Published at 24th of February 2024 10:33 am

Chapter 52

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I’d half expected someone to be waiting to jump on me as I walked through the door, but they must have thought better of it. They were sitting in the same formation they’d been when I’d made my first appearance, and Solidaire took his seat wordlessly after letting me in.

“What would you like to know?” I asked as I looked around.

“How sure are you that you can fix the barrier?” Karad asked.

“Completely. I’ve already looked over the ward stone prior to any of you getting here. Assuming no one had taken a hammer to it between then and now, there’s no reason I can’t fix it as soon as this conversation is over, provided we can reach an agreement.”

“This is ridiculous,” Melmir muttered, his voice so soft that I doubted I was meant to hear him. Nobody else reacted, at least.

“And you can really invoke the blessing of the spirits to make new mages?” Shel asked.

“I don’t know about any spiritual blessing, but yes, I know the conditions required for a person’s mana core to ignite and start producing up to twenty times as much mana as it otherwise would. It’s not that hard to do. And yes, I am willing to do it for a few people and teach them how to do it as well. Within six months, the entire village could have ignited mana cores.”

Shel settled into her chair, a satisfied smile on her face. Given the mana requirements it took to tend to a bunch of trees, I had no doubt that the Arborists struggled more than anyone else to do their jobs on a limited mana budget. The idea of having half a dozen mages, even apprentice mages, probably appealed to Shel immensely. I would be very surprised if my initial batch of volunteers didn’t include at least one Arborist, possibly even Shel herself.

“How do we know any of this is true?” Melmir asked. “Yes, you can do magic. I acknowledge that. As preposterous as it seems, you truly do appear to be a mage. But so what? Lord Noctra was a mage. He couldn’t grant a spiritual blessing. How are you going to do what a capable, experienced, adult mage couldn’t?”

“I’m going to be blunt here,” I said. “Noctra was an amateur. He was in his forties and still working with a stage one core. You saw his experiment with the dust jackals, didn’t you? He was trying to figure out how to advance his core to stage two, something that would be considered an end-of-year project for your average second-year student at any major academy. I’ve met fourteen-year-olds with fully functional stage two cores. I will complete my own mana core’s transformation to stage two in the next few months. There are a million things I can do that that hack couldn’t.”

That caused some bristling around the table, but no one responded. After a moment, Karad cleared his throat and said, “Yes, well, there’s still the matter of Lord Noctra’s demise. Regardless of whether he was in fact a traitor, we can’t condone wanton murder. You’re asking us to not only look the other way, but to give you a position of power as a reward for killing not one but two people, and to take your word that it’s okay because they deserved it. You can understand why that’s an issue, I hope.”

“I get it, yes. But you’ve made a mistake. I’m not interested in a position of power. In fact, I want the opposite of that. I do not want to replace Noctra. I don’t want to run your village. I don’t want to do any administrative work, and I don’t want to make any decisions that don’t relate to the use of magic. I am more than happy with being placed under house arrest, if you’d like to do so. You can send students to me for regular magic lessons, and as long as I’ve got a bare minimum of comfort, I won’t object to staying in one place for the next few years.”

“You can walk through walls,” Solidaire pointed out. “How are we supposed to confine you to house arrest?”

I shrugged. “Look, you need to accept that whatever you decide to do, you don’t have any power over me. I could give you another demonstration, if you like?”

Solidaire and Melmir both glared at me, but neither said anything. I continued, “I see two ways this can go. One, you work with me. I help keep your town safe and bring you some much-needed knowledge on the fine art of magic. Two, you refuse to work with me. I leave. I take my family with me. You’ll never see any of us again, and whatever comes in the future will be on your heads to deal with.”

Shel was the most accepting of my words, possibly because she was the most disconnected from everyday life in Alkerist and also had the most to gain from a partnership with me. Solidaire was harder to read, but I thought I’d at least partially won him over with my promise that I could fix the barrier. That would make his life significantly easier if I could actually pull it off, and if not, he wasn’t in any worse of a position than he was now.

Melmir and Karad were the two holdouts, Melmir both because I was threatening to make his organization redundant and just through plain obstinacy, and Karad because I represented a very real security risk. If I’d been a normal person, I’d be arrested immediately and probably executed. He was absolutely right that normal people didn’t get away with murder.

As the de-facto chief of the village’s police force and the person most likely to assume control of the day-to-day operations, it was his job to capture me. And he knew he couldn’t do it. I could see it in his eyes. He was measuring steps, trying to think of how many seconds he’d need to reach me, wondering if he could do it before my magic caught him.

He’d seen what I’d done to stop Solidaire mere minutes ago. I could do the same to him, or maybe worse. Karad had no leverage to make me do what he wanted, and it galled him. He didn’t want to say yes to me or let me walk away, but he didn’t think he could stop me. Oh, maybe he could pretend to play along, gather his whole group up, shoot me in the back or kill me in my sleep. But what if he tried and failed? What would I do to him?

