direction and saw her pointedly staring at her. I guess that was my signal to get over there.

Chapter 3

As she joined Linda’s side, she heard her speaking in a low voice to the Weather Mage.

It was in Sahalian, but she caught most of it.

“This Weathervane might be the only thing standing between you and the next world, Marcus,” Linda said while nodding to Ciardis, “We can’t afford to loose another mage. Not if we want our numbers to stay strong. Strong enough to defeat the hordes in the North.”

The man looked over at her with bloodshot eyes. He sucked in a breath and broke once more into a chanting trance. When he awakened, if he awakened, his choice would be clear. Taking Ciardis’s hand, Linda Firelancer shared her mage vision. His aura was fading and his core was depleting.

It was the first time she’d seen a mage dying.

The man’s breath was shallow, his magic erratic, his pulse fading, and still he hesitated. Ciardis reached forward hesitantly to grasp his hand. To give him what he couldn’t ask for because of his damn pride. And then Linda caught her wrist in a bruising grip. She hadn’t moved. Her face was still turned to the Weather Mage’s as she sought to tell him a story of sacrifice and pride with just her eyes.

But the grip she held Ciardis’s hand in was iron tight. In her mind, Ciardis heard the Fire Mage speaking.

Never, Ciardis, Linda said, never interrupt a dying mage, not unless you want to die alongside them. If he rises from the trance, he will make his choice.

Ciardis couldn’t pull her hands from Linda’s grip and couldn’t take her eyes off of the Weather Mage. Occasional drifts of wind blew her hair in her face and she didn’t move. She was silent as raindrops began to pelt their skin. She didn’t answer as the retinue began to question their stillness. Her eyes and Linda’s stayed firmly fixed upon the man before them. The man who had a choice to live or die. To accept help or to put his pride before his downfall.

She felt her breath become slower. Minutes passed that felt like hours.

And then he was conscious, opening his eyes and emerging from the trance. With a slow breath he reached a shaky hand forward and grasped Ciardis’s. Linda’s shoulders relaxed and she looked as if the world had been lifted from her shoulders. She nodded to Ciardis.

With a rush of power, Ciardis replenished the mage’s lagging store. Together they fixed the wind shield, pushing it outward and making it stronger. With a squeeze of her hand, he said, “I’m going to dive into the sea with my power and still the waters. The currents are swift and they are strong. Magically and physically. You shall act as my anchor, but if anything goes wrong, you are to let me go. Do you understand?”

“Yes.” Ciardis nodded.

He looked out over the ocean with a fond and tired smile, “Weather is a particularly difficult power to master and manipulate. I don’t know what you’ve been told. But mages do not forsake that oath. In every instance the younger mage is to take all precautions to protect their lives. I expect you to do the same.”

“She will,” Linda said with strength in her voice. “I will be here to assure that she does.”

And then it began. Ciardis felt the pull from his magic to hers. He began drawing immense amounts as he shot down in a spiral—no, a maelstrom—of power into the element of water. She watched as he wove her enhancement power into his spool of power. He began to weave the two cords together in a simple stitch that fell into the wild and chaotic swirl of power that was the water element. No matter how much power he had, she instinctively knew that it wouldn’t be able to harness water. Not this fierce and wild beauty that moved with the freeness of a spirit in the ocean.

She felt him change tactics. Instead of trying to harness the water element, the Weather Mage began to coax it into playing a game. With flashes of lightning emitting from his fingertips and a calm soothing voice he called it closer. And closer it came until it was near enough that he could entrap it a complex web. Rather it was a game with an intricate stack of layer upon layer of flashing lightning. The elemental didn’t even notice when the web began to close around it. It was too entranced in playing as it bounced from point to point on the web and gave the Weather Mage the time he needed to still the waters surrounding the ship.

He began to tie off the ends of the magic neatly to form a self-sustaining cradle that would feed the elemental’s desire for the quest until the web dissipated. Back in her body, Ciardis blinked and stared into the concerned eyes of the Weather Mage and the Fire Mage. They stood in a tight circle.

In a low voice Linda said “Everything all right?”

“Fine,” said Ciardis faintly.

“Good,” the Weather Mage said with a curtness that Ciardis tried not to take offense at.

With a push, Linda sent Ciardis back to Prince Heir Sebastian’s side.

Turning back to their guest, she put her thoughts on the Weather Mage’s illness aside before Sebastian could pick up on it. In front of her she took in the dragon envoy. This dragon, all dragons, were from Sahalia. They nested nowhere else. No one knew why. Sahalia was an empire far off in the Western Sea, ruled by a loose amalgamation of a dozen families united only in the belief in the supremacy of dragons above all other species and a firm desire to wrest more power and wealth for themselves. For thousands of years, dragons had not left their empire’s shores. They’d seen no reason to leave the comfort of their homes for distant lands and certainly wouldn’t cross an ocean to do it. Even now they tended to avoid the lands of Algardis because of the Initiate Wars centuries earlier.