Chapter 19: The Woods in Winter

The new year had passed long ago on Earth, but our start of the new year was just another day on Arbor. The Arborian New Year started on the first day of spring, the vernal equinox. I chose that propitious day to deal with the alaspore and its master.

I wove a new trick out of something Cor showed me how to do using the wind. I wove a cocoon out of moving air as she had shown me. I was able to use it, as she did, as a method of transportation, but I couldn't become the wind as she could, so I had to teach my cocoon how to hide me within it. In some ways my viewing of the alaspore and seeing, even if only second hand, the layered way it was constructed was the key that led me to succeeding with this trick.

For a week now I had been silently and invisibly accompanying the alaspore back into Norhal and to the keep where it returned each day. Today was gong to be different. Today I would be taking it back, not following it. Cor was again my inspiration for the cage I was going to use to trap the ancient artifact in. Well, part of the inspiration. The gate-like transportation spell that I had seen Seablaze Marco use in Beletara was the other piece.

My trap was layered like Cor's space suit's, with multiple layers of gravity fields, each with a surface gravity approaching that of the sun. In between were layers of the same ruby fire that Seablaze had called forth. I had spent many long hours working on the ability to manipulate gravitic fields without resorting to technological tools, and an equally long time replaying the taste of his spell before I was able to duplicate it. The ruby fire led to a little 'pocket dimension' as I thought of it, and to build it you needed an exit and an entrance to balance each other. Mine were both inside the gravity layers of my trap.

I had to grow as a Wizard to accomplish this, and NeedleThorn had to grow with me. We had bathed together in the pool and I had woven a half dozen of my Moonstones into her crown-in-heart tip. The Moonstones had flowed and warped into a woven core of stone filigreed with silver and gold that had poured, already molten into NeedleThorn's tip, straight from the spring's mouth. Molten metal danced and spun and foamed in the air before falling into the mass of Moonstone and wood. The foam of gold and silver shrank itself into the staff and when the steam and smoke and haze of Magic had faded, NeedleThorn's tip was a complex latticework of stone and wood and precious metal.

I sprung my trap, with Firetree and Cor standing by, and I had the alaspore. Its struggles tugged at my strength, draining me, but I held, and the trap held, and I pulled more strength into myself and then it was time to follow the path back to Norhal. Wrapped in my cocoon of wind, I flew back along the track and to the keep. I duplicated the slight little Magical flicker that signaled the keep's wards. We slid past them unopposed.

The chamber the alaspore returned to was at the top of the keep, an almost cathedral like room, round, with a stained glass dome. There were four guards stationed within it, but they couldn't see me. At the center of the room sat a spidery, cage-like cradle that appeared to be coated in raw gold, rough and uneven, as if it had been grown, rather than constructed. I let my captive slide into the cradle, but with the multiple fields of force and Magic that encircled it, the spidery arms of the cradle tried to snap into place and could not.

I sent my senses into the cradle and saw where and how it was tuned. The cradle had to be attuned to an individual. That individual had to send it and retrieve it each time. With my senses absorbing the inner workings of the cradle - alaspore combination, I suddenly felt an echo from beyond the chamber. The alaspore's controller was coming!

I spat out the four Lightmitter cameras I'd brought with me and once they were clinging safely to the upper reaches of the walls, I sent a wave of sleep at the four guards, and that was a mistake! They had some level of protection provided to them and the need to sleep slid off them, though it did leave them dizzy and disoriented for a moment. Not so disoriented that one of them didn't get off an alarm.

I let my cocoon fade and struck the nearest one with a quick slash from NeedleThorn. His armor made NeedleThorn's new and improved Moonstone tip flare with blue fire, but whatever protection it was intended to provide was not enough, The flare of blue sent him flying against the wall behind him, unconscious.

I used the Gifts a second time and reached into the minds of the three remaining guards and forced them into unconsciousness. I made sure the first one was as equally out of action.

A woman came into the room, slender, with short spiky white hair. She wore a short dress that seemed to be made of frost crystals and had ice blue eyes.

"Who are you?" She demanded. "What are you doing here?"

"There's no need to pretend you don't know who I am, is there?" I answered. "Your little spy here has been keeping you informed of my activities for some time now. I am here because it is time this toy stopped making its trips across the border, so I've captured it and brought it back so that there would be no misunderstandings."

I lifted the alaspore out of the cradle as I said it and brought it through the air to hang in front of me. I reached out a hand and pretended to stroke its invisible leaves. It quivered and clattered in frustration as I did. I moved it back to the cradle and let it go, still wrapped in the layers of my trap.

"The Queen shall hear of this!" The woman blustered.

"As she should!" I blustered right back. "I can assure you Sorceress Glimmer that King Esterhal and his Wizard Firetree are already quite aware of the current situation. And as a gesture of good will he has asked me to pass along his greetings to your Queen, and put you on notice that the next such attempt to trespass on sovereign Midhalian soil will be considered an act of war."

