Chapter 32:

  When Aria tied off her final knot, she leaned back with a small sigh of accomplishment. “All done.”

  Eli set the last glove aside, inspected the seam, and nodded. “It is very good.”

  Her face brightened at the compliment. “Really?”

  “Really,” he said.

  She folded the shirt neatly, pleased, and helped him gather the scraps. Together they stacked the fabric, set aside the chalk and needles, and cleared the table.

  As Eli folded the gloves into the completed bundle, he spoke without looking up. “Since we finished the outfit this afternoon, we are going to use this time differently now. Starting tomorrow, how do you feel about training.”

  “Training?” She asked. To her credit, she gave the answer due consideration before blindly agreeing. Then she nodded, almost to herself. “I want to get stronger,” she said. Eli heaved a sigh of relief. He hadn’t wanted to force or coerce her into the training and had been wracking his brain on suitable incentive had she said no.

  “That is good. It will be your first time outside, so we will go slow.”

  Aria blinked, caught off guard. “Training? Outside the keep?” She asked.

  “Outside the town.”

  “Are we going to a different town?”

  “We are not,” Eli said.

  “Then where are we going?”

  “To the border,” Eli said placing the last glove on top of the shirt. “We will be training in a clearing.”

  Aria froze. “You mean the woods?” She asked.

  “Yes,” Eli responded. “It is the safest place for us to train right now.”

  “But the woods are not safe. There are monsters in there!” She whisper-shouted, grabbing his arm as he made to leave the workstation. He smiled at the hand on his arm, then traced it back to his owner with his eyes. Realizing what she was doing she made to pull her hand back, but Eli caught her, holding her gently by the wrist and walking them over to the study where he released her to go scour the bookshelves while she settled herself in her usual comfortable spot. Once he’d found what he was looking for he returned to settle in beside her. The book was called ‘The Woods and the Wilds’ by Keej Forester. The author of the book had to be at least 400 years old, approaching the end of her natural lifespan, and had been one of his favourite instructors at the academy. She was a nature and life mage that had deviated from the expected healing path. She could heal some, but it was not her focus. Instead, she pioneered and specialized in manecology, which was the study of how mana interacts with nature, though Keej specialized in the effects of mana on mundane lifeforms.

  Aria brightened up instantly when she saw the cover, then deflated again when she realized the book was out because Eli was serious.

  “Will we be going with Kara, and Cale?” She asked hopefully. Eli shook his head.

  “We will be doing private training. I have secrets they cannot know.”

  She nodded quickly, no hesitation. “Of course. I won’t say anything.” He smiled at her, knowing it was the absolute truth too. Aria was much more resilient than she gave herself credit for. The same little girl who lugged dozens of kilos of meat across town by hand had a resolve that had been nearly unrivaled in his past-future.

  “It is easy to be scared of something you do not understand. The less you know, the more scary things can feel. So today we learn all about where we are going, then tomorrow we can test out our runes.”

  ~

  Later, Eli sat alone in the same room. The table that had held fabric and needles was now covered in maps and scrolls. A warded parchment glowed faintly in the corner, ink shifting with the illusory representations of real roads and river lines. Small weights pinned open ledgers and copied contracts, the Rodrigo seal pressed into the margins.

  He leaned forward, eyes following the glowing blobs that popped up intermittently on some of the lines denoting things like the size of the transport, the direction they were heading and other details picked up by the sensors in and around the Lira area. The Rodrigo’s had maps like this for every road between Adler and the larger trade hubs. He knew in his parent’s strategy room there was a much bigger, more detailed map with much more specific information, like known affiliations, and cargo weight. That map couldn’t even compare to his mother’s masterpiece at their estate in Adler. That one was linked to sensors, arrays and formations that could even sense individual lifeforms and mana signatures. However, for his needs, this small scroll would do.

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  He traced the shipment routes, and cross referenced that with what he knew about the traders and travelers who used them. Most convoys and shipments followed regular schedules, easy to register, easy to approve, and easy to track. But there was one line he’d been watching for months now. Unregistered, no flags at the gates coming or going. No tracking within the towns it visited. The only reason he’d caught it at all was because he had some semblance of when the clandestine shipments had been transported, and he had taken the liberty of planting his own route trackers on the roads leading into and out of his town. They might be able to hide from the enchantments and scrying efforts of the current conventional sensors, but Eli’s script work was pulled directly from his future knowledge.

