Vassal by Sterling D'Este (ebook reader computer TXT) 📕

They’d be empty now since everyone would be heading down to lunch. “Did you really argue with Master Estan?” she asked. “What if he gives you poor marks for that, and you have to take the class over? You’d be a year behind, and then we’d have no classes together.”

Etienne looked down at Alphonse as they walked, noting her worried expression. He was not ordinarily good at understanding human emotion, but perhaps he had just grown so familiar with her that it had become second nature. “I did argue with him,” he said. “The correct answer was just out of my mouth before I’d realized it was the sort of thing that might make him angry.” His mind was always doing that at inopportune moments, working faster than his mouth or inhibitions could keep up. “I let it go in the end, though, because I knew you’d be upset. So you don’t have to worry.” Alphonse’s lips thinned, but she made no reply.

Shortly, they came to a less used hall, on a lower level than most classes, and usually abandoned because of the ever-pervasive damp. Etienne picked a classroom at the end and swung the door open; they weren’t generally kept locked. As the door closed behind them, he rummaged in the bag hanging from his shoulder and gingerly withdrew a book wrapped in cloth.

“This is what I’ve been dying to show you,” he said, excitement creeping into his voice even though he spoke in a whisper. “I found it! The book I was telling you about! And what’s more, there’s a spell inside that will teach us everything we want to know about the Old Gods and what became of them.”

Alphonse leaned forward to stare at the book. “A spell? They didn’t just write it down, like a history? It’s odd, isn’t it? That the author would go to the effort of keeping a journal, but then only put a spell in it to reveal the truth.”

“Because it’s not a history,” Etienne said, his face breaking into a grin as though he could not possibly contain his excitement. “It’s a memory.”

He paused for a moment to let it sink in since Alphonse seemed so unsure. “Léger’s journal was the key. He had the title, the lengths his mentor went through to keep it hidden, clues to the hiding place. I think he must have been afraid that the knowledge would be lost again due to Seyrès’s paranoia.”

Of course, it still had been lost for centuries, but that was beside the point.

Etienne described the steps he’d taken to locate the book, glossing over the bits that had included an after-dark foray into restricted sections of the academy. Alphonse certainly wouldn’t have liked that.

“It takes two to say the spell, but I’m confident it will work,” he went on. “We could do it as early as tomorrow night, and then we’d know, Alphonse! The secret of the Old World would be ours.”

He could be the first mage at Moxous to truly understand what had sparked the great war. The end of Rhosan. The development of Ingola as they knew it.

❀

She had just stared up at him, amber eyes wide as she listened to the gory details of his quest for knowledge. The product, the grungy little book, hardly seemed worth it. But if it really was from the dark times, if it really had been written when Gods and Goddesses had walked these very lands, ruling with magic and brute force…

It would be the most incredible find in Ingola’s long and proud history.

It would be the most impressive and noteworthy discovery in Moxous’s history too.

And Etienne had done it.

Doubt and uncertainty clashed with pride in her industrious friend, making Alphonse gape up at him, at a loss for words.

He wanted her to recite an old spell to recount a memory of a time so dangerous and volatile historians called it the Age of Darkness? Alphonse shivered.

“Me? But I’m—I’m not even in the Sorcerer’s studies! I don’t know anything about this type of magic, Etienne. I’ll just mess it up, your hard work…” She actually took a step back, head shaking aggressively in denial. Surely he had some other, scholarly friend who could…

But then, Etienne didn’t really… have other friends. Though thinking that about him made her feel guilty.

✶

Etienne laid the book down on one of the desks in the classroom, taking care to keep the linen between the wood and its delicate spine. He slipped on a glove from his bag and opened the book to the pages containing the spell so that Alphonse could see the text.

“Take a look,” he said. “It’s a surprisingly simple incantation, though it clearly calls for two people and a few ingredients. All we’ll have to do is a bit of setting up and then take turns reading from the book.”

He looked up from the pages at Alphonse. “I think magic at this time was a bit more straightforward—fewer ingredients. We have everything we need, just about. And I’ll take care of the rest.”

He was unflinchingly confident in his research and translations of the spell. For all he had come from nothing, Etienne had believed his entire life that he was meant to do something great, something henceforth thought impossible, and now he had the chance to share it with his best friend, the only person that had steadfastly believed in him.

It would work. It just had to.

His apprenticeship depended on it.

❀

“Are you certain I won’t just… Be in the way? Colarie would happily do it…” Alphonse knew how pathetic and nervous she sounded, how much self-doubt she had. But this was BIG magic, no matter how Etienne tried to make it seem simple. It wasn’t.

Alphonse was an excellent healer; she knew that. But that sort of magic just came from within her. She studied plenty, but at the end of the day, she simply was a healer. She laid her hands on the sick, and they became well.

This was so much more than that.

But