"Well perhaps I'm being a bad hostess, but since you are here without benefit of a declaration of peaceful intent, I don't have to settle for that, no matter what our respective Royal mandates are."

As she said this, the woman waved a hand and a shower of razor sharp ice crystals slammed into the space I had just been occupying. I had jumped as soon as I felt the surge of magic and I was behind her.

"I'd heard you were a master of transport spells." Glimmer said, but her words were a distraction, as fingers of frost and cold swarmed towards me through the floor. I levitated myself several body lengths into the air just as the Sorceress sent a large ice bolt flying towards where I had been standing. It hit the tapestry covered wall and the tapestry shattered like glass. I countered from midair with a blast of sunfire. Glimmer screamed and dodged. While she was distracted I fell back on an old trick from our childhood football games. I began jumping rapidly through a half dozen different spots, in an arc on one side of the room. I gave spot two and spot five an extra microsecond of presence before jumping, and that made those two spots appear to both be me. From her point of view their were now two of me.

A bolt of purple fire split the difference between the two images, hitting the wall behind and sputtering into nothingness.

"An intelligent guess, but not quite right." I said from behind her, just before NeedleThorn slammed into her side throwing her across the room.

She had some sort of defensive layer around her and it flared into life at NeedleThorn's contact and I got hit with a wave of numbing feedback that made my whole body feel like your teeth do when you bite tinfoil. Through the pain of that I felt several blocks of stone hit me. If I didn't have my Arbor-modified Legion armor on they would have probably shattered my spine. I rolled left and got back on my feet. I got myself in the air and lifted myself up towards the ceiling very quickly as another numbing wave of absolute zero ran through the floor. This woman definitely had an affinity for cold effects!

I sent a wave of sound up and into the stained glass dome above me. The glass shattered and a million shards began to fall around me. I let them bounce off my armor, and as they fell past I heated them up and made them molten. Sizzling beads of liquid glass began falling like rain around the Sorceress, and as she screamed and dodged I took one more shot, jumping in beside her and laying a good wallop on the back of her skull with NeedleThorn's heavy tip.

Just like that, the fight was over.

I was still feeling simultaneously tingly and numb from the feedback of that one defensive reaction shot, and the stones that had hit me may have been unable to do any real damage, but my back was sore in two places. I checked on the four guards that I'd left unconscious on the floor. The molten glass that had rained down had done some damage to a couple of them. I spent a couple of minutes doing a little healing there before I turned again to Glimmer. She had managed to shield herself from the molten glass, and the blow to the back of the head was going to leave a nasty lump, but no permanent damage. I sent the alaspore and its cradle back to the tower and then woke the sorceress with a wave of Light. I held her tightly in a kinetic lock as her eyes slowly fluttered open and focused on me.

"I've healed the damage I caused to your men, but the damage to the roof I'll leave to you. Once again Lord Esterhal sends his message through us to Golden Deleste. - Violate the sovereignty of Midhal again and there will be war."

I grabbed my four little Lightmitters from their spots and was gone.

Spring on the coast of Spain was going to be much more pleasant than spring back in the Valley on Arbor. I suspected that Thistle and Starlight would take little notice of the weather, regardless of where they were, as long as they were able to bury themselves in the craft and art of guitar making. The concept of a school of guitar making, with scheduled classes was foreign to both of them. They were much more at home with the master/apprentice approach, so we began looking for a teacher willing to take on a couple of apprentices who would only be available for a couple of months at a time.

The Internet had not proved to be a great resource this time. Those people we found online offering to provide guitar making instruction were seldom doing the kind of one-on-one instruction that Thistle demanded, even if it was going to be one—on-two. In the few cases where it was, the instruction time was too brief or the starting point not basic enough. Anyone who wasn't starting with the selecting of the raw materials was rejected immediately. While the concept of kit building was unknown to either of them, they grasped the idea immediately and rejected it.

It was Formerio Sabarte and his old world connections that found a master that Thistle would accept, near a mountain village called Secastilla, in the Pyrenees, northeast of Zaragoza, Spain. We watched the two of them head off to Secastilla on a bus out of Barcelona. We would be back to pick them up in two months.

We followed that with quick trips to visit our families and check on the Loft in Somerville. It had become the semi-official temporary hub for the IME team until the construction on Nauru was completed. Ren was off on one of her famously mysterious disappearances to wherever that other Midnight lived.

I had a book open and waiting for me when we got back to the Tower called 'The Dragons of the Dawn'. It was time to steep myself in the history and lore of Arbor and really become a Wizard before Arbor discovered that I was just a clever lad with a few tricks.

