Mageborn 05 The Final Redemption

by Michael G. Manning

  Rose questioned me about my dual nature at the time, revealing to the court that I had, according to my testimony, not been in actual control of my actions. She asked for leniency based on the grounds that I wasn’t capable of making my own decisions at the time. It was essentially a defense based on mental incapacity.

  Duke Grumley had one simple retort to that line of reasoning. Gazing around the room, he summed it up quickly, “My lords and ladies, we cannot know the truth of what lies in a man’s mind, but what we can see, here and now, is that Lord Cameron is quite clearly in control of his own actions. His assertion that he was not, in fact, himself, is nothing more than a thinly veiled attempt to avoid culpability. He should be judged accordingly.”

  I could see Penny’s hands gripping the rail in front of us. They were white-knuckled, and she wasn’t the only one who was nervous. Rose’s normally unflappable exterior was showing signs of strain as well.

  He won’t go that far, I told myself. Banishment, loss of title, those I can live with.

  Rose and Grumley both made closing remarks, and then it was time. The High-Justicer withdrew to deliberate. It wasn’t long before he returned though, a matter of minutes only. “If the defendant will rise, I am ready to read the verdict,” he announced.

  Taking my feet again, I scanned Winfield’s face, hoping to garner some clue as to what he was about to say. As I did, I felt a shift in the room, a new presence. Gareth Gaelyn entered from one side. He had been hidden behind one of the new privacy shields in a side room. One look at his face told me all I needed to know.

  They had him here all along, as an officer of the court. He was there to make sure I didn’t run.

  “Son of a bitch!” I muttered under my breath. Penny followed my gaze. Her eyes went wide when she saw him, and I felt more than saw her body tense.

  Harold was standing by Ariadne, and his eyes were a warning to me. More guards positioned themselves at the edges of the room, and these felt enhanced to my senses. Possibly by Doron, since I was sure they weren’t any of the remaining Knights of Stone.

  “Mordecai Illeniel, Count di’ Cameron and Protector of the Northern Reach, I find you guilty of the unlawful deaths of the citizenry of the Duchy of Tremont. While the court understands that there may be some mitigating circumstances involved in this case, we find that the magnitude of the harm done must require a commensurate penalty. You will be stripped of the title, ‘Protector of the Northern Reach’, but you will retain the title Count di’ Cameron, so that your heir, who is blameless of these crimes, may inherit it. I sentence you to death by hanging, to be carried out immediately.”

  As the words rang out I found myself numb. Next time, I should listen to Rose, I thought as what seemed to be a very heavy stone settled in my stomach. Penny’s hands rose to her braids, reaching for the metal cylinders that capped them. I knew instinctively that they must be weapons.

  Desperate I looked around the room. Harold stood opposite me, next to the Queen. Whatever his feelings might be, I could only assume he would act on behalf of the court if my wife attacked. The extra guards and Gareth weighed on me. In an instant the Hall of Lords could turn into a battlefield.

  There would be no winners.

  Reaching out, I put one hand over Penny’s, “No,” I said softly. “We can’t win.”

  Rose nudged me then, and I realized I had missed a question from the High-Justicer.

  “Huh?” I said in some confusion.

  “Do you have any last words to say?” he repeated.

  I blinked and took a deep breath. “Yes, Your Lordship, I would like to address the full assembly of lords.”

  “You have one minute to speak,” he replied.

  Facing the gathering, I put on a determined face. “While I find the court’s decision to be just, I would like to reiterate that I did only the best I could under unusual circumstances. If I could change what happened in Tremont, I would. As for the Duke himself, I am unrepentant. I would also give warning to any here who may have secretly conspired with him. I have returned from death once already. Should I discover that any of you were in league with him, or should any of you create a new conspiracy against our queen, I will find a way to do so again. There will be no refuge that can hide the traitors from my retribution.”

