Dangerous Waters

by Juliet E. McKenna

  ‘Thank your kind guardian,’ Starrid immediately ordered them.

  ‘Thank you,’ they chorused obediently.

  Zurenne contemplated her embroidery scissors and imagined ripping the points down Starrid’s florid cheek.

  As the two men left the room, Zurenne smiled at her daughters with all the reassurance she could feign. ‘Let’s see how much more we can get done before the noon bell rings.’

  ‘Oh, Neeny!’ Ilysh plucked the calico square from her little sister’s unsuspecting hands.

  ‘Lysha—’ Zurenne braced herself for Esnina’s wails of outrage. Then she’d have to rebuke Ilysh and both girls would be in tears. A featherweight more on the scales of her misery and Zurenne knew she would be weeping too.

  ‘Let me smooth it for you.’ Audibly curbing her irritation, Ilysh edged away, turning a shoulder to stop Neeny reclaiming her work.

  Seeing her sister painstakingly using a pin to tease the thread backwards through her stitches, Esnina folded her hands in her lap, biting her lip to stop its quivering.

  Lysha was very much her father’s daughter; decisive, inquisitive, assertive. She resembled him so strongly, with her light brown hair and hazel eyes. Her long limbs already promised height above the common for girls while her strong features would be judged handsome more than beautiful.

  Neeny would be the pretty one. As slightly built as Zurenne, she had been blessed with the same delicate nose and rose petal lips, wide dark eyes and an abundance of glossy chestnut tresses.

  Who would find Ilysh a husband to value her as she deserved? A man of good character and willing to set aside his own name and family to become Baron Halferan in his turn. Someone to warn off the adventurers and fools sure to be lured by Esnina’s beauty and to see her safely wed.

  Ilysh looked up and Zurenne saw her eyes were shadowed with awareness too old for her years. The older girl had realised some while ago how powerless her mother was. How truly helpless any widow was, deprived of the husband who should love and protect her once she left her father’s guardianship.

  Zurenne closed her eyes to deny the treacherous thought she couldn’t stifle. If only she had borne Halferan a son. How foolish they had been, telling each other there was time enough for Drianon to bless them with an heir. The girls had proved her husband’s manhood and Zurenne hadn’t suffered her mother’s childbed misfortunes.

  No, she could not blame this calamity on that circumstance. If Halferan had neither brothers nor uncles, there were more remote cousins to whom he would have consigned the care of his family. Zurenne’s sisters had husbands who would do their duty if called upon. The law allowed for such cases, in the absence of close male kin.

  So why had none of them come forward in her time of need? Tears finally escaped Zurenne’s closed eyelids. Two halves of spring. Both halves of summer. For-Autumn and now the aft-season would soon turn to For-Winter. So long without her beloved husband and Halferan’s loss still ached beneath her breastbone like a freshly struck bruise.

  But she could not weep without distressing the children and her poor daughters didn’t deserve that. She swallowed hard and forced her thoughts towards more practical questions. What might yet come to their aid?

  The promise of their birth runes? Both girls were embroidering around the sigil formed from the three runes cast at their birth. As was Caladhrian custom, one of the three-sided sticks had been drawn at random from the set of nine by Lord Halferan, one by Zurenne and the honour of drawing the third had been given to the husbands of Zurenne’s two eldest sisters. Nine runes, three sides to each, twenty-seven symbols in all.

  Halferan, Zurenne and her sisters’ husbands had thrown the chosen rune sticks onto the shrine table, each one shaped like the crystal prism which Halferan used to split candle light into rainbows to amuse the girls. With one of the three faces hidden, the other two showed their runes, one upright and one reversed. Earth, Fire and the Harp had been the runes in their positive aspect for Ilysh.

  Born at mid-morning, she enjoyed the Sun’s blessing too. That symbol was set in the downward pointing heart of the sigil customarily drawn by arranging the first two birth runes side by side and then topped by the third to form a larger triangle. The Earth indicated that her life would be honoured with rank beyond her birth, so Halferan had said, as befitted the confidence and skills that the Fire foretold, along with the Harp’s beauty and perseverance.

