Mage Resolution (Book 2) Read online

  As she kept her eyes fixed on me, waiting apprehensively, I smiled genuine thanks and hugged her. “I’ll wear it on one condition.” She lifted her brow in cautious query. “You’ll have to think of a new title for me. Mage Champion sounds a bit too belligerent.”

  “And you’re not?” Her grin was eloquent. “Well, all right. I’ll think about it.”

  “Please do.”

  “Must it be complimentary?” Elena crossed her legs and added before I could answer, “Speaking of which, Erich was full of compliments for my friends. I’m not sure why, Alex, but he was impressed by you. He kept reminding me how valuable you were as a friend.”

  As a weapon, perhaps. “It was mutual,” I lied, “It’s obvious he makes you deliriously happy.”

  “He does, Alex. I’ve never quite felt this way before.”

  Anders sat beside me and wrapped an arm around my shoulder in warning. “We’re pleased for you, Elena. You deserve some happiness.”

  “And speaking of gifts,” I took the opportunity to say, “our betrothal gift wasn’t quite ready yet either.” When she started to protest the need for a gift, I raised a hand. “You’ll want ours. Trust me. We just don’t want to spoil the surprise, so when it’s ready, we’ll deliver it in person. Right, Anders?” I elbowed him roughly in his firm stomach.

  Wincing, he kissed me on the lips. “If you say so. Just remember, we have six months to make sure it’s ready, or it’ll be a wedding gift.”

  When Elena laughed and stood to leave, I called after her, bringing her to a stop, one hand resting on the door. “Just because I despise Ardenna doesn’t mean I won’t come here if you need me.”

  “I know that.” Blue eyes smiled with affection.

  “Or just need to talk.”

  “I know that, too.”

  “I’m serious.”

  She traded an amused glance with Anders. “I know that, too. And so does Erich. Your message was quite clear this evening, Mage Champion.”

  I flushed with embarrassment for Elena’s sake, though didn’t regret my message to her lover. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to be rude.”

  Elena laughed merrily at my discomfort. “You weren’t rude. You were just protective. You were being my champion.”

  “No, I wasn’t. Well, yes. I’m supposed to be.”

  Still laughing, Elena pulled the door open. “No, Alex. Not you. It’s out of character.” Tossing a kiss to Anders, she left.

  I muttered a long string of vicious oaths and started tossing things again.

  “Well, you did ask for it.” Running a hand along my neck, Anders yanked a boot from my hand and pulled me down beside him.

  Chapter Two

  “Were my grandchildren so horribly behaved in the schoolroom today?”

  Three days later, I stopped sorting through a pile of schoolbooks at Rosanna’s question and blinked, content to be home in Port Alain. “Of course not. Every one of the little beasts kept me busy with questions about Ardenna and their wise and glorious monarch.”

  “Ah.”

  “What are you getting at?” Suspicious, I rested my chin in the palm of my hand.

  Jules’s mother sat across from me, planted an elbow on the schoolroom table, and rested her own pudgy chin, facing me. I was intimately familiar with that look from the earliest days of my childhood when Rosanna had come to be the only mother I remembered. “Coming back from Ardenna generally puts you in a pleasant mood, because you hate to be there and love being home.”

  I sniffed with indignation. “Are you implying that I’m not pleasant?”

  “Well, yes.” Though I started to protest, knowing full well that she was correct, I let her talk. “You’ve been as cranky as a seahag deprived of its prey. Makes me wonder,” Rosanna drawled, never taking her eyes from my face, “what happened in the capital.”

  I slammed a book on the table. The old duchess didn’t blink. “You weren’t supposed to notice. However, I’m surprised Anders didn’t warn you about my mood.” I piled one set of books on the floor near my feet.

  “He doesn’t tell me everything, even though you don’t believe us.” When I started to laugh, she tried to look offended. “You’re the only one who returned in a foul mood. Though no one else’s temperament is, ah, quite as explosive as yours.”

  “Explosive?”

