Dragon's Mage (An Advent Mage Novel), The - Raconteur, Honor (23 page)

Mari’s eyes nearly crossed while picturing this. “I’d end up strangling her, in your shoes.”

“It was a near thing, some days.”

Glancing back at Kaya, Mari said thoughtfully, “I always thought you kept her close at first because you were afraid how some people would react to her. It was a safety precaution.”

“Well, that too,” I admitted. “But honestly, some days I can’t tell you who was protecting who.” I looked around and got my bearings, which proved a mite difficult considering things looked very different down here than they did from the air. “That southern flare-up that caught us off-guard, wasn’t that more south of here?”

“I think so.” Mari also took a good look around. “In fact, let’s go dead south-east for a mile or so. I think we’re too north.”

That sounded about right to me.

We changed direction and kept walking, but of course we didn’t have a trail to follow, so we had to duck in and around leaning remains of trees, or climb over logs. I found a few hotspots from time to time that, while not openly burning, had the potential to do so. I ground them out without breaking our conversation, nipping trouble in the bud before it could grow.

Mari moved around in an agile way, her breath never getting short despite the fact that we were moving at a steady pace up an incline and climbing over things constantly. I’d noticed before that she had more strength than the average woman, but then, as a firefighter herself it didn’t surprise me. Her job might be on the more administrative side, but I’d seen her gear up and head into the field when the situation called for it.

As we walked, it occurred to me that I finally had her one on one, with no one around to interrupt. Maybe I can satisfy my curiosity a little. “Mari, how did you ever get into this job?”

“Ah, well, it was tradition more than anything. See, my mother’s side comes from a long line of bakers and they’ve always managed a shop. My father’s side has always been in firefighting in one way or another. Tradition had it in the family that the bakery would go to the oldest girl, but…” Mari shrugged.

“You didn’t like the idea?” I guessed.

“No, didn’t have a problem with inheriting the store,” she corrected with a wry smile. “But I can’t bake bread.”

Ah-huh. Not what I expected. “At all?”

“It comes out like a deadly stone every time. You can literally kill people with it.” When I laughed, she shook her head, mouth teasing up in a smile. “I’m not exaggerating. I dropped a loaf on my brother’s foot once and broke his big toe.”

I could picture it in my mind’s eye and, for some reason, it became even funnier. I had to stop for a second because I was laughing so hard. “A-All right,” I choked out, “I guess firefighting was a better choice.”

“It was, for me. I like the adrenaline rush of it, like we all do, but I liked helping people and preventing damage the most. But when they asked me to move to the office two years ago, I thought it was a good chance for me. Maybe with a steadier job that wasn’t as dangerous, I could find someone to marry and settle down.”

Oh? So she
was
interested in that? I carefully filed that information away. “Do you like it as much?”

“Actually, I do. I didn’t think I would, but this job gets me out and about, talking to people from all over. It’s fun.” She gave me a significant look. “Although we sometimes get some really interesting people coming through. Never in a million years did I expect you.”

“I’m a little surprised myself to be in Sol.” I’d always half-expected it to be Hain that I would eventually settle in.

“We’re glad it’s you they sent, though. I’m especially glad.”

Could I take that statement the way that I wanted to? The expression on her face suggested that I could. “I am too.”

She put a hand on my shoulder, almost in a flirty way, but she also used me as a lever to help her over a particularly large fallen trunk. I let her go up and over without a word, really wishing I was better at reading women. Asla told me once that Xiaolang was good at flirting. Maybe I could get him to give me some pointers….

I climbed over the trunk myself, but paused at the top. There. That patch right ahead, something about that looked different. “Mari, stop.”

She paused two feet from the trunk and looked at me sharply. “What?”

“I think we found it.” I lightly leaped to the earth, sending the bag on my shoulder swinging about.

“How can you tell? It all looks the same.”

“Not to me.” I pointed at my eyes in illustration. “To a mage, we can see our element very clearly. Even though there are no flames here there’s still enough residual heat that I can see it. It’s why I had to investigate this now. I wouldn’t be able to tell right from left after it cooled off completely.”

