The Last Wizard

by Jane M. R.

  I shouldn’t feel so self-conscious about my bad performance – first day, after all – but I can’t figure out why the other four girls are even taking this class, because clearly they’ve been masters at it since the age of two. Their disapproving looks is starting to chaff me. I explore the idea that if I can prove unteachable, I might be kicked out of the class. There is always a chance that Jaicom is pretending to love violins as much as I am pretending to play them.

  The class finally ends with a speech from the instructor whose body sticks too far out in the front and too far out in the back. She congratulates everyone on the fine job we’ve done, sure not to make direct eye contact with me.

  Stacking my violin case along the wall with the rest of them, I head outside to my horse and reach for the reins.

  “Brine!”

  I look around. My father is sitting astride his horse. Pre-irritation builds inside me.

  “Father? Why are you here?”

  He shrugs and won’t look at me. “Your mother read the newspaper about the thief breaking into the jewelry shop and that somehow translates into the fear of getting kidnapped. Sleep overs three miles from home are fine but a two mile ride back from town on horseback is sure to encourage dangers and it is easier to just not argue with her.”

  I think I just pinched the rest of my freedom out when my gloved hand closes over the reins. I tap the flanks and the horse starts forward. “You could have just gone to the bar and had a couple of drinks instead,” I say lightly. “She’d never know.”

  He smiles lightly, and I see that he is allowed his worries too.

  Riding across the town square, I see the same trio of gypsies playing on their instruments. The monkey is doing hand stands in front of them.

  I recognize Jesaro, the man who gave me a nice compliment about my kind heart the day I went dress shopping. My horse is already angling that way before I have fully decided to give in to the temptation.

  My father doesn’t question as he pulls his horse beside me. We stop in front of the gypsies and dismount.

  “Mr. Frondaren!” Jesaro announces as we approach. “The silverman hisself!”

  “Hello,” my father greats politely, looking expectantly down on me. The monkey is pulling on my dress again and I bend down and hand him a shilling.

  “Your heart is still kind,” Jesaro says.

  “And your music is still beautiful.” I’m pleased my father doesn’t think as lowly about these people as my mother does. I never understood how they get along with each other so well.

  A nudge on my shoulder indicates my father is ready to go. I wave to Jesaro and the two others with him and mount up. When we are far enough away, my father says, “They are gypsies for a reason.”

  I don’t get angry at him like I did my mother, but I still prickle. “Likely because the women went untied for so long that society has considered them tainted and so were not able to marry a man who could provide for them.”

  “Hey now,” my father warns, though his tone is severally lacking any proper chastisement. “Just… be careful. They are pickpockets and I didn’t like the way he was looking you up and down so carefully.”

  “He was not!”

  My father glances at me with his brown eyes and I shut up. Jesaro was not looking at me like that.

  “The parish constables have reported they suspect the gypsies are involved with the thefts of Corrana’s dress shop,” my father says, clearly trying to sway me to think poorly on the poor. “And the jewelry shop. They even think the burning of the Isendell house was their doing, too.”

  Isendell… that was a popular topic on the Small Minded Hamlet Gossip Because In Valemorren Everyone’s Business is Everyone’s Business And We Especially Love to Regurgitate Old News Gazette a year and a half ago and is still brought up every once in a while. I have no idea why. Sure, it’s tragic that a house burned down and consumed the family inside – both parents, a boy named Hrendel and a girl named Joseara. See? I still remember the names because of the gossip – but tragedies happen. People certainly don’t need to keep reliving the same tragedy for a year and a half in memory.

  I’m not sure where all my boldness is coming from. “Sure. The gypsies are also responsible for Durain’s death, cholera, and –”

  “Stop,” he says, and I do because I detect heat crawling into his voice. “Just be careful. There are reasons why people avoid them.”

  But now I’m irritated. And because I am, I bring up something else to further my irritation. “Does this mean I must be escorted like a disobedient child to and from town every day?”

  He passes the reins back and forth in his hands for a moment, causing the horse to snort and shuffle its neck. “We’ll see. I’ll try to convince your mother of your capabilities.” He sighed. “Unfortunately, those capabilities will hurt you more than save you.”

  “Why,” I start off indignantly without refrain, “because girls aren’t supposed to know how to forage? Knife fight? Start camp fires –”

  He cuts me off with a brisk raise of his hand. “Yes, all those things Durain taught you.” He falls uncharacteristically silent, tightening his hold on the reins. “Which, I’m afraid I hurt you by letting you run untied for so long.”

  “Hurt me? You gave me the greatest…”

  He raises his hand again. “Hurt you because now I have to fight with society so they won’t view you as tainted.”

  I suppose I knew this already, but to finally have the words inked before me on stark white paper curls my stomach into knots. Society’s insatiable need for gossip fabricates stories to fill them with drama to bust apart their mediocre lives. Since women are discouraged from reading dramatic books, they then start to create their own life-like dramatic stories to live in.

  I might run away to join the gypsies tomorrow. I’ll sleep on it overnight.

  “Jaicom is over-looking that, though,” I defend, “so societies gossip about me can’t be all that believable.”

