Chapter 17: Encounter

“What can you do, then?”

The old fisherman looked at him with what seemed to be a mixture of greed and disdain on his weathered face.

After turning back toward the south, Pelam had walked through the forests of the central highlands for days, until spruce had given way to pine, and pine to birch. Eventually, he was once again journeying through the golden fields in the lands of his youth.

The first time he saw the River Rax again, he nearly burst into tears. He knew everything he had ever held dear was now gone, but the sight of its blue waters, gently drifting from its sources in the Cold Edge all the way to the Sea of Pearls in the west, brought with it memories of all that had been good in his life.

For a while, he had just sat there on his knees, his hands grabbing fistfuls of mud from its bank. Eventually, he had stood up and started walking again, this time following the river eastward.

But seeing the River Rax, whose tributaries he had fished as a child, had also stirred a measure of guilt in him. Standing above the burning bodies of his family, he had made a vow, and once again laying his eyes on its waters was concrete proof he had failed to uphold that promise.

Later. That’s what he had told himself. This was just a temporary setback. He would return to Terynia later.

“Well, say something, boy.”

“I’m sorry, master,” Pelam replied apologetically. “I do not know much about fishing for a living. But I know this river, and I have strong hands and a quick mind. I can man the oars and lift the nets, and if they need mending, I can tend to that as well.”

The fisherman pretended to consider his offer, but Pelam knew he would eventually take it. If he was anything like the peasants back home, he would never say no to free help.

“Alright,” the man said at long last. “But I will only pay you in food and lodging, like you said. You’re welcome onboard, son.”

And stay on the boat Pelam did. As they traveled upriver, they sailed when the west wind overcame the sluggish current of the slow-moving waters and rowed when the breeze was insufficient. Throughout it all, he performed the tasks assigned to him without complaint, careful not to draw undue attention to himself.

As they neared the plains closer to Cloverheart, he started to grow apprehensive. Downriver, he had been mostly anonymous, but around here, any boat they met could be manned by someone who knew him. The greatest danger came when they sailed through Riverwaist, with its walls crossing the river both when they entered and exited the city.

Already on the first day of his new life on the fishing boat, Pelam had discovered a hidden compartment below deck, on the other side of the main storage room. Entirely by accident, he just so happened to be down there while they passed through the gates of the magnificent river city.

After that, sailing was smoother for a couple of days, until they drew closer to the border. Down here in the southeast, the River Rax marked the boundary between the Agerian Empire in the north and the Nimean Compact in the south, until the river grew too narrow to be traveled by boat as they neared the Cold Edge.

This was the tensest part of the journey. At times, it seemed as if the guard stations and lookout towers dotting the bank grew like trees in a forest. Every time there was a bend in the river, two new towers—one on each side—kept a close eye on both their assigned stretch of water and the enemy guards on the opposite shore.

But the old fisherman seemed almost jovial about the tension. With the Empire having crossed the Cold Edge into Derimar instead of marching south around it, and thus through the Compact, as everyone had expected, he seemed to believe there was less reason than ever to fear hostilities would break out here. Another man’s war was his peace.

Everything changed when they reached the last stretch of the river before they had to turn back.

At first, Pelam didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary. They often made stops at piers jutting out into the water from the small villages lining the Agerian side. This was where they sold their catch or exchanged it for provisions, like the meat and vegetables they dined on to make their monotonous diet of perch, pike, and catfish more palatable.

When he came up on deck, he saw the pier on the right side of the boat—not the left, where he would have expected it—and at first thought they had already reached the endpoint of their journey and had now turned around without him noticing.

But then he saw the sun, still where it should be in the sky if they were going east.

Shocked by the realization, he drew a sharp breath of air. This was not the Agerian Empire. They had crossed the border and, out of sight of the surrounding guard towers, docked on the Compact side of the river.

Suddenly, the hidden compartment behind the storage room made a whole lot more sense.

“Hurry up!”

The old fisherman’s voice, coming from behind the dunes beyond the shore, sounded anxious.

“Yes. Yes, we’re here!” someone shouted.

As the disembodied voices grew nearer, their owners came into view as they rounded the dune. Pelam could see them in the distance, frantically running toward the river through the sand. Once they were in view of the boat, the fisherman followed, quickly herding them toward the pier. The pair—a man and a woman—were young, perhaps around his own age.

Suddenly, the running man stopped in his tracks and sat down on the ground.

“Get up!” the fisherman barked at him impatiently.

“What are you doing?” the girl asked. She sounded simultaneously annoyed, amused and perhaps a little afraid.

“There’s a pebble in my shoe,” the man said. “Go on, I’ll just have to…”

The fisherman grabbed the man’s right arm and hauled him to his feet. Just watching them made Pelam anxious.

“I don’t care!” the old man yelled. “Even if you had a scorpion in there, we’d still have to leave, right now!”

“Just run!” the woman shouted.

Half stumbling, half running, the younger man followed the other two to the boat, his right sandal still in his hand.

Pelam didn’t know if he should greet them or ignore them as they stepped onboard, but his indecision quickly became moot as the two newcomers were immediately rushed down below deck and locked inside the hidden compartment.

Someone called his name.

“Get to the oars, son!” the old fisherman barked at him. “Hurry up!”

The man seemed harsh, almost angry, but Pelam knew there was no malice in his demeanor. He was just stressed, and the antics of their male guest hadn’t exactly helped.