“I had wondered about that.” She turned to look in the direction I faced. “All right, so what do you see?”

“A different heat source. Or maybe I should say that it has a different ignition source. All the fire around us,” I waved a hand in a large circle to illustrate, “ignited and fed on wood. But this patch up ahead is different.” I walked closer, studying it intently. Over my year of study, I’d experimented with every heat source and flammable material known to man, and I knew the properties to each very well. It didn’t take more than a few seconds for me to see the source for this.

“Oil.”

“Oil?” Mari repeated dubiously. “But why would oil be here in the middle of the…woods…” she trailed off, eyes widening in understanding. “You’re saying this fire was started deliberately?”

“Yes, and whoever it was even tried to re-start it while we worked to put it out. He was nearby the whole time.” Curse the luck. If I had only seen him—but of course, who could in that thick covering of smoke?

“Krys, this is serious.” Mari regarded the woods around her uneasily. “We’ve had trouble with men like this before, men that enjoy playing arsonist, but never on this scale. This is sheer madness.”

“We’ll have to find him.” Who would be in charge of that, I have no idea. “Mari, let’s head back. We have to report this.”

~*~

Stancliff took in my report with furrowed eyebrows, growing steadily upset with every word out of my mouth. When I finished, he took the helmet from his head and threw it to the ground with enough force that it bounced twice before rolling away. For several minutes, he turned the air blue with curse words, using some of the strongest language that I’d ever heard a man utter. Then he took in a breath, regaining his temper, and said, “Pardon me, Mari.”

“No need,” she assured him, expression just as dark as any thundercloud. “I feel the same way.”

“Magus, I have to ask this, are you
sure
?”

“I’m sure.” I didn’t like saying it either because it meant more trouble in the future. “To you, all fire looks more or less the same. But not to me. To me, it all looks very different depending what started it, and what it’s feeding on.”

“Arsonists can go free for a long time because we can’t always tell what starts a fire. Actually, usually we can’t.” Stancliff faced me squarely, and something in his eyes told me what he would say next. “Magus. Will you take on the task of hunting this man down?”

“Yes,” my mouth said before my mind could really think about it.

He inclined his head to me, voice gruff and soft. “Thank you.”

“I’m coming with you,” Mari informed me.

I whirled to look at her, automatically protesting, “Mari, this could take
months.
I have no idea how to start hunting this man down.”

“Which is part of the reason why you need me to go with you.” She crossed her arms over her chest, lifted her chin to a determined slant, and stared me down. “I’m going with you, Krys. This is not a debate, this is an order.”

Grateful, I didn’t even try to argue. “Yes, ma’am.”

Chapter Seventeen:  Marble

After a full day of flying and firefighting, I was more than exhausted. Mari and I chose to rest and tackle the problem of the arsonist tomorrow. Stancliff, through his contacts and a bit of elbow twisting, found us an inn that would accept Kaya in the stable yard and we went there after I made sure that every spark of that fire had been subdued. I dragged myself through a quick bath, an even quicker dinner, and then went straight to bed.

I awoke to someone straddling my hips on the bed and shaking me awake. Groggily, I managed to pry open one eye and look upwards. “Mari?” I croaked out, still not entirely sure she wasn’t a hallucination. “Problem?”

“Yes, I was making sure you’re still actually alive.” She sat back and blew out a long breath. “You’ve been asleep for almost twenty-six hours.”

A full day? Really? I’d known I was tired, but
that
tired?

Mari’s head cocked slightly as she studied me carefully. “Cora mentioned that magicians would get exhausted like this if their power level got too low. Just how low is yours?”

“Low,” I admitted, struggling up to my elbows. It felt a little strange to be holding a conversation with someone sitting so comfortably on top of me. Mari apparently didn’t think anything of it, though. “Or at least, it was before I went to sleep.” I turned an internal eye onto the core of my magic. “Hmmm, it’s higher now. Not quite normal levels, but close. Has Kaya behaved while I slept?”

“She’s actually been sleeping most of the time, too,” Mari informed me, finally getting off the bed. “I had a devil of a time convincing her that she couldn’t sleep on the roof, though.”

