Guild Mage: Apprentice-Chapter 155: Valegard

When Liv woke up, her left leg was throbbing painfully.

She thought, at first glance, that she was most likely still in the same bedroom that she’d been brought to upon arrival at Valegard. The walls were of gray stone, and two narrow windows set into the right-hand wall admitted beams of morning sunlight. The door out of the bedchamber was open, and Liv could feel that she’d been undressed, though there was a clean sheet over her.

The bed itself had four stout wooden posts, and was draped with gauzy, light fabric that billowed in the gentle breeze from the windows. Liv had been at Coral Bay - or Lendh ka Dakruim - for so long that she’d lost track of what the weather in the mountains would be. The heat must have lingered deep into harvest season, for the breeze itself was not uncomfortable, even in the morning.

When Liv turned to the left, she saw that Rosamund was sleeping in an armchair that she’d dragged up close to the side of the bed. The dark-haired girl had her arms crossed just beneath her chest, and was leaning back and to the left, with her head tilted until it was nearly touching her shoulder. She looked, Liv thought, peaceful.

A light tap came from the doorway, and Liv turned to see Mathew standing there. Her adoptive brother was wearing jack of plate in the Summerset white and green, as well as a sword at his hip. One of his sleeves had been pinned up and out of the way, and he was utterly filthy with dust, blood, and trinity knew what else. It looked like he hadn’t shaved his face in days.

“Good to see you awake,” Matthew said, keeping his voice low. He approached the bed, and looked down at her from the side opposite Rosamund. “I was on the wall when you came in, but mother told me your leg wound was a nasty one.”

“I didn’t lose it, at least,” Liv said. She reached down with her left hand and prodded gingerly at the sheet. She could feel that her thigh had been tightly wrapped in bandages.

“You’re one up on me there,” Mathew agreed. “Blood and shadows, Liv, what happened in Coral Bay? No one else seems to have the full story.”

“Genevieve Arundell is guild mistress now,” Liv said. “She was trying to prove I’d stolen a word of power.” In a moment of panic, she reached up to feel about her head, and discovered the enchanted comb from Al’Fenthia was gone: her hair was unbound, spread out across the pillows.

“All your things are over here on the dresser,” Matthew said. He crossed the room, lifted first Liv’s wand, and then her comb. “The boots are on the floor.”

“Just those two for now,” Liv said, and reached out her hand. Mathew crossed the room again in two quick strides and handed the wand and comb over. Liv clutched them both to her chest.

“Alright, she accused you of something,” Matthew said. “How did that turn into you having a hole in your leg big enough to stick a wand through?”

“I had a plan to keep her from finding out,” Liv said, closing her eyes. “The comb. But I never told Jurian.”

“Profesor Jurian?” Matthew asked, and Liv nodded.

“So he told me to run, and he fought her,” she explained. “I looked back and I saw the second floor wall of Blackstone Hall blown out by an explosion of magic. And then three of the students Arundell recruited attacked me while I was trying to get to the waystone.”

“One of them put a hole in your leg,” Matthew guessed.

“And I killed another one.” Liv swallowed. “Anson Fane.” She saw the boy’s face again, as the fingers of ice closed around him and squeezed. The eyes wide in panic and pain, and then -

Liv opened her eyes. Better to see Matthew and the room around her than to relive that moment. “How are things here? Triss said it was bad, but not an eruption.”

Matthew shook his head. “No. Not an eruption. The foundry’s come back to life.”

“I’m not sure I understand entirely what that means,” Liv said. “I’ve never been here before. But it seems awfully convenient for our enemies that it would happen at the same time as the conclave, doesn’t it?”

“Mother said something very similar,” Matthew admitted. “You think you can walk? I can explain better from the battlements, where you can see.”

Liv shifted her leg. It didn’t feel good - it hurt quite a bit, in fact - but it also moved when she wanted it to. Arjun must have put in a lot of work while she was asleep. “I need to get dressed,” she said. “Find Thora and send her in, and let me get decent.”

Matthew nodded, then looked across the bed. “Your friend seems pretty attached to you,” he observed.

“Rosamund,” Liv answered. “Her name is Rosamund.”

“I know, I met her at the coronation. Liv,” Matthew said, “you’ve never been great at relationships -”

“Excuse me?” Liv protested, though in truth her single courtship had indeed ended in disaster - while Matthew had spent years with every girl in Whitehill chasing him, until he’d met Triss.

“Don’t even try to argue,” he said. “Anyway. That girl’s been sleeping at your bedside all night long. She held your hand while that healer boy from the east worked on you. That’s not what a friend does, Liv.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“I mean - look, it isn’t any of my business,” Matthew said. “But that’s how a girl who cares for you behaves. A girl who loves you.”

Liv felt her cheeks light up like torches. “Go get Thora,” she said again.

