Torchlight

by Theresa Dahlheim

  “If she never intended to, then why was she there?”

  “She said she thought they were just going to kiss.”

  “Is she that naïve?”

  “Of course not, but what else could she say to me?”

  His mother thought Miriam was lying! “She wanted him to stop,” he spoke up, and both his parents turned. “She was crying but he kept hurting her. He wanted to hurt her.” Now he realized what had been so creepy—Hagan liked hurting Miriam, had no guilt about it, and would do it again.

  “Graegor,” his father said gravely, “go on up to bed now.”

  “But it’s unlucky to go to bed tonight,” he protested.

  “Then you’ll be unlucky.”

  “But I didn’t do anything!” This was crazy! How had he gotten both Miriam and his father mad at him when all he’d done was try to help?

  “Don’t talk back to me. You’re tired. Go to bed.”

  “But—” He looked at his mother, who was studying the floor. “Momma—”

  “Graegor.”

  He looked back at his father. His face had changed from stern to angry, and he spoke each word slowly and carefully. “Go—to—bed.”

  Graegor said, “Yes, sir,” and stomped up the stairs.

  The injustice of it made him sick. His father hadn’t said anything about Hagan being in trouble. Did his father mean to punish Hagan at all?—But he had to. His mother had the same master’s rank in her craft as his father had in his, and his apprentice had hurt hers. When the furrier’s apprentice had broken the tanner’s apprentice’s arm, the furrier had put off the apprentice’s examination to journeyman for an entire season.

  He wished he could have broken Hagan’s arm. He may be too small now, but someday, he vowed, he was going to get Hagan for this.

  His bedroom was a jail tonight, not a refuge. But although his father could make him stay in here, he couldn’t make him sleep. He pulled his bed to the window and propped himself up on his pillow so he could see outside. The lights and music from the dance square made him scowl. He rested his chin on his arms, folded across the sill. A breeze scented by the pine trees blew against his flushed face.

  It’s not fair. Graegor glared into the darkness. He wished the whole stupid town had been drowned by that big wave.

  He blinked, because he thought he saw that strange mist again, rising from the ground. He felt—not cold, but his muscles were tightening up and his skin had gooseflesh. He was so angry it was making him sick. He kept blinking, slowly and deliberately, and eventually his eyes cleared and his body relaxed into a slump. The anger growled inside him but didn’t strain to break free anymore.

  He knew he should be tired, but he wasn’t, and grew less so as the night passed. The dance square was gradually abandoned, the torches slowly winked out. Children stopped running up and down the street, and grownups gathered in groups near the tavern or went home, though most people tried to stay up all night. Graegor was surprised when he realized that the sky was lightening and he hadn’t slept at all. He had done it.

  He could just barely make out the clock on the bell-house of the chapel, but he couldn’t read the hands. Very, very early, on this shortest night of the year. As he pushed himself up from the window sill, he winced at the stretch in his shoulder, remembering the stickball game. It seemed like a long time ago. A bad day ago.

  He heard a bedroom door open, and footsteps descending the stairs. Someone was up—maybe his mother. Maybe he could talk to her without his father around. Even after the whole night of thinking about it, he didn’t understand their reaction to what had happened.

  He pulled on clean clothes and mostly clean shoes. He was about to leave the room when the sound of the front door opening and closing came through his open window. He looked out and saw Miriam go down the street and cross it to the tavern, carrying a bundle and wearing her cloak. She went inside, but came out only a few moments later, and sat on one of the benches on the porch.

  Graegor hurried downstairs. His mother was lighting the three wicks on a long, log-shaped candle in the middle of the dining table. He could smell chamomile. She smiled at him. “You’re up early. Are you hungry?”

  “Where’s Miriam going?”

  She turned back to the candle. “Miriam ... well, she’s going back home.”

  “Why? Did you send her away?”

  She sighed. “Yes.”

  “It’s my fault, isn’t it?”

  “No. She’s just not the sort of girl we want apprenticed here.”

