True Warriors Sing by Rowan Erlking (classic book list .TXT) 📕

He took another step down. “You’re a wizard.”

LjuBa stiffened. “I am not!”

His laugh answered her, popping out with complete disbelief. Jonis shook his head, striding over to his wife. “Then what was it that you just did back there?”

Stalking back to Ljev with a slight stomp, LjuBa snapped, “It was just a song! We sing it every night!”

Nodding, Jonis smiled though it was more of a secretive knowing kind of smile. “Yes, I forgot that the KiTai were that kind of people. But normally, as I understand it, that song requires that you walk around the structure in a certain order, touching the cardinal points.” He tilted his head, his smile turning into a smirk. “You didn’t do that.”

S’vjeTa and SoFija always did what he said. They were sticklers about it. But the song always acted for LjuBa without all that walking around. It was the song that mattered, she told herself, though in her gut something felt off. It made her tense.

“You don’t know that song is magic, do you?” Jonis said.

LjuBa blinked, her face flushing. Ljev averted his eyes, pulling his arms across himself. Jonis seemed to smile more at the pair of them, shaking his head.

“You are a very big skeptic of magic, as I recall,” Jonis continued, touching his wife’s shoulder to tell her something. Tia nodded and then whispered to her children, urging them to go upstairs. The older child helped the younger one, both rushing off.

“Magic in human hands is evil,” LjuBa replied. She saw his annoyed eye-roll at that. “I don’t expect a demon to understand.”

That made Jonis laugh more, looking to the sky. He folded his arms. “Honestly, you are a hoot. I can’t believe how ironic all this is. But, lady, you are a wizard. And that means magic is stuck with you whether you like it or not.”

“I am not a wizard!” Her hands balled into fists.

Jonis merely tilted his head. “It is nothing to be ashamed of. I told you I know a great man who is—”

“I don’t do magic!” LjuBa felt her side for her sword but then realize she had left it next to the chair. She walked over to get it.

“Don’t do that,” Jonis said with warning. “I don’t want to have to kill you.”

Ljev rose immediately.

Jonis shook his head at him also. “I told you. I’m a retired soldier, and neither of you aren’t wearing your belts now.”

LjuBa drew her sword anyway. “I don’t need luck to dispatch a demon.”

“Luck?” Jonis walked to the wall, plucking off a huge two-handed sword of the finest craftsmanship either KiTai warrior had ever seen. “Your belts don’t give you luck and neither do those songs of yours. Every last one of those songs is a magic spell, from that structure spell you just sang to that hate-ward you wear. Do you want me to demonstrate?”

He then scraped the ground around him with the tip of his enormous blade, spinning on the ball of his foot, saying the very words to the luck song for putting on belts. Then he called the end word as if it were a command. Looking up to LjuBa, he tossed out his sword.

“Go ahead. Try to kill me.”

LjuBa looked to Ljev whose face had fixed on Jonis in a frown. However, he nodded to LjuBa to try it. Marching up to the smug looking demon standing in the circle scratched into the floor, she raised her sword. Then she glanced at Tia who this entire time was still watching the clothes wash, only looking slightly concerned.

LjuBa lowered her sword to the ground. “Why aren’t you worried I’ll kill him?”

The corner of Tia’s mouth curled up into a smirk, her blue-eyes sparkling. “You can’t kill him. In that ward he is safe from about everything except goles and walking corpses, and that is because they don’t feel pain.”

Hearing that LjuBa stepped back from Jonis. But then it crossed her mind that it was lie, so with the flat of her sword, she swung at Jonis just to smack him for being impertinent.

Like hitting bent tin, her blade bounced off, sparks suddenly deflecting into the air. The force of it nearly threw her back.

LjuBa staggered.

Jonis nodded. “You see? That’s what your belt does. Every time you put it on, you are performing a magic spell.”

“No.” LjuBa swung harder this time, using all her strength.

But the rebound was equally hard, so hard that Ljev rushed to catch her when her sword clattered down. He said, “Jonis, why did you say she was a wizard?”

Sighing, Jonis made a gesture as if to erase the spell he had just cast. He stepped out of the circle to fetch his sword. “Because, only a wizard has the natural ability to make nature do things without following all the rules to spells.”

“I am not a wizard,” LjuBa repeated, now feeling her eyes burn with tears. “I don’t do magic.”

Setting his hug sword on the table, Jonis approached her, shaking his head. “Magic is an intrinsic part of what you are, lady. And you have to square with that some day.”

She reached up to hit him with the sword again, but Ljev caught it, shaking his head at her.

“But how does that magic work,” Ljev asked, pulling her closer to him so she would not move.

Jonis blinked at him. “You believe me.”

Peeking at her, Ljev nodded, much to LjuBa’s surprise. “I’ve witnessed things….”

Chuckling, Jonis nodded with a look to LjuBa who pulled away from the pair of them. He said, “I don’t know how her specific wizard skill works, but most wizards can either hear, see, smell, touch or taste the flow of our world. That’s what’s unique about them. My wizard friend can do it all, which makes him the most powerful magic user in the world, especially since he’s been studying magisterial skills for a long time now. But if she hasn’t noticed that she is different from everyone else, I’d say it is a minor, yet tappable, ability.”

