The Disinherited Prince

by Guy Antibes

  Pol wondered about Mistress Farthia’s journey. “Did my teacher leave for Yastan just to deliver Father’s petition?”

  “Let’s say he took an easy opportunity to make sure his petition got into the right hands.” His mother looked worried. “I had always thought you would take my own father’s place…” She looked out the window and then back to Pol. “But your health needs to improve. I can wait.”

  Pol smiled to comfort his mother. “Maybe I’ll take my father’s place here in Borstall.” Pol knew his siblings wouldn’t permit something so bold, and they definitely wouldn’t wait.

  His mother looked a bit shocked at Pol’s comment. She smoothed her face and lifted her chin to look more like a queen and less like a mother. “Over the dead bodies of your brothers and sisters, and that even includes your friend, Amonna, my dear. There is nothing more to say, for now.” His mother and he were in precise agreement on that.

  ~~~

  Chapter Four

  ~

  THE CONVERSATION WITH HIS PARENTS hadn’t quite gone the way he had expected. He thought his father would demean him, and his mother would step up to defend Pol’s right to the Listyan throne. Instead, the King unexpectedly threw him a compliment, and his mother chided him for naiveté.

  He shook his head while he headed towards the classroom and passed a window looking out at the Royal Gardens. His mind needed some kind of distraction, so Pol decided to stroll in the gardens. Perhaps the change in scenery would help him to process the disturbing breakfast.

  No one disrupted his stroll down to the ground level of the castle and out the door leading to the gardens. He walked, taking in Siggon’s handiwork. The colors seemed to ring like bells in his mind, a visual music that Pol hadn’t quite realized before. He sat on a bench under a small tree and looked about at the pathway and the vibrant borders.

  Someone pushed hard in the back, enough to spill him onto the gravel path. He heard laughing and wondered which of his brothers had played with him this time. He hadn’t even had an opportunity to prepare his mind to act calm and friendly.

  “Only you, My Prince?” Paki said, grinning, as he leaned against the tree and swept the cloth hat from his head in a bow. “I hope you’re not hurt.” A look of concern replaced his grin.

  Pol got to his feet, brushing the gravel from his knees and hands. “Nothing permanent.” He tried to say it as seriously as he could, showing him the abrasions on his palms.

  Paki winced and bowed his head. “I’m sorry.”

  After giving his friend a mock glare, Pol broke into a smile. “Don’t be. I would have expected much worse from…”

  Paki raised a hand to keep Pol from continuing. “I know,” Paki’s gaze went up to the castle. He turned back to Pol and put his foot on the bench, facing Pol. “What brings you to my domain?”

  “Your father’s. You still don’t strike me as the gardener type.”

  Paki frowned, but then brightened. “To tell you the truth, neither does my Dad. I’m his apprentice until further notice, though. He’s teaching me how to be a scout, but a scout who knows all the plants in the forest. I’ll get to know what can be used for healing and which herbs for cooking,” Paki got closer to Pol and looked around, “and what can be used for poisons.” He jerked his head. “I’ll not be letting someone get to me again.”

  “I’d like to get in on that instruction,” Pol said, “but I’m afraid my father won’t allow it.”

  Paki puffed out his chest. “Did you ask him?”

  Pol laughed. “Why would I do that?”

  “You won’t know if he doesn’t allow it if you haven’t made the effort to ask.”

  Pol wondered about that. He made the effort to ask his mother about taking the Borstall throne, but perhaps that question was impertinent. “Knowledge is power.”

  “What?” Paki said. “Where did that come from?”

  “Something that I learned from Mistress Farthia. I guess I’ve been learning more statesmanship than I thought. Your learning woodcraft along with your gardening gives you more knowledge. Maybe no one would give you a chance to be a scout if you didn’t have that knowledge. It’s the same thing ruling a country, supposedly, but you really don’t get the chance if you’re not born the right way.”

  Pack sat down next to him. “Born the right way? You’re a prince by birth. Doesn’t that count for anything?”

