“Before we go I have one more thing to take care,” Penny told her daughter, and then she addressed Gram. “Where is Alyssa?”
He tensed, “I believe she is with Grace.”
Grace had finally awoken the previous evening, but she was still recovering. Alyssa had stayed with the smaller dragon as a precaution.
“Take me to her,” ordered the Countess.
Gram nodded, “Yes, Your Excellency.”
Since they were already at the teleportation circle they didn’t have far to go. Grace was resting in the barn of a small farmhouse less than a quarter of a mile from there. The owner of the farm hadn’t appeared, so they weren’t certain if the man or his family were dead or merely fled.
Chad Grayson and Alyssa were engaged in conversation when Moira and Penny entered. Gram followed close behind them, worry written on his face.
“My lady,” said the hunter, dipping his head. Alyssa kept her eyes on the ground.
The Countess acknowledged him but her attention was firmly on the young woman. She waved at the open barn door and the three guardsmen that had accompanied them filed in, moving to the sides. “Alyssa, or whatever your name properly is, you are under arrest for murder, kidnapping, and the assault of my guardsmen. You will surrender yourself to my men and accompany us to Castle Cameron, there to stand trial for your crimes.” There was steel in her voice.
“Yes, Your Exce…”
“Hold on!” interrupted Gram, moving to stand between his liege and his lover. “There’s more to this than what you’ve heard.”
Penny’s eyes were cold. “That will be seen during the trial. Stand aside, Sir Gram.”
“She didn’t want to be there. You don’t have to do this,” he answered, stubbornly keeping his place.
“Lilly Tucker is dead. My daughter was kidnapped. The trial will determine her responsibility in this matter. Now step aside Gram, unless you are thinking of violating your oath.”
“Mother, please, it doesn’t have to be like this,” said Moira. Her mother looked calm, but Moira’s magesight could sense the tension in her muscles. Penny’s hand rested lightly beside her sword hilt, ready for violence.
One of the guards stepped forward, pulling a pair of iron manacles from a heavy leather sack he had been carrying. I should have noticed those, thought Moira, but it hadn’t occurred to her to examine the guardsmen earlier.
“No!” said Gram, waving a hand at the man. “Step back.” He had a desperate glint in his eye.
Chad’s hand was on his long knife, “Think about what ye’re doin’ Gram. Ye’ll only make things worse.”
The moment teetered on a dangerous edge until Alyssa stepped past Gram, holding her wrists out to the guard with the manacles. “Let them take me, Gram. I must answer for what I’ve done,” she said sincerely.
The tension went out of his stance and Gram’s head bowed.
“Take her to the circle,” commanded the Countess. Still as stone, she watched the guards lead Alyssa out. Gram followed and Chad behind him, watching his young friend in case he had any more thoughts of rebellion.
Penny started to move, but Moira spoke, quiet fury in her voice, “That wasn’t necessary, Mother.”
“It was entirely necessary,” said Penelope, unfazed.
The cold dismissal sent fire running through Moira’s veins. “He’s in love with her. Are you trying to drive Gram away? What do you think he will do if he’s forced to choose between her and his loyalty to our house?” As much as she would rather Gram wasn’t in love with Alyssa, Moira didn’t want to see him do something stupid.
Penny turned, facing her daughter with one brow arched, “You’ll understand better when this is over. These things don’t go away. The matter needs to be handled sooner rather than later or it will become a festering wound.”
“She took three arrows protecting Rennie! Isn’t that enough?”
“Lilly Tucker is dead,” said Penny. “Do you think he can just bring her home and marry her? What about her brother, Peter? What about her fiancée? Do you think they will forget? What about everyone else living in Castle Cameron, or the town of Washbrook? Should we be allowed to ignore someone’s crimes if they’re inconvenient for us? Is she above the law simply because Sir Gram happens to be in love with her?”
Moira wanted to slap the superior expression from her mother’s smug face. “So you’d rather what—hang her?! Do you think Gram will thank you for that? He won’t stand for it. You’ll lose him, and what about Lady Hightower? How will she feel when he takes her and turns outlaw?”
Her mother drew a deep breath in before exhaling slowly, “Do you remember when your father faced trial in Albamarl?”
Moira frowned, wondering where she was heading. She nodded.
“I felt as you did then, or perhaps as Gram does now. I knew your father was blameless. A lot of people died, but he wasn’t directly responsible, and if he hadn’t done what he did things would have been much worse. He saved the world, and yet they drug him up before their grubby little court, and they judged him. The men that decided his fate had done nothing to save us from the catastrophe, but they presumed to mete justice to the man who had saved us all.
“I was furious, and I tried to convince your father to run away with me, to take you and your brothers and sister and run far, far away. But he wouldn’t do it. He had the power, they couldn’t have touched him if he hadn’t allowed it, but he refused to run. Gram’s mother represented him, and she could have gotten him off on a technicality, but he wouldn’t allow that either. Instead, he accepted the charges, and when they decided to humiliate him, to whip him like some dog, he bent his head and took it.
“Have you ever wondered why?” asked Penny.
