What We Do to Survive

Saying it out loud made it sound so easy. Adonia and the Earthshadows were clearly mistreating Lea. That was unacceptable, but as I was not yet in a position to change their minds the remaining solution seemed clear. I had to remove my darling Lea from the situation before things could deteriorate further.

Five minutes later I was feeling much less sure of myself. I had made Lea a promise, and in this instance it was a promise I planned to keep despite the lack of magic enforcing my vow. She would never go back to the Earthshadow estate, at least not until I had Adonia on her knees ready to beg for forgiveness.

I certainly couldn’t bring her back to my room in Avalon. For one, I had a pair of naked elves locked up in makeshift milking stations. I had a feeling that Lea wouldn’t take it particularly well. It was a completely different situation from what she’d gone through with Seatamer, but I didn’t think she would see it that way. Even if I managed to convince her, I doubted she would be comfortable living in the same space as them.

Then there was Rea. She would probably be a slightly easier sell, I could just say that she was a… servant I’d hired. It wasn’t something I would ever actually do, I couldn’t imagine ever sleeping comfortably in the same room as a hired servant with uncertain loyalties, but I did now have the funds to do so if I wanted to.

Still, some of her habits and tasks would be harder to explain. Her day to day dress, or lack thereof, would probably make Lea uncomfortable and some of the work I had her doing would likely do the same. Actually, maybe not. Lea and Adonia had been dating for some time before things between them had fallen apart so Lea was probably comfortable with naked women and some of the other things Rea got up to during her harvesting time.

No, that definitely wasn’t an option. Even discounting the fact that Lea would simply be trading one prison cell for another, after all non-members were not permitted to freely wander the Academy even if I was insane enough to let her do so, taking my darling Lea to my dormitory would be a disaster.

That… didn’t leave me with very many options. Perhaps I could work something out through Cayla, her parents were nobles living on a nearby island and had the means to care for and protect Lea, but that came with its own issues.

Cayla’s parents may be nobles, but they were simply Spellblades. That was about as common as a noble name could get. The moment Adonia located Lea, and I had no doubts she would spare little expense in tracking Lea down, she would be able to retrieve her with little difficulty. Cayla’s family would either give her up or be made to do so in short order.

Okay, just thinking of random ideas wasn’t going to get me anywhere. I needed to do this properly and I was rapidly running out of time. Given Adonia’s general attitude towards my friend, I was pretty sure that if we weren’t back by nightfall she would send some of her ‘retainers’ to go retrieve Lea.

They would probably try to be nice about it at first, but would absolutely insist on taking Lea back with them and I really didn’t want things to turn messy. I could handle most of her black-cloaked men, but if one of their few stronger mages was with the group it would get dicey very, very quickly.

Even if I could fight off the first group, this was not a good place for it. With Lightcastle within eyesight and guards patrolling at regular intervals, it was not out of the question that the school’s headmaster or one of his senior students could get involved. That would go very poorly for me.

So what did I really need? The first requirement was safety. Lea needed to be protected from the Earthshadows, from anyone trying to exploit her to get to me, from other nebulous dangers, and potentially from herself. Her safety was the absolutely most important part of all of this. Other factors would be nice, but I could potentially live without them. I refused to lose my Lea for a second time.

Okay, now what did safety mean? First of all, I needed to keep Lea away from the Earthshadows. That either meant getting her far away physically, putting her under thick anti-scrying wards so they couldn’t locate her, or placing her somewhere the Earthshadows would not dare try and get at her. Safety also implied that Lea couldn’t be hurt by anyone else. That meant either people to protect her or anonymity.

I nodded my head slowly. Yes, that narrowed the scope of my search considerably. What else did I want?

Well, ideally she would be easily accessible to me. Spending time with my Lea was calming and wonderful in a way nothing else was. I could live without her, though even irregular visits were better than nothing, but I would certainly prefer not to.

Finally, I needed to cater at least slightly to Lea herself. She probably wouldn’t be very happy if I locked her in a tiny stone prison somewhere, nor if her living conditions became completely unbearable. In the short term that wasn’t a huge issue, but I was afraid that too much time without the ability to move freely would cause her mental state to deteriorate further. Just looking at her I could see that she was not quite all there, life had fractured my darling friend, and hammering those cracks would be devastating to her recovery.

She would also hopefully have access to some proper magical mentoring. The best way to guarantee her safety was to train her to a state where she could protect herself. I didn’t know if Lea was ever going to be an archmage, I was afraid the girl I knew simply didn’t have the will or the drive to reach those lofty heights, but I would feel much better about her safety if she could fly, teleport, and had some basic defensive spells under her belt.

I sighed. Well, that didn’t really make things less complicated. I had no idea how I was going to manage most of those requirements, much less all of them. Things would be so much easier if we weren’t in Xethis. Here the Earthshadows were a big fish in a small pond, one of the wealthiest and most powerful names in the entire country. On a worldwide scale however, they barely mattered at all.

What were they going to do if I left her in Armouth? I’d seen the quality of their divination rituals, I doubted their spells could reach halfway to the city state. Even if they did find her there, they had neither the pull nor the resources to send people after her. The city guards would not take kindly to foreign mages attempting to abduct a visitor, no matter what excuses they gave.

I was pulled from my musings when I realized that we had stopped. “I think this is the place,” Lea told me quietly, gesturing across the street with our entwined hands. “Uncle said they were staying here with some friends.”

I glanced dispassionately at the building she had indicated. It was a narrow, three story building with a shingled roof and a sign over the door declaring it as ‘Edric’s Wares and Imports’. I assumed it was a lot like the shop Lea had called home before Brenda’s men had burned it down, a shop on the first floor and a living area above it.

