Mageborn 05 The Final Redemption

by Michael G. Manning

  They weren’t powerful. I could have easily broken one, but I could tell they were linked to something else, probably something to signal that the enchantment had been breached. It was the sort of thing that should have been done ages ago for King James. It made perfect sense for the ruler of our powerful nation to have privacy for matters of state.

  Except, I had never thought of it.

  Apparently someone else had, though. It had to have been Gareth, I assumed. The man hadn’t been human more than a month, and he was already sticking his nose into politics.

  I sat, irritated, and waited until something like five minutes had passed. Finally I got up, and as I was striding toward the door, it was opened by someone I recognized just before I got there.

  “My lord,” said Sir Harold, looking a bit embarrassed, “If you will follow me.”

  I raised one eyebrow, but followed him without comment.

  He led me along a long corridor, one I already knew quite well. It did not lead to the royal quarters, or to one of the meeting chambers. He was taking me toward the barracks.

  “Harold,” I asked calmly, “Where are we going?”

  “Forgive me, my lord,” he said quickly. His eyes looked a bit furtive, as though he was afraid someone might spot him. No, as if someone might spot me, I corrected myself mentally. “This is the way to my office near the barracks. We can talk privately there.”

  I nodded as though that were perfectly normal.

  We reached his office without encountering anyone, which I figured had been his purpose. He must have known that the men in that area were already on duty. As soon as we entered, I pounced with my first question, “Why do you have an office in the palace, Harold?”

  His face turned a funny shade of pink, telling me I had hit a sensitive spot. “Well, my lord, that’s an interesting story. While you were away, a lot happened. The lords nearly rebelled when we moved to have Her Majesty crowned. Peter thought it would be a good idea to provide the Queen with solid support to prevent the same sort of thing that happened before…”

  “Alright, I get the picture,” I said cutting him off. “But this is an office.”

  “The remaining Knights of Stone have taken over security for the palace, as well as command of the royal guard,” he explained.

  “For how long?”

  His color grew deeper. “This is merely a temporary measure, Your Excellency, since you were unavailable, until…”

  “Until, what?”

  “Until you sign the documents the Queen has had drawn up,” he finished. His eyes wouldn’t meet mine.

  “Documents,” I muttered.

  “Her Majesty intends to nationalize the Order of the Stone,” he replied, his voice growing softer as the sentence wound down to its end.

  I gave him a sour look. “Nationalize, as in she’s taking my knights for her own?” I took a deep breath.

  “Peter should have informed you about all of this,” suggested Harold.

  I waved my hands dismissively. “He’s left a lot of papers and reports, but I haven’t gone through them yet.” I was regretting that already. I had left my self-imposed retreat without warning, and Peter had been out at the time.

  “So, you have no idea about today’s conclave?” Harold asked tentatively.

  I tilted my head to one side and gave him my best ‘what do you think’ look. “Surely there’s someone here who will share the news with me,” I offered, staring through him.

  “They’re in the Hall of Lords,” began Harold. “They’ve called a full conclave to discuss what to do with you.”

  “Of course,” I said dryly, “I figured it would be something silly, like confirming the support for her coronation or reorganizing after the disaster. I never suspected it would be something so important.”

  “The coronation was held last week,” mentioned Harold.

  They hadn’t wasted much time with that then. Obviously, I was woefully lacking in information. “So, what are they trying to decide about me?”

  “The majority of the nobility is calling for a trial, to settle the matter of your actions during the recent insurrection,” he explained.

  “Trial?” I spluttered. “What are they charging me with?”

  “Today’s meeting was to decide the formal list of charges, my lord.”

  That’s when I finally realized that Adam had been trying to do me a favor by keeping me from wandering blindly into a meeting I wasn’t prepared for. Instead he had brought Harold, giving me the opportunity to discover what lay in front of me.

  “Tell me honestly, Harold. How bad do you think this is?”

  “Do you know what the people in the streets call you?” he asked suddenly.

  I shrugged.

  “They’ve taken to calling you the ‘Blood Lord’ or sometimes the ‘Blood Count’. You’re what they tell their children about when they want to make sure they don’t leave home at night,” said Harold.

  “Well that’s new,” I responded blandly. I was completely blindsided. While I was deeply ashamed of what my alter-ego had done that night, I hadn’t thought anyone had seen him, no one still alive anyway. Since he had restricted himself to the usurpers men, I didn’t think it would have been a matter for a trial either.

  “They found over a thousand people dead,” said Harold urgently. “And that was just inside the city. There were thousands more outside of it.”

  Well true, but most of those had been shiggreth. They had stopped moving like marionettes with their strings cut when Mal’goroth/Brexus had finally died.

  “A lot of those were already dead,” I told him honestly.

  Harold clapped his hands over his ears. “Please don’t make me a witness, my lord.”

  I sighed. Sometimes Harold was too honest for his own good.

  “The point of all this, is that you should return home. Plan your response,” he advised me.

  Chapter 51

  “I told you there was a risk of civil war!” said Peter loudly, almost on the verge of shouting.

  “You didn’t say anything about them putting me on trial,” I groused.