Matthew turned about and left the room, leaving Liv, for a moment, in silence, with only the slumbering Rosamund for company. She turned her head to the left, to watch her friend sleep. Of course Rose cared for her - they were friends. They all cared for each other, didn’t they? Even Tephania, who hadn’t raised her hand, who’d remained behind at Coral Bay. Liv knew why, and she wasn’t mad. Teph wasn’t a fighter - she was going to be a court mage, and she couldn’t very well do that if she ran off.

And yet, Arjun wasn’t in the room. He was probably wearing himself thin tending every wounded guard with even the faintest hope of recovery, Liv knew, but he wasn’t with her. Sidonie wasn’t there. Not even Wren was present, at the moment, though she was theoretically Liv’s bodyguard. Hopefully no one had been foolish enough to send the huntress back by waystone to go after Jurian.

None of the rest of them were sitting in a chair next to her bedside, but Rose was. frёeweɓηovel.coɱ

Thora bustled into the room with an armful of clothing and armor. “It’s good to see you awake, m’lady,” she exclaimed, loud enough that Rosamund stirred in her chair.

“Good morning,” Liv murmured to the dark haired girl at her side.

Rose blinked, sat up, and Liv could see the moment she remembered where she was. “How’s the leg?”

“Not as good as I’d like,” Liv admitted. “But if Thora will help me dress, I’m going to try to stand on it. Matthew says I need to see things from the top of the wall to really understand what’s happening.” She drew her legs up, put her palms against the mattress, and pushed herself up into a sitting position.

“Be careful!” Rose said, and before Liv could stop her, the other girl was out of her chair, with a hand on Liv’s back to help support her. Her bare back, Liv realized, and she clutched the white sheets to her chest so that they didn’t fall.

“I’m alright,” she said, suddenly aware that no one had really touched her bare skin like this since Cade. No one but Thora, at least, but that didn’t count.

“I’ll -” Rose hesitated. “I’ll let you get dressed, then.” She removed her hand, straightened, and crossed the room to the doorway, closing it behind her when she left.

“Are you really alright, m’lady?” Thora asked.

“I will be. Arjun does good work,” Liv said. She likely could have been in even better shape if she’d been conscious and able to cycle her mana, but she’d have to make do. She set her wand and comb aside, then pushed the sheets off. Carefully, she slid her legs around and off the bed, then scooted forward onto her feet.

She gasped at the pain, and her left leg nearly gave out, but Liv grabbed the bedpost to lean on and shifted her weight onto her right leg. The stone floor was cool on her bare toes. “Help me get dressed,” Liv said, and Thora came over with a fresh shift.

That morning was a struggle like none had been since she’d woken up in Lendh ka Dakruim, after Arjun had gone to work on her bones. Come to think of it, she was just as lucky that Arianell Seton hadn’t broken her femur as that she’d missed the artery - if Arjun’s inscriptions had been destroyed, and her bones started crawling around in her body, Liv doubted that she would have been able to fight off Anson Fane.

Despite Thora’s objections, Liv insisted on donning her armor, on top of a dress. She put her wand in its sheath, her enchanted boots on her feet, and the comb in a dress pocket beneath the armor - though she did allow Thora to carry her helm, for now.

“Master Grenfell left this for you,” Thora said, once Liv was completely dressed. The maid stepped over to where the bed was set against the wall. “He thought it might help you walk.”

Liv was surprised to see Thora lift her staff from where it had been leaned, unobtrusively, against the bed and the wall. The maid carried it over, and handed it to Liv. She took it in her left hand, leaned her weight on it, and smiled. “It helps,” she admitted, and shuffled her way over to the door. Thora rushed ahead of her to open it, and Liv stepped out into the hallway of a castle.

Not only Rose, but Matthew as well, were waiting outside, leaning against the stone wall.

“Are you certain you should be walking?” Rosamund asked, and Liv nodded.

“I’m fine,” she said. “Just a bit stiff.” There was no way that Liv was going to let them stuff her back into bed while trinity knew what was happening. “Show me that wall, then. You’ve got to lead the way, Matthew, I have no idea where we’re going, or where anything at all is, here.”

The wall, it turned out, extended out from the castle to plug the gap between two cliff faces. There was a great gate in the wall, with a tower on each side, and crenellated battlements on top, along with scorpions and trebuchets, all pointed down into the valley which opened up to the east. The entire construction was perhaps a hundred yards across, and fifty feet or more tall.

Getting there was the worst part, for Liv. The journey involved corridor upon corridor within the Crosbie’s castle, along with several staircases that had Liv cursing nearly as foully as one of Captain Athearn’s sailors. Whenever the four of them came upon a pair of guards in Crosbie black and red, they were given respectful nods or salutes, and Matthew was always addressed as ‘m’lord.’ Liv supposed the fact he’d married the only Crosbie daughter must have gone a long way.

When they reached the spiral staircase that went up, and up, to the battlements, Liv decided that she’d had as much climbing as her leg could take. With a muttered incantation, she created a disk of mana beneath her boots and sent it skimming up the steps, allowing her to rest the wounded leg.

