Marcus Greer had been the stable master of the Northern Tower for nearly thirty years. People liked to talk about how much trouble Maziar was, but Marcus remembered when half of the Tower’s current residents weren’t much different—including the Grand Wizard herself. At Maziar’s age, she, too, was just a young foal running around setting the kitchens on fire and flooding the fountains in the back gardens.
While Yulda’s spells and ideas occasionally went awry, she never meant to hurt anyone. She was quite righteous through it all, in fact—she just thought it was funny to see everyone scurrying around like ants from the top of the towers, trying to settle whatever disasters she caused. Marcus supposed that if this were a normal town where magic wasn’t the beginning and end of people's lives, such an act would be considered criminal—or at least problematic—but the former tower master would just laugh it off as he watched her dance in the chaos she left behind wherever she went.
‘This is the Tower,’ he’d said, stroking his beard as he did—and while her reckless behavior was frowned on, it also led to several acts of connection, innovation, and discovery that began the whirlwind that sent her flying to the title of ‘Grand Wizard’ at such a young age. She was a reckless one, but it lent her a confidence that couldn’t be matched.
Unlike most of the casters and commoners that worked in the Tower, Marcus Greer hadn’t forgotten this. He didn’t embrace the wave of negativity that swept over them when the former tower master died in the face of the endless battles against the Darklands, and he saw Yulda lift the Northern Tower to a new golden age. The flames of success may have dwindled in this age of exhaustion and war, but the embers still burned as Marcus saw it.
The young people would fan those red-hot coals Yulda was leaving to them and the Tower would rise to even greater heights.
As such, when he looked at Yulda’s son, Maziar, Marcus didn’t see what other people saw.
He saw the son of the little girl who was once a child of delightful chaos. He saw Maziar, and he knew the apple didn’t fall far from the tree. The boy was far more clever than he let on, and though his abilities to manipulate others was still maturing, most who thought they were standing above him fell prey to becoming a mere puppet in his hands.
It was an important distinction.
Maziar was not Yulda. Where Yulda always felt carefree and determined, there was a shadow in Maziar that Marcus couldn’t quite dare to touch. He supposed it came from his father and his name; the things he didn’t share with his mother—the things his mother had rejected in order to remain who she was.
What went on between Yulda and Duke Kreeth was never made public. Marcus simply wasn’t able to imagine what it would be like for Yulda to be contained in a manor being drowned with etiquette, trapped in tight, fancy dresses, and stuck fighting petty battles of words.
She was a phoenix—explosive and wild with a penchant for coming back from failure with a light in her eyes and fire in her soul. She was not a bird to be kept in a cage.
Born and raised in that cage she’d escaped from, Maziar was different. Well-groomed and well-spoken, Maziar looked like a small animal—or a palfrey, Marcus decided; graceful and handsome, but lacking power and stamina. To others, he made it appear like he could be kept in a cage, but the shadow in his soul never matched his age from the day Marcus met him.
Deep within Maziar’s eyes, a monster slept—a monster he wasn’t sure yet was good or evil, and he dearly wished the other initiates wouldn’t be so determined to poke at it.
He wasn’t sure he’d ever seen a better match between horse and master as Maziar and War, either.
Horses rarely, if ever, frightened Marcus after so many years. Occasionally one would act out in a particularly startling way that would remind him of their inherently wild nature, but it was more the situation he feared, not the horse.
War was different. Marcus wasn’t convinced that War was even a horse. Bright, intelligent crimson eyes, lean, and nearly seventeen hands tall, he was a beast to behold—but just as with Maziar, it was what was behind those eyes that gave Marcus pause, and an uncomfortable feeling came to sit in the pit of his stomach that grew with every new trauma the boy was put through, no matter how small it seemed.
War was keeping score.
If something were to happen, he wouldn’t be the first. The Tower had seen many tragedies in its history—and Marcus was determined to do anything in his power to do what he could to prevent that ending, even if the rest of them wanted to feed him to the dogs.
But why did he feel like Maziar would be the one holding the dogs’ leashes instead?
Brushing out the hair of a friendly appaloosa named Guinea, Marcus was deep in thought when the gate guards started shouting. Guinea’s ears twitched back at the disturbance, but as the commotion grew she became more and more unsettled.
“What’s all this now?” Marcus muttered, leading Guinea back to her stall and tossing the brush onto the countertop by the front of the stable. Hands on his hips he sauntered out, expecting it to be just another one of the prospective students throwing a fit after being denied entrance.
The stable hands had gathered along the fence, with the younger ones standing on the lower fence posts to try and get a better look.
“Get down from there,” Marcus said, picking up the littlest of the boys and placing him on the ground. “You know the rules.”
“But I wanna see what’s happening!” the boy cried.
“Nothing to see there, I’m sure,” Marcus told him. “Go and check the feed buckets.”
The boy kicked the ground in disappointment, but did as he was told all the same. Marcus got the other boys down and off to work again before he walked over with a couple of the older hands to investigate.
He started to worry when he saw the healers rushing past.
The healers wouldn’t come for just anyone.
Maziar, Marcus knew in his heart. Though he’d listened when Marcus told him to take care, Maziar had sped off with reckless abandon. Marcus’s stomach dropped.
Was it already too late?
Breaking out into a run, Marcus and the others encountered a desperate scene at the gates where Yulda was on the ground, holding Maziar’s head in her lap as the healers began to cut off his shirt. The broken end of an arrow was sticking out of his shoulder, just low enough and at enough of an angle that the top of it might have been embedded into his chest.
War was going between angrily stomping at those trying to lead him away and huffing his dissatisfaction in their faces as they tried to calm him, to fully rearing when they tried to separate him from Maziar.
