Cursed Mage Read online

  Cursed Mage

  Witch School Book One

  Mia Archer

  Contents

  1. Destruction

  2. Little Joke

  3. Two Days

  4. Two Nights

  5. Ghost Fields

  6. Unquiet Dead

  7. Stolen Moments

  8. Into the Tower

  9. Dark Danger

  10. Magic

  11. Falling

  12. Rescue

  13. Taken

  14. Magic Moment

  15. Confession

  16. Release

  17. Evasion

  18. Power

  19. Sneaking Home

  20. Evening’s End

  21. Dark Lady

  Also by Mia Archer

  Cursed Mage

  Advance Reader Copy

  By Mia Archer

  Copyright 2018 Mia Archer

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  Individuals pictured on the cover are models and used for illustrative purposes only.

  First digital edition electronically published by Mia Archer, September 2018

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  Created with Vellum

  1

  Destruction

  The fitful light reflected off of Jaska's eyes as Choikal burned in the distance.

  A pity, to be sure. There’d been so many good years spent in that city. Years when she thought she would rule the place. Years when she’d been the golden student.

  No longer. There was no chance of going back from what she'd done, but burning the city seemed the least she owed them considering what they'd done to her.

  "It can't be that bad mistress," Uinae said.

  Jaska looked down at her and the dark glow in her eyes was enough to make Uinae pull back. The look of terror in her eyes brought momentary satisfaction, but only momentary.

  It couldn't draw Jaska's attention away from what was happening just on the other side of the horizon, after all. A glow bright enough that it blotted out the stars.

  Yes. That was one hell of a fire raging. She didn't see how the city would recover from this.

  She was surprised to feel a single tear trickling down her cheek. She quickly wiped it away.

  She didn't have time for sentimentality or looking weak in front of the help. She didn't have time for much of anything, to be honest. They would be hot on her heels no matter what she did to try and throw them off her trail.

  She didn’t even have time for this. Though she smiled at that notion. Of course she had time for this. Who wouldn’t have time for the young child that was destined to destroy her?

  She rolled her eyes. Those pontificating old bitches and blowhards in their robes going on about the future and what must be. She figured what they really wanted was to scare her onto the straight and narrow path they all walked.

  Well the glow reflecting off the clouds in the far distance was proof enough how well that had worked.

  A cry brought her attention back to the business she was about. A bit of fun in the middle of all of the trouble this night.

  She looked down at the child. She was so new. So innocent. She was wrapped in swaddling and set in a small basket where her mother could keep an eye on her without getting out of her own bed.

  Jaska's eyes darted over to that bed. To two figures who stared at her with their eyes wide. Terror showed clearly there.

  She sighed. She would have to take care of that before leaving, but for now she had something far more important to occupy her attention.

  Something that didn't involve burning one of the greatest cities in the world to the ground, though that had been its own fun. It was almost a pity it was over.

  It was rare for someone to experience a moment that they knew would define their reputation for the rest of their lives and know it even as it happened. Though those moments seemed to happen to Jaska more often than most.

  Mostly she’d fallen into those moments by accident and hadn’t realized what they were until other people told her, but she assumed burning a city like Choikal to the ground would be one of those moments for sure. A moment that would live in infamy.

  She smiled. There were times when she truly loved her work.

  Still, she should also enjoy the small things. Especially when those small things could become a very big problem for those she hated.

  She returned her attention to the child.

  "Are you sure you want to do this mistress?" Uinae asked, a slight tremble to her voice.

  Jaska resisted the urge to lash out with her magic. She wanted to show Uinae the price for being so timid. But she didn't.

  Good help was hard to find, after all, and honestly at the end of the day Uinae was the perfect kind of help. Just enough spine to stand against Jaska’s enemies while turning to supple jelly whenever she looked at Jaska.

  Not to mention just smart enough to carry out orders without being smart enough to question them. Minions who questioned orders could get to be an annoyance in Jaska’s line of work.

  She wasn't going to throw away a good servant like that. Even if it was fashionable among the darker magic users in the world to dispose of assistants once they'd outlived their usefulness. Or even if they made a small mistake.

  Actually, in her experience pretty much any excuse was good enough for most dark magic users to do away with their minions in a very messy and spectacular fashion.

  Which could be terribly satisfying in the short term, but then you had to go through the trouble of hiring someone new and shoulder the cost of training them and it was nothing but work, work, work.

  "This needs to be done," Jaska said.

  "But the child…"

  Jaska held up a hand. Raised one finger. It was a small gesture, but it was enough to buy Uinae's silence.

