Fast Coach

Getting paid for the wyverns wasn't a problem. Taylor's merchant account swelled, and he had a share of the wyvern skin waiting for him in Bostkirk. On the other hand, the mana crystals were a major issue.

"The governor doesn't believe you. She won't pay for the mana crystals until you meet her." Jane's usual steely demeanor had an extra-sharp edge when she told him. "She has summoned us for an audience."

"We can't sell the crystals to someone else?"

"That would be treason."

Taylor could understand why. They were so dense with mana, they were uncomfortable to hold. The empire used them to create powerful praxes for the military, so their handling was restricted to the government.

"I suppose it's too late to destroy them, so they don't cause trouble."

Her lips quirked up in a rare visible sign of amusement. "Alas, too late. There's a fast carriage in two days. We have tickets."

Taylor spent those days learning concealment spells from Art and Practice. They were subtle things, prone to breaking when he moved too fast. He practiced in the woods behind his house, passing through trees and falling snow with intense concentration. He made a game of sneaking as close as he could to wildlife. He could get close enough to birds to touch them, but the occasional rabbits he found were too sensitive and bolted away before he could get near. He let his stalking take him into areas with people in them, woodcutters and such, and waved hello to them from a distance before fading back into the forest. He thought it was fun, but stopped when one man shouted at him that he was creepy.

The fast coach was a long, sleek vehicle in red and yellow, on oversized wheels, lightened by weight magic and pulled by improbably large chickens. They were shapeless masses of feathers puffed up against the cold, with black button eyes and short beaks on top and legs below. The driver was an old human woman dressed in black, holding a long crop engraved with taming spells.

Most of the carriage was a single compartment with rows of benches, but there were a few narrow private rooms at the front, each with a dedicated door and a single window on each side. Curator Jane and her masked ward took one of the rooms. The coach passengers might be safe from his curse, but Jane wouldn't be, so they awkwardly maneuvered a folded paper screen into their narrow compartment.

They were barely underway when she turned to business. "I'm afraid I have bad news for you. I wanted to wait until it was confirmed, but it's better you hear it now than as a twisted rumor later. The resettlement is in retreat. There was a massive monster swarm, bigger than the empire has ever seen. They've lost the Garem-Da. Your brother died while protecting the retreat. I'm sorry."

She handed him a copy of The Estfold Herald, folded back to display an article:

Retreat In Garem-Da

An overwhelming surge of mana beasts in Garem-Da drove Imperial forces to make a desperate retreat. Complete disaster was barely held at bay by the storied Manticore Company, who bravely covered the main force as it fell back across the strait separating the infested region from Restoration. The action came at a high price for the Manticores, costing the lives of a third of their members, including their captain.

Marshall Idris Prevost said, "If not for the Manticores, thousands of Expeditionary soldiers would have died. The loss of Captain Simon d'Mourne, a prodigy and distinguished warrior, is a particularly grievous blow. The Manticores will receive an Imperial Unit Citation for yesterday's heroic action."

The captain is survived by his father, Colonel Otis d'Mourne, and his sister Cecilia d'Mourne.

— The Estfold Herald

She had other things to say, about how the entire peninsula might be lost and how difficult it was to evacuate tens of thousands of people across water. His father was still fighting, and his sister was safe, but Taylor could only half-listen. His Bilius brain was having a rough time with the news. The boy in his family portrait was dead. He'd seen that face nearly every day he lived in the mansion, and the person it belonged to was gone. Of the four people in the portrait, only half remained. At this rate, he could lose his whole family before he ever met them.

He was quiet for a while, watching snow-covered fields speed by in a blur. Jane left him alone. She pulled thick reports from a black, hard-sided travel case that flared with mana every time she opened it. She flipped through their pages and absorbed them with little more than a glance, which consumed more mana. She kept at it until her reserves began to wane. She was probably half-full, but people who hadn't trained extensively under depletion would start to feel weak and nauseous at that point. Only combatants, or obsessed people like Taylor, trained on nearly empty mana.

By that time, the fields had given way to snowy grassland. He had glimpses of wide-horned bovines traveling in herds, nine feet tall at the shoulder. They looked tough. Sometimes they needed to be culled, but not this year.

"He's just a picture I never met," he said at last. "I should feel more than that for family, but here we are. Is this connected to the reason for our trip?"

