The Making of a Mage King: White Star (27 page)

Blindly, he pulled the white stone from her bag and the other white stone from the palace. He shoved them each into her hands, then pulled the healing magic through them all. Taking care to preserve this vessel, he healed himself.

Already in pain, he expected the healing to hurt too, but expecting it didn’t help. His first successful breath filled his lungs, then came out in a ragged scream, the last of his awareness went with it.



Mattie, leading her husband, half a dozen of his men, and Sean’s best friends, suddenly found the reins in her hands replaced by the white stones. She only had moments to wonder that there were two of them before she felt the rush of magic through them and her. Her horse nearly spiraled out of control, but Cordan’s hand held it steady as he watched his wife with concern. Anyone close to her, even if they couldn’t wield magic, could feel the amount of power coursing through her.

The magical floodgate cut off a few moments later, leaving her gasping. “He’s hurt.” She looked at the two stones in her hands. Two white stones that looked and felt the same to her. “He’s hurt real bad to do this. We have to find him.”

“Are you all right?” asked Cordan.

She looked ahead in the direction they had been going. “I’m fine; he was very careful of me.” A tear slid down her face. “He’s not using magic anymore. I can’t find him. I can’t find either of them.”

“Then we do it the old-fashioned way,” said Cordan, and he took the lead. Traveling as fast as he dared in the fading light, while still watching for signs of the chase that had gone before them, they moved out again, grimly determined to find Sean and bring him back, dead or alive.

They gathered around the figures sprawled on the bloodied stones. Covered entirely in fur, they looked like very large men wearing heavy fur suits. One of them, he had a reddish cast to his fur as if he had been in the sun too long, knelt beside Sean. His hand brushed and caressed Sean’s body, and eventually that body stirred and moaned.

The fur-covered giant nodded and pulled away the pieces of mangled metal as if they were cardboard and duct tape, then he picked up Sean’s limp body like a child and carried him away, followed by the rest of the group.

Sean groped his way to awareness through a fog that tasted like fresh potting soil. The feeling was confusing because he should feel like he was buried, but he didn’t; the air he pulled into his lungs was clean and crisp. The desire to sort out this odd feeling brought him fully awake, and he opened his eyes to see a very large, very hairy face dominating his view.

He was lethargic, and where there should have been alarm, there was only curiosity. The lack of alarm allowed him to identify that it was magic he was feeling, a very earthy magic, the magic of the ageless cycle of growth made tangible, tastable.

Efforts to talk brought into play muscles that should have stayed quiet and buried in the earth. He moaned.

The giant, hairy face produced an equally giant hand that lifted his head and shoulders like he was a small child. A shallow stone cup was held to his lips and he drank, relishing in the cool of the cup as much as the wet now sliding down his throat.

The giant hand lowered him back down, then pulled a heavy hide up and tucked it around his
shoulders.
“Sleep,”
he said, but it was far more than a word. It meant the sleep of winter that rested the earth before the frantic growth of spring. It was restful and healing, without being cold. Sean slept.

There were other awakenings like that. Sean was wrapped in an earth magic that felt older than the mountains. During his lucid moments, he found it fascinating, but it kept him detached enough that he was unaware of the passage of time and could scarcely concentrate enough to wonder at where he was and how he had gotten there.

The people that tended him did so gently if silently. As Sean became stronger, he caught snatches of the wordless conversation that perhaps he wasn’t intended to hear, or perhaps he wasn’t expected to understand.

“Will he make it? He was badly injured,”
said an anxious voice in his head. She—yes, female—felt like flowers and a spring breeze.
Rose-Wing
was her name.

“He’s doing fine,”
said another voice, older, more assured.
He was the one who found me.
Carried me from…where? Carried me to…where? I can’t remember.

“Is he the one, do you think?”
asked another voice, younger, but considering, learning the way of being a leader.

“I do, but his magic has gaps. We’ll wait until later when he’s stronger,”
said the elder.

Sean felt the giant approach. He was reminded of something that niggled at the back of his brain. The giant was nearly ten feet tall, or at least he looked it from Sean’s position on the floor at his feet. He was entirely covered with a thick fur that took care of all modesty, and his face was oddly flat. Then it occurred to him: “Bigfoot,” he said, or maybe he just mumbled.

He felt humor in return, and as the creature sat down beside him, he lifted his foot into view. His foot was indeed huge. It was nearly triangular with the toes looking unusually broad compared to the heel, the top was covered with reddish hair that got longer the farther up the leg he looked, but the sole was heavily callused from a long life with no shoes. Sean began to giggle, but that hurt, so he stopped, gasping.

The giant Bigfoot leaned over him, concern in his large, liquid-brown eyes. Then he reached a massive hand to cup Sean’s face,  encompassing the entire side of his head and neck. The warm summer breeze that wafted through a sun-warmed wheat field blew his pain away.

“Who are you?” asked Sean, as he basked in the feel of the magic’s warm sunlight and fresh breeze.

“I am called, Mountain-Wave.”
Like everything else these people said, this was far more than words. The short statement was the formation of mountains over the eons as they heaved up and sank down, to heave up in another location in another eon.

“What ‘one’ am I supposed to be?” whispered Sean, but the liquid eyes above him only blinked slowly. Mountain-Wave shook his head and Sean sank into sleep again.

Sean recovered quickly, all things considered, but before he was able to do more than prop himself up on an elbow, Mountain-Wave showed him the gaps he had found in his magic. Mostly it was the result of having started so late, and the lack of consistent teaching complicated by the driving need for haste and the lack of time. But a significant part of it was Mountain-Wave’s desire that he be able to use this ancient magic, as well. Again, there was nothing along the way of words in the teaching, and the teaching bore no resemblance to something that might have taken place in a classroom, but by the time he had finished, there were no more ‘gaps’, and Sean felt near bursting with it all.