  Zurenne could only pray that he had been right. Of late, she had come to fear that Neeny’s runes had merely indicated her younger daughter’s character. The Oak and the Mountain were certainly apt symbols of Esnina’s stubbornness and defiance. Though the Eagle promised freedom and overcoming difficulties and as another day-born baby, she too could hope for the Sun’s promise of justice. Perhaps the Oak and the Mountain promised the strength of character which Neeny would need, to endure and overcome these troubles.

  But Zurenne found it increasingly hard to believe that the runes could truly have seen their current plight in Esnina’s future and even if they had she refused to feel guilty for not having had the wit to see their warning.

  Neeny was a For-Winter baby. Once again, tears threatened Zurenne. Five years ago, and eight long years since Ilysh’s arrival in the second Aft-Spring after their wedding, Zurenne and Halferan had celebrated the anniversary of their marriage with their new daughter’s first birth festival. What a wonderful Solstice that had been.

  What a miserable festival lay ahead for them this year, with Master Starrid ruling the roost. He delighted in denying them the most trifling sweetness in their miserable lives.

  ‘Can we play a game of runes Mama?’

  Zurenne opened her eyes instantly at Ilysh’s question, anger burning through her grief. ‘No,’ she snapped.

  So slight compared to the other insults that this man had offered her, it infuriated her nevertheless. How dare he introduce her daughters to the games of chance that stable hands and common troopers played? Not that Zurenne ever dared to object when Minelas imposed his company on them, uninvited of an evening, rattling bag of rune bones in hand. But she need not allow such unseemly behaviour while he was away.

  She relished the thought of his absence once again and wondered what else could improve their lot. Divine intervention? Zurenne contemplated the panel she was embroidering. She would hang it in the manor shrine where she honoured her husband’s ashes daily with her prayers to Saedrin and to Raeponin, god of justice.

  Before her life had been cast into this disarray, she’d made only occasional visits to the shrine. For the seasonal festivals and sometimes, if she succumbed to idle dread, when Halferan was travelling to whichever Caladhrian town was hosting the quarterly parliament. Mishaps on the road, some unforeseen malady; everyone knew that such things could cut short even the strongest men’s lives.

  A visit to the shrine soothed such fears. Zurenne would arrange some boon for the demesne folk, perhaps for indigents tramping the roads. She would pray to draw the gods’ attention to her charity so that they would reward her family with the favour they deserved.

  Now she prayed to Talagrin daily, along with Saedrin and Raeponin. Halferan had a particular fondness for the god of the martial skills that were the truest mark of a man. Talagrin was also the god of the hunt and of wild places. Halferan always said he’d look fondly on their rough-hewn lands, so far from the tidy fields and neat coppices approved by Ostrin, the farmers’ god.

  Once she’d sought the hunter god’s vengeance on Halferan’s killers, Zurenne turned to Halcarion. She prayed that the moon maiden’s favour would bring love and luck to her innocent daughters. She asked Drianon, goddess of hearth and harvest, for the strength to be a good mother amid the troubles that beset her.

  Finally each day, Zurenne made her devotions to Maewelin, the aged goddess of winter and of widows. This hanging she was currently working depicted the goddess cloaked and stooping, leaning on her stick. With For-Winter ahead sacred to the crone, what could be a more de
corous choice for her needle?

  But these men who kept her so confined and frightened, they knew nothing of the goddess’s secret role, confided by mothers to daughters across untold generations. The Winter Hag was the avenger of mistreated women, bringing down their curses on the guilty men.

  Zurenne had promised the ancient goddess this new shrine decoration in return for some sign of hope. She would see her honoured with a costly new statue if someone would rescue her children. By all that was holy and profane, she and her daughters deserved redress.

  Maewelin send that Minelas’s unexpected absence would offer some opportunity for her to summon help.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The Wizards’ Physic Garden, in the Island City of Hadrumal

  Spring Equinox Festival, First Day, Noon

  In the 9th Year of Tadriol the Provident

  KNEELING BY A freshly dug herb bed, the Archmage crumbled dark soil between his lean fingers. Pale bone markers indicated which plants the apothecaries had sown to flourish through Aft-Spring and For-Summer before their potent leaves, seeds or roots were crushed, steeped or dried.

  ‘Is she dead?’ He squashed the rich loam and tossed the clod away.

  ‘No.’ Jilseth replied. ‘I believe she will recover entirely.’