"I suspect it is. Mourne was founded by your ancestors. When Estfold was a kingdom, your family head was a hereditary baron. Under the empire's rule, the legature has passed from father to son in deference to tradition. As long as there's a competent son to fill the role, the township's legature will always pass to a d'Mourne. The governor respects that practice except in cases where a family line goes extinct or falls into dissipation. If she tried to break that tradition, she'd have a lot of angry legates on her hands. Maybe a revolt."

"But Mourne just lost its heir. Can my sister inherit?"

"That would be an option in some families, but d'Mourne has long been a patriarchal line."

Taylor shifted uncomfortably. He'd been wrapped up in succession fights before, but never as the focus. "Someone wants to diminish me so I can't be considered for legate. They're hoping Father dies out there, like my brother did, and they'll have a chance to take the empty position. So who is our adversary, do you think?"

"Your mother's family, the Augbergs. Specifically her grandmother, Keeva Augberg. That family controls several townships in Estfold." She pressed her lips into a displeased line. "Your mother was Keeva's pride and joy, her golden child. She was a Battlemage, ranked near the top of her class at the Imperial College, and could have married her way into a governorship or powerful imperial family. But your father won her heart, and she married down. It was only allowed because he's a Commander and a legate. Otherwise, Keeva might have had him killed."

"Let me guess. She blames me for Mother's death and hates the thought of me getting a legature that should go to a decent Augberg. Like my sister, for example. Or, anyone else of her choosing."

"There's a variety of first and second Augberg cousins who could marry Cecilia. The next generation would be more Aubuerg than d'Mourne. That's Keeva's idea of revenge for the death of her favorite: water down the family line until it's just Augbergs."

It was an easy setup to imagine: A windfall of mana crystal is discovered, accompanied by an unlikely story about a boy who kills wyverns. Sow doubts about the story, prove the boy is a liar, and he would never be considered for legate.

"How much does the governor care about who runs Mourne?"

"She wants it run competently, without upsetting the other legates. But, she doesn't want any one family to have too much power."

"Leaving me caught in the middle. Last question, I think. Would Mourne be better off in their hands than mine or Father's? Which is to say, your hands, because you do all the work."

Her displeased mouth turned upward, dangerously close to smiling. "They would most likely keep me on. The Augbergs are a competent lot overall, but the central family earns substantial funds from the towns they manage. It takes a lot of gold to finance Keeva's ambitions. To her, managing townships is an enterprise, and legates are her managers."

"Everybody gets taxed twice. Once for the governor, and again for the Auburgs. They sound charming."

"They are charming. And resourceful, rich, and ruthless. Try not to be drawn into their schemes if you can help it."

They rode in near-silence as the grasslands gave way to a forest of ash and elm.

"Billius, I find I quite dislike you at the moment. Would you mind?"

He put up the paper screen between them, further dividing their small compartment into two very narrow ones. Each side had a cushioned bench with half a window at each end. He lit a small light on his side of the screen to read by.

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He removed his mask and read the book he brought for the trip, a tome on taming magic. If he could have tamed the blue wyvern instead of killing it, he would have had something to brag about. The book was a poor translation of the Mi'iri original he had at home, but he didn't dare get caught reading Spellscript as if it were a normal language to him. The fact that he could speak it nearly got him killed, and Taylor wasn't interested in ending this life early. His situation wasn't ideal, but he had the freedom to train and pursue his interests. He wasn't done with this life. Not yet.

They laid over for a few hours at a station. It was a large establishment set up to handle several carriages at once, with restaurants, inns with rooms to rent by the half-day, a souvenir shop, warehouses, carriage houses, animal pens, and a small community built up to support it all. From there, one could take the wide highway directly to Estfold's capital of Bostkirk or one of three smaller roads leading to the many rural townships.

Taylor passed quickly from the coach to a private dining nook. It had a table and two chairs, a door that locked, and a hinged window above to let in light and air. While Jane collected news from other travelers, he ate alone and listened to the rumble of conversation from the main room. They had a musician who performed off and on, and Taylor felt mana pouring out of him (very inefficiently) while he played. He could sing in two notes at once and create his own harmonies.

Now, that was an interesting skill to have. Why hadn't Taylor ever thought of it? His Bilius body didn't know how to sing, but Taylor knew about overtone techniques. If he combined that with mana-enhanced vocal cords, maybe he could produce four or five notes at a time. He paid his server to entice the singer to his room with promises of alcohol and silver.

