.
I had to grab Dilorè’s sword hand before she did something unfortunate, so I wasn’t in a position to prevent Rod from wrapping me up in an embrace. Fortunately we had never progressed to kissing before, and he didn’t make any attempt to do it now. Which was good, because I didn’t have any plan to let him start.
We had emerged into the mountain ruins where the Berado soldiers had previously guarded the tunnel down to Ilim Below. The wide grotto crowded with foundations that had once supported monastery buildings now held Gado and Orestanian soldiers, plus a certain royal and his knight escort.
I patted him on the back after I had given him what I felt was enough time, and said, “Your Highness, your other little sister escaped from the clutches of demons. I think it is more appropriate for you to be hugging her right now.”
“It’s ‘Rod’,” he corrected, not letting go, “And right after the last time I saw you, the worst traitor in recent history tried to murder you.”
“And since then, several others have tried, Your Highness,” I assured him. “It’s a normal occurence with me. Get used to it.”
He scowled at me as I pressed him away. I told him, “I need to check on the wounded, Your Highness. Go greet Amelia.”
“Oh, you don’t have to hurry, Tiana,” I heard her say as I worked to disentangle myself. I turned my head to see her standing nearby, obviously happy to see Rod embracing me. I avoided rolling my eyes or sighing as I retreated to go check Diur.
Melione had been watching him the entire time, so the truth was, I was at least partly using him as an excuse, but I did need to do something that she couldn’t. I crouched next to his stretcher, held out my hand and gathered a light dose of Healing.
Over the last four days, I had practiced with [Hidden Voice] at Diur’s suggestion in order to chant spells with it– which in effect becomes the chantless magic that only fairies do on Huade. It doesn’t work for Durandal’s attacks because they are designed to specifically react to the sound, but it works for regular spells. I don’t know yet if this is the reason that Mother and some other fairies can do chantless casting, but it works.
I intoned, [Healing].
My reinforced blood core had really improved my control. My lightest possible touch no longer made my victims feel like they were roasting. The mana flowed forth from my hand into Diur and the same long list of problems came back to me with the magic’s feedback effect. But again, I couldn’t heal any more than I had already managed back in the cavern.
Since I was only doing this for the diagnosis it provided, that was fine. I then focused on his pneuma with fairy sight. Upon seeing what his other symptoms had told me to expect, I told Melione. “He needs another dose of [Restoration].”
Thanks to my fairy sense, I could detect his flagging pneuma where Melione could not. A human healer can only guess at such a thing from other symptoms, or using the specialized magic tools of a physician.
She nodded and began casting the spell I had prescribed. I turned back to the royal siblings who had been watching me.
Amelia was standing next to Rod and smiling at me, her eyes flicking once or twice toward her brother. I did sigh, this time. Then I gave him a quick curtsey and a greeting.
“You Highness Roderick, your father’s knight has returned. As you can see, I am unharmed. Wounds that you may have heard about were never life-threatening, and are now entirely healed. Your worries are unfounded.”
His brow furrowed and I thought he might retort, so I hurried to say. “The wounds of our comrade on the stretcher are considerably more dire, Your Highness. We need to begin transporting him down off this mountain and to a better facility as soon as possible, so I would like to get started.”
The path up to this place, that clung to the side of the gorge, was not going to be an easy route for those handling the stretcher. They were using levitation spells, but it would still be challenging.
“That won’t be a problem,” Talene stated from the side. She was tapping a bracelet on her wrist. “I’ve been in communication with Senior Disciple. She will be here shortly with my flying boat.”
I looked around, then up at the overhanging roof of the grotto. It was pretty spacious, but…
“You can land that thing here?”
If she couldn’t, I had a mental image of them hoisting the stretcher up to the boat as it hovered like a rescue helicopter. Talene would have seen images of such things in her previous lifetime too, so she may have included the equipment for it.
“We don’t need to land,” she said confidently. “We can tie up at the precipice.”
And that statement gave me an image of the boat floating mid-air and us trying to board from the cliff’s edge, which seemed just as dicey.
But instead, Pasrue’s crew stationed the vessel slightly overlapping the ledge, with the landing gear for one side and the gangway resting on flat ground while the rest of the boat hovered. Loading the stretcher wasn’t a challenge, since our Wind mages had been rotating the duty of levitating it through the tunnel all the way up from the cavern.
Ceria took on the task, working from the deck of the boat, easily flying Diur’s stretcher over the gunwale and down into the hold.
“The trip down is going to be a lot easier than the trip up,” Rod commented with a smile while we flew back. “We had to walk all the way up from the mouth of the gorge.”
“I don’t understand why you came up, though,” I said. “You didn’t have anything to do up there except meet us, right? You could have done that at this boat’s destination, after we flew down.”
“Tiana…” Amelia reproved me, with a tone that implied I was being terribly dense.
Rod chuckled. “I should claim here that I did it in order to see you as soon as possible, right? But I’ll be honest. I needed to inspect the defenses of the tunnel entrance for myself. It’s an irreplaceable link to the caverns below until we can find an alternate route down.”
Confused, I asked, “And you needed to inspect it for yourself because why?”
