Published at 24th of February 2024 10:32 am

Chapter 26

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Before I could consider any other actions, Mother poked her head out over me and looked at the approaching Garrison members. One raised his hand in greeting, and she hesitantly returned the wave.

“Little late for your little one to be up, isn’t it?” the man said. I tried to think if I knew any of them. All three looked familiar, and I knew I’d seen them around the village, but I couldn’t put names to any of their faces.

“It’s my fault, I’m afraid,” Mother said. “I’ve been up late waiting for Sellis to get back and I woke him up on accident.”

“About that,” the man said. “We actually need you and your two children to come with us up to Lord Noctra’s manor. Sellis is doing some work for him and it’s going to be a long-term project, from what I hear, so he requested his family join him.”

I wasn’t sure if the man was lying or if he was just relaying the lie he’d been told and didn’t care enough to examine it, but I wouldn’t have believed it even if I hadn’t already been spying on Father when Noctra had sent him to an enchanted slumber. There were just too many obvious flaws in that reasoning.

“Sellis wanted you to wake us all up in the middle of the night to walk a mile so we could go back to sleep somewhere closer to him, where we’re going to be staying for an unknown length of time?” Mother asked, her voice flat. “Are you going to be sending some people around to keep our garden from being overrun with weeds?”

“Well, that is… No, it’s not really what we do… You know, busy with our own jobs and…” the man stuttered through his excuses while Mother stood there, arms crossed.

I waited to see if they’d give up or if this would turn into a kidnapping once we didn’t come voluntarily. Considering that it didn’t take three people to deliver a message, I had my suspicions about how this whole thing was supposed to play out. One way or another, their orders were to get my entire family up to that manor, probably so that Noctra could examine us to see if there was any other talent he could exploit in the family.

For a moment, I considered playing along. I needed to go there anyway if I was going to take care of our governor, but with my father being miles out into the wasteland already, I needed to prioritize. Beyond that, it wasn’t a good battle strategy to let an opponent dictate the terms of the meeting. While I was confident I’d win a fight between the two of us, it would be even easier to do if Noctra didn’t realize he was in a fight until I’d already hit him once.

One hit was all it should take.

“I’m afraid I’m going to have to insist, Xilaya,” the Garrison member said. “Lord Noctra’s instructions were quite clear.”

A basic sleep spell, cast by an archmage who knew what he was doing, needed one second to take effect on its target. I started with the one in the back and hoped the other two wouldn’t notice, since I’d need to tap into my mana crystal between casts. It took me six seconds to get all three of them, ending with the guy who’d been arguing with Mother right as he was saying “What in the-”

“This is a complication we didn’t need,” I said, one hand still on the curtain. “I don’t think you can stay here now. Noctra is already targeting you. He’s going to get much more aggressive when he finds out about all the people I’ve put spells on.”

There would be no denying that there was another mage in town at that point. If we were lucky, he’d think it was a coincidence that was in no way connected to my family. Maybe he’d think someone else from the cabal he’d been talking to Iskara about had shown up to sabotage him. This whole thing was going to put him on his guard, but I didn’t have much choice.

I could kill Noctra, or I could go rescue Father. Since they weren’t in the same location anymore, I didn’t have enough mana or time to do both. I wasn’t even sure if I’d have enough mana to get back once I’d rescued him. We could very well end up walking, and since it looked like I’d need to take my family with me now, it was going to be even more expensive to get out there. Fortunately, the elemental manipulation portion of the combo wouldn’t cost more just because I had passengers. It was by far the more expensive part to keep going anyway.

“Get enough food to last us a week and pack it up,” I said, my mind made up. “You and Senica will have to come with me. We’ll find a secure place to hole up until I can neutralize Noctra and it’s safe to come back home.”

“You want us to go out into the wastelands?” Mother asked, her voice incredulous. “You have no idea how much danger we’d be in.”

“Less than if you stay here?” I asked. “Do you think the man who kidnapped your husband and sold him off is above taking you hostage? Do you think he’s going to let you just go on with your day as if nothing happened?”

Mother’s lips pressed into a thin line as she glared down at the three unconscious people in the street in front of our house. “Fine,” she said as she grabbed the basket near our table and walked out to the garden to start harvesting food.

The weight reduction spell I had in mind was only usable on myself as an invocation, but there was a more expensive version that had looser requirements at the cost of worse efficiency. It would be almost three times as expensive to maintain, but it did have the benefit of a higher maximum weight reduction. I’d be able to make back some of the mana spent on it by needing less mana for the elemental manipulation portion of the combination.