  ‘A blessing for them both.’ A savage edge undercut Planir’s words.

  ‘You don’t propose to discipline him?’ Jilseth’s query held the merest hint of rebuke.

  Planir rose swiftly to his feet, no hint of stiffness despite the silver frosting his close-cropped black hair and beard. ‘You think I should punish him for using his magic to save the life of the woman he loves?’ he chided.

  She didn’t yield. ‘I think you have an obligation to uphold the precepts of Hadrumal. To uphold the edicts of your predecessors who wore that ring. The foremost has always been that wizards do not involve themselves in warfare.’

  ‘Indeed.’ As the Archmage turned his hand, sunlight splintered around the great diamond that symbolised his rank. Shards struck the facets of the sapphire and amber, the ruby and emerald that framed it. It was the only manifestation of his rank. Planir was wearing dusty boots, faded breeches and a balding velvet jerkin over a shirt which his laundresses must despair of.

  ‘You don’t think I know the costs of sending mages into some petty fight beyond our shores?’ He held up his hand. An ugly scar circled his finger beside the ageless splendour of his ring. ‘You don’t think that salutary tale deters any prentice-wizard tempted to defy the Council? I make certain that every hesitant mageborn hears every gory detail,’ he added with some bitterness.

  ‘Not every detail,’ Jilseth ventured. ‘Just the story that best serves your purpose.’

  ‘Thus I fulfil my duty to my office,’ he retorted, grey eyes steely.

  ‘You couldn’t have saved Larissa.’ Jilseth’s voice wavered despite herself. ‘You didn’t send her into peril either. She chose to go.’

  ‘It’s all one.’ The Archmage grimaced. ‘She still died.’

  And every mage in Hadrumal knew it, Jilseth reflected, even if only the Element Masters and Mistress knew the full story of that conflict far away in the eastern ocean, when wizardry had saved the Tormalin Empire from an insidious threat.

  After which, some wizards had chosen to settle in Suthyfer, that chain of scattered islands in the middle of those wild seas. Beyond that, Jilseth had no clear idea what exactly had happened.

  She had heard plenty of other wizards speculate, from Council members down. Not on what had happened but what the outcome meant for Hadrumal.

  How had the loss of his lover affected their Archmage? Which of his decisions during this past handful of years might have been different without that personal tragedy? How far did lingering emotion undermine his reasoning in the service of wizardry?

  She suspected that blunter questions were asked behind closed doors in Hadrumal’s tallest towers. Did romantic dalliance leave a wizard unfit for high office? Especially the highest office responsible for disciplining those mages who defied Hadrumal’s edicts. Most particularly when it proved necessary to assert wizardry’s eminence among the princes and nobles who ruled the mainland.

  Was Planir going to ignore what had happened in Lescar this past half-year? Jilseth chose her words carefully.

  ‘Now that the Duchess of Triolle is not likely to die, she has more to answer for than merely benefiting from the gallantry of a half-trained wizard like Sorgrad. If you wish to overlook his infatuation with her, that is your privilege. Granted, he did no more than get her to a surgeon to staunch her wounds, though it is arguable he should never have been present in the first place, or involved in negotiations with the Duke of Marlier. But Archmage, Litasse of Triolle hired Minelas to use his magic to help her husband’s armies prevail!’ Jilseth couldn’t hide her outrage at that heinous offence.

  ‘Which came to nothing, thanks to you and, let us not forget, thanks to Sorgrad.’ Planir more than met her challenge with his own. ‘How do we punish Litasse of Triolle for suborning sorcery in Lescar’s wars, imposing sufficient penalty to deter other nobles tempted to similar folly, without letting all and sundry know that renegade wizards such as Minelas are out there?’

  He gestured beyond the modest houses enclosing the garden, beyond the whole island itself. ‘What happens when the mainland’s mundane populace learns that Hadrumal does not merely shelter and educate the mageborn, saving their families from the inconveniences of overflowing wells or chimney fires when some adolescent’s elemental affinity manifests? When they realise that despite all our efforts, some mages prove corrupt? That some are willing to trade the powers afforded by their affinity for the opportunity to indulge their basest lusts? Won’t such knowledge do far more harm to Hadrumal than keeping one desperate duchess’s folly a secret?’