His eyebrows rose. “I guess nobody told you. I’m in command of the Royal forces here. Father has put me in charge of the Orestanian expedition in the Tabad.”
I blurted, “Put you in charge?!”
His smile turned a bit rueful. “I’m that unreliable in your eyes, huh?”
While I grew embarrassed at my bad manners, he recovered with a wry grin.
“That’s right, Your Highness. He put me in charge.” Then he became more serious as he explained, “The Royal Army has a gross shortage of officers right now, especially senior field officers. All those southern officers with ties to rebel lords tried to take their forces to Parna, but underestimated the loyalty of their troops. Many only escaped with a few men after their units refused to follow them. The rest were arrested by their own soldiers. So we have plenty of rank and file, but a shortage of command personnel.”
As if to confirm it, one of the escort knights came up, saluted and asked for Rod to come to a discussion with Pasrue on the quarterdeck.
Ceria came over as he departed, her eyes filled with curiosity. “That was the fiancé, right?”
With a grimace, I admitted. “That’s him. Try not to bother him, please.”
She gave me a faint smile. “You’re not happy to see him?”
“It’s… complicated,” I had trouble choosing the right word. “I grew up in his household as a foster child. In my heart, he’s my older brother, not my fiancé.”
Amelia hooked her arm around mine. “It’s normal for things like that to happen, Tiana. Fosterlings are more often than not candidates for either adoption or betrothal.”
I sighed. “I know. I just never realized that concept applied to my own circumstances, growing up. Someone should have told me.”
The trip wasn’t going to be long enough to worry about finding a place to sit. It seemed we were headed to the current military headquarters, the fort that guarded the main road up to the plateau. We stayed on deck as the crew floated the ship up out of the gorge.
As we cruised gently on oar power– the trip was also not long enough to break out the jet engines– Rod came back down the ladder from the quarterdeck and approached us with a pensive frown.
“Is there something wrong, Rod?” Amelia asked.
He gave her a slight nod and looked to me. “You have a fairy knight with you, right?”
I raised my eyebrow. “That would be myself, Your Highness.”
“Ah,” he winced. “Of course. I meant another one. I was told that you need to stay beside that wounded mage, or he won’t make it to the help he needs.”
I nodded and motioned toward my cousin, standing nearby. Her travel cloak had been hiding her armor since we came out of the tunnel. “This is Lady Dilorè, my cousin.”
“Properly speaking, I’m not a knight though,” she stated after rising from the bow she took while I was introducing her. “I am Lady Serera’s apprentice. I believe in your kingdom I would be called a squire.”
His brows knit. That was clearly not what he had wanted to hear.
I asked, “Your Highness, what is the nature of the problem?”
“It’s the Berado tribe,” he explained. “And the rebel forces assisting them. They are occupying the Great Trading Road, on the other side of the mountains, and it looks like they are preparing to launch an attack to retake the pass. The Arelians are still days away from getting their land army here in force. Other than Prince Rufin’s cavalry, all we have is aerial forces to face them.”
“I thought the Amaga were sending troops in, too?” I wondered
“They have. They’re currently helping down in the Gado valley,” he answered with a nod, “but their land troops are only a few hundred soldiers. Even if we send them in, they will make little difference. The Berado have a trump card they can’t match.”
“Lilhàn and Feraen,” Dilorè stated, then looked at me and shook her head. “I was over my head when I fought Lilhàn. I could never hold out against both her and Feraen on my own.”
I had forgotten about Parna’s two fairy knights. Rod did just say ‘and the rebel forces assisting them’. If Parna’s militiamen were joining the attack, then of course, the fairy knights attached to them were part of the deal.
While chewing my lip, I thought the problem over. Diur was just barely clinging to life. Two or three times a day, we were casting [Restoration] on him, because his body lacked the vitality to recharge his pneuma, and was still desperately short on pneuma to recharge.
I went over to the open cargo hold hatch that he had disappeared into, and looked down. Melione was kneeling beside his stretcher. Some clue led her to look up at me.
“Is he awake?” I asked.
“I am,” he answered for himself as he opened his good eye. “And I’ve been listening. If Lady Dilorè cannot handle it herself, then you shouldn’t prioritize me over lending your hand to them.”
I had wondered in the past if my freakishly good sense of hearing was an Elder trait. The fact that Diur had overheard from down in this hold was probably confirmation.
“Listen, you!” I retorted. “Do you understand just how close to death you are?”
“I do, My Lady,” he assured me. “Which is why I request that you allow your Servant to continue tending to me when you go to battle.”
Melione looked up at me with concern in her eyes, as if adding her own feelings to the request.
With a nod, I said, “Fine. In the meantime, don’t die on me. I still have a lot of questions I need to ask you.”
I had a ton of them actually. Mostly, I needed his help to reconstruct my skills as an Elder and learn more about my blood magic and spirit craft. But, after five days to consider his story, I had also noticed a lot of holes. Not that I was distrusting him, just that I had become convinced he had left out some important details.
But I needed him to recover first. Due to his injuries, he was currently spending almost all of his time asleep.
