I managed to pull myself out of the fugue when I felt my hand close around something yielding. "Here, elfling, I found a few potions just in case we run into anyone else on the way out." Some part of me raged silently at his words, but I didn't understand why.
Before I could try to sort it out, he pushed past me and opened the door. Stairs led deeper into the castle, stone bricks giving way to rough hewn walls after just a few feet. My eyes stung from torch smoke, but it had the feel of an old annoyance somehow, and I put it aside. Sometime soon I was going to have to figure out what was going on, but hopefully I'd be able to find a quiet hole where nobody wanted to kill me or make me want to kill them to do it.
We rounded a corner and Hadvar slowed, tilting his head to the side. I also heard it...it sounded like someone arguing. One voice was shrill and indignent...the others were deeper and angry. He looked at me and we nodded in unison slowing down to move more quietly. It didn't really work...sneaking is difficult enough, but doing it in armor proved to be beyond my skill. Thankfully, it didn't matter. The men in blue were standing with their backs to the entrance and loudly berating a long-nosed fellow in black robes, and whatever he was saying was going to get him killed.
Hadvar shouted something and charged forward without warning. If I lived through this I'd have to berate him for even bothering to be quiet if all he was going to do was scream and yell and, well, he had a powerful swing. I moved in to his left as his first target fell to the ground with a terrible cut. All attention was on us as I stepped in with my shield and slammed a man's strike wide, following up with a short cut under the edge of my shield rim. My sword tip got hung up in his mail shirt for a moment, but the force of our momentum carried the edge through and I heard him grunt in pain. The weight fell off of my sword and I straightened to strike again and again and then I was on the ground and I couldn't move my shield arm.
I looked up into the eyes of the mace wielding man who had hit me and met his furious gaze with my own. I started to scramble away, anger that the filthy Nord would dare lay a hand on me and I heard a sound like tearing cloth and lightning flashed out from the long-nosed man's fingers, enveloping the mace-wielding Nord, and I gathered my feet and launched myself at him and watched his warm blood flow over my sword. I ripped my hand from the sword before the blood could get on my hand and his dead body collapsed to the floor, glassy eyes no longer filled with the soul of man. I couldn't tear my eyes from the sword sticking out of his neck.
From nearby, I could hear Hadvar and the long-nosed mage conversing. Hadvar was trying to convince the mage to leave, I thought, but I wasn't really tracking. I felt my hand reach up and felt a tug deep inside, a pulling at a part of my I hadn't even realized existed, and a green glow filled my vision and the pain in my shoulder was gone. That shocked me back to the here and now. Did I just do magic? I had said something quietly...some word. Lasvuut. I heard it again, and remembered (?) that magic had a language. Words had power. Some people could use it with a lot of training and practice.
I remembered that I didn't have to practice.
Hadvar turned to me and gestured at a pouch on a small table nearby. "This fool won't believe there's a dragon attacking, but says he won't get in our way. See if there's anything in there we can use and catch your breath. We need to move on quickly." I could understand the mage's skepticism, honestly. You could barely hear anything from outside in these stone walls.
I opened his satchel while Hadvar bandaged up a minor cut he'd received.
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