by A. F. Dery
“I can’t control it! Don’t you think I would if I could? I can’t, I know I can’t, not as well as I need to, that’s why I became the wolf!” Rupert exploded. “But even so, I know it’s not just happening without my knowledge, all the time-”
“Don’t you feel the chill in the air? Where do you think that came from!”
“I can’t control weather, I just change things.”
Hadrian wanted to laugh. “From cold to colder is a change, Rupert!”
Then a thought, a horrible thought struck him. He felt as though all the air left his lungs at once and he leaned heavily against the door, not trusting his legs to hold him.
“Rupert…all you can do is…alter things?” he asked. His voice didn’t sound like his.
“Yes, that is all my magic does,” Rupert answered, but he sounded confused now. “Why? Do you have some idea of how I can control it?”
Hadrian could hear the pulse pounding in his ears. He felt hot and cold all at once, and pressed his palms to his ruined eyes, trying not to vomit.
Oh gods, no, it can’t be…that can’t be…
But Hadrian’s magic wouldn’t work to cure the plague that it had made.
The thought repeated itself over and over in his mind, and he couldn’t make it stop, and he couldn’t follow it to its conclusion. He couldn’t bear to. So many years, all this pain, his life, his eyes. He would never see again. He would never see the woman he’d fallen in love with, never know what the hair looked like that he loved running his hands through. So long, and so much pain, and his magic couldn’t cure the plague that it had made. He was panting, unable to catch his breath. He heard someone shouting- it had to be Rupert- but he couldn’t make out the words over the sound of his own heartbeat. The door behind him opened abruptly, and he fell into the room, but he still didn’t take his hands off his eyes.
He began to throw up and felt hands turn him onto his side. He heard the murmur of Grace’s voice, sounding like it was far away. He tried to listen to it, but the roaring of the blood in his veins was still drowning everything out.
At some point, the world mercifully went completely black and silent. When he next awakened, his head ached, but he immediately felt the press of cool soft fingers against his hand, letting him know Grace was there.
He squinted into the shadows, trying to see her, but as usual, could make out nothing. He gave up at once with a sigh.
“I’m here, Hadrian,” she said softly, pressing his hand again. “You’re on the bed. You passed out a few minutes ago.” He felt her other hand touch his forehead. “You feel a little hot, but not really fevered. How are you feeling?”
He didn’t know how to answer that. His thoughts had snapped into a kind of clarity, but he still wasn’t sure how to proceed with what he had worked out.
“I…I need to speak with you, Grace,” he said. “Is Rupert…?”
She was silent a moment, then she said, “He’s here. He put you on the bed for me. I’m not sure I could have lifted you.”
“I need to talk to you alone. It’s important.” Hadrian added in a louder tone, “I swear this has nothing to do with…with our disagreement, Rupert.”
“I think you’ve done enough talking,” came Rupert’s gruff reply from somewhere across the room.
“It’s all right, Rupert, you can see he’s not well,” Grace said, though Hadrian could hear the uncertainty in her voice. “I’ll speak with him. Why don’t you go down to the kitchen, and I’ll call you as soon as he’s done?”
There was another moment of silence, then a grunt and the sound of the door creaking.
They waited a few moments, then Grace squeezed his hand. “He should be on the stairs by now, I would think,” she said gently. “If this is about what I said before-”
“Grace-”
“I’m so sorry if I upset you this much, I really didn’t think-”
“It’s not that, Grace, please listen to me,” Hadrian fumbled with her hand, taking it in both of his. “I-I realized something, when I was talking to Rupert out in the hall before.” He paused, trying to collect his thoughts. “This is going to sound…bad. I know you’re not going to want to believe it. I know he’s been telling you things about me, though I’m still not sure what. I need you to know, this isn’t about any of that. It isn’t about you. I’d be saying this to you now even if I wasn’t in love with you.”
He heard her draw in a sharp breath, and he realized what he’d just said. His face went hot and he hurried on, “Understand, please, I have no way of proving this, but if you’ll just listen…it is about Rupert.”
“If it’s about him, we should call him back. He should hear it, if it’s so important,” Grace said.
“I don’t know how good an idea that is,” Hadrian said quietly. “Listen first, then tell me what you think. I’ve been working on a cure for the plague for years, Grace, but I’ve never gotten anywhere. Everything that looks promising, fails. I only brought my research out here to this tower because all my efforts in person to cure it, failed. All my attempts to seek help from other mages failed. I thought I knew at the time what I was doing, but I thought I had to have done something wrong, that I must have been overreaching so far that I couldn’t even see where I’d messed up, and no one else could, either.
“You see, it’s impossible that I used a different kind of magic than the one I thought I used. I suppose you’ll have to trust me on that, I certainly have no way of proving it. I’ll just say you can’t accidentally use magic in one field when you’re trying to use magic in another; either what you’re trying to do just won’t happen, or you’ll do something you didn’t intend in the field of magic you are using. It would be like…like…” He frowned, trying to think of a good analogy. “It would be like trying to paint a red flower when you only have blue paint. No matter what you do, you’ll be getting a blue flower. You can end up painting something other than a flower, but it will still be blue. The different fields of magic are like different colors of paint, and you just can’t pick up the pot of blue and not know that it’s blue and have it produce a red flower. It’s not possible. Are you with me so far?”
