A Sorcerer and a Gentleman

by Elizabeth Willey

  The Fiscor spent the morning reviewing certain accounts with the Countess, who wished to be assured that the funds she and Ottaviano anticipated needing would be available at once. She gave directions for getting more cash—for what, she did not say, save that there would shortly be demand. Although she was not yet of age, the Fiscor had heard the announcement of the upcoming wedding, and he had decided that, legal or not, the Countess’s word was law.

  “I am thirty-six days from majority,” the Countess said to him as she rose to take her leave.

  The Fiscor nodded.

  “I know that it is not lawful for me to command my own affairs yet.”

  The Fiscor smiled. “Your Grace,” he said, “I have lived within the law all my life. If living within the law now were possible, I would. However, I cannot, in good conscience, do so. And in the end, a man’s own conscience judges him more harshly than any monarch can.”

  Luneté, who had meant to offer him an opportunity to resign and leave Lys if he wished, smiled. “Thank you, Sir Matteus.”

  He smiled also, embarrassed. “Although your guardian was appointed by the Crown, Your Grace, I was appointed by your late father. I consider myself his humblest servant, and yours.” He bowed deeply.

  “Thank you, Sir Matteus,” she said again, softly. “May the Well favor your loyalty. Good day. Please keep me informed about the money.”

  “Yes, Your Grace.” He bowed again and opened the door for her. She left his office and the first clerk hopped down and opened the outer door for her, bowing deeply. Her maid swept out behind her.

  The Fiscor’s offices were in a relatively recently-built black-and-white tiled corridor, which had a shallow gallery on either side where there were benches. Winter tapestries still hung between the galleries’ high, narrow windows. The pillars were spirally striped black and white, and the tapestries were mostly in shades of red: an outdated fashion since the death of King Panurgus, but homely to the Countess’s eye. She started down the corridor, meaning to go to her own rooms and send for certain burgesses of the city to inform them in person as to her intention of marriage and the probable consequences.

  She paused, however, seeing a tall man in blue-green and green-blue standing with his back to her studying one of the tapestries in the right-hand gallery. He turned and smiled frankly, then approached her and bowed.

  “Good morning, Your Grace,” he said. “I wish to thank you for your hospitality.”

  “Good morning,” Luneté replied, and, though it felt oddly intimate to address him nakedly by first name, added, “Dewar.”

  He smiled again. “You are much occupied with business, I know, but I would steal a few minutes of your time today.”

  “The theft of time is a grave thing to contemplate,” Luneté said, beginning to walk again and nodding to him to join her. “Once stolen, it cannot be returned.”

  “True. Yet the victim can often be compensated in other ways, even to the point of welcoming the theft,” he suggested.

  “The compensation’s value must in such cases be well in excess of the time’s, then, for time is a precious thing to all mortal creatures,” Luneté said. “We have a fixed allotment which cannot be increased.”

  “The theft of time, by and large, cannot account for nearly so many of the days lost from a lifetime as time wasted and time squandered on trivial things,” Dewar said drily.

  “It is often difficult to determine what is trivial and what is significant until time is nearly out,” Luneté countered.

  “Thus I must offer you, for the time I’d steal, something of enduring and evident value,” he said, and smiled at her again.

  Luneté could not but smile back. She felt her face grow warm. She was engaged to be married, she thought; she should not be flirting with this man. He was a sorcerer. There was no knowing what he really wanted in Lys.

  “Sorcerers are not known for gambling,” she said. “You must have something which meets those criteria already in your mind.”

  “I do,” he replied. “And if it does not meet those criteria in your mind, I shall do my utmost to refund your wasted time.”

  “This is uncommonly generous of you,” Luneté said, “and I shall strive to assay the value of your compensation as justly as humanly possible.”

  “I thank your ladyship for double kindness, then: for enabling the theft and for your justice in judging the thief. In return I shall offer something few victims of theft receive: the boon of naming the time.”

  As they talked, they had left the black-and-white checkered corridor and crossed through the central hall of the castle, ascending a flight of stairs at its back and arriving outside Luneté’s solar. Luneté had stopped; Laudine hovered a few steps behind her mistress, watching the sorcerer with evident dubiety.

