by Colin McComb
At last, I went to the farspeaker, tuned it to the appropriate frequencies, and said, “Magus Underhill wishes to speak to the Archmagus.”
That scarred face appeared, and he hid his scowl. “Congratulations, Magus. The tower is yours.”
“Thank you, my lord. I look forward to studying under your tutelage in the coming years.”
“We shall see, Underhill. I will inform His Majesty of the new status of Underhill Tower. He may have requirements of you.”
“I am his servant,” I said.
“Yes,” he replied, and signed off.
That told me all I needed to know. The Archmagus still plotted against me. Sandoval had told me that he wanted the devices that had been removed from the errant knight, Pelagir. That he did not ask me for them directly screamed that he did not trust me. With the plans for the tower in enemy hands, I could not be certain of my safety here. In fact, I could count on it being not safe at all.
Of such epiphanies are revolutionaries and dissidents made. His lack of faith destroyed any hope I had of realizing ambition within the Empire. Very well. I’d work with the Council of Magi, but my real work would be outside their scrutiny.
But first, I needed to seal off the hidden entrances and lay new traps around the tower to protect myself from other incursions. These would be dangerous times.
Interlude: The Cruelty of Children
Catya was angry. Possibly as angry as she had ever been in her ten years. In point of fact, in spring of CY 596 she was ten and a half.
Some of the children from town—the ones who had been born there, the ones who lived in town—had been telling lies. They said that she wasn’t the daughter of Arul, and that she didn’t look anything like him. They said she was adopted.
That was true. Her skin was darker than most of those in the north because her mother was of House Bhumar. But her putative father and her Da could not tell her of this because she was too young for the truth yet. Ten-year-olds are not noted keepers of secrets, and because this secret would get her killed, they lied to her.
This was not her main reason for being angry. What made her angry was being ostracized by the others. What made her angry was that she could not explore the most fascinating features of her hometown. After all, Kingsecret had been a hotbed for noble activity, and though it had fallen out of favor over centuries, and though the Houses had moved their summer homes to other towns, their houses remained. Some had fallen into disrepair; others had been torn down or claimed by extended families (some of whom had put on airs before being savagely reminded of their proper place). Still others had been looted, their pieces scavenged and scattered to make proper homes for the less-wealthy families of Kingsecret.
Those that still stood were magnets for the children. Their vast halls, mazes of cellars, crumbling stairs, and high towers were irresistible to children looking for adventure, and those who were not old enough to have been taken to apprentice or to do adult work on the family business did all the exploring they could. Naturally, the parents forbade their kids from exploring these structures, and naturally the children ignored these restrictions.
They weren’t foolish enough to explore rotting houses on their own, so they traveled in groups. Because groups could informally claim a building for their explorations, tensions and tempers would occasionally flare. Sometimes a child returned home with a puffy cheek, a bloody nose, or torn clothing. It was rare that the situation escalated beyond that because then parents would get involved, and no one wanted a whipping from the smith or the tanner.
That was the backdrop for Catya’s shame. Her main rival, a girl named Jasi, had laid a foundation of treachery for a year, and it was paying off for her now. The girl was heavyset, dark of hair and pale of skin, and she had a certain charisma. She was clever, funny, and an absolute monster to those who crossed her—or to those whom she decided had fallen from her favor. She was fickle and did not care if she hurt others as long as she was not hurt herself. Though she was only twelve years old, Jasi already commanded a small collection of sycophants, including some who appreciated her wit and others who feared her tongue. Her friend Sten was her strong right arm; he was big for his age and strong for his size. He was a terror, and with Sten behind her, Jasi had started to express her power by forbidding other children to play in the ruins.
And now she had turned her attentions on Catya. Whether it was because she feared the ten-year-old’s independence—Catya had maintained loose friendships with some of Jasi’s exiles—or because she wanted to destroy a potential rival or just because she had not destroyed anyone recently, Jasi found her victim and began her whispering campaign against her new most-hated enemy.
What she said wasn’t important. It was the way she said it: hateful, sly, insinuating. Few of the other children gainsaid any of her lies. Instead, they jumped at the chance for a new scapegoat with all the cruelty of children, and within a week, even Catya’s normal playmates had forsaken her. Jasi began to spread other rumors, too, more hurtful and adult stories: Catya was available for the boys; Catya had relations with her father when the smithy had closed; Catya experimented with the farm animals. The first time Catya heard these stories, she ran home weeping.
For a week after that, she worked around the farm, helping Arul finish another room in the basement, mucking stalls for the horses, tending the sheep with Toren, and generally being underfoot with loud, theatrical sighs until at last Arul and Toren sat down with her one night to ask what troubled her.
Both men had learned gentleness and patience in raising the girl, made more difficult by Arul’s own horrific upbringing. He frequently had to control his temper and refrain from corporal punishment; he looked to his own example for how not to raise a child, and thus more often than not he made the correct choices. Indeed, rather than set harsh boundaries on every aspect of Catya’s life, he outlined the expectations he had of her and allowed her free movement once she met or exceeded those expectations. Because of this, she was developing independence, critical thinking, and a deep sense of personal responsibility.