  “But she was really nice, and she did good work, you said so.” And then he thought of something else. “Will she get another apprenticeship?” But he already knew that she wouldn’t. Girls didn’t usually go into the guilds. His mother and the glassblower were the only women craftmasters in town, and some towns didn’t have any women craftmasters at all. Miriam wouldn’t get another chance.

  His mother finally looked at him, then sighed again and sat down at the table. “I think you have a lot of questions about what happened last night.”

  Graegor sat down, surprised that she was actually going to talk about it.

  “You see ... what Hagan and Miriam were doing was something only married people should do. It was wrong for them to do that without being married.”

  “But Miriam didn’t want to—Hagan made her do it. Does he have to leave too?”

  “No.”

  “But that’s not fair.”

  “What happens to Hagan is your father’s decision.”

  “But he should be punished.” Graegor had no doubt that if he was his father’s apprentice, he would be punished over something like this.

  “He is being punished.” That was his father, coming through the back door. “His workload has been doubled for the next month.”

  Miriam had to quit her apprenticeship, but Hagan got more work?—His father always insisted that more time to hone your skills wasn’t punishment! “But he made her do it! What if—what if someone pointed a sword at me, and said, steal that horse! Would you punish me if I did it, even if someone made me do it?”

  “Graegor ...” his mother began, rolling her eyes, but his father was stern: “This is different. If she hadn’t wanted to do it, she shouldn’t have even been there.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You don’t need to.”

  They needed to. He had to make them see! “When you tell me to stop doing something, I can stop, but Hagan didn’t want to stop. He wanted to hurt her!”

  “Enough. You’ll understand when you’re older.”

  He opened his mouth again, but his father lifted one finger. “That’s the end of it, Graegor. I don’t want to hear any more.”

  Graegor frowned at the table. His thoughts were spinning in his head, pressing down into a hard core of anger. After a short silence, his mother said, “Graegor, please go and fetch Audrey.”

  “Yes, Momma.” He was glad to leave.

  As he crossed the back yard toward the gate, he kept his eyes away from the stable. He shouldn’t have said anything. Miriam must be blaming him for telling his parents. It was his fault she was leaving. The more he thought about it, the more it made his stomach clench, anger giving way to anxiety. He had to tell her that he was sorry and that he had only been trying to help. He hadn’t known that she would be sent away. How could he have known that?

  The street was quiet in the early-morning light. He could see people slumped over the tables in the dance square. As he passed the fountain he saw some fisher children lying near it, sharing cloaks for blankets and pillows. As he came up the steps of the tavern’s porch, Miriam didn’t move, didn’t even lift her head, and he hesitated. She held the bundle on her lap, and her hood was close around her face.

  Long after the pause had become painful, he sat down next to her. He wasn’t brave enough to look at her. “Miriam, I’m sorry.”

  She didn’t say anything. A dog came out the doggy door and sat next to Graegor, thumping its t
ail cheerily. He patted its head. A few moments later he tried again: “I was just ... just trying ...” It was really hard to find the words.

  Miriam might have nodded, but he wasn’t sure. He scratched between the dog’s ears and waited for Miriam to say something. Eventually the dog wandered away.

  Graegor realized that she wasn’t going to say anything, and he’d better say everything he needed to all at once, and leave. “I’ll miss you. You’re really nice. You’re a really good apprentice, too.” She was. Before now, his mother had never had anything bad to say about Miriam. Graegor’s indignation grew stronger than his embarrassment, and he said firmly, “And I don’t think it’s right that they’re sending you away and not Hagan. You did nothing wrong.”

  “No.”

  Her single low word was startling and confusing, because he couldn’t tell if she was agreeing or arguing with him. He waited for more, but she just stared at the ground, her blue eyes very dark in her pale face.

  He should say something else. He didn’t feel like he was helping at all, and he really wanted to. “Um ... are you getting a ride back home?” Maybe he could go find someone who was going out that way, so she wouldn’t have to walk. But after a moment, she nodded in a way that indicated the tavern, where lots of people from the farms had stayed for Solstice.