Working together, they turned the boat around and rowed to the Agerian side without incident. From there on, they would be going downriver again, toward the central plains of the Empire.

Toward Terynia.

* * *

She still found Larean to be very annoying. Annoying, spoiled, and naïve.

What she no longer thought was that he was dumb—definitely not dumb. And behind his self-centered façade, she was quite certain there was not a single evil bone in his sunburned body.

Oh, he certainly still acted that way, but Soria saw through his disguise. Larean, she thought, was a man who enjoyed being the hero of his own fairytale. It wasn’t that he was delusional. The boy knew very well he was no hero, and he didn’t believe for a second that the fictional narrative he continuously made up to embellish his own grandeur was real. But it just seemed to make life a little more exciting for him, and perhaps a tad more bearable.

Which, of course, made the living conditions for everyone else around him quite unbearable instead.

The little fishing boat had been traveling downriver for a couple of hours now, silently gliding between the watchful eyes of the two armies guarding the border. Fortunately, despite the tension in the air, no one had bothered them.

“It just doesn’t work,” Larean complained as they sat huddled together inside the tiny smuggler’s compartment. “I think of fire spewing out from my palms, but it never does. The best I can do is randomly incinerate things all around me. The flames don’t come from me. They just seem to spontaneously burst into existence out there. I can’t control it.”

She knew that all too well, but so far, no one had gotten seriously hurt from his magical antics. Still, she felt it was important he learned to use the Deepwell properly if they were going to make it to Terynia.

Pointing at one of the water containers the old fisherman had left them, she told him about the training she had done back in Palangea.

“Focus on the water in the bowl. Try to make it boil.”

The exercise didn’t really have much to do with fire magic. But it had even less to do with healing wounds or raising shields, yet her old teachers still called it good practice.

He hesitated.

“What’s the worst thing that could happen?” she prodded him. “The bowl could boil over, and we’d spill some water. There’s plenty more where that came from.”

He just looked at her, the sound of her chuckle finding no answer in him. “The worst thing that could happen is that the water stays cold and I heat something else instead, just like with my fires. It could be your brain that boils over! You wouldn’t like that, would you?”

Soria had to admit he had a point there. But still, her old teachers had felt the exercise was safe enough to conduct in a hall with dozens of novice students simultaneously trying to boil their pots. It couldn’t be that dangerous, could it?

“Remember that using the Deepwell involves two distinct phases,” she explained, trying to recall how they had phrased it at the academy. “First you open the funnel. Then you use the magic flowing down the conduit you’ve formed.”

“That’s what I’m trying to do. That’s when things tend to explode. Literally.”

“Yes, but remember, you can’t do the second part, you can’t actually use the magic, if there’s no funnel. And preventing it from closing again requires concentration. It doesn’t stay open unless you want it to.”

“So… that’s good or bad?” he asked, not understanding what she was getting at.

“So if you feel even the slightest indication things are about to go wrong, just drop out of the Deepwell. Retrieve your mind and let the funnel go. Then there’s no magic, and nothing that could hurt you or me left.”

Larean nodded. “I can do that.”

“So let’s try it, then.”

He closed his eyes, but for a moment, nothing happened. Then, she began to hear a soft, simmering sound of liquid heating up.

Pleased with his success, Soria carefully touched the outside of the bowl, but to her great surprise it was still cold. Where…?

“Ouch!” Larean shouted, opening his eyes and quickly pulling a scalding-hot liquor flask from the front pocket of his shirt, fanning it in the air to cool it.

“That’s good,” she said, trying to encourage him. “You’ll just have to try again.”

It wasn’t good.

“I don’t want to boil water!” he exclaimed, covering up his disappointment with feigned irritation. “I want to throw fire from my hands, like they do in the stories. Not make things spontaneously combust.”

She thought for a little while. “That’s what you were trying to do with the cat? Throw fire at it?”

“Yes,” he said, “and in the antiquities shop I told you about. But when I try to create a beam of fire, nothing happens. The air around my hands just gets a little hot, and then everything fizzles out.”

Suddenly, Soria began to laugh. She tried to stop herself, but couldn’t.

“I’m sorry,” she said between fits. “You were trying to set the air on fire?”

She wasn’t sorry.

Larean just looked at her, dumbfounded.

“So you have no problem setting a piece of paper, or a heap of leaves, or a dry branch on fire, but you find it difficult to set the air itself on fire? Is that what you’re saying?”

Larean nodded, pretending not to understand what she was telling him.

“Alright,” she said, thinking there might be hope for him yet, “I don’t know much about fire magic, so this might be completely off. Maybe this isn’t at all how real Fire Breathers do it, but I do know my alchemy. Can’t you, like… do it in two steps instead? First transmute the air into droplets of something combustible, like oil, and then set those on fire? You think you can do that?”

He seemed to mull it over, frowning as he did.

She didn’t blame him. Doing both transmutation and heating was probably more complicated than he had expected. Then again, the fact that this method might actually work, unlike what he’d tried before, ought to be incentive enough. Air simply wasn’t combustible.

Maybe he really could learn to do it this way, Soria thought. It probably wouldn’t work for her. She needed more precise control over her magic. She had to know the mechanics behind it before she could properly use it. But Larean seemed to have a much more intuitive approach to his use of the Deepwell than she did.

And that was a good thing. Because if their future hinged on Larean Onyx, the con man, understanding the theory of fire magic, they were well and truly doomed.

Author's Note

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