by CJ Brightley
Time for a change of subject, Lainie decided. Fortunately, supper was ready. She stuck her head through the door to the dining room. “Food’s ready, Pa. Will you ring the dinner bell?”
Burrett stepped out the back door of the dining room and rang the bell to summon the ranch hands for supper. Mr. Vendine came into the kitchen and offered to carry the heavy pot of beans in for Lainie. She followed with the loaves of bread and then went back for the big serving bowl of cooked greens. The ranch hands filed into the dining room through the back door, each man taking a plate and cutlery for himself from the sideboard and finding a place to sit on one of the benches that ran along the long table. Mr. Dobay came in and shook Mr. Vendine’s hand, greeting him in a friendly manner since they were already acquainted. Burrett took his seat at one end of the table and offered Mr. Vendine the guest seat next to him at the end of one of the benches, and Lainie sat facing her Pa at the other end of the table.
Burrett offered a quick thanks to the Provider, then everyone dug in. After the first few minutes of silent, concentrated eating, Mr. Vendine said, “Miss Banfrey is surely an excellent cook, Banfrey.”
Lainie tried to hide her smile at the compliment, to not look like she was making too much of it. She had worked hard at learning to cook well and was proud of her skills, but hearing it from Mr. Vendine made her feel like no one had ever said so before.
“I heard that the Rusty Widow has a restaurant-trained cook from some big city in Granadaia,” Burrett replied, a faint note of challenge in his voice. The ranch hands had been abuzz with gossip about Mr. Vendine ever since the day he arrived, and everyone knew that he was staying at Mundy’s and spent regular time in the Rusty Widow. Lainie hoped her Pa didn’t think that Mr. Vendine was really working with Carden and the miners and had come out here to make trouble.
“True,” Mr. Vendine said. “But Miss Banfrey beats him hands-down for good solid Wildings cooking.”
She glanced at him, blushed, then quickly averted her eyes so her Pa wouldn’t see her looking at him. “Thank you, Mr. Vendine,” she said.
As the meal went on, Burrett asked Mr. Vendine what news he brought from other parts of the Wildings. Lainie listened eagerly to what he said – because it was a rare treat to hear word of new and interesting things all the way out here. Not because she was particularly curious about him.
Mr. Vendine told them that he had spent the last five years or so in the eastern part of the Wildings, in the Long Valley that ran along the foot of the Spine, the mountains that divided the Wildings from Granadaia. He told them about a range war that had broken out last year in the southern part of the Valley despite the best efforts of the local cattlemen’s co-ops, and about a renegade wizard who had been captured by two other wizards and then the three of them had hightailed it back through the Gap to Granadaia with a hanging mob of a hundred townsfolk hot on their heels, and about his venture into the blueskin-controlled Roughs while he was on the trail of a private bounty. Yes, he had been born in Granadaia, of Island ancestry, he admitted when Burrett asked him, but there had been nothing there for him so he had come out to the Wildings.
He made no mention of a wife or children. But that didn’t mean he didn’t have any, Lainie told herself. Her face heated up; she had no business even thinking about such things. It didn’t matter if he had a wife and children or not. Men like him weren’t interested in settling down in one place, and her Pa would never sit still for her marrying a wanderer and a bounty hunter. Never mind how he would react if he ever found out Mr. Vendine was a wizard. Mr. Vendine would only stay in Bitterbush Springs long enough to solve the mystery of the ore and find the rogue mage, if there was one. Then he would be off, to turn in the renegade and chase the next bounty, and she would stay here on her father’s ranch and marry her father’s foreman. She sighed and poked at the remnants of her beans, no longer hungry.
The thunderstorm had moved on by the time the meal ended, and the ground, parched after the long season between rains, was already starting to dry. The ranch hands went out to do their evening chores, and Mr. Vendine took his rain cape, coat, and hat from the hooks in the front parlor. “Thank you for the meal, Miss Banfrey.” He tipped his hat to her and then to her Pa. “I appreciate the hospitality, Banfrey. Good night.”