  “Don’t talk about unimportant or unrelated matters. Tell me what happened.” As I stared at my hands for a long, uneasy time without really seeing them, I had the distant feeling they were getting tangled up. “I won’t tell Jules,” she said quietly, “if that’s why you’re hesitating.”

  “Partially,” I admitted, trusting the older woman. “I don’t want Jules to tell Elena, even though I know he’d do it with all good intentions. But I’m not sure he’s the one to tell anyway, not with how he feels about her.” Taking a deep breath, I gave her a quick summary and explained, “I don’t have any right to tell her who to marry, but I don’t trust him. And I don’t know why, other than a possibly coincidental glance that passed between Erich and Ravess at the duel. I was so rattled that morning, worried about defending her throne and her honor, how can I trust anything I saw or heard?”

  “Your instinct usually serves you well, Alex, especially when you link it to common sense.” A slight lifting of her brows made me extraordinarily wary of her choice of words. Not quite sure if I was being insulted, though odds were that I was, I glared at Rosanna, who only grinned and shook her head. “I raised you from the day you were born. If you want me to list every instance where you made a mistake, I’d be here all day.”

  “Give me one legitimate example,” I challenged, walking wide-eyed into her trap.

  She locked her eyes on mine. “Refusing to see or even discuss your father.”

  Motherless seahag.

  I stood and turned my back on her, staring out the schoolroom window overlooking her pampered gardens, seeing nothing but a bright blur of green and a riot of colors.

  “You still don’t know enough about your mage talent, though you pride yourself on being Elena’s Mage Champion. By refusing to see your father—”

  “I don’t need him.”

  She sighed behind me. “I’d quite forgotten you don’t understand his half of your heritage, even though you selfishly use it.”

  “Stop it,” I whispered, whirling back to face her. “I don’t use it selfishly, and you know that. You also know why I refuse to see him.”

  “No common sense there.”

  “Damn you, Rosanna!” I tried to keep my voice from shaking, but failed.

  “Don’t you think he’s suffered enough guilt for your mother’s death?”

  “Go away.”

  “You need a father.”

  “I’ve learned to live without one. I’m not a child. I don’t need him.”

  “Maybe he needs you.”

  “Maybe he should have thought of that when he abandoned me.”

  “Ah.” Rosanna crossed her arms, and watched me, the sarcasm back, accompanied by a peculiar expression. I turned away again. “I thought you were angry at him for not telling your mother he was a mage so that when she was giving birth to you, she couldn’t use her own magic to help herself. After all, she promised him never to use it near him, and didn’t understand—”

  “Stop it.” Heartsick, I rested my head against the window, shutting out her painful words.

  “She couldn’t have known that his mage talent mixed with hers created a mage child with potential no one had ever seen or envisioned. But now I see you’re angry because he left you. It doesn’t matter that he wanted to spare you his own guilt. You condemn him for abandoning you like a ragdoll.” The wooden chair creaked as she came to stand behind me, twisting me around and wrapping me in her plump arms. “Alex. He made a mistake. Forgive him. He wants nothing from you but what you would give him willingly,” she whispered, my pain mirrored in her eyes. “You won’t be free of this grief if you don’t confront him.” Rummaging around in her p
ocket, she pulled out a lace handkerchief and handed it to me. When I stepped away, putting a fair amount of distance between us, she asked, “What are you going to do about Elena?”

  I blinked at her abrupt change of topic, but that was how she wore me down. I shrugged. “Nothing. I have no proof of anything, so there’s nothing I can do. Not yet, anyway.”

  “What does Anders think?”

  “Don’t you know?” I needled, but she didn’t blink. “That I’m being over-imaginative and over-protective, though there may be something there. Maybe.” I shrugged again. “If I didn’t hate Ardenna so much, I’d stay there for a time just to keep an eye on Erich.”

  Rosanna scratched her graying head and stared into the air above my head. “What could he gain from this marriage besides the usual lure of power and an exquisite bedmate?”

  “That’s what bothers me. We don’t know enough about him. I don’t, anyway.”

