Magician In Battle (Power of Poses Book 4) Read online

  Kulara and Valanna walked along the main street of Landsgood seeking out a store that would sell clothing more suitable for Pestledown than their Warish-style clothes and that suited them more than the dowdy things that Coffun had procured. They also needed proper hair dye for Valanna’s bright blonde hair.

  The day was pleasant enough for late fall. Far to the north in Espozia, Valanna would already wear coats and gloves, but in Pestle and Warish, it rarely snowed, so Valanna especially liked this time of year. Pestlan trees were taller, and the fall had already forced many of them to lose their leaves, so they shuffled through the crackling remnants that blew around in the gusty breeze.

  “In here,” Kulara said. She walked through the door of a clothing store that seemed to be a bit more fashionable than the one they had already passed.

  Valanna strolled to the women’s section and began to browse through racks of dresses. She picked out two and then looked at blouses and skirts.

  The saleswoman walked up. “You are buying quite a few clothes? We’ve just been notified of a new inventory tax, so I can give you good prices. Can I help you or your friend?”

  Valanna looked at the woman, and then at Kulara who dipped her head down, looking at silk scarves advertised to come from Bennin. Valanna thought of the beautiful silk dress that Trak had given her. She had it in her bags.

  “Yes. My uncle died in Pestledown, leaving me his house and money. My friend and her husband agreed to help me settle my uncle’s affairs. We live far to the southwest, by Sesta and Warish, so I need clothes more appropriate to a big city.”

  The saleswoman narrowed her eyes in concentration, taking in Valanna’s figure, she guessed, and went to work. Soon a pile of clothing appeared, and then the woman took Kulara and a smaller pile grew for Kulara.

  “Do you sell cosmetics?” Valanna said. “I want to dye my hair a darker color. My uncle’s side of the family had darker hair, and I don’t want to stand out.”

  “Really?” the woman said. “Your hair is such a beautiful, bright color.”

  “It is my wish. Once I get established, I’ll want to change it back.”

  The woman shrugged. “I have a few products that might work to darken your hair. They are generally used by women to hide their gray.”

  “Really?” Kulara said, touching the wings of her hair. “Do you have anything for my hair color? I’ve got a few strands of an unwanted color showing.”

  “This way.”

  Valanna paid for their clothes with the Pestlan coinage they had brought with them. “My lawyer was very kind to provide an advance.”

  After seeing the plumpness of Valanna’s purse, the woman nodded.

  “Could you deliver them to the inn where we are staying? We will be here for a few days before everything is ready for my arrival in the capital.”

  The saleswoman nodded. “Of course. Your uncle must have been a notable person, but I must caution you about Pestledown. The city is restless. People have filled up the inns on their way out of the capital, and Pestledown relatives are filling up the town visiting their Landsgood families.”

  Valanna smiled. “We will be. I expect we will leave Pestledown as soon as my affairs are settled. No one knew how much money he had amassed, but my lawyer is working on it.” She tried to put an air of excitement into her voice as Kulara and she left the shop, only carrying the cosmetics and hair coloring that they both had bought.

  “That woman will remember you until the day you die, Valanna.”

  “I know. I just hope that day is a long way off,” she said, as she hooked her arm with Kulara’s. “Now let’s get our hair colored and help Asem shave his beard off again.”

  ~

  On their fourth day at the inn, Coffun Cricket finally arrived.

  “It’s not the right time to enter Pestledown,” Coffun said. “The city is in an uproar and there is talk of fighting in the streets. We will be heading near a village just south of the city along Bosun Bay. There is an estate an acquaintance of mine owns, where you can wait for a week or two. There is a chance that the pressure might be off of Esmera’s inn by then.”

  “Are you going to accompany us to the estate?” Valanna asked.

  “No. I have to get back to Pestledown. I hired a local driver from Landsgood to take you there. He is locating a carriage.”

  “Quickly get him before he does. We have another means of transportation,” Valanna said. “It is faster than a carriage.”

  “Very well.” Coffun left them and returned with the driver, who looked a bit confused.