The story she told was disjointed and incomprehensible on the first telling, but with patience, they extracted the tale from her. They began to offer advice, and what they offered made it clear that they had no inkling of what it was like to be a ten-year-old girl. Their childhoods had gone long before, and though they tried valiantly to provide useful feedback, they spoke in terms of campaigns and tactics, in winning a war rather than winning hearts. Their advice was aimed at Catya regaining the freedom to travel the ruins rather than at the heart of the matter: the girl was being forced from her friends. Because both Arul and Toren had been without true friends for so long, this was perhaps understandable, but it was still a failing, and Catya did not have the words to explain their mistake.
Instead she stopped arguing with them, and she listened. An attentive child, Catya had been as well educated as they could make her, and she came to a slow and certain knowledge that her family did not have all the answers, and that she would have to find the answer herself.
A few days later, she cornered her best friend, one of the town boys. His name was Mannion, and his northern blood was true. His pale skin burned easily in the sun, and his dark hair was long and lustrous. His father was the cooper, with a body and arms that matched his barrels: stout and banded like steel. Mannion was not that strong, and he never thought he would be, but he claimed his older brother Eskillion would surpass his father’s strength.
Mannion once said that his father had knocked out Catya’s father in a fistfight, and Catya defended her father’s honor by punching the cooper’s boy in the face. The two of them had fought then, hard and bitter, and Mannion lost because Catya wouldn’t quit. Even when he had her pinned on the ground, sitting on her chest, she spat and struggled, and she flung her legs up behind him, locking them around his neck. She pulled him off and delivered a ferocious punch to his groin, and when he had recovered, he admitted defeat and declared that they wo
uld be friends forever. That was two years before, when she was eight and he nine.
Only now he wouldn’t meet her gaze, and he tried to brush past her in the market, his head down as if not seeing her would make his shame disappear. She would not, though, and she grabbed his arm. He recoiled, but her grip was fierce, and when he looked at her face, her eyes blazed.
“Please, Catya,” he began.
“No! You’ll talk to me, and you’ll tell me why you’re listening to dumb Jasi instead of someone who has been your friend for years. You don’t even like her, so why are you listening to her?”
“It’s not me,” he said, still not meeting her eyes. “It’s the other kids. They all do what she says, and if I don’t, then they’ll get me next.”
“Wait—you’re saying you’re still my friend, but you’re afraid to be my friend in front of people?”
“When you put it like that, it sounds like I’m a coward.”
She said, “It does, doesn’t it.” Her flat voice and her hands on her hips made her opinion clear. She was gambling everything on knowing her friend well enough, betting that she could shame him into doing the right thing. In her mind, she knew that he was a good boy, but he would never be what her Da called a strong-minded man.
Well, so be it: the world couldn’t all be nobles and knights and she might not ever rise above her station, but she’d be damned if she’d back down against a brat like Jasi. Still, she’d need help, or else she’d be fighting by herself, and she’d read enough to know that all successful insurgencies drew on a broad network of supporters.
She’d never really stopped to question how it was that someone her age could know this.
Catya watched her friend fight with his internal voices, and she took one more risk. She said, “If it’s that hard for you to do the right thing, maybe she’s the kind of friend you deserve.” She turned to walk away and shot over her shoulder, “But don’t think I’ll be your friend once she does the same thing to you.”
And then she really did start walking, her heart pounding, hoping that he’d do the right thing, afraid that he would not, and that she’d be on the outside for the rest of her life.
But then his arm closed around hers. She turned around, her right hand curling into a fist in case he was too angry about what she’d said. Instead his eyes were full of tears and he whispered, “I’m too scared, Cat. I’m sorry.”
“Make a choice, Mannion.”
“I can’t fight her and you both.”
“I said: make a choice.”
“Then…then I’m with you.”
That was the easy part.
Over the next few days, Catya and Mannion began to recruit allies. As with any children who have been bullied, they were sullen and withdrawn, unwilling to work with others. They clearly feared that Catya, who had never been exiled, was setting them up for some greater humiliation. It was only when they began hearing the rumors about her from other sources that they understood what she had at stake.
They trusted Mannion even less. He had, on occasion, worked with Jasi to spread lies about them, though he claimed not to have known any better, and they demanded apologies from him. They upbraided him, and to his credit he did not disagree with them. It was only Catya’s word and her fervent support of Mannion that convinced them to trust him at all.
Most of these children were the weak ones, outcasts and loners by default. That was why they had been chosen. They had on occasion been rallied by other outcasts, as Catya was doing now, only to see their would-be saviors reabsorbed into Jasi’s troop. When Jasi cast those children out again, as she did inevitably, they had lost their credibility completely, and likewise they destroyed the hopes of the others.
It was here that the advice of Catya’s papa came in handy. He had told her this, as they exercised in the basement: “Some will be eager to return to her embrace, and if they think they can gain favor by betraying you, they will. Watch for this, and be ready for it.”
“How do you know this, Papa?”