He left. Lainie stepped outside after him and watched him ride off in the dusk towards town. Even after he rounded past the trees in front of the house and was lost to her sight, she stood looking out the direction he had gone, holding on a little longer to the glow of happiness she had felt while he was there.
When she went back inside, her Pa was waiting for her in the front parlor, looking grim. “He’s a wizard, ain’t he, Lainie?”
Lainie’s pleasant mood turned bleak. She fumbled for words. “Why – What do you mean?”
“That Vendine fella. He’s got that look an’ manner, arrogant, like he owns the world. Like he’s got every right to go around asking questions about things that ain’t none of his concern. An’ even though he tries to speak like a Wildings man, he’s got the accent of someone educated in Granadaia who also speaks the Island language. An’ that dark skin of his – that’s no tan.”
“There’s Plain folk descended from Islanders, aren’t there? From the servants an’ slaves the Island wizards brought over?”
“Only pure-bred Island wizards, or close to pure-bred, got skin that dark. He’s a wizard.”
“But –” Lainie started to argue some more, then she sighed. It was clear he already knew the truth. Even if she wanted to argue with him, there was no point in it. “Yes, he’s a wizard. He thinks there’s a wizard gone outlaw somewhere around here. That’s the kind of bounty hunting he does. He says they’re dangerous to the settlers, that’s why he hunts them. And he knows there’s something strange about that ore. I think he wants to stop what Carden is doing. Wouldn’t that be a good thing?”
“Nothing good can come from anything a wizard does.”
Resentment burned hot in her chest and stiffened her spine. It wasn’t fair for him to condemn all wizards at once, without knowing anything about them. And anyway, she was a wizard; had he forgotten that? “Why do you hate wizards so much? And I know all about how hard life is for Plain folk in Granadaia, because the laws favor the wizards and the wizards keep the Plain folk pushed down beneath their feet, and all that. But you don’t know everything about every wizard. How can you say what they’re all like?”
“All right, then, baby girl,” Burrett said. “I’ll tell you about wizards. When I was a boy, five years old or thereabouts, my mother was found to have magic power. Seems she was the by-blow of some great wizard with a Plain servant girl, and her talent came on late. So she went away and became a wizard. Got all trained up and got her wizard ring. And then, since she was a wizard, she got the rights to the farm we lived on, even though it had belonged to my father’s family for eight generations. She disowned us kids – she was ashamed of us because none of us had power – and took another wizard for a lover, and gave the farm to his son. Instead of letting us stay on to work the land, she forced us out of our home and off our land because we were a reproach to her, the reminder of her old life as a Plain.”
Lainie’s heart went cold inside her. She couldn’t believe any wife and mother would turn against her family so. How could she have such a wicked woman for her grandmother?
“We were cold and hungry, begging on the streets, for a long time,” her Pa went on. “Finally my father got an offer to indenture my older brothers on a sailing ship owned by a rich wizard merchant and to put my sisters in a brothel. I never heard anything more of them. I was too young to indenture, so he kept me with him. We begged and did the dirtiest work in town, that no one else would do, and saved our copper bits until we had enough money to buy a handcart and a few supplies and come through the Gap to the Wildings. My Pa died in the Gap, like so many folks did, and so I was on my own in a wild new country, twelve years old, with nothing more than a handcart an�
�� a bag of dry beans an’ the clothes on my back. I reckon I’ve done pretty well, even after the wizards did their best to destroy me. An’ now you know, that’s the kind of people wizards are – and the kind of people we Banfreys are.”
“Pa…” She felt sick. She didn’t want to believe it, but her Pa had never lied to her. She knew he was telling the gods’ honest truth. Were all mages bound to become that evil sooner or later, no matter how good they wanted to be? Would she become that wicked herself if she ever learned how to use her power?
“He may charm you with his smile and his good looks and a little show of kindness,” Burrett went on. “But he’s a wizard. He’ll take what he wants from you – your heart, your virtue, your loyalty, your soul, and then he’ll leave you desolate and ruined. Or, even worse, he’ll try to make you into what he is. One way or another, he’ll destroy you. And don’t you ever forget that, baby girl.”