  “Can we fit in your carriage for a short ride?” Asem asked.

  Coffun nodded. They ate a midday meal together with the drivers and loaded up the carriage, and then headed to the flyer.

  While Asem and the two drivers cleared the brush off of the camouflage cover, Coffun looked on with surprise on his face.

  “Is this one of the flyers that you were supposed to have used in the Santasian civil war?”

  Kulara nodded. “It is, but one of my own design. You can watch us take off. Our driver will have to find his way back to Landsgood.”

  “What is a flyer?” the man said.

  Asem laughed. “You are about to find out, young man. Just lead us to the estate. We will be there soon enough.”

  Coffun waved to them when they hovered a few stories above his head. “I’ll send a message in a week. If nothing comes after two weeks, I will have been incarcerated, I’m afraid, and you are on your own.”

  Valanna exaggerated nodding her head, and Kulara took them up to twenty stories and drove closer to Bosun Bay at a relaxed pace.

  In an hour or so, the bare branches of a fruit orchard looked like a field of gray brushes from their elevated view. The driver directed them to the estate, and told them they would have been more than four hours by carriage. After unloading all their bags, an older woman and man walked out from the large estate house.

  “We thought you wouldn’t be here until after dark.” The man eyed the flyer with suspicion. “Who sent you?”

  “Coffun Cricket,” Valanna said. “He’s an old friend.”

  The pair seemed to relax. “What is that? How do you make it fly?”

  “Magic,” Valanna said. “I suggest that you don’t tell anyone about this.” She looked at the driver. “You keep your lips sealed as well, right?”

  “Right.” The young man moved a finger across his lips. “I’ll be taking my leave.” He started walking back towards the orchard.

  “No need,” Valanna said. “I’ll take you back as soon as we get settled. You can eat your evening meal in Landsgood.”

  ~

  After dropping the driver off at his horse farm, Valanna hovered over a stretch of woods and drank in the solitude. She wished Trak sat at her side, and they could whisk the flyer away to Bennin or to a far corner of Pestle.

  But as she thought of it, Trak could teleport. He claimed that he had teleported two flyers tied together filled with people across the Southern Sea. She wondered if she could do something similar with the flyer. After thinking about it for a quarter of an hour or so, she made the crouching pose of teleportation and thought of the orchard.

  In an instant, she could see the house down below. Light from inside illuminated a string of five horses tied up at hitching posts in front of the house. Could their location have been compromised? She took the flyer down, and crept up to the house, looking through the back window.

  “Where is the blonde woman?” a man said, dressed as a palace guard. It would have taken nearly a day for riders to travel from Pestledown. Someone had found out about their intended location.

  The old woman and man stood with four of the soldiers, observing the interrogation too casually. That meant the pair were in on everything. Asem and Kulara were bound, but sitting up next to wall in the kitchen. The remains of an evening meal still sat on the table.

  Valanna needed to take care of the fifth soldier before she could help her friends. She
wished Trak would have had the time to teach her the poseless magic that had made him so devastating against the traitors in Balbaam, but Valanna would just have to make do with what she knew.

  She clamped her teeth together and ran away from the house, back the way she had come, returning to the flyer. Valanna struggled to put five heavy stones from a nearby rock wall into the flyer and then took it up three stories. Cruising around she saw the fifth man sitting on a fence, looking down the road that led north to Pestledown.

  Thanking the gods for a calm night, she positioned the flyer just above the man and dropped a rock. Valanna let out an un-ladylike curse and took out the knife she wore in her boot and pointed it at the man looking up at her. She posed and let fly a bolt of lightning. He went down without a sound.

  Tucking aside a pang of conscience, she put the flyer down in front of the house and untied the horses. She used blasts of wind to send them galloping down the road. The door flew open, revealing two men holding swords.

  Valanna put them to sleep and then entered the house. The two remaining soldiers and the couple looked stunned, but that wouldn’t last long, Valanna thought, when she pulsed the sleep spell at them and then untied her friends.

