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Lars was the first student in his year to be summoned to the apprenticeship trials, and he not only passed on the first try, he broke the previous Shadwood record for fastest trial. After the trial, Ghelda had given him the bow between Sorcerers and told him it was an honor to be his Envoy.
The results were publicly posted on the academy signboard within an hour, but Lars got his first congratulatory visit before that, when Delphine dropped by along with Gregor. Lars ignored Gregor’s blatantly obvious jealousy and took the opportunity to invite Delphine to the celebratory meal he was hosting that evening at the Blue Raven.
He invited a careful selection of other students over the course of the morning, only those of acceptable rank and academic standing, of course.They met up in the grand hall once afternoon classes finished before heading out together. He relished the envious glances as he and his entourage left the campus grounds.
The Blue Raven lived up to its reputation. He was too young to order alcoholic drinks but Lars still felt a heady excitement as he sipped his cold pomegranate juice in between bites of saffron chicken with sliced almonds and fried cardamom dumplings drizzled generously with date honey.
Of course then that imbecile Adrian had to ruin it.
“I heard the slave girl has also gotten her summons,” he said. “Before half a dozen more qualified of her betters. It’s sad to see what the Academy is coming to these days, with the Empress’s absurd policies.”
There was only one slave girl he could be talking about. Lars felt the meat turn leaden in his mouth.
“There’s no need to discuss anything so crass right now,” Delphine said, giving Adrian a look, before deftly turning the conversation towards other topics, but it was too late. Lars felt his appetite desert him.
It was common knowledge that the slave swordsinger had come from his household. There had been no hope of suppressing the news, when two other students had come to Shadwood from Ghalarah and knew how matters stood.
It was a mere trifling on-dit at first, when the slave girl didn’t have the decency to drop out within the first week, as many former slaves did once they received their token.
But then the results of the first round of tests came out, two months into the year.
Lars was easily the best sorcery candidate in his year, a result that surprised no one. His performance had been expected to be outstanding ever since he’d broken the measuring metric on the initial talent screening done when he was eight.
But Rhen, absurdly, had somehow hoaxed the teachers into believing she was the best swordsinger candidate in hers.
From that point onward the trifling on-dit became the hottest gossip of the year, a source of endless entertainment particularly to those students who disliked Lars and his otherwise uncontested supremacy over the rest of the student body.
In every test and competition leading up to the trials Rhen had kept pace with him, every step of the way. Instead of being able to escape his association with her, Lars would occasionally overhear some commoner student talking about “Rhen and Lars”, the two genius students, as if they were on the same level, as if it wasn’t beneath his dignity to be mentioned in the same breath as her. The humiliation of her name surpassing his on the overall ranking lists had him studying late into the night and cramming magic drills into his free periods, and even that hadn’t been enough to leave her in the dust.
It was well known that Shadwood culled their students during the novice period. If you couldn’t make it through the apprenticeship trial, the Academy had no further interest in you.
But there was no expectation that every apprentice graduate. The Academy supported life-long apprentices as well, students more interested in devoting themselves to research and study than to seeking out a deed of great bravery so they could graduate to the exalted status of full-fledged Sorcerer or Swordsinger. People still spoke about the apprentice sorcerer Shara, who had remained an apprentice until her death at the ripe age of one hundred.
Lars had no intention of following her example. He was going to accomplish a worthy deed and graduate, and become a sorcerer of great renown, not a humorous footnote in the Academy’s history. All he needed to do was find the right deed.
Of course he’d already planned how he would accomplish that. As a member of the empress’s extended family, even if he was only 179th in line for the throne, he had the right to attend court. So today he was going to invoke that right, and then listen in on the petitioners to the court. People came to the Empress with problems of national significance, and he just needed to spot the right one for him to apply his talents to.
He was contemplating the delicate glass mosaics adorning the audience chamber, waiting for an interesting petition to arrive, when she came. The realization that she must have passed her trials this morning had little time to register, before he saw her going directly up to the Empress. It was audience hours, and none of the guards stopped her.
