Target Of The Orders (Book 3) by Ron Collins Read Free Book Online

wanting to see what Garrick might say.
    A truth built within him.
    “The orders obtained their god-touched mages first.”
    “Yes, Garrick, there is
indeed
hope for you. If others of my ilk hadn’t provided the orders with their mages first, I would not have been inclined to give this power to you. You are the balance, you see. You are the consequence.”
    “Lucky me.”
    “Yes, lucky you.”
    “Why me? Surely there were better options.”
    “You made yourself available.”
    Garrick grimaced. “I’m not naive enough to think you would choose an apprentice based on mere convenience.”
    “Do not sell yourself short, Garrick. I’m pleased. You are so much bolder today than the mere lad who cried out for help a few months ago was.”
    “That’s no answer.”
    “I feel no need to answer such a senseless question.”
    “A magewar is brewing, Braxidane. There are no senseless questions.” Garrick stopped then. A sudden chill ran up his back. “You’re all just playing with us, aren’t you? The planewalkers, that is? You're just dallying. A war between us wouldn't bother you at all.”
    Braxidane smiled.
    “The other god-touched mages came from other planewalkers. And it was those planewalkers stepping into Adruin who gave you
permission
to follow. But when you add it up, you're all just playing a game.”
    Braxidane shrugged. “We play only those games the people of the planes play themselves. My brothers and sisters are the ones fostering the mage hunt. I'm helping you. But none of these things seems foreign to your people.”
    Garrick paused, letting this idea sink in. Thoughts jumbled as he looked at the planewalker, but he could not form a proper question.
    “It all seems so senseless.”
    “You want senseless, Garrick? I’ll tell you what senseless is. Senseless is the Freeborn being obliterated by the orders’ champions without your help—that is what senseless is.”
    “You want me to join them?”
    “It seems prudent.”
    “What will happen if I don’t?”
    “Your friends will die.”
    “Why should you care?”
    “The question, Garrick, is: Why do
you
care? And the question is how long can you persist in thinking you don’t matter?”
    Anger spiked in him then.
    Garrick was nobody. He had always been nobody. He was barely out of apprenticehood. A neophyte. Yet, now he actually had the ability to change things, and for the first time his gut was telling him he could make a difference in the world. But how much of this feeling was actually his? Braxidane owned him, after all. This conversation alone told him that much. How much of this thinking was his own?
    Braxidane expected things.
    And Darien. And Sunathri, and the men and women of the entire Freeborn camp.
    He thought of Darien’s inner strength. He recalled the purity of conviction in Suni’s gaze as she pressed him to join her cause—a cause she had created wholly from within herself. He remembered the force of Will’s youthful life.
    They were all so full of hope. All so certain of things.
    He wished he could be that way.
    They did need him, though. He felt their need, and their expectation, as if it was a stone on his chest.
    Their hope was false, though. Their expectation was wasted. He had no idea how to help beat back the orders’ aggression.
    And Braxidane was right about another thing, too—if the other god-touched mages were anything as powerful as he was, they could be devastating in battle. No opposing force could stand against that kind of power in the hands of a mage of real status and real experience. If the orders were planning to take the whole of Adruin, the Freeborn would be destroyed.
    “I can’t join the Freeborn,” Garrick said. “But I’ll do what I can.”
    “That sounds like a start.”
    Garrick set a defiant jaw. “I’ll take life only under just conditions, though.”
    Braxidane’s grin spread over his lips slowly. “It will go better for you if you remember there is no such thing as