Whiskeyjack

by Victoria Goddard

  “I shall not betray your trust.”

  She did deal in curses. Presumably she had a vested interest in not becoming the subject of one herself.

  “I have a number of—it sounds so histrionic, I’m sorry—enemies, or people whom I seem to have made enemies, and could easily imagine a couple of them cursing me. Mr. Dart and I fell afoul of a cult to the Dark Kings about a month ago ... in rescuing me from a fascination cast by one of the priests he received the stone arm.”

  She lifted her glasses to inspect first him and then me. She set them down again in her lap, her fingers stroking the rich wood. “It is possible the same wizard was responsible for both, but your curse is much older and much subtler, Mr. Greenwing. Its physical effects are obviously different, and its signature may only indicate that the one who cursed you also dabbled in the forbidden arts. The touch of the Dark Kings infects all who try to deal with them.”

  I nodded as if this made sense. “The second possibility is that I ... while I was at university ...” I squirmed in my seat, flushing with shame at the whole episode with Lark. “I was ... beguiled and ... and drugged by another student who ... I thought ... She was using wireweed to—” I could not bear to say ‘enslave’— “to endear me to her and to steal my magic. I didn’t know I had any, but that’s what people have said ... I have been sick from the ... She stopped in the spring, we had an argument and I broke from her then, and all the summer and autumn I have been ill from the ... the process of ... ceasing to be ... on ... the drug.”

  “The last time you took any was this spring? When did you begin?”

  I winced. “Nearly three years. Since Winterturn of the first year.”

  Mr. Dart shook his head in a sympathy that for once I found reassuring.

  Domina Enory said, “Does the Chancellor know?”

  “I haven’t told her,” I replied sharply.

  She regarded me through her glasses for another few moments. Acutely uncomfortable under her huge-eyed gaze, I shifted my feet and glanced over her shoulder at where my father now was standing next to Hal. Both looked at us, concern visible in their bearing; and I thought with a queer wrench in my heart how marvellous and incredible it was that those two people should stand there caring about me.

  “Your relationship with that man is of more than three years’ duration.”

  I sneezed; as if that were going to hide anything any more than my uncle’s blustering emotion did.

  “Mr. Greenwing?”

  She was a professor, that was certain; she had that inexorable patience of questioning.

  I shifted position again. “Yes,” I said, and it was an admission, not the triumphant acclamation it ought to have been. Too much of my soul was still angled out defensively to protect the man I had thought buried under the White Cross.

  “How long, Mr. Greenwing?”

  My throat was sore from my earlier bout of coughing; my chest felt tight, heavy with frustration and a grief I did not at all understand and those encircling doubts that came crowding into my mind every time I relaxed my vigilance. The air was heavy with an acrid scent I did not recognize, tinged now with corruption like rotten meat.

  They must have opened the dragon’s stomach, I thought vaguely, automatically lifting the handkerchief.

  Domina Enory was implacable. “How many years have you known him, Mr. Greenwing?”

  I was so tired of being sick, at being at the beck and call of every passing whiff of magic or incense, at trying to fight off the thickness in my throat of grief and resignation and disbelief.

  Mr. Dart laid his hand on my shoulder again. He shocked me and himself; we both jerked and exclaimed at the static discharge. In the strange way of things sometimes the accidental seemed pregnant with meaning, like one of those domestic poems used to plot apocalyptic revelations or revolutions.

  A Scholar and two students seated in an old tithe-barn: figures hunting knowledge into whatever coverts it might be found.

  Mr. Dart smiled in apology at the shock. I smiled back as he laid a comforting hand once more on my shoulder. I could not think why I had not yet answered what was not a very difficult question.

  “All my life,” I said simply. “He’s my father, you see.”

  Domina Enory turned with her glasses trained now on him. After a moment she gave a grunt, turned back. “I think I begin to. Mr. Dart, was it? Will you ask Mr. Greenwing senior to join us, please?”

