Chương 61: Chapter 60: A Fearful Discovery

++Liches do not feel paranoid, everyone is out to get us. ++ - From the writings of Isabel Vornholt, 'The Great Lich'. 1, 891 A. E. My father was not happy when I, Agrian and Victoria returned. Indeed, he almost seemed to be on the verge of a mental breakdown. He screamed so loudly that it actually hurt our ears and caused several glass fixtures in the room to shatter. That was not an expense the family could afford in its current state.

Pointing that out to him during the dressing down was not, I will admit, a diplomatic move, but I was enjoying my newly-claimed freedom from his tyranny, and could not help but push things that little bit. It was fortunate the Earl was not there, he would definitely have not allowed the challenge if someone had seen it.

"Just go to your rooms," he snapped at last. Even as he said it, the Baron's eyes held a note of concern where they flicked towards me. He was waiting to see if I would obey.

"Okay father," I replied, then headed off to do just as he said. I saw no reason not to, I had wanted to go there anyway, and the Baron already understood, privately, where we now stood. If he pushed the line again, I would have to correct him, but for the time being it was more convenient for me as well as him if we both played the part of ordinary father and daughter. My feelings of triumph were like honey on the tongue, a sensation I had discovered after being reborn and come to like a lot.

It was only natural, then, that this triumph fizzled out shortly. As I entered my room, I knew there had been a disruption within it. Someone had entered without my permission. First, I thought of my books. Earl Yilear had made it perfectly clear what he thought of my reading so much, or at all, and was just senile and stupid enough to have deliberately hidden or destroyed them in some petty attempt to enforce his will on me.

I looked for all of the tomes I had brought from Winzorth, and found each one exactly where I had left it. My bed was undisturbed—it would have been quite unsettling if that were not—and the space underneath it was not, as far as I could tell, touched in any significant way. My drawers and closets had not been searched either. The carpets were as they had been too; either nobody actually had been in here, or whoever had was very, very thorough about keeping all signs of their presence hidden.

Then something caught my eye. It was subtle, a tiny glimpse, but it told me what had really occurred here. There was a wisp of magic in one corner of the room, impossible for me to feel and only just visible to my mana sight. It was disguising a spell. I hesitated before investigating further. There were ways of weaving magic that would come undone with any kind of arcane tampering at all, a sure-fire way to know when a given effect had been noticed by checking back on it later.

Did I want to let whoever did this know that I knew? The decision was a hard one, but I eventually settled on yes. Or rather, I settled on it being a risk worth taking. Keeping them ignorant to my lack of ignorance would be useful, but having the chance to learn more about them in turn outweighed it. Tentatively, I extended tendrils of mana to the spell and slowly unravelled it. Moments into making contact, I knew it was like almost no magic I had ever felt before.

Only on a few occasions had I been exposed to this grade of power. Divine magic, the stuff of Godtouched, Demigods, and the Gods themselves. My feelings at encountering a sample of it again after so many years were… complicated. Natural enthusiasm for any kind of magic was unconditional on my part, but now I felt it overridden by the fear at play. A Godtouched had been in my room, at best. At worst it had been a Demigod. What could be the cause of that?

The list of possible explanations was not especially long, and topping it was the possibility of my identity, my true, original identity, being uncovered. Was I about to be sent back to the Depths? Quickly, like I had never thought before, I cycled through my memory to try and compile all the oddities I had let show over my new life. Magical talent was obviously chief among that list, as were my speech patterns.

Besides those two things, however, nothing I did was actually comparable to what the Gods would know of Lord Dread. So how damning were those two things? I knew already that the mythologised telling of my reign was wholly inaccurate. The Gods had gone out of their way to embellish just about every significant fact, to the point where a scholar of their retellings would not be able to identify me.

My primary question was whether or not their own direct servants, the Godtouched and Demigods, shared these misconceptions. Yes, most likely. The Demigod who had been called in to examine me at the Winzorth Institute would surely have pieced together my identity if this were not the case. Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.

So I could assume that at least lower-tier Demigods, the ones who might be told to answer summons like that, were not able to piece together my identity. I had assumed that much in the first place, and that assumption allowed me to accumulate power far more rapidly than if I had played things too safe. This only left me with the conclusion that whatever this divine power was, whoever had left it here, it was not produced by someone who knew they were dealing with Lord Dread.

That much actually should have been obvious from the beginning; had they known who I truly was, they would have completely masked their spell from my sight as well as my feeling, just as the Grandmaster did. I calmed as I really thought it through. Of course I had not been discovered, the Gods would not spy on me if they suspected I was who I am, they would simply obliterate me. Probably from afar, and almost certainly at the cost of burning every acre of land in the Vornholt estate out of existence along with me.

