Weeks passed without anything of real consequence happening, and that was just fine by me. I spent most of the journey practicing my swordsmanship, and was certainly spoiled for chances. With my growing physicality following the siege and other events, I’d become potent enough in combat that Gruiin now lost to me eight or nine times out of ten. This pissed him off nicely, and impressed everyone else.

  I’ll admit, I enjoyed myself. The one thing that pathetically irritated me about it all was that Il’vanja didn’t seem to much care how well I was performing in my bouts with the Grynkori, and I’d become rather infatuated with her. Entirely for bad reasons, let me be clear.

  She was entirely uninterested, which won’t surprise anyone who knows the first thing about aelfs, and mostly kept to herself. A few times, though, I was able to coax her into sparring with me, if only for practical purposes.

  “It’ll help me see how you move,” I said, “make us better at fighting alongside one another.”

  Il’vanja didn’t look to have an opinion one way or the other, but she nodded anyway and agreed. We gathered quite a crowd around us as people eagerly flocked to watch who’d come out on top, then the bout began.

  I’d been hoping to make an impression on her and earn some respect. Stupid, that. She began the bout by lunging forwards, scoring a touch before I was even able to start moving. I just stared, unable to quite believe what had happened while all the onlookers whooped and jeered. Il’vanja stepped back, patiently awaiting me making my next move.

  So I did, but more cautiously now. It wasn’t that she was faster than me, though she was certainly not slower, as much as that she just seemed to always move in the exact perfect place. Wherever my sword was, she almost pre-emptively wasn’t. I felt at times as though she’d written up some choreographed script for me to follow ahead of time.

  But I had certain advantages too, namely a superiority of strength that was great enough for her to not even be capable of parrying me. She was forced to exclusively dodge my swings, and the more she did that the more chance I had to try and work out some pattern to her evasions. That much was proving difficult though.

  Because Il’vanja was easily the most skilled fighter I’d ever encountered.

  There’s several grades for combat ability, and the first one is total amateur. The gap between that and someone with any significant amount of training is night and day. I’ve seen trained swordsmen last entire five-minute bouts without taking a single touch just from standing and parrying when sparring with those who’d never wielded a sword before.

  Most people know that much. What they don’t know is that there’s a similar gap between someone who’s just trained and the top echelons, the people who have world-class technique and experience applying it. And that day I learned that there was yet another gap separating fighters like Il’vanja from even them.

  Even without the ability to do something as basic as parry me, she was always one—no, three—steps ahead from my blade. I tried to catch her with it, to box her into one part of our makeshift arena or the other. No matter what, she just slipped away. Her second touch came before long.

  The match ended in a big uproar of laughter as I found myself just as thoroughly humiliated as Gruin had been, perhaps moreso. The aelf didn’t seem to take even a scrap of pleasure in having done so, though, just backed away from me without so much as a glance as if she’d merely accomplished a minor chore.

  My face burning, my hands trembling, I did my best to retire with what dignity I still had left. Only joking of course, I was a young man. I stormed after her in a fury and demanded answers.

  “What the hell was that?!” I snapped as I followed the aelf. She irritated me further by being completely unimpressed before my display of manly rage.

  “You wanted to spar with me, now we have done so.” Her answer was not exactly contemptuous, but it needled me. Something about it. Like she’d put in the precise minimum amount of energy needed to respond to me, like I was worth no more of her effort than that.

  Aelfs have many skills that humans do not, but emotional intelligence is far from among them. Most children are better at handling feelings.

  But then most children have an advantage over the aelfs. They have feelings of their own.

  “How did you move like that?” I demanded. “I’ve never seen anything like it, you were using Thaumaturgy?”

  “My people do not use Thaumaturgy,” she told me, “we wield true magic. Which, I will inform you, I do not have as great a mastery over as your question implies.”

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  I was somewhat one-track at that stage, and was interrupted at the peak of my belligerence to hesitate, consider, and then ask.

  “What is true magic?”

  What can I say? Wielding Thaumaturgy myself had gotten me over much of my superstition, and taught me how useful a tool magic can be. The idea of aelfs having some other, better kind of power that warranted the term ‘true’ while Thaumaturgy did not was something that needled me, but not as much as the thought of mastering it myself excited me.

  “Your kind are unable to understand,” Il’vanja told me abruptly. That’s the thing with aelfs. They don’t really feel things. They can understand emotion intellectually, can calculate around it and account for it as a variable, but empathy is beyond them and working with the feelings of others doesn’t come as naturally to their kind as it does to ours.

  People think they’re arrogant, which is wrong. They just don’t see any reason why pointing out things they’re superior at should annoy anyone else, and consider it the offended party’s shortcoming when they do.

  Maybe they’re right.