That didn’t sound like what she knew of Mr. Vendine. But what did she really know of him, other than what he had told her? His kindness and the things he said about wanting to protect Plain folk could all just be part of his deception. Deep inside, she felt like he couldn’t be the monster her Pa said he was, but she was smitten by his handsome face and ready smile, his air of danger and adventure and his kindness to her. Her judgment was clouded, and she shouldn’t depend on it. “Yes, Pa,” she said miserably. “I’ll remember.”
HE HAD BETTER be careful, Silas told himself as he rode in the twilight back to town. Unless he was seriously mistaken, Lainie Banfrey was setting her eye on him. He couldn’t help but be flattered by her admiration, and she herself was a most admirable young lady, smart, spirited, and pretty, and an excellent cook. But, for one thing, he had no plans to marry, at least not any time soon. Having a wife didn’t fit into the life he had chosen for himself. And, for another, even if he was inclined to marry, he doubted the Mage Council would approve a marriage between him and a young lady of unknown family, Wildings-born and untrained. Not that he cared what the Mage Council thought, but entering into a marriage without their authorization would be problematic, not to mention illegal. His family would have a fit as well, but that didn’t matter. He had parted ways with them in every possible sense years ago.
It would be cruel to let Lainie entertain her affections for him when the only thing he could do for her was present her with the choice between being taken to Granadaia, away from everything she knew, to become something she feared, or to have her power Stripped from her.
True, once she was trained, and if the mage bloodline which had to be present somewhere in her ancestry was identified and found to be sufficiently elevated, she might be considered a suitable match for him by the Mage Council. But by the time the Granadaian schools of magic were done with her, there was every chance she would no longer be the young lady he had grown to admire so much. Silas had made it out of school with his humanity and finer feelings mostly intact, but he had had the advantages of his own innate stubbornness and considerable talent, and his family name and position had protected him from the worst rigors and excesses of Granadaian magical education. And it still hadn’t been easy for him. Lainie almost certainly didn’t stand a chance. She would either be crushed, her mind, heart, and spirit shattered to the point where she was useless as a mage and would have to be Stripped anyway, or warped into the kind of cold, callous, inhuman creature that she believed most mages were.
One way or another, her heart, and maybe more than that, was going to be broken.
When he got back to his room at Mundy’s, he removed a pouch from a magically-concealed space at the bottom of his knapsack. From the pouch he took specially-spelled pen, ink, and paper, along with the small, round, ornately-decorated silver box the Mage Council had issued him upon granting his authorization as a mage hunter. It was time he sent a report to the Mage Council about the strange ore and Carden’s activities. Even if Carden wasn’t a mage, if the Council judged that the ore and his interest in it were dangerous enough, there still might be a good reward in it for Silas.
Using a bit of power to activate the spell that would bind the words to the paper, Silas wrote that he had detected the possible presence of a rogue mage in the Bitterbush Valley and that a man who claimed to be in the employ of foreign scientists was paying a premium for an ore with very odd and malign magical properties. He didn’t know if the two matters were connected; he suspected they were.
He didn’t say anything about Lainie. He didn’t want the Mage Council to step in and make her decision for her – or question why he was taking so long to resolve the issue.
When he had finished writing his report, he took his mage ring out from under his shirt and slid it onto his left forefinger. This next spell was small but powerful and required the additional focus that his mage ring would provide. He called up his power, and his ring began to glow blue as he shaped the power to do what he needed it to do.
He folded the report in the correct pattern, murmuring the words that would help him further bind the message he had written to the paper, ensuring that they would make the coming journey intact and undisturbed. Then he tucked the message into the silver box. With a touch of his left forefinger and another word, the paper began to glow, then to curl up in flames. Silas closed the lid of the box. In a moment, nearly a thousand leagues away in the city of Sandostra, in a room high up in the Mage Council tower, a similar box would begin to glow, and a small pulse of magical energy would alert one of the monitors in the room to the appearance of the written report inside the box. If the Mage Council had further questions or instructions for him, a message would appear in his box in the same fashion.