Lars edged closer, and was able to hear every detail of the conversation that followed, in growing horror. They were discussing something about his useless slave girl being “the chosen one”? Had the empress gone mad? And who was the terrifying white-haired woman who appeared and vanished using magic within the Empress’s own castle?
He had come to find a lead for a worthy mission, and to present himself to the Empress. Somehow Rhen had swooped in yet again to steal his glory. But he wasn’t going to let her, not this time.
“Find a companion to take with you,” the Empress said, and Lars immediately stepped forward.
“I will go with her.”
Rhen jumped as if she’d been scalded, and then turned to the empress. “No! Please, Empress, anyone but him!”
The Empress looked at Lars, really looked at him. He could feel her gaze piercing down to his bones, and he forced himself to stand even straighter under it.
“You are still a student, Lars,” the Empress said.
Lars resisted the urge to point out the same was true of Rhen. “I am one of the strongest magic wielders in the Empire, even if I am still an apprentice,” he said.
The Empress pondered his words before giving a small nod of her head. “That is true. Extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures. You can go.”
Rhen, the uncultured boor that she was, gave an audible groan. Lars flashed her a smile.
Lars hurried back to his room to pack. It wasn’t long before Rhen arrived to fetch him.
She was visibly steaming mad, and he enjoyed the sight of it.
“Why did you offer to come with me? Insist, actually! You hate me, remember?” she almost shouted.
“Poor Peta, you just don’t understand, do you?” Lars said, in his most condescendingly pitying voice. “I could not let a slave girl complete such an important quest unaided.”
Rhen looked like she was about to punch him. Lars reached out and patted her on the shoulder. “When I become High Sorcerer of the Academy, I will make sure that no slave trash ever gets into the school again.”
She slapped his hand away from her shoulder.
“And when I become High Sword Singer, I will make sure that slavery is banned,” she spat. “Now let’s go. We have a job to do.”
She turned and marched out of his room, slamming the door behind her.
They made their way through the forest with no great difficulty. Occasionally palm-spiders would drop down from the trees, and there were a few feral chickens, but nothing that posed a real challenge to two qualified apprentices from Shadwood. Lars and Rhen fought them off without exchanging any words– Rhen seemed dead set on ignoring Lars’s presence entirely. Lars told himself he was more than happy to have no need to make conversation with a former slave, but he couldn’t resist trying a few jabs anyway. It made no difference – Rhen simply hurried on without so much as looking at him, and the priestess who was accompanying them gave Lars a look that made him feel uncomfortable despite himself.
It was almost evening by the time they reached the shore, and the ferryman who took them across the Channel told them that they’d caught him just before he’d planned on closing up for the day and heading home. He lived in Thornkeep, and was willing to accompany them along the snowy paths back to his home, since it was on his way already.
“Well, Peta,” Lars said, after they checked into the inn for the night. “What a fascinating day this has been. I’ll see you in the morning.”
“Mm,” Rhen said. She was looking around her and seemed to be thinking about something, but Lars wasn’t interested in knowing what it was, so he went off to wash up and go to sleep.
The next morning dawned bright and early – far earlier than Lars was accustomed to waking, but he smothered his irritation and gave Rhen the brightest of smiles when she came to wake him.
“Good morning, Peta,” he said.
Her eyes narrowed but she didn’t say anything.
They made a quick stop at the stores to buy some more food and warmer clothing, and then left Thornkeep to make their way to Aveyond. The fierce storm Lars had heard from within the warm walls of his room in the inn the previous night had passed. There was only a gentle drift of light snowflakes and the occasional rumble of the ground.
They didn’t know how much further it was to Aveyond. The priestess was no help, unable to guide them with any more specificity than the existing signposts near Thornkeep. She said that things had changed since she had last been in the waking world and the land was now unfamiliar to her. The truth was that the priestess gave Lars the creeps – she seemed more than half in a daze most of the time, rarely speaking, and he frequently caught her walking after them with her eyes closed.