  Jaska smiled. Yes. That combination of terror and willingness to obey orders was perfect.

  "I'm well aware of what this child is supposed to do to me eventually,” Jaska said. "But I choose to look on that prophecy as an advantage."

  She’d given this a lot of thought, after all. Any thought was more thought than Uinae typically gave any issue that flitted across her mind.

  "How can you look at your eventual defeat and downfall as an advantage?" Uinae asked.

  Jaska shook her head and made a tsking noise with her tongue.

  "How can I not look at this as a good thing?" she asked. "Look at this child! Just a little baby. It's not like she’s going to cause a party of adventurers to come knocking on my door intent on overthrowing me when she's just a wee babe, after all. That's the sort of ridiculous thing you only hear of in the stories. Stories told by second-rate storytellers, at that."

  Uinae's face scrunched up. It always did that when she was trying to think. Thinking wasn't one of her strong suits.

  "I don't understand…"

  "Of course you don't understand," Jaska said. "I don't expect you to understand. All I expect you to do is obey."

  Uinae instinctively moved into a curtsy even though she wasn't wearing a dress. "Yes mistress."

  Jaska smiled. A thin smile. Not a pleasant smile on the night she burned one of the greatest cities in the world, and Uinae recoiled from that thin smile.

  Oh yes. She might not understand, but Jaska didn’t look for understanding from her minions. Merely obedience.

  She looked down at the child. Wondered that something so small could turn into something so terrible for her eventually. Though she’d decided that if the prophecy was true
, and in all her research it seemed they did have a pesky habit of coming true despite all her wishful thinking, then it was a prophecy she could twist to her advantage.

  Oh yes. This child might be the instrument of her eventual downfall, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t also make the youngling the instrument of her greatest triumph as well.

  2

  Little Joke

  Jaska tried to control her disgust at Uinae’s pitiful display. She did roll her eyes. Something her minion couldn’t see since she was conveniently bowed to the ground.

  She might be bowing down in a curtsy, but Jaska could tell she still didn't quite understand exactly what Jaska was getting at. Clearly the idea of Jaska’s empire eventually crumbling was something that bothered Uinae far more than it bothered Jaska.

  She sighed. She was going to have to explain this after all. If there was one thing she hated it was explaining herself to her inferiors.

  Which made life difficult considering everyone she met was automatically put into that category.

  "You don't understand," she said.

  "I don't, but you just said I don't need to understand. I just need to obey."

  Jaska gritted her teeth. She didn't like having her own words thrown back at her, but she’d walked into that one.

  "This girl is just a baby. If the child is prophesied to defeat me that means I have a good couple of decades ahead of me, at least, before things go all pear-shaped. The one certainty about children, human children at least, is they take at least a couple of decades to even be able to wield magic, let alone be able to use it in a way that would threaten me.

  "But…"

  Another finger up. That halted Uinae in the middle of whatever inane thought she was about to unleash on the world.

  "I find comfort in that certainty," Jaska said. "If there is a prophecy that I can't be defeated until a certain someone decides to come after me that means I am free to do whatever I please in the intervening years. And nothing anyone can do will touch me in that time, because the only one who can defeat me will still be in diapers or learning how to walk or preoccupied with trying to get the opposite sex interested in her.”

  She smiled a thin smile at that last bit. If the child did manifest the ability, something that would be put in serious doubt after what she did tonight, then there was a good chance she might spend more of her time trying to get the same sex interested in her considering where she would be going once they discovered that ability in her.

  Jaska could well remember her school dalliances. Pleasant memories rendered only slightly sour with the knowledge that she may have killed some of those dalliances this dark night.

  A pity, but omelettes and breaking things came to mind.

  “Does that make sense?"

  Once more Uinae's eyes started to go wide. Finally Jaska could see understanding dawning on her face. An understanding that still wasn't complete. Uinae was nothing if not simple, one of the things that made Jaska like her as a minion, but still.

  The understanding was there. Sort of.

  "So you're saying…"

  "I'm saying no matter what I do, I can rest assured that it won't result in me getting thwarted or killed. At least not until this one is old enough to give me trouble.”

  A look of worry passed across Uinae's face. "But what if that means you get captured and held prisoner for twenty years waiting for this child to come along and slit your throat in a jail cell? Bad things could still happen to you."

  Jaska glared at Uinae. The spell to disintegrate her minion down into her component atomic parts was on her fingers before she gave it thought.

  Jaska took a deep breath and stopped. Forced herself to draw back.

  No. There was a certain elegant, if simple, logic to what Uinae had said. A logic that galled Jaska because she hadn’t thought of it herself. She’d been so busy reveling in the immunity she thought this chosen child bought her that she hadn’t come at the problem from all angles.