  “Not to my siblings. They have the birthright, but I’m afraid all I have is the knowledge.”

  “Then why don’t you make use of your knowledge?”

  Pol considered the question in his own mind. What knowledge did he have that would make him valuable to anyone? His father said he was smart, but then he dismissed Pol in the next sentence as too weak. Maybe knowledge wasn’t the source of all power.

  Suddenly he knew he’d have to seek out Kelso Beastwell. He needed the kind of knowledge that he could use in his own defense, and Kelso could teach him how to use weapons and build up his strength. He might not get strong, but his father had all but told him that he was useless in his present state. Malden Gastoria told him that he wouldn’t get a lot stronger, but one didn’t necessarily need strength. If Amonna and Honna could get some training in, so could Pol.

  “You’re thinking again,” Paki said as he gently shook Pol’s shoulder.

  “Keep shaking. I think you’ve dislodged an important thought. Why don’t you give me a more detailed tour of the garden? It sure is colorful.”

  Pol spent the next few hours roaming around the garden until Siggon called Paki away. He sat down on another bench and was trying to fix in his mind what he had just discovered when Malden Gastoria walked up to him.

  “Lunch in my rooms, Prince Poldon,” Malden said. “I came out when I overheard that you were noticed wandering the gardens by certain people.” He flashed his eyes towards the castle.

  ~

  The magician’s rooms were on the other side of the castle from the Royal Family’s quarters. The walk wore Pol out a bit, but he made it without a single wheeze. It seemed that he had nearly recovered from his poisoning.

  “Come in,” Malden said. “You haven’t been here before, have you?”

  Pol shook his head.

  “No revived corpses or boiling blood here, I’m afraid. We will be talking about magic, however. In fact, I’d like to test you to see what kind of potential you have.”

  “Me? I’m no magician.”

  Malden squinted his eyes and took Pol’s hand. His eyes went unfocused for a moment, and then he looked at Pol. “You can be, you know. It takes a certain mind, and I’m sure you have that kind of mind. Your siblings don’t, except for Grostin, perhaps, and I’d never teach him anything.”

  “Refuse to teach a prince?” Pol said.

  “I’d leave your father’s service first. That is between you and me, right?” Malden said it so calmly, but Pol’s heart began to race at the implications in the magician’s words.

  “You don’t trust him? His mind is too devious?”

  Malden nodded. “Let’s leave it at that.” He took a portfolio from his bookshelf. His books were haphazardly arranged. Mistress Wissingbel’s bookshelves in the classroom were a model of orderliness. He untied the two strings that held a number of thick pages.”

  “I want you to examine this board intently. Tell me what you see.” Malden pulled what he called a board from the portfolio.

  Someone had painstakingly painted lots of different colored dots on a black background. Pol couldn’t see the point of the exercise, and he let Malden know it.

  “Patience. Keep looking. There is a pattern in there, and I want you to tell me what it is.”

  Pol put the board on his lap. He leaned over and squinted his eyes and looked quickly from one side to the other to see if he could pick up something, but the dots still looked like dots.

  “You have to let your eyes take over. Don’t try too hard, or you will fail.”

  “Fail?” Pol said. “I either pass or fa
il this test?”

  Malden nodded. “I’ll give you a few more moments.” He stepped to a rope pull and jerked it three times, twice. “I have called for lunch. They always give me more than enough for two, so we’ll get enough to eat. I’m afraid I may not eat quite as fancily-made food as you do.”

  “It’s all right,” Pol said, waving his hand, still concentrating on the board. He rubbed his eyes and kept them closed. Relax, he told himself. He opened his eyes and something materialized. It was a shape… an animal?

  “I saw something! Am I doing magic?”

  Malden shook his head. “No. This is all preliminary to your testing. Keep looking until you can see the shape as long as you look at it. A momentary flash is insufficient.” He picked up a book on a side table and began to read.

