“Jadis, we’ve been waiting for you. How did your talk with the emperor go?”
“It was fine,” Jay answered Aila’s overly formal question with a small smile. “I’ll tell you about it later. Are we leaving?”
“No, not yet,” Aila shook her head. “Since we’re all here, we spoke with Wilhelm and decided to discuss the Oracle situation. We have a private room set up already and I believe Wilhelm’s whole party is waiting there with everyone else.”
“Ah, that makes sense,” Jay nodded. “I’m not sure how the fu—how exactly we’re going to work that out, but hopefully he’ll just agree to let me ask the questions…”
“Hopefully,” Aila agreed lightly. “Come, we shouldn’t linger here.”
No, they really shouldn’t, Jadis couldn’t help but agree.
After parting ways with the emperor, Jadis had been led by a guard who had materialized practically out of nowhere away from the palace interior and back out into the main hall. There were still dozens of nobles lingering inside the grand space for reasons Jadis could only guess at, though it looked like the crowd was starting to thin. She didn’t see Elodie or her mother in those who remained, nor did she see anyone else who she was particularly interested in speaking with. Though from the looks she was getting, it felt like a lot of the nobles were interested in speaking to her. Probably to find out more details about the audience with the emperor, she guessed, or possibly to try plying her with their political rhetoric and give her reasons why she should ally with them for whatever obtuse reason. Jadis wasn’t interested in finding out, either way.
Aila had been waiting for her alone in the great hall. Now that they had something of a plan and no reason to hang around, Jadis let Aila and the unobtrusive guard who had been waiting a short distance away lead her out of the large audience hall and down a side corridor. This hallway felt far less personal compared to where the emperor had led Jadis before, thankfully, and soon they were deep inside a palace wing, lost to the many turns and intersections.
Following the guard around one corner, Jadis spotted an open door where three people stood. One was Thea, who was standing at parade attention for some reason. She didn’t look nervous, but she was behaving in a reserved way that Jadis wasn’t used to. Probably it had to do with where they were; Aila had been doing the same, after all. A fair reaction, really, to being surrounded by so much pomp and circumstance.
The other two people were Severina and the broad-shouldered orc man. Severina was quietly talking with Thea while the orc stood a couple of paces back, silently watching. When the paladin saw them approaching, she cut off whatever she was saying and gave Jadis a polite bow.
“Greetings, Jadis. I am positive you are busy right now, so I won’t take too much of your time. I simply wanted to express my gratitude. You saved my life during that attack. Thank you.”
Jadis paused all three of her bodies for a moment, staring down at the stiff, overly formal Seraphim. Severina wasn’t acting like she didn’t want to be there, exactly, but she did look faintly uncomfortable, like she was embarrassed to be in the position that she was. Jadis got the feeling that the powerful woman wasn’t used to “expressing gratitude” the way she was.
“Hey, you aren’t my guard anymore, right? Now that the emperor has cleared me?”
“No, I am not,” Severina replied, her expression flickering with confusion. “I was never your guard, Jadis, I was one of the many paladins available to watch over—”
Severina’s unnecessary explanation was cut off as all three of Jadis’ selves leaned down and kissed her at the same time. One on each cheek and the third on her forehead. Severina went as stiff and still as a mouse surrounded by cats while her face colored a bright red. Then, a heartbeat later, she reared back, glaring daggers up at Jadis’ selves with her strange, cross-shaped irises.
“What are you doing!?” she let out in a barely restrained yelp.
“Thanking you,” Jadis replied with three grins. “For saving my life. Maybe you forgot, but I didn’t. You saved me back there, too. So I guess that makes us even, or we’re both in each other’s debt. Depends on how you look at it, I guess. Either way, thank you.”
“You are welcome,” Severina managed to get out as she got her expression under control, though her face was still pink with a flustered blush. “I… hope that we will not be in such positions again.”
“Fair enough,” Dys shrugged from where she stood to the left of Jay.
“I can think of way better positions I’d like to be in with you anyway,” Syd agreed casually from Jay’s right.
Severina’s face went from pink to crimson as her nostrils flared in indignation.
“I am certain you can,” she choked out. “Have a good day, Lady Jadis. I must go now and you have your own meeting to attend to.”
Turning smartly on her heel, Severina practically dashed away from Jadis, nearly running into the orc who stood behind her but had deftly stepped to the side just in time. They all watched the Seraphim leave, various expressions on the faces of those present, ranging from wide-eyed shock to exhausted bemusement. Jadis, for her part, had three wide grins on her faces.