“They are near,”
said the younger voice,
Oak-Root
by name. A name that spoke of strength and power, but not the power of the conqueror, merely the power of strength, patience, and endurance; the power of the oak.

“Who is near?” asked Sean, as he struggled to sit up and take part in their conversation.

A vision of horsemen gathered around some sort of battle scene was the answer, and the understanding of the distance of a single arch of the sun came through with it. The ‘picture’ was only a snapshot, but Sean knew that they were looking for him, and because of that he knew who they must be, even if he didn’t know who, specifically.

“You will sleep now,”
said Mountain-Wave.

Rose-Wing, who was kneeling beside him, helped him with a dish of water, then she helped him lie back down and covered him warmly in the bear hide again. Sean tried to fight off Mountain-Wave’s command to sleep, but it felt like his operating systems were shutting down one piece at a time. By the time Rose-Wing was tucking in the pelt around his shoulders and neck, the lights had been turned off. He didn’t see them tidy up the cave, then file away making no sound and leaving no trace of their passing.



Cordan and Mattie looked over the grizzly find with horror. Prince sprawled to one side in an unnatural, twisted and splayed position; it was obvious that he hadn’t been killed with magic. The front half of his body looked like he had crashed into something, and the marks around the body indicated that he had thrashed some before finally dying.

Though there was blood everywhere, the blood smearing his saddle concerned them the most. The blood on the saddle and that smeared over the rocks ten feet away, coupled with the amount of magic Sean had drawn through Mattie, could only mean one thing. Sean had fought Ludwyn here. With the amount of destruction in the area, it could be nothing else. The sight of Sean’s armor lying as if tossed away didn’t help allay their fears as to what they would find, provided they found anything at all.

There was no sign of Ludwyn, and right now, they didn’t care. Sean had been badly injured. The only good thing about all this was that, somehow he had managed to get away from this place. All they needed to do was figure out where he had gone. Since there had been no magic beacon since that pull of healing, a week ago now, they were confident that Ludwyn had not taken Sean. If Ludwyn had survived at all, he did not use magic to get away from here, and they didn’t believe he would have left any other way, not and take Sean with him.

The trail was comparatively easy to follow, though Cordan suspected it was intentional. He found things he felt he shouldn’t have; rocks had been rolled onto the trail from locations where they would have done little more than roll over if someone had chanced to walk that far from the path, and where he looked for crushed grass, broken twigs or scuffmarks, he found none.

As the trail became rockier and steeper, they left the horses behind with three men to watch over them, and forged ahead on foot. The sun was setting below the peaks when they found the cave where Sean slept, wrapped warmly in a heavy bear hide. The cold remains of a dry wood fire was in the middle of the cave floor, and a stone jug of water sat on a shelf of rock close by.

Fearing what they would find, Mattie knelt down beside Sean and touched his forehead. He looked pale, but he was warm and not fevered. He opened his eyes at her touch.

“Mattie,” he said, muzzily. “Has it been a day already?” Then he closed his eyes and went back to sleep, leaving them to puzzle over what he’d said.

Mattie sighed, and Jenny pulled her hands away from her mouth, though her eyes were still wide with fear.

Slowly Cordan looked around the roomy cave, taking in the collection of firewood and the few pieces of shaped stone. “This is more than anything
he
could have done,” he said, as he identified rolled furs on high ledges. “I doubt he’s moved the entire time he’s been here, and I’m thinking he’s been here ever since…whatever happened back there.”

Mattie nodded in agreement, but such detail didn’t concern her, much. She sent some of the men after more firewood and Cordan had them keep an eye out for anyone else. Larry discovered a tiny spring near the back of the cave. It was the visible portion of some underground river with a slow current.

Gently, so as not to disturb his sleep, Mattie started to roll the pelt away from Sean so she could see the extent of his injuries. If he hadn’t moved in a week, it couldn’t be good.

Bruises, now yellowing around the edges, began to show on his left shoulder, and as she rolled the pelt away from his side, just to peek, she found more all the way down to below his left knee. Appalled, she pushed the hide away and saw that he was very nearly one entire bruise; from his chest, encompassing his belly mostly, then extending down his left leg. She also found, scrawled across the left side of his belly, as if by a child’s hand, a wide crust of blood. The wound had healed, but the scab had yet to fall away.

Awakened by the draft, Sean started and tried to clutch for the pelt. “Mattie!” he said in indignation, but she didn’t hear.

With skilled hands, she rolled him on his side away from her. Suddenly she knew what had to have happened; all that was left was to find where all the blood on the rocks had come from. Despite the care she took, Sean cried out in pain as she rolled him over. Everyone in the cave looked to the sound and saw the ugly gashes on his back. One slashed across between his shoulder blades in a diagonal cut only a few inches long, and the other trailed from his right ribcage down through his left buttock, halfway to his left knee, nearly reaching his crotch at one point. This was where all the blood had come from; this was why he had needed to draw so much healing magic so desperately.

Ludwyn must have hurled something at Prince, who knows what Sean had done in return, but Prince had fallen or been knocked over backward, crushing Sean between his saddle and the jagged rocks. If he had been knocked out, he would have died within moments.

“Can I cover up now?” asked Sean indignantly, bringing her back to the moment. Mattie gently settled Sean back in his nest and covered him warmly again. “I’m all right, you know.”