  A number of people’s faces went pale as I spoke. The fire in my eyes left no doubt, even my death would not grant safety to the wicked. I hoped they would lose sleep over it.

  Another messenger from the Queen found the High-Justicer’s ear, and after a moment he held up his hand again.

  “In accordance with our ancient law and custom, our monarch reserves the right of pardon. Rather than force her hand, she has instructed the court to commute Lord Cameron’s sentence. Out of respect, I will do so, rather than see justice diverted,” announced the Earl of Winfield.

  Now I was confused. “What does that mean?” I asked Rose.

  “It means the Queen will use her right to pardon you if the High-Justicer refuses to amend your sentence. Rather than let that happen, he has agreed to give you a lesser penalty,” she explained in a whisper.

  Relief washed over me.

  The High-Justicer continued, “Therefore I will reduce the sentence to a fine of twenty gold, to be paid for the death of every person who died in the attack on Tremont’s estate, and ten lashes to be administered at noon tomorrow. The gold paid as a result of these fines will be given to the heirs and relatives of those who died. For those with no familial survivors, which I understand are many, the gold will be held to assist whomever the Queen grants title of those lands to.”

  While I should have been glad to be free of the threat of death, it was hard to be overjoyed by the replacement. Ariadne was frowning at Earl Winfield from her position behind him, clearly displeased with his substitution, but she said nothing. Her only option at that point would have been to pardon me anyway and overturn the entire trial.

  A lashing for a peer of the realm was virtually unheard of, and the humiliation that accompanied such a public event was probably viewed as barely preferable to death by the majority of the noblemen present.

  Lashes in Lothion were not as civilized or humane as they were in Gododdin. There they used a short rod that terminated in a number of thin plaited leather strips. It was painful, but unless the number of lashes given was very high, it wasn’t dangerous.

  Lothion however, had a different tradition that had probably originated with early punishments given on board ships. In Lothion lashes were administered with a medium length leather whip that was capable of slicing through the skin of the prisoner if done by someone with sufficient force and skill.

  As a result, the number of lashes given as punishment in Lothion was generally low, two or three for most offenses. Five or six were used for very serious crimes, and more than that was unusual. Ten could be dangerous if the person punished wasn’t treated promptly to stop bleeding. A sentence of twenty sometimes resulted in death even with prompt treatment.

  I was willing to bet that the royal flogger took great pride in his work.

  Penny was shaking with rage.

  “Penny, you’ve got to calm down,” Rose told her, for she seemed on the verge of a violent breakdown.

  “You’re not taking this!” said my wife, glaring at me indignantly. “To hell with them, they can’t do this to you.”

  I smiled bravely, “Winfield never did like me, but I will survive.” My courage never felt as false as it did then.

  “We don’t need these people, Mort. We don’t need the titles or the money. We can…”

  “…talk about this later,” I interrupted. Too many eyes and ears were focused on us.

  Lifting our heads we let the final moments of the court play out until I was dismissed, and then we retired from the hall. We were in dark spirits when we finally left, but Penny and I did our damnedest to keep from showing it to anyone there.

  Chapter 53

  Our debate that evening had been heated
and bitter.

  Penny had thought we should abandon it all, rather than accept the punishment. I felt otherwise. In the end it wasn’t something she was able to persuade me on.

  There were a number of possible ways magic could make the lashing less painful. A shield would negate the entire thing, but that would be noticeable. Subtly strengthening the skin could prevent a lot of the damage and reduce the pain somewhat, but again, it might be noticeable.

  Blocking the nerves, as I did when healing, could save me from the worst part of the experience, and since I could heal the damage immediately thereafter, it wouldn’t matter how badly my back was torn up.

  But it felt like cheating.

  When I finally stepped onto the platform I had already decided to take the punishment as it was intended. My only concession was allowing Elise Thornbear to treat my back with an ointment meant to numb the skin. Hopefully, it would dull the pain to a level that would keep me from embarrassing myself.

