by DAVID B. COE
“Soon. I think dusk. At least, that’s what it looked like.” Jaryd described his dream, although he left out what he had seen himself do. He needed to think about the implications of that part of his vision before he discussed it with anyone.
By the time Jaryd finished telling Royden about the dream, the first soft glimmer of dawn had begun to illuminate the bedroom window. Royden and Jaryd dressed and went to their parents’ room, where they woke Bernel and Drina and told them of Jaryd’s vision, and of those that had come before. The blacksmith and his wife listened in silence, and, even after the brothers had finished their story, their parents said nothing for a long time. Drina sat very still on the bed, staring down at her sun-darkened hands, and occasionally pushing her hair back from her face in a characteristic gesture. Bernel, who had moved to the window as Jaryd described the dreams, stood motionless, his face silhouetted against the early morning light, his expression unreadable.
“So, it has come at last, just as he said it would,” Drina finally said in a small voice, more to her husband than to her sons.
“Just as who said it would?” Jaryd asked, looking from his mother to his father.
Bernel turned toward Drina, his broad frame blocking the light. “I don’t wish to discuss this right now,” he told her with finality.
“But, Papa—”
“Not now, Jaryd! There are more important things to deal with. We need to alert the rest of the town and prepare for the possibility that your vision is genuine.”
“Bernel,” Jaryd’s mother replied, tears starting to flow down her cheeks, “we both know that this is a true seeing. We’ve known—”
“Enough, Drina!” Bernel snapped. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath before continuing in a softer tone. “We’ll discuss this later, I promise. But this isn’t the time.”
Bernel and Drina exchanged a tense look, brown eyes locked on grey. After a few seconds Drina nodded, assaying a thin smile that looked more like a grimace.
While Royden and Drina spent the rest of the day at the house, boarding the windows and gathering what weapons they owned, Bernel and Jaryd went to the village to warn Accalia’s leaders. With the help of Leuel, the Keeper of Arick’s Temple in Accalia, they gathered together most of the town council, as well as the chief constable and his officers. At first, the village leaders seemed skeptical, but Bernel offered cryptic assurances that Jaryd’s vision carried the weight of prophecy, and in the end, he managed to convince them to arm and organize the townspeople in preparation for the attack.
As he hurried back toward home with his father, Jaryd felt a battle waging within himself between the questions that he burned to ask and his desire to avoid angering his father, who, as usual, seemed reluctant to speak about what had happened. Finally, though, unable to contain his curiosity, he broached the topic as gently as he could.
“Papa,” he began tentatively, “why were you and Momma so willing to believe me?”
“You’re our son,” Bernel replied simply. “If you tell us that you saw these things, we believe you.”
Jaryd shook his head. “No, that’s not what I meant. Why are you so sure that my visions are—what did Momma call them—true seeings?”
Bernel said nothing for a moment, and Jaryd wished that he had kept silent. He and his father rarely spoke unless they needed to; Jaryd couldn’t remember the last time they had a conversation. On the rare occasions when Jaryd initiated a discussion, Bernel usually made him feel as if he had violated some unspoken agreement to maintain his distance. But this time his father surprised him. His answer, when it came, was mildly, even kindly spoken, although cautiously phrased. “Our family—my family—has a history of similar . . . abilities.”
“Abilities?”
Bernel let out a slow breath. He seemed to regret answering the question at all, but he pressed on. “Prophetic dreams; the power to predict the future.”
“Can you do it?” Jaryd asked with astonishment.
“No, I can’t. But my mother could, and her mother before her. And others.”
“Have you tried?”
Bernel smiled ruefully. “There was a time when I did, yes. I don’t anymore, though. Either you have it or you don’t.”
Jaryd considered this for a moment. “Who did Momma mean when she said thathe told you that this would happen?” he finally asked, chancing one last question.
One too many, it turned out. “Enough, Jaryd!” his father warned, the familiar severity returning to his voice. “As I said before, this is not the time to discuss these matters.”
“Sorry, Papa.”
