by Carol Berg
She snatched her hand away. “A spelled artifact buried in the streambed!” Her explosive astonishment was not feigned. Nor was her humiliation. “But that changes everything…risks conflicting spellwork…unending complications…flood, mudflows, cave-ins.…”
“Even so.”
“But the land grant said nothing of an altered streambed or buried caskets. How could you—anyone—possibly know of it?”
“Because I think. Because my expectations of devious human behavior are more accurate than those of a star-eyed aristo lady who grew up sheltered by a rich father. A blood family would never allow civil law to settle a boundary dispute, nor would they yield desired territory if their sorcery could possibly prevent it. Because when it comes to keirna, unfounded rumor can have greater significance than historical or scientific truth; thus I betook my commoner boots out of the library and into the hills and deigned to speak with a few crofters hereabouts. And because I don’t allow trivial concerns to intrude on building spellwork. Magic is not a study for dabblers.”
Before the words faded, I knew I’d gone too far. She whirled on me like a tornadic wind.
“My family is not trivial!”
I didn’t retreat, but I did raise a shielding spell. Her uncontrolled anger could peel the paint from a wall, crack its foundation, or flatten an unwary teacher against it—only a few of the possibilities we had uncovered as we’d explored the dangerous side of her blood heritage. But again her discipline held.
“And a dabbler? I’ve heeded your every word for two years, worked your tedious exercises, allowed you to lead me to the netherworld and back, not complaining about your insults or criticisms or your stubborn refusal to heed my wishes or speak with me on topics of my choosing. I agreed to your conditions. Indeed, I no longer fear I’m going to murder someone by accident, and you’ve given me an understanding of the world I never imagined. But this part of it…working spells…Clearly, I can’t get it right. And I was failing long before I decided to visit Montclaire.”
No possible response was going to soothe her. So I spoke the truth, though it dripped brine into her wounds. “You fail because you refuse to commit yourself to the work.”
“But I can’t be like you, Dante. I can’t pretend I have no family, no life, no past, no future. I can’t wall off my heart. I can’t forget that my sister was murdered or ignore my conviction that we should be studying the lore of Ixtador and the eternal Veil and the horrors we witnessed on Mont Voilline instead of these ridiculous spells. I am not dead.” No one on this side of her flaying tongue would imagine that. “If you would just listen to me…talk with me…”
“Control and discipline are not enough,” I snapped. “If you cannot shape your own power, you might as well be dead.”
Anne was right that something was terribly wrong in between the living world and the realm of souls beyond death—the borderland pious folk named Ixtador Beyond the Veil. She believed she had heard her sister’s voice after the explosive end of the de Gautier conspiracy at Mont Voilline. Dead only a month, Lianelle had begged Anne to find help for those beyond the Veil, claiming that the souls of the dead were being leached away. Our friend Portier’s experiences of that night had convinced him that Ixtador’s existence prevented the dead from moving on to whatever awaited humankind beyond mortal life—whether that be Heaven or the Souleater’s realm of ice and darkness or blessed oblivion. Yet, how could we possibly remedy such an aberration in the natural order?
Anne’s conviction made the problem of Ixtador real and urgent. But I had insisted she learn to control her power and develop the fundamentals of spellworking before we dealt with it. We weren’t going to make any headway on such mystery without her magically capable.
My gift for sorcery was extraordinary, all the more so in an age of the world when sorcerous practice was moribund. But as I had taught Anne…as I had been taught…one could not effectively or safely create spells while ignoring any evidence of intellect or senses. After two years blind, my memories of the visible world were becoming imprecise. Every day I failed to bind some construct correctly because I could not recall or learn a physical detail I needed.
Certainly, others could describe things to me. But temporary crutches would not solve my problem. The inevitable lay before me like a bottomless chasm. Sooner or later, I’d have to stop practicing sorcery. An assassin’s knife would be a mercy on that day.
Yet I refused to take a dead man’s year, enjoying careless pleasures or opening doors into rooms I could never enter. Germond de Gautier’s conspiracy to upend the laws of nature had consumed Anne, Portier, and me and spit us out broken. Though we had won the day at Mont Voilline, the full accounting for de Gautier’s deeds had yet to be rendered. Someone with exceptional power and well-honed skills must be ready when payment came due. Portier was in seclusion a thousand kilometres away. It certainly wasn’t going to be me. That left Anne.
“Dante, wait.…”
“Sunset. The lesson is over.” I was already tramping across the pasture to the guesthouse, though poking with my staff like some witless beggar to find the cairns she’d used to mark the path precluded the kind of dramatic departure that might emphasize my point.
The days would be wretched with her gone.
ANNE LEFT EARLY THE NEXT MORNING. As her maidservant Ella and Ella’s brother Finn loaded a borrowed donkey cart, I sat on the steps of Pradoverde’s main house, letting the weak autumn sun bathe my cold skin and soothe the void in my gut. Every morning it was the same—a panicked sickness when my eyes opened yet again to eternal nothing.