  “Major Greenwing,” Mr. Dart corrected, and strolled unhurriedly over to him. I swallowed down phlegm and felt acutely miserable.

  “I’m sorry for sneezing so much,” I said to the professor, feeling a strong need to say something. “Ever since this spring I’ve been fighting illness ... and I seem to have some sort of adverse reaction to magic; it makes me sneeze. The dragons’s smell doesn’t help, either. And in addition I appear to have contracted a bad cold over the weekend.”

  “Mm,” she replied with scintillating interest.

  “You asked for me, domina?” my father said politely.

  “Yes, ah, major. Your son has asked me to be discreet, which I assure you I will be. One does not live to be a curse breaker without the ability to keep one’s counsel.”

  “Very good. What can I do to help release my son from his curse? Is it from the dragon?”

  She dismissed the dragon with a wonderful shrug. “No, it appears that particular legend is not realized in this instance. Young Mr. Greenwing here has given me part of what I need to know. A second portion I would be grateful if you were to explicate.”

  He smiled with grim humour. “My variously reported deaths and reappearances?”

  She nodded. “I am afraid all my knowledge beyond your heroism at Orkaty comes from the play.”

  “Three Years Gone. Well, to begin with, I was not the traitor of Loe—you may ask the General for the truth of that, if you will. I was instead trapped on the far side of the Border and was still there when the Empire fell. It was more or less three years later that I returned home to ...”

  He glanced at me. I nodded tiredly, pressing the handkerchief against my lips as if the pressure could offset my interior turmoil.

  “I came home to a reception not too different from that described in the play. This was entirely to my shock, for I assumed I had been reported missing presumed dead. I was expecting to be greeted with astonishment and ... joy ... not to find my reputation destroyed, my son disinherited, and my wife married to someone else.”

  Mr. Dart gripped my shoulder firmly. It was still more or less comforting. But no one, I thought dismally, was holding my father’s shoulder.

  “What happened then?” Domina Enory asked with placid implacability.

  “You might need Jemis or Perry to describe their side of the story. On my end I set off to Nên Corovel to ask the Lady’s assistance. In the Forest I was waylaid, captured, enslaved, and eventually sold to a pirate galley. This summer I was freed by a ship of the Lady and made my way here.”

  Domina Enory nodded gravely. She glanced between me and Mr. Dart. “And your impressions?”

  I was fighting back a pain in my chest that might have been more phlegm in my airways. It was conceivable, at any rate, that it was the developing cold.

  Mr. Dart said, “About three weeks after Major Greenwing’s reappearance we heard that his body had been found in the Forest. My brother and Sir Hamish were good friends with the major, and Jemis and I have always been close ... so we heard ... the death was ruled a suicide.”

  “What was the general response?”

  I could not, simply could not believe Domina Enory had asked that with my father and me right there.

  Mr. Dart’s hand stayed reassuringly warm and tactile on my shoulder. “In the community? Disbelief and dismay from most people. Nobody had wanted to believe all the talk of treason, despite all the rumours. Lady Olive was very pale and silent, I remember that, and Jemis was so overthrown he was sick in bed. Everyone was worried about him.”

  I flu
shed with shame—no, with embarrassment—at the weakness. I would not, I did not, feel shame for loving my father.

  Domina Enory said, “Did something happen that had to do with your father this spring, Mr. Greenwing? I realize you did not know him to be alive at that point.”

  If I had felt embarrassed mentioning the wireweed it was nothing to describing what had happened with Lark at the end of the term. Making the whole thing worse was the fact that at some point over the past few weeks I had begun to wonder if Lark’s betrayal of my confidence had extended to finding a pet playwright. If that were so it was my fault that the story of my father’s terrible return had achieved the circulation it had with the success of Three Years Gone.

  Even so I explained how I had one day broken Morrowlea’s rules to tell Lark about my family, justifying it to myself at the time that I had wanted to marry her. How even as I grew progressively sicker from the wireweed (or so I now understood my spring illness) she had written that stunning philippic; and how at the very end of things I had stood up against her in the viva voce examinations and refuted her every point and process as intellectually and morally bankrupt.