For reply, Bernel put his arm around Jaryd’s shoulder in a rare gesture of affection, and they walked the rest of the way home without speaking.
That evening, when the bandits attacked, they were confronted by an angry crowd of townspeople armed with torches, farm implements, forging tools, and kitchen knives. The outlaws were killers; they were well armed and they had the advantage of being on mounts. But the horde they faced that night fought for their homes and their families. The battle lasted less than one hour. The bandits did little damage and captured few goods before being driven off. When it was over, two of the invaders lay dead. Only seven of the townsfolk had been hurt.
In the wake of the attack, and the villagers’ successful defense of their homes, Jaryd became a celebrity. All had heard of his dream and timely warning and recognized that the Sight he possessed marked him as different. And even now, a year later, as he tried to shield his books from the rain, he paid the price of that difference in the stares of his neighbors and old friends. Some in the town, giving in to ancient superstitions, came to fear him. Most, however, considered his Sight a gift and admired him for it. Even so, it set him apart. His friends treated him differently now, with respect and deference, to be sure, but not with kindness and certainly not with the humor and playfulness that they once had. What disturbed him even more was that things also changed between him and his mother and father.
Drina had always been overly protective of him—far more than she was with Royden—and she became more so after she learned of his dreams. She also seemed at times to be in awe of him, which left Jaryd feeling awkward and sad. And his father, despite their warm exchange the day of the attack, grew even more distant. It almost seemed to Jaryd that Bernel blamed him for the bandits’ appearance. But that was not all. Although he told himself repeatedly that he was imagining things, Jaryd could not help but notice that his father envied his newly acquired fame.
Even his new job as a teacher at the school came as a result of his prophecy. Well, Jaryd thought to himself, smiling inwardly, that isn’t entirely true. He had always been quick to learn, the quickest in all of his classes. But, at seventeen, he had become the youngest teacher in memory, and he was smart enough to know why they had chosen him. So it was in Jaryd’s life since the dreams: he had respect and status, but he had almost no friends. Indeed, the only one who treated him normally—the only one who wasn’t afraid of him, or jealous of him, or awed by him—was Royden. After Jaryd and Royden told Bernel, Drina, and the rest of the town of Jaryd’s dreams, their relationship returned to normal. It seemed ironic in a way that at the same time Jaryd became isolated from the rest of Accalia, he regained the love and trust of his best friend. The two brothers spent nearly all of their free time together, and many in the town came to believe that both of them had the Sight and kept watch over the safety of Accalia.
Jaryd knew that people constantly spoke about him behind his back, and he hated it. Royden urged him to ignore the gossip and those who spread it, pointing out that there was little he could do to stop them. But Jaryd remained uncomfortable and often found himself straining to hear what the people he passed on the street were saying. It was in one of these passing conversations, soon after the battle with the bandits, that he first heard people speculate that he might be one of Amarid’s Children. Just the mention of it made Jaryd’s heart race with excitement. The Children of Amarid, with their s
pectacular birds and glimmering crystals, had served Tobyn-Ser for over a thousand years, protecting its borders and aiding its people. Jaryd had seen only two of the wandering mages in his lifetime. One, of course, was Hawk-Mage Radomil, who had served the northwest corner of Tobyn-Ser for over two decades, and who had become a fixture in the lives of every man, woman, and child in Accalia. The rotund, bald mage was unfailingly kind and generous, and Jaryd had grown to love him as he would a second father. He anticipated the mage’s regular visits, and the sight of his graceful, pale hawk, with as much enthusiasm as he did the seasonal festivals of the gods.
And yet it was the memory of the other mage, the one Jaryd had met only once, that embodied the wonder and excitement that he associated with life as a member of the Order. The Hawk-Mage had visited many years before, when Jaryd was still just a child. Nonetheless, Jaryd remembered the encounter with a clarity that defied both his youth at the time and the intervening years. The mage was tall and slender, with hair the color of Bernel’s and bright blue eyes. He wore the hooded, forest-green cloak of the Order, and carried a long, wooden staff with intricate carvings and a glowing, orange crystal mounted at the top. And on the mage’s shoulder sat a magnificent grey falcon with dark, intelligent eyes. The mage, Jaryd recalled, had been friendly, with a warm smile, and he had spoken with Jaryd for a long time, although, surprisingly, Jaryd could recall nothing of their conversation. Jaryd also remembered that Drina and Bernel appeared to know the Hawk-Mage, and that his father and the mage argued before the cloaked man left. And he remembered that, from that day forward, he had wanted to wear one of the green cloaks signifying membership in the Order of Mages and Masters.