  Luneté hesitated, then suggested that he join her at the eighth hour for a light luncheon in the garden. Dewar bowed and thanked her again and took leave of her. The Countess watched him go and then went into her apartment.

  Laudine tried to catch her mistress’s eye. The preoccupied lady, however, went to her writing-desk and sat down, ignoring her maid.

  “Madame,” said Laudine finally.

  “Yes?”

  “Is it true that that man is a sorcerer?” Laudine asked.

  “By his own admission, Laudine. He is clearly a gentleman as well.”

  “Handsome,” Laudine said, in an undertone, going to the window and looking out.

  Luneté shrugged. “He speaks agreeably,” she said.

  “Have you need of a sorcerer, my lady?” asked the maid.

  Luneté turned and looked at her, raising her eyebrows.

  “No,” she said. “But a gentleman who makes himself pleasant is welcome everywhere he goes.”

  Through a glass, Prince Prospero watched his daughter watch the town.

  She was sitting on her heels on a felled tree at the edge of a stump-littered clearing, half-hidden in the tree’s foliage. He could see the end of her bow above her shoulder, see the leather band that held her hair more or less in order, see the line of sweat trickling through the dust on her throat; her mouth was set in a line, her brows wrinkled in a frown, and her demeanor was that of the animal which intends to have a look, then move on.

  The objects of her suspicious glare, a party of men apparently resting from the midday heat of the early summer sun, lounged and chattered tensely at the other end of the clearing. They were unsure what to do, and so they pretended—badly—that she was not there, that her brilliant and unrelenting stare did not discomfit them, and that they were going to go back to trimming the tree’s branches and cutting it up as soon as they had rested.

  Prince Prospero frowned. She was wild; rather, she had become feral. He’d had her domesticated, at least he had thought so, and he had been caught unawares by the revival of her solitary roving habits. She’d run for seven years after he had shaped the people he needed, and run again three days after her return from that long absence, yet not so far as before. For an hour or a few days or most of a winter, Freia would sidle back in, wary and weather-beaten, bearing some gift of game or gathered fruit. She’d rarely acknowledge with look or word the hundreds of folk, denying them. It always ended: she’d take offense at some little matter and fly. He had not wished to hobble her and keep her forcibly with him, trusting time to tame her; yet soon he must lead his army into Pheyarcet, and he intended that she sit in governance in his absence and carry on his works in the town. He had told her this, yet still she preferred the forest.

  It was enough; it was too much. Prospero put the glass back in its case and walked down the bare-sided steep hill where he’d been watching for a stone-barge on the river. He could not fathom Freia. Though she had no art for dissembling and showed all her thoughts in her face, he could not pierce her moods and fits of temper to see what stirred them, nor what spurred her departures and returns.

  He picked his way through a pasture and over a fence, and the folk at the edge of the
clearing saw him now—and he saw the other thing they’d seen that he could not see from his hilltop: an animal behind Freia, hidden in the green.

  Freia noticed him. The animal—a bird, he saw the beak, of gigantic size—tossed its head, rustling the branches, and he recognized it. A gryphon, by heaven’s veil; he had seen few enough of them. It might be a favorable portent.

  Freia shifted on the tree-trunk, waiting for him to come near.

  “How now, daughter,” Prospero said. “Hast seen fit to be seen.” Freia said nothing, but her expression altered: he had stung her thin skin. Prospero sighed, softened his voice. “And I am pleased to see thee,” he concluded.

  “You were not here. I came back, and you were gone, they said.”

  “That is half a year ago—nay, more. I travelled away some days, and returned. ’Twas business that concerns thee not. Thou wert wiser to have waited for me here.”

  Freia tossed her head back. “I had business too. I went to meet someone, because I had promised her I would do that.”

  Prospero, briefly dismayed by her “someone,” was reassured by “someone’s” sex. It would be educational for Freia to spend more time with the women here. “So thou hast made a friend of one of my people? That is well,” he said.

  “She is nothing like them. I don’t like them,” she said.

  “They have done thee no offense.”

  “They cut down the best trees,” said Freia, and Prospero heard real grief in her voice. “You let them.”

  “I commanded them.”