  A reworked scrying and tracing script was one of the first things that had been created as a countermeasure for what they had then thought was a civil war. It took no more than one ambush for some of the strategic commanders to realize that whichever tech the opposition was using was able to bypass detection.

  Now, Eli was using those same countermeasures decades in advance.

  He could see the convoy enter Lira Town, and whereas they should have changed colours to indicate approval at the gates, the moment their vehicle moved passed the range of Eli’s own sensors it disappeared. He had no sensors placed here as unlike outside the gates, he couldn’t just go activating tracking runes and tracing scripts without his parents being immediately alerted and alarmed. Unlike most territories, Adler was ruled by one of the foremost script smiths, enchanters, and rune crafters on the continent. The first thing she had done after co-inheriting the Adler territory with her husband, was travel to each town and ensure she had the best detection arrays possible set up.

  It was how he knew he wouldn’t get away with putting up his own sensors, but also how he was sure the shipments he was tracking were both sophisticated, clandestine, and very likely the ones he was looking for.

  Eli tapped a ledger entry with one finger. The timing of the described transport corresponded with the timing of one of the disappearing transports. The records listed the entrant as a convoy belonging to a 3rd Step House. According to the gate guard the merchant was there to pick up ‘mineral shipments’, but no mines in the Rodrigo lands required such armor or secrecy, and the ones that did were either transported by the Rodrigo Transport itself, one of the house businesses, or were all registered, had specific delivery times and dates, and were overseen by at least one, or more, powerful members of each party.

  That led Eli to one conclusion. These vehicles that showed up unregistered in any trade database, invisible to both imperial and regional proximity sensors, and undetectable through all forms of conventional scrying at this point in history, had to be the ones he learned, centuries too late, in that distant future.

  They were carrying advanced alien tech, through Rodrigo territory.

  “How kind of them to donate,” Eli sneered.

  He drew another parchment closer. Timelines. Contracts. Merchant signatures. Each one confirmed what he already suspected, irregular deliveries passing through their territory, disguised as mundane trade.

  It had taken no small effort to gain access to these maps, letters and ledgers. Remarkably, gaining access to the enchanted maps and trade routs had been the easier part of the ordeal. He had just needed to become very invested in economics during his afternoon lessons. This had the effect of delighting Mme. Okoro, distressing Aria, and providing him with genuinely useful information he had either forgotten or been newly introduced to in this timeline. It was both enlightening, and incredibly helpful in narrowing down his target.

  Unfortunately, the same excuse of requiring study materials didn’t work nearly as well in securing the documents he needed. Eli understood that handing such sensitive materials to a seven (nearly eight!) year old was probably a wise decision on his parent’s part. However, that hadn’t stopped him from needing access to then anyway. He had been forced to discreetly copy out the documents and ledgers in spare gaps of time. Cutting into his nighttime excursions, and private study. Even with magic doing a lot of the heavy lifting in duplicating what he needed, it had still taken months.

  The one benefit of the arduous endeavour was the amount of proficiency he’d gained in Shadow Arts. Master Moss would be proud. Horrified, but proud.

  He shifted the maps aside and sat back, the lamplight casting sharp shadows across the desk, illuminating jagged portions of some pages and throwing the magical dots and lines that represented roads, routes, and resources into stark relief against the encroaching darkness.

  The warmth of the afternoon lingered faintly in memory, Aria smiling over her stitches, her pride at his compliment was replaced by quiet calculation, determination, and carefully controlled rage. His eyes were cold as he measured distances and times and planned out his attack. Today they were collecting the shipment, tomorrow night they would leave the town. Eli would be sure to see them off nicely.

  Eli stood and stretched. His hand brushed against the collar of the shirt Aria had helped reinforce, and some of the anger drained out of him. The deep blue fabric seemed to absorb the light. He guided a thin trickle of mana into his eyes and watched the hidden runes come alive. Aria’s durability sigils glowed neat and steady where they were stitched. The finer patterns of his own work shimmered where thread met fabric. When mana powered the weave, the runes would read as a single, stable system. He closed his hand slowly around the fabric. His preparation and surveillance were complete, and he had all the gear he could get without inviting undue suspicion.

  In silence he packed away the maps, the gloves, and all the materials into his now complete bag before locking the bag in a secret runed compartment. He was ready.

  Tomorrow would be the first training trip out to the wilds with Aria, and tomorrow night would be his first real strike against the Families, against the invaders.