Recalling this, Jaryd was confronted by another memory, more vivid than the first, and as wondrous as it was daunting: his vision of himself, wielding a mage’s staff and blasting the outlaws with blue fire. If his dreams did indeed foresee the future, then did it not follow that Jaryd would one day carry such a staff and master the Mage-Craft? The mere possibility overwhelmed him.
Yet, the possibility that he might someday join the Order, and the conversations he overheard to this effect, had begun recently to bear a darker side. Over the past few months, word had reached Accalia, through the news brought by traveling merchants, bards, and musicians, of renegade mages and corruption within the Order. Whisperings from farther south spoke of feathers left at the sites of devastating fires and crop destruction, and even on the mutilated bodies of men, women, and children, in a horrible perversion of the Order’s tradition of leaving feathers as tokens to indicate a mage or master’s gifts or service. Jaryd listened to these stories with a skeptical ear, but, as the tales persisted and the crimes attributed to the mages worsened, he grew increasingly despondent and fearful, not only for himself, but for all of Tobyn-Ser.
When he reached the school that rainy morning, drenched and carrying an armful of soggy books, most of his students had already arrived. Schoolmaster Fyrth had started him off with the youngest children, the four- and five-year-olds who were just beginning their schooling. And, as he stood in the antechamber and shook off his sodden overshirt, he could hear them shouting and laughing. He entered the classroom and, immediately, the children fell silent and hastened to their seats. One of the advantages of being feared, he thought to himself, not without humor.
He had already taught them their letters and numbers, and, the previous week, he had started teaching them Tobyn-Ser’s history, focusing for much of the time on Amarid’s discovery of the Mage-Craft and his establishment of the Order. Today’s lesson began with the Abboriji invasions, and the Order’s successful wars against the northern raiders. Jaryd told his class of Fordel, Decla, and Glenyse, the only three Eagle-Sages in the land’s history, who on three separate occasions, over a span of two hundred and fifty years, led armies of both mages and brave men and women against the mercenaries of Abborij, driving them back across the strait and thwarting their efforts to conquer Tobyn-Ser. Three times the lands went to war, and three times the invaders were driven back, until, after the last, Eagle-Sage Glenyse and the leaders of Abborij forged a peace that had lasted for more than four hundred years. And, inwardly, as he told the tales, Jaryd smiled to see the wonder and awe with which his students listened. As a youngster, he, too, had been fascinated by stories of the old wars and the heroics of Amarid’s Children. The morning flew by, and, at midday, he dismissed the students, smiling again at their shouts and laughter as they charged out of the classroom.
The rain had slowed to a fine mist when Jaryd emerged from the schoolhouse and started toward the smithy. Even from this distance, and through the rush of the river and the sound of water dripping from trees and roofs, Jaryd could make out the familiar alternating rhythm shaped by the ringing beat of his father’s hammer and the heavier thud of Royden’s sledge. He guessed that they were forging Jorrin’s tools, and he quickened his pace, knowing that they would need him at the bellows. Jaryd looked forward to his time in the shop, especially after a few hours of teaching. He found the physical nature of ironwork a welcome change from his more sedentary job at the school. Often, he volunteered to do the arduous, less-skilled tasks in the shop, like tending the fire and manning the bellows, simply because he enjoyed the labor.
As he crossed through the village, however, moving toward the sound of Bernel and Royden’s hammers, he noticed a crowd gathering in the town square, beside the meeting hall. Several of the people there were pointing down a path that led to the footbridge across the river. Stopping to cast his eye where their outstretched arms indicated, Jaryd saw a figure on the far bank approaching the bridge, and he felt his heart leap within his chest. The stranger wore a hooded cloak of green and carried a great bird.
