The Guild (25 page)

“Well, what I thought was my first serious romance turned out to be a case of social climbing,” he stated wryly, wrinkling his nose. Rexei turned to look at him in inquiry. Alonnen nodded. “Yeah. Her name was Daralei, and she knew—everyone knew by then—that I was going to be the next Guardian of the Vortex, being the strongest in the Guild next to Millanei. Before that was settled, she was flirtin’ with one of the other two candidates. Storshei. He’s second-in-command of the dam works now. But back then, she glomped onto me, had my head spinning . . .”

“And?” Rexei asked, curious in spite of herself.

“He tried to convince me of what she was up to, then he went to Millanei, who contrived my ‘fall from grace,’” Alonnen said, giving
her a lopsided smile. “Dara tried getting me reinstated. A little too hard. So, suspicious, I told her I was happy to let Storshei be the next Guardian . . . and so she started flirting with him on the sly. I caught her at it so it wasn’t just his word against hers, and Millanei kicked her outta the guild. Put her in Pistons far to the north.”

“I’m sorry you had to suffer that,” Rexei told him. She moved over to the couch and settled into the corner of it.

Following her, Alonnen claimed the other side. He pulled off his boots, then put a wool-covered foot on the cushions between them. “Better to find out before she leeched any real status, power, or wealth outta me. The next one . . . wasn’t a mage.”

“Next one?” Rexei raised her brows. “Uh . . . how old are you?”

“Thirty.”

Her brows rose. That was a bit older than she had expected. “Thirty? Well . . . I suppose you act it, but you look more like you’re twenty-five.”

He grinned at the compliment and doffed his cap to her. Literally, pulled it off with a bow of his upper body. “Thank you, thank you . . . my dad could get mistaken for a twenty-five-year-old at the age of forty-one. Good bones, and all that. I take after him in all but . . . well, in all but the nose. More like my granddaddy in that.”

The way he flicked up the tip of his longish nose with the side of one finger, teasing himself, made her chuckle and smile. “I’m not sure, since it’s been so long, but . . . I think I have my father’s chin. And his forehead. Everything in between was mum’s.”

Her gaze dipped down.

Not wanting her to grow sad, Alonnen changed the subject. “My mum calls me ‘Al,’ and some of the others, but I rather prefer my full name. A bit opposite—most children would rather their parents didn’t call them by their full name. That, and there are three other Alonnens in the Precinct. I know of at least seven
people named Rexei between here and Gren Precinct to the west, two of them girls here in Heiastowne. But one of them likes to be called ‘Lani’ for some reason. She’s in the Bakers Guild. Do you have a nickname? Or did you?”

“No,” she admitted, after giving it a few moments of thought. “Not unless you count things like ‘sweetie’ and ‘kitten’ when I was very little.”

“I got saddled with ‘dumpling,’” Alonnen found himself confessing—and grinned as she burst out laughing, then quickly covered her mouth, blushing. “No, it’s okay. At least I’m not as round as one.” He looped his arm around his knee, staring off past her shoulder. “If Millanei hadn’t warned me, I wouldn’t have realized that working magic burns the body’s reserves as surely as working muscles. You won’t see many plump mages in and around the dam, unless they’re compulsive eaters.

“But, if you’re ever tasked with setting warding amulets, you’ll be set a diet of vegetables and greens to eat, not just things like potatoes, breads, and meat. We don’t do as much of that in the winter, though,” he said. “It’s hard to get fresh greens. The few books on magic we have all agree that fresh plant-based food is good for a mage, since that’s where magic comes from.”

“It does?” Rexei asked, blinking. “I don’t remember that. Mum said it comes from within people and is something I should never, ever let the priesthood find out about, because they’ll steal it all away.”

“Oh yes, it has a whole cycle, like rainwater,” he told her. “Rain evaporates from the land and the lakes, goes up into the sky, condenses into clouds, falls as rain, evaporates again . . . Magic comes from plants and is absorbed by animals when we eat the plants—we humans are animals as surely as any donkey or cat, just a whole lot smarter. And we in turn shed magic, or rather, life-energy, which in
turn the plants drink up and grow strong, feeding us again. The only exception is the Vortex, and similar fountains of energy.”

“There are other places like the Vortex?” she asked.

