"There are now some hyn thieves who are painted bright pink running around. I doubt they are very happy with us. Shall we be going?" I inquired rhetorically of everyone.

"We can't be afraid of a bunch of hyn?" Nico asked in surprise.

"Shall I tell Master Buck you've no reason to be afraid of him?" I asked without turning around.

"He'll plant a dirk in yer balls an' ask ye to repeat yerself, genius," the Mick added laconically over his shoulder. "We're in a city, tight corners, people everywhere, lots of obstructions to duck and hide behind, hyn all over. They could come from multiple angles at any time, and they'll have friends not painted pink."

"Makes one wonder what was in that parcel," Rika pointed out smoothly, shoving Nico onto a Disk and keeping her eyes in motion. "We've got the geniuses, Lady Edge. Just get us moving!"

"At your command." The dry return made her flush, but an apology seemed useless, so she just swallowed and made sure to stay on her own ride as they picked up speed… and then lifted right off the ground.

"Hah! The little bastards aren't going to sneak up at us with… yow!" Hammel snatched up his legs and leaned away as a loud POINK echoed from an egg-sized rock bouncing off the bottom of his Disk. "Hey, you little-!" he snarled, but the hyn slinger in the blue and white stocking cap had already ducked out of sight.

"If you Fireball anything, property damages come out of your share," Lady Edge noted over her shoulder flatly.

Or any other destructive spell. Hammel winced, decided not to let go with something that would likely blow apart the building the hyn had ducked into, and just glared as they made a smooth retreat… well, except for the rocks that came whistling up trying to hit them, most of them adroitly avoided by Lady Edge just juking back and forth and letting them fall wide of their marks.

The walls of the city were soon upon them, and they zipped down, back to the ground as the startled guards there watched. Lady Edge absolutely ignored the men's upraised arms, golden coins glittering through the air and smacking into those hands instead, overpaying their gate fee as they zipped on out the opening, reconnected with their Lived-lines and zoomed away as quickly as a mounted horse.

If there were a few fuming hyn visible on the rooftops behind us, and some of them were garishly pink, they could at least exult in the fact they'd chased some damnable Zanzyran wizards out of the town, right?

"Is that mess going to create us trouble in the Shires, m'Lady?" the Mick leaned forward to ask me as we zipped away towards the hills that led to the small nation of hynfolk.

"Given the nature of wizards, Master McMikal, what do you think?" I replied without turning around.

He just grunted. "Rather not have to be fighting with the wee folk," he said in a low voice.

"Well, they are sending word ahead." I turned my head as some white doves went flashing by and past us. I suppose Duum could have shrieked them out of the air, but I had no reason to harm the birds. "So, assume there's going to be trouble ahead not of our making, and try to avoid ways of making it worse. Master Buck insisted his people were not aggressive and deceitful, but they've learned a powerful distrust of wizards of all kinds, and Zanzyrans and Siricilans in particular."

"Nico's going to get the worst of both, isn't he?" His Fuirenze accent and attire was very Siricilan in origin, as most of the natives of that Principality were descended from imperial immigrants, and even had relatives there, especially among the magi.

"He is nowhere near as treacherous and scheming as most of that breed, or he would have Fed the Land some time ago. However, that is not to say that he is inexperienced with the nature of his kin near and distant. I daresay you are part of a small circle of people that he could trust as actual friends for the first time in his life, McMikal."

The Mick snorted softly. "Even a no-magic blade-swinger like meself, aye?"

"He's got a soft spot for gladiators. I believe his older brother was crippled in the arena, trying to make a name for himself, and was betrayed and left exposed by his fighting partner in order to fix a fight. He's lost the use of his legs, and without clerical magic, will not learn to walk again unless our young alchemist finds a way to regenerate the damage done to him."

The Mick scowled, as that detail had never come up in his hearing. "He dinnae talk about it, m'Lady," he ventured quietly.

"He doesn't tell people that the sot who betrayed his brother died frothing at the mouth with blue veins bulging in his face making his head look like a giant penis… and his manhood swelling up to four times normal size and exploding in a rather gory display of fitting revenge, either."

The Mick blinked, looked back at the laughing young alchemist for just a moment, then away again. "Poison runs in the breed, doesn't it?" he murmured knowingly.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

"You should ask him about poisons that work on undead, Master McMikal. It would open up a whole new avenue of research for him."

The Mick blinked, but did not turn down the idea, unsurprisingly. When your dead relatives were up and moving around and making your life miserable, you tended to look for surprising solutions to the problem. "Summat of interest to you as well, m'Lady?" he asked carefully.

I was aware he'd long deduced that I was more powerful than I seemed, by the simple fact I'd hauled his father's remains out of a red dragon's lair without mentioning any other help in so doing… and Duum, well, Duum was not a servant beast a weaker mage should be able to handle.