“I think so,” Grace said slowly.
“Well, with Rupert, he can only use one color of paint. He can’t control his magic well enough to change colors: it’s always the same. He can alter the nature of things, which is how he changes into a wolf. He can change the air around him, freezing it; I saw him do it without realizing it out in the hall. Sometimes he doesn’t release enough magic to change anything, or at least not in any way that we can see. When we fought before- with magic- he could shape the energy itself into a shield, but I suspect that was probably the extent of his instruction. He would have better awareness and control if he’d been able to make it any further than that.”
“All right…but this doesn’t sound any different from what I already knew,” Grace murmured. “I mean, I understand it a little better now, don’t get me wrong, but…why is this so important? Why were you so upset? You…you scared me.” Her voice dropped into a whisper.
“I’m sorry for that Grace…I really…I couldn’t help it. I think you’ll understand, if you’ll just bear with me. It’s important because…when I made that plague…I know what kind of magic I used. And the reason I couldn’t cure it is because it didn’t respond to my magic. It never occurred to me, not once, not in all of those years, or to any of the other mages I consulted, that a different kind of magic was responsible for the plague infecting people when it was only supposed to affect livestock. There was simply no way that could have happened without my knowledge, unless that magic came from someone else. Someone else had to have changed it. Now there is no reason to even suspect such a thing, do you see? My lord’s enemies would certainly not want their own people infected. My lord would not want his people infected when the plague inevitably traveled over the border. Such a thing would be far too dangerous for either side to want, yet, it happened.
“
Grace, there is no other explanation that makes sense. Someone changed the plague with magic different from my own, and I can’t believe that it would be anything other than an accident…anything else…well, it’s unthinkable.” He paused for breath. “There will never be any way of proving this, of course, not with absolute certainty, but…”
“You…you can’t think…Rupert?” Grace sounded stunned.
“If he was in Jetheth, if that was his village, his brother’s village…that is where the plague was first used. It spread from there. If he was there when it started, then the idea is credible. Grace, he could have changed it without even knowing it. He lets off magic all the time without knowing it, many times in such small amounts that until I started observing him for it, I never would have guessed. He could have done it in wolf form, or as a man…he wouldn’t have known. It wouldn’t have taken much, just a matter of being in the wrong place and having it happen at the wrong time. Either while the plague was released, or if he was around the first infected livestock. If the timing was right, or I should say if it was terribly wrong, the people who tended them could have picked it up that way.”
Grace was very quiet and still at his side. It worried him.
“Grace, please,” he whispered. “I wouldn’t make this up. I’m not trying to turn you against him, or absolve myself of my own part in all this…even if I’m not responsible for the plague changing, I regret ever having had anything to do with it, believe me. I still bear responsibility for it even existing. But, if what I think happened is what happened…Rupert is even more dangerous than we thought.”
“I…I believe you,” she said finally. “What you say makes sense, and I can’t imagine…you didn’t see yourself, Hadrian. You were…the agony, on your face.” Her voice broke.
“If I’m right about this, I’ve thrown away years of my life, and my eyes, seeking a cure I could never actually create, and blaming myself for deaths that at least weren’t wholly my fault. I thought I was worthless, as a man and as a mage, if I could make so horrible a mistake and even after years never even be able to point a finger in the direction of where it went wrong.” His voice trembled and he felt a tear slide down his cheek. “I just…I don’t know how to deal with it. But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe he was never in Jetheth. Can you see why I didn’t want to tell you this in front of him?”
“I’ll ask him,” Grace said. “I’ll find out. But if it was Jetheth…what will we do? What can we do?”
Hadrian thought about the past few years of his life and the toll they had taken on him. He shook his head a little, wincing when it throbbed anew. “Well, we can’t tell him.”
“What?”
“We can’t, Grace. He’s even more dangerous when he loses his temper. Hearing he’s responsible for his own brother’s death- assuming he’s even willing to believe it when he refuses to accept just how uncontrolled his magic is in the first place- would devastate him. Not only that, but…” Hadrian hesitated. “I know what it’s like to live with something like this. How can I damn someone else to that hell? It was an accident. I don’t think for a moment it was anything else. He had no way of knowing what was happening or preventing it from happening.”
“That’s not…quite…true,” Grace said with obvious reluctance. The words she didn’t say hung almost palpably in the air. They would have put him to death for not learning how to control his magic. If he’d accepted that fate, he wouldn’t have been in the wrong place at the wrong time. “But I can’t blame him, just the same,” she added after a moment, likely thinking of her own flight from fate.
“No, I can’t, either. No one wants to die, and he surely hadn’t done anything particularly catastrophic at that point to justify what had to seem like an extreme penalty,” Hadrian agreed, though inwardly he wasn’t entirely sure of that. Still, he was willing to give the benefit of the doubt.