  Pol closed his eyes again and relaxed, just as he had the first time. He took a deep breath and slowly opened his eyes. He cried out in frustration, but then let his eyes relax without closing them and all of a sudden the shape of a horse appeared in front of him.

  “It’s a horse! I can see it. Not very well drawn, though.”

  Malden lifted his eyes from the book and nodded his head. “Take the next one and tell me what that is. It’s the same technique. It is very hard to create an image with the dots, so give the illustrator some latitude, that’s a good prince.” He went back to reading as Pol pulled the next board from the portfolio.

  It took him half the time to figure out the image, and then he flew through the others once he had the technique down.

  “Good. You passed the first qualifier. If you can’t detect the pattern, then your mind just won’t be able to handle the magic technique. Rest for a bit until our lunch is delivered.” Malden pointed to a couch on the other side of the room.

  Malden had to wake him when lunch finally arrived. Pol rubbed his eyes.

  “Headache?” Malden said while he directed the servant to put their meal on his small dining table.

  Pol shook his head. “No, just rubbing my eyes from sleeping.” His comment brought on a yawn. He joined Malden at the table. “This isn’t quite the same as I get,” Pol said, “but I’m hungry enough that it doesn’t matter. I didn’t eat very much at breakfast.”

  “You ate with your mother and father? Is that a common occurrence?”

  Pol took a bite of bread that he had just buttered. It wasn’t quite as fresh as what he usually ate. “The first time in the history of the world.”

  “Can you share any of it?”

  Pol munched on his bread while he thought it out. The king hadn’t said anything that Malden couldn’t figure out by observing the family.

  “I don’t think it will hurt,” Pol said. “He sent Mistress Farthia to Yastan with a petition to allow him to install Landon as a vassal-king under Father.”

  “King to king. I knew he didn’t want to reduce Listya to a dukedom. Your father has a chance of getting his way. Does it make you feel disappointed?”

  “I shouldn’t be. Father said that I’m smarter than my brothers and sisters, but I’m so weak that I couldn’t survive ruling for very long.”

  Malden nodded. “I can see his point, but I disagree with him. By the time you’re twenty, you will be capable of ruling better than any of your siblings—”

  “If I last that long,” Pol said interrupting the magician.

  “That’s right, if you last that long. What do you intend to do about that?”

  “I thought that if I was nice all the time around my siblings, I mean aggressively nice, that they might just ignore me.”

  Malden prodded and pulled a tiny bone out of his fish. “That won’t work.”

  “I wanted to try, but then I ran into Paki.”

  The magician narrowed his eyes. “He’s not a good influence.”

  “I disagree. He told me that I should ask more questions and be more prepared.”

  Malden raised his eyebrows. “He did?”

  Pol nodded. “I told him knowledge is power, but then I realized that knowledge alone isn’t power. You need to mix it with other things to make it powerful. A scholar may know everything about the world, but that just makes him a scholar. Paki is learning how to be a scout while he apprentices with his father. Siggon is continuing to teach him the things that he was just starting to teach the both of us.”

  “Where is the knowledge?” Malden asked.

  Pol furrowed his brow. “What do you mean?”

  “I agree with you that knowledge is power, and that it isn’t everything. I’d like you to explain Pakkingail’s relationship with what you just postulated.”

  “Oh. He wants to be a scout. Scouts need to know a lot of things, but Paki will know about plants that grow in the wild and plants that are cultivated. He’ll know which ones can be used for healing, health, and…and for killing. Just knowing what the plants are isn’t enough, so his father will teach him how to use them.”

  “Go on,” Malden said.

  “So it isn’t about just knowing something, but you need to know when and how to use that knowledge. Isn’t that right?”

  “It is. Wisdom is where you know when to use that knowledge and how much to apply it. The process is both simple and complex. Simple, because knowledge can often be easily obtained. It is complex because there are many factors known and unknown that create an uncertain environment for applying the tools to deliver the results derived from knowledge.”

  Pol blinked a few times. He asked for Malden to repeat what he just said.