  “We’re glad you took the driver back,” Asem said. “My bonds were a bit uncomfortable. What about you, my first wife?”

  Kulara smiled and looked surprised. “I am wife Number One now, aren’t I? You certainly didn’t pick an exceptionally romantic time to say it.” Her smile turned into a mock-angry look.

  “Did you learn anything?” Valanna said.

  “It wasn’t Coffun, but the Pestledown driver who took him to Landsgood. I would say there are few people to be trusted left in Pestledown.”

  Valanna looked over the food left on the table and served herself some of it. “I don’t know about you, but I am hungry. You don’t have to worry about the guard outside. I’m afraid he won’t need to be tied up. I tried to drop a rock on him, but I missed.”

  “I’ll take care of the others,” Asem said. “I should have noticed the caretakers’ nervous behavior, but I thought they were afraid of us.”

  “They should have been,” Kulara said, joining Valanna. “They drugged our wine, I think. Whatever it was didn’t last long, but long enough for them to tie us up. They knew who we were, but kept asking us where the blonde woman was.”

  Valanna touched her brown hair. “A disguise doesn’t work in the darkness, but what do we do now?”

  I think we go to Pestledown, regardless of Coffun’s advice.

  Valanna thought of Honor’s dance studio. It was vacant when she last went to the capital, and she knew she could teleport them close to it, and it had enough rooms for them. “I know just the place. Get your bags.”

  “You probably didn’t notice, but they are still in the entry hall,” Kulara said.

  “The guards?” Asem said.

  “Did they mistreat you?” Valanna asked.

  Kulara shook her head. “Other than the expert job of tying up Asem and me, they were civil enough.”

  Valanna wanted to punish them. “Take off their shoes. In fact, get all of the shoes out of the house. After they find a way to get the ropes off of them, then let them walk into the next town barefooted.”

