Spellmonger's Trial at Sevendor

The Spellmonger's Trial was the centerpiece magical event of the first Sevendor Magical Fair. With no joust to draw the Talented from across the Five Duchies, Minalan invented a magical equivalent: an open contest with a witchstone as the prize and the entire mountain of Sevendor — Matten's Helm — as the contest field.

The setup

Over two hundred magi registered, drawn from across the Riverlands, the Wilderlands, Castal, Alshar, and even Remere — everyone Talented who could travel and who hoped to leave Sevendor with an irionite shard. Most had no other realistic path to a witchstone short of dying in the Penumbra against the gurvani.

Minalan and the Sevendori magi designed the trial themselves over weeks of preparation:

• The course began at the foot of Matten's Helm and climbed to the summit, ending at a flat slab where Minalan's pipe (the prize-token) sat next to a banewarded protective spell.
• The route was strewn with the Trail of Trials: gouts of flame, crushing noise, noxious vapours, binding spells, narrowing spells, illusions, and personalised challenges that triggered differently depending on the contestant. Sarakeem took particular pride in the design; Planus contributed.
• The summit slab held a banewarding with three layers of sophistication, woven through thaumaturgical misdirection. Breaking it required mastery of three elemental disciplines and the dynamics of arcane force. The retributory feedback for failure targeted the higher functions of the human mind.

I was proud of that spell. It was the biggest piece of original magic I'd attempted in a while. And it was artful, a truly classy piece of spellcraft, not dependent upon the massive amount of energy I had access to through the sphere but on thaumaturgical finesse.

— Minalan, on his banewarding

Two contestants nobody saw coming

The favoured contender was Jendaran the Trusty, a tall, double-braided warmage in silvered chain mail with a hickory battlestaff and a mageblade. Six inches taller than Minalan, broad-shouldered, intimidating, and a proven combat mage. He led the field through the Trail of Trials, broke the banewarding at the summit through pure thaumaturgical skill, and reached for the pipe.

The pipe was already gone.

Hours earlier, a thirteen-year-old falconer's daughter from the Westwood named Lenodara had ridden her hunting hawk Frightful in mind — a bilocation Talent neither she nor anyone else had recognised as full-blown rajira yet — and flown the bird up Matten's Helm. Frightful glided over every challenge, every illusion, every narrowing spell, every gout of flame. The bird could not break the banewarding (it was targeted at human higher cognition) but it could see the slab, watch the wind, and wait until the moment Frightful's eyes were the only ones on the prize.

Frightful picked up the pipe and flew away with it.

Dara's Frightful had retrieved my pipe by simply flying past all of the challenges and spells and trials to the top of Matten's Helm.

— Minalan, on Dara's circumvention

The argument

The committee of Magical Fair organisers convened in private to argue the question. Mavone took it personally that a stripling sport-Talent had outflanked a card-carrying warmage:

You cannot give a witchstone to a stripling lass. Not when there are so many worthy magi who competed. Jendaran, at least, is a proven warmage of good repute. He would gladly serve against the gurvani -- with a witchstone, he'd be powerful. But this girl? She knows not the slightest cantrip. Her Talent is just emerging -- for all we know she's just a sport!

— Mavone, in committee

Pentandra, however, ruled cleanly: by the published rules of the contest, Dara had won. She had used a Talent to take possession of the prize before any other contestant could. The contest had not specified the human contestant must do so personally. The witchstone was hers.

The committee compromised. Dara would receive a witchstone — a lesser stone, one of the small Wenshari shards that Mavone had brought back from his eastern travels — in recognition that the stones were typically calibrated to match a mage's power and Dara's Talent was barely budded. Jendaran, in compensation for actually breaking the banewarding by skill alone, would receive the original prize-stone conditional on his enlistment in one of the militant Arcane Orders. He accepted on the spot.

The introductions

Minalan brought the two together for a face-to-face meeting in the great hall. Dara, intimidated by the warmage, refused to give up her claim. Jendaran, who could very easily have made trouble, instead chose generosity:

He acknowledged he had been bested by a sport-Talent half his height and twice as resourceful. He praised Dara's ingenuity and courage in front of the gathered fair-goers. The hot-heads who had been muttering about challenging Dara to a duel went quiet. Banamor and his fair wardens kept the rest of the night calm. By the next morning the hangovers and the novelty of fresh witchstones in working hands had moved the dispute to the back of every mind.

What the Trial set in motion

The Spellmonger's Trial founded several things at once:

• Lady Dara of Westwood, who would take to the witchstone faster than anyone in living memory, become Minalan's formal apprentice within a year, and grow into the Hawkmaiden, the founder of the Sky Riders.
• Jendaran the Trusty, who joined the Horkan Order, served at the Dragonfall and the rest of the Penumbra war, and rose into the senior leadership of Minalan's combat magi.
• The Sevendor Magical Fair itself as the annual professional gathering of the kingdom's magi, with the Trial as its keystone event in subsequent years (with revised rules to prevent another Frightful-style bypass).
• The political precedent that witchstones could be openly awarded to commoner-Talented contestants, breaking the Imperial-noble hereditary monopoly the Censorate had spent two centuries enforcing.

Dara wore her witchstone for the rest of the series. The pipe she retrieved from Matten's Helm went home in Minalan's pouch. Frightful was rewarded with a chicken.