Raya blinked, and her ankle flared with pain as though she had stepped on it. She cried out and reached along her leg to brace the broken joint. The floor boards beneath her pained body were different, she realized, and her hand paused halfway to her foot. She glanced up.
Raya sat in an unfurnished room, next to Axar, Ailo, Benn, and Dondar. There was a burst of breath from the group, as though there had been silence earlier. It was disconcerting for Raya, because, an instant ago, they had been in the loudly crackling flames of Axar’s house. Now, the plain wooden walls and roughly sanded floor planks surrounding them were quiet, undamaged, and completely undecorated.
“Where are we?” Benn and Raya blurted together. Their voices echoed dully off the walls.
Axar leaned close to Dondar and pressed his hands to either side of the wounded man’s shoulders. Ailo, Axar’s swordsman guard, stood up slowly. The floor was built on the ground, Raya determined; nothing creaked except Ailo’s expression.
Benn gently pulled up Raya’s pantleg a few inches. “How bad is it?” he asked. “Sprained?”
“Broken,” Raya said, wincing. She touched her cheek, smudging the blood there; she couldn’t even feel the sting of the arrow gash along her cheekbone. The only pain she felt was in her ankle. She clenched her teeth. Someone had tried to kill them, and very nearly succeeded. “Where are we?” she asked again.
Axar still did not reply. They fell silent, waiting. Benn didn’t move from Raya’s side, but Ailo casually walked through the room’s only doorway into a likewise unadorned hallway. He would make certain this location was secure.
After a few moments, Dondar’s irregular breathing seemed to ease, and he slipped deeper into a peaceful sleep. His eyes were closed and did not flutter. “He’ll recover,” Axar told them, as the veteran Olston guard mumbled in his sleep. Axar pulled himself across the floor, loudly scuffing the poorly made wooden floor boards, to Raya’s side. He looked at Raya with a grimace. “This will hurt.”
Axar’s warning was genuine. He began to poke Raya’s ankle and she bit her tongue before finding the right position for her jaw to clench. Then Axar grabbed her joint roughly and forced the bones to line back up—Raya cried out, despite her braced muscles. Her voice echoed briefly off the wooden walls and down the hallway, and then her yelp subsided. She panted for breath, but the agony quickly subsided to discomfort. Axar continued holding her ankle, his grip firm but not bruising.
Their relationship had always been one of distance; Raya had first pointed a weapon at Axar, on their first meeting. Then they had agreed to work together, hesitantly. Trust had never really developed, but Axar’s support had given Raya the opportunity to do something she had wanted to—supporting the mistreated people of Ith. Now, they had fallen somewhere dark and isolated, and Axar, once an authoritative schemer, held tightly to Raya’s ankle, skin-on-skin. It made her uncomfortable, in an uncanny way.
For more than fifteen minutes, they sat this way, unspeaking. Axar was focused on something unseen to Raya, while Benn touched her hand once, to get her attention and wordlessly make certain she was alright. When at last Axar released her, he pulled himself to the nearest wall and put his head against it, exhausted. Ailo strolled back into the room, hand resting on his now-sheathed sword.
Raya could move her ankle now, without only some soreness and stiffness. She suddenly realized how exhausted she was. Benn, unaware that they were both trying to recover some modicum of conscious strength, blurted to Axar, “Where are we? What happened?”
There was a small window on the other side of the room, with the plain exterior of another house visible through it. Raya started to stand, her muscles weak and shaky. Axar held out a hand, his short brown hair smoothed back by a little sweat and a lot of stress. “You shouldn’t put weight on it, not yet,” he told her. Raya sank back down onto her backside. “We are in the city of Elpan, and we are safe for now. I purchased this property a year-and-a-half ago, when the armies of Ith first claimed the city.”
“Should I get supplies?” Ailo asked, quietly.
Axar nodded. “And some blankets, in the very least,” he said.
Benn leaned closer to Raya; she could tell by his eyes that he was tired too, but he put on a forced smile and whispered to her, “Will you be fine on your own, for a bit? I think I should help.” Dondar was fast asleep on the floor, providing no security to the duo.
Raya looked at Axar. If he was going to give her any answers, she thought he might be more likely to in privacy. She nodded to Benn. “Go ahead,” she told him. “I’m just resting.”
Benn and Ailo left the room, while Raya dragged herself to a nearby wall, careful not to use her healed ankle. She could hear the door close a few minutes later. There must have been a few other rooms, for the sound was muted. She almost fell asleep, as she sat there, but then looked at Axar, with his eyes closed, and asked, “So what happened?”
Axar didn’t look at her, but sighed and mumbled a reply anyway. “We were attacked and I was forced to use a Journeying spell. Likely, we would have been killed, so I can’t say how long it took before the spell decided when we should arrive here. Months have passed, doubtlessly.”
“What’s a Journeying spell?” Raya asked.
“It brings us from one place to another place, without making us walk all the way,” Axar explained, still resting against the wall. “In ideal situations, the duration of such a Journey is about three-quarters the amount of time it would have taken. That is literal, not rhetorical. If a magician were to travel by foot from the first place to the second, he might be distracted by someone in need of his services, or by a chance encounter with an estranged acquaintance. Such encounters elongate the duration of a Journey spell. But should a magician be meant to die during the time he would have travelled, then the universe has to sort out that chaos. It just chooses a point and pops the magician back into the world there. Or then, I guess.”
Raya rubbed her forehead. So they really would have died in Ith, she realized. Someone had tried, and nearly succeeded, in killing her. But who? “Do you know who attacked us?”
“Not for sure,” Axar said. Then at last, he opened his eyes and looked at Raya. “I suspect they were the revolutionaries we were helping, from what I saw and from their numbers.”
“What?” Raya asked. “Why would the revolutionaries attack us?”
Axar’s face remained blank, unyielding of any opinions. “Somehow, they learned that you were working with me. They are adamantly against magicians, which is why I asked you keep my patronage a secret.”
She wasn’t sure if that was enough of a reason. Would the rebels she had worked with really try to betray her just because of Axar? Raya instead assured him, “Well, I didn’t tell anyone.”
Axar tipped his head back again, eyes closing. “Trust me, we wouldn’t be having this conversation if I thought you had.”
Raya supressed a scoff. She was getting tired of the scheming nonchalance of magicians. She licked her chapped lips and asked a final question. “Were you able to recognize any of the attackers?”
“Too dark, and too many of them,” Axar said, with a shake of his head. “We’ll rest here, recover, and then we’ll determine if it’s even worth trying to follow up on whatever we missed.”
His words rang with a sense of resignation that Raya hadn’t prepared for. She let the phrase hang in midair. She could not remember ever being this tired, and she knew Benn and Ailo would be gone long enough to get some sleep. There were oppressed people and malicious Mage Kings only ten days walk from her home and her family; whatever had happened in their absence, it was still ‘worth the follow up.’