  “Perhaps you should do some research. Alex—” Her voice was gentle as she started toward the door, giving me fair warning. “You know I only pester you for your own good.”

  “You’re only being nice so I don’t turn you into a goat.”

  “You can’t do that. Anders told me.”

  Chapter Three

  “Do you think there are any others like me?”

  “By the grace of the lords of the sea, Alex, I sincerely hope not!” Anders placed both hands on his chest in mock horror.

  “Pretty fast for an old man,” I complained as he dodged my fist, putting the armchair in my parlor between us.

  “You always underestimate me.” When I crossed my arms, waiting for an answer, he released a long-suffering sigh. “You, Mage Champion, are the only one of your kind we know about. Intermarriage between Glynnswood people and outsiders was forbidden after your mother— After you were born,” he changed the words to spare me. “Your father,” he added, appraising my mood, “was the first to break with tradition when he fell in love with your mother. Most Glynnswood people never sought mates outside their own clans. Your father was also the last to do so, or so we think.”

  “You never told me that. I always figured they liked to keep to themselves, but I did assume”— I shrugged beneath his patient gaze— “some of them ventured beyond their borders, like Sernyn Keltie.”

  Sernyn Keltie. Not my father.

  “In all your hundred thousand questions I suffered through, you never asked.”

  “Hmmm.” I turned back to the task of sorting through Mother’s and Grandmother’s notes and arranging them in the small oak chest Rosanna had kept them in, along with Mother’s copper seamage pendant. Rosanna had given me half of that pendant, Anders the other. Through some peculiar accident of fate, my magic allowed me to merge the copper halves into one. I never could explain it, since my talent didn’t allow me to work magic within one element. I could, however, change copper to water. So my merging of the two halves left me, and everyone else, bewildered.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I want to keep this chest in a safe place.”

  “Give it to Rosanna.”

  “I’d rather it were near the cottage.”

  “Why?”

  Shrugging, I brushed unruly curls from my eyes. “I don’t know.”

  “You won’t tell.” When I didn’t answer or deny it either, he said quietly, “With Jules’s expert guidance, Elena handpicked every new mage she appointed to the Crown Council, right after you defeated Charlton Ravess. Erich had nothing to do with that decision.”

  I stared at him, guilty. “I didn’t accuse him.”

  “You didn’t have to. You’ve been edgy ever since you had that pleasant facetious conversation with him in front of Elena.”

  I flushed in embarrassment and tried to distract Anders. “Will you help me hide this chest, or must I do it myself?”

  He tossed an overstuffed pillow at my head before pulling me to my feet. “It’s a good guess you already know where you want it placed.”

  “I always try to be prepared, as you taught me, master mage.”

  He ignored my sarcasm and carried the oak chest into the bright afternoon sunlight. Standing aside, he waited as I settled down on an old gnarled tree trunk and stared at the flat, dry dirt beneath the oak tree that commanded the clearing behind the cottage, the tree against which I’d slammed him unexpectedly more than a year ago, scaring me half to death. With confidence, I coaxed the talent awake inside me, felt the cold bite of ice and sharp sting of fire, merging them until the familiar cool warmth spread throughout my body. Concentrating on the dirt, I imagined it as air. Clean, invisible air.

  Just so.

  “You’re too lazy to dig a hole in the ground?”

  “Be a good Crownmage and harden the dirt at the bottom of that hole to stone.”

  “You only keep me here for my talent.”

  “That’s all you have to offer.”

  Anders called on his own mage talent, which allowed him control of all four elements and the ability to change each element from one form to another, say water to steam.

  After he solidified the dirt, I picked up the chest and placed it gently in the depression. “If I change a portion of air to dirt around the chest, could you simultaneously harden it so that it’s covered in rock?”

  “If you don’t make a mistake, sure.”

  “The only mistake I ever made was to let you stay with me.”

  Grinning smugly, Anders balanced on steady legs, pushed his tunic sleeves upward toward his elbows, and stretched his arms out toward the oak tree.