“Impressive,” the orc said, his own expression flat and unchanged. “I have never seen Severina become so flustered. Not even Kestil has managed to rile her up so much that she has walked away down the wrong corridor.”
“Well, that’s me, master of embarrassing myself and others,” Jay joked. “Sorry, but who are you?”
“Eadgar,” the big orc rumbled. “Prince Kestil’s advisor.”
Advisor? Was that an official position? The man didn’t look like he was a noble. He wasn’t exactly dressed poorly, but his clothes were plain and uninteresting and without any adornments. He didn’t look military, either. Maybe a former mercenary? Something about the way he stood reminded Jadis of Noll. Relaxed, but on guard at the same time.
“This is for you,” Eadgar said as he pulled two folded pieces of yellow paper from inside his coat.
“What is it?” Jay asked as she took the papers and flipped them open to see small, neatly printed notes.
“The first is a full background on the recent new hires of Fortune’s Favored. Family connections included. You have nothing to worry about regarding any of them. No unexpected affiliations. The second is a list of registered mercenaries you should not hire in the future. They are either linked directly to Prince Hraustrekr or to his subordinates. They would either already be spies or easily susceptible to coercion.”
“Thanks,” Jay said slowly as she reevaluated the broad-shouldered man. “How did you come across this information, exactly?”
“It’s my job to ask questions.”
“Right,” Jay narrowed her eyes. Passing the two notes to Aila, she crossed her arms and glared suspiciously down at Eadgar. “You don’t have a list of mercenaries who work for Kestil to give me, do you?”
“Why would I have such a list to give you?” the orc asked flatly. “Vraekae has already inserted her own spy into your company.”
“Uh huh,” she hummed.
“Have a good day, Lady Jadis,” Eadgar bowed slightly at the waist towards her. “Lady Aila, Lady Thea. We will speak again.”
Without further words, the burly man made his way down the corridor in the same direction Severina had fled.
“That is a dangerous man,” Aila said quietly as soon as Eadgar had left earshot.
“Yup,” all three of Jadis agreed.
“Everyone is, ah, w—waiting inside,” Thea said, her expression still wide-eyed. “Sh—should we go in?”
“Yeah, we should,” Syd said as she patted her shy lover on the shoulder. “Wouldn’t want to keep the Hero waiting.”
Seeing no reason to delay further, Jadis quickly entered through the doorway that Thea had been standing watch over.
Inside was a spacious living area with a long table lined with high-backed chairs. Two fireplaces burned brightly along opposite ends of the room and several arched windows looked out over a wintery view of the river. The décor of the room looked different from what Jadis had seen elsewhere in the palace or in rich places like Trummelton’s restaurant. The style was likely from a few generations past, Jadis guessed, and the furniture could probably be considered antique. In fact, she was fairly certain that if the same furniture was brought back to Earth, it would quickly be placed in a museum.
Instead of being on historic display, the fancy furniture was being used by Jadis’ companions and the Hero’s party. The two groups had separated themselves by sitting on either side of the long table, showing a clear divide between them. However, there was no awkward silence waiting to greet Jadis when she entered. Small conversations were going on between those gathered, showing that they were at least willing to talk to one another. Jadis had privately feared that there might be some tension between the two groups due to their differences in status, but that didn’t seem to be the case. She supposed it helped that they were all young people, around the same age.
“Welcome back,” Wilhelm said as he rose to his feet. “You have good timing. We were just discussing Sabina’s findings regarding the cursed pendant.”
“Well, it’s not cursed exactly,” the smith said as she motioned at the open box in front of her. “It’s actually a beneficial enchantment depending on how you look at it. I mean, it’s entirely dependent upon the intentions of the person who is tuned to the enchantment and the spell they are using with it so you could conceivably make a pendant or ring or anything else really using this enchantment and it could be for a good effect. It’s just that this person definitely didn’t have a good intention in mind when they made it since they wanted to distort Jadis’ vision without her permission which is actually something I did with my first enchantment ever but that was a mistake and this was definitely intentional so they aren’t really the same.”
“Yes, you’re quite right,” Wilhelm smiled, completely unphased by Sabina’s nervous rant. “It’s not a curse, but a clever enchantment.”
That was no news to Jadis. She had already gone over Sabina’s findings with everyone else back at the temple.
The pendant had an enchantment crafted into the backside of the jewel in the center of the flower. It was an incredible piece of work, with runic etchings so small that even with the jewel removed and the runes pointed out to her, Jadis could barely make them out. Whoever had created the enchantment had been a master, at least according to Sabina. Such fine detail work was in the realm of the truly elite.
