She had better learn something worth the tedious toil ahead, since further magical travel was plainly out of the question. Velindre sighed and searched for any semblance of a track leading up through the trees. Intellectual curiosity about what Azazir might or might not know had faded in the face of grim determination by the time Velindre was half-way up the steep slope. The hem of her fur cloak was caked with snow and her boots dragged leaden at her feet. Legs aching fiercely, she pressed on, the icy ground slick and unforgiving. She caught at saplings with her gloved hands to pull herself up awkward stretches and silently cursed the bleak rocks breaking through the soil and forcing her sideways to find a clear way forward once more.
As she worked her way down the north face of that ridge and across the valley beyond, Azazir’s dampening magic weighed more and more heavily on the blasts of air she was summoning to clear snow out of her path. She was reduced to fighting her way through waist-deep drifts with no more than the unaugmented strength in her arms and legs. By the time she was at long, long last approaching the foot of the first true scion of the mountain range, the sun was sinking, turning the rocks breaking through the threadbare ground to a cold, steely grey.
Velindre clenched her fists inside her gloves to quell the trembling of fatigue. At least she wasn’t cold. Azazir might have the reach to stifle magic beyond her arms’ length but he couldn’t overcome her innate abilities, whatever his unlooked-for talents. She sighed and pressed on up the punishing slope, the heavy fur cloak dragging at her shoulders.
Half-way up, she lost her footing and fell to her knees. As she did so, her hand landed on a fold of the beaver fur. It squelched beneath her weight. Velindre frowned and stood up carefully. She stripped off her doubled gloves, her suspicions growing hand in hand with hot anger. Taking a double handful of the cloak, she squeezed the fur tight. Water oozed over her fingers. There was a curious glitter to it, almost like quicksilver. She looked for a moment at the bright drops, then shook them off Rather than falling to the ground, the moisture flew back to the fur, vanishing in an instant—all but one bulbous drop which sat on the surface of the dark fur until a blackness winked across it, like the blink of an eye. Velindre tore at the clinging ties of the heavy cloak and dropped its sodden weight to the ground. It was saturated with water, she realised with sudden fury, but not through any normal turn of events. She rubbed a hand over the shoulders of the woollen cloak she was wearing underneath. The cloth was dry and faintly warm with the heat of her body. None of the wet from the fur had penetrated it, nor the thick flannel shirt and sturdy woollen gown beneath. Sitting on a bare patch of cold, dry earth, she fought to pull off the clumsy gaiters she was wearing to keep the mud and damp from her boots and stockings. The leather was grotesquely swollen with moisture, but the boots beneath were still dry, their polish unmarred. She reached for her thick outer gloves and found that they, too, were weighed down with more water than the fur could ever hope to hold without magical deceit. She wrung one out and the water gathered itself on the moss in oval drops, again with an uncanny semblance of watching eyes.
‘That’s a subtle working, Master Azazir,’ she remarked, partly to the motionless drops of water and partly to the empty air. ‘Do you discourage all your visitors like this?’
She stood up, shaking out her thick skirts and drawing her woollen cloak close. ‘Or is this a test for mages, to see if they can do without the conveniences of winter clothing? Believe me, I am more than equal to keeping myself warm without furs.’ As she spoke, the drops of water abruptly ran away to be lost in the frosty ground.
Never mind Dev and his distant difficulties. Velindre gritted her teeth. This contest was becoming one she wasn’t prepared to yield, however good this unseen Azazir might think he was. Drawing on her kidskin gloves with hard-faced resolve, the magewoman enveloped herself in still air warmed with a hint of fire. Abandoning fur cloak, gloves and gaiters, she began climbing again.
Determination drove her on and her spirits rose as she realised she was actually making better progress without the hampering bulk of those outer garments. Then the fire in her spell was abruptly snuffed and the gathering chill of the frozen forest dusk bit through the air surrounding her. Gritting her teeth, she pressed on until a small saddle between two jagged spurs of rock offered a place to catch her breath.
She couldn’t snare any spark of fire. The element was fleeing in all directions from the cold damp now suffusing the air. Frost was already glazing the rocks, visibly thickening even as she looked at it. Dev would have been no use here, she thought inconsequentially. He wouldn’t even have got close enough to learn anything of dragons. In the gathering dusk and chill, that notion wasn’t as comforting as it might have been.
‘My compliments, Azazir. I see you have a considerable mastery of fire, which is all the more impressive given that it’s the element antithetical to your own.’ She stood, listening, but heard nothing. Closing her eyes the better to concentrate for a moment, she wove a denser cloak of air around herself. If she couldn’t warm herself from without, at least she wouldn’t lose any more of the precious heat from within her body. The ground was less steep now and she could walk without using her hands. That was fortunate as she found her cocoon of air under insidious assault, the threads of air weighed down with more and more moisture until they snapped, tearing shreds of the protective magic away. Velindre found herself reaching further and further afield for untainted air to draw into her magic, the effort exhausting her more effectively than the weight of the sodden fur cloak
‘I only want to talk to you,’ she snapped with weary irritation. ‘I don’t see why you should freeze me out like this. Don’t the customary courtesies between mages apply in this forsaken place?’
A sound suspiciously like laughter brushed past her ear. She snatched at a breath of fleeting fire to cast light into the shadows of the trees. She just had time to see that there was no one there before the fire slid out of her grasp with ominous finality. The noise had come from a chuckling brook splashing over a rock-strewn stream bed.
She tried to find the fire again but her search was fruitless. Unease gathered chill beneath her breastbone. Without at least a modicum of fire, the other three elements were cursed to lie inert and useless. That was one of the first things any prentice wizard learned and a circumstance that frequently gave those with an affinity for fire an unwarranted sense of superiority—especially given that fire could be snuffed, which surely made it the most vulnerable of the elements when all was said and done. Velindre gathered her wits, realising that cold and fatigue were making her foolish. She had to concentrate on the here and now, where Azazir certainly gave the lie to any claim of fire’s pre-eminence, in this remote fastness where he’d honed his magic.
Magic that was unlike anything she’d encountered in Hadrumal. That’s what she was seeking. Velindre took two more determined strides onward before she turned back to look at the stream. With winter still ruling these northern lands, it was the first open, running water she had seen there. How much higher was she than those uppermost villages where the miners and trappers were still smashing the ice in their wells of a morning and the brooks were frozen solid?
Then she saw the direction this implausible unfettered water was taking. The stream was flowing uphill to vanish over the lip of the valley ahead. Her mouth fell open, astonished as any ignorant villager. Recollecting herself and narrowing her eyes, she dropped to one knee, stripping off a glove. She pressed her palm to the spongy, mossy turf and concentrated with every mageborn sense within her.