The Redoubtable Pali Avramapul by Victoria Goddard

Author:Victoria Goddard [Goddard, Victoria]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Fantasy, General
ISBN: 9781988908571
Google: bHEtzwEACAAJ
Amazon: 1988908566
Publisher: Underhill Books
Published: 2022-05-17T18:30:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY

AURELIUS MAGNUS

“W hat was that,” Jullanar said, almost as blankly as Fitzroy.

Masseo sat back, tea in hand, and sniffed the aroma appreciatively. “The new Fitzroy. Somehow both entirely different and exactly the same.”

Pali took a breath, and held her peace. He was Fitzroy. He was here. He had not needed her to rescue him, after all. He had simply needed—

She forced back the question of why, if he’d been able to follow her so soon, he had refused to come with her in the first place. Or—

Or left before, and come to find them himself.

Pali sipped her own tea, which was delicious, of course, and admired Masseo’s teapot, which she thought she recognized. She looked at the smith, deliberately changing the subject. “It’s good to see you, Masseo.”

“And you, Pali,” he replied, eyes crinkling. He wore his hair shorter than before, in close-cropped curls, but had grown a rambunctious beard. “I can’t believe Fitzroy’s method actually works!”

Of course they would immediately turn back to him.

“The coincidences,” Jullanar agreed, shaking her head. “Wild mages.”

“I should like to say that it was all my doing,” Pali muttered. “I found Jullanar first, and then Fitzroy, and now you—”

“He found me!”

She waved her hand dismissively at Masseo. “As I said, I should like to say it was all my doing, but alas, wild magic and their coincidences … How did you get here, Masseo?”

“I was working in my forge when my apprentice’s brother showed up with his pregnant sweetheart, who happened to be a postulant nun …”

“Oh dear.”

Masseo laughed. “They’re dear folks, but not the sharpest tools in the box, alas. Kenna, my apprentice, is much the cleverest—but her brother is a fine young man, and his sweetheart—his wife, now—is a lovely girl. Credulous, mind you. They showed up, full of excitement, to tell me that Aurelius Magnus had answered her prayers in person.”

Pali considered. “The emperor Aurelius Magnus … The one who wrote the Aurelian Code? Is he supposed to be a god?”

He was one of the famous emperors of Astandalas, somewhere around the fiftieth in succession. He had been a superlative general before he came into a powerful gift of magic and built the magic of the Empire of Astandalas into the form it had held until its cataclysmic destruction under Artorin Damara’s reign.

Pali considered that thought, and shoved aside the guilty curiosity as to what exactly Fitzroy thought about being the emperor when Astandalas fell.

“What’s the Aurelian Code?” Jullanar asked.

“The first great revision to the laws of Astandalas,” Pali explained, falling easily into her teaching voice. “It laid out the policies for making war and governing conquered peoples. Aurelius Magnus wrote a book—we only have about half of it, alas, one of the later emperors reacted hard against it—where he talked about how to create a lasting peace. He was the one who created the magical Pax Astandalatis.”

“He’s one of the local gods where I lived,” Masseo said. “He was supposed to have been stolen away by the Sun and the Moon and made into a god himself for his power and wisdom.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.