The musician was human, in his twenties, and fairly good-looking, probably with some elvish in his bloodline if his green-tinged skin was any sign. Too much wine and time in carriage houses had softened him a tad too much. He tossed his long green locks to one side as he entered and focused his tawny eyes on the masked person before him. He looked disappointed, and Taylor suspected he knew the cause.

"You were hoping for a woman, weren't you? Please, sit." The server appeared and put the singer's preferred drink on the table, to which Taylor added five silver coins. These weren't the tiny ones used for making change, but fat, heavy Imperials. Together, they weighed about a pound.

"I'm interested in your vocal skill. As you satisfy my curiosity with answers and demonstrations, I'll pay you from this pile. Interested?"

The man's smile shone bright enough to dim the moon. "Looks like we'll be good friends! I'll not mind the mask, as I have enough looks for both of us! Owen Linarty, at your service."

"Excellent. I am Bilius d'Mourne. I won't keep you long."

Owen was the proud recipient of the Bard class, level eight, and the skill Taylor wanted to know about was called Multivoice. His Multivoice skill was level six and produced two notes at once. Class information was personal, so that much information earned him a coin.

Next, Taylor asked him to demonstrate his skill without accompaniment so he could observe the flow and activity of mana around him. Then, Taylor pushed him. How far apart could the notes get from each other? Did they have to be in harmony or could they be discordant? What was his full range? Owen started to sweat. He'd hit the midpoint of his capacity, where most people felt the strain of using too much magic.

That earned him two more coins and another drink.

"I might be done, Mister d'Mourne," he said with a shake of his head. His once-flowing hair was heavy with moisture. "I'm close to tapping out."

"This next part doesn't require mana. I want to see if you can learn a new technique, a purely physical one. You seem to have enough control over your vocal tract to pull it off. If you can, I want to know if it affects your class."

In thirty minutes, Taylor taught him throat singing. It pained him, and he couldn't keep it up for long, but Owen could do it. Taylor paid him another coin. The drink was forgotten in the bard's enthusiasm.

"This is marvelous! I can do something unique with this. You want me to try it with my skill, don't you?" He swallowed his drink in a single pull and stood up in the cramped dining space. "Here's an oldie for you!"

He sang a song in not two voices, or even three, but a full quartet all to himself and, on the last note of his verse ("There is nothing as sublime as that flame-haired girl of mine") an additional fifth voice rose from the overtones of the other four.

It had been literal lifetimes since Taylor watched a class level up. His last world didn't have a class system, and he'd forgotten how brutal level-ups could be. All the mana was squeezed out of Owen all at once, and new mana poured into him, suffusing and subtly changing his body, especially around the vocal tract. To the recipient, level-ups could feel like having their brains stuffed full of new books and their bodies set on fire. The strain was too much for a non-combatant, and the bard fainted. He would have hit his head if Taylor hadn't caught him.

Owen awoke later, alone, with a meal in front of him, a pitcher of purified water, and a stack of five imperial silvers in his pocket.

Taylor and Jane sped through a forest dressed in snow, going even faster than before, thanks to the province's main highway. In this life, he'd never spent so many contiguous hours in the company of another person. Though there was a screen between them, her presence was close. Her breath, the rustling of reports, her huff of dissatisfaction when they failed to illuminate her, and the class-driven shifting of her mana were alien companions.

Sometimes, at home, he would wake up late to discover people were already in the house, doing their work for the day. Even though his staff kept their distance, he felt a strange comfort in waking up to them. He was feeling that now, with Curator Jane.

That's why he was procrastinating. The conversation he needed to have with this woman could ruin their present amity, but he would never learn if he didn't start asking questions. He said a silent prayer to Shitukan.

"Miss Jane, may I ask a difficult question?"

She sighed and stuffed her reports into her case. "You might as well. These reports aren't doing anything for me."

"What happened when I was born? There has to be more to it than 'she died and cursed you'."

"I'm sorry, but I can't answer that. I wasn't there. Your mother didn't want anyone but her chosen midwife in attendance. Her friends and family objected, but she insisted. Giver help us, we let her have her way. It's one of my few, true regrets in life.

"You were her third child, and she wasn't in labor for very long. Next thing we knew, she was dead and you were cursed."

