Torchlight

by Theresa Dahlheim

  When they were about ten yards from the edge, Lord Contare’s steps slowed, his eyes on the ground as he picked his way carefully forward. Graegor followed, and then he looked out, and down, to see what he had done.

  The earth fell away before them into a deep crater. The earth magic had pushed a wall of rock up from the sea bed—a wall five men high that closed the crater on the other side and kept the sea from pouring in. Only thin trickles came through the cracks, and the floor of the crater was a brown-green soup of mud, seaweed, driftwood, and salt water. He could see the striped layers of the rock that had been sheared off, and the fallen remains of what looked like a staircase.

  “Oh my God,” he murmured. This was no dream—it felt nothing like a dream. This was absolutely real, and absolutely his fault.

  “Yes,” Lord Contare agreed. Graegor met his eyes, and the older sorcerer’s gaze was piercing. “We are very lucky that it was night when it happened, and no one was on the road.”

  “I’m sorry,” Graegor said again, wishing there were stronger words.

  Lord Contare nodded. “I know.” He looked out over the crater for a little while. “You may have heard in the tales and songs that the Telgard sorcerers vow to never take a life through magic.”

  “I ... in the stories I heard, we aren’t supposed to take a life at all.”

  “Yes.” Lord Contare looked back at him. “Have you ever killed anyone?”

  “No!”

  “Are you certain? No one later succumbed to any injuries you inflicted?”

  Graegor opened his mouth to deny it, but the truth was that he couldn’t be sure. Magus Paul had healed Craig and his thugs, and Graegor had seen the boys in Farre get up after he’d thrashed them, but was he sure that they had all been all right? Was he sure that none of them had gone to sleep with a head wound and never woken up?

  “I don’t know for sure,” he admitted. “But I ... I don’t think so.”

  “That’s good. I’d rather you weren’t already blooded. Once you’ve killed someone, it’s easier to find reasons to kill someone else.”

  He’s talking about himself. Graegor’s stomach clenched up when he realized that Lord Contare had broken this vow, too, in order to help Augustin Torchanes.

  “Sir?” he asked after a pause.

  “Yes?”

  “Has any Telgard sorcerer kept that vow?”

  Lord Contare shook his head. Graegor studied the crater below them and wondered why any of his predecessors had even attempted to live up to such a standard. Completely untrained, he could do horrible damage by sheer accident; what could a full-fledged sorcerer do if he really tried—and was really angry?

  “But there’s always a first time,” Lord Contare said. “So far you’ve avoided it, and assuming you don’t want to kill anyone, you may be able to avoid ...” All at once his expression changed, and he stepped back from the precipice, gesturing for Graegor to do the same. For the first time in Graegor’s hearing, he swore, and shouted, “Run!”

  Graegor ran back through the grass they had trampled on the way there, but soon realized that Lord Contare was far behind him. He stopped, but Lord Contare shouted to him to keep going, his arms stretched out to either side and his eyes fixed on the ground, as if he could see through the rock to the fissures that were breaking open. Graegor started running again for the perimeter of horsemen, waving his arms in broad gestures to tell them to get back, but the magi were already riding along the line and shouting that the cliff was giving way. Horsemen encircled the king and his sons and herded their horses back toward the trees, and Graegor saw Darc and Adlai looking over their shoulders to try to see what was happening. Graegor wasn’t sure anything actually was happening, but then he heard the sound.

  It was a groan so deep he could feel it shudder through him, the groan of rock moving against rock, ponderous and inexorable. Dark purple started to spin in his head, like it had in Farre, but he didn’t know if it was reacting to the crumbling earth or to the earth magic or to whatever Lord Contare was doing. He kept running, until a mighty jolt threw him to the ground.

  He held onto the grass with both hands as the earth rolled under him. He’d been on Long Lake in a windstorm before, and this was much the same, and much, much worse. He pulled himself forward in a belly crawl, not daring to stand up. At last he reached the line of horsemen and magi, and saw Karl, who was staring at him, stunned mute.