The students considered such things easily explained by either my family or my Cryptomancy, having or been given a Rune to control the giant Bat. I was also obviously older and more well-traveled than they, and came from a wealthy family that had shuffled me off to the Great School as an embarrassment, given my appearance and odd mannerisms… and delightfully unique magic. Something so ostentatious and dire among elves was merely stylish and flavorful in Zanzyr, making me a fashionable darling there instead of an outcast.

Which I totally could and had leaned into, creating all sorts of love/hate dramatic nonsense among wizards who totally were supposed to be above such base and simplistic types of things. Being smart didn't excuse you from having hormones and other such similar things, after all, and wizards were notorious for not being able to control their emotions and, eh, strange obsessions they tended to develop with all the brains and none of the empathy or insight to go with them.

"If you are referring to my father's people, well. A Caergard's thoughts would probably prove remarkably similar to any Transyvian's on the matter of undead walking out and among them, and having power over them."

He sat back and just nodded slowly, glancing at his sister behind him, currently in a deep discussion about a new dress she'd picked up in Federyn, and a dozen others she and the other women had seen when they'd hit the fashionable areas of Federyn City. They needed to be a bit flashier or with more unique cloth to do the job in Zanzyr, of course, but that was just to be expected when you were a wizard.

"Aye, putting some o' me ancestors back in their graves would be a good thing, m'Lady," he offered grimly.

"Anyone who is a Wizard, even undead, can become a Zanzyran noble, McMikal… or remain one. However, it is not against the law to kill the undead, even in Zanzyr."

"Huh." He thought about that. "So, the other Princes know, and so there's no protection for the undead…"

"Oh, one can also find that the foremost proponents for removal of clerics from Zanzyr were Prince Morphail and the Prince of House Tilian at the time, and Caergard and Verdain have shot down any attempt to repeal it. In addition to the lack of healing and curative magic, the power of priests against the undead are one of the great things Zanzyr lacks at this time. The other Princes can also threaten both our family's Houses by simply lifting the ban on Clerics, which would immediately imperil their very existences."

He was silent as we headed up the long hills that would peak at the border with the Shires, thinking about that. "What do ye know of Caergard's undead?" he asked quietly.

"Caergard and Transyvia dominate the ranks of necromancers in Zanzyr. Prince Morphail is a vampire, and has been the only head of his House since it was established. He is not Morphail the Twelfth, he is the one and the original.

"Given the fluctuations about his tower when I examined it from afar, I believe Prince Cannarl is a lich, destroyed and risen again by overusing the power of the Radiance. The feigned friendliness and rivalry between the two is no doubt helped along by the fact your Prince doubtless desires the title of Master of Necromancers for himself."

The Mick whistled soft and low. "M'Lady, that be a heap of dangerous knowledge to be spreading about."

"It lets you know that we are both in similar situations, with fine upstanding elders, McMikal, who all need to be Fed to the Land, as graves are too good for them."

"I knew there was a reason I liked you, m'Lady," he smiled broadly.

"We'll make something out of you all of the undead will fear, McMikal, have no worries on that score."

"I'll hold ye to it, then, m'Lady!" he agreed cheerfully.

I just nodded slowly as I kept up the road towards the Shires.

------

The attack came on the downslope, with the nearest city of Dunpudding not two miles ahead.

I saw the magic shifting, strings playing in the Sublime Chord on the Primal bands as spells were invoked, and the area about us began to erupt with brambles.

Unperturbed as everyone began to shout, I rose straight up, less than a foot above the ten-foot reach of the tangle of supernaturally tough briars, and the others hurriedly pulled their feet in as they cried out and began to prepare spells.

I flicked my hand out to my right, and a Wardwall peeled down the side of our formation of Disks, mostly transparent but glowing a faint silver… with black skulls impressed into the center of each linked five-foot square. They seemed to laugh as suddenly a bunch of rocks, arrows, and magically-launched thorns thwapped and cracked as they embedded themselves into the protective surfaces in crinkled glass-like force distortions, rather making everyone blink at the amount of missile fire that had just come in.

"Hynfolk brigands. A most unusual breed of their species," I noted aloud for everyone within three miles… and that included those hyn in the city ahead. "I certainly wasn't expecting to be attacked by hyn while traveling peacefully here. No, no spells, people. This is the Shires, and defending ourselves from brigands with magic is curiously enough considered to be worse than the brigandry itself. However, Nico, Laur, do you have the blue and green vials?"

The two of them blinked, then dug for the phosphorescent and rather eye-catching alchemical vials as I came down with the line of Disks, then veered off the road without hesitation to get around a half-dozen hynfolk darting out of cover to block us, effectively going around them faster than they could change position.

That lot got the blue Potion. The green one went spiraling off to the right where the archers, slingers, and spellcasters had set themselves up in a flashing arc.

Two large explosions of very bright pastel blue and green exploded into very large and quite visible clouds of alchemical fun. The students whooped as all the missile fire was immediately cut off by the covering smoke, and we zipped on away and down the road as gasping hyn stumbled and rolled out of the cloud… all of them covered in very bright paint that was not going to come off easily at all…

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