Candle and Claw by Stephen Taylor

Author:Stephen Taylor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: magic, high fantasy, fantasy magic, fantasy novel, fantasy action, witch fantasy, wizard fantasy, magic action, magic battles, hard magic
Publisher: Stephen Taylor

ZURIS'S PLAN

The people here care as much about forest and grass and water as they care about the cities they’ve built. I hope I can bring this care back with me.

—The Witherclaw Witch; letter to Recia.

New routines. Where he’d gone to meetings and listened to reports before, now Giovel spent his mornings with Varan. They stayed in the Candlespire for the most part, with her installed in a small room off the second level for her own safety, so while he saw the other members of the Order coming and going, meeting and working, his labor was not like theirs.

Most of Giovel’s energy went to talking, trying somehow to encourage Varan, or trying just to help her master Medín more quickly yet. He told her everything he could think to say, babbling about what it was like to be in the Candleguard, buildings he admired, how he’d loved climbing as a boy. Nothing seemed to reach Varan. Though she still studied, mouthing, chanting, and writing the words over and over to learn them, there was a new heaviness in her that hadn’t been evident before. She stayed mostly in her bed, sometimes running a hand over the bandages on her ear. She’d still show something like a smile when Uri, Kirida, or little Progis came to visit, but otherwise she kept almost totally to herself in spite of Giovel’s best efforts to gain her trust.

After the first week of it, Giovel nearly begged Adni for more duties. There were new ones to fill, after all. Someone had to take over intelligence and investigations for Dlenar. Elínla had been given twice her normal workload—now shouldering Sur’s responsibilities to try finding the witches on top of her own duties marshalling the Gray Order. Hirnu seemed to be doing more too, likely working with the Candles to identify the fighters who’d helped the witches on Perception Day, not to mention carrying Ralden’s responsibilities for compliance and certification. Giovel knew he was getting desperate for work when even those tasks sounded appealing to him.

Still. He couldn’t bring himself to ask Adni for anything. And Adni might be right that Varan needed him.

Two weeks after the attacks, Varan’s healer recommended Giovel take her out for some exercise. She resisted glumly but finally followed Giovel out to Lilywater Lake at the edge of North Hold, the farthest she’d gone from Divnum since being spirited. Giovel only wished it were for a better cause.

More than three hundred men and women labored in a trench not far from the lake, preparing to flood the old stretch of village once ravaged by the Redremel. They had first cleared hard-packed snow where traders and farmers and workers walked between their homes and the rest of Foneth. Then they’d started removing trees, digging up brush, clearing boulders, and now hacking into the frozen ground while people evacuated the homes nearby and looked for new ones in Divnum.

Was this the first lake Inorovel had played in, back when she was young, when

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