  “Fuck you,” I snapped, proving the aelfs exactly right in their general attitude towards humans, “how can you know that?”

  Il’vanja was not patient with me, she simply lacked the mental equipment needed to register impatience.

  “Because I am familiar with humans and what your minds are able to withstand, this is far beyond that threshold.”

  I was still a little shit and far from happy to be told as much, but I at least understood that I wouldn’t be getting more from the aelf through tantruming alone. I breathed, controlled myself, and decided to try another approach.

  “Then can you at least share some insight into what you know of Thaumaturgy?”

  The magical ability of aelfs was well known enough that I didn’t even think to question whether it was real, but in this particular case my ignorant assumption had been a coincidentally right one. Il’vanja nodded crisply before she answered me in as complete a way as I might have hoped for.

  “I know some, though not more than your current teacher is likely to. My kind do not have much use for that particular craft due to our minds being able to channel the substance of primal magic more directly, it was mainly created as a crutch for the less arcane nature of human cognition.”

  My teeth were grinding and my temper fraying. Conversation with an aelf gets grating fast, let me tell you, and it was a damned good thing my history with Gruin, Devyne and Morlo had already prepared me for tolerating even more infuriating people than this one.

  As always, Il’vanja just stared at me with her blank expression, waiting patiently for me to continue speaking.

  “Do you know anything that might make me better at using Thaumaturgy?” I growled through gritted teeth, doing everything in my power not to punch the aelf. Of course, had I tried that, she’d probably have just dodged anyway. That’s the other annoying thing about dealing with them.

  In retrospect, Il’vanja was really quite nice to me. Or rather, she saw a benefit to her short or long term goals that would be attained by helping me with my magic and decided to do so as a result. Over the rest of the journey, I enjoyed advice from a second teacher in the arts of Thaumaturgy.

  Il’vanja knew less technical information than Morlo did, entirely lacking his actual experience of using the art. What she compensated for with, though, was a shocking insight into the depths of magical theory, and, more importantly, a willingness to share her knowledge that greatly exceeded Morlo’s own.

  Granted, at that stage of my training I didn’t get much use out of any of it. I was also a terrible student, lazy and prone to boredom. Il’vanja didn’t really know how to deal with that, meeting it with endless patience which, I fear, only brought out the worst in me.

  But that didn’t mean I wasn’t learning something, and Vara certainly was too. As the time progressed we furthered our already deepening mastery over Thaumaturgy. I began to move onto control of force, while she sharpened her grasp of what was already there. Morlo oversaw our progress with as much grumpiness as ever.

  “You’re learning fast,” he said as if it were information he was reluctant to part with, “I’d estimate that in three months, Kyvaine, you possess as much power as most apprentices of as many years. Vara, your six months will have made you a fully recognised Thaumaturge already if you weren’t a woman.”

  Vara spat at that, which was fair enough.

  “How good are you?” I asked Morlo abruptly. “What are you, a top-class Thaumaturge? Some special rank? How powerful are you considered exactly?”

  Morlo chuckled at that. “Oh, you don’t want to be using me as a benchmark. I have…advantages.” He refused to give any more detail than that, as usual.

  Another week and the terrain changed from plains to mountains. Or, rather, from plains to what we Anglysh people think are mountains. The Foggy Peaks are a shade small by the standards of most regions, though that didn’t make them any less intimidating to me when I saw them for the first time.

  “Everyone stay together,” Morlo advised us as we reached the base, “do you all know what lurks in these mountains?”

  I certainly didn’t, but Il’vanja was nice enough to volunteer an answer.

  “What your kind refer to as ‘wretchlings’, yes?”

  “Yes,” Morlo concurred. “Small things, the wretchlings. And nasty. Takes about five of them to have even odds against a single human soldier, which sounds great until you remember that they usually outnumber humans about ten to one. We’ll have to move fast and quietly if we’re to get through here unmolested.”

  Morlo looked nervous, which was cause for me to feel terrified.

  “Can’t we just go around?” asked Chak, sounding precisely like a man who was being ordered to march through wretchling infested territory by a mad Thaumaturge.

  “We can’t,” Morlo sniffed, “there’s something in here that I need to examine to test a theory.”

  “Will you tell us what this theory is?” Vara prodded.

  “No,” Morlo replied, “now come on!” he hastened over to the mountains.

  Well what could we do there but follow him? I trudged after, hiding my misery more to avoid giving the mad Thaumaturge any satisfaction from seeing it than out of some sense of decorum or dignity. Everyone else, I suspected, was doing likewise. We made good progress in scaling the slope.

  Good progress in marching our way closer to the end. But then that’s heroism for you, isn’t it? Who said it was any fun?

  The idiots writing my songs, I suppose.

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