  Then someone shouted, and they looked up to see a brown, frothy geyser shoot a hundred feet into the air above the shattered cliff. It hung there for far too long; then it dropped with a fury, and Graegor, Karl, and everyone in the center of the line ducked their heads under their arms as they were trammeled under a rain of mud.

  Graegor had managed to shut his eyes in time, and when he cracked them open to look around again, breathing hard, he saw Karl and the horsemen nearby coated with mud like they had been painted, and he glanced down at himself to see the same. He was as wet as if he had jumped in a lake. Karl managed a shaky grin, still wild about the eyes, and pointed back the way Graegor had come.

  Graegor looked, and saw an eagle wheeling across the bright grey sky. Its head was white, its wings blue-black, and it was at least twice as large as any eagle Graegor had ever seen. It soared down to the ground and landed near the new cliff edge, some twenty yards away; then white light overtook it, and a prickling rush swept over Graegor again. When the light cleared, Lord Contare stood there, his hands held over the ground. He stayed motionless for what seemed a long time. Then he nodded, and started toward them through the tall grass.

  Everyone stared at him, and when he reached Graegor and Karl, he spoke so that some of the horsemen could hear him, and start spreading the word to their fellows: “It is stable. I have strengthened the foundation, and no more will fall.”

  Graegor wanted to ask if he was sure, but the sorcerer would not have said it if he wasn’t. And Graegor was still too awed by the shapechange to say anything. He had witnessed so little of Lord Contare’s magic before now.

  Lord Contare looked at him, and there still seemed to be something of the great eagle in his lined face. “Are you all right?” he asked.

  “Yes.” Besides being covered with mud, he had the start of a headache and the slowness of exhaustion—but he wasn’t hurt. He was a sorcerer, so he didn’t get hurt. Whenever anyone asked him if he was all right, he would say yes. “Are you, sir?”

  “Well enough. More embarrassed than anything else, with so many witnesses to my misjudgment.”

  “You told the king there might be some settling, m’lord,” Karl pointed out.

  “But I thought it was safe enough to bring him here. This could have been very bad.” He looked from ground to sky, as if to reassure himself that it would all stay put. Then he looked at Graegor and Karl again, and at the horsemen, his eyebrows raised. “Come along. Let’s throw some clean water over you before you harden into statues.”

  Graegor thanked the pageboy with the candle who had escorted him from Lord Contare’s tower to his chamber in the royal apartments, and dismissed him with relief. In the three days since he had moved in here, he’d never walked the corridors unattended, and it was irritating. He hadn’t been watched and catered to like this since before Audrey was born.

  But the pageboy was just doing his job, and Graegor’s irritation was actually more wide-ranging. Last night Lord Contare had taken him to a gathering of the lords of Telgardia’s highest noble houses. All the courteous tension had put an edge on Graegor’s already-shredded nerves that, a whole day later, had yet to wear off.

  He was glad that Duke Richard of Farre, at least, had not been there. He still could not help blaming the duke for the actions of the bluecloaks after the riot last autumn. He wanted to talk to Contare about it, ask him why the duke had allowed the bluecloaks to prey on their own people like that. He wanted to ask; he didn’t know why he hadn’t yet. Maybe he just didn’t want to hear any other side to the story.

  As he w
as pulling off his cloak, he heard a knock at the door. Curious about who it could be at this hour, he opened it to see Darc and Adlai, both grinning hugely. Wordlessly Darc held up a tall green bottle, and Graegor let them in.

  “What’s that?” he asked once he had shut the door again.

  “Pear wine.” Darc gave him the bottle. “Stolen just today from the distillery.”

  “Don’t you mean the winery?”

  “It’s triple-distilled,” Adlai informed him. “So it’s not really wine anymore.”

  It didn’t sound appetizing, but Graegor wasn’t going to refuse. He’d never been drunk before, and right now it seemed like a really good idea. He gestured grandly to the table by the half-open window.

  “Lord Contare kept you locked up in the tower today,” Darc observed as he took a corkscrew from his pocket.

