Sworn To Conflict: Courtlight #3 Read online

  Table of Contents

  Sworn To Conflict

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 1

  Ciardis Weathervane stood on the frozen ground of the North dressed in a too thin tunic and pants while staring around in confusion. Her vision was blurred out and her hearing was a distance echo of an increasingly louder clamor of voices. Men. But she tuned them out. They weren’t important. Neither was the cold landscape beneath her feet and the icy chill in the air. Minutes passed and she stood still. She didn’t hear the men surrounding her as they demanded to know where she had come from or see the frustration cross their faces when she didn’t answer. Her senses were closing off and her mind had gone remote. It was as if everything else was a blur and nothing was real in that moment but the magic in the air around her.

  A rainbow of colors swirled in the air high above her like banners fluttering in the wind. The colors moved in and around each other freely. First a hue of bright blue like a crystal clear lake on a spring day passed over, next to it the green of a new summer’s grass arced in a playful manner, and then the purple of a weaver’s gown swooped up over the both of them. Gorgeous, gorgeous colors in the sky. She couldn’t take her eyes off the brilliant hues that formed over the icy mountain passes—more ethereal and wonderful than anything she’d ever seen.

  Minutes passed and she couldn’t ignore her senses anymore as she watched the colors move with a majesty and grace across the arctic sky. Her attention focused on the feeling of nature surrounding her. She heard the whistle of the arctic wind as it wound around the crags of the mountain pass and left her feeling chilled after passing by. She felt the glare of the sunrise above the mountain peaks as its rays shone down on the ice of the mountain passage. Lastly, in front of her she saw the edge of the broad cliff that spread as far her eyes could see to the west and east.

  She stood close to that cliff’s edge on packed snow. The ribbon of lights wound its way through the mountain pass and down into the chasm below. Taking tentative steps forward, Ciardis walked. She was aware that two men were by her side. They were muttering darkly as she shuffled forward on cold feet. Complaining, she surmised. Within a few steps she made it to the edge of the cliff and she looked down in incomprehension. A startlingly sheer drop-off met her eyes as she watched the ribbon of hued light flow down the chasm to the bottom.

  It wasn’t the chasm that mystified her, or the depth of the fall. It was the seemingly endless horde gathered at its base. They moved and shuffled and walked with a single-minded purpose. Gray figures that bore metal weapons and leather coverings. Even at a distance it was clear that they weren’t human. She didn’t know what they were. But from the way their backs angled sharply upward with a hunch at its peak and then sloped back down to a small head perched on huge shoulders where long stumpy arms swung forth as front legs in a shuffling gait, they were assuredly kith.

  It was like a dream. But the feel of ice-cold air and a bright sky uninhibited by a towering forest told her it was very real. She stared around in what felt like delirium. Surrounded on all sides by strange men in an even stranger land. They all shouted their demands.

  Who was she?

  Where had she come from?

  Whom did she serve?

  All of the voices had been too much. So she’d turned and run. She didn’t know where she was going. She had never been here before and her feet immediately bruised as they ran across the rough terrain where the soldiers had done their best to clear the snow and packed ice, exposing the rocks beneath. Needless to say, she didn’t get far. But she did manage to escape through the group of men encircling her. It was enough to breach their circle and reach fresh air amid the cacophony of sound.

  As she sought to comprehend the hordes below her, a tall man stepped firmly into her line of sight and into her personal space. General Barnaren’s intrusion caused her to shuffle back from the edge with chattering teeth. Seeing that she was still in a daze, the man, at least two decades older than her with gray hair and the scars of a seasoned warrior on his face, shook her forcefully by the shoulders, trying to wake her from her daze. It did nothing. She didn’t want to come out. She didn’t want to hear more. She didn’t want to hear from them that she’d somehow transported herself into the middle of a goddamned war. She just wanted to go sleep in the cold night air and wake up in her bed in Sandrin. Snuggled in her covers. Or even the cot in the Ameles Forest would do.

  Anything but this.

  “She’s in shock. Call the healer!” snapped the general.

  He picked Ciardis up, noting her chilled body and her feet that looked blue with the cold of winter as he swung her into his arms. She was too cold to stay out here.

  To his men, he said, “Have the Healer come to my tent.” Wrapping her in a cloak wasn’t going to do much good. Not in these cold temperatures. Hurrying to his tent, he set her down on the pallet and proceeded to lump as many blankets as possible over her shivering form.

  “Where’s the damn healer?” he said as he pushed the blankets into a cocoon around her. Anxiously he reached over to his tent chest for the pillow on top. It wasn’t fluffy, but it was what he had.

  “Behind you,” came the snarl of the healer. “And I very much doubt, that she is the least bit concerned for a pillow.”

  He dropped the offending piece of bedding onto the rug with a guilty look and anxiously backed away. He knew Maris. The female was brash, cold, and impersonal, but also the best healer in the Empire and the only healer he had demanded be placed under his command.