“Yes—those Guardians you spoke with, they guard other, similar resources. Some are formal points in the world where magic spills in from the . . . well, it’s not the Afterlife, but it’s on the way to the Afterlife. The Darkhanans call it the Dark, and they base their religion around it. I think,” he added, frowning slightly. “Priestess Saleria of the far-off Empire of Katan was explaining some of it to me, because she’s being visited by a Darkhanan Witch—not Witch-Knight Orana Niel, but someone else. I’ve met her, you know. Our secret champion.”

Rexei smiled at his lofty look. She held out her thumb sideways, the other fingers curled into her palm. “I’ve pricked this thing thirty times—thirty-and-one, if you count
your
guild—signing the petition books. I even met her once, in the Glassworks Guild. Though at the time, I had no clue who she was or what her significance was. I just knew everyone in that guild trusted her completely and that we were signing special books to get Mekha removed from the world. No one believed it’d happen in our lifetime, but . . . we clung to the hope.”

“And here we are, with Him actually removed.” He relaxed into the corner of the divan, then sighed. “Well, we won’t know any details of how it all happened until after the Convocation ends and we can speak with everyone in Nightfall, but I’m confident Sir Orana carried through on all her promises. I hope she—they—weren’t harmed doing it, but when
I
met her, she swore on a Truth Stone she’d brought that she’d lay down her life to get the job done.”

“If she could . . . Is she really immortal?” Rexei asked. “That’s what everyone was whispering.”

Alonnen shrugged. “Millanei said the Witch-Knight hadn’t
aged one bit from when
she
was a young apprentice, so she very well could be. But nobody knows how she did it.”

Thinking about it, Rexei finally shrugged. “Maybe it’s because she slew Mekha? Slay a God, gain immortality?”

A tip of his head acknowledged her point. “Yeah, but the buggering bastard didn’t
stay
dead.”

Her eyes widened at the epithet. She hadn’t ever heard anyone apply it so casually, so
jokingly
, to the God that so many had feared for so long, mages and non-mages alike. “You don’t
fear
Mekha, do you?”

“I
did
,” Alonnen told her. “But after living here most of my life, seeing His magics
fail
to find the mages who fled to the dam even while being tracked by His dog-priests . . . no, I’m not afraid anymore. And even if He somehow did return, even some of His own priests won’t worship him anymore.” At her puzzled look, he reminded her, “. . . They let the mages go?”

“They let them go so that
we
wouldn’t attack,” Rexei reminded him cynically. “I sincerely doubt they’ll let
any
scrap of power go, if they can help it. Being told by the Consulate that the priesthood is no longer an officially recognized guild is going to enrage them. Particularly the lot here in Heiastowne.”

“Well, without Mekha to back them up with His God-power, they’ll get a good shock if they try to go up against
us
. We may be half trained compared to mages elsewhere in the world, but we
know
how to counter the priest-mages,” he asserted.

That assertion made Rexei frown. “Alonnen . . . if you can contact powerful mages via that mirror—mages outside Mekhana’s borders—then why do you say you’re half trained? Why can’t you just get the training you need from them?”

Her words caught him off-guard. It was an honest question, though. Sighing, Alonnen swept his hand over his head . . . then picked the knot out of the ribbon binding his hair at the nape of his
neck. The golden strands fluffed forward, spiral curls released like snapped springs, and he caught her amused smile. He returned it, then dragged his attention back to her question.

“It has to do with the oaths of the Guardian, and the fact that, just up until a few months ago, we didn’t even
have
that particular scrying mirror. Just two precious ones that could only view things within the kingdom’s boundaries, and only with great effort could I peer at anything beyond. Mekha kept a shield over the entire border,” he explained. “Unless they were extremely powerful—maybe even shielded by another God—mages could not slip into the kingdom without being seen and tagged . . . and most mages on either side of that border could not scry past it. If I hadn’t had the power of the Vortex backing me, I wouldn’t have been able to try. So almost nobody could come to us to teach us without getting caught, and even Witch Orana couldn’t stay.”

“Then how did you get the mirror?” she asked. “You all acted like it had been working for some time.”

