The Summoner

Chapter 2: Rescue

"The Knights are dead," Kaylen said.

"It is unlikely all of them were killed," Elon corrected.

"But they might as well be," she said with growing heat in her voice. "Any that survived are too smart to reveal themselves. They will believe the request for aid a trap."

"The Order were not the only ones capable of summoning."

"The blades were lost."

"Night sits before you."

"And Shadow? Where is she?"

The wizard did not answer.

"You don't have her, do you? Do you even know where she is? Where to look? King Halemon had the blades rounded up and disposed of and the men who did the job silenced. Did he give King Yulon a location? Because Atolin is huge and there is no guarantee he even let them to remain in the kingdom."

"Are you quite finished?"

Kaylen glared at her master but forced her mouth shut.

"Good." Elon looked down his nose at her and suddenly it felt like she was back in his workshop having misplaced wolfsbane for turit root in one of the healing salves or having chalked one of her dreadfully common and ill-received swoops at the end of what was supposed to be a straight line in her spell runes. How many times had she seen that look growing up?

"We do not have Shadow. Nor are we sure where she is. But the king was able to locate the wife of one of the men charged with their hiding. He did not say what he was doing or where exactly he was doing it, but he did tell her he was traveling to The Wilds."

"Look around you!" Kaylen swept out an arm to encompass the forest. "The Wilds is hundreds of miles long and the deadliest place in the realm. We cannot just traipse around hoping we stumble over them!"

Elon glared right back.

"He also said he'd check in on her cousin and see the new baby and that he'd be gone a moon. So we know his general direction. There are only a few places the king would have thought a suitable imprisonment for what was left of the Order that stole his son." That I-am-being-reasonable-and-you-are-not tone of his was making Kaylen's blood flame like a phoenix on a bender.

"And if you are wrong? If the king just wanted it done with and ordered them tossed in the depths of the wood?"

"Then all is lost and the king and the army are as good as dead!"

That hit her like a bucket of cold water.

She still wanted to shake her master but her temper banked enough for her to realize that most of the embers were fear. She was afraid. Afraid of why this group of royal soldiers crossed a kingdom to find her. Afraid of what her master was leading up to asking. And most of all afraid of how much she wanted her master to ask her to take the sword.

She couldn't want that. Her brother was dead because of the Order and it wasn't right for her to want what had killed him. She vowed against it! She didn't want it.

But her master was right. If they did nothing then nothing would change; they owed it to the kingdom to try. More, Kaylen, as a remnant of the Order of Knights who nearly annihilated the royal family, owed it to the king.

And to her master. She owed it to her master for abandoning him.

Guilt ate at her. It hadn't been her intention; the pain and the memories were simply too much for her a decade ago so she fled. But the result was the same. She left him with a dangerous relic and never looked back. He could have hung if someone saw him with a Knight's blade. But he'd kept it safe and cared for all these years and she never went back to see him. Not once. She never even sent him a letter.