I had spent my winter dedicated to learning while I waited for kings and queens to dance around the idea of war. I hoped to spend as much of my spring as possible doing the same.

Or perhaps not.

Laying atop my book was a single sheet of paper. When I turned it over I found a picture of a very pregnant woman in a wedding dress. Beneath it was scrawled, 'This could be me!' In Cor's loosely flowing handwriting.

I would have to read the book later. My Damsel was calling.

I brought the alaspore and its cradle to King Esterhal's palace and deposited it in the Royal Repository. I had carefully blanked out Glimmer's imprint on the cradle and I showed Firetree how to tune it to someone. With it safely in our control the King decided it needed to be shown to Princess Redstone and Seablaze Marco. He decided it was wise to invite the High Guildmaster of Westhal and the Shar as well.

The Shar probably wouldn't come, I was told, as they never left Sharhome. The Shar were subterranean Brude, and they kept to themselves in the rugged Urdek Mountains that made up all of Sharhome's territory.

Serene Esterhal decided that since it was going to be a semi-secret meeting, minus all the pomp and circumstance of a public state visit, it was going to mean a social occasion rather than a political one, so she planned an evening meal in the residence for the royal families and their Wizards. I suggested we invite Prince Verity of Lamin as well. Two major trade roads intersected in his small kingdom and it would be an important crossroads if war began to sweep east and south from Norhal.

The Long Ears I had gotten from Dad were still in orbit and still functioning so far. I had been monitoring the Valley's immediate vicinity, but the sensors had been recording a much larger area all this time. Winter and I went back over the recordings, concentrating on the border areas between Midhal and Norhal looking for signs of new construction and activity along the border.

It seemed lately that our lives seemed to revolve around the evening meal table, either ours or someone else's. I had waited in vain for the still of winter to let me sleep in three days in a row. 'A wizard's burden never eases' Firetree had told me once. Apparently the former stuffed shirt from Esterton had it right.

Perhaps the winter gloom had made me grouchy. I had gotten in hours of stick work with Master Jo every day. I had put a serious dent into at least one section of my now decently stocked library. Cor and I spent at least an hour a day on wedding plans. This was the way my winter passed, and so far spring had been marked only by the melting of the snows and the warming of the air, and Cor's more frequent trips back to Earth and Meadow.

I was going to be a June Groom it appeared. Our scheduled commitment to the International Mars Expedition began in July of next year and Cor wanted to be married for at least a year by the time we had to begin that commitment. The entire pregnant bride scenario which had been cropping up recently was just her way of releasing the pressure, because I knew for certain there was no way she'd allow us to have a baby until we were back from Mars. It sure made for fun nights though, so I wasn't about to complain!

Firetree had wasted no time in making use of the jump bracelet I'd given him. He was about to make the trip to Lamin to invite Prince Verity to the meeting. I had asked to tag along, so I was meeting him at the Red Flag for morning meal.

I threw a coin to the boy at the door, intended to pay him for watching my horse, not that I had concerns for Slider's safety while I was inside.

Traffic at the Red Flag may have been severely reduced during the winter, but once spring began to break, the volume and the 'interestingness' of the clientèle went up dramatically. I saw Rose and Bug working the tables with Sunshine behind the bar. Cold air swirled in from behind me and I turned and saw Firetree.

"My timing is impeccable as ever I see." He said with a perfectly straight face. I was finally starting to get a sense of what he found funny. I had originally considered him a bit pompous, which was a mistake on my part. Together we found a table close to the bar so we could say hello to Sunshine while we waited for our meal.

"A pair of Wizards!" She commented with a false sneer. "Must be a wild spring indeed when Wizards have to travel in flocks like geese."

"Come a little closer, barmaid. I've got your goose right here!" Firetree suggested. That had all three of us laughing, and when the laughter died and I had my eyes open again, there was Bug with a bowl of oatmeal and a mug of cintosa for both of us.

"Rose'll be by in a bit with the bacon and bread." Bug said.

"Thank you Bug." I said. "How was your winter?"

"Quieter than I'd like." He said. "But at least I wasn't forced to be a winter layabout like most of the runners. I might even get to stay on the common room duty now that spring is here, once Sunshine has her baby."

Sunshine was extremely pregnant, it was true. She was the type to show early and appeared to be smuggling baskets.

"Sunshine, you are due any time now aren't you?" I asked.

"Yes weaver, any time now. Spider won't let me work more than half a day, the softy!"

I gave her and the baby a quick scan as Doctor Mom had taught me. Of course my Mom being an actual doctor and recognized on three worlds as such meant my idea of a scan had some practical knowledge behind it, especially after she heard of our adventure on the Zadrain Steppes. Sunshine's baby was ready and she was already beginning to dilate, though it was just beginning. A little Light signature tasting told me she was going to be a mom again in a handful of hours.