by T. A. Miles
Merran had had instructors, veritable employers, while he waited and worked for Emergence. Rising to Mage-Adept had been no easy task either and he wondered sometimes if he truly deserved the rank. After what had happened in Haddowyn…. “Bastard….” Korsten murmured just then, still bordering on unconscious, pulling slowly out of it. “Let me … be.”
“Idiot,” Merran answered. There was no need for etiquette here. This was no longer Korsten Brierly, Vicegerent to the Governor of Haddowyn and perfect stranger. This was simply Korsten, raw mage and recalcitrant patient. “Did it ever occur to you that I told you to stay put for a reason? Your stubbornness in going to the Camirey manor might have cost you your life.”
While argumentative seemed to be Korsten’s second nature, the man said nothing now.
Merran continued dropping words upon deaf ears. “Damned if your obstinacy didn’t save my own life. Though I’m quite certain that wasn’t your intention.” With Korsten’s arm sufficiently cleared of injury and blood, Merran proceeded up the arm, toward the shoulder. He looked at Korsten’s tilted face. He looked something like a sleeping boy just at the moment, with all of his guards down for once. Merran’s Empathy might have been dormant, but he could still feel pity for an individual. He was sure he felt it now. “You poor, deluded fool. You must have been blinded by your loneliness. And now you’ll never see clearly again. Why is the truth so hard a thing to recognize, even as it stares one directly in the face?”
Korsten again answered him with silence.
Merran focused on the man’s closed eyes, the long red lashes fanning his cheeks. He truly was beautiful. The unplanned thought made Merran’s face feel warmer than it should have, but he failed to look away from the captivating view in front of him. For months he’d looked upon this face, asleep, unresponsive … a sedate mask to hide the agony that others now saw in Ashwin. Perhaps seeing it in Ashwin was actually why Merran saw it here … now.
“When you are awake you are in tears,” he whispered. “And when you are asleep, Ashwin cries for you. Your pain runs deeper than I can reach. Deeper than I can understand.”
He extended one finger away from the sponge just enough to brush a limp red curl away from Korsten’s chin. Still smooth. The man had no ability to grow facial hair, else the Apprentices had been more thorough than was expected of them in caring for him in his unconscious state. Merran felt his features soften helplessly. You are the most curious and somehow compelling obstacle I have ever come across.
Just as the thought finished forming, brown eyes fluttered open, locked with Merran’s gaze for a moment, and then strayed away. Merran withdrew as Korsten tried to sit himself up a little better, but still offered support, so that he didn’t slip completely into the basin and somehow manage to drown himself.
“Where,” the red-head started, clearly disoriented.
“Try to relax,” Merran advised. “You’ve been through quite a lot.”
Korsten looked at him again, and finally recognized him. “You’re … dead.”
Merran suppressed the smile the other man’s words inspired. “Almost.”
Korsten appeared justifiably confused by that statement. “Where am I?” he asked and didn’t wait for an answer. Slipping his arm from Merran’s loose grasp, he stood and stepped out of the basin, heedless of his bareness. Merran expected him to fall, but somehow he didn’t. Korsten surveyed the large room again, noticing the blood and the bloodied sheets beside the bed. That prompted him to look at his arm, which drew his attention to the rest of himself. “What … what have you done to me?”
“I healed you,” Merran answered honestly, looking at the floor instead of the nude and distressingly attractive form in front of him.
“Healed….” Korsten lowered to his knees, wisely, before he collapsed. He hugged himself, shivering for a moment. “Why can’t you let me die?”
Merran frowned at him. “That’s a stupid question,” he said bluntly, finally coming to the end of his patience, or near to it at any rate. “I think I’ll overlook it, but in answer to your first inquiry, this is the Seminary.”
Korsten had no more ease saying it now than he had the first time he’d tried. “The Seminary … then it’s true, isn’t it? Renmyr’s dead.” His voice grew immediately more strained, more painful to listen to. “Gods … Ren….”
Merran felt disgust now as well as pity. How could anyone feel anything for a demon? How could the lie be this convincing? It was convincing enough to fool me, Merran reminded himself. Even he hadn’t suspected Renmyr Camirey of being anything more than an arrogant bastard until it was too late. Such was the power of a very old demon, who’d found a very suitable vessel; one that didn’t fight it. Renmyr had welcomed the beast, joined with it … become it. And not by conventional means. He was no victim. That much was certain and it sickened Merran that Korsten couldn’t see that … that he wouldn’t see that, even if it was explained to him with irrefutable evidence placed directly in front of him.
Korsten had no sense of time. He kept waking out of darkness and falling back into it. Each time he found himself briefly in a nightmare that grew increasingly more distressing, more real. And he couldn’t leave it, no matter how hard he tried. Someone continually thwarted his best efforts. Merran…. Bastard, I thought you were dead. Why couldn’t you have died instead of Renmyr?
The selfishness of that thought occurred to Korsten long after it had formed. The selfishness and the malice. Why should he wish death upon a stranger, when the blame lay with him? Renmyr was gone because of him.