  *****

  Maris swept forward to her patient, ignoring the commander of over three thousand men that she had just casually chastised. Leaning over Ciardis, she couldn’t yet see her injuries. The blankets covered her from head to toe. She reached with a furred hand to take the girl’s pulse at the base of her throat. Checking her extremities would be her next priority.

  Maris’s ears curled back with unease as she brusquely said, “I’ll check for normal vitals and signs of frostbite. Unless there’s something more damaging that I wasn’t informed of. She wasn’t stabbed or poisoned, was she?”

  “No,” came the answer.

  She pushed down the blankets covering Ciardis to reveal a shivering girl with golden eyes, curling chestnut hair, bronzed skin, and a complexion that looked like it was turning blue. As she set to work, Maris murmured soothing words. She poured her power into the girl and turned up Ciardis’s internal heat by pushing her own body’s warmth into Ciardis’s internal organs first and then her extremities.

  “Have an attendant bring a brazier with hot coals and a teapot. Have them fill the pot with packed snow from the hills before they come,” she said, not taking her eyes or her wandering fingers off her patient.

  Maris knew that her patient’s fingers and hands as well as her toes and her feet would be the worst off from hypothermia. The extensiveness of the damage would depend on how long the girl had stood exposed in the snow and where the hell she had come from in the first place. Absentmindedly she went over the symptoms in her
head while her ears snapped back and forth in concentration. Extremities would always absorb more of the cold quickly, as they laid the farthest from the pump of blood through the heart. Dark or blackened extremities would indicate a patient far gone into a severe case of hypothermia.

  But from a brief examination Ciardis looked fine. None of her fingers or toes had darkened substantially from frostbite and the bluish chill of her skin was being rectified by the heat. But there was something else. A mental darkness that worried Maris. As the girl began to flail and mutter darkly in her sleep, the healer reached into her mind to soothe her. Maris frowned as she muttered, “Delirium should not have set in this quickly. Not with this little damage from the cold.”

  She leaned forward, her cat eyes glowing in the confines of the tent as she sought to soothe Ciardis’s mind. Even now the girl was delirious. Maris frowned as she felt for the illness that was causing the girl’s delusions. Cold and ice wouldn’t do this.

  She looked for the culprit with her mage sight. Reaching forward with the blue swirl of her magic, she opened her eyes and looked over Ciardis’s body with the practiced assessment of a hunter. Most non-human races, known as kith, had some ability to use their natural gifts in sync with their magical ones. But none were able to use that union of natural and magical like Maris’s kind were able to. She came from a clan chimeras with highly skilled mage bloodlines, which made her magic intrinsic and natural. Even non-mage chimera were infamous hunters who ran in packs to hunt down their prey. On a hunt skilled mages were necessary, as they could imbue their physical strengths with the natural talent of their magic. This allowed those mage hunters, already fleet of foot with the endurance to run for days and the strength to claw down a white hart elk, to become twice of fast, with the sight of eagles and the individual strength of a dozen of their pride.

  Their coats grew dense and cold resistant so that even in below-freezing temperatures they were not affected. Their body’s natural strength was increased threefold so that they could go days on the hunt without resting or eating. The pads of their feet were given dexterity so that even on the slick and icy slopes of the mountain passes they could hunt any prey, and their eyes were layered with an extra clear lid that changed their already acute perceptions to a three-dimensional layer of heat. All of this and more were attributes the mage hunters of the chimera were able to use on their hunts.

  But it was that last magical gift which was the most useful for this patient. Turning on the heat vision, she looked over Ciardis with the assessment of a predator eyeing prey. Chimera would never bring magically or physically ill prey back to their nest or their kits. The mages among their kind could see and assess the illness of the animals they hunted from a great distance, allowing them to avoid the poisoned, the moribund, and the cancerous.

  As she looked at Ciardis’s body through the slits of cat’s eyes, her mage sight turned her vision from color to shades of gray except where the red of heat signatures lay. One large mass of swirling colors of red was straight in front of her. The burning red and bright orange of Ciardis’s radiating body heat even while the girl shivered from frostbite. The area around her beating heart was the strongest, which boded ill for the rest of her body which shone with less fervor. But she hadn’t given up her fight to live just yet. Maris leaned closer, optimistic for the girl’s recovery. For the most part she was physically healthy, but Maris’s fur lifted up off her back in alarm when she switched from heat vision to an assessment using mage sight. The gift of mage sight was something different. It was an ability she’d learned to use only after being trained alongside human mages. It would allow her to assess the girl’s mage powers after looking over her physical form with the heat vision that came to her from birth. What she saw when she completed the transition made her fear for her patient’s life. A magical malaise covered the young woman’s whole body from head to toe. This one was threatening to kill her long before the effects of winter would push her body to deteriorate from the bite of the frigid air and cold snow.

