The aftermath was simple by the rules of this world: knights surrendered and expected fair treatment. Foot soldiers had no such expectation and were generally treated according to whoever had just won's current mood. Evan had already decided to let them live.
He walked to where Mykel had fallen and closed the dead man's eyes. The storage ring on his finger went to Evan — materials, some gold, a set of alchemical instruments, and two jade pendants.
He almost moved on. Then he stopped.
He had seen a jade pendant before. Exactly one: in Boniface's ring, taken after their fight. He had assumed it was an unusual decorative item, since jade wasn't valued in this world's western territories.
Here was a second one.
He sat down and separated both pendants carefully. Each one was two thin pieces fitted together — and when separated, each revealed text on the inner surface. This world didn't carve jade for decoration. These were containers for something.
The first pendant he'd taken from Boniface bore a number — one. The text inside described a triple furnace: a sand bath layer, a shallow receiving dish above it, and a sealed half-sphere on top that the text called the Sage's Egg. Together these formed the Threefold Furnace, the classical apparatus of high-level alchemy. The accompanying instructions described combining something called "Red Sea Foam" with something called "the Fat of Mercury's Wind" in equal parts inside the Egg, along with fire-timing specifications and incantations that Evan had found impenetrable.
The new pendant bore the number four. Its text was different — an equation he recognized as alchemical notation but couldn't read, with references to "Eternal Water" and "Virgin's Milk," along with counts of moons and suns that seemed to indicate duration of treatment.
He stared at both pieces for a long time.
Philosopher's Stone. The Sage's Stone. The highest achievement of alchemy — said to transmute base metals into gold, said to confer immortality on those who consumed it. He'd known the legend from Earth. He'd known it existed as a concept in Ashton's memory. He hadn't known there were physical instructions fragmented across numbered jade pendants.
He was a Lich without a Soul Vessel. The Stone's traditional property of conferring immortality or regeneration was not something he could dismiss as academic.
The texts were written in cipher, and the materials were described in the obscure symbolic language of classical alchemy, which was deliberately impenetrable to outsiders. He could identify the references — "Fat of Mercury's Wind" had appeared in Ashton's memory in connection with mercury, though whether that was the correct interpretation neither of them had been certain — but he couldn't confidently say he understood either formula.
Two pendants. Two numbers. How many were there? Where were the others?
He put both away and committed the text of each to memory. Then he rejoined the camp.
He noticed Bess watching him from across the clearing — or rather watching his hands. When he looked up, she turned her head. But the wanting in her eyes had been legible.
He looked at her hands. No storage ring. Of course — she was a Magic Apprentice, barely, and storage rings were expensive. He tossed the ring to her across the space between them.
"That's for you. I already have one."
Bess fumbled it and went red. "Mr. Evan, I wasn't — I didn't mean to — I can't accept—"
"You're a mage now," he said. "You need somewhere to put things." He didn't give her room to argue, and Felix, seeing the moment, added his own endorsement, which closed the matter. The ring went on Bess's finger, and her face stayed red for a while, but she stopped trying to give it back.
Meanwhile, the valley behind them had gone quiet. The fires had burned themselves out. Blue smoke drifted from the scorched grass and the blackened valley floor, and the smell of it — Evan was careful not to think too precisely about what made up that smell — drifted over the camp.
That evening, something shifted in the small tent where Bess had taken herself to rest. Evan, sitting outside in the last of the daylight, felt the water element stirring — not dramatically, not with visible manifestation, but a realignment in the ambient elemental distribution, water flowing toward a new center. He stood and watched the tent.
Bess had broken through to full Mage rank.
Felix came out of his tent, felt the atmospheric change without understanding it, and found Evan watching the small tent. "Bess?"
"She's become a real mage. Fourth level, water element." Evan paused. "Your family's investment paid off."
Felix stared at the tent with an expression that had nothing calculated in it for once. When Bess emerged twenty minutes later, he went forward and told her immediately that her position in the household was changing, that she wasn't going to be his attendant anymore.
Bess looked briefly terrified. "My lord, you're dismissing me?"
He laughed. "Of course not. You're a mage now. Your title and your salary both need to reflect that."