Finally, Matthew led them out onto the battlements, where scores of Crosbie men stood watch, and Liv got her first look at the valley which contained the Foundry Rift. To the west, the town of Valegard lay, protected from the dangers beyond the gap by the castle and the wall. It looked much like any other town, with curls of woodsmoke rising from a hundred or more chimneys in the morning air. Liv could even see a road leaving the town heading west, linking Valegard with the rest of Lucania.

To the east, however, the land was desolate and barren. The land was entirely a peculiar shade of reddish-brown, Liv saw - and it took her mind a moment to identify it as the color of rust. The mountains that rimmed the eastern valley were entirely of rock, with not a tree or a piece of scrub to be seen. Indeed, the rock faces and formations were craggy, rising in strange, twisted spires, arches, and pillars that she could not imagine being naturally formed.

Past it all, at the heart of the valley which the Crosbie family guarded, was the rift itself. Many of the Vædic ruins that Liv had seen before were situated underground: the Bald Peak quarry, for instance, had a strange corridor buried in its depths which she had been unable to explore. At Coral Bay, the great rooms of machinery were hidden below the ocean floor, and at the Well of Bones, the ancient structures had been situated at the bottom of a deep, deep shaft. This was the first time Liv had ever seen Vædic machinery that towered above the ground.

The structures were massive, and Liv’s mind struggled to make sense of them at all. Great metal silos and boxes, scaffolding like the kind used by the guilds when they worked on the walls of a building, save of metal instead of wood - and enormous. Long poles leaning at an angle, and shapes that she didn’t even have proper names for. All of it was hazy and distant in the morning light, sometimes obscured by clouds or rust-colored dust that swept across the valley.

Nor was the space between the ruins and the wall empty.

The entire plain seemed to be in constant, lurching motion. It was heaped with the wreckage of ancient machinery, thrown into great piles and clumps, and over these artificial drifts of rusted metal, Antrian machines clambered.

They reminded Liv of Karis, and of the docking room they’d found beneath the Well of Bones, where the war-machines could be stored and fed mana. Rather than two legs and two arms, a generally human-like shape, the machines crawling over the valley often had four, six, or eight legs, like they had been modelled after spiders, crabs, or stranger creatures.

“They harvest scrap metal, weapons, and armor from the war-machines we destroy,” a man’s gruff voice broke across the morning air.

Liv looked away from the valley to see Baron Arnold approaching, with Duchess Julianne at his side. It felt nearly impossible that it had been only a year since she’d seen them both last, at the time of Matthew and Triss’ wedding, and her own departure for Coral Bay.

“You look pale,” Julianne said, and hurried across the space between them to catch Liv up in her arms.

“I suppose losing blood does that to you,” Liv said, and she couldn’t help but grin as she embraced the duchess in return. “You’ve been well? And Baron Henry?”

“We have,” Julianne said, holding Liv at arm’s length and examining her. “We heard you had some excitement on your way out of Coral Bay.”

Liv nodded. “I’ll tell you about it when we have time to sit down for a meal,” she promised. “I’m more worried about what’s happening here, at the moment. I don’t think you’ll be getting any more help than us, with the changes Benedict is making to the guild.”

“Even that has already made a difference,” Arnold Crosbie broke in. Liv and Julianne released each other while the baron explained. “Having a few extra mages to put on the walls overnight let me send my sons to get some sleep, which was sorely needed. And your friend the healer’s been working wonders on our wounded.”

“I had Kazimir bring that great hunk of rock he keeps around,” Julianne explained. “They’ve got it down for - Arjun, I believe? - to make use of.”

Rose, in the meanwhile, had crossed her arms across the stone of a crenellation, and leaned over to get a good look out at the valley. “I could crush most of those things under a wave of earth,” she offered. “Bury them thirty or forty feet deep. Whatever’s still working would take ages to dig out.”

“Those things aren’t our chief concern,” Arnold said, turning to join Rose looking out to the east. “They’re easy to destroy - much less of a threat then the war machines that come out of the foundry. Of course, under normal circumstances, we would - just to break their supply lines. But at the moment, we have bigger problems.”

“What?” Liv asked, making her way over to stand at Rose’s side.

“You won’t be able to see it,” Matthew explained, “but Triss and everyone in her family can, using their word of power. There’s a force out at the rift, doing something with the machinery. And we can’t get to them because every few hours a wave of Antrians assaults the wall.”

“What do they look like?” Liv asked.

Mathew, Arnold and Julianne hesitated, but it was finally the duchess who spoke. “They’re Eld,” the older woman said. “Eld, and a force of great wyrms.”

Liv felt a fire ignite inside her chest, and once again she saw her grandfather lying in his sickbed, blackened flesh around the wound where a wyrm had bitten him.

“House Iravata,” she said. “The ones who betrayed us to Ractia.”

“We didn’t have a name to put to them,” Arnold Crosbie admitted. “And we can’t get a good look at whatever it is they’re doing.”

Liv nodded. “That’s fine. I know someone who can.” She turned to Thora, who’d hung back from the edge of the parapet, cradling Liv’s helm in her arms. “Go find me Wren.”