Hawklady: A Spellmonger Cadet Novel Read online

  Hawklady

  A Spellmonger Cadet Novel

  By Terry Mancour

  All Rights Reserved. Copyright © May 9th, 2016

  For Zoe Hamilton,

  Because Every Teenage Girl

  Needs A Best Friend Like Her.

  Special thanks to Sire Aaron of Schwartz,

  For keeping the peasants in line.

  CONTENTS

  Chapter One

  Magic Lessons

  Chapter Two

  Duty

  Chapter Three

  Apprentices On The Stairs

  Chapter Four

  The Thoughtful Knife

  Chapter Five

  Armed And Armored

  Chapter Six

  Through The Ways

  Chapter Seven

  Battle At The Cotyard

  Chapter Eight

  A Picnic With The Spellmonger

  Chapter Nine

  Facing The Dragon

  Chapter Ten

  Dragonslayer

  Chapter Eleven

  The City Of Barrowbell

  Chapter Twelve

  Lady Amara Of Siviline House

  Chapter Thirteen

  Hunting With An Owl

  Chapter Fourteen

  The Plot In The Darkness

  Chapter Fifteen

  A Chase In The Dark

  Chapter Sixteen

  Hawklady

  Chapter Seventeen

  The Voyage To Sevendor

  Other Books In The Spellmonger Series

  Spellmonger

  Warmage

  Magelord

  Knights Magi

  High Mage

  Journeymage

  Enchanter

  Court Wizard

  Shadowmage

  Cadet Series

  Hawkmaiden

  Hawklady

  Chapter One

  Magic Lessons

  “You must learn to think in metaphors,” Lady Pentandra explained, as she paced gently back and forth in front of Dara. “That’s harder than you might think, but absolutely essential for a wizard.”

  They sat on the top of Magelord Minalan’s personal tower, basking in the autumn sunshine while she took her lesson. Despite the pleasant surroundings and delightful weather, the subject matter was enough to make it feel like a rainy day. She’d only been a wizard for a few days, and apprenticed for even less, but Dara felt as if she’d received more education in that time than she’d had in her previous thirteen years.

  She hadn’t meant for this to happen. She’d just wanted a chance to show off what she’d discovered she could do, since the night of the Snow That Never Melted, and the events that came after*[1]. Ever since she’d schemed a way to use her magical connection to her falcon, Frightful, to win the Spellmonger’s Trial in front of many far more experienced contestants, her cleverness had paid off by consigning her to an arduous fate: becoming the youngest apprentice of the foremost wizard of the age.

  It had seemed like a good idea at the time, part of her mind lamented. Fame, fortune, all that she’d dreamed of, should have been hers after winning a witchstone with her plan. Instead, it had led to this kind of incessant instruction.

  Nor was she reluctant to take up her new trade. Dara wanted to learn magic, more than anything. Even if it meant learning to read. She was a bright girl, she knew, and everyone told her she was capable of learning. She spent several hours a day, now, with a variety of tutors.

  But that much knowledge at once would make anyone weary.

  Pentandra stopped, suddenly. “You do understand what a metaphor is, don’t you?”

  “When you say something is something else,” Dara replied, recalling an earlier discussion. “Not comparing it, exactly, but saying one thing is another thing.”

  “That is correct – more or less,” the wizard agreed, her lips pursing prettily.

  Lady Pentandra Anna Benurvial was beautiful, Dara could plainly see. Her brunette hair was neatly braided and pinned under a Remeran–style wimple, her dress a fascinating display of scarlet and gold, cut in an exotic fashion completely different than the sideless surcoats favored by the Riverlord women. Her distinctive appearance lent to her reputation, Dara had learned in the few days since the Spellmonger’s Trial... and that was not without scandal.

  Lady Pentandra was her new master’s best friend, it was said. Her powers and position were second only to Master Minalan’s, himself. And it was whispered that they had once been lovers, in their youth.

  The fact that the important Remeran wizard was spending her valuable time instructing Dara on the fundamentals of her magical Talent made Dara self–conscious. She seemed far too important for this kind of work.

  “We call a direct comparison a ‘simile’,” she continued. “Those can be useful. That was a major difference between how our ancestors learned the Art, and why the Alka Alon – the Tree Folk, who are the masters of magic – find our transposition of their songspells into spellcraft maddening. They prefer simile. But for Imperial–class magic, metaphor is what is most useful, for all magic is metaphor... and within each metaphor is the seed of all magic.”

  “That’s the part I don’t understand,” confessed Dara, guiltily. She’d been trying for days, now, since the excitement that had suddenly elevated her among the great and powerful in the domain.

  The contest was open to all wizards and magi, anyone with magical ability – rajira, she’d learned it was called. While very, very few people had it, fewer still had the Talent in sufficient quantity to actually use magic like a true mage.