"What about the midwife?"

"Gone before we could question her. She was a very old beastkin healer from Rossignol. The most we could ever determine was that she went to her home province, but we couldn't force answers out of them. They're semi-autonomous."

"So the answers to my question are in another province."

"If she exists at all. She was old, even for a beastkin. She might have passed on by now. "

"Then, can you tell me something about my mother? What was she like? How did you meet? That sort of thing."

"I met her at Imperial Academy. She was obviously someone special. She had the Battlemage class, already past level ten, and scored near the top in her entrance exams. She was well-connected, rich, and beautiful. Her minions made sure everybody knew all about her." Jane's voice turned soft as she talked about Mother. "I was just a rube from the provinces, someone who lucked into a Scholar class and wound up at the academy on the off-chance I might be useful for something.

"She had a full-blown faction in school, devotees who sought to curry her favor by pushing down any students who did better than her at anything. She didn't know about most of the bullying, but I didn't know that at the time. Her little protectors wouldn't let me near her, so I accosted her in class directly, in front of everyone. I accused her of all the things her minions were doing and said she was … well, I was very angry and called her some ugly names."

Jane paused for a long time. Was she stuck? "What did she do?"

"The most unexpected thing. She said, 'Oh, you're that Jane girl who thinks she can beat me.' I thought I'd made a terrible mistake, and I was going to spend the next three years paying for it. But then she said, 'It's not worth crushing you if there's outside interference.' She told her minions to ignore me because she wanted to beat me on her own, and she told them to stop harassing everyone else because they weren't worth the effort."

"She sounds like a pain."

"She was! Whenever I did better than her on a test, she would appear out of the blue with a pack of followers and demand proof I didn't cheat. I'd have to show her how to work a problem, or go over my notes and study materials — basically tutoring sessions for her and her cronies. But whenever we had one of these forced sessions, I received anonymous gifts. Money, books I wanted," she patted her travel case, "this case.

"You see, the daughter of the great Augbergs couldn't be seen making nice with a complete nobody. But she saw my value when nobody else would. The Academy thought we were these terrible adversaries, but we were secretly working together. After a year of 'competing' for the top scores in nearly everything, nobody questioned my worth when we came out as friends. Even her minions were okay with it. I had improved their grades tremendously, and they knew it.

"Most people couldn't see it, but we were natural allies. A Scholar and a Battlemage is a potent pairing. When we had the opportunity to explore beyond the empire's reach, we jumped at the chance. Her class gave bonuses for killing new kinds of enemies, and mine gave bonuses for poking into forgotten places. She was … "

Jane's voice hitched and strained against the next words, "a kind woman. And a great friend."

"So the princess attitude was an act?"

"A tool." Jane sniffled away her emotions. "She learned her noble sneer at Keeva Augberg's knee, but it wasn't the way she saw the world. Once she got away from them, we hardly ever saw that face except when she was fighting monsters."

"Thank you. For telling me all this."

"It's little enough for her son." Her usual dismissive tone was coming back.

Taylor wanted to do something nice for Curator Jane, something substantial, on behalf of his mother. But, there wasn't much he could give her that she couldn't get herself, outside of hunting pests for the township. Unless …

"Are you satisfied with your current level?"

"It's not my ambition to increase my level at this point in my life, but I've been at the cusp of forty since before you were born. I haven't received any new skills in a long, long time. I've leveled a couple of skills in the last decade, but that's about all. Barring some catastrophe that puts me back into the field, I'm capped."

He put on his mask and set aside the screen. He wanted her to know how serious he was. "Have you ever considered mana training?"

"It's not part of my class. Even if it was, I don't have spells to use it with." Her smile was very nearly sweet. "I appreciate you wanting to help. Truly, I do. But what you're suggesting isn't possible."

"All right. Let me know if you change your mind." He opened his book on taming magic. "But for the record, you're wrong. Spells, praxes, classes, maneuvers, skills — they're all just tools for using magic. With good mana control and sensing, it doesn't matter what your class is. You can invent whatever skills you want, even if they're not part of your class. You just need to work at it — and discard your crippling dogma."

"Spoken like a budding dark lord. Don't spend your training time on me. Use it for yourself." She didn't believe him, of course. Her entire life was circumscribed by her class. But maybe one day she would listen.

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