The boar charged straight for my head. I kicked against the ground, and my body twisted, sliding across the ice. The boar’s tusks missed by an inch, and I brought the knife up, plunging it into the coarse fur at the side of the creature’s neck. The wound hissed and sizzled as if I’d dropped hot iron into cold water and steam billowed from the spot where my knife was buried in its flesh. The monster writhed convulsively but didn’t stop moving, and I was dragged along beside it, clinging to my knife and trying to wrench it free while avoiding getting trampled by the thundering hooves.
The boar screeched and belted out another wave of ice over the clearing. It missed Amelia’s hiding place by a couple of feet. With a suddenness that sent me flying, my knife came free. I rolled, yelling out at the pain as my left side bashed against the ground, then staggered to my feet.
The monster was circling at the edge of the clearing. It was limping, and blood poured from the side of its neck. Stabbing it with a hot knife appeared to wound it. I’d have to try it again.
The Beast turned, focused its raging red eyes upon me, and lowered its tusks to face me again.
This time, I could feel energy coming from my Mana pool as I willed the knife to burn hotter. I focused on that energy and poured some more into the knife.
As the boar began its lumbering charge, I thrust the dagger forward. Bright flames flowed along the knife and flashed out from its tip.
The boar squealed in fright as fire licked along the edge of the blade toward it. It changed tack, shifting its path so it would pass me rather than hit me head on. A wave of ice blasted from its nostrils, but this time I managed to jump sideways to dodge the elemental attack. The boar lowered its head, ready to buck me with its tusks.
I wouldn’t get another chance to take the creature down.
I leaped at the creature, just dodging the cruel points of the huge tusks, then grabbed a handful of the course fur and slammed my red-hot knife into its neck again and again. The boar bucked and screamed, and blood erupted steaming and boiling from the wounds. I clung on grimly and stabbed my knife deeper into the thick fur, tearing at the flesh beneath. Steam billowed off in clouds, and the blood bubbled and hissed as it evaporated.
After what seemed an age, it tottered forward a few more steps, stopped, then crashed to the ground. I leaped away from it as a final wave of freezing mist wreathed the creature’s monstrous corpse. It twitched and convulsed a few times before finally laying still. I stood, panting from the exertion, the boar’s warm blood coating my hands and steaming off the still-hot blade of my knife.
Amelia stepped out from our hiding place. She clutched her book to her chest and looked at me with a pale face and wide eyes. “That was really something! You used your magic to kill it!” She sounded impressed, and that felt pretty good.
“Yeah, I did.” I held up the dagger in my hand and looked at it.
I was feeling lightheaded again, and my head throbbed a bit, but nowhere near as badly as before. I suspected it was from pulling that energy from my mana pool, but I was also starting to feel like every time I used Mana from my pool, more came back than I had used. I wondered if the Mana pool was like a muscle—the more you used it, the stronger it got. That made sense, I thought.
Amelia seemed a little shaken as she looked at the corpse of the monster. “A Magical Beast… and so far from the mines! This doesn’t bode well, and it confirms my fears…”
As if realizing she had spoken her thoughts out loud, she snapped her gaze up at me. When she did so, her eyes widened in surprise.
“Your arm is glowing.” Amelia pointed at my left arm, still hanging loosely at my side.
I lifted my arm to see. It was feeling less numb as the sun coming through the treetops warmed my skin, but it still hurt a lot. The skin was bluish, so I figured that the breath of the Beast had almost given me frostbite.
But one patch on my arm was still pink. The tattoo on my wrist and forearm was not frozen.
“Gods, what is that?” Amelia asked, her hand to her lips as she stared at my arm intently.
I shrugged. It didn’t seem important. “Just some old tattoo I got a while ago. I don’t know why it didn’t get frozen like the rest of my arm, maybe that spot was protected from the blast.”
“That’s strange,” Amelia said.
Now I thought of it, it certainly was. I couldn’t explain how every part of my arm had been almost frozen except for the skin beneath my tattoo.
Amelia walked over to me, and the interest and excitement of the scholar glittered in her bright, eager face. “What you did today; have you been able to do it before?”
I shook my head. “This is the first time.” I rubbed my hands together, trying to get some warmth into the left one. As I looked at it, I remembered that my hands hadn’t been scorched when I’d burned the ropes in the slavers’ wagon.
That gave me an idea.
I concentrated on the energy in my Mana pool and pushed a bit into the tattoo on my left hand. It seeped slowly through, like water through a sponge, the warmth of the magic radiating from the tattoo and into my palm and through