  Asem chuckled. “Not near nasty enough for a ruler, but you can learn.”

  ~~~

  Chapter Ten

  ~

  Trak and the Princess stood on top of the rocks Trak had piled well over a year ago in the middle of Dianzan Pass. He could see watch fires on the Kandannan side and fires and magic lights on the Toryan side. He didn’t waste any time teleporting to a ledge on the ridge below them. They were inaccessible to the Kandannans.

  “Do you want to spend the night here or move on?”

  Lia looked into his eyes, barely visible in the moonlight, and rubbed her shoulders. “Not only is it cold, but we are surrounded by soldiers. What do you think?”

  “Hold on,” Trak said. He looked down into forests he could barely see and teleported. “There, do you know where we are?”

  There was the barest pout to her lips and to the sound of her voice. “Roughly.”

  Trak closed his eyes and searched the surrounding woods for signs of magicians, but didn’t find any. “How about sleeping here? There are pine trees, so we can use their needles to cushion the ground.”

  “Do we have any food or drink left?”

  Trak smiled. “We can eat as soon as we have laid out our blankets. The night will be cold, so we will sleep together again. Is that acceptable?”

  She narrowed her eyes. “It is in this particular circumstance.”

  In the morning, Trak looked up at the cloudy sky. It felt like rain, but as cold as it was that night, they could get something worse. “We need to find a village or shelter or something. It could rain or snow this morning.”

  Lia looked a bit worried. Neither of them had heavy clothes of any kind. “I’m not sure.”

  “Okay. I’ll take you into the air. We can fly without a flyer. I haven’t practiced doing it, but we can look around for trails of smoke or village roofs.”

  The princess looked afraid but nodded her head. Trak could tell the woman was not in her element. He made sure the bags they carried were secure and put his arm around her waist.

  “I’m just going up a few feet to show you how this works,” Trak said. “Are you ready?”

  Lia cleared her throat. “I am,” she said in a very small voice.

  He took her up about five feet and floated around the small meadow. He felt confident enough to take her above tree level and then higher.

  “We are pointed north. Where should we fly?”

  Lia looked down, and Trak could see the fact that nothing held them up made her clutch at him.

  “Calm down,” Trak said. “I see some thin columns of smoke underneath the clouds over there.” Trak pointed to the northeast.

  She took a deep breath and looked back towards the mountains guarding the pass. “That should be Coriasku. It’s a small town carved out of the forest.”

  “Okay. Now I’ll teleport us over there.”

  They floated above a town that looked much like any other Toryan village Trak had seen from above on the eastern side of the mountains and took them down to a fallow field near a crossroads, just walking distance from the town. When they were on their way, tiny white snowflakes began to fill the air.

  “The village is that way.” Trak said.

  “I have eyes,” Lia said curtly, her confidence now returning after walking on solid ground. She pointed to the many tendrils of smoke winding over the trees northwest of them.

  Trak let the princess lead the way. A few minutes later, snow coated the ground, and then coated the pair of them. They trudged through what quickly became a muddy road and ended up standing in front of an inn.

  “I’ve never stayed in a Toryan inn before,” Trak said.

  “That makes two of us, Trak,” Lia said. “But you’ve stayed in plenty of inns, right? Would they be managed much differently?”

  “Probably not.” Trak fished the small purse of Toryan coins from his bag. “Do Western Toryans accept Eastern Toryan coins?”

  “You are asking me?” Irritability had crept back into her voice.

  “Sorry, I didn’t think,” Trak said, shaking his head. He entered Lia’s country knowing more about how to survive among her subjects than she did. “Observe. You can either learn from me, or show me what I do wrong. In either case,” Trak looked up at the thickening snowfall, “we need shelter.”

  The pair of them shuffled into the largest building on the street. Inside, Trak could smell the sour stench of poorly brewed ale. Why did Toryans on either side of the mountains put up with such swill? He walked up to the counter.

  “My companion and I would like a room for the night.”

  The innkeeper, the craggiest looking Toryan Trak had ever seen, looked at him with hooded eyes, and said something to him in a lang
uage he didn’t understand.

  “He is asking you why you aren’t speaking Kandannan?” Lia said in Toryan.

  “Tell him I’m from Pestle, and we would like a room. You can say we are married or something,” Trak told her in Benninese.

  “Married?” Lia’s face turned red, and she stifled angry words. “Why can’t we have separate rooms?”

  Trak looked at the innkeeper and at the handful of patrons, too interested in what was going on.

  “If they are being forced to speak Kandannan, then what does that tell you about the political situation here?” Trak said.

  “Oh.” Lia cleared her throat and said something to the innkeeper. He only relaxed a little. “He wants a gold coin. I’m sure that is too much.”

  Indeed it was, thought Trak. He took out a Toryan small silver coin and laid it on the counter. “Tell him his room is worth half of what I am paying him.” This time he said it in Toryan and looked the innkeeper in the eye as he spelled the coin to levitate up to his eye level and then put it on top of the innkeeper’s bald head.

  The coin didn’t stay they for long. The innkeeper jumped back, catching the coin before it fell. He looked at Lia and Trak with frightened eyes, and then bowed to Trak. “This will also cover a meal for tonight and breakfast tomorrow,” the innkeeper said in Toryan. He put a key on the counter. “Up the stairs, third room on the left. There are two single beds, but they are the best I have.” He bowed again, but Trak was already past him.

  Trak paused at the bottom of the stairs. “After you, Lia,” Trak said.

  The princess quickly ran up the stairs. She looked nearly as frightened as the innkeeper. Once they were in the room, Trak entered and shut the door, locking it behind him. He spelled a magic light, and then took a deep breath, sitting heavily down on his bed.

  “How did I do?” he said.

  “Very well, husband,” Lia said, blinking her eyes and managing a smile. She rose and pulled back the curtain, looking at big flakes of snow falling past the window. “Your glare was quite impressive, it even frightened me. What possessed you to move the coin?”

  “Hubris,” Trak said, “and I didn’t want to spend a gold when a large copper would do. He knows I’m not from Kandanna, and people who look like him need to be shown rather than reasoned with if you hope to change their behavior. I’ve spent enough time waiting on them myself.”