I could sense a number of people inside the building. Two of them were clearly Erwin and Estin, I couldn’t distinguish which brother was which, but I was sufficiently familiar with the feel of their undeveloped mana to recognize them from such a short distance.

Up on the third floor I could also feel an oddly familiar mana signature, but I couldn’t place where I’d felt something like that before. Perhaps that was their friend and he’d visited the shop at some point while I was there? I wasn’t sure. The rest were completely unremarkable, just magic-less civilians from the feeling of their meager mana reserves.

“You’re right,” I told her, “I can feel them inside. One’s in the shop, the other is upstairs.”

“Oh good, I was worried we were going to miss them. Last time Uncle Erwin came by he told me they were spending a lot of time getting things set up for the new shop, but I’m not sure how that’s coming along.”

“It worked out well then. Let's go say hello.”

I dropped several of the visual disguise spells on Lea as we stepped inside. Erwin, who was sitting behind the counter, noticed us immediately and his eyes lit up when he saw who it was.

“Leana, my darling girl!” he called out loudly, “What a surprise to see you! Oh, it's so nice to see you up and about! Come here, give this old man a hug!”

I let go of her hand and Lea rushed forward to meet her adopted uncle. Glancing around I found a small bench conveniently placed against the wall and sat down. This didn’t really concern me and my time was currently better spent planning. It felt like I was onto something, I just needed to find it.

Erwin loudly called out for Estin to come down and I felt that third person up on the top floor move around as though they were pacing. It was strange, I didn’t tend to memorize mana signatures unless they were relevant to me and I couldn’t think of who this person reminded me of.

I shook my head to clear it and put the thought out of my mind. It probably didn’t matter, just some random person I’d seen on the street or something like that. I’d spent a lot of time honing my mana senses over the past few months but I still sometimes wasn’t certain how to interpret what I was sensing.

What was important was what I was going to do with Lea. It had been nearly an hour since we’d left the Earthshadow estate and I estimated we would be here for at least half an hour while Lea was saying a temporary goodbye to her uncles. Ideally I would know where I should be taking her by the time she was ready to go. I needed somewhere safe, accessible, and open enough that Lea wouldn’t feel trapped. That was not an easy thing to find in a country as densely populated and tiny as Xethis.

Something about that last bit nagged at me. Not easy to find in Xethis. In Xethis. Safe… accessible… in Xethis… I couldn’t take her back to my dormitory. In… Xethis…

I sat up sharply and dug into my pockets only to come up empty. Damn it. There were a number of things I always carried around with me within Avalon, but I didn’t have my school bag on me so I was limited to what I carried in my pockets. Of all the times to leave my student handbook behind. Where was Avalon’s portal moving after it left Xethis? I knew the location was already decided, but I couldn’t remember where it was.

That was… yeah. That certainly had potential. I closed my eyes and thought back to the start of the year when I’d last reviewed the handbook. I’d memorized every rule and regulation that I thought had any chance of coming up. I could remember looking at the specific page near the back of the handbook, could picture the formatting of the table and everything. Where was it moving next?

The familiar signature on the third floor stopped moving and I almost snapped at the two shoppers discussing the merits of two different boxes of candles just a few feet away from me. I needed to focus and this was not the environment in which I did my best thinking.

I channeled additional mana into my mental enhancements. I could enumerate all forty-three bylaws regarding when it was permitted for an upper class student to retaliate against a first-year, but apparently I’d never even glanced over the list of portal locations? I could even remember the exact date when the portal was supposed to move, though actually that might have changed due to our rapid departure from Port Anangala, but the locations? I was coming up blank.

I shifted gears. Perhaps someone had mentioned the name to me at some point? I couldn’t think of a specific conversation where that might have come up, but it was the sort of thing Miranda might have mentioned during one of our discussions. I thought back to every conversation I’d had with my pet succubus in the past few months. Nothing.

Maybe I could consult with Miranda? I’d told myself I would make an effort to make better use of the resources I had available to me and she had a way of approaching social problems that I just couldn’t wrap my head around. This wasn’t exactly a social issue, but it was close enough, right?

Unfortunately I didn’t have a good way of contacting her from outside the Academy and meeting with her meant either bringing Lea with me or leaving her alone in the city without any protection. I glanced suspiciously at an older man with graying hair and very bushy eyebrows that I could just barely see over a nearby set of shelves. He didn’t look like a threat, but when magic became involved it was impossible to say for certain.

No, leaving her alone wasn’t an option. Twice in my life I had left my darling Lea unprotected, and twice I had nearly lost her. There would not be a third time.

And then it came to me. It was not a perfect solution by any means, but it sidestepped the majority of my problems. Lea would be safe, protected, kept away from some of my secrets that she was not yet ready to see, and most importantly I would have easy access to her whenever I needed it. Sure it would temporarily limit her freedom of movement, but it was only until a better solution could be found.

I plastered a mostly-real smile across my face as Lea led her uncles over to where I was sitting and stood up to greet them. I suppressed the annoyance I felt every time I saw the silver sun and moon pendant hanging around Erwin’s neck. Despite whatever else I might think of them, they’d done a passable job caring and providing for my Lea, and for that they deserved my consideration if not my respect. Sure they were uneducated false-god worshipers, but that was more a criticism of Xethis’s terrible standards of education than any fault of their own.

Getting Lea away from them was not a priority, but it was certainly a favorable outcome. I just hoped they hadn’t had time to indoctrinate her too much. I didn’t think they had, they honestly didn’t seem all too fanatical themselves though my books said you could never say with cultists.

Educating Lea properly was going to take some work, but she would have little else to do for the rest of the semester so perhaps it wasn’t going to take too long. I was certain I could find some way to motivate her.

For now though, I simply let her enjoy her last minutes with the men who had saved her from a watery grave. They could have this. After all, from now on she was mine. Mine and only mine.