The purpose of the enchantment wasn’t strictly negative, as Sabina had pointed out. Technically, it was just a spell booster. However, it was extremely specific, far more so than most enchantments would ever be. After consulting with Doru, the high priest of Svaroga, Sabina had been able to determine that the effect of the enchantment was to increase the power of a single spell that had been attuned to it. The specific spell had been chosen at the time of crafting and could not be changed after the fact. It only worked in conjunction with that one spell, and further, the spell had to be cast by a specific person, otherwise the enchantment wouldn’t activate and remained completely inert. However, this extreme limitation was made up for by the fact that the enchantment boosted the power of the spellcaster’s effect by three times its base value. In other words, if the spellcaster had an Eldritch stat at fifty points, the power of the specific spell cast by them upon the person wearing the enchanted pendant would be equivalent to one hundred and fifty points. It was a massive increase, one that didn’t have to be used for ill purposes. If the spell attuned to the pendant had instead been attuned to something like Eir’s healing spell, then Jadis would be healed for three times the amount of health points whenever Eir used her channeled healing on her.
“Cleverly hidden and cleverly applied,” Rein spoke as his red eyes glared at the offending piece of jewelry. “But why not set a spell in it that would simply kill you?”
Jadis and all of her lovers stared at the gray elf who held up a hand in response to their displeasure.
“Peace. I meant no offense. I am merely pointing out that since the goal was to kill you, it would have made more sense to attune the enchantment to some malign spell that would do you direct harm, rather than an illusion.”
The Lancer had a smooth voice, accented in a similar way to Vraekae with a sharp, almost clipped tone. He didn’t seem particularly apologetic for his poor word choice, but he also didn’t seem like he was trying to stir up trouble, either.
“Forgive Rein,” Wilhelm said as he nodded towards the elf. “He is a man who likes to cut straight to the point.”
“I can get behind that,” Jay allowed. “I’ve been known to be pretty blunt myself.”
“You? Blunt? No chance…” Kerr drawled with heavy sarcasm.
“Sabina said the reason why it wasn’t something deadly had something to do with the type of enchantment itself,” Jay pushed on, ignoring her wicked lover’s taunt. “Right, Sabby?”
“Yes, definitely,” Sabina nodded her head, causing her black curls to bob wildly. “The enchantment has an extremely narrow field of spells it can be attuned to, which I think excludes harmful spells. I can’t be sure because I would need to do more research and testing and that’s kind of hard to do because these runes are so far above my level it’s kind of disheartening but super exciting at the same time but what I think is going on here is that the enchanter had to remove any possibility of the spells being directly harmful otherwise the enchantment would have come up as a hazard for all the tests and examinations that the high priests did on it with their own detection spells. The spells that are typically used to inspect equipment for curses are looking for magic that could potentially cause a person harm, usually by causing damage to their health or by causing some form of status ailment like paralysis. Since this was an enchantment that wasn’t doing direct harm or even had the potential to, it snuck in without triggering a response from any detection spells.”
“Causing a person to lose their vision in a fight seems pretty harmful to me,” Bridget pointed out. “Hearing too. Maybe not the sense of smell, but definitely hearing and vision.”
“Speak for yourself,” Amarantha quipped. “I’d be thrown completely off my balance if I suddenly lost my sense of smell.”
“I believe it might be because of the nature of the spell that was used,” Aila said thoughtfully. “It didn’t directly blind Jadis, but instead distorted her perception, drawing upon her memories. We can’t know for sure without seeing the wording, but the spell may not have been explicitly intended for combat.”
“I cannot imagine that a spell that changes your sense of smell to that of a fondly remembered smell would be one frequently used in battle,” Tiernan chuckled. “Can you see it? Casting such a spell upon a brigand who has you at sword point? ‘What is this, but the scent of my childhood blanket! I am ever so distracted; I think I shall set my blade down and be weepy for a while. Be on your way, then!’ That is certainly no defense I have ever heard of.”
There was something oddly theatrical about the way Tiernan spoke. His accent made him sound less like he was from the green hills of Ireland like most of the gnomes Jadis had met, and more like he was an overly dramatic Shakespearian actor.
“So you think that spell wasn’t meant to hurt me?” Jay asked the Arch-Wizard.
“Probably not the original spell, no,” he made a face as he dramatically shrugged his shoulders. “But if I were to use a frying pan to hit you in the head, it would be no less deadly despite not being intended for that purpose.”
Tiernan paused, then circled his hand in a dismissive gesture.
“Well, not me. I doubt there is anything in the world I had the strength to lift that would do any harm to you. Let Halvor hit you with the frying pan.”
“I’m not hitting anyone with a frying pan,” the barbarian growled around a mug of something strong he was sipping on. “I have axes.”