  Graegor set the bottle on the table and started turning over the coffee cups. “He said I needed a quiet day before all the chaos starts tomorrow.”

  Adlai pulled out a chair. “And after that evening we put you through.”

  Darc laughed, stifled it, and looked quickly at Graegor as he opened the bottle. “I’m sorry. The Great Houses are always trying to outdo each other, and the dukes didn’t like seeing how thoroughly we Carhlaans have already corrupted you.”

  Lord Contare had said essentially the same thing—that Graegor’s close association with the royal family diminished the other lords’ hopes to influence him. Again the idea of the Carhlaans as his foster family made him feel uncomfortable—simply because the idea felt natural. Was that the real reason he wanted Audrey to marry Adlai? So that he could have brothers?

  But he pushed the idea away, and with it the sense of disloyalty to his real family. He wasn’t in the mood to nurse any guilt. “Every question the dukes asked me made me look stupid,” he muttered as he sat down across from Adlai. “And they kept talking about the trapdoors opening in their chambers, and quoting all those songs about Khisrathi’s spell ...”

  “About you and Khisrathi’s spell,” Darc corrected him, pouring the pear wine.

  “It’s only been a few days—who writes songs that fast?”

  “The dukes weren’t trying to make you look stupid,” Adlai said. “They were trying to make us look stupid by impressing you with how smart they are.”

  “They’re not happy with Father right now,” Darc told him. “He won’t let them sight-see at your cliff until the road is rebuilt.”

  Graegor shook his head. “That’s just to keep everyone safe.”

  “They don’t think such precautions apply to them. But let’s forget about it.” Darc took a seat, and Graegor looked into his coffee cup. It was half-filled with what looked innocently like water, and Darc held up his hand as if to give the signal to start a race. “On three ... ready? One ... two ...”

  At first Graegor could only sense wet; but then his tongue tried to turn itself inside-out, and a cold rush stood up the hair on his arms and the back of his neck. Within seconds the inside of his mouth dried out, and his entire nose was tingling. He’d never felt anything like it, and he refilled his cup while Adlai was still coughing and Darc was still swearing.

  “Have you had this before?” he asked them.

  “Not this,” Darc said, giving the label on the bottle a suspicious look. “We’ve sneaked brandy before, but I couldn’t get to the back rack this time. The servants probably make torches with this stuff.” He paused, then shrugged and poured more into his cup. “Adlai, stop hacking like that, you sound like you’re dying.”

  Adlai finally cleared his throat, and when he spoke, his voice was very rough. “And I thought the brandy was horrible.”

  “But brandy is supposed to be good,” Graegor frowned. “People say so ...”

  “It’s not.”

  “You don’t have the palette for it yet,” Darc said.

  “You didn’t like it either.”

  On the next round, Graegor was the one who started coughing, his eyes watering so badly he couldn’t see. Darc decided they needed a chaser, and went to get some red wine from the royal family’s private dining room. He got back as Adlai was telling Graegor about a magi cousin of theirs. She was from their mother’s family, near the Khenroxan border, and Darc and Adlai had stayed with them for a couple of years before their sisters were born.

  “We met the Khenroxan princes while we were there,” Darc said as he shut the door behind him. “They came down with their grandfather to tour his southern lands. The one who’s my age is a magus.”

  “The one who’s my age is a jackass,” Adlai reported.

  “Take pity, Adlai, he was an ugly child.”

  “Will the older prince be going to the Academy on Maze Island?” Graegor asked.

  Darc shook his head as he unfolded the corkscrew. “No, he has a magi tutor. He’s the heir after his father, so he needs to stay close to home.”

  Adlai spun his empty cup on the table. “Khenroxan politics.”

  Graegor didn’t know what that meant, but he did know that he’d had enough of politics last night. “So are you two part Khenroxan, then? On your mother’s side?”

  “One-eighth,” Adlai nodded.

  Darc gestured to his hair. “That’s where I got this. I look a lot like our uncle.”

  “That’s funny—I never thought of Khenroxans as having blonde hair.”

  “It’s not normal for them beyond the borderlands. I think some Thendal traits got mixed up there somehow.”