He was just relieved beyond words that Grace believed him.
“Hadrian, if he is that dangerous…he needs to know. He can’t just keep on as he has been, thinking everything is fine as long as he’s the wolf. He could hurt people without knowing it. Something like this could happen again, maybe not with a plague, but who knows?” She stopped suddenly.
“Grace?”
“What if…what if his magic is why…well, it just seems so unlikely, you’d…want…someone like me.” Her voice was barely audible.
He forced himself to sit up, aching head and all. He lifted a hand and found her face, caressed her soft cheek. “Grace, that isn’t possible, I promise you. His magic can’t change my feelings, and it didn’t change you.”
“How can you be sure it didn’t change me, though? Maybe it did. I have been much more outspoken than I ever would have been back home,” Grace said nervously.
“Magic doesn’t work that way. His can change him into a wolf, but it can’t change the personality inside of the wolf. They really are the same person, even if he thinks of them differently. It’s possible he changed the way you look, but I certainly wouldn’t be able to tell if that happened, so there’s no way that has had any effect.”
She leaned into his hand and his heart missed a beat. “But…nothing’s going to change,” she whispered.
“That’s what I was trying to come tell you before, Grace…things have already changed. I’ve changed. Even before I realized this about Rupert’s magic and the plague, I was beginning to consider a life apart from sitting here waiting to die. That’s a change, and it wasn’t because of his magic, it was because of you. You said we will forget about you when winter has passed, but I could never, never forget you. I see more than the dead now when I close my eyes, and even when they’re open…and that’s because of you. I have nothing at all to offer you, Grace, even now, even if I’m right about what happened with the plague…I’m still a ruined man with nothing. But…I want you to be happy. You deserve to be happy. If you’ll be happy with me, then…I’ll find a way to live with what I’ve become. Whether I’m the only one responsible or not. If that’s what you want. If it’s not, then I’ll learn to live with that too…but I will live with it…because of you.”
She nearly knocked him back onto the pillow when she threw her arms around him. “I want to be happy with you,” she whispered against his ear. “I…you know how I feel about you. But I have to go back, in the spring. You know that, right? I have to know what happened. I have to pay for it, if I can. I can’t keep running. I don’t want to keep running.”
He wrapped his arms around her, holding her tightly. “Then I’ll go with you. We’ll find out what happened together, and we’ll deal with it together. If you’ll have me.”
“Aren’t you worried none of the shepherds will accept me if I turn up with a strange man?” she asked, and he couldn’t tell from her tone if she was teasing or not.
“I hope they won’t. I hope you’ll introduce me as your husband.”
She went very still in his arms, as if she stopped breathing. “I couldn’t do that,” she said weakly. “It would shame you, if…if the worst happened. If whoever is left decided to execute me.”
The thought made his blood run cold. “Why would they do such a thing?”
“It’s considered a form of treason not to fulfill one’s duty to the village,” she told him. “And that’s the only duty I ever had that mattered, and I definitely failed to fulfill it, through my own choice. The penalty for treason is death.”
“I would help you appeal to your lord,” he insisted.
“You could try, but…things are the way they are,” she said matter-of-factly.
“We’ll see about that. Whatever happens, you are the best thing to ever happen to me, Grace. There is no shame in that.” He tried to tamp down his sudden anxiety at something happening to her. If they survived this winter, only for him to lose her when she wanted to be with him…he couldn’t bear the thought.
“I…I want to be worthy of you, Hadrian. If you really want me to be your wife…once I’ve paid for what I’ve
done, if such a thing can be done, then I will be, if you haven’t changed your mind about me.” She took his hand and pressed her lips to his palm. He felt utterly certain in that moment that he would do whatever it took to see that she survived whatever was to come. There was simply no alternative.
“Grace-”
“I need to go talk to Rupert,” she interrupted gently. “He’ll be wondering what’s taking so long.”
“Please be careful,” he said, frowning. “I should go with you.”
“No, you shouldn’t. If he wasn’t there, then he doesn’t need to know what you were thinking,” Grace said bluntly. “It will only make things worse between the two of you. And if he was there, he doesn’t need to know what it means, if you think we can find some other way of impressing on him the danger he poses to others without telling him about it.” She sighed. “I still don’t know how that’s going to work.”
“We’ll figure something out,” Hadrian told her.
And for the first time in a very long time, he felt a genuine sense of hope.
CHAPTER TEN
Rupert stood in the window, looking out on the snow. It hadn’t been a difficult climb; while the windows were set high in the walls the structure on this side of tower had been damaged somehow. The stones were crumbling, with breaks between some of them that allowed him to use them as foot holds as he climbed up.
He was in the other unused room on at the top of the stairs, another room no one had been in for some time. He had walked there as if in trance after hearing Hadrian’s words to Grace. Words about him.
He hadn’t been about to leave the two of them alone; he had lingered outside the door, holding his breath until they started talking so the blind man would not notice his presence. He needed to know what would be said, so he could refute whatever madness the Murderer spewed to Grace.