  The man who greeted me on the platform was masked, much like an executioner. As far as I knew, that might be his other job, but it didn’t seem like the time to ask. I wondered if the mask was to protect his identity from me, or from the crowd. I probably could have identified him later from his aythar alone if I had been of a mind to be vindictive.

  “Good day,” I greeted him. Old habits die hard.

  He didn’t respond to my greeting, choosing instead to remain business-like. “If you’d put these on for me, my lord,” he handed me a pair of manacles with a short chain between them.

  “I’m not planning to run,” I explained. “I would have already done so if that were my plan.”

  “Those are more to keep you upright, my lord, after you pass out,” he answered in a dead pan voice.

  “Does that happen a lot?”

  “Yeah, if you’re lucky, it happens sooner, rather than later,” he told me.

  Involuntarily my eyes were drawn to the braided black coil of leather he had soaking in a bucket nearby. Clasping the irons around my wrists, I raised my hands to show the crowd. My situation was humiliating enough, but I felt a need to show my determination.

  They remained silent, but every eye was on me; some with pity, some gloating at the lord brought low, and most of the rest with simple interest. For them, perhaps I was merely a source of entertainment.

  Penny had come, along with Rose and Walter, but we had excluded everyone else from Cameron, especially the children. Ariadne had invited them to stand with her, as a kindness, but Penny’s anger hadn’t allowed for it. She blamed the Queen as much as the Justicer.

  “Why do you soak the whip?” I asked as he helped to loop the chain between my wrists over a hook mounted on a pole in the center of the platform.

  “We soak it in brine, my lord, to help minimize the bleeding. The physicians say that it keeps the wounds from getting the rot later too,” he volunteered. “Personally though, I think they started doing it to make it hurt more.”

  I was beginning to sense a theme regarding that.

  “Try not to tense up too much,” he added. “It cuts deeper if you’re stiff.”

  And how many people actually retain that much self-control after this starts, I wondered. Now you’re just saying things to make it worse.

  I watched the crowd while listening to him ready the whip, shaking off the excess liquid and letting it uncoil like an evil snake behind me. I made certain my eyes weren’t on Penny as I felt more than saw him draw his arm back for the first blow.

  A line of burning white fire exploded through my consciousness, wiping my mind clear of every clever thought I might have had. Somehow I had thought perhaps I would be able to clench my teeth and get through the experience without making a sound, but my body took matters into its own hands. A strange yelping left my lips involuntarily, possibly because the whip had struck when my lungs were only half full.

  The animal side of my brain was in full panic now, and the sane rational portion of my mind was vanishing quickly. My ears heard the slithering sound of the leather on wood, as he flicked his wrist to return it to the starting position. It took every ounce of will I had to keep from creating a shield then and there.

  The second blistering stroke took the air from my lungs. If there was a yell that accompanied it, I couldn’t be sure. At that point, I was no longer worried about whether I might make noise anyway. The fragment of my consciousness that was still faintly rational began to compare my current pain to the pain I had experienced during my ordeal with Mal’goroth. It was a bit like comparing apples to oranges, but its final conclusion was that at least I had a well-defined end point for this pain.

  Then again, that was then and this is—Unhh!!

  With the third lash, I had had enough.

  Unwilling to shield myself or otherwise give in, my mind did the only other thing it could, it escaped. Slipping into the half-state that I had learned years before as an archmage, my mind found shelter in the earth beneath me. It didn’t abandon my body completely, but my flesh and blood self was now a much smaller part of my awareness.

  In fact, the first time I had ever sought mental sanctuary in the stone like that was right before I had fought Celior.

  I watched the rest of the lashing almost as an outside observer. My body still jerked, and spasms caused it to twitch after each blow, but I no longer experienced the pain in the same way. It was impersonal, something more of an annoyance than an immediate threat to my well-being.