  “Oh. Well ...” He worked on a smile, then gave up. He should just go. He wasn’t doing any good. He stood up, but suddenly Miriam reached out to touch his sleeve. He froze and stared at her, but she still didn’t look at him.

  “Thank you,” she said, barely above a whisper. “For trying to help.”

  He stayed silent, to listen to her.

  “If ... when you’re older ...” She trailed off, but he waited, and her eyes came up to focus on him. When she spoke, it was as if she was trying to burn the words into his brain: “If she says stop, you stop.”

  It was so important to her that Graegor repeated it: “If she says stop, you stop.” —to show her that he understood. He thought he understood.

  She let go of his sleeve and wiped at her eyes. Graegor stepped back, then bowed, like he would to someone important. “Goodbye, Miriam.”

  Miriam ducked her head, and he saw her lips move but could not hear her. There was something blocking his throat. He jumped the porch steps to the street and ran toward the baker’s to get Audrey.

  Chapter 2

  The Duchess Bridge was eight hundred years old, and it linked the towns and villages south of the River Telgard to the Lakeland Marketplace in the city of Farre. Its eight spans leaped across the quarter-mile width of the river like a skipping stone, each span shorter than the last, until only twenty yards separated the bridge’s final support pillar from the city. After last night’s punishing autumn rainstorm had washed away the clay riverbed—as it did every few decades—the engineers that the duke had hired had spent the morning erecting a scaffolding around that final pillar. Now, at last, a cart was moving forward to cross the span.

  Graegor was only fourteen years old, and his formal education had included nothing in the area of engineering. Because of those two things, he knew that he was very likely wrong in believing that the scaffolding would splinter into kindling the moment it took any weight. But he was still convinced it would. He sat his horse next to those of his father and his father’s broker Johanns, near some other men at the wall of the first warehouse. It was a good vantage point over the heads of the crowd gathered on the wharves west of the bridge gate. He could hear the engineers shouting confidently to each other from their positions on either side of the wet span and in tied-off boats on the river forty feet below, but their audience murmured to each other and shook their heads, especially when the carthorse balked at the span’s edge. A boy jumped down from the cart and ran up to lead it.

  Graegor’s father grunted impatiently. He was worried, and justifiably for once. They were due to leave for home tomorrow, with a wagonload of special lumber. If the engineers couldn’t certify the bridge as safe by then, they would have to go four miles upriver to the ferry, paying premium in silver and time to cross—and that was only if the storm hadn’t damaged the ferry too. If it had ... well, Graegor only hoped in that case that his father would be in a bad enough mood to not want to talk.

  The horse was about to emerge from under the scaffolding when something happened—Graegor couldn’t see what, but the horse neighed, the boy screamed, men shouted, and the end of the span fell from the pillar and tilted down toward the river, dragging the cart back with it. Two of the engineers ran to the edge, arms outstretched, and a rippling heat rushed through Graegor’s chest, leaving him breathless as the horse, boy, and cart simply stopped in midair.

  His heart in his throat, Graegor stood in the stirrups. They were magi! He could see now that they wore badges on their cloaks, the emblem indistinct at this distance but undoubtedly the pearl or the shield—both were sigils of the Lord Sorcerer Contare and all the magi sworn to him. In a silence broken only by the churn of the river, the two magi slowly, slowly, with but the force of their mental power, lifted the cart. Its rear wheels were touching nothing as the horse was urged forward to pull it onto the second span. Then the first span itself was lifted, even more slowly, with the help of several more engineers scrambling forward with ropes and boards and tools.

  Graegor exhaled. So did everyone else, and a buzz of voices marveled at the feat as the rain started pelting down again. One of the magi knelt beside the boy, who was soon sitting up. Graegor guessed that he had probably fainted as soon as he hadn’t needed to keep the horse calm anymore, and he didn’t blame him.

  “And that’s for anyone who says magi are only good for birthing babies,” his father said, as if he had had an argument with someone recently on the subject. Graegor turned, but his father didn’t seem to be addressing Johanns, who was agreeing wholeheartedly with something someone on his other side had said.