  But Lenodara of Westwood did. The power she’d discovered over the summer, the ability to slip her mind behind the eyes of her falcon and see the world through the eyes of the bird as she flew, known as bilocation to the wise, was just part of her capabilities. Lady Pentandra tested her for hours to determine her degree of rajira and pronounced her Talented enough to learn the ancient, secretive art of magic.

  She’d also mentioned that she thought Lenodara intelligent enough, which both pleased and irritated the thirteen–year old girl.

  Lady Pentandra pronounced her fit to learn, and to avoid a scuffle with the very, very large and highly competent warmage, Jendaran the Trusty, who’d lost the contest to a wisp of a girl. Magelord Minalan, himself, took her as apprentice, to avoid conflict. As such she was protected from the violence (particularly after Magelord Minalan, in his wisdom, granted a second, more powerful witchstone to the runner–up in the contest). But that also meant that her future was suddenly spelled out for her as evenly as lines written across the page of a book... an art she’d yet to fully master.

  Her father and uncle were both proud and anxious about the appointment. By winning a witchstone – a magical piece of amber that granted a wizard tremendous power – she’d proven herself clever, quick, and foresightful, a credit to her folk in the Westwood. But the attention she’d called to herself and her kin was troubling. In these changing and turbulent times, it was dangerous for a commoner to be so close to the nobility. But it was also a splendid opportunity. The Spellmonger (as everyone called the Magelord, with pride) was an extremely important man, and being allied to him meant opportunities. Not just for herself, but her entire estate.

  Since the few days after the Magical Fair broke up, Lady Pentandra instructed Lenodara (or Dara, to nearly everyone) to come to Sevendor Castle in the morning, before breakfast, and study reading in the morning before she or Master Minalan (as the Magelord insisted she call him) gave her a few hours’ worth of lessons in the afternoons.

  The reading was the hard part. Lenodara mastered the Narasi alphabet simply enough in a day, and understood the l
etters and the sounds they stood for. In the last few days she’d been stringing the letters together and understanding the sounds as words, and today she’d recognized (successfully) the entire first sentence in the primer: “When humankind first came to Callidore, they found a beautiful green and blue world awaiting them.”

  It was an odd sentence in many ways, and was at odds with a dozen legends she’d heard, but Master Minalan insisted it was the real history of human beings here, on the world she lived in. That fascinated her. And frustrated her. She had dozens of questions about where humans came from, and how they got here on Callidore, but there was much about the world and the past even the great Spellmonger did not know.

  While Lenodara found that disappointing, on the basis that adults were supposed to know everything, she tried to put that aside as she tackled the difficult lessons. There was so much to learn, Lady Pentandra assured her, that she could spend years in study and still not master all known magic.

  Dara found that a little intimidating, but Lady Pentandra was very gentle in her explanations of how magic worked... an art Dara now knew was called “thaumaturgy”, which simply meant “the study of magic”.

  There were many more concepts and ideas she needed to learn beyond simple reading, she was discovering, but considering how many new words magi had for things, she could see why being able to store them up in books made sense. And Lady Pentandra was very patient in explaining them to her.

  “Metaphors are essential to magic because symbols are the key to bridging the gap between our magical minds – our rajira exta, the Archmagi called it – and the greater Magosphere. You see, although our minds can perceive and even manipulate those energies in raw form, they are not designed to do it.”

  “Why not?” Dara asked, innocently enough.

  “Because we were not born here, originally, say some–”

  “I was born right over there,” Dara objected, pointing at the top of Westwood Hall, in the distance.

  “Not you, personally, Dara; all of humanity. As that first sentence of the primer told you, humanity did not originate on this world, we came here. And adapted to it. Our original world... well, it is theorized by some scholars that it possessed little or no magic, based on the confusion with which our ancestors greeted the ability by the Alka Alon–”

  “Those are the Tree Folk, right?” prompted Dara.

  “Yes, and thank you for interrupting. The magic of the Tree Folk – the Alka Alon – and the other races of the Alon we found here was strange to our ancestors. From what we think, it was generations after our arrival that the first traces of rajira arose in us.

  “But the Tree Folk – the Alka Alon – taught our ancestors how to deal with their emerging powers. At first they tried to teach complicated Alka Alon magic to us, but few are equipped and talented enough to master even basic songspells.

  “So the Alka Alon contrived the Imperial Runes,” she continued, opening a book to a page filled with broad, strongly–drawn characters. “Each rune is a... metaphor.”

  Dara frowned. “How so? They just look like wiggly lines. Or straight lines.”