“I saw many things in the army, my sweet. The poison of the High Houses seeps into those under their command. People want to be accepted by those in power. They think it makes their lives better.”
“Does it?” she asked.
“More comfortable, perhaps. But better? If you believe that society works well, maybe. If you measure quality by proximity to power, yes. But the problem with power is that it doesn’t care about others, and those who don’t have it should fear it.”
“Why?”
“Because if you become inconvenient to power, it can destroy you. Better to learn to resist it. That’s power in itself.”
“That’s why we always train, right?”
“That’s right, kitten.”
Catya learned well from her family. And so she recruited her allies, knowing as she did so that her enemy would soon hear of it. She had her plans.
Her first order of business was not to counter the stories Jasi told about her but to make her opponent ridiculous. For instance: Jasi was actually a boy, a runaway from a minstrel show, but he still wore patterned underclothes so he could feel like he was always juggling. Jasi was actually a very tall and deformed gremlin, which would explain her enormous ears. The reason Jasi wanted to keep people away from the ruins was because she was afraid they would find the burrow she originally came from. The reason she wore perfume is because she still had no control over her bowels.
Once started, these rumors took on lives of their own, and Catya encouraged her allies to make up more. Her interest in this was not to indulge in the same kind of pettiness as her rival, though the other children of Kingsecret were more than happy to share in the game of messages. Rather, she wanted Jasi’s grip on the town shaken. She wanted people to see that it was all right for them to make fun of the girl who would otherwise terrify them.
That plan worked well enough until some of Jasi’s closest friends caught Sean, a small seven-year-old they’d overheard telling stories, and beat him badly enough that they broke his nose. He told his parents that he’d run into a post outside the stables, but he told the other children the truth.
Catya had not been sure that she wanted to escalate. She just wanted space to play in, and that led to wanting other children to have the same chance. But given Sean’s fate, she decided that her goal was no longer to pry open a space for the outcast children but to remove Jasi from power altogether.
So it was that Catya’s allies—some of whom were rapidly becoming actual friends—began to travel together in groups of three or four, heading back to the ruins. She had taught them some code whistles, and they were under instructions to retreat if their right to explore the old mansions was challenged by Jasi’s friends.
But if they saw some of Jasi’s close friends, or if they saw Jasi herself, they were to come get her. They never did, but Mannion overheard one of Catya’s alleged friends spilling the secrets of their little insurgency, and Catya knew she had to act. She put out word that she was going to beat up Jasi in a one-on-one fight at the old Stonemill mansion that night, if the other girl was brave enough to show up.
She knew there was no way her enemy could turn down that challenge and save face. And she told her followers to come, and to be ready to fight, because there was no way Jasi would fight fair.
So the word went out. One of the boys ran to tell Jasi what was happening, and she sent out the word to gather her cronies. She also fetched her older brother because she thought it more important to put down her enemy than to be seen as honorable, and he went to find his friends. One of his friends was Lexmere, an apprentice at the smith’s, and he was running out the door when Arul stopped him.
“Where are you going?” Arul demanded.
“Out!” he replied eagerly. “Jasi’s finally going to beat down...” He trailed off as he realized he was speaking to Catya’s father, and he quailed as he saw the journeyman smith’s eyebrows contract in anger.
“Where?”
“I—I don’t know, sir, I was going to meet up with friends at... uh...”
He barely saw the smith move before he felt his arms clamped in a grip that was unforgiving and cruel. “You have exactly two seconds to tell me.”
“Stonemill, sir.”
“How old are you, Lexmere?”
“Fifteen, sir.” The boy’s voice was faint, his face pale.
“Fifteen. What would you have done there, eh? Stood guard while others beat smaller people? Maybe taken part? Don’t you think,” and here he lowered his face toward the apprentice’s, “that perhaps you’re too old to take part in the battles of children?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Tonight we’ll clean the shop. When the master returns in the morning, I want it spotless. Bank the fire and fetch the brooms. After that, the mops and rags.”
Arul felt the keen desire to protect his daughter, and Pelagir the desire to protect the princess, and both of these minds recognized that the girl must learn to stand under her own power. But he had no idea how venomous Jasi truly was.
Catya’s allies numbered about twenty; they carried no weapons, for she had told them this would not be a vigilante mob. They saw no sign of other children as they entered the Stonemill. The mansion had not been, contrary to its name, a mill of any sort. Instead, it had been a pleasure palace, and it featured a honeycomb of rooms large and small, all feeding inexorably toward the central chamber, a room of balconies and alcoves four stories high. The ceiling had rotted, leaving the chamber open to the sky and the clutter and ruin of the roof on the floor.
Jasi was waiting inside the Stonemill, in the large central chamber, when Catya arrived. She had dressed in her best clothing, a sure message that she was not afraid of the scrappy little smith’s daughter. She sat against one of the fallen beams, looking around the room with its balconies and alcoves, and she smirked as Catya walked in. If anything, her smile grew larger as she saw Catya’s army of outcasts filing in behind her. Faint rustling and scratching from some of the balconies overlooking the chamber reminded the children that this building was known to be a rats’ nest.