Sianim 02 - Wolfsbane

had snagged for her.
    “But there isn’t any farmland there,” broke in a tawny-headed girl of ten or eleven summers.
    “No,” agreed Aralorn softly, pleased that the child had added to the drama of her story. “Not anymore. There’s just an endless sea of black glass where the farmland used to be.”
    She paused and let them think about that for a little while. “As I said, Tam was raised in the small farming village by the priest. When the boy was twelve—the age of apprenticing—he was sent to the king’s wizard for training. By the time he was eighteen, Tam was the most powerful wizard around—except for those using black magic.”
    Aralorn surveyed her audience. “There were a lot of black mages, though. Black magic was common then, and most people saw nothing wrong with it.”
    “Nothing?” asked Gerem.
    “Nothing.” Aralorn nodded. “Most of the mages used the blood and death of animals—if they used human deaths, they kept it quiet. If you kill a pig for eating, its death releases magic. Isn’t it a waste if you take the animal’s hindquarters and throw them in the midden? Why then is it not a waste to leave the magic of its death to dissipate unused?” She waited. “They thought so. But our Tam, you see, was different. He’d been raised by a priest of the springtime goddess—a goddess of life. Out of respect to her, he didn’t sully himself with death.”
    Satisfied that she’d given them something to think about, she continued the story. “Fargus, with the wealth of the gold mines of Berronay behind him, bade his mages ease the way for his armies, and he took over land after land. As each new country added to his wealth, he hired more mages. Even the Great Swamp was no barrier to Fargus’s mages, whose powers only grew as the number of the dead and dying mounted.
    “Now, Fargus was not the first warlord to conquer others using the power of the black mages. A score of years earlier, the battles between Kenred the Younger and Agenhall the Foolish had raged wildly until the backlash of magic had sunk the whole country of Faen beneath the waves of the sea. A hundred years before that, the ravages of the Tear of Hornsmar destroyed the great forest of Idreth with the magic of his sorceress mistress, Jandrethan.” Aralorn looked up and saw several members of her audience nodding at the familiar names. “But it was Fargus’s war that changed everything.”
    “Hallenvale,” she went on, “came at last to Fargus’s notice, and he sent his magic-backed army to fight there. But it was not an easy conquest. The king of Hallenvale was a warrior and strategist without equal—called Firebird for his temperament and the color of his hair. Ah, I see several of you have heard of him. Hallenvale was a prosperous little country, as it had been ruled wisely for generations. The Firebird used his wealth to gather together wizards of his own, including Tam. The small unconquered countries all around, knowing that if Hallenvale fell, their lands would be next, aided him any way they could.
    “A battle was fought on the Plains of Torrence. The armies were equally matched: Thirty-two black mages fought for Fargus, a hundred and seven wizards stood beneath the Firebird’s banner—though these were mostly lesser mages.”
    She let her voice speed up and drop in pitch as she fed them details of the fight. “. . . Spells were launched and countered until magic permeated the very earth. After three days, a pall hung over the plain, an unnaturally thick fog, a fog so dense they could not see twenty paces through it. To the mages, whichever side they fought upon, the air was so heavy with magic that it took more power to force yet more magic into the area. Fortunately ”—she let her tongue linger on the word and call it to her audience’s attention—“there were so many dead and dying on the field that there was power enough to work more and greater magics.
    “Tam, his power exhausted, was sent to the top of a nearby hill that he might get a better view of the battlefield. He did so. What he saw sent him galloping for the Firebird’s personal mage, Nastriut.”
    “Wasn’t the mage who escaped the sinking of Faen on a boat called Nastriut ?” Falhart asked.
    She nodded. “The very same. He was an old man by then, and tired from the battle. Tam coaxed him onto a horse and hauled him up to the top of the hill.”
    She sipped water and let the suspense build.
    “Only a very great mage could