Anne was busily instructing Finn about the care of the house, the horses, the pantry, and her herb garden. She didn’t mention how to tend an irascible blind spellcaster. Not this time. She’d been instructing Finn on how to put up with me since he’d joined our household the previous year.
Ella was accompanying Anne to Montclaire; thus Finn and I would be left alone at Pradoverde. Finn was a steady, honest lad with useful skills when it came to carpentry and mechanics, but he scuttered about the place like a nervous weasel. I had learned the uncomfortable limits of my sightless state in those first months after the cursed rite at Mont Voilline, else I would have thrown him into the cart with the women.
Anne dashed past me and into the house. Her steps, ever light, raced up the stair. Doors slammed. More quick steps, as she returned.
“Almost forgot the book of poems for Ambrose,” she said, as she crunched across the gravel to the cart. She was excited to go. It was her first time back to her childhood home since she’d been forced to leave it two years before, an event that roused her dormant talent for magic to the benefit of the world—and her own dismay.
I didn’t plead with her to stay. She knew my arguments.
Ten years previous, a natural philosopher named Arronge had formulated a theory that the energies of objects in motion are invariant, transferred from one to another as the objects interact in the physical world. The concept translated well into the sphere of enchantments. Magical energies, the stuff of life, thought, dream, and enchantment, every bit as observable to those who had the sense for it, could not simply evaporate, either. Drained from one place, they must end up somewhere else.
If Anne and Portier were right about their experiences at Mont Voilline, then our mystery was far greater than Ixtador. The energies created by stripping the essence from human souls must be inconceivably huge, and we had not the least idea where those drained from Ixtador had gone. The universe was unhealthy, very like the shell of a diseased hen’s egg, thin, brittle, and ready to shatter. Profound magic would be needed to solve the problem.
“Will you not bid me a safe journey?”
I jumped, grazing an elbow on the brick pillar behind me. Gnarled worries must have left me deaf. Unlike Finn and Ella, Anne was always careful to let me know she was near.
“Naturally. Yes.”
She waited for more. But words ever eluded me. I hated her leaving. She knew that a
lready.
Threads of her unruly hair itched my cheek. “I’ll come back,” she said softly. “As I told you on the day I walked into this house, we are irrevocably bound. I know you. I value—”
I jumped up and slammed my stick against the front-door lintel so as to get through the opening without crashing my face into the wall. Anne was naive and sentimental, forever inviting me into places no uncouth, ill-tempered necromancer belonged.
I cannot ignore my family’s need. Her declaration, bound with apology, followed me indoors, voiced not in audible speech, but in the unspoken diction of the mind, a gift Anne and I shared. Dante, I will return.
Devilish perversity made me slam the door behind me. Moments later the cart clattered away, leaving me alone in the everlasting dark.
Words spoken in the aether testified clearly to the speaker’s truth or lies. But Anne’s present belief didn’t matter. She had acquired what she most needed from our arrangement. She wasn’t coming back.
NEVER HAD I IMAGINED ANY person like Anne de Vernase, much less met one. Unbelievably disciplined, yet so…replete…with exuberant life. An exceptional mind. Determined as an avalanche. Her courage in the face of true horrors would put the king’s chevaliers to shame.
I had come to know her in the aether, the medium of souls, where the passions of the living are expressed in an unceasing torrent of “voices” only a few in the world can hear. From earliest childhood I had been gifted—cursed—with the ability to perceive them. But until encountering Anne, I’d never found anyone in that mad, noisy maelstrom who could hear my own directed speech, much less speak back to me in kind.
To discover that this exceptional person was the daughter of the man I believed a traitorous mastermind near overthrew me. Yet even that profound astonishment had been overmatched on the day Anne walked into this house and announced she intended to live with me, so I could teach her how to control the fearful power in her blood. Her mind raddled by an ordeal that would crush weaker spirits, she’d spoken a great deal of sentimental twaddle that day. But I had believed her serious about her magic.
Now King Philippe was engaged on Sabria’s northeastern borders with a gritty enemy whose longships threatened the kingdom’s precious shipping lanes, and he had summoned his demesne lords to bring reinforcements. Anne’s father, the king’s good friend and brother-in-arms, had survived his five-year ordeal as de Gautier’s prisoner, but his bones were like honeycomb and his mind fragile. He’d never again be fit enough to fight at his liege’s side. By law, the heir to his demesne, Anne’s brother, Ambrose, must go in his stead. Ambrose could likely have won royal exemption, but he had suffered his own torments during de Gautier’s conspiracy and had been chafing to kill someone ever since. I didn’t blame him, and I preferred the victim not be me—which had ever been in his mind. I had hoped Anne might persuade Ambrose to make other arrangements for minders at Montclaire. But she had made her choice.