  The malaise looked like black nodules, throbbing as they took nourishment from Ciardis’s body and depleted her core. Carefully, Maris prodded the nodules in Ciardis’s body where golden lines from the young woman’s magic were seeking to fight off the illness. The golden lines circled each black nodule in a swirl pushing at its mass as they tried to contain the virulent darkness, but she watched as one after the other the gold swirling lines were drained into the black nodules—much more quickly than she would have expected. Ciardis’s magic wasn’t strong enough to combat whatever the malaise was. As she rose out of her healer’s state, she opened her mind to Ciardis’s mage core and couldn’t halt the hiss of anger which escaped from her lips.

  The girl’s core looked like a tiny button when it should have been twenty times that size, even for the lowliest of mages. Maris pulled back and wrapped her mind around the fact that this young woman was suffering from magical exhaustion. It was a very rare day when the depletion of a person’s magic extended so far that their body shut down in an attempt to counteract the strange void of an essential part of the body: the mage core. It would explain why she seemed to have such a severe reaction to the winter’s cold when she had only been outside for minutes. Maris sighed and flicked her ears. The girl had depleted her mage core doing who knows what. Or someone else had depleted it for her—a much more depressing thought.

  Deciding that the best action would be a healing sleep, she firmly but gently urged Ciardis to go into a deeper sleep. One that would prevent movement of her physical form and even dissuade mental activity, including dreams. She watched carefully as Ciardis slipped into a dreamless darkness where her mind would float free of worries. As she observed her progress Maris continued to renew her patient’s body strength, replenish the power source, and smooth the frayed edges of the depleted mage core as best as she could.

  “With enough rest and plenty of care, the girl’s core will revive itself,” she muttered to herself.

  “Ciardis,” came a deep baritone voice from behind her. “Her name is Ciardis.”

  Turning slightly, she looked at General Barnaren and snarled in anger. Maris wasn’t feeling too kindly to the fact that Barnaren had been the one with the girl before she came. If he was responsible for her ill health even the gods wouldn’t save him from her fury. She was feeling protective of her patient as a healer should. But more than that she felt furious. Furious that someone had depleted this poor girl’s magic and it had happened under Barnaren’s watch. Maris’s teeth were bared as her lips curled back from long fangs and the orange slits of her cat eyes glinted with fire.

  The general had fought wars and slew many men on the battlefield. But even he froze in the face of that threat. The tent was too small to back farther away even if he had been so inclined. He was too proud—even in the face of an angry chimera. He looked nervous with beads of sweat forming on his forehead. Maris was one of the best healers in the land, with an implacable nature and a quiet efficiency. But it was well known— a chimera, when angered—was unstoppable. She, like all of her kind, looked like the white tigers of the north, and at times acted like it. Fiercely independent and skillful hunters, chimera were silent and deadly adversaries. Tales were told and all ended the same way – one didn’t encounter an angry chimera and live.

  And Maris was definitely angry.

  Her snarl echoed in the small tent as she barely held back the urge to claw him to death.

  “I have known you a long time, Barnaren, which is the only reason why you do not lie curled on the ground with your entrails spilling from your open gut,” she said.

  Coldness leeched into his eyes as he faced down the deadly healer who towered above him. She wasn’t in a blood haze – her eyes hadn’t turned red with deadly intent nor had her claws fully descended. But it was close enough, and he would be a fool not to be well aware of how many of his men it would take to kill her if she descended into the blood haze. She would kill without thought or regret
for as long as another opponent came forth. All in an effort to protect the young, unconscious girl lying behind her on a cot. With Ciardis helpless and the chimera healer stepping in as her protector, they would all be in danger.

  “How could you allow her to be drained?” she demanded, “We may be losing this war, but we have never descended to such vileness.”

  “I didn’t drain her. Neither did any of my soldiers,” he said with an assessing look at the sleeping young woman on his bed.

  “Then who did?”

  He had to know that she would hunt down any person he named. If they were anywhere within the vicinity of the camp, they were a threat to everyone in the camp. Stealing the power of mages was a deadly offense ever since the Initiate Wars and was punishable by death under the laws of the court of the magistrate. Even if they weren’t nearby, she could probably still find them. Chimera were excellent hunters and trackers. Snow and ice were no deterrent.

  “She transported herself here,” he admitted. “From where, we don’t know, but obviously wherever it was that she came from it wasn’t good.”

  Not mentioned was the fact that Ciardis’s ability to just appear in the midst of their camp was a security breach of epic proportions.

  Maris rescinded her claws. She could smell the truth on him.

  “We must find who drained her. This kind of magic isn’t legal for a reason.”

  “We will,” he said with steel in his voice that promised retribution.

  Maris turned back to her patient with a flick of her tail. “Out.” It was a command, not a request.

  He hesitated.

  “She needs to be given ointment,” she said as she cocked her head back towards him with gruffness in her voice. “You will not be able to speak to her anytime soon.”

  He nodded and exited the tent, intent on speaking with his subordinates. As he left, an attendant arrived carrying the brazier with water. Irritation flowed through the healer’s veins at the long wait.

  “Put it at the foot of the cot,” the healer said with a glance over at the attendant. Before she could snarl at him she noted with approval that the attendant had taken the time to heat the packed ice until steam rose from the confines of the pot. That was good—it would make her treatments much quicker.