The pain of realization threw Korsten into full consciousness. He opened his eyes to a strange place that he was beginning to recognize, then covered them with his hands and wept for several minutes while lying on his side in a strange bed. He felt no better by the time he stopped, but he was too tired to carry on.
“That’s becoming very annoying,” someone said, inspiring an immediate frown.
“Bastard,” Korsten snapped without turning to look at the man stationed at the bedside. Uncontrollable tears softened his words. “Who … asked you? Just leave me alone.”
“I wish that I could,” Merran replied. “But as you’ve proven untrustworthy….”
Korsten rolled over, glaring fiercely at this man who he was sure he hated like none other. “I trusted you. I believed you when you said you could help us. And now everyone I cared about is dead!”
Merran held his blue gaze steady, saying nothing while he sat collected and indifferent in a high-backed chair positioned so that it faced the bed’s occupant. He was so cold … so…. Words eluded Korsten. He didn’t care anyway. He only wanted to be left alone … alone to die … please, gods, let me die. Turning over again, Korsten hugged the pillow beneath him and cried softly into it.
“Are you finished?” Merran asked several minutes later, after Korsten had exhausted himself and made his lungs and back hurt. “I’d rather not repeat the same spell over and over. It does begin to strain after a while.”
“Just go away,” Korsten whispered tremulously, staring at a trilogy of arced windows fronting a vine-festooned balcony that seemed hundreds of miles away. He wondered what lay beyond that balcony besides more nightmare. And that was all life was or could be without Renmyr. He would never have his arms around him again. He would never hear his confident voice or his impassioned sigh again. They would never ride together again and stray intentionally from the riding paths on Ithan’s private land. No more playing only friends at Brenwick’s. No more arguments because Calla was a shameless whore. No more taking back their harsh words with tender kisses.
The mattress lowered beside him and a hand settled lightly upon his back. Korsten stiffened, determined to shun Merran’s unwanted attention, but he couldn’t deny that the strain in his back and shoulders eased away with the mage’s healing touch.
“I didn’t bring you here simply to watch you suffer, yo
u know,” the mage said civilly. “It frustrates me, though, to see suffering … of the type that I cannot heal. There is no one who can heal your pain, I think you know. Perhaps time….”
Korsten said nothing. He was scarcely listening to the man as he closed his stinging eyes and tried to will death upon himself.
“Perhaps not,” Merran added eventually, still administering his soothing spell. He wasn’t actually touching Korsten, just as he hadn’t been when mending the damage done to his leg by Areld. It felt like he was touching him, though, and Korsten resented it because it reminded him that he would never feel Renmyr’s touch again.
“I don’t want to live,” Korsten finally spoke, his voice barely above a whisper. “If you don’t want to see suffering, then let me be. Let me do what I must.”
“What you must?” Merran echoed, a twinge of bitterness in his tone. “You must die for a love that should never have been? For….”
“What do you know of it?” Korsten demanded, squirming away from the mage’s spell hand and sitting up to face him. “From the start you acted as if you knew something about me, and you know nothing! Renmyr was everything to me! Do you understand that? He was … everything.” Korsten’s voice faltered. He lifted his hand to his mouth in time to catch the escaping sob. He hated that he had no control over himself, or over anything.
Merran’s very blue eyes narrowed and were as ice. “A pity you did not mean half so much to him.”
Korsten glared vehemently. “How dare you? You—”
“You’re very fond of asking me that; how I dare. I dare because I know,” the mage hissed. “Because I have seen. I have seen the Vadryn kill … time and time and time again. They never stop. They will never stop, not so long as they have souls to prey upon. Those they do not kill quickly, die a slow, mournful death, slipping further each day into an unexplained depression. Knowing only that there is a constant weight upon their hearts, a dismal fog enshrouding their minds, a darkness from an unknown source, taking their lives from them slowly.”
“I arrived in Haddowyn depressed,” Korsten argued. “If I was any worse off it was because I feared losing Renmyr, not because I had him. Any dark influence came from Markam, from the demon that had taken him. I saw the evil in him, but never in Renmyr! He loved me and don’t you dare again to tell me otherwise!”
Merran wouldn’t give up. “Ask yourself why he was the only one left alive in that house.”
Korsten looked away from him, swatting irritably at the winged insect suddenly fluttering in his breathing space in the same moment. As an afterthought he looked to see if Merran was still wearing that ridiculous brooch. He wasn’t, so maybe it was real after all and flitting about the room now.
“I will tell you what I faced in that house,” Merran decided.
“I will not hear this,” Korsten told him, swatting again at the moth who seemed to be taking his hair for an actual flame.
“I am going to tell you anyway,” Merran said, then snatched Korsten’s wrist and pulled his hand down. “And stop doing that. She’s here to help you.”
Korsten frowned, angry and puzzled. “Who….”
A red butterfly drifted into his line of sight, then settled onto the bedding that lay twisted in front of him. Korsten stared, horrified as memory flooded over him. He’d seen such an insect before … when whatever happened to him killed Renmyr.