  “So it is like an arithmetic problem except the numbers aren’t all known. Missing pieces to a pattern. Wisdom is making the right guesses with the information at hand?”

  “Patterns.” Malden smiled. It made Pol uncomfortable. The entire conversation had unnerved him. “I am going to give you some knowledge. Magic is made by finding patterns and then tweaking them, like this.” He reached forward and put two of his knuckles on either side of Pol’s nose and twisted.

  “Hey!”

  “That is tweaking, except you do it in your mind.”

  Pol remembered the times when Malden’s eyes lost their focus. “Like when you heal? Did you tweak my pattern when you did that?”

  “I knew you would get the essence of magic quickly, helped unexpectedly by your friend Pakkingail.”

  A few things made sense all of a sudden in Pol’s mind. “So you have to nearly go into a trance to detect the patterns. How do you go about ’tweaking’ the pattern?”

  “That is the hard part. Visualization is absolutely necessary, but manipulating the pattern takes a lot of practice. There are those who attend monasteries and never learn how, even if they can pick up the patterns in the boards with ease.”

  “I can do that now.”

  “A preliminary step only. I think we can set aside the magic lessons for now. It could be dangerous for you to learn much in the way of magic all at once, and you’ve gotten a tiny taste. Finish your lunch, and we can start on the list that Farthia gave me.”

  Pol shook his head. “Mistress Wissingbel gave me a large book on religion to read. I thought my lessons consisted of reading that.”

  “We won’t be talking about religion. Studying that book is something you are to do on your own. You need to continue to learn sums, political and military history, and some geography, maps, and what the various dukedoms and kingdoms in the Baccusol Empire contribute that is unique… or not unique, as the case may be.”

  After clutching the dinner knife in his hand, he remembered that he wanted to talk to Kelso Beastwell about self-defense. “If I can’t use magic to defend me against my siblings, I wanted to ask the Captain of the Guard to teach me defense and help me exercise to get stronger.”

  “Are you finished with your lunch? I’ll ring for a servant to clean up.” He rose and pulled on the rope. “I think you need more tools to defend your knowledge, so I will go with you to Kelso. We can do that now, since there is no reason to put off teaching you some basic things.”

&nbs
p; The servant soon came, permitting Malden to lock up his rooms. They walked through the castle corridors. Pol looked back at Grostin, who pointedly ignored his brother when they passed him.

  “You can call me Malden, by the way,” the magician said.

  Pol had always thought of the magician as Malden Gastoria. “If I can do that, then you can call me Pol.”

  The magician nodded and turned his head towards where Grostin had headed. “Has he ever acknowledged you?” Malden said.

  “Yes. I’d at least get a sneer or some snide comment, but not in the last few months.”

  Malden nodded and put his hands behind his back as they continued down to Kelso’s office close to the practice yards. “Ever since King Colvin probably began thinking about giving Listya to Landon?”

  “I suppose so.”

  The magician raised his index finger. “That’s a pattern, Pol. Look for patterns of behavior everywhere you can. Sometimes you will notice a change in a pattern, and when you do, there is a technique for backtracking and finding the original pattern. Grostin used to show his meanness. That is a pattern. Now he ignores you, and the pattern has changed, and something caused Grostin to change that pattern. I want you to look for things like that, large or small. Consider it as preparation for learning about magic. Although I am loathe to admit, pattern observation is generally more useful to a magician serving a monarch than any magic he is called upon to perform.”

  “Oh. Observation gives you knowledge and putting it in a pattern is the tool to make sense of it. That is where the power comes in?”

  “Close enough,” Malden said. “Even if you never pick up magic, recognizing patterns can serve to help you all of your life.”

  “As long as I use that information wisely?” Pol said.

  “You really were listening. Very good!” Malden clapped Pol on his shoulders. That made Pol feel like he had been appreciated for what his ideas.

  They talked about patterns a bit more until they found Kelso examining weapons in the armory.

  Kelso looked up from a table filled with swords. He put the one he held into a barrel next to the table, point down.