Page 4 of War Mage (The War Brides of Adrik #4)
Urim
“K ill a demon?” scoffs out Adara. “Have you gone mad? No mortal can kill a demon.”
“Keep a respectful tongue,” I admonish mildly. “You speak to your queen.”
The mage gets a mulish expression on her face and I can practically smell her need to roll her eyes, though she keeps it in check. After three months of consistently being punished for defiance and impudence, one would think it would be snuffed out of her by now. But though she is no longer as angry as she once was, she still has her spirit. I would almost be impressed if it didn’t also exasperate me.
“I understand your skepticism,” Queen Adalind says, matching my mild tone. “I would have thought the same thing only days ago. But we have found, in an ancient religious text, a reference to the God Wars eons ago. When the demons tried to usurp the gods in Ethereal. It spoke of a way to make the demons vulnerable. A reference to soulfire.”
The mage stiffens in front of me, growing more wary. “I have never lit a soulfire,” she says, sounding defensive. “No one has.”
“But that doesn’t mean that you cannot, is that correct?” pushes the queen.
I wait for Adara to answer. I had never heard of a soulfire before the queen’s scholar found the reference. It seems mythical to me, unreal. The mage will know if it is possible, however.
“I can’t make a soulfire,” she says stubbornly.
There, a whiff of a lie. Or at least a half-truth.
“Do not lie to your queen,” I say more firmly.
Adara growls in frustration. An actual growl, almost like an angry orcress. “Damn your orc nose! I’m not lying.”
“You are and you know you are,” I tell her. If we were still in the cell I would turn on another rune. At least, I would if they weren't all already on.
Another growl. “Fine! Perhaps it is not that I can’t light a soulfire, but I won’t . Your offer of pardon is a lie if this is what you require from me.”
“Why do you say that?” asks Queen Adalind curiously.
“If you have a reference to soulfire then you should know why! Do you not know what it actually is? Soulfire is when you use an actual piece of your core soul, not your mana, to summon a flame. It would cause me to burn out at worst and take years off of my life at best! I’ll be frank, Your Majesty: I have no loyalty to you or Adrik. My loyalty was to my mages at Fort Attis and it died with them. I’ll not be taking on a suicide mission for you. I’d rather die now to spite you.”
My lips turn down in a frown and I am about to demand she apologize for her harsh words to my queen, when Queen Adalind raises her hand, stilling the words in my mouth.
“I appreciate your honesty, Adara,” she says. “If we are to succeed in this endeavor, we must all be honest with each other.”
Queen Adalind pauses. After a moment, she asks, “Do you still blame me for the deaths of your friends? Is that why you’d die to spite me?”
The mage surprises me by shaking her head. “It’s not that. I’ve had three months to think and I do not blame you any longer. I know that my hatred in that matter was misplaced. Yorian started the war and it was Yorian who got my friends killed. My only regret now is that I didn’t kill him before your orc did. I am mostly at peace that I have missed my chance for vengeance. No, I would spite you because you do not see me as a person, but a pawn. I have been kept in agony, off and on, for months. You say that I was not truly tortured, but the torment I suffered was severe enough to grow resentment. I lived day after painful day, never knowing what my fate would be. But now that you have need of me, you pull me out like some forgotten game piece to dust off and throw into battle. You don’t even ask what I want. So, no, I won’t be an obedient toy for you, Your Majesty.”
Such impudence . Still, I can't help but admire her eloquence. I knew that this plan would not work, precisely because this mage doesn’t have any loyalty left, nor does she even seem to have a reason to keep living. I saw her earlier when we were leaving the cell. She thought that she was going to her death and she was relieved. Her life isn’t important enough to her to try to save it.
“Alright, Adara,” the queen asks calmly, “what do you want then? What would be important enough that you would risk your life for the country and queen that you resent?”
A wise question. I am consistently impressed by my king’s choice of mate. When he first signed the treaty so that he could wed the queen, I had my doubts, though I kept them to myself. I thought that he might have been deceived by her fairy-blessed beauty into making an unwise choice. But though Queen Adalind is certainly the most beautiful living creature, behind that face lies wisdom, cunning, and bravery. Rognar is truly the most fortunate of orcs.
The mage goes still, like she wasn’t expecting to be asked. But she answers readily enough. “The Mage’s Tower has long been under the thumb of the Crown. We are used as mere tools, both in times of peace and war. Our lives are never our own. But there is no alternative. If you are a mage in Adrik you are pressed into service of the Tower. Even though there isn’t supposed to be slavery in Adrik, what would you call that, being forced to serve the Crown and its whims until you die?”
“I have never thought of it that way,” Queen Adalind returns evenly. “You have a point.”
“Of course I do!” the mage continues passionately. “My dream is for mages to be free to live and love and study and practice magic without constantly bending to whoever is in power. To choose for themselves who they would serve or not, as a matter of their own conscience.”
Adara sits up straighter, her eyes narrowed and posture determined. “If I am to risk my life by using my soulfire to attack your demon, that’s what I require in return: the sovereignty of the Mage’s Tower.”