Moira had heard most of this before, but she had never thought it was fair. She knew what her father’s answer had been, “He said that the people had to see that justice applied to the powerful as much as it did to the weak, but Alyssa isn’t a wizard. She isn’t a lord of the realm. Her punishment will prove nothing.”
“She has a powerful lover, and you are her friend, and she did commit several very serious crimes,” argued Penny. “You think I’m trying to drive Gram away? I’m trying to save him. If he’s ever going to live peacefully with that girl she has to face the consequences of her actions, in court, otherwise the people will never be satisfied. If she doesn’t, he’ll take her and run eventually anyway. This is their only chance.”
Her heartbeat slowed as confusion replaced her anger. She had been a hair’s breadth from attempting to change her mother’s mind forcefully. Moira stared at Penny, thinking carefully before asking, “What are you saying exactly?”
“That your father was right. If they had actually tried to execute him, perhaps he would have fled with me then, but he was determined to give the people justice.”
“But it wasn’t just!” exclaimed Moira. “He didn’t deserve that.”
“True justice is an illusion, but it’s necessary for a civil society to exist. He understood that, even then, and more importantly, he knew that for us to live as we do today, the people needed to feel that he had paid for the crimes they felt he had done. I’ll say it once more, he was right. And the same is true now. If Alyssa and Gram are to ever have a chance at living a normal life as man and wife, then the people harmed by her actions must feel that justice has been done.” The Countess paused for a moment then before adding, “Don’t tell your father I said that.”
“Said what?”
“That he was right. The man would be insufferable if he ever heard me admit it.”
Chapter 29
Moira Centyr, the woman who had lived in the heart of the earth for more than a thousand years, sat in a comfortable chair, watching the man who had raised her daughter. Technically speaking, she wasn’t the original Moira Centyr, but rather an artificial copy, a spell-twin made in a moment of desperation before the first Moira had gone to her final battle with the Dark God, Balinthor.
T
he difference was academic at this point, though. She had a living human body now, thanks to her husband, Gareth Gaelyn, and while she didn’t possess the living source that most people were born with, she had been given enough aythar to last any normal person a hundred lifetimes.
The man who had taken that power from the gods and shared it with her sat across a low table from her, a pensive look on his face. “You aren’t saying much,” he said, hoping to break her silence.
She opened her mouth, and then closed it again. What could she say? The story he had just finished relaying to her was new in some ways, and depressingly familiar in others. It was her fault. Her only reason for existing had been to protect the life of her creator’s child, her child, and she had failed. Why didn’t I tell her more, sooner?
To speak the truth would be to sign her daughter’s death warrant, to conceal it would be to risk the lives of countless others.
“I have done you a great disservice,” she said at last. “I waited too long, and now your daughter, my child, will pay the price for my error.”
Mordecai frowned, “I was hoping you would have something a bit more positive.”
A wave of despair swept over her and she fought the urge to pull at her own hair. Her frustration was so great she wanted to run screaming from the room. The former lady of stone had a sudden vision of throwing herself from the tallest tower in the castle, not that it would have helped. She couldn’t die without permission. “I have nothing good to offer,” she told him. “I neglected to warn you properly, to warn her properly, and now the seeds of my negligence have borne their wicked fruit.”
“That’s very poetic, but I thought perhaps you could tell me something more practical, such as, ‘give her some honey at bedtime, she’ll be fine in the morning’,” he replied sarcastically.
She shook her head, “No, there’s nothing so simple as that, and nothing more complicated either. She has unwittingly crossed a line, and now the curse of the Centyr family will fall squarely on her shoulders. Our daughter is doomed.”
Mort raised one brow, “Doomed?” He had heard that before, and it was a phrase that he had grown to despise. “Do you know how many times I have been told that? Yet, still, I am here. I don’t want to hear dramatic phrases; I want to know what’s going on with my girl so we can figure out how to help her.”
“She is becoming a demon.”
Mort rubbed his face, “See, that is exactly what I’m talking about. Could you try to explain without all the descriptive rubbish? There are no demons, unless you count the gods we so recently deposed.”
“My family called them ‘reavers’ back when there were more of us. She has broken two of our most fundamental rules.”
“Obviously she did something strange to accomplish what she did,” agreed Mordecai. “I have never heard of a wizard controlling thousands of people at once, but I don’t know that I would use a term like ‘reaver’. She didn’t really hurt them, at least not directly.”
“I haven’t examined them myself, but I assure you that she must have damaged some of them. That isn’t the issue, however, unless we’re discussing the morality of it,” said Moira.
“Weren’t we?”
She shook her head, “No. There is definitely a moral problem here, but more important than that, at least for us, is the fact that she has damaged herself. You described to me the impatience and anger that you sensed in her, the changes in her personality. Those are significant markers for the decay of her inner balance. Her mind has been warped and it will only continue to worsen.”