  “And that is why I don’t want you to ever question Jaicom why he is courting you.” He meets my eyes, his own shinning in the aging stretch of early evening. “I was worried for a while that no man would want to court you. No man has courted you. But now you have the most eligible bachelor in Valemorren pining on you.” Pining is most definitely the wrong word. “And I’m certain that is only because of my status. If we were any lower –”

  “I got it,” I say. My father is being truthful and that infuriates me to the point I now want to argue about all the wrongness of the world. “If society didn’t label every woman as an automatic whore, no one would have this problem.”

  The trotting horses angle into each other, bumping my dress against my father’s trouser leg. How I miss trousers.

  “There is great purpose to why women are tied into their dresses.”

  “I know. It is because we are automatic whores.” I’m getting too passionate about the topic so I stop. Why am I the only female that thinks this is outrageous? Durain… I blame it on Durain and how he fed my head full of wonderful stories about mythical creatures and about other worlds different than mine. How he went out of his way to show me how to survive off of edibles in the forest, how to build fires… Ya. I blame it on Durain.

  I plod gloomily the rest of the way home like I’m certain my future will. But now because my head is full of Durain and all the stories he read to me, I scamper into my father’s study upon arrival at the house and find a book about the local fauna. Sitting in his leather chair, I thumb through the pages.

  And though the artist who drew the wildlife did a remarkable job on the detail, none of them look like the orange colored flying dog thing I saw the night I found Durain’s note.

  I doubt myself. Am I sure it was orange? I thought I saw hooves instead of paws but it was dark and I was looking through a blur of leaves and sticks as they fell over me. Something was weird with the wings too but, again, it was dark.

  I find an excuse for every odd thing I thought I
saw. But what I can’t explain is that noise that approached and left with the animal. A tinkling sound, like the glass bead curtain hanging in the doorway of our drawing room.

  I thumb through the book again, but none of the animals offer up any help, because nothing in the book shows a picture of a four legged flying thing. It had four legs. I’m just as sure as that as I am about the tinkling sound.

  I close the book with a snap and put it back on the shelf. Durain would know what it was. He knew everything. The ache in me magnifies. I think a visit to Aunt Magara’s is due.

  I’m received with an unexpected smile by the household macramist who takes my calling card and sits me in the foyer. My aunt emerges shortly afterward, still enshrined in black bombazine.

  “Brinella,” she says with a smile. She reaches for me and I stand, accepting her kisses on my cheeks. “To what occasion do you have to call on me?”

  How do I ask this without sounding dispassionate?

  “I hope you will not find me inconsiderate,” I say, and already the emptiness of the house void of Durain claws at my chest, “but I was wondering if I might borrow some of Durain’s books.”

  I see mixed emotions flex in the wrinkles around her eyes but she nods. “I hadn’t quite gotten to the point of… cleaning his room. Yet. It will actually help if you… take some of his books off my hands.”

  I nod in return and follow her through the house to Durain’s room. I’m not expecting the blast of sorrow the moment I step foot passed the threshold, as if Durain’s ghost has latched lips onto me and is sucking me empty. I grab the door frame to catch my breath. Aunt Magara is already in the room and does not notice. With force, I compose myself and join her.

  Durain was never a tidy person. Books stack along the wall, clothes draped on everything that would hold their weight, his other random personal belongings strewn about like leaves in a forest but he always knew where everything was. Aunt Magara turns to me with hands clasped in front of her. I can see the effort she is making not to cry.

  “Me and Andlas have already collected what we want to keep,” she says. “The rest is going to charity. The more you take, the less I have to… clean up.” She inhales quickly. Then bustles past me to the doorway.

  “Aunt Magara?”

  She turns around, her back straight and her head high.

  “Would you like me to clean his room for you?” I fight tears in my own throat. “It would be no bother to me and I would like to help.”

  She inclines her head a little. Then with pinched lips that is not quite a smile says, “I won’t refuse the help. But you won’t make it home before curfew.”

  “I’m okay staying the night, if you’ll allow me.”

  A smile is finally coaxed out of her trying-for-stoic expression. “You’ll find me in my boudoir if you need anything,” she says, and walks out of the room.

  In an odd way, I actually find relief cleaning up Durain’s room, piling his cloths together, scooping his personal effects into a central location on his desk. It is easier to guide a river of sorrow in a direction than to bottle it up in a lake where the dam is only going to get bigger over time as the pressure builds.

  I’m cleaning until dinner time, where I take a break to join them for the meal and then resume my work. I’m also looking for any clues while I clean around the space he’d occupied for seventeen years.

  Finally tiring, I conclude my cleaning complete and reward myself with sitting down among his stack of books and begin thumbing through them. I’m not surprised to find most of them are about the history of the Middle Ages, smattered with divers ranges of fantasy readings about Beowulf, the wizard Merlin, and others I recognize as him having read to me. He loved this kind of stuff.

  I pick the next book off the stack but my attention is caught on the odd looking book beneath it. It appears to be bound in red and black dyed leather, clamped down tight by the four metal corner pieces, the two covers held closed by two metal clamps affixed to the front cover.

