“It’s simple. To lead Kaon Warriors, it’s necessary to defeat one in a personal battle. They will follow no others but a victor.” His smile spread.
The idea of the fat man standing in front of me, the one a full head shorter than any Kaon Warrior, and a man who had never been taught to fight, if my guess was correct, defeated one of them struck me as unlikely. Unbelievable, was more accurate—and it must have shown on my face, because his smile turned into a chuckle, and then to a belly-laugh.
Obviously, he’d fought and won. It didn’t seem possible until I reconsidered. Large bodies and training are normally a winning combination, but there was also guile and ruthlessness to consider, qualities the Slave-Master had in excess. I said, “We’ll enter the city at mid-day, I heard you tell Kendra. Before then, we need to know what is waiting for us.”
He said, “The slave-blocks, of course. You’ll be sold to a man who owes me a large debt. He’ll have his people escort the lot of you to his home, which is in the center of the city. I’ll wait for you there.”
“Wouldn’t it just be easier to deliver us to him and avoid the rest?”
“Kaon is a city full of eyes and spies. Any actions out of the ordinary are reported. Then people disappear.”
We talked late into the night, all of us sitting in a tight group beside the shore of a lake, planning for the morning. Ducks splashed, there were too many mosquitoes, but bats were doing their best to eat as many as possible. A soft breeze blew off the water, cooling the accumulated heat. There were no boats or other campfires within sight. We were alone.
It appeared the Slave-Master had it well planned, and the wealthy buyer would meet with Elizabeth and plan her next moves. She felt if we could manage to gather several of the wealthy merchants into our cause, we might stand against the Young Mage.
The discussion went back and forth, examining each detail in minute fashion to make sure nothing went wrong. Flier was nervous. I asked him why.
“Because this mage is supposed to be so smart and powerful, is he really going just let us walk into his city and defeat him?”
He had a point.
Anna came into my mind, giving me a small mental touch of warning, first. It was the polite thing to do, and I was about to compliment her on the creativity when she barged into my head like striking me with the butt of a sword. *He’s here. She’s here.*
*Who?*.
*Look at me!*
It was not like Anna to speak to me harshly like that, with words or mind-speak. I turned my head slowly, dreading what I’d find. It was worse than anything expected, or that I’d seen before. At Anna’s side sat Emma—a familiar small smile twitching at the corners of her mouth.
My feet and legs acted of their own accord. I found myself standing and backing away as I pulled my sword free. With the first of my actions, the others turned and found Emma. All leaped aside, revulsed and scared.
Emma cackled a small laugh but remained sitting, her small legs crossed. She said, “Hello.”
“You!” I managed to grunt, completely taken by surprise. For all the good it would do against an apparition as thin as smoke, I held my sword higher, defensively. The only good thing was that from Anna’s warning, I’d thought there would be two enemies. Anna hadn’t known how or what to call Emma.
“Yes, it’s me, my family. Did you really think you would be allowed to come here and kill me so easily? I have watched every step you’ve taken, listened to your every word. If you scratched your behind or spoke ill of me, I watched and listened. I know you. All of you.”
It looked like the little girl Emma, the waif we’d rescued, but the voice was cruel and slightly off. The eyes were as flat as iron.
Kendra moved a step closer to her. “What name do you prefer?”
“Why do I care what you call me?”
Kendra was not about to be put off. She displayed her open palms in a gesture of goodwill and said, “We know you as Emma, but you are also who we call the Young Mage. I want to reason with you.”
“You want to kill me.”
“No, that isn’t true,” she said in a calm voice. “Remember the day we met? The terrible storm, one you probably created? I want you to think back to that day and remember. We gave up our horses so you could ride. Later, Damon took you in his arms and protected you from the storm until we reached shelter. Remember?”
“You didn’t know who I was.”
“You’re right. But we still took you in and protected you.”
“You believed I was a little girl,” Emma snapped in a voice dripping with anger.
Kendra took another step closer. Her tone was imploring. “We did. If you had been a small boy, we would have done the same. Can you deny that?”
Emma’s image flickered for the briefest moment as if the Young Mage had lost his concentration. Then, the voice became harsher and louder. “I came for you. I was going to kill you there in Mercia but decided to wait until your princess showed up so I could kill her at the same time. I enjoyed watching her plan to sign a treaty with Kondor—when I ruled it the entire period. I laughed at your efforts, and now I’ll spit on your graves.”
*Emma’s hiding something.*
I agreed with Anna’s silent statement. Worse, he sounded like a spoiled young man who had never been required to learn self-control, much like a few princes at home. He was threatening to kill us, but he—as we saw him—had no form. No substance. How could he kill us if he couldn’t touch us?
The quick answer was that he couldn’t. I sent a thought to Anna, *He’s also scared of something.*
He couldn’t touch us in his present form. He’d admitted he could see and hear us, probably because he knew us so well and how to do it. In the form of Emma, he knew of our strengths and weaknesses, as well as our location at all times. That line of reasoning also revealed how the Slave-Master’s people knew to attack us on the mountain pass, and how the small army knew where we were a few days ago. How the army knew Elizabeth was on the ship. He had told his servants, in some fashion.
Thinking back, he’d also known where the Gallant sailed and where to blockade it so Princess Elizabeth nor we could proceed to Dagger. The army in Vin knew our location and had nearly captured us. The Young Mage had been behind all of it.
I realized all those things in an instant, but the central question remained. Two of them, I realized. He wanted us killed and had tried several times and failed. The first question was obvious. We wanted to stop him. The second was as Anna suggested, what was he afraid of?
I touched Anna’s mind, *What is he afraid of? What is he hiding?*
*It’s not you. I think it is Kendra but don’t know why I think that. It’s just a feeling.*
I pulled away from Anna and allowed my thoughts to churn like water behind a rock in a river. It spun around and went in all kinds of crazy directions, none with a purpose other than to eventually reach the mouth of the river and flow into the ocean. The water acted erratic and went off course here and there, but always returned to the main objective. It had to reach the ocean.
Instead of fighting it, I went with the mental flow until stumbling onto a different stream of thought. From the Young Mage’s standpoint, what was his purpose, his objective? Killing us was a symptom. There was a reason behind it that caused him to want to kill us.
Anna’s words came back to me. He’s hiding something.
My mind, like the river of thought I paralleled, changed direction and took a wide turn. The Young Mage had taken control of Kaon, Kondor, Dagger, Vin, Trager, and almost Dire. There might be more kingdoms farther to the south where he’d done the same. He was greater than any king in history. He controlled the mages and members of four or five Councils that ruled the former kingdoms, and with a few words, he could combine them into the most powerful kingdom I’d ever heard of—with the largest army, one that could march into Dire as if we had no army, which was almost true.