I floated the three Garrison members into the house and left them in a row out of sight of the doorway. Someone would probably find them first thing in the morning anyway when they saw that the curtain was missing, but there was only so much mana I was willing to waste hiding them. Besides, they’d wake up in about eight hours anyway.

The worst of the preparations was waking Senica up. That was a whole chore in and of itself, one I was happy to leave to Mother. My sister did not appreciate being woken in the middle of the night, but I was busy plotting out our course with an application of applied scrying spells. I was no judge of distance, but I thought the five-mile estimate was too conservative. It was probably more like seven or eight.

This was going to be tricky, especially with two passengers, a basket of food, and a sail that had no framework to keep it open. I needed to keep no less than four spells channeled at the same time to make this work, plus repeated castings of another one. I started with the same gravity twist enchantment my mana crystal was under on the basket of food. That done, I could safely banish it from my thoughts and concentrate on the harder tasks.

First was a pair of feather weight spells for my mother and sister, followed by the novice tier weight reduction for me. All three of us combined now weighed less than ten pounds. Then I channeled minor telekinesis to stretch the blanket out across a frame of magic that I held onto. And then I did the hardest part.

I summoned the winds to push us up into the air. It wasn’t enough to simply go up high, though. I needed to keep us flying in the right direction, a feat which would have been far simpler by myself, and if Senica hadn’t immediately started screaming. In all fairness, Mother let out her own strangled gasp of surprise, but she at least kept the volume low.

The last thing I saw in the cool darkness below was the face of Malra, our nosey neighbor, gawking up at us from her window.

***

It was far too taxing to keep elemental manipulation going the entire time, so I resorted to sending repeated gusts of air into the curtain to propel us up and give us some speed, then let us drift for half a minute or so before repeating the action. We didn’t make the best time, but I saved myself a dozen or more cores worth of mana over the next few hours.

Part of my task while I was scrying out the route to Father’s cart was to also determine a safe place for my family to stay until they could all return home. I’d noticed a few possible candidates, but one spot in particular struck me as completely inaccessible without a pair of wings. It would leave anyone there stranded if they had no magic, but it should also keep any local predators from getting at them.

It was just far enough out of the way that I couldn’t easily tell if it would actually save me any mana to take them there first. Luckily for me, there was an easy way to make the decision without relying on mana calculations.

“Mother, do you want me to take you directly to the safe location I found or should we retrieve Father first?” I asked over the wind.

“We should go to your father first,” she said back.

“It will put Senica at risk,” I told her.

Mother had both of us in her arms, pressed up against her chest, while the basket of food was held in one hand down by her waist. I’d attached the telekinetic frame holding the curtain open around her chest, and had been manipulating my own weight to help steer and keep us at a good altitude. We were actually flying backwards so that the wind would hit Mother’s back, except for the ones I created and sent directly into our sail. It was pretty uncomfortable for everybody involved, and I’d already burned through a third of my mana crystal’s reserves.

She took a few moments to consider, then said, “Drop us off first.”

“Changing direction,” I warned her as I summoned another gust of wind to shift the curtain while simultaneously dropping my weight as low as it could go. We gained another ten feet or so of air and started gliding more north than west. Below us, the landscape had become mostly hills, and I angled us for one of the smaller mountains at the foot of the range beyond those. There was an isolated ledge there that led back into a wide, shallow ravine. It was all but impossible to reach without wings or magic, and I figured they’d be safe there for an hour while I finished my business.

I restored their weights to normal and broke the enchantment on our food basket after we landed. Senica clung to Mother hard enough that I knew it had to be hurting to have fingers digging into her like that, but Mother just stroked her hair and held her tightly.

“Go bring your father back, Gravin,” Mother said. “If… If Nermet gets in your way, you do what you have to do.”

“Hmm,” I said. “Quite bloodthirsty of you.”

“Just get him back,” she said grimly. “We’ll figure out what to do next after that.”

I nodded once. It wouldn’t come to that, Nermet was just as much a victim as Father, after all. But I did hope it didn’t cost me too much mana to break the mental subjugation enchantment he’d been burdened with. Leaving him out there in that kind of state was just a slower, more painful way of killing the poor man.

I spread the blanket out with telekinesis, lowered my weight down to a mere two pounds, and let the summoned gust of wind carry me back up into the sky.

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