Ink Mage (Book 1)
Dante King
Copyright © 2020 by Dante King
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Cover illustration by Czepta Gold @ http://thecoverforge.com
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Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
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Chapter One
The wooden wheels of the two open wagons creaked as they trundled along the wide and rugged forest road. On each side, the rough, broad highway was flanked by a dense wall of untamed forest. Tall pines loomed over low, gnarled acacias and nameless thorny shrubs, bent and twisted by the endless winds of the Kingdom’s north.
Pain thudded dully though my back and side as the awkward motion of the ox-drawn wagon bashed me against the wooden planking. Again. My hands were numb from the ropes that bound them, and the ropes at my ankles chafed when I tried to move. Thankfully, the bonds weren’t biting into the skin on my wrists, so my tattoo wouldn’t be damaged. It depicted a small flame. Knifing through the flame was a spear that reached halfway up my forearm. I had drawn the tattoo myself on a drunken night with my girlfriend, Katlyn, whom I feared I would never see again.
I shuffled to one side and tried to sit up straighter. My lower back ached abominably, and I grimaced as I straightened up and looked around. I must have dozed off. This wagon ride seemed to have lasted an eternity. Days had blended into each other until I could not have said how long it had been since that horrible day when I had been sold into slavery by those I had considered my friends and neighbors.
Had a week passed? Two? All I knew was that both landscape and weather had become wilder as we climbed relentlessly up, away from the fertile farmlands around Aranor and into the northern regions. Day by day, the bumpy wagons made their plodding way northward toward the mountains.
“Could you make it any bumpier?” snarled Boris, to the wagon driver. The driver growled wordlessly back at him and muttered curses as he whipped the twin oxen.
Boris was my guard, a thickset, dull-witted trollman dressed in stinking, badly cured wolf hides. He seemed uninterested in me for the moment, so I took my chance to take a look at the beautiful blonde woman who sat opposite me. She had been in the wagon for only two days. Like me, her wrists and her ankles were bound with coarse cords. For most of the journey, she had sat with her knees drawn close to her chest. Fear was in her eyes.
This woman wore high, well-made brown leather boots that had seen some serious wear. Her long, graceful legs were clad in tight leggings of green linen, and she wore a loose brown tunic that bared her forearms, her shoulders, and the top of the generous swell of her breasts. Her skin was very pale, as if she was not used to spending time outdoors. A tumble of blonde curls fell past her pale shoulders. She looked cold as well as frightened.
When these trollman slave traders had picked her up, I had already been in the back of their wagon for long enough that I had begun to lose track of time. She’d been walking up the road alone, wearing a rich cloak of white fur with a deep hood, and carrying a heavy, leather-bound book open in her hands. As we drew parallel with her, she closed her book and glanced up, pushing her hood back to reveal her pretty, lightly freckled face and a somewhat naive smile.
“Pardon me,” she had said, “but is this the right road to Brightwater town?”
Boris and the driver had conferred for a moment, and the driver had nodded his head. Without a word, Boris leaped from the wagon, grabbed the woman, and hauled her up into the wagon. Her book had fallen to the ground, and Boris, seeing that it looked valuable, had grabbed it and flung it unceremoniously into the wagon beside her. When he pulled her cloak off her back and used it to cushion his own backside, she glared angrily at him, but did not dare protest.
I was grateful for her company, even if we weren’t allowed to speak with each other. That was not for a lack of trying, either; I had attempted to ask her name, but Boris had delivered a swift back-hander across my cheek.
The sting of that strike had made me want to break free and kill Boris, but I was sorely outnumbered. There was only Boris and the driver in this wagon, but there was another wagon coming along behind ours, and it contained four more slavers. Six to one odds weren’t great, and I doubted the blonde would be able to contribute much in a fight.
For all that, I was curious about her. She was the most interesting thing that had happened since I’d been forced to start this journey, and she was certainly better to look at than the slavers. I checked her out as much as I could.
From the obvious quality of her garments, I figured she had to be a noble of some kind. I wondered if she was one of the Arcanists, the powerful magic-users who operated as judicial enforcers, tax collectors, and sometimes warlords and militia leaders in the towns and cities of the Kingdom. That didn’t hold up though; her book
