Rowan bent a look on him. “What was that about?”
“Used to work with an Advocate on a regular basis,” Mage Tobitt explained on a long groan. “But after we split up a few months ago, I’ve avoided working with him. He’s apparently floundering and making a mess of things in my absence. Thisisn’t the first time someone’s stopped to yell at me. Miss Collins was a previous client we helped together, and it seems she paid him for another job and, well, you heard the result.”
“But it’s not a mess of your making.”
“Well, true, but I do feel bad for these clients. They went to get help, after all, not a bigger mess.”
Still, it wasn’t his fault nor his responsibility. Rowan barely knew his new colleague, but he didn’t like Mage Tobitt being caught in the fallout of someone else’s idiocy. It didn’t seem at all fair.
The mage sighed dramatically and listed to one side of the bench seat, smoothly returning to the eccentric man Rowan had first met. “My hero! Thank you for coming to my defense. I don’t always know what to say, and at my core, I’m a people pleaser.” Mage Tobitt shot him a brilliant smile from his bent position, a vision of pure radiance.
His smile did something funny in Rowan’s chest. The flip-flopping of his heart was something he had never experienced before, not even with past lovers, few as they were. Then again, he’d never had so beautiful a smile directed at him before. Gods, this was a powerful feeling, having someone happy with him. Some primal part of his hindbrain started plotting how to elicit this pleased reaction more often.
Shaking off the thought, he suggested, “Let’s continue. Before someone else recognizes you.”
“Great idea. The sooner I can leave this mess behind, the better.” Mage Tobitt sat up straight once more and got the cart in motion.
Rowan went back to leading them—the only sensible way to handle the uptick in traffic—but he kept a much sharper eye on the man following along behind him. Just in case. In the meantime, the little mage busied himself by whistling once more. Eventually they were away from the main throng, thecrowd drastically thinning as they reached the outer city limits. Once they reached the hard-packed earth that formed the wide northern highway, Mage Tobitt smoothly maneuvered the cart alongside the warhorse and began chattering away.
“So tell me about yourself, about Gravegarde, all of that. I don’t know a lot, other then you’re one of the areas frequently needing mages? For some reason?”
Hadn’t anyone properly briefed him? “We are. Gravegarde is one of the Bastions of Ascos.”
“I’m not following.”
Rowan glanced at him in surprise, but the mage seemed genuinely confused.
“Haven’t you heard tell of the Bastions of the north?” Rowan asked in disbelief.
Mage Tobitt shrugged, hands fiddling with the reins. “I knew there were more fortresses up north, and they once had some kind of man-eating creature problem, but I’ve always lived in the southern part of Ascos, so I don’t know much.”
The gap in his knowledge surprised Rowan. All the other assigned mages, inept as they were, seemed at least aware of the Drachifel.
“Mage Tobitt—”
“Pshhh. You can drop the formalities. Call me Milo.”
“Milo”—Rowan’s tongue wanted to savor each syllable, but he pressed on—“were you not briefed on this assignment?”
“I maaaay or may not have tuned them out.”
Right. “Just in case, we’ll start from the beginning. As you may already know, there are well-guarded fortresses all along the northern coastline. Each fortress was built to battle a specific creature—the Drachifel. Gravegarde was one of the first of these fortresses erected in the country, in fact. The Drachifel—or man-eating creatures, as you referred to them—have nests all along the northern coastline, as they like to burrow in theunderwater sea caves that plague the cliffs. Try as they might, our ancestors found it impossible to completely eliminate them, so the fortresses have remained occupied to at least keep the Drachifel in check. The term Bastion is derived from the defensive structure surrounding each fortress, but the word has been used in more recent years as a title of honor. My family has been managing Gravegarde for generations. Alongside the other fortresses, we help to prevent the rest of the country from being overrun with these pests. Your predecessors helped with this task by bolstering our ward”—barely—“and I can assure you, the Drachifel are still very much a threat to our borders and not some creature of legend.”
Rowan rarely found himself in a verbose mood, so his wordiness surprised him. He glanced in Mage Tob—ahem—Milo’s direction, somewhat worried he’d just scared the mage off the assignment.
But instead, he got an “Ooh, bitch, this next year just got a lot more interesting. You said they’re water dwellers, right? Now that you’ve said the name, I think I remember studying something about them at the academy, but I’ve slept since then, so refresh my memory.”
“Water dwellers, but they can come up on land.”
“Shit. Uh, and to clarify, even with magic handy, eradicating a nest…?”
“As I said, they dwell in the underwater caves.”
“Got it. So unless we grow gills, we’re not going to be able to eradicate the nests. Magic can’t sustain proper oxygen levels for long, after all. Phew, your fortress needing a ward now makes perfect sense. Soooo I’m going up to do just the ward, like the other mages? But now that I’m hearing you, it seems like the bare minimum. I mean, I can fight the things, for sure—”
Rowan’s hope rose once more. Could the gods really have sent them a high-ranking mage who could also fight?
“—but generally speaking, no one asks me to fight. It’s kinda mean. I want to bonk, too! But no one looks at me and thinkswow, let’s take him into battle. But, excuse you, I placed top of my class for offensive magic. Well, not that I get to use it much. Anyways, what was I saying again? Oh, right! Surely you don’t only need me on the ward.”