This was something else. Unfortunately, I had far fewer educated guesses about what that else might be. Living bodies are terrible things; they come with living hormones and living brains. I tried to bury myself in work and training, study and teaching Victoria. I tried to distract myself from the creeping worry, and it did not work. I was left to wonder how in the world the rest of humanity got anything done living like this. Then I pondered the state of the world, and found it making a bit more sense.

Victoria's lessons were coming along well, fortunately our father was not quite angry enough to risk my ire by putting them on hold. I soon took an interest in Qaigor's training, as well. My youngest sibling was not nearly as nice to me as Victoria or Agrian were, but he was still family and therefore a potential asset. More than that, he seemed to be growing notably fast as a warrior, and therefore a potentially useful asset.

It seemed my guess that magicians and warriors were one and the same at birth was entirely true, because his magical talent seemed to convert directly into physical power now. That would have made him formidable enough on its own, but of course it was not on its own. Because now that I was here, Qaigor's training regime was being influenced by someone who had glimpsed things about warriors that even the rest of Garamon did not know.

The Baron was, predictably, reluctant to let me sit down with my younger brother and teach him however.

"You want him to learn magic," he growled.

"I know it, you'll just teach him that if I'm not around."

"Then you can watch," I offered him.

"I simply wish to ensure that his training is as efficient as possible, he is my brother and will one day be one of the defenders of our family."

"Its leader," my father added sternly.

"Does Agrian the younger know that is your plan?" I asked him, putting on the tone of mock innocence that came naturally to the physically young. If there was one drawback to having intimidated my father, it was that he did not fall for such things anymore.

"Don't try to manipulate me," he snarled. The venom in his voice actually surprised me a little, was he really that angry about being overpowered? How ridiculous.

"Have mother watch us then," I suggested after a moment.

"She never has anything to do." As a matter of fact, she had a good deal to do in managing the household, watching Qaigor and Victoria at other times, seeing to the staff and all sorts of other domestic maintenance. My father did not seem to consider any of that 'something' however, and as I would have guessed he became thoughtful at the suggestion. An hour later, I was in a training hall with Qaigor and my mother. The one that Agrian and myself had once used.

"What happened to Doctor Brown?" I asked my mother suddenly.

"Your father removed him from the staff after he confided that he couldn't teach you or Agrian much more," she explained. I felt a stab at that, and was not sure why. My accursed body should not have begun randomly tearing out in pain for another few weeks.

"Will he be brought back on, now that Victoria is being taught?" I asked. My mother suddenly looked uncomfortable at that.

"Isabel, do you know how magically skilled women are seen by men?" Oh no, she was trying to have a heart-to-heart conversation, one of those talks where she imparted aged wisdom and I attentively listened. I did not like those, not from people a thousand times less wise than me at least.

"I know that most people do not want us to use magic," I said after a moment.

"That's partly right," she nodded.

"They see it as unladylike, unattractive. Unattractive, Isabel." She said the last word with such emphasis that I assumed, for one moment, she must have made a very notable point that I had simply failed to grasp. Of course, she had not. I found this out when she continued that point.

"Our job is to attract a husband and make babies, there are other roles of course, important ones, but at the end of the day we make sure the family keeps going through generations," she continued.

"It's all well and good for you to forgo the normal way of doing things, you have the magical power of a Demigod, apparently, but Victoria…she isn't you, there's dozens of magicians in the world just as gifted as she is. It will be that much harder for her to attract a husband as a result. Do you want your sister to live her life alone, Isabel? Never to have her own children? To be some aging spinster, mocked by everyone?" She was getting heated now, while I remained calm.

"Better to be powerful and isolated than weak and conformist." I had not meant to say that, it was not a very 'twelve year-old girl' remark to make, but I was feeling an uncharacteristic jet of emotion and it had moved my mouth almost without consulting the rest of me. My mother's shock was written across her face in a dozen frown lines.

"No," she snapped with heat.

"Not at all."

"Then we disagree," I said simply.

"And one day Victoria may disagree too."

"If Victoria disagrees, it will be because you have corrupted her!" my mother hissed. I was surprised to see disgust, even hatred in her eyes as she said that. It gave me pause for a moment. She said nothing else for that moment, though I could tell she regretted her outburst.

"It does not really matter what you think, does it?" I asked at last.

"You have no say in this, father is the one who decides and he has agreed to let me teach her. He will agree to bring back Doctor Brown to teach her too, and then he will agree to send her to the Winzorth Institute once she is ready. You just sit back and focus on making babies." The look on my mother's face was one I had seen a lot; long-suffering tolerance, bravery in the face of powerlessness. Normally my father was the one to inspire it, and being the one to do so now was certainly a pleasant feeling.

Another reminder that my old power was returning, if slowly. One day I would be the master of a house, and this would be the feeling I got from every conversation. But that was the future, and I was still in the present.

"Qaigor," I called out, "we are going to go through some special training exercises together."