“She feels your agitation,” Merran said, as if to explain something. “It makes her restless. She is trying to get near to you because she thinks it will help. It can’t really, not yet, but it is her nature.”
Korsten continued to stare for several moments, speaking when a name suddenly came to mind. “Eolyn.”
“She is my bond mate,” Merran replied. “This is yours. I do not know her name … but you do.”
Korsten finally looked at the mage and found his senses again. He twisted free of the man’s loose grasp, glaring again. “You’re mad.” He shooed the obscenely scarlet butterfly away. “That is nothing more than an insect and if it has a name, I assure you that I don’t know it and that I don’t want to know it. I want to leave here,” he decided in the next moment. “Where are my clothes?”
Merran sat back, placing himself on the edge of the mattress again. “They are being tailored for you and will be brought to you when you are well enough to put them on without collapsing and cracking your skull on something.”
“Bring them to me now,” Korsten insisted.
“It isn’t—”
Korsten didn’t let him finish. “I’m leaving.” He flung and kicked the bedding away from himself and slid off the side of the bed, opposite Merran.
“There is still a constable in Vassenleigh,” the mage said. “I’m sure he won’t hesitate to arrest a man walking naked through his town, covered in the telltale scars of Emergence.”
“The scars of what?” Korsten looked at himself, and almost collapsed. He managed to sit instead of fall, but he felt suddenly ill and he couldn’t take his eyes off the peculiar symbols drawn over nearly every inch of his skin. “What … is this? What have you done to me?”
“You asked that once already,” Merran reminded.
“I … thought that I was dreaming,” Korsten whispered, too shocked to frown, though he was seething under his marred skin. He asked again, “What is this?”
“The reason I brought you here, Korsten,” Merran answered. “The Essence is in you, the potential for magic, gifts bestowed upon you from birth by your predecessor, who served the Seminary long before your parents dreamed of you. Your talents, dormant throughout your previous life, Emerged all at once … and at the precise moment a Vadryn Master meant to claim you. Emergence negated the demon, throwing it clear of you. Defeated and thoroughly alarmed, I would imagine, it left you where you lay, traumatized by what had happened to you. We call it Emergence trauma, a state of shock almost all of us suffer when our talents finally awaken. The markings will fade as you recover. They should have faded months ago, but you battle all efforts to help you.”
“Months?” It was the one word of all that Merran had said that Korsten understood.
“Three months,” the mage confirmed. “And fourteen days. Your physical strength has mostly returned to you, but my spells can only do so much. Not even Mage-Superior Ashwin can reach you where you suffer most. He has tried and managed only to share your burden without relieving any of it. It is because I watch the both of you in such agony that I let my frustration get the better of me. I’ll ask your forgiveness now.”
“You’re lying,” Korsten said, almost too quietly to be heard. Even as he looked at the dreadful symbols tattooed upon his skin, he refused to believe any of it. “This can’t be real. Everyone at Vassenleigh is dead. The Seminary no longer exists … and I am not a mage. I know nothing of magic and I don’t want to know anything of it.”
“The spirits of dead mages are kept here,” Merran said, as if he hadn’t heard what was just told to him. “They are tended to by creatures capable of existing between worlds, that of the living and that of the dead. When a mage dies—a true mage—he or she returns here in spirit. The essence of magic that can never be destroyed, that existed in them, and is a part of them, travels to another vessel and waits to be awakened again. When the individual is ready, the one who bestowed that most precious gift upon them sends a messenger born of their spirit. Contact with that messenger awakens and bonds the chosen mage. The bond is at its weakest level now, but it will grow and you will entrust the most precious aspect of yourself to your bond mate, who will return that part of you here in the event of your death, even if your body should be utterly destroyed. Your gifts will one day be passed to another. That is the cycle.”
“That is madness,” Korsten told him. “You cannot expect me to believe … any of this.”
“You would feel the changes in yourself, if you would allow yourself to recove
r,” Merran continued, persistent as he ever was. “You would feel it and you would know your predecessor, as well as the name of your bond mate. She will speak only to you and not with words. You will feel what she has to say, if you listen with your soul. Your soul is the connection between the two of you and it can never be broken by anything other than the utter destruction of your physical being.”
A helplessly sardonic smile drew to Korsten’s lips. “Oh? And where is that unsightly creature that was so avidly clinging to you? I don’t see it now.”
“You were curious before, even if skeptical” Merran said. “You are not even that now and have therefore rendered yourself blind as most ordinary people are.” He lifted his hand to his collar and a large white moth stirred from thin air, or so it seemed, fluttering up toward the ceiling. “She does not cling to me always,” the mage continued, his voice softening just a little. “But she is never far from me.”
Korsten turned away and closed his eyes. “I don’t want this. I don’t want to be here.” I don’t want to be in this world without Renmyr.
“Haddowyn is lost,” Merran finally said, almost with compassion. “Edrinor remains, though no one can say for how long. Your duty has been given to you. Accept it at least, if you can’t embrace it. You are needed, Korsten.”