Shaking off the shock, Marcus went up to the massive black destrier, batting the idiot guards away, and spoke in a calm, deep voice:
“That’s enough now,” Marcus murmured. “Your boy’ll be alright. We won’t let nothin’ happen to him.”
War may not have been thrilled, but he quieted quickly as Marcus brushed his nose.
“What happened?” Marcus asked Yulda, his voice cracking.
Struggling with her own emotions, Yulda shook her head in a quick, erratic way. Marlen was kneeling next to her, holding her shoulder to simultaneously support her while also effectively preventing her from going on a rampage.
Maziar, a seventeen-year-old boy who had just gone for a ride to cool his head—her son—was now laying half-conscious in her arms again; this time, he was battered and bloodied. Yulda could scream at the world and set it aflame and it would never be enough.
This was Walden’s fault, she decided. It didn’t matter who had actually hurt him—if Maziar still had his magic, this wouldn’t happen, and it was under Walden’s watch that he lost it—and the man still couldn’t face her to tell her what he’d done.
Why is it always Maziar? she wondered, brushing his hair out of his pale, dirty face. A tear rolled down her face as her body curled over him. This wasn’t a slum. This wasn’t a war zone. This was the Tower, and the roads that she controlled.
“How did this happen?” she managed to whisper to him.
“Lady Yulda…” one of the young healers began. She was a young blonde girl named Avery. “Could you lean back?”
No! Yulda shouted in her head, but she knew the healers had a job to do. Taking a deep breath, she sat up straight and stared up into the mechanisms of the iron gate above her and let the healers do their job.
It’s all right, Yulda told herself as Avery and her master, Nurlos Talar, did their best to help him. Avery was sterilizing and stitching the deep wound the arrow left with slow, careful magic while Nurlos focused on his hand. While Maziar’s chest and shoulder looked bad, even Yulda, with her limited knowledge of healing magic, could tell that he was in danger of losing the use of his hand if skilled and delicate precision wasn’t carefully applied to mend the cut tendons and damaged muscles.
She, of all people, had to maintain her awareness and rationality. She, of all people, couldn’t find those responsible without some semblance of justice to support her.
She knew that—but she didn’t have to like it.
When she looked back down, his wounds were largely cleaned, and the healing circles carefully inscribed on his skin were actively knitting the wounds back together. Maziar’s breathing eased, and color began to return to his cheeks.
As her son’s health improved, Yulda’s mood did, too.
“Thank you,” she told Avery as the light from her circle dimmed.
Wiping off beads of sweat, she shook her head with a smile. “I’m glad I could help, Grand Wizard.”
‘Grand Wizard,’ Yulda scoffed. What was the use of being a Grand Wizard when she couldn’t even protect her own blood? This is what they did to her son—what would they do to any other young initiate or more defenseless allies of the Tower who weren’t protected by her walls?
Avery pulled a towel from her medical bag and dabbed Nurlos’s forehead as he continued to work on Maziar’s hand.
“Marlen,” Yulda murmured.
“Grand Wizard,” he responded in a grave tone that was usually reserved for the battlefield.
“How much time do I have until I need to leave for Kvell?”
“A week, my lady,” Marlen reluctantly told her.
Yulda grit her teeth.
A week.
A week was all she had to root out these bastards.
“You’re leaving again?” Maziar’s voice croaked, and Yulda’s eyes shot to his as they stared at her accusingly. Yulda opened her mouth, then shut it again, clenching her jaw tight before choosing her words more carefully than she wanted to.
“I have to,” she told him. His face was so full of pain and frustration that she couldn’t bear to maintain eye contact. “...but never mind that. How did you end up like this, Maziar? Who did this to you?”
“Forget it,” he grumbled, trying to sit up to see what Nurlos was doing. Avery pressed him down, but he still refused to look her way. His eyes, glittering with tears of anger and pain, instead mercifully focused on something in the distance as he waited for the healers to do their job.
“Kvell had a massive breach on the south side,” Yulda tried to explain herself, attempting to absolve herself of the guilt of once more abandoning him. “They’ve requested backup to help stitch the planes’ borders back together.”
“How long?”
“A month. Maybe two.”
Maziar sniffled as he looked over at War. “Whatever.”
“I’ll only be gone as long as I have to be.”
“It’s fine.”
“Maziar, please!” Yulda pleaded softly.
“Seriously, I don’t care,” Maziar said, grimacing. “It’s not like you’ve ever been around.”
There was an uncomfortable silence as the unrelated people around them looked at one another, afraid to even breathe for the risk of making the situation worse.
Thankfully, Nurlos finished his work a few minutes later and helped Maziar up. Maziar stood, stretched, and flexed his hand as Yulda was left to sit on the road.
“As usual, the healing will still take a few days to truly complete—more than usual, considering how deep the wounds were,” Nurlos said as he ran a quick inspection of Maziar’s other injuries. “I wouldn’t go riding again anytime soon, and be wary of doing anything that could put additional stress on your hand.”
“Thanks,” said Maziar gruffly. He moved back over to War and took his reins from Marcus. Head hanging, he went off to the stables without another word. It looked like Marcus wanted to intervene on Yulda’s behalf, but she knew even he wouldn’t be able to change Maziar’s mind.
To him, she was exactly what his father told him she was.
It’s my fault, she knew, letting the tears flow freely from her eyes as everyone else returned to their daily duties.
Marlen draped his coat around her shoulders and squeezed her tight.
“You have a week,” he reminded her. Swallowing, she looked at him. His blue eyes were alight with rare determination. “Make it count.”
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