  My blond chamberlain ran his hand through his hair again. It was a miracle he hadn’t pulled it all out yet. “I wasn’t informed. That was in the private missives that the Queen sent you. Didn’t you think to read them?”

  After my ordeals, I had taken an almost perverse pleasure in completely ignoring all of it. I figured I deserved it, and most certainly my family had. Now I was paying the price.

  In my absence, the new Queen had been hard pressed to solidify her hold on the governance of Lothion. The capital had been in a state of near anarchy when she returned. My ‘solution’ to the problem of Andrew Tremont had traumatized the citizens and given birth to a whole host of rumors and outright lies.

  If I had been there, much of it might have been avoided. The Lords would certainly never have been so bold as to press a case against me. Gareth and to my surprise, Elaine, had done their best to support Ariadne during the transition. It had actually been Elaine’s handiwork producing the enchanted privacy shields in the palace, although Gareth had taught her the design.

  But Gareth Gaelyn hadn’t had the same sort of reputation and general clout that I did. Combine that with the fact that I had done my best to ruin myself in the eyes of just about everyone, and it was a recipe for my political downfall.

  A knock came at the door. After a moment, one of my footmen introduced the visitor as Lady Rose. That startled me a bit. I hadn’t seen her in weeks.

  “Gentlemen,” she said. It was only Peter and me in the room. I had spoken with Penny about it earlier, and she’d been rather perturbed. She still hadn’t gotten past the ‘cutting them into small pieces’ stage of anger management.

  “Rose,” I said, trying to keep my emotional reaction off of my face. I took her hand and passed it under my lips. Not something I did on most of our greetings, but it had been a while and it helped to get my face out of view for a moment. Th
e last thing she needed to see was pity on my face.

  She was not so easily fooled of course. “I am not so fragile that I will break, Mordecai,” she told me. Setting her hand to my chin she lifted my head, forcing me to give her a direct stare. My eyes began watering almost immediately.

  Seeing her brought Dorian’s death back into stark, painful focus. She pursed her lips, trying to keep her own eyes dry, and then she hugged me tightly. A few minutes passed before we were able to return to the discussion at hand. Stepping away Rose moved the conversation on, “We’ll talk about things later, for now I need to hear about your trial.”

  I lifted my eyebrows. “Why?” It was rude the way I said it, but I had thought to leave her out of this. She was still grieving.

  “Two reasons,” she said, beginning her points in the same logical fashion she often did. “One, you need someone to represent you. Two, I need to do something—anything, before I go mad.”

  I couldn’t help but agree. Not to mention, it was a relief to hear the words. Somehow I couldn’t imagine my case going poorly with Rose defending me. The woman was sharper than any two noblemen put together. I had learned a deep respect for her during the years I had known her. She was a force to be reckoned with.

  “Tell me about the charges,” she said.

  I offered her the charging document and summons, which I had just received. She scanned through it and thought for a moment before speaking again.

  “This is rather unusual,” she said at last.

  I nodded intelligently.

  “I thought they might press a case based on the events in Albamarl, but this relates to what happened at Tremont’s estate. They really don’t have any evidence of your involvement there. Were you involved in it?” she asked.

  My alter-ego had sent a legion of the shiggreth to wipe out Tremont’s holdings. While I had some blurry memories of arguing with him, trying to convince him otherwise, he hadn’t been swayed. In fact his actual orders had been rather open ended. The shiggreth had killed every living person at Tremont’s castle, everyone in the neighboring town, and most of the outlying farmers.

  It had been an almost complete slaughter. Afterward, many of the shiggreth themselves had died there, when I freed Mal’goroth/Brexus. The first people to try and restore contact with the region had been horrified to find a land full of dead and rotten corpses. It was still unoccupied. The land itself had acquired a cursed reputation.

  “I think so,” I told her.

  She frowned, “You think so, or you know so? Explain, please.”

  I launched into a lengthy description of the events. Their faces grew paler the more I talked. In fact, the more I went over it, the more I wondered at how quickly I had pushed those thoughts to the back of my mind. I had been very carefully not thinking about all the things my other-self had done in my name during the past year.

  “Well, they don’t really have a case,” said Rose after I had finished.

  Short of arguing that I hadn’t been in my own mind at the time, I couldn’t see how that would be. My face told her as much.

  “There’s no proof you were in charge of the shiggreth,” she said bluntly.

  “I was a shiggreth,” I replied.

  “They cannot infer control from that alone, nor can they prove that you were, in fact, a shiggreth,” she said calmly.

  “But I was!”

  It was her turn to raise an eyebrow, “You don’t look like one to me.”

  “I got better. Look you know most of the story already.”

  She sighed, “That’s not the point, Mordecai. They don’t know the story, and we don’t have to share any facts that might incriminate you unless directly questioned regarding them.” She paused for a second and then added, “And if they did know the full story, they’d drop this entire thing. You don’t deserve this. There wouldn’t be a court to prosecute you in if you hadn’t done what you did.”

  “So should he tell them the whole thing?” asked Peter.

  “No,” she said calmly. “They’ll never believe it. I meant if they really knew the truth. There’s no way to convince them of the actual story. It sounds like a fabrication to protect him from blame.”