34 OCET
Surprisingly enough the days passed rapidly. We had decided to fence in a paddock for the four horses Anne had acquired in the summer. Likely Finn could have done it as well alone as with me. Sightless assistants with only one good hand are rarely invaluable. But I craved physical labor, and Finn insisted he would welcome my help. I used no power of mine to probe the truth of his words.
As a boy I would have scoffed at the idea that any but a king might hold a demesne so fine as Pradoverde. Yet the main house was actually only five rooms, the guesthouse two, and the rolling terrain comprised a mere fifteen hectares—cramped by the standards of royal holdings. We had pasture enough for the horses, and a few sheep should we choose to have them. The previous owners had planted a decent kitchen garden and a small orchard of apple, pear, and cherry. To the west lay a fair expanse of open woodland and the once-disputed stream. Despite its contentious history, it was a good place. Healthy. Quiet. But for this bit of land…and Anne…I’d have been a raving lunatic. Worse than I was already.
Three days saw us almost done with the fence. While Finn mounted the gate hinges we’d forged that day, I set some simple spells on the fence, ancient charms of ward and welcome to keep the horses in and thieves, moles, and whipsnakes out.
The weather was a confusion only a late autumn day could produce: hot sun, chill air, dry, dusty, and still. The silver mage collar that bound my neck itched with sweat and grime. By the time we had hung the gate, the angle of the sun signaled dusk, and I’d no thought for anything but the barrel of beer cooling in the cellar.
Finn sluiced his head at the courtyard font and bolted for the nearby village of Laurentine to pursue a budding rapport with the tavern keeper’s daughter. I carried my beer to the steps of the main house, leaned against the porch rail, and inhaled the night. The cooling breeze rustled the dying vines and grasses, stirring up scents of dust, horse, mice, and drying mint. Tree crickets trilled. The collared dove perched in the stable eaves whimpered. The horses whuffled. All that presented itself to my senses I tried to absorb. To remember. To see. Inevitably, my fingers drifted to my bracelet of thin copper.
“Oraste,” I whispered, triggering my newest version of an enchantment I hoped might counter the damage to my eyes. Magic poured out of me until my flesh near caved in.
The night remained entirely black. Spitting curses, I launched my cup into the garden.
The device de Gautier had used to blind me as punishment for my duplicity had been made two centuries past, when the knowledge and practice of sorcery had reached heights never recovered after a century of savagery. Even so, my skills should have been sufficient to disentangle the original spellwork and effect a counterspell. Unfortunately, trapped in an underground vault and near out of my mind with the fire in my eye sockets, I had destroyed the cursed device. Devising a counter without access to the original enchantment would likely take me longer than I had left.
Terror of destroying my eyes altogether prevented anything but the most cautious experimentation. I had only just begun to experience any success—an occasional shadow landscape, where objects appeared as darker blotches in the dark. I’d not even told Anne as yet. Unfortunately, even so primitive a reversal required every scrap of power I could muster. And the spell failed the moment I stopped feeding it. Nights like this when I was physically and magically depleted, I could not even begin.
A sirening disturbance in the aether interrupted my litany of invective. Hooves trod the lane from the village road. Though our boundary wards signaled but one intruder, I stood and reached for my staff. I needed no eyes to draw on its enchantments, ever ready to release fiery destruction. Half the population of Merona and the entire Camarilla Magica would gleefully slit my throat if allowed the idea it was possible.
“Sorcerer?” The horseman’s booming voice bounced firmly from the stone and brick. No telltales of magic accompanied him.
“Who asks?”
“Be ye the sorcerer called Dante?” No anger or hostility marred his query. Wariness, yes. If he knew aught of me, that spoke some rudimentary intelligence.
“Why should I yield my name to a stranger who refuses the same courtesy?”
Halted on the gravel, the horseman dismounted smoothly. He tethered his horse—no mountain pony or farm hack, but a large, spirited animal—to one of the oaks that shaded the lane. Firm, confident steps crossed the gravel yard. A heavy man with the slightest trace of a limp.
“Masson de Cuvier, Grenadier, First Legion of Sabria,” he announced. “Honorably retired.”
A tall man. His voice was almost on a level with my face. He smelled of good horse, good leather, and no spirits.
“I’m Dante,” I said. “What’s your business?”
“Peace.” His voice broke ever so slightly, a burden of desperation surely unaccustomed for such a strong, confident man. “A fellow in Bardeu told me ye can take a dream away. Is’t true?”
“It’s been more than six years since I left Bardeu.” That’s where Portier had found me and dragged me into his in
vestigation of conspiracy and secrets.
“But they remember you. Around Bardeu, folk claimed ye were a healer of the mind, as well as a sorcerer. One said ye’d kept a dream from killing him. So is’t true or not?”
“Eradicating dreams is only possible if they’re visited upon you by enchantment. Some are just the natural stuff of the mind—”
“I’ve heard all that. But this dream is not natural. ’Tis a plague and an abomination, and if I cannot be rid of it, I will die by my own hand before the new year breaks.”
That, I understood.
“Well, then…” I stood aside and motioned him into the house.