Disbelief hangs in the air. The sovereignty of the Mage’s Tower? Letting mages self-govern and choose their alliances? It’s madness. Like sending a country’s arsenal to an enemy. For though Adara may not like it, mages are, primarily, weapons. Some of the strongest weapons a nation can have. It is why we focused on killing them during the war, to de-fang our enemy.
To her credit, Queen Adalind doesn’t scoff or get angry at the ludacris demand. Instead, she merely says softly, “You put great store in your life, don’t you?”
The mage shakes her head. “My life was forfeit the moment that I threw fire at you that day in Undrian Forest. It’s already gone, worth nothing. I am putting great store in the lives of the people of Adrik. The fact that if you are desperate enough to come to me shows that this demon must be a great threat, one that is imminent. Perhaps one that directly affects you or the orc king. You must ask yourself if you would rather have the mages under your thumb or the lives of all your people.”
Adara is smarter than I gave her credit for. She has deduced our desperation and is using her ambivalence to her own life to her advantage. Clever.
Queen Adalind tilts her head, considering. Finally, she says, “There would have to be checks on the power of the Mage’s Tower. Treaties signed where they could not start aggression with Adrik, nor align themselves with any of Adrik or Orik’s enemies.”
She can’t be seriously entertaining the idea of the Tower’s sovereignty, can she? I interject, “My Queen . . .”
“No, Urim,” she says, cutting me off, “Adara is right. We don’t have time to waste. Our demon problem is mounting and the border skirmishes are worsening. If this is what we must do to save our countries, no, the world, so be it.”
She is right. The stakes are indeed high. Rognar is already at the front, keeping the vampiric forces at bay, but it is a losing battle as long as they have Grazrath’s power backing them. Once our countries fall to the demon’s onslaught, the rest of Teurilia is sure to follow, and then the world. But it grates on me that we must give up a weapon like the Mage’s Tower just because we are desperate. Especially to one such as Adara Flameborn, who is, above all else, a threat to the Crown, no matter what she says.
“Then when and if the Tower is given its sovereignty,” I hear myself saying, “Adara cannot be its ruler. That should be part of the treaty.”
“Why not?” asks Queen Adalind curiously.
“She tried to kill you once,” I remind her darkly, even as my voice remains calm and impartial. “She cannot be trusted to keep any treaties that we make with her.”
“Jokes on you,” retorts the mage, “I don’t want to be in charge. Someone better suited to the job should take it. Like Hoggins, for example . . .”
“Not Hoggins,” interrupts Queen Adalind, shaking her head. “He’s dead.”
Adara looks shocked. “Dead? The Royal Mage? But he wasn’t even at the front . . .”
“It wasn’t during the war,” the queen tells her. “He was part of a dark ritual that was intended to expel the orcs from Adrik but instead summoned the demon we want you to kill. Hoggins was killed as a result, as well as his conspirators. But the demon remains.”
“A dark ritual . . .” muses the mage. “Blood magic?”
“Yes,” confirms Queen Adalind. “He was part of Yorian’s Cabal, the group you admitted the Mage’s Tower helped by providing forbidden texts to them. It is likely one of those texts gave them the knowledge of the ritual they performed.”
“Another reason to give the Tower its independence,” points out Adara. “We only surrendered those texts because it was the king asking for them and we had no choice but to obey him under our charter.”
“Quite,” agrees Adalind, her tone deceptively agreeable. I can see her already strategizing about the sovereignty of the Mage’s Tower. She is likely thinking of a plan to make it benefit Adrik and Orik, even while losing control of the mages.
“Then we have an agreement?” Adara asks. “I do this mission for you and you free the mages?”
“If you succeed ,” the queen emphasizes, “I will give the Mage’s Tower its sovereignty. I will not give you something so precious for a mere attempt.”
“I will succeed,” the mage proclaims brashly. “The only mission I ever failed was my attempt on your life and if I had known about your magic, I wouldn’t have even failed that.”
She is arrogant, this mage. I suppose I already knew that from my times interrogating her these past months. But to bring up her assassination attempt in front of the target of said attempt and to claim that she would have been successful? That is in another realm of arrogance entirely. It borders on stupidity, even if I can’t help but somewhat admire her audacity.
Queen Adalind doesn’t seem offended by the mage’s claims, however. “Then let us be sure that you have all the information you need going into this mission. We can't have you making excuses for why you failed this time. The stakes are too high.”
Adara flushes at the slight censure in the queen’s words, but she raises her chin proudly, not backing down. “We have a deal?” she repeats.
“We do,” replies Queen Adalind calmly.
The mage then raises her wrists, the iron manacles hanging off of them. “Then will you release these bonds?”
“Oh, Adara,” says the queen, her voice amused. “I’m not stupid. I have not survived this long by just releasing people who have wanted to kill me in the past at their word alone. There’s something you must do first.”
“And what is that?”
Queen Adalind’s lips quirk. “How do you feel about needles?”