  There was a long, cold moment.

  “I found this animal,” Freia said, “and I brought her back.”

  Prospero said levelly, “Do not allow thy gryphon to prey upon the folk here. I command thee so.”

  “Of course not. I’m going to give her a pig,” Freia said firmly.

  “Nay, no pigs, nor cattle—”

  “Why not? They’re not people.”

  “They’re for breeding and working and eating in winter,” he said. “Let the gryphon hunt her wild meat.”

  “She is hurt, and I promised her a pig,” Freia said. “I promised.”

  “The pigs are not thine to give,” Prospero said, folding his arms, “that thou knowest, for I have told thee. Now leave this game and come—”

  “Not without my gryphon. She’s mine, I found her, and I said she would have a pig here. There are many pigs. I counted forty-four. She can have a male pig and you still will have pigs to breed.”

  “The pigs belong to the folk here, not to thee,” Prospero said, his patience fading.

  “Then I will ask them,” Freia said, and she stood, walked along the trunk of the tree, and jumped down. “Chup-chup-chup!” she called, clapping her hands, and the gryphon’s head withdrew into the green shade. A disturbance, and the animal pushed through the bushes, snapping at them with that terrible beak. It—she, Prospero corrected himself—looked briefly at Prospero with an unnervingly intelligent gold eye. As she emerged from the trees, wings protectively tucked tightly against her back, Prospero realized he had underestimated her size. He had never seen such a large one.

  Freia had a plaited leather halter around the gryphon’s beak, head, and neck. She tugged on the lead-rope and the gryphon, favoring her off hind leg heavily, hopped after her, toward the little group of people on the other side of the clearing. Her wings, Prospero saw, were restrained by a fibrous-looking rope, made by Freia, and one wing was splinted.

  “Freia—” Prospero began.

  Freia threw him a quick, brilliant glance and looked back to the people.

  They were backing away, murmuring. One stood his ground, and Freia went to him and stopped an arm’s-length away. The gryphon halted and settled into an uncomfortable half-crouch.

  Scudamor and Freia examined one another. Freia’s bow and her little leather knapsack of gear, her short leather tunic and the knee-high leggings she wore, made her appear a wild woman of an explorer’s dream before black-bearded Scudamor, who wore a simple muddy-white sleeveless smock, belted up above his sandalled legs for ease in working.

  “Welcome, Lady,” said Scudamor.

  “This is a gryphon,” Freia said. “She’s Trixie.”

  Scudamor looked at the gryphon.

  “I promised her a pig, and Prospero says the pigs are yours,” Freia said.

  Scudamor looked at the gryphon still. She had pulled her head in, sitting hunched.

  Freia looked at Scudamor, and then Prospero heard her say a very small, soft word that gave him all hope for the future.

  “Please,” Freia said.

  Scudamor said, “The gryphon favors her leg.”

  “Yes.”

  “She cannot hunt,” Scudamor said.

  “I hunt for her.”

  “Let us go to the pigs,” Scudamor said.

  “ ’Tis not needful—” Prospero began, and Freia drew in her breath, and Scudamor said mildly, “To give the Lady’s gryphon a pig is a good thing.” He nodded, as if to himself, and turned and walked away. Freia tugged the gryphon’s lead gently and the gryphon rose and limped with them.

  “Be damned,” muttered Prospero, confounded. Well, let them give the beast a pig, and when her leg healed they’d have no pigs at all in eight days.

  But the gryphon ate her one pig, and then no more, for Freia hunted for her; she hopped after Freia devotedly, and Prospero realized when the gryphon’s feathers and fur began to shed and grow again that this was a youngling, coming only now into bright mature plumage. He did not know how young she might be, but she was growing larger as she fledged. Trixie had apparently decided Freia was her foster-mother, and Freia, who had never shown inclination toward pets, poulticed and bandaged and combed and fed her assiduously.

  “Belike,” Prospero suggested, as Trixie pulled strips of meat from a wood-elk Freia had shot and rafted home to the island for her, “belike thy gryphon were better encouraged to hunt for herself.” He feared the day the animal’s health returned.

  “She cannot fly,” Freia said. “Her feathers are half-out. I told her she mustn’t eat anybody here, or the pigs or the new ones.”