  When it was finally over he put the whip back in its bucket and moved to help unhook the chain from the post. Resuming more direct control over my body, I straightened, and with only a thought I severed the iron chain so that I could lower my arms.

  “I thought you were unconscious,” the man told me, eyeing the ruined manacles. As an afterthought he added, “You’ll have to pay for those.”

  I had been about to use my magic to pop the clasps themselves open, but I had another thought. “That’s fine,” I told him. “I’ll keep them as a reminder.”

  Ignoring the crowd, I began walking to Penny. Every movement was painful, and standing, much less walking, was an exercise in misery. I could feel the blood running down my back, but I refused the physician’s offer of assistance. Putting my mind partially back in the earth enabled me to reach her without stumbling.

  They put my arms over their shoulders, which elicited a fresh surge of pain from my back, and then Walter made us invisible. The three of us made our way home then, and I tried to forget the rest of the day. There was no good to be had in it.

  Chapter 54

  The months passed quietly at Cameron Castle, and spring had already come again. In all that time I had not returned to Albamarl once. The Queen had sent several letters, but I didn’t read them. My rational mind knew my lashing hadn’t been her fault, nor her wish, but somehow my heart just couldn’t accept it. It wasn’t Ariadne I was angry with, it was Lothion itself, and since she represented it, I kept her at a distance instead.

  I did let Peter read the letters, to make sure I wasn’t missing something earthshakingly important. Once he had told me that they didn’t contain any orders or summons, I burned them. I refused to discuss their contents with him afterward as well. I wasn’t ready to open my heart yet.

  Ordinarily Penny would have been a mitigating influence, but in this matter she was angrier than I could ever be. If it had been up to her we’d have started a civil war. She had always been somewhat protective of me, but now—she had progressed to an entirely new level. I began to avoid any mention of the capital, Ariadne, any of the nobility—the list went on. A single reminder would often trigger an eruption of acid-tongued invective from her.

  Immediately after our return, I had used my magic to close the skin over my wounds, but I refrained from healing them. Instead, I let them heal on their own, slowly and imperfectly, which left a crisscross pattern of scars on my back that mirrored the ones in my heart. Penny urged me to erase them, but I refused. ”Some things are wor
th remembering,” was my reply.

  We hadn’t told the children, but the twins had passed eleven years old now, and they were proving to be very perceptive. I’m sure they discovered the truth at some point, but they never said a word to me about it. I told myself we would talk about it someday, but that day never seemed to come.

  The fine that Earl Winfield had levied upon me eventually totaled in the hundreds of thousands of gold, one-hundred-sixty-three-thousand and twenty gold, to be precise. Divided up that amounted to something over eight thousand people wiped out. I didn’t begrudge them the money at all, although I was fairly certain that many of those who came forward to claim kinship had only the most tenuous of claims.

  The sum was enough to bankrupt me and then some. I was forced to take a loan for twenty thousand of it, on unfavorable terms, in order to pay it in full. Rose had suggested I seek a personal loan from the crown, but again, I refused to approach our new queen.

  One bright spot was that Cameron Castle, and by extension the town of Washbrook, had received very little actual damage. That was good, since I had no money for repairs. Arundel and Lancaster on the other hand, were in bad shape. The people of the three neighboring areas helped one another with the rebuilding, but financially, I had nothing left to assist them. The most I could do for Walter and the people of Arundel was exempt him from the taxes he owed me that year. That, of course, made it more difficult for me to pay my own taxes, or even pay my retainers and servants.

  Peter urged me to ask the Queen for amnesty from my taxes that year, but again—you can imagine my response. The capital needed the money anyway; the fighting there had resulted in quite a bit of damage to the palace and the city.

  Instead I produced money my own way. There were no active mines on my lands, but as an archmage, it was easy enough to convince the earth to bring what I wanted to the surface. From its fiery heart, I brought pure iron, shaping it into bar stock even as it emerged. In smaller quantities, I brought silver and some gold as well, molding those into ingots.