  “So did the letters of the alphabet, when you first saw them, but each stood for a sound,” Pentandra reminded her, gently. “The principal is the same, here, only instead of sounds, each rune is a metaphor for a particular thing. Or group of things. Or class of things. But each one uniquely encapsulates the idea of a metaphor for something else.”

  “I am totally lost in the woods, Lady Pentandra,” Dara admitted, uncomfortably. “How can a wiggly line be something else?”

  Pentandra paused, then picked up her walking staff from where she’d lain it and began drawing in the sand.

  “You see this?” she prompted, as she sketched a rough circle in the sand, with two lines below it, parallel. “What do you see?”

  “A... tree?” Dara ventured.

  “Yes, a tree,” the wizard nodded. “You see a tree, I see a tree, Minalan sees a tree, the beggar boys on the docks of Fest would see a tree... yet there is no tree. Indeed, it is a circle and two lines. How is that in any way a tree?”

  “It’s not,” agreed Dara. “But it looks like a tree.”

  “Are there not trees that look nothing like this?” Pentandra asked.

  “I can’t think of any trees that look anything like it,” Dara agreed. “And I’ve seen a lot of trees.”

  “Yet almost every human in the world who saw this drawing would see it to mean ‘tree’,” Pentandra continued. “The symbol has nothing to do with the thing it represents. This one is convenient, because it’s so common, but if you saw this,” she said, drawing another circle, but one with a smaller circle inside, “would you see that as a tree?”

  “No, more of a wagon wheel,” Dara said, shaking her head.

  “What if you were looking at a tree from above?” Pentandra suggested. “Like you do when you’re riding behind your bird’s eyes?”

  “Oh!” Dara said, seeing what the wizard meant. “These are the leaves on the outer circle, this is the trunk at the inner circle!”

  “Right,” nodded Pentandra, pleased. “But if you didn’t understand that, it would mean very little to you. You’d be looking at a symbol of a tree and seeing a wagon wheel. Unless you know the secret,” she pointed out. “Knowing the secret is knowing the metaphor.”

  “So this is a metaphor?”

  “Essentially. This is also the rune ‘selseth’, which is a simple rune meaning ‘year’ or ‘sun’.”

  “Which is it?” Dara asked.

  “Whichever it needs to be,” Pentandra explained. “When you are using it in the context of a spell with a temporal component – that is, one that works over time – then it means ‘year’. If you are trying to improve the growth of corn with a beneficial weather spell, it means ‘sun’.”

  “What about a weather spell... over a period of time?” Dara asked. “Could it mean both, or would you have to use two of them?”

  “Good question,” Pentandra smiled. “We’ll get to that, but the short answer is yes.”

  “That... to which one?”

  “Context,” Pentandra repeated. “But we’ll get to that. Right now, just focus on the idea that each of the Imperial Runes has a ‘secret’ – many of them, actually. Their meanings are usually deeply intertwined, but in the end, they are meanings that we assign to them, not powers intrinsic to the runes themselves. It doesn’t matter what the symbol looks like, it is the meaning with which we invest it that is important.”

  “But... but what if the same symbol can have two entirely different meanings?”

  “And now we come to the discussion on one of the mage’s most important skills: the manifestation of intent,” she began, taking a deep breath. “When–”

  “Pentandra?” came the voice of her new master from the narrow stairwell that led to his laboratory. Master Minalan’s head appeared from the floor, followed by the rest of him as he bounded up the stairs. Dara didn’t think he looked like a very dignified wizard when he did that, but then she wasn’t really sure what to expect. Most of what she knew of wizards were from stories and legends, not personal experience.

  “What is it, Min?” Lady Pentandra asked, with far more familiarity than one might expect from two professional colleagues. Even though Master Minalan was married to Lady Alya, who wasn’t gifted with rajira, he did not seem to mind how familiar she was with him, even though he was the lord of the domain.

  She’d heard it whispered around the Great Hall that their handsome Magelord and the exotic–looking Remeran wizard were lovers, once, long ago.

  “Sorry, Dara,” he said, glancing at his newest apprentice for a moment before continuing. “This is important. I’ve just spoken to Terleman again. The hordes are definitely on the move in his direction. He’s already in trouble,” he added, without elaborating.

  “How many?” the dark-haired woman asked, concerned.

  “Far too many,” the Spellmonger said, his voice grave
. “If they aren’t relieved, and soon, they’re going to be overwhelmed.”

  “You don’t think– excuse us, Dara, I think we’re done for the day,” Pentandra said, interrupting herself. “Why don’t you get some dinner in the Great Hall before you head back to the Westwood? Let’s get you here early, tomorrow, and see if you can’t get through a whole page, shall we? You don’t think Terleman would surrender, do you?” she asked Minalan, turning her whole attention to him after speaking with Dara.