Ayra hesitated in front of the wooden door. She took a deep breath gathering all the courage she could muster, and knocked.

“Come in!”

The voice of a bored old man. She entered the poorly lit room and barely saw him as he was seated at the table. He raised his eyes and watched her. She noticed a fickler of interest lighting his eyes. Maybe her fears were not founded; perhaps he would be willing to help her.

She was getting desperate. The training progressed too slowly as they did many other works instead of actual training. She begged to be moved to the mage training lager several times. She remembered what Cala had said: Spartacius wanted a mage, not an archer. There was a mage training group, but it was more expensive as the trainer was a hired mage from the Golden Empire.

She had been in an audience with the superior mother. She asked; she begged for her gold to pay for the training, but the superior mother refused.

When she went for the third time, she ended up disciplined in front of her squad: for her rudeness and stubbornness.

She had asserted her claim to the money and accused the superior mother of stealing it from her. She even tried to daunt the superior mother.

“I will tell Lady Cala everything!”

The superior mother turned white, then watched her with a wicked grin:

“Do you think that Cala the Assassin will care when she hears that you died in an accident?”

Cala the Assassin?

The superior mother's grin turned broader as she watched her round eyes.

“Yes, she is a footman of Tenebra's Black Temple! Maybe the footman.”

A cold shiver passed through Ayra's spine. Yes, Cala had something from Tenebra's aura with her. She had felt it. Fear and panic grasped her heart. Then she was taken away. She had been bound to a pole and her back and ass beaten with a thick wooden stick.

Ten times. Ten hard hits. She screamed after the first strike and started to cry after the second one.

Oh, how they laughed when the punisher hit her ass, and she yelled in pain. Not everybody laughed, but many did.

She fell like a sack to the ground when they unbound her hands. As she lay there, the superior mother came near her and spoke in a low voice:

“If I ever hear another complaint about you, your next punishment will be one hundred strokes with the many-headed whip. A simple horsewhip would be too kind for you. Such insolence!”

After that, nobody healed her; she had to suffer the pain. The other girls had laughed about her. Not all, but there was a noisy group. They started to call her Ayra-the-stick-mage. The lines that damned stick had left on her body were still visible and painful to touch even now, a week later. She could not sit, and she could sleep only on her belly, but she had to work. And some of those girls would, as if by accident, just hit her.

"Oh, excuse me!"

And the group would laugh at her pained yell.

The camp was no longer a refuge but turned more and more into prison.

When Noviel returned, she hoped again. She hoped to hear about Spartacius, but what she heard from Noviel was nonsense. She did not want to believe that. No, that cannot be the truth. Noviel's story must have been wrong. And now Noviel was leaving. As she had broken her contract, she was seen as a pariah. Even if her former trainer, mother Anora, begged the superior mother to give Noviel a second chance, she was banned. She had to leave immediately.

As she saw Noviel preparing to leave, Ayra decided to try to talk with the mage trainer. She was sorry for Noviel, but now she realized that Spartacius was again missing his mercenary. She had to train fast to become one because she knew: he would come back!

“What do you want! I don't have time to waste!”

The mage glanced at her, then turned back to his reading. As she stepped further into the room, he stopped her.

“Close the door behind you. Speak!”

She turned, closed the door, then turned again towards him, bowed deep and spoke:

“Honoured Master, I am begging you for admission to the mage training hours!”

He chuckled and looked at her.

“Hm! You are that idiot that was flogged a week ago!”

“Yes, master!”

She bowed her head, ashamed.

“Show me!”

She watched him for a couple of seconds, not understanding what he requested. He lost his patience.

“Undress!”

She took off her jacket and blouse with trembling hands. She stood there holding her clothes in front of her. He raised his eyes again, stood up and came closer. He walked around her.

“And further? Drop them!”

“But...”

He had a magic staff in his hand and hit her over the back with it. It was not a hard hit but enough to excise a pained yell from her.