“Stop it!” LjuBa shouted at them, setting her hands over her ears. “I don’t do magic!”

“Really?” Jonis smirked, leaning back. “Then answer me this, when you saw that gole, was there anything odd about him that told you he was a demon? A repugnant odor? Or a knotted flow that you can see? Or a dissonant sound?”

LjuBa stiffened. She then glanced to Tia who unconsciously maintained that minor key tone about her movements.

Jonis looked to Tia also then nodded. “I see. It is most likely sound. That explains your affinity for song.”

But LjuBa jerked away, shaking her head. “No. I don’t do magic.”

He chuckled with a slight tilt to his head, his bright eyes flickering like a ripple of light on water. “But you hear it. You hear it everywhere. That’s right…I remember. All the world is singing for you.”

She ran out of the house.

Halting in the yard with a desperate look around at the darkness, she could hear the songs of night coming on. Somewhere in the trees she detected slight dissonant noises, like claws scraping into wood. Beady eyes stared back at her. The dissonance was demons?

“LjuBa!” Ljev ran out after her, catching up. The song in his heart thundered like drums, beating a tune like a war march, one prepared to defend in battle. He reached out, trying to pull her to him but she shoved him back with one hand. “LjuBa. Please. I’ve been trying to tell you—”

“I won’t believe it,” she said through his teeth, her eyes fixed on the ground. “I’m not some wizard. I don’t do magic.”

“The KiTai life is magic, LjuBa,” Ljev replied.

She turned to stare at him. “What?”

Nodding, Ljev sighed. “It is what makes our people more civilized than the others. Our people embraced the ways of magic ages ago, so much that we are no longer aware of it. It was the wicked magicians and witches we cast out, not magic.”

LjuBa stood back from him. “You are not making any sense! You’re saying magic isn’t evil but that those that practice it are? At least that demon believes in the magic users the same as he believes in magic. His commitment at least isn’t hypocritical!”

Groaning Ljev set a hand to his head. “No! You are not comprehending what I said. It was the wicked magicians and witches that were cast out. Not the good ones!”

Her body went rigid. “What?”

“You heard me!” Ljev shouted.

LjuBa saw Jonis emerge from the house, standing in the doorway, just watching them. This witness to their argument made it all the worse.

Ljev said, “I said the wicked ones. I wasn’t describing magic users as a group. When you learned about the end of the those magic users in your lessons, wasn’t it clarified what the good ones were now called?”

LjuBa felt a shudder go through her.

Sighing with another shake of his head, Ljev said, “The king keeps a council of wise men, they’re called doctors.”

The doctors? The king’s royal doctors were magic users? LjuBa felt sick.

“And what of the herbalists in the villages?” Ljev asked, his voice tense. “That is the true name of witches.”

Dread sunk into LjuBa’s chest, clenching her heart. She shook her head. “No…”

“Yes.” Ljev frowned at her. “I respect your family, but your father failed to clarify that one important detail, misleading you especially.”

“No,” LjuBa murmured, her heart thumping with pain.

“He was afraid they would make a mistake if you came to them about your heart, because that is what happened to your mother.”

She shook her head. “Mother died giving birth to our brother. They both died.”

Ljev peered into her face. “The herbalists were unable to stop her blood loss. Your father told me.”

Looking up at him, LjuBa stared. “He told you?”

Nodding, Ljev frowned. “Yes.”

“Why didn’t he tell us?” LjuBa felt tears rolling down her cheeks, her heart hurting more.

She hunched over suddenly.

“LjuBa!” Ljev caught her, then called out to Jonis. “Can you heal her?”

Jonis already jogged over, reaching out to feel LjuBa’s pulse.

She felt even weaker by his touch and for a second thought she was going to die, her heart tightening. However, the Cordril suddenly made Ljev lay her on the ground. He forced the front of her robe open, setting his finger to the center of her chest.

“Sing the words, LjuBa.” Jonis’s voice echoed above the pain as she felt a strange surge of energy stroking her skin. “Sing them after me.”

He then spoke words, beseeching Jodis of the north to bring his cooling hands, talking to Temis of the east to bring suppleness and flow, then asking the southern god Klodil for stability, and then finishing with a plea to the western god, Hanin, for robustness and strength. He then begged them all to heal her heart so that it would beat for many years to come. But he finished with a command as if ordering them—“Heal.”

LjuBa sang the words.

In her chest, the sensation was like no other. As if Jodis had stroked her heart to calm it, as if Temis had made her blood flow correctly again, as if Klodil had made it hold together again as it ought, and as if Hanin had suddenly given her strength to last forever, LjuBa felt her heart beat completely true for the first time in her entire life.

Jonis rose and stepped back. “Take her upstairs where she can rest. She has been under a lot of strain, which is my fault. I should have realized such news would be a shock to her.”

LjuBa blinked at him, his eyes glowing in the dark like little lights. And as Ljev heaved her up in his arms, cradling her to his chest with the thump-thumping of his steady heart nearly beating with hers as he walked back to the inn, she stared at the Cordril that just saved her life. Jonis was peering up at the trees, his expression darkening at every demonic undertone around them