Outside of the safety of Thornkeep they encountered danger almost immediately. There were feral oxen wandering around on the snowy ground, and they could hear the occasional wolf’s howl echoing in the wintry air, somewhere not too far away.
Rhen wanted to avoid the beasts, insisting that they stay cautious. Lars could only sneer at her pathetic cowardice. He wasn’t afraid. He was excited– excited to be on an adventure, excited to be off campus grounds, excited to let loose the full force of his magic, watching it rip into the slow-moving oxen, the red glowing light in their eyes dying as they fell.
“We don’t have time for this, Lars,” Rhen said, after he detoured off the path once more to take down yet another one of the beasts.
“I know what I’m doing perfectly well, Peta,” Lars snapped. “The practice helps strengthen my magic.” He had a few light injuries, but nothing too serious, nothing to stop him from continuing. And he wasn’t interested in taking orders from a slave, whether she bore the empress’s token or not.
To make sure she understood that point, he marched off through the snow away from her with rapid strides, leaving her and the priestess behind. At her pace they would never get to Aveyond, but he didn’t need to let her slow them down, he was more than capable enough of clearing the way for them all by himse–
There was no warning before the first snow wolf pounced. It appeared out of the snow as if from nothing, its white coat perfectly blending into the surroundings. Lars fell under the weight of it, felt its jaws close over his already injured shoulder. The fangs penetrated his leather armor and penetrated his skin almost to the bone, the pain catching Lars off guard so that he momentarily forgot how to cast Shock.
With a shout, Rhen was on top of the wolf, her sword flashing. Its head fell to the ground, fangs stained red with blood.
“I had it under control,” Lars snapped, furious at her interference.
“Shut up,” Rhen snarled. She wasn’t looking at him, was in a careful combat stance, her eyes focused behind Lars.
Something in her eyes made Lars hold back his nasty retort– how dare she tell him to shut up? Instead he turned to follow Rhen’s gaze.
And saw the six other wolves, closing in.
The priestess arrived after Rhen, her long robes dragging in the snow, and Rhen danced her way back to her, trying to protect her.
“Come here, Lars!” Rhen shouted. “We need to fight together!”
Lars ignored her. The humiliation of stumbling into an ambush, the humiliation of Rhen saving him, it was too much. He held his staff with his uninjured hand and cast, and cast, and cast, until his whole body was trembling violently from his magic reserves being overdrawn. The throbbing pain in his shoulder was matched by the throbbing pain in his head, the whole world starting to go brightly fuzzy at the edges. A snarling wolf crouched, preparing to leap, and he struck it with a blast of fire, the air filling with the smell of singed fur, and then something was dragging his leg forward, almost pulling him off balance, and he didn’t have time to wonder how the wolf had gotten past his guard when Rhen was there, again, her sword flashing.
“You stupid, useless idiot,” she snarled, shoving an aquifolium into his hand. He took it and drank it automatically, the action instinctive. “I can’t guard both of you this far apart–”
Lars saw, as if in slow motion, the wolf leap. He saw the priestess crumple. Something funny was going on with his head, so that sound came too slowly, the awful thud, Rhen’s scream. The priestess’s body lay limp on the ground.
Rhen was charging at a dead run, and her sword pierced the wolf’s flank and kept on going, throwing the wolf off the priestess’s body.
Lars, his mana renewed, dispatched the remaining two wolves. They were surrounded by carcasses, blood steaming in the snow. Rhen pulled herself up from the wolf, freeing her sword from its body. Nothing moved. There were no howls from the distance, no rumbles from the ground, just silence as Rhen wiped the blood off her sword. Lars cast a healing spell on himself, the pain in his shoulder immediately lightening to a gentle ache.
Rhen knelt down by the priestess’s side and felt her neck for a pulse. For several seconds Lars forgot how to breathe.
“She’s not dead,” Rhen said. “I think she’s fallen into some kind of protective sleep. We need to bring her back to town.”
Lars felt a relief so overwhelming it choked him, but it was immediately followed by other, less pleasant emotions.
“You should have stayed guarding her,” he said. “This is your fault for interfering with me, Peta.”