  “I’ll just tell them the truth. What they do with it is none of my concern,” I stated, wearying of the topic.

  Rose gave me an incredulous look, “Well of course it’s your concern. This could affect you and your family in serious and permanent ways, and that’s without considering the possible damage to our nation.”

  Mal’goroth had been potentially damaging to all human life. After my year long ordeal, I was having trouble seeing the importance of the constant political maneuvering involved in my life as a nobleman. “What can they do, seize my bank accounts, strip me of my title? I could care less,” I said truthfully. “I’m tired of the whole thing.”

  “Those are both possibilities,” agreed Rose, “depending on the charges they convict you of, but there are far more serious penalties; execution or banishment could be handed down for what happened on Tremont’s lands.”

  Not that I don’t perhaps deserve those things, I thought to myself, but after everything I’ve been through… “They could try. I wouldn’t suggest it, but they could try,” I told her with a stony glare.

  “Suppose they did,” she began, “and you flaunted the court’s justice. Certainly, you probably have enough power to ignore their mandate. What would that mean, civil war? Is that what you want? Is that what you fought Mal’goroth to protect?”

  “I wouldn’t have to go to war. Ariadne would have enough sense to leave me alone,” I declared.

  Rose frowned even more, “Think, Mordecai! Think! You are much brighter than this. What happens when the Queen can’t enforce her laws on you? What happens if she doesn’t try? She’s already standing on shaky ground. Lothion has never been ruled by a woman before.”

  “They wouldn’t dare try to depose her,” I said ominously. “They call me the ‘Blood Lord’ now; I’d teach them the meaning of it if they started another war.”

  “Which leaves Ariadne where?” said Rose pointedly. “The puppet ruler of a puppet nation, dancing in fear of an evil wizard.”

  “I’m not evil,” I protested feebly. My logic sounded pretty thin even to my own ears.

  “Even Mal’goroth thought he was just getting his due for what had happened in the past,” observed Rose. Sometimes the woman was just too damned sharp.

  I knew she was playing the devil’s advocate for my own sake, but her words stung a bit. An idea occurred to me then, “I could just disappear. Take the family and retire someplace far away. That would solve their problems.”

  “If they choose banishment, yes,” said Rose. “If they choose another penalty, and you abscond it will still weaken Ariadne’s position—and you won’t be around to save the day afterward.”

  I gave up. “What would you have me do then?” I looked back and forth between her and Peter, who had been listening quietly the entire time.

  “In two days you appear before the court. I’ll argue your case, and they will either dismiss it or find you guilty. If you are given penalties, you take them. You must accept the rule of law, otherwise this nation you’ve worked so hard for will be nothing but a sham,” she said firmly.

  “And if they order my execution?”

  “They could, but they won’t,” said Rose with a smile. “That’s the clever part. The High-Justicer, Earl Winfield, is no fool. If they handed down a sentence like that, you’d be forced to buck them, which would undermine the Queen. Even if we lose, they’ll make sure it doesn’t force you into a corner.”

  Peter nodded emphatically.

  I held up my hands in defeat. “When you are right, you’re right. We’ll do it as you suggest.”

  ***

  Rose visited that evening, along with Moira Centyr. They brought Gram with them but left Rose’s small daughter, Carissa, with her mother-in-law. They joined us shortly before dinner, and once we had all e
aten, the children went to play.

  The conversation during the meal was plain and unremarkable. Both Penny and Rose were inhibited by unspoken issues. Once we finished, the two of them went aside, leaving Moira Centyr and me to entertain each other. I suspected that it was a strategic move on Rose’s part. She had probably brought Moira with her just for that purpose.

  We made small talk for a short while before Moira brought up a topic I didn’t expect, “Have you noticed anything odd in your daughter’s room?”

  I wasn’t sure where she was headed with that, but I was always willing to discuss ‘our’ child with her. “Aside from the fact that she can’t be bothered to keep it clean?”

  A smile quirked at the corner of Moira’s lips. “No, I mean something more along the lines of her imaginary friends.”

  Moira Centyr was a frequent visitor in our home. In fact, next to Lilly Tucker and my mother she was our most common baby sitter. Some women might have been intimidated by their adopted daughter’s mother’s thousand year-old shade hanging around, but Penny had been more pragmatic. Moira Centyr had become something like an extra grandmother for all our children. Consequently, she was almost as familiar with my daughter’s room as I was.

  “She’s always had imaginary friends,” I admitted easily. “I think she’ll outgrow them eventually.” The reality was that my daughter spent a lot of time talking to a stuffed bear we had given her several years ago. It was a cute habit most of the time, though it worried me some. She was almost eleven now and had shown no sign of stopping.

  Moira gave me a knowing glance, “Pay more attention. She’s a Centyr, remember? Her imaginary friends will probably start talking back to her, if they haven’t already.”

  That was a sobering thought. “I hadn’t even thought about it,” I admitted.

  “It’s usually not a problem,” said the Stone Lady. “I just wanted you to be aware. Don’t overreact if you find something unexpected moving around and talking in your home.”