“It’s a hypothetical frying pan.”
“I don’t care what kind of frying pan it is, I don’t want it. It’s not a fit weapon for a warrior.”
“Ah, but what if it were a special, spiked frying pan crafted by High Priest Doru! Would it be fit for battle then?”
“Then it wouldn’t be a fucking frying pan at that point, would it?” Halvor snapped at the gnome. “Then it’s just a terribly designed mace.”
“Is it, now? You could still fry an egg on it, I’m sure—”
“Putting the frying pan aside,” Jay interrupted the two bickering men before the conversation could be derailed any further. “We’ve basically agreed that the spell was probably some kind of uniquely applied illusion spell that wasn’t originally intended for harm but the cultists used it to screw with me in a particularly horrible way that heavily impacted my ability to fight. That said, how does any of that information help us catch the bastards that made the enchantments?”
“It doesn’t,” Lucia spoke up for the first time since Jadis’ arrival in the room. “Unless we can use this information to locate an illusionist who has three specific spells that relate to memory.”
“That isn’t a lot to go on, no,” Aila frowned. “I suppose we can search the academy records for documented classes that might have spells like that, but that doesn’t necessarily help us find individuals who have such classes.”
“The academy may not even have a documented cultist class like that,” Sorcha pointed out. “I doubt there are many cultists who turn over their class information to the empire.”
“What about other leads? Like the jewelers who gave me the pendants?”
“Dead end.”
“Dead end?” Dys turned to look at Halvor. “What do you mean?”
“Dead! What do you think I mean?” the tattooed man grumped at her. “Dead!”
“He means that they were found dead,” Wilhelm stepped in. “Both were found in their home above their jewelry shop. Or at least what was left of them. Most of their skin had been taken. What remained had been decomposing for a long time. It’s likely that they were dead for weeks by the time you were given those pendants.”
“So the two I saw that day were imposters?” Jays asked out loud. “Some kind of illusion?”
“Or a spell that let the cultists wear their skin like a suit.”
When everyone in the room turned to look at Amarantha, she blinked her eyes innocently and flicked one ear.
“What? Some malediction and Eldritch spells can get quite creative with flesh.”
“Thank you for the nightmare fuel,” Syd grimaced. “It’s not like I didn’t already have enough.”
“So where does that put us?” Jay asked the group at large. “Where are we supposed to go from here towards finding the cultists?”
“That is what we are here to discuss, is it not?” Lucia tilted her head to one side. “All other avenues have been tried and are showing minimal progress at best. Lady Eir’s oracle ritual is needed so that we can find a swift answer to the question of where the cultists are located.”
“I understand that you are hesitant to perform the ritual with me,” Wilhelm addressed Eir directly. “Though your reasoning is unclear. Is there something I must do that would ease your worry? I have actually done the ritual many times with Jocelyn. Since I have the experience of speaking with Valtar quite often, I think it would be best that I be the one to ask the questions, just in case the answers go in unexpected directions.”
“Hear that, Big Stuff? Willy here has done the ritual many times with Jocelyn,” Kerr smirked with mischief in her eyes. “Isn’t that sweet? They do look like they make a cute couple.”
Both Wilhelm and Jocelyn started at the comment, their faces turning bright shades of red as they blushed with obvious embarrassment. Amarantha openly laughed at their discomfort while Ludger grinned and pretended not to notice. The others reacted to varying degrees of amusement, though Lucia remained completely deadpan.
“W—we are not a couple, Miss Kerr,” Wilhelm stuttered out. “I’m not sure why you would even make a joke like that. What does it have to do with the oracle ritual?”
Jadis couldn’t help but notice the slight way Jocelyn deflated when the Hero asserted that the two had no romantic relationship.
“I suspect that the ritual steps for Jocelyn are quite different from my own,” Eir explained quietly while Kerr grinned like a cat who had gotten the cream. “Kerr is using your ignorance to those differences to amuse herself.”
“Well, what is the difference then?” Wilhelm asked in a somewhat petulant way. “I don’t like being left in the dark.”
It was kind of cute how flustered he had become. Jadis was tempted to join Kerr in her teasing, just to get more reactions out of him and the squirming healer sitting next to him, but they did have serious matters to attend to. She did have some sense of urgency, after all. She also had a sense of respect for Eir, who likely didn’t want to explain the details of her class and rituals to a group of strangers.
Unfortunately, while Jadis paused to think of a good explanation, someone else with less understanding of human interactions took it upon themselves to answer the Hero’s question.
“Probably… The sex…” Alex gravely advised Wilhelm in her most serious voice.
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