Betrayed by Magic (The Baine Chronicles #5)(70)

“Well, look at you,” Rylan teased. “First, you’re engaged to the Chief Mage of Canalo, and now you’re the proud owner of an airship. Moving up in the world.”

I rolled my eyes at him, smiling.

“That sounds great, Com. I’d love to see it.” I’d hire an instructor to teach me how to fly it too. After all, I didn’t want the task-force missions to be the only occasions when I got to travel around the Federation. Now that I had time and money, I wanted to see the world. And hopefully, if everything turned out well with Noria, I’d be able to take her and my other friends along with me.





28





I didn’t have a whole lot of time to think about Noria’s upcoming trial the next morning—I was back to work in the Mages Guild as an apprentice. Now that I was Iannis’s fiancée and he’d given orders to include me in all magical tasks, I was no longer doing paperwork for the Agricultural department. I actually got to spend the morning out with one of the maintenance crews, checking on the various spells that helped regulate the city’s water and sewage systems. It was educational, if rather gross at times, and I came back with a healthy appetite.

Unfortunately, Fenris wasn’t available to tutor me in Loranian in the afternoon—he had an appointment somewhere. So I found myself in my rooms, studying my primer and getting bored out of my mind that I wasn’t doing any actual spellcraft.

“Screw this,” I said, closing the book and tossing it onto my side table. I wanted to practice some magic! Closing my eyes, I tried to recall some of the spells I’d recently seen, figuring if I could remember the Words well enough, I could recreate them.

The image of a glowing ether pigeon popped into my head, and I opened my eyes with a grin. That was perfect. I’d seen both Elnos and Iannis use magic to create the glowing magical birds that could be used to send messages. They seemed really useful and fun, and I wanted to try my hand at making one.

Grabbing a piece of paper and pen, I sat cross-legged for a moment and tried to recall the exact Words. I checked them against the primer, but unfortunately, at least half of the incantation’s Words weren’t in there, so I had to guess at those as best I could. Oh well, if I didn’t get the spell right, then it just wouldn’t work. It wasn’t like I would blow up the Palace.

Would I?

“Whatever,” I grumbled, scanning the Words again. Iannis had safeguards set up around the Palace to prevent that kind of thing from happening. Besides, I was ninety-nine point nine percent certain that I had the incantation right.

Taking a deep breath, I focused in on the glowing ball of energy in my center that was the source of my magic. Since Iannis had taken the seal off it completely—a seal I now knew had been set by Ballos, not my father—it was much bigger, and I had to be careful not to draw too much too fast.

Once I was certain I had a good hold on it, I held up a palm and spoke the incantation.

Wisps of magic floated up from my palm, twisting together to form a glowing blue ball. The ball rose higher and higher into the air as it slowly shaped itself into a bird, and I grinned. Yes, it was slower than the other times I’d seen the spell performed, but it was working! My grin faded as the shape kept changing, the feathers growing longer, the beak becoming much bigger and more hooked than that of a pigeon…

“Oh shit,” I breathed as it fully formed into not a pigeon, but a parrot. An honest-to-Magorah f*cking parrot.

“Oh shit!” the parrot squawked, perching on the footboard of my bed. It cocked its head at me, then swiveled around to regard me with one glowing eye. Damn, but it looked incredibly real—I could see each individual feather cover its glowing body, and man did the claws curling around my footboard look sharp! “Oh shit!”

I groaned, flopping back against my pillows. “No!” I whined at the parrot, flicking my hand in a shooing motion. “This is wrong. You’re not supposed to be a parrot! Just be gone already.”

The parrot cocked its head to the opposite side, then vanished in a flash of light. I let out a sigh of relief that I hadn’t had to resort to using magic to get rid of it. Clearly, I’d been a little too optimistic about my memory of the incantation. I was lucky my pigeon had turned into a parrot and not, say, a hippopotamus. Those things were mean as hell, from what I’d heard, not to mention downright huge.

Oh well, I thought, curling up on my mattress. I might as well take a nap until my lesson with Iannis. With any luck, he’d never find out about this little incident.



After our usual warm-up exercises, Iannis took pity on me and offered to do some combat training. We suited up with magical armor, and with Fenris acting as referee, we launched into three-minute rounds of magical combat. As in our previous mock fights, we stuck to fire and ice, but this time, we added shielding to our arsenal, which enabled me to deflect Iannis’s ice blasts.

Of course, I quickly found out that since he could also do the same, our fights devolved into something more like a match of tennis, with the two of us bouncing balls of fire and ice back at each other.

“This is so frustrating!” I shouted as I shielded against another ball of ice. “What is the point of doing this if we’re never actually going to hit each other? Why do mages even duel in the first place?”

“Good question!” Iannis shouted as he lobbed the ice ball back at me. I shot a fireball at it to melt it, then another one directly at his head, hoping to catch him off guard. No such luck; he simply bounced it back at me again. “Mage duels are difficult and frustrating, and should never be undertaken without good purpose.”