“The Vortex is connected to the Fountainways, and the Fountainways aren’t included in Mekha’s spell. Or weren’t,” he clarified. “I only got that mirror a few months ago. As it is, the Fountainways before that were voice only . . . and rules of Guardianship state most firmly that I could not explain to anyone that my Guardianship was
within
Mekhana’s borders. You took the oath; you know the spell.”

Rexei nodded and recited the rules of the oathbinding she had taken. “I know. Anyone who tries to say to the priesthood of Mekha, either of their own free will or via coercive spells,
where
the Mages Guild is located—or its members or speaks of the Vortex and its powers—automatically and completely forgets the answers before they’re revealed.”

“Exactly. As the Guild Master, my oathbinding is a bit different because I
need
to be able to talk about magic and mages and such . . .
but as the Guardian, I am still bound by my oaths to keep the powers of the Vortex out of the hands of those who would abuse that power. And the one thing the priesthood of Mekha
never
learned—and never will—is that there
is
a Fountain, the Vortex, here in Heias Precinct. With the power of the Vortex at His fingertips, Mekha could’ve challenged a fellow God to His or Her face, even without needing the Convocation to meet them here in the mortal world.”

“War in Heaven?” She shivered. “Is it really that powerful?”

He leveled her a look. “Rexei, the Vortex has kept a
God
from finding out about the home of the Mages Guild. Perhaps not the strongest of Gods out there, since hardly anyone wanted to worship Him beyond His priests, but still, a God—and a God who drained magic from mages, at that, adding to His power. Not that it makes
me
the equivalent of a God or anything,” Alonnen added quickly. “But from what the other Guardians have said about such things, two or three of the Fountains combined might make a mage close to being a God, if that mage could handle the power. I can just handle the Vortex, but adding another would fry me alive. Giving it to a God? That’s just a bad idea all around. I don’t have to test the theory to know that much.”

A knock interrupted them. Rising, Alonnen crossed to the door and cracked it open. The last clutch of the fellows he had brought along for their protection had arrived. Murmuring where Ohso, Gabria, and Mark had gone, he directed them to pick one of the other two rooms. Once the door was shut, Alonnen realized what that meant. Sighing, he turned back to Rexei.

“As much as I’d like to give you privacy tonight . . . I’m going to have to stay here. Guild policy, no one sleeps alone outside the Vortex. These rooms are sheltered against magic, both scryings and attacks, but not against nonmagical attacks,” he told her.

She blushed, thinking about sharing the bed with him again. Rexei glanced at it, then managed a casual shrug when she looked
back at him. “It’s okay. I trust you.” The way he relaxed at her words, the smile he gave her, warmed her. She returned it, ducking her head a little. “Besides, you didn’t snore last night. I’ve no guarantee about sharing a bed with anyone else.”

“You were out so hard, not even the dam breaking would’ve woken you,” Alonnen retorted. He tapped the tip of his nose and pointed at her. “But you can’t say I didn’t warn you tonight.”

That made her laugh heartily . . . and that made him feel the paradox of a sudden flush of heat coupled with a chilling realization.
I like her. A lot. Like I haven’t . . . like I haven’t
loved
anyone since Bethana
 . . .

His first romantic interest had tried to use him for power and prestige. His second had been a good woman at heart, but she had died in an explosion at her munitions factory. After that, Alonnen had buried himself in his work, believing that Fate just didn’t have a long-lasting love in mind for him.
So either Fate is teasing me a third time, or . . . well, Daralei didn’t count since it wasn’t mutual on her part, so Fate just might be giving me a second chance, not a third, at love . . .

Sleeping chastely beside her might be awkward, now that he was aware of how much he really liked Rexei Longshanks. The couch was a little short for a full-length sprawl, but he’d manage if need be. Pushing away from the door, he lifted his chin. “Right, then. Let’s get out some paper and a couple writing sticks, and start figuring out what, exactly, the role of the new Holy Guild will be. What you’ll do, what you’ll not do . . . You are the Guild Master, the very first one, and that means you’re the one stuck with figuring out how your guild will be run.”

With a groan and a roll of her eyes, she pushed off the divan and headed back to the table, grabbing her satchel on the way. “Which means I’ll have to present a Guild Charter
and
figure out who to choose for my three apprentices, as soon as possible.
Because there was another reason for a Patron Goddess, one I didn’t dare tell the others at the meeting.”