I didn’t need mind reading to know his thoughts. I’d seen them before, many times. It had been early on in my career as a mage during my first life, but I still vividly remembered that exact look in the eyes of many lords and rulers until I’d advanced so far in power that even the thought of challenging me seemed to disappear.

Karad wasn’t stupid. He knew my offer had too much value to turn down. He’d accept it, and he’d hate me for it. He’d probably try to add some stipulations, which I might or might not agree with, but if I turned him down, he’d have no choice but to agree anyway. And then, sometime in the next few weeks if he thought he could get away with it, he’d try to kill me. If that didn’t work, or if he lost his nerve, he’d tell himself he could wait until he’d exhausted all my value, then kill me then. After all, I wouldn’t be expecting it years down the road.

That had never worked out for anyone who’d tried it on me in the past. Even the ones who’d sent mercenary assassins hadn’t been safe from my retribution. The longer the chain between the man with the knife and the man with the coin, the more bodies there ended up being, but no one had ever tried to kill me by proxy and survived the attempt.

I’d have to replace Karad with someone more pliable to my will if I was going to stay in the village long term, or else I’d have to impress on Karad that his schemes would accomplish nothing but his own death to thoroughly cow him over the next decade. I expected my mana core to be full-sized by age sixteen, eighteen at the most. At that point I could advance to stage three and then stage four in quick order. I’d have more than enough time to save up the mana I needed. Having a core that could hold over thirty times as much mana as my current one and produce it almost a thousand times faster would make everything that came after easy.

“You will be escorted to the cell your family occupies,” Karad said after he finished his internal debate. “You will remain there while we announce Lord Noctra’s death. Your family will be released, as by your own confession they were not responsible for the murders of Lord Noctra or Iskara. We will place you in a small home with slotted windows too narrow to crawl through and a locked door that you will be confined to except by special permission, and all instructional sessions will be closely supervised.”

I rolled my eyes, and Karad paused to glower at me. “Go on,” I prompted him.

“I realize that none of this can actually stop you from leaving, but it’s going to be hard enough to sell the idea that a child murdered an adult mage.”

“I did it in his sleep,” I said. “Maybe throw that detail in there.”

Melmir was looking at me with disgust now, but Shel didn’t seem to much care. Then again, she hadn’t shown interest in anything except the idea of igniting a mana core. It was abundantly clear to me that she only cared about gaining more power, though whether that was to help with her work or for personal reasons, I wasn’t yet sure.

“Yes, well… there is that. As to whether we’ll reveal Noctra’s crimes, I haven’t decided. We’ll have a meeting tomorrow to determine that,” Karad said.

“No.”

“Excuse me?”

“No, you’re not covering up his crimes. My parents are already going to be treated like dirt because of this. You’re not going to hide Noctra’s scummy behavior and let everyone think it was Father’s fault. You’ll tell them the truth of what I did and why I did it. This isn’t going to be some closed-door deal that you get to cover up and pretend never happened until you’re in a good position to tie up the loose ends.”

“Just what are you implying?” Melmir asked.

“That you’ll either try to kill me within the next week or sometime in the next few years after you feel you’ve gotten all the usefulness you can out of me. I’m not going to make it easier for you to do your dirty work. Speaking of, I’ll be needing Nermet with me until I can finish unraveling the spell Noctra put on his mind. He might never be the same, but he’ll be a lot better than he was.”

Karad rubbed a hand across his face and glanced around at the other three people in the room. When no one objected, he let out a frustrated sigh and nodded. “It’s going to cause problems if we draw attention to this, but if that’s what you want.”

“I cannot believe we’re just caving in to this child’s demands,” Melmir said.

“If he can do even half of what he claims, it’ll be well worth it,” Shel told him. She turned to focus on me and said, “All of these conditions are of course contingent on you being able to live up to our expectations. We’ll expect you to repair the ward stone immediately and grant the spirits’ blessing to someone as soon as we have a candidate.”

“I can repair the ward stone now,” I said. “I’ll need more mana to ‘grant the spirit’s blessing,’ as you call it. By myself, it would take at least a week to gather that much mana. If the whole village wants to continue with the nightly tithes, perhaps two or three days. I will also need at minimum a few weeks to teach your candidate proper mana manipulation techniques. Depending on how quick a study that person is, it may take more. Their progress will be measurable and you are free to check in with them as often as you like.”

They didn’t look happy, but no one objected to my terms. That was good, since there was no changing them. I did need time to collect the mana, and whoever they sent forth would need to learn a few mana manipulation techniques. There was no getting around those facts, at least not as I currently was.

“I can’t believe I’m saying this, but…” Karad shook his head. “I believe we have an agreement.”

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