  “And at what point did you collapse?” Domina Enory enquired politely, as if she were asking about the state of the croquet lawn.

  “Shortly after Lark whipped up the other students to the point of stoning. Hal—did I say that Hal came down to stand with me? That is, the duke—he and another friend, Marcan, took me to the hospital wing and when I was a little recovered we went off on a walking tour up to Fillering Pool.”

  Domina Enory made another quite wonderful shrug. I kept my eyes on her. “Please correct me if I am wrong. The pattern appears to be this: your father, who had been reported, falsely, twice dead for contradictory reasons, returned to your joy and many other people’s consternation. He was then reported, again falsely, dead by his own hand. Did you believe this?”

  I bit my lip; had to drum up my courage to look my father in the eye. “Yes.” The eye closed in silent pain. I coughed wretchedly. “I did not, then or ever, believe him a traitor, and I found it extremely hard to believe in his death.” I coughed again, the tightness not easing in the least. “I dreamed for months that he was not dead, that he would come back again.”

  The eye opened in startlement. Please understand, I begged him. Please understand that I would do anything for this to be real, to be true, to be not a dream ...

  “And you fell very sick. Did a physician attend you?”

  “Yes, Doctor Imbrey and the local magister.”

  She nodded. “How long did it take you to recover?”

  I wondered bleakly if I had ever recovered. My behaviour this past week suggested I hadn’t. “About a month, I think.”

  “What can you tell me of those who attended you? The physician and the magister?”

  I was frankly baffled, and accordingly spoke rather brusquely. “Dr. Imbrey is dead—it couldn’t have been long after that, actually, because he wasn’t there when my mother fell ill with the influenza the next winter.”

  “I think he fell into the river trying to save someone around Winterturn,” Mr. Dart supplied. “My brother will remember.”

  “And the magister?”

  I tried to affect nonchalance. “Oh, Dominus Gleason? He’s still here, in town. He used to be a professor of magic in Fiella-by-the-Sea, but came back after the Fall.”

  “That’s impossible,” said my father. “He’s dead.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five: The Importance of Being Earnest

  The Wild Saint of the Arguty Forest was to me little more than a rumour, as unsubstantial as children’s tales of smugglers’ caves or dragons.

  I looked at the very corporeal dragon whose body lay down the length of the old grange, jade green of scale and dark maroon of blood where Dominus Vitor had been cutting into it.

  And the caves had been there, courtesy of ancient troglodytes and modern tippermongeramy-hunting Tufa.

  As for the Wild Saint ... the very name evoked faint thrills of excitement and trepidation and wonder. One did not—I did not—expect the irruption of the divine into ordinary life. Mr. Dart’s eyes shone with delight every time the words were said.

  Mr. Dart, I reflected (not for the first time), seemed halfway to a vocation as inconvenient to the heir of a prosperous family as his unexplored and inadmissible gift at wild magic.

  The Wild Saint’s name keep recurring because Domina Enory was starting to be baffled by the curse.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, each time she tried something new that did not work; and she was still trying to disentangle its components, not even to undo them. “The wizard who cast this is both skillful and subtle.”

  “He keeps wanting to teach me magic.”

  My father looked at me worriedly. “He’s not the real Tadeo Gleason.”

  “Whoever he is, he makes my skin crawl.”

  “Your instincts are good,” murmured Domina Enory, pulling out yet another magical implement from the box she’d brought with her.

  Sir Hamish and Hal came over at this point to join us. “What’s toward, Jack?” Sir Hamish asked in a low voice.

  Jack said, “Did you ever notice a ... change ... in Tadeo Gleason’s behaviour?”

  Sir Hamish accepted the apparent non sequitur with sardonic equanimity. “Recently? No, except that he’s been sniffing around Jemis, and he usually skulks in the background—which he always did.”

  “And before? Years ago, maybe.”