I smiled because I could well envision why she would want to. Here, in this part of the Empire, they didn’t have sloped roofs but ones that were perfectly flat. The inn especially had a very large, flat roof to it. To Kaya, it would look like the perfect place to sunbathe. “So how did you convince her?”

“I told her that the roof wouldn’t hold her weight and that if she slept there, she’d crush you.”

An effective argument. Kaya would never do anything that would harm me. Swinging around, I got my legs over the side of the bed so I could sit up fully. Of course, doing that almost knocked my toes against the opposite wall. The inn was clean and neat but couldn’t be described as spacious. This room could barely hold a bed, a washstand, and a single chair and still have room to walk inside.

A little hesitantly, Mari reached over and picked up a lock of my hair. “I didn’t realize how long your hair is. It’s almost mid-back.”

“Almost,” I agreed. That hadn’t been a general observation on her part, but a lead into another question. I could see it weighing on the tip of her tongue.

“I noticed that even the two boys had long hair. Is that typical of mages?”

“Yes. It’s connected to our power control, you see.”

She quirked an eyebrow at me, not quite in disbelief, but close. “Tell you what. I’ll comb out that very tangled hair of yours while you explain.”

“Deal.” After sleeping on it wet, my hair likely looked like a very intricate rat’s nest right now. I sat still as she fetched a comb from my bags and carefully untangled my hair, explaining in layman’s terms about magic and how it connected with a magician’s body. She had about half of my head untangled by the time I finished.

“So you all grow your hair long. Hmmm. But I imagine that you won’t let it grow out indefinitely.”

“We’ve all more or less drawn the line at having it more than waist’s length,” I admitted. “Partially because anything longer than that is just not worth the hassle. Cora’s the only one that’s grown it past her waist, and she told me once that her control wasn’t really that much better than mine.”

“So why keep it longer? Just personal preference?”

“I think so.” I closed my eyes and enjoyed the rhythmic stroking. I could count on one hand the number of times that someone else had combed my hair. I’d forgotten how nice it felt.

“I didn’t get a chance to ask this yesterday. What does your family think of you being a mage?”

“Hmmm.” I had to think about how to answer her, as my brain had gone back to sleep. “They’re proud of me, I think. Deep down, they probably wish I wasn’t a mage, because that way I could’ve stayed home with them. But they’re still proud of me. It’s hard not to be. I’ve had a hand in creating history, after all.”

“In several ways,” she agreed. “Do you want me to braid this back?”

“If you would. I have a tie around here somewhere.”

She leaned over my shoulder and past me to reach the windowsill, where I had apparently put the tie. Strange, I didn’t remember putting it there. But that didn’t mean much. I barely remember getting into bed.

“Mari, I know I agreed to track this madman down, but I don’t really know how to go about doing that.”

“Understandable.  All we know about him is that he started the fire with oil, which isn’t much to go off of. But I do have a good place to start. Arsonists, you see, never start big. They usually start setting fires as children, doing little things, and then as they grow older they start going larger in scale. The frequency of their attacks usually increases too, becoming more consistent and less sporadic. It leaves quite the trail of evidence behind, if you know what to look for.” Which she apparently did. “Right now, we ask around and investigate every fire that has happened in the past two years or so, see if anything leaps out at us. Then, if nothing has, we go to some of the major cities nearby and look at their fire reports for the past twenty or so years and see if anything looks suspicious. Maybe we’ll be able to figure out where this man is from and hope that he’s made a mistake to give us more information. If any new fires are set off, we investigate those too. With you around, at least the fire won’t be able to do much damage or go unnoticed.”

“There’s that.” It was naïve of me, I guess, to hope that the arsonist wouldn’t strike again. “So we start with the town’s records?”

“That would be the best place.” She tied off my hair with an efficient tug before patting me on the shoulder, shifting off the bed as she did so. “But you’ll have to talk to a few people first. The chiefs here are very impressed with Kaya. They want to talk to you about going up and somehow convincing a few dragons to come down here and work with them.”