  “Sheep.”

  “They don’t look very nice to eat. They’re all hairy.”

  “That’s wool, wench, and thou hast seen it ’fore this, in thy garments.” And he told her about wool. Freia thought that cutting the hair off the sheep was a strange occupation, and suggested that waiting for them to shed would be easier, but Prospero forbore to expand upon the minutiae of husbandry.

  “Anyway Trixie won’t eat them; I said she mustn’t,” Freia said when Prospero had risen to leave her. “Papa—”

  He waited.

  “I asked the men who were making the ship, the big one, if I could not have some of the iron ropes—”

  “Chain, Puss. It is chain, or chains.”

  “Chains. So that is what chains look like. I had wondered.—They said I must ask you.”

  “What wouldst thou with chains?” Prospero asked, guessing.

  “For Trixie.”

  “Wilt not let her fly when she’s mended?”

  “Yes, I will, but … she must have better harness. The leather is thin, and she doesn’t mean to break it, but it breaks.”

  “Ah. Hm. Well, there is little to spare. Do thou wait, and tell them I have said thou mayst have any excess, but only when they have completed their work. ’Twill not be long—five days, or six; they labor with good will.”

  Freia nodded. “Thank you, Papa.”

  Dewar used the hours between his meeting and his appointment with the Countess profitably. He went into the town and found a tavern where he eavesdropped and gossiped, learning as much as he could about the Countess and her affianced. At the eighth hour he met a page as he emerged from his room at the castle, and the page led him to a sunny, pleasant bower in the garden where the Countess’s maid and the Countess waited by a table laid with covered dishes on a yellow cloth, beneath a tree which was seasonably adorned with
clouds of white flowers and sharp, impossibly bright-green new leaves.

  “Good afternoon, Your Grace.” Dewar bowed.

  “Good afternoon, Dewar. Laudine.”

  Reluctantly, Laudine withdrew to a bench some distance away and sat down to a piece of needlework, and the page was also dismissed to skip off back to the castle.

  “Please be seated.”

  “Thank you, madame.”

  “I seem to recall asking you to call me Luneté,” she said when he was beside her.

  “I would not seek to presume on the informality of fellow-travellers,” he said, “but to willfully disoblige you would be far more presumptuous. Luneté, then.”

  “Thank you. Would you care for salad?”

  “Allow me. It is kind of you to grant me this interview today. There are a great number of things clamoring for your attention after your absence.”

  “I am curious,” said Luneté. She was curious, and his talk was delightful. With his courtesy and address, he made her feel as if she were the Empress Glencora herself.

  “And so am I,” said Dewar. “You see, I am not particularly informed on local issues. I wondered why you and the King of Ascolet were pursued by Ocher of Sarsemar.” He had acquired some inkling of the business in the tavern, but wished to hear the tale from the lady herself. The town had begun to seethe with preparations for some kind of battle; Dewar had glimpsed Otto leading a column of pikemen.

  “Oh,” said Luneté. “Ah.” She sipped some wine. “Well, it is complicated. In effect, Ottaviano kidnapped me.”

  Dewar raised his eyebrows, watching her over the rim of his heavy old-fashioned goblet.

  “In effect,” she emphasized. “Baron Ocher was appointed my guardian by Emperor Avril on the death of my parents when I was a child; he was no particular friend of my father, but when he petitioned for the position, the Emperor granted it to him. The terms of my parents’ will and the custom in this area have kept him from assuming real power over Lys; I have lived here sometimes, in Champlor sometimes, and in Sarsemar sometimes, but in Sarsemar more than anywhere. When I was sixteen Ocher petitioned the Crown for permission to wed me. He was denied. I am told this was probably through the interest of Empress Glencora. My mother Sithe of Lys was a lady-in-waiting of Queen Anemone, and she knew Princess Glencora in Landuc. The Baron lately has made every effort to—to woo me, although I find him entirely disagreeable. I refused and made myself as unpleasant and unmanageable as I could, while keeping close ties in Lys. Ottaviano was a captain in Ocher’s service who maneuvered himself into the position of escorting me as often as possible—” She smiled, her cheeks flushing red for a moment.