  “I was never friends with him, Jack. I know you used to visit him in Fiella-by-the-Sea when you were up there, but I always thought there was something unwholesome about his fascination with the Good Neighbours. All that just got worse after the Fall. Mind you, everybody with magic found the Fall disturbing. I suppose he was a little cracked by it. So many were.”

  Domina Enory was listening intently. She seemed to be waiting for something more. After a moment I awkwardly cleared my throat. “Yes, Mr. Greenwing?”

  “Dominus Gleason bound the waystones. After the Fall, I mean, so their magic wouldn’t keep ... coming out. People say South Fiellan was the least affected region—magically affected, that is, by the Fall. No one knows why but he’s tolerated as an open wizard because of that.”

  Sir Hamish frowned. “How could he have done that? You’re right that he does claim to bind them—he certainly does some of the old ceremonies at them—the final autumn ones this week, for instance—but now that I think of it he didn’t come here till after the Interim was over. They closed the faculty of magic at Fiella and he came home to retire.”

  “Family?” Domina Enory asked delicately.

  “His parents had died, his father before and his mother during the Interim—the Pestilence, I think it was. His father was a drunken oaf, no one missed him. I remember, the house was empty for a while. Not that we came into town much until the end of the Interim. Once we started coming in regularly he was well established.” Sir Hamish sniffed. “I remember now, he snubbed me badly the first the time I saw him after he’d moved back. I’d gone to call on him out of respect for your old friendship, Jack, rather than any sense of my own, and he was so repellently nasty I never tried again.”

  Domina Enory nodded as if all was becoming clear to her. I wished I felt less stuffed-up and achey, for it was hard to govern my mind to think of anything but my sore throat and the tightness in my chest.

  “Will you explain your earlier comment, major?” the professor asked.

  Jack’s face was grim. He watched Sir Hamish as he spoke. “Tadeo Gleason died before I went on the Seven Valleys campaign. I’d gone up to meet the General in Fiella-by-the-Sea, as we were sailing from there to the muster at Eil. I called on Tadeo, as I usually did, and found him dying of a cancer in the lungs.”

  “Were you with him when he died?”

  He shook his head. “No. The General had arrived that day and I had to report to him and ask for leave to wait until—he never had many friends, Tadeo,
and even though I never really liked him, we were countrymen and I didn’t want to leave him to die alone. When I went back one of his fellows from the university was there—a woman professor, I think—I didn’t think much of it at the time except that I was glad he wasn’t totally alone. We buried him the next day in the churchyard of Saint Fiella’s. The day after that I left for the front.”

  I realized I was gripping my chair-seat to the point of making my fingers ache. I unclenched them one by one, very consciously.

  Mr. Dart was the one to speak my thought. “Keeping that secret is a fairly good reason to want to murder someone.”

  FOR A MOMENT EVERYTHING made sense: and a moment after that everything returned once more to confusion.

  “But he wasn’t murdered,” I said, not quite able to address my father directly. (And why not? I demanded fruitlessly of myself. Why could I not shake this strangulation?) “We all thought he killed himself ... but then he wasn’t dead at all.”

  Domina Enory nodded. “Surely you have theories regarding that?”

  Sir Hamish uttered a kind of bark of humourless laughter. “Our theory focuses on the person we’d thought had the only motive for getting Jack not only out of the way but also disgraced and attainted—his younger brother, who currently holds the estate.”

  “Whereas it should have gone to Jemis,” said Hal.

  Domina Enory put up her hand to stop Hal from continuing. “Please, your grace, one moment so I can have all the facts. Because you were held to have committed treason, Major, your brother took control of your estate instead of seeing that your son did? Did your wife not object?”

  “My elder brother held the estate when I left for Loe. He was still in possession of it when the letter falsely announcing my disgrace came.”

  Sir Hamish nodded in turn. “Yes, and he died before the second letter—the true one—came.”

  Of course—the second letter was correct—For a moment the puzzle shifted as if about to be resolved, but—