“Do you want the training or not?”

“But...”

Again a hit over her back. Exactly over the blue lines. Another pained yell from her. She was perplexed and turned to talk to him.

He swatted her cheek with his hand so hard that she fell to the ground.

“I will take you. I know you need to learn your place. You are to sleep in my laboratory and do everything I will ask without questioning. After one year, if I am satisfied with you, you may try to learn the basics from that book.”

He pointed towards the book he was studying.

“That is the book to become an archmage. I will allow you to look into it, but I doubt you will be able to learn even a spell. If you ever question one word of what I say, if you ever do something a little different from what I say you should do, I will find ways to make you regret that."

He grinned, happy at the thought.

"Now, stay here as you are and do not move until I return. Put your hands on the floor!! If I don't find you with your hands on the floor, I'll glue them there. I'm going to talk to the superior mother to let me discipline you. You'll be my personal assistant, and you'll learn to obey.”

The obscene explosion of pure hate and desire to dominate her made her shiver. She watched with horror as the door closed behind him, not understanding the world anymore.

She started to cry with her hands as if glued to the floor. She did not dare to wipe her tears.

This… this kind of behaviour was exactly what she was running from. And this madness caught up with her even here in what should have been a refuge. Was this fate? Was this her fate to become enslaved?

This mage was a slave master. He treated her as he would treat a slave.

She took a deep breath and closed her eyes.

No! Sir Spartacius had freed her from the slavers. Should she undo what he did?

She opened her eyes and looked around, then started to dress.

She breathed the air out. Never a slave! She will run away.

Was this another test? Why did fate bring her here? She walked to leave the room. She saw the book in its heavy leather cover as she was closing the door.

She stopped. The book called to her.

Should she accept to be this crazy mages' slave to be able to learn from it?

NO!

She went to the table, closed the book, put it into a sack, and then ran out the door with the pack under her arm.

She walked the corridors trying to attract as little attention as possible. She has to leave the camp, but how could she do it? She was carefully walking towards the stables when the alarm horn sounded. She tried to hide in the hay.

“What have you done again?”

Ayra froze and turned.

Noviel was putting a saddle on her horse. Her eyes went to Ayra's red cheek. She sighed, seeing that.

Ayra trembled. She whispered from her hideout:

“Please, no! Please don't tell them you saw me!”

Noviel shook her head:

“Be quiet. Do you think you can hide from them here?”

“They will kill me if they catch me. The superior mother promised to flog me one hundred times if I...”

Noviel tsked and cut her short:

“This cannot be!”

“I told her I would tell Cala that she stole my money!”

“She stole your money?”

Noviel looked around.

“The four gold that Cala had put in my...”

Noviel opened a sack.

“Shht! Get in here!”

Ayra looked at the sack, then at Noviel, then, without further ado, entered the sack and made herself as small as possible. She tried to keep her own sack with the book in her arms. Noviel took it from her.

“I'll put it separately. Now shht!”

She pushed Ayra's head down and pressed some hay beside her to hide the contours. When satisfied, she closed the sack and bound it with leather straps to another two sacks. She added a couple of heavy stones on the other side for the balance; then, she lifted all three sacks with an effort, putting two on one side and the one with Ayra on the other side of the horse. She put another two smaller sacks above to camouflage her and walked out of the barn pulling the horse behind her. In another two minutes, she was riding outside the camp. The guards at the gate knew her well and wished her good luck.

Ayra was almost suffocating inside the sack but did not dare move. The hay was sticking her all over, and something was moving on her skin, probably a spider. She bit her trembling lip until she tasted blood, but she did not move. She heard the discussions and the distant turmoil inside the camp. Will Noviel deliver her, or will she free her? What will she do?

As soon as Noviel disappeared from the guards' sight, she pushed her horse. After some time, she left the road and entered an abandoned farm. There she finally freed Ayra, who fell crying into her arms.