Rhen looked up at him from where she was kneeling by the priestess’s side. Something about her expression made Lars take a stumbling half-step backwards, as she rose in a single fluid motion to her feet.
“What was that?” Rhen said.
And Lars could have– he could have apologized, he could have thanked her, he could have tried to brush it off, but the priestess was lying there with her face pale and the shame and the helplessness was too overwhelming and he needed something to reassert control, reassert normalcy, reassert–
“You heard me, Peta,” he said, and braced himself for Rhen’s outburst, some angry rant he could argue against.
Instead he got a punch to the face.
He was completely unprepared for it, and fell backward, landing hard even with the cushioning of the snow.
He put a hand to his face, feeling the tenderness of the skin.
“You– you hit me!” He said.
“I’m about to do it again,” Rhen said, and stomped down, hard, on his stomach.
He scrambled to stand up, reaching for his staff, but Rhen used the scabbard of her sword to whack his hand so that the staff tumbled from his nerveless fingers. She kicked it out of his reach, and then, crouching down next to him, she slammed his head down into the snow, so that he gasped and inhaled a mouthful of the stuff.
He choked and flailed, while Rhen kept a firm grip on his hair, her knee pressing into his back, her other arm holding his hands behind him. His legs kicked against the ground but he couldn’t get leverage to shove her off him.
She waited several moments, until he stopped moving, and then used her grip on his hair to none-too-gently force his head up out of the snow.
“You know, I realized something last night,” she said, almost conversationally. “We’re not in the Empire anymore, Lars, are we?”
He spat out ice from his mouth. He could taste blood.
“I’m not a slave anymore. I don’t need to listen to you, or otherwise get beaten. Talia says I need companions, so I’m stuck with you. But I don’t have to put up with you any more, do you understand? You can stop acting high and mighty around me.”
“You– you’re c-crazy,” he stuttered.
“I’m not crazy,” Rhen said. “If I was crazy, I’d be talking to you about how easy it is to hide a body in all this snow. People wouldn’t find you until the next thaw, and who knows when that would be? But I’m very, very nice. I’m so nice I’m giving you a warning. Talk to me like a human being, Lars, not like a dog.”
She gave his head a little shake.
“Do you understand me?” she said, voice poison-sweet.
“Yes,” Lars ground out.
“What’s my name, Lars?”
“R-Rhen,” he said.
“Okay,” she said. “I’m glad we had this little chat.”
She stood up and brushed her hands off on her pants.
“I’ve been wanting to do that ever since you told your mother I ate those cookies,” she said. “The ones you decided to sneak before the party. She gave me ten lashes for it, did you know? And I didn’t get anything to eat that day.”
Lars staggered up, breathing heavily. He glared at her.
She held out her hand. “Now let’s call us even,” she said. “Pax?”
He hesitated. His head was throbbing, painfully. He wanted revenge, he wanted–
He couldn’t help himself, and gave a little snort of self-deprecating laughter. Revenge. Right. She’d saved his life twice in the past hour, after he'd given her no reason to want to do so. She was right, he was a stupid fool. And he remembered lying about the cookies. He hadn’t known about the beating that came after, but he could have guessed, if he’d spared a moment to think about it. He hadn’t, because he'd thought she was beneath him.
He held out his hand, clasped hers.
“Pax,” he said.
Rhen gave him a little half-smile, just a quirk of her lips. Then she walked back to where the priestess was still lying in the snow.
She lifted the priestess onto her back with a single effortless motion.
Later they would defeat the hind, later they would get their Sorcerer and Swordsinger tattoos together, both of them drunk as was traditional, later they would return to Ghalarah and Lars would watch his mother bow, low, to Rhen.
Later he would find her, in the house they bought, and ask her forgiveness.
But that was later.
Now, Rhen turned to him, one hand supporting the priestess to keep her from falling.
“Let’s get going,” she said. Lars reached out and stuck his arm under the priestess’s shoulder, balancing the weight between them.
“Okay,” he said.
And they went.