  “Don’t be so flameblasted dramatic.” When he nodded his readiness, I felt the cool warmth still awake inside me and clearly saw in my mind what I wanted. A sizable portion of air turned to dirt and hardened, encasing mother’s oak chest in solid rock.

  Safe from unwanted eyes and ears.

  * * * *

  “I still think it’s an interesting mage symbol.”

  “You’d think anything Elena did was interesting,” I accused Jules good-naturedly the next day, throwing a booted leg over the arm of the guest chair in his book-lined study.

  “I’d be more agreeable with you if you’d be more agreeable with me.”

  “Did you know about this?” I waved the copper pendant on its leather string around my neck in his direction.

  He shook his head, ruffling light brown hair in need of a trim. “Of course not.”

  “Of course not,” I muttered, and then tried to act unconcerned. “Elena seems pretty attached to Erich.” I watched Jules discreetly through narrow slits, gauging his reaction.

  “Attached?” He laughed with honest affection, though his eyes held a trace of regret that was never very far away. “Wherever Erich is, Elena is near. And the opposite is true. They’re very much a matched pair.”

  “Jules.”

  Something in my voice warned him as he turned away to stare out the window, at the merchant ships and fishing boats crossing the harbor or bobbing gently at anchor. “What do you want me to say, Alex? That Elena never looked at me that way? Well,” —he faced me— “she never did. But Lauryn does. I’m not a complete fool. I’d never begrudge Elena her happiness. She deserves it. But you can’t expect me not to feel any regret.”

  “Do you think I don’t understand?” I asked, as familiar with their old heartache as I was with my own. “I was concerned about you.”

  Jules’s smile released the tension that hovered between us. “I know. So was Elena. She spoke to me in private before Lauryn and I left Ardenna.”

  “Then it’s all right?”

  “Of course, it’s all right. Look, Elena didn’t even have to give me a second thought, didn’t need to worry on my behalf, but she did.”

  “She’s your friend, you stubborn, thick-witted—”

  “So are you.” Jules flashed a disarming smile. “I find it fascinating how you manage to express your concern so different than Elena does.”

  “Yes, well. She was raise
d on diplomacy. I was raised with you.” Satisfied that I shut him up, I switched topics. “Does Erich agree with her policies? Or does he have a very different set of priorities?” At Jules’s questioning look, I explained, “I’m just curious as to whether there’ll be lively debates in the bedroom, that’s all.”

  Jules graced me with a long-suffering look, not catching on that I was acting like, well, the queen’s Mage Champion. “He agrees with the important ones. I’ve heard him commend her handling of the Meravan ambassador in the Mage Challenge affair.”

  “Then why didn’t he raise his voice in support a year ago?” Idly, I swung my legs back and forth. “No one spoke up in her favor. Not one duke besides you. If Erich wanted her to notice him, you’d think he’d have declared his support.”

  Jules fixed me with a suspicious stare. “What’s this all about?”

  “I’m curious and apprehensive as to whether he’ll support her in the future. That’s all.” Barely, but it seemed to satisfy Jules for the moment.

  “He never contradicts her, at least not in public. I’ve never heard him mentioned as being controversial or a troublemaker or linked with anyone dangerous.”

  Wasn’t Charlton Ravess, the mage with whom he exchanged that unreadable glance at the duel, considered dangerous? “Well, that’s good.”

  My next words were cut short as a tempest from Shad’s Bay whirled into Jules’s study in the form of his six-year-old twins. “Alex!”

  “Easy.” I caught them both in my arms, Carey first as usual. “If you don’t learn to walk through open doors, instead of flying through them, you’re going to have a flat face like your father,” I scolded, fixing them with my stern schoolmistress expression, which was blatantly ineffective.

  “You’re always so gracious,” Jules grumbled. “Now what’s chasing you monsters so that you forgot your manners and interrupted our serious discussion?”

  “You promised to take us riding,” Carey said confidently, inching up to his father’s carved chair, the one that replaced the previous chair I’d transformed to water, with Jules in it, to announce my mage powers.