  ‘You don’t think wizards tempted to turn renegade should learn of Minelas’s fate?’ Jilseth countered. ‘To convince them that playing that particular game is never worth the cost of the candles?’

  ‘Perhaps.’ The Archmage’s sudden smile deepened the fine wrinkles around his eyes. ‘I don’t have all the answers. I can only follow the safest path I see.’

  He shrugged. ‘In the event, Minelas’s magic didn’t affect the outcome of any battles and the duchess had truly repented of her monstrous bargain before you had to threaten her with my wrath.’

  He raised a hand before Jilseth could respond. ‘On the other side of these scales, I cannot believe that Sorgrad will stand idly by and let me chastise Litasse, even if I could devise a suitable punishment. What then? The authority of my office will hardly be enhanced by a squabble with a rebellious mage over an ignorant girl. I certainly couldn’t let such defiance go unpunished, so would you have me impose my authority by killing him?’

  ‘It wouldn’t come to that!’ But even as she protested, Jilseth recalled Sorgrad’s unyielding will.

  ‘How could it not?’ Planir demanded. ‘If my authority is undermined by Sorgrad’s defiance, my authority over all wizards is weakened, in the eyes of mageborn and mundane alike.

  ‘What follows from that?’ he challenged her. ‘Some baron or prince claiming authority over a wizard who’s settled in his lands? Those who rule on the mainland only accept that Hadrumal alone has the right to discipline wizards as long as Hadrumal is deemed capable of keeping renegades in check.’

  ‘No mage would submit to such authority,’ Jilseth said slowly. ‘No noble could imagine they would. Hadrumal alone governs wizards because Hadrumal alone has the power to.’

  ‘I wish I shared your confidence that good sense would prevail,’ Planir said drily. ‘I find it all too easy to imagine some bumptious lordling clashing with a barely trained mage who lets his temper get the better of him. What then? If I must see that foolish wizard hanged for some inadvertent murder, I might just as well have killed Sorgrad in the first place.’

  He shook his head. ‘Never mind how ill either death would sit with the other m
ages of Hadrumal. Consider what the mainland populace would make of an Archmage striking down one of his own. They wouldn’t be reassured. They’d be terrified. Those generations when mages were feared, the mageborn shunned, even murdered for fear of magical tyranny, those days may be long past but they’re not forgotten. Chimney corner tales and tavern songs still recall the fiery death of Lady Shress and the foolish ambition of Frelt of Algeral that laid waste to the Hecksen demesne.’

  Jilseth wished she could protest but in good conscience, she couldn’t. All Hadrumal’s apprentices learned the litany of the dead, disgraced and mad from the days before Trydek’s decrees. They fervently agreed they would never become so arrogant, so deluded, that their names would become such a byword for wizardly folly.

  Planir gestured to the trees planted along the garden’s enclosing walls. Stirring from their winter torpor, the barren twigs were budding.

  ‘Who would sell us apples, pears and quinces if Hadrumal was feared and loathed? Archmage Trydek found us this sanctuary where we can grow life’s necessities but I prefer to enjoy those luxuries which trade with our neighbours brings. So let’s be content that this Lescari upheaval is subsiding without tangling Hadrumal in its coils.’

  Jilseth’s lips narrowed. ‘Sorgrad will think he’s got away with his insolence.’ She wondered why Planir had sent her hunting for him, Minelas, and any other mage even slightly involved in Lescar’s revolution, if he wasn’t going to act on what she discovered.

  ‘Does that matter,’ the Archmage asked lightly, ‘if we’re the only ones who know? If there’s one thing that Sorgrad can do, it’s keep a secret.’

  Jilseth shook her head in silent disagreement before trying another line of attack. ‘What of Minelas’s previous treachery in Caladhria? Hiring himself out to fight the corsairs and then taking the enemy’s coin too?’

  ‘Once again, I ask where’s the profit in poking that sleeping snake with a stick?’ Planir shook his head. ‘Baron Halferan paid for that recklessness with his life, so there’s no penalty I could impose on him. If there was any sign that his neighbours were tempted to follow in his footsteps, then we would assuredly revisit the matter. Until then?’ The Archmage shrugged. ‘What’s done is done.’