  Graegor hesitated, and decided to risk saying it. “Isn’t that good enough?” When his father only frowned, Graegor went on. “I mean, even if magi were only good for birthing babies, wouldn’t that be enough?” He pushed on after a pause: “Ted’s sister’s baby was breech. They both would have died without Magus Paul.” His father knew that; his father had been one of the elders responsible for convincing Magus Paul to settle in their town three years ago. Graegor had heard his mother say that there were at least four babies and their mothers who were alive today solely because the magi healer had attended their difficult deliveries.

  After a pause, his father said, “My point ...” and paused again for effect, “was that magi have many talents even beyond healing.” He nodded at the bridge.

  “Did someone say that they don’t?” But his father didn’t answer.

  Graegor sighed. The hell of it was that they didn’t disagree about the usefulness of magi, but they were arguing about it anyway. Why did that always happen?

  Because you’re just supposed to say “Yes sir” when he talks to you. More and more, Graegor was finding it difficult to resist the insolent impulse to argue whenever his father expressed any opinion whatsoever.

  “I think I know one of those fellows,” Johanns said, turning back to them. “The tall one, helping the boy there. If I’m right, his father is a pearl trader, and he himself studied at the Academy.”

  His father snorted. “The Academy.”

  Johanns lifted his eyebrows. “Why, Aric, such disdain.”

  “Magus Paul does not think much of Academy-trained magi. They are too interested in their own advancement. There are stories ...”

  “There are lots of stories about the Academy,” Johanns agreed, sluicing water from the wide brim of his black hat. “If half of them are true I’ll eat my boots. Has your magus gone rogue, then?”

  “Of course not,” Graegor’s father scoffed. “It’s the Academy he doesn’t like, not the sorcerers. The way the students behave ...”

  “Ah, well, boys will be boys.” Johanns waved toward the scaff
olding with his good arm. “If they’re to have this fixed by tomorrow, we’d best leave them to it. Meantime, I told some of the guild folk that you’d be willing to show him that fancy awl of yours. Shall we?”

  His father nodded. Graegor fell in behind them, for once wishing Johanns had let his father talk. How did students behave at the Academy on Maze Island?

  They moved slowly through the crowd, away from the warehouses and across a smaller bridge toward the southeastern gate of Farre proper. From here, where the buildings were all low to the ground, the tower of the keep in the center of the city soared lofty and alone, high above even the dome of the Basilica of Saint Michaelis, high above all the other towers that crowded it out of the skyline as one bored deeper into the city streets. Graegor had ridden by the outer gates of Duke Richard’s palace grounds many times on his errands, but he always thought the fortress tower looked best from here, from a distance. Closer in, he saw too many of the chinks and stains.

  Just like here. Farre’s angled walls and moat broke open to allow the mercantile traffic through, and he again noticed the cracks in the stone that he had seen when they had ridden out an hour ago. Part of the wall to the east had been dismantled. Maybe a repair had been intended, but now moss covered the half-wall, it smelled faintly of decay, and no blocks were arranged to go back up. Probably people had used them for houses. Even the ancient obelisk, which marked the entrance to what had once been the inner harbor, was chipped and scarred, its bottom third buried under centuries of city life, its south side obscured by ivy.

  It would be easy to take Farre by force right now, with the defenses in such a bad state. But, of course, no army would. Farre sat in the center of Telgardia, and Graegor figured that any invader striking for the city would be heralded from so far off that the citizens would have plenty of time to repair the walls. But then, he didn’t know anything about engineering, so maybe they wouldn’t.

  Despite what had happened at the bridge, dozens of wagons were lined up to make the crossing if possible. That line, and another of wagons heading for the market, and clumpy groups of foot, wheelbarrow, and single-horse traffic, made for a congested stretch of road. Graegor’s father wasn’t the only one annoyed at it, and not far away, two men in a fistfight threatened to engulf dozens around them before the duke’s horsemen appeared. They separated the two men with quick blows from the flats of their sabers, and everyone backed off and looked away, trying to look like they had been minding their own business all along. The two horsemen stayed on the street, directing traffic. It didn’t move any faster, but there were fewer complaints.