  I’m not sure where the book went that was just in my hand but now I’m holding this relic of time. This book is so unlike any others I have ever seen that my imagination teases me with a story I’m making up in my head that it has come from the Middle Ages down a long line of ancestors and all of life’s secrets are going to be revealed to me once I open the cover.

  I suppose this is what I get for letting Durain read to me. An imagination.

  With humble reverence, I pop the clamps on the book and yawn open the cover. I first see a black ink inscription written in what looks like a form of Old English on the first page.

  Zadicayn,

  I hopeth thou hast a birth year happiness like upon a sunrise.

  ~Elshina

  My first thought: Who uses the word “thou” anymore? My second thought isn’t even a thought. It is a flutter of excitement as I turn the page. The paper is different than I’m used to. Smoother. The first page shows a brilliant painting of an abada: a mythical creature like the unicorn, although smaller with two horns on its head. That is on the page on the right. The page on the left has hand written words that I can only read a small handful of because they appear to be mixed with some form of Latin.

  Is this for real?

  I turn the page. I don’t recognize the creature in it and the Latin-English explanation on the left of the page doesn’t help much. I turn again. I recognize the basilisk there and the few words I understand on the left page confirms my guess that the page on the left is a description of the mythical animal.

  Every right-sided page has drawings. It looks like they are alphabetical. I recognize some of the creatures from Durian’s descriptions of them during his story telling, but most of them I don’t.

  I turn every page as if spelled, trying to process where Durain acquired this book. It looks very old, like, it-should-be-in-some-book-museum old. We’d play games in the forest where Durain would create a mythical creature from his imagination and insert it into our games. I always thought he was highly imaginative to make things up like that. Now I know he was just referencing this book.

  I reach the “F” section and my heart skips a beat. Suddenly the room is too hot for my heavy dress.

  The creature is orange in color. Hairless. Standing on four legs with hooves. A thick neck like a horse and jaws big enough to chomp through a man’s skull. The wings are a drooping curtain of individual strands of skin jeweled with transparent discs, looking for all the world like our glass bead curtain in the drawing room doorway.

  I’m going to throw up.

  I don’t actually throw up, but I put the book down and move to the window, tossing it open so the evening air can cool the fever in my brain. And because my brain refuses to connect what I saw that night and what is glaring at me out of the book I left open on that page, I focus instead on the inscription on the first page. Zadicayn. Who is – was – Zadicayn? Was that his book? It has to be his book. Why else would his name be in there? Who was that other person… Elshina? Who names their child Elshina? Why did Elshina reference a sunrise? What does “hopeth” mean?

  I go on with useless questions like this for a while until the outside air becomes too cold for me and I close the window. I close the book, too, without looking at the picture again.

  I tuck the book under my arm and look around the room again, spying a pair of Durain’s trousers and a shirt slouched in the pile of clothes I made.

  I take them both.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  BRINELLA

  My mother sits on a stool as Varseena orbits around me, tying the knots. I scrunch my face up in the mirror. “It’s just his sister’s debutante, mother.”

  “A man loves it when a woman dresses up for him for any occasion.”

  “He might realize I’m over doing it and get creeped out.” I shouldn’t have said that. It would work to my advantage if Jaicom stopped courting me.

  “Nonsense. You’ll see.”

  I roll my eyes and fork brown hair
back over my shoulder.

  Apparently, according to my mother, Jaicom’s favorite colors are orange and green. Thankfully, my mother had enough good sense not to have those two colors sewn together. But that doesn’t make the orange dress with brown trim any better, which is the one she picked out on the day we went dress shopping. I’m about to complain that the orange reflecting off my pale face makes me look like I have jaundice but I’ve already decided it would be better if Jaicom is creeped out.

  Even when my father comes into my room to remind us of the time, it’s not until my hair resembles something in a J. Turner painting that we finally leave. The cage under my dress bangs against my legs like a bell against the gong as I walk the hallway and down the stairs.

  The chirping of crickets beneath the skirt of a darkening sky invites a restless energy inside of me. I breathe in the night with smells alive with grass and cold earth and I want more than anything to run barefoot through the lawn and roll around. But as if my mother can read my thoughts, she latches onto my arm and urges me into the coach.

  Never having had the occasion to see the Whaerin mansion myself, I still could have described it to you just with all the rumors and eye witnesses who had. Maybe not quite like the Palace of Westminster, but certainly the Palace of Valemorren.

  The coach turns left down a long gravel white rock road lined on both sides with lanterns. A man stands on the porch in a white long sleeved shirt under a black buttoned waistcoat with trousers and shoes to match. I’ve only ever met Aklen Whaerin officially once while in town. Even from this distance I can feel his stature of importance and it only intensifies as the coach bumbles to a stop beneath the four-legged awning like a squatting dog with its head bowed to sniff us out. An orange, hairless, flying dog thing.

  I can’t get the picture out of my head. And who was chasing it that night?

  We exit the coach.

  “Mr. Frondarens,” Aklen manages to say in a tone that combines arsenic and saturol together in a way that makes them sound like envied party favors, “I am honored to have you attend my daughter’s debutante.”