Watching the mage walk slowly across the bridge, Jaryd knew that this could not be Radomil; this person was far too tall and slender. For an instant Jaryd wondered if the Order had sent a second mage to serve Leora’s Forest and the Upper Horn, but then he saw that, like the mage he recalled from his childhood, this one carried a staff crowned with a gleaming orange stone. This mage’s bird, however, differed from the one Jaryd remembered. Rather than a grey falcon, the approaching figure carried a brown owl with a pale, streaked belly, a round face, and bright yellow eyes. This, then, was an Owl-Master, more experienced and with higher authority within the Order than the Hawk-Mage Jaryd had met as a child. Jaryd had never seen an Owl-Master before.
As the mage stepped off the footbridge, the crowd grew quiet and tense. Others in Accalia had heard the stories of sinister forces within the Order. The mass parted, allowing the figure, still hooded and moving slowly, to pass through, but the people watched with obvious apprehension each movement the mage made. The figure paused in front of the meeting hall and deliberately surveyed the crowd and the surroundings. When his gaze fell upon Jaryd, the mage froze momentarily and then threw back his hood and began striding purposefully to where Jaryd stood. For his part, Jaryd remained motionless, too intimidated and amazed to do anything but watch the mage approach him. As the man drew closer, Jaryd recognized him as the same mage he had met as a child. The Owl-Master’s reddish-blond hair was thinner now and peppered with grey. But his vivid blue eyes and warm smile were just as Jaryd remembered.
“You’re Jaryd,” the mage said, stopping in front of the young man and placing a hand on his shoulder. “I’d know you anywhere. You have your mother’s eyes.”
“Yes, Child of Amarid,” Jaryd replied, remembering to use the formal title, although unable to control the flutter in his voice.
“Do you recall our first meeting?”
Jaryd nodded. “I remember you. But not this bird.”
“No,” the mage agreed, “not this bird. You would have met Skal, my falcon. This is Anla.” The mage regarded Jaryd for a moment, the smile fading from his face. “Do you know who I am, Jaryd?”
Jaryd knew the mage’s formal title, Owl-Master, although he did not know his name. But this didn’t seem to be what the tall man w
as asking. Then Jaryd thought back to a conversation he had had with his father nearly a year before. “You and I are related, aren’t we? On my father’s side?”
The mage narrowed his bright eyes. “Did he tell you?”
Jaryd gave a small laugh. “No. He and I have never spoken of your visit. But he mentioned once that the Sight runs in his family. In your family,” he added, correcting himself. “And you look alike.”
“We should,” the Owl-Master said with a grin. “My name is Baden. I am your uncle; Bernel is my brother.”
Jaryd’s expression must have been comical, because Baden began to laugh, although Jaryd thought he saw another emotion flicker in the mage’s eyes before giving way to mirth.
“Well,” the Owl-Master said, still chuckling, “I’d guess from the look on your face that you didn’t know that you had an uncle Baden.” He looked down at the ground. A smile lingered at the corners of his mouth, but when he spoke again a note of sadness had crept into his voice. “I suppose some things don’t change. Even with the passage of all these years; even between brothers.”
For a moment longer a cloud seemed to darken Baden’s brow. And then it was gone, leaving the dazzling grin and the cheer in his voice. “But I’ve interrupted your day. You were headed somewhere?”
“Yes,” Jaryd said, suddenly aware again of the hammering coming from his father’s smithy, and acutely conscious of the crowd of people watching him speak with the Owl-Master. “I was going to the shop, to help Papa and Royden.”
“I see.” Baden took a deep breath and glanced around the town with uncertainty. Then he seemed to make a decision. “Well,” he breathed, “if I may accompany you, I think it’s time for a family reunion.”
“Sure,” Jaryd answered, shrugging awkwardly. They walked toward the shop. Jaryd could feel the townspeople’s eyes boring into his back, and he wondered if Baden sensed their stares.
“I take it all in your family are well,” the mage said casually.