by SFnovelists
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No personal signature. No politenesses. I had no acquaintance with Villa Margeroux or with any person who lived in the vicinity of Ventinna.
The note could be a prank, perpetrated by some student I had reprimanded for marking in books or dripping lamp oil onto irreplaceable pages. Mage Rutan's much-praised validator, the small pewter charm I had wheedled out of the old sturgeon only with extraordinary groveling, wavered maddeningly between dullness and brilliance, refusing to designate the message as truth or falsehood.
Yet the request was stated with a certain directness uncharacteristic of students. Uncharacteristic, too, was the distance involved; Ventinna lay a good four days' ride westward. And a particular detail tickled my imagination, one that might escape a reader unburdened by the excessive expectations of names and bloodlines-or the private convictions of some greater destiny too embarrassing to mention, even to his longtime mentor. The outer address used my common appellation, Duplais being my father's unprepossessing demesne. But the inner included Savin, the family name I had long discarded, which could not but lead my thoughts to one particular kinsman and couch the imperious tone of the message in an entirely different light. Present yourself . . . We require . . .
A prickle of excitement minimized all sober considerations, such as how to request leave from my duties while maintaining utmost discretion, and how ridiculous it was to imagine that my fifteenth cousin, the King of Sabria, had summoned me to a clandestine meeting. I had never even met the man.
My finger traced the Savin family device scribed on the back of my left hand at birth, then moved inevitably to the ragged, nine-year-old scar that bisected it, scoring my wrist and vanishing up my sleeve. If not now, Portier, when?
In an instant's resolve, I stuffed the missive inside my threadbare doublet, snatched up my compass, journal, and pen case, and locked my desk without so much as returning my books to the shelves. A hastily scribbled note directed students to see Adept Nidallo for access to the archives or the vault. At the modest age of two-and-thirty, I'd spent precisely half my life inside these walls. My bones had near fossilized. Did my royal cousin bid me suckle his children, I'd do it.