“I think perhaps you’ve read too much into what I said earlier…”
“No, Mordecai, let me explain,” interrupted Moira Centyr. “Much like in the physics you love so much, every action of the mind has a reaction, a consequence. When a Centyr mage bends the will of another human being it also exerts a force upon their own mind, twisting its shape. Your daughter has altered the minds and memories of not just one or two, but thousands of people. The inevitable result is that she has distorted her own reality. What lies inside her now is not the child you raised.”
While her words made perfect sense to him, Mordecai had his own opinion. He knew better than most how violence and hard choices marked the soul, but he didn’t believe for a moment that his daughter was beyond saving. “I can’t accept that. As far as I can tell, she didn’t do most of it directly, these ‘spell-twins’ that she created did.”
Moira nodded, “And that is the other part of the problem. Mind cloning is also forbidden.”
“Yet your original did it, and I am glad she did.”
She sighed, “I am not saying that it is an evil act, or even wrong, but it is dangerous. My progenitor died shortly after, which saved her from facing the consequences.”
“What consequences?”
“Execution, for one, if the Centyr family had discovered it. It is a skill that any of us could potentially develop, but once learned it is impossible to forget. Now that she has done it, it will always be before her, a ready solution to every problem. Unlike the difficult task of creating a new and original mind for her spellbeasts she will always be tempted to simply create a copy of her own mind. It is far faster, and the result is a creature with all of the original’s powers and abilities, not to mention a complete understanding of what problem is at hand and what is needed.”
He coughed, “Nothing you have mentioned makes it sound like something worth executing someone for. It sounds very handy. If I could have done that, I could have solved many of my problems over the years.”
“You did experience it, when you became one of the shiggreth. Your mind-clone, Brexus, was exactly that,” she noted.
“Then I should be executed?”
Moira smiled wryly, “Probably, for a hundred other reasons, but not that one. You cannot repeat the process, it was accidental. Moira however, can do it as often as she wishes, more rapidly than you can possibly imagine.”
Mordecai stood and began pacing, “But she won’t, not if we can explain to her why she shouldn’t, and you still haven’t explained the danger.”
“When she did it, she used her twins to control thousands of people simultaneously, changing their minds and personalities. Assuming that she reabsorbed those spell-minds afterward, all of their actions effectively became her own. The pressure that put on her spirit is what twisted and changed her essence. It made her into a reaver, of that I have no doubt.”
“What is a reaver?” he asked in exasperation.
“A nightmare,” said Moira Centyr without hesitation, “a wizard that can invade the minds of others and remake them in moments, without remorse or regret. A wizard that can duplicate herself many times over, creating a million such monsters, all just as capable as the original. A creature of the mind so powerful that no one could defend themselves against it.”
Mort narrowed his eyes, “Except other wizards, of course.”
She laughed, “You think so?”
“Are you saying she could do this to me?”
Moira’s face took on a serious expression, “You would be difficult, but you would lose. If it ever comes to a struggle you must kill her swiftly, before she breaches your defenses. Once she has crossed over into your mind she would devour you.”
“Because she’s become this ‘reaver’ you keep talking about?”
“Any Centyr mage would win, if they could access your mind, but if they weren’t a reaver before, they would be by the time they finished. Fortunately, it is difficult for us to force our way in against a wary opponent, but your daughter has gained a lifetime’s worth of experience now. She is no longer a novice and her spirit will be harder than steel and blacker than death.
“She can create endless minions now, and they are not limited by her aythar if they don’t choose to be. They can steal the souls of whomever they possess, taking the wellsprings of those they inhabit. They might not be powerful, but mind magic doesn’t require great strength, it is an art built on subtlety.
“This has happened before, several times in fact. The first few were limited and they were destroyed once the danger was realized. The worst was a man named Lynn Centyr, several hundred years before I was born. He was discovered quietly altering the minds of a few of his friends.
“Since it was early and he seemed sincere in his repentance, he was allowed to live. He kept his promise to behave for almost ten years before he gave in to temptation and changed his wife to make her more compliant.”
Mort laughed, “Well, honestly, who wouldn’t…”
“This is not a joke!” snapped Moira, losing her temper. “Knowing he must avoid discovery he began altering more people and eventually he started making spell-twins to aid him in keeping his secret. It was years before they suspected what was happening and the first wizards to investigate had no idea what he had become, for they were not from the Centyr family.”
“Why didn’t they know?” asked Mort.
“Because my family kept its secrets close. This is knowledge we have never shared for fear of turning the other families against us,” she answered. “By the time the Centyr family intervened he had enslaved an entire village and the two wizards who had initially interfered were his most potent guardians. My family lost many lives putting an end to him, and several more had to be destroyed once it was over, for they were forced to become reavers themselves to win.”
Mordecai walked to the window and stared out at the trees, watching them bend in the wind. He seemed contemplative, but when he turned back to her there was determination in his eyes. “Why didn’t Gareth come with you when I sent my message?”
She looked down, “I didn’t tell him.”
“Because?”
“I was ashamed.”
“Of your family’s curse?”
She shook her head negatively, “No, he would accept that, but he would never forgive me for what we must do.”
“Murdering my daughter, you mean?” he asked to clarify, his voice strangely calm.
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