“I don’t think that Xavier had anticipated that we would need to walk back,” Rowan told her sister.
“He should’ve known. He knew what was going on here.”
“I doubt it,” Laric said. And he did. He had no real reason to believe that Xavier would think there was going to be anything like that happening. The only thing he thought Xavier knew was information about the strange relics that had been brought out of Korthal, but had he known anything more than that?
Maybe something about the dragons too. If that were the case, then Laric wanted to question him about that as well.
“My feet hurt,” Malcolm said. “My back hurts. And I still can’t get the stench of the dragon burning people out of my nostrils.”
“I can’t either,” Joselle said. She looked at Laric. “Do we even know who they were?”
“Well, I’m presuming they were mages. But I don’t know.” He glanced over to Rowan.
“I think so too,” she said.
“So now we have more dead mages to deal with,” Iveris said. “We haven’t even talked about the danger of that, have we? We have Talia who’s hiding in the whatever-it-is, and we have Daelon who we ended up killing. Or you all ended up killing. And we have—”
“We didn’t kill Daelon,” Rowan interrupted.
“What? I thought you used some sort of spellcraft form and incinerated him. Are you telling me that you didn’t do that? I was actually impressed by it.”
“That was Malinar,” Laric said.
“The funny little dragon guy?” Iveris asked.
Laric glanced at Rowan. Her sister was really going to be a problem.
“He wasn’t funny, and he was more than just a dragon guy,” he said. “And he sacrificed himself to save us.”
“Did he need to?”
Laric shrugged slightly. “I don’t know. Daelon was pretty powerful, and I’m not sure if we would’ve been able to escape from him otherwise. So maybe?” He thought about what they had dealt with and the power that they had encountered, and tried to think about if there had been any other way for them to have dealt with that kind of power. He wasn’t entirely sure. “I don’t know, though,” he finished.
Iveris scoffed. “So Daelon is gone, but you all didn’t kill him, and now we have three other mages that are dead. Talia is trapped, and we don’t know who else she was talking to, but it’s quite likely that she got herself involved in something.”
“Quite,” Laric said.
“I don’t know—”
“Say. Is that Xavier?” Malcolm asked, pointing into the distance.
A cloud of dust hovered in the air, and within it came the movement of something racing at them.
“Why would he be out here now?” Joselle asked.
“I don’t know. I can only guess because he knew that there was something going on. Or maybe he picked up on something.” Malcolm turned to Laric. “Why do you think he would come out here?”
“I have no idea.”
Laric had expected to need to get to the city to talk to Xavier. He had not thought that the man would come out here for them.
Unless he wasn’t coming out here for them. Maybe he didn’t know what they had been dealing with.
How could he? He’d not been there. Not this time, though he obviously knew of the cave.
Laric focused on a barrier spellcraft form and readied it. He wanted to be protected just in case they were surprised by something else. A part of him wished that he had a better connection to Sashaak so he might be able to reach across that link and find some greater use of power, but he simply did not have anything within that to use.
Rowan turned toward him, as if understanding what he was doing. “Are you worried?”
“I’m not sure,” he said softly. He wished that he had a way of communicating only to her, but he couldn’t perform another spellcraft form while holding on to the one he was using now.
“Do we need to be prepared?”
“I think we should always be prepared,” he said.
She was quiet for a moment, and then Laric felt pressure behind his ear as she began to create her own spellcraft form. He didn’t know which form she chose, but he appreciated the fact that she was willing to simply do it without questioning.
As that power blossomed around him, he waited. Then he noticed that what he thought was a caravan coming at them was just a single wagon with a pair of horses. Seated on the wagon, guiding the horses, was only Xavier. Not the rest of his team.
Laric stepped forward, and once Xavier caught sight of them, he drew the horses to a stop.
“There you are,” he said, flicking his gaze around at all of them. “Just you?”
“Who else did you think we would find?” Laric asked.
“Don’t play coy. I…”
“You what? You knew something had happened? If you did, I’m curious how.”