  “Or Essenan,” Graegor said, then remembered something. “You know, Prince Augustin was half Essenan, and after the coup he fled to Khenroxa. If he was blonde, maybe the trait came from him.”

  “I like it,” Darc grinned as he popped the cork from the wine.

  “That makes us far-distant cousins,” Adlai said, holding out his cup. “We should drink to that.”

  “Hear, hear!” Darc poured the round and they all clanked their cups together—but then, “Wait, wait!” he stopped them before they could actually drink. “That can’t be right. We can’t be Augustin’s descendants. We can’t go in there.” He pointed at the square of light at the trapdoor to the tunnel.

  “Lord Contare says I’m from the Torchanes paternal line,” Graegor said. “Maybe the spell doesn’t see the maternal line as Torchanes blood.”

  “Hm.” Darc considered this, then shrugged. “Let’s drink to it anyway.”

  The wine, probably among the world’s finest, still tasted like vinegar to Graegor, but it went down much more smoothly than the torch-lighting fluid they’d consumed earlier. When Darc was required to raid the dining room’s sideboard again, he came back with a bottle of white, and this went down even more smoothly.

  They talked about horses, and the riding they had done in the parklands over the last few days; they argued about longbows and crossbows; and they discussed deep, profound ideas about what it meant now that the Eternal Flame was purple. Graegor worried that they were getting too loud, but then he remembered that no one was in the rooms on either side of his, so he shut the window and considered the problem solved. They had two more rounds of the pear wine to finish it off, then tried to decide what to do with the empty bottles they were accumulating.

  “Why does it matter?” Graegor asked, idly twisting King Zacharei’s signet ring around his finger.

  “Works like this,” Darc explained, holding up his fingers as he made each point. “Servants see bottles. Servants tell castellan, so he doesn’t think they took the bottles. Castellan tells Mother. Mother tells Father. Father lectures us.”

  “And then punishes me,” Adlai added, “since he doesn’t think ‘children’ should get drunk. I’m not children though. It’s really not fair.”

  Then Graegor had a brilliant idea. “I can put them up there!” He pointed to the glowing trapdoor. Filled with purpose, he stood too quickly, got tangled in his chair, tried to fight it off, knocked it over sideways, and fell his full length across the carpet.

  T
his was the funniest thing that had ever happened to anyone in the entire world. All of them writhed with nearly soundless laughter for what felt like hours, and Graegor’s attempts to climb back up to the table from the floor only made it worse. Finally he won the battle against the chair, planting it firmly under his butt, and Darc recovered enough breath to talk. “Oh, God, my stomach hurts.”

  “My face hurts,” Adlai said, rubbing at his cheeks.

  “But it’s a good idea, right?” Graegor picked up his last thought. “Hiding the bottles in the tunnel? I’m still the only one who can go in there, right?”

  “Unfortunately,” Darc said.

  “You want people creepy-crawling through those tunnels?” Adlai demanded.

  “Unfortunately for us, not people.”

  “What people?” Graegor asked.

  “Court toads,” Adlai said. “Lords we loathe.”

  “Like the ones I met last night?”

  “And others,” Darc said. “We’ll point them out for you tomorrow. That way you can start hating them right away.”

  “What about the ladies?”

  “You can loathe them too,” Adlai said, “but you can’t show it as much.”

  “Are there any you like?”

  “Lots,” Darc said. Adlai echoed him, and they both looked a little unfocused.

  Graegor thought it was a good thing that there hadn’t been any women at the gathering last night. Lord Contare was right; it was best for him to not talk to girls right now. He probably shouldn’t even talk about them, but he asked Darc, “Do you have a special girl?”

  Adlai laughed before Darc could answer. “He doesn’t now. He kissed this girl one time—”

  “It was more than one time,” Darc said.

  “But that time—”

  “And there’s been more than one girl.”

  “Right, there’s been two.”

  “That you know about.”

  Adlai rolled his eyes. “Anyway, she told someone, and her father found out.”

  Graegor whistled. “Was he angry?”