There was a second message box concealed in the magical space in his knapsack, square with different markings embossed and engraved on it. Silas took it out and wrote a similar message to the members of the Hidden Council, his allies in protecting the rights and freedoms of Plain folk, emphasizing the threat that Carden’s activities posed to the local settlers. Then he hesitated, wondering if he should tell them about Lainie. They might sympathize with the unpleasantness of the choice he was required to present to her, but they could offer no alternative options. There were no alternatives. And, well-meaning though they would be, he also didn’t want them taking the choice out of Lainie’s own hands.
In the end, he sent the Hidden Council the message about Carden and the ore, and kept the information about Lainie and her power to himself.
7
SILAS WANDERED INTO the Rusty Widow just after noon the next day. He made sure the shield over his power was firmly in place, especially now that he wasn’t so sure that Carden wasn’t a rogue mage. As he had hoped, Carden was in the saloon, sitting at a table in the back corner near the jangling hammerbox with Gobby and another miner. Each of them had a house lady on his knee.
Silas walked over to Carden’s table. “Carden,” he said, tipping his hat.
“Vendine,” Carden greeted him. Silas was certain he hadn’t told Carden or any of his people his name. It must have come back around by way of Dobay or another of the Banfrey ranch hands. Sometimes he wondered if name-slip charms were worth even the slight trouble it was to use them, but they were much easier to deal with than trying to remember a dozen different aliases and where and when he’d used each one. He could only hope that if the name Vendine did get around, it would strike fear into certain hearts.
Carden’s house lady paused in running her hand over Carden’s broad chest to give Silas a long, slow, predatory look up and down. Silas had been using a large amount of power during this hunt, and while eating and sleeping a lot regenerated some of it, normally the local house ladies would have also started looking pretty damn irresistible by this point. But now, for some reason, he found her strangely unappealing, and it didn’t take much effort for him to keep his mind on business.
“Allow me to buy you a drink, Carden,” he said. “And I’d like to have a word or two with you. In private,” he added, looking pointedly at the
two miners and the house ladies. He ignored the hammerbox player, who wouldn’t be able to hear them over the racket he was making anyway.
A puzzled, suspicious look flitted across Carden’s face, to be quickly replaced by his usual good-natured expression. With the practice of more than five years of hunting renegade mages, Silas kept own his face perfectly pleasant and neutral. After a moment, Carden shook his house lady off of his knee. “Get on with you,” he said to her and the others. “But don’t leave the room.”
“But, Boss –” Gobby said.
“Go on. I don’t think there’s anything to worry about. Just a conversation between gentlemen.”
Grumbling, with a few glares directed at Silas, the miners stood, taking their drinks with them. Along with the house ladies, they wandered over to a table where a lively card game was in progress. Silas signaled to the barkeep for two glasses of whiskey, then sat down. A house lady in blue and yellow striped satin quickly brought their drinks, then stood by, looking hopefully at Silas.
He shooed her away, then took a swallow of the whiskey and suppressed a gasp as the breath was burned out of his lungs. The whiskey was locally-made house swill, strong and rough enough to scour the paint off a madam’s face.
“Damn!” he said when he could breathe again. “You can buy the next round, Carden. I think the barkeep’s trying to run me out of here.”
“My pleasure. I have a standing order for the good stuff. But I don’t think you really came in here to drink, eh?” Carden lifted one dark eyebrow in question.
Silas noted Carden’s Granadaian blue eyes and the contrast between his pure black hair and the paleness of his skin. Too pale and smooth for someone who had spent any time at all in the Wildings. Definitely not a settler, then. If he was a mage, he wasn’t of Island blood, not with blue eyes and pale skin. Or he might be a favored Plain, chosen by a mage to be educated and raised to a position of authority in managing the mage’s business and affairs. Silas planned to do another scan to see if Carden had power, but not now while Carden’s attention was on him. “All right, then. I’ll get down to business,” he said. “I’m wondering about this ore that everyone’s so excited about.”