  Clearly she would have to be careful, even if there was a prophecy that said she was indefatigable until this child got off its diapered ass and defeated her, which seemed like it was a long way off.

  She hadn’t interpreted “defeated” as getting captured and waiting around for this child to come along and finish her off some dark day in the future, but one of several problems with prophecy was there was always plenty of wiggle room.

  Enough wiggle room that she could conceivably be crippled and defeated for all practical purposes well before her final defeat.

  Jaska looked down at the child. Bald. Smiling. A girl child, but they all looked the same to her. She smiled back at the creature without thinking, then turned to a frown when she realized what she was doing.

  Assuming the city of Choikal did manage to survive, and there was a good likelihood that was going to happen despite her best efforts to destroy it once and for all, she was going to send them a surprise that would come of age just in time to finish off what she’d already started.

  Sure she could worry that her attempt to send a surprise like this into the midst of the very people who had defied her and forced her to set fire to the city would eventually set in motion the series of events that would result in her being destroyed, but that was another problem with prophecy.

  She figured that prophecy was going to happen in its own good time no matter what she did. Why not have a little fun with it in the meantime?

  She moved her hands over the child. Wiggled them just so. It was very important to be precise with a spell like this. Lack of precision would only result in sloppy mistakes.

  That was the last thing she wanted. Especially for a long running magical spell that was going to take its sweet time manifesting. Like perhaps eighteen years.

  Just enough time for the most dangerous child in the world, to her, to become the most dangerous child in the world to those stuffed robes at the Academy who didn’t see the benefits of doing things Jaska’s way.

  A strange glow appeared over the child and settled on her like a blanket.

  Were the particulars of this spell cruel? Maybe, but she figured a little bit of confusion and discomfort upon coming-of-age was the least she owed someone who was destined to overthrow her and put an end to all the bad work she planned on doing in this world.

  The glow spread over the child. She felt a push back and frowned. That wasn’t something she should’ve felt from a child. It meant the little shit factory was pushing back against her spell. Resisting.

  The child giggled as though it didn’t have a care in the world. Which, in a way, she didn’t. Yet she pushed back. The power was incredible, and it gave Jaska an understanding of just how dangerous this creature would be to her someday.

  It was almost enough to make her want to kill the child today, but she was well aware that the shit factory had the armor of prophecy around her. The last thing Jaska wanted to do was something stupid like trying to kill the child only to trigger that prophecy now rather than twenty years from now with something ridiculous like her killing spell bouncing back on her or something.

  It was almost enough to make her want to take the child. Raise her as her own. Mold her in Jaska’s image. Though of course she could see the inevitable end of the prophecy if she did that just as clearly as she could see the end if she tried to kill the thing now. The filthy ungrateful creature would eventually chafe under her tutelage and destroy her master. Plus if she went down that route it would mean several years of changing diapers.

  Well, of listening to Uinae complaining about changing diapers. Which would almost be more tortuous.

  No, best to leave the girl child to grow on her own and let the prophecy find Jaska in its own sweet time rather than tripping that prophetical trap today or inviting that danger in as a constant companion.

  Jaska pushed against that power, surprised that an infant would be the one thing that successfully defied her this night.

  Finally the magic snapped in place in a way that told h
er it was done. For better or worse. The infant might defy her without realizing what she did, but Jaska had won in the end.

  For now, at least. There was that damnable prophecy, after all.

  She’d set a series of events into motion that would likely result in her own untimely demise, she considered anything short of immortality untimely, but it would totally be worth it to see all of those stuck up prigs at the Academy coming to terms with what she’d dropped into their midst.

  It was a bomb, of sorts. Something that would challenge the very foundations of what the schools believed to be true, and she couldn't wait to see the outcome of her experiment.

  It was the least she owed them for all the trouble they’d caused her.

  She turned to Uinae. The ghost of a smile played across her face.

  "It's time for us to go," she said.

  "Are you sure it's done?" Uinae asked.

  "Would I say it was time to go if I wasn't sure?" she snapped.

  She turned to the parents who we were still lying, paralyzed, in their bed. No doubt they wondered what she was going to do to them. They had to know who she was. What she was capable of.

  The glow on the horizon was proof enough of that.

  But something stayed her hand. Maybe it was a sense of pity for them. Maybe it was a sense of pity for her future adversary. Maybe it was the sure knowledge that nothing better filled a future adversary with a sense of destructive purpose than discovering at a dramatically appropriate moment that their parents had been killed by the evil sorceress they were now bound to swear revenge on.