The Wizard King

by Julie Dean Smith

It was a solution, but not the one Athaya had been praying for. And one unpleasant question remained to be asked. “The spell is compelling him to kill Durek… but what happens if Durek dies some other way and Nicolas has nothing to do with it?”

  Hedric’s expression was grave. “Then he would remain in his current state until his death—unless the Sage dies first—since he would have no way of ever completing his task.”

  The room was silent for a long time—so silent, that Athaya could hear Adam turning the brittle pages of his magic book in the chamber above.

  “You spoke of caring for him yourself,” Athaya said at last, “but shouldn’t I do that? He’s my brother and I feel responsible for him. And the sealing spell made my powers even stronger than they were before…”

  Her eyes drifted back to the window, and the bar of late afternoon sun that slated into the chamber and burnished it with gold. She looked forward to the coming summer; last spring, with her powers imprisoned by a sealing spell, she had declined into lunacy and lost three months of her life. Athaya shivered at what few memories of those days remained to her; memories of helplessness and rage and pain… God, such pain. With no outlet, the pressures of her caged magic began to build to a lethal level, bringing her closer to death with each passing day. But in the end, as was true with most of her life’s calamities, the ordeal had made her stronger; now it would be worth every day of hell she had endured if she could use her new level of skill to help Nicolas. Compared to that, her abilities to cast spells effortlessly, to traverse the whole of Caithe in the blink of an eye, and even to detect the dormant seeds of magic before they bloomed inside a wizard’s mind—a thing no wizard in history had ever dreamed possible—paled to insignificance.

  Hedric’s telltale smile broke her out of her reverie and she groped to remember what she had been saying. “I didn’t mean to insult you. It’s just that—”

  “I am not offended—you mean well, I know. I will gladly concede that you are more powerful than I am now; perhaps you were even before the seal… my magic has been gradually fading over the years. But in this case, raw power is no advantage. Helping Nicolas is going to take a great deal of delicacy and skill. Only the Sage has both, I fear. Oh, I know what to do in theory,” he explained, “but it will be slow going in practice. My lesser level of power will be to Nicolas’ benefit—it will give me the gentler touch required for this sort of work. Adam has kindly invited me to stay at Belmarre as long as I like, and I think it would be best for Nicolas if I did.”

  “But what about your duties at court?” Jaren asked. “Osfonin will start climbing the castle walls if Basil stays on more than a few weeks.”

  Hedric chuckled in secret amusement, but the humor soon faded into something more indistinct and melancholy. “Everything has been arranged, Jaren,” he murmured. Only the slightest edge in his tone warned Jaren not to press the subject. “Adam and I will find plenty to talk about—he may not be a wizard, but magic fascinates him and he wants to learn as much about it as he can. And when I’m not attending to Nicolas or trying to teach magic to someone who doesn’t have a drop of it,” he went on, turning an anticipatory smile on Athaya, “I can use my free hours to read your accounts of your work.”

  Baffled, she gave him a blank stare. “Accounts?”

  “Your journals and notes… that sort of thing.”

  “My—?” Athaya shot Jaren a desperate look of inquiry. Had she forgotten something, or was Master Hedric growing absentminded as well as frail?

  Hedric gaped at her, openly scandalized. “You mean you haven’t been writing any of this down? Haven’t been recording anything you’ve done since you started this crusade?”

  Athaya decided it would be an excellent time to warm her tea. “Well,” she mumbled, backing away from the table, “I’ve been busy.”

  Hedric threw up his hands in exaggerated despair, like a long-suffering father whose daughter has refused yet another in a long string of suitors. “You must learn to see yourself in a larger context, my dear. Future historians and wizards will not only be curious about your crusade, but interested in your unique physical talents. Little is known about translocation and even less about the long-term effects of the sealing spell. And as for this ability to detect the seed of power long before the mekahn—to know who is and is not a wizard before their power starts to develop…” Hedric was rendered temporarily speechless at the wonder of it. “Athaya, that’s never been done before; it’s never been considered possible before! If you don’t teach us, the knowledge could be lost forever.”

  Suitably admonished, Athaya refreshed her tea with hot water and ventured back to the table. “I never thought of it that way,” she confessed, vaguely embarrassed by Hedric’s high praise. “But you know how much I dislike writing—it makes my fingers stiffen up. Besides, you’ve seen my penmanship,” she reminded him. “You called it appalling yourself.”

  Without arguing the point, Hedric circled back to the central issue. “Then tell Jaren what you want to say and have him write it down for you. He was my secretary for five years—I can vouch for his handwriting. Of course, I do have a more selfish motive in all this,” he conceded, the corners of his mouth curling up into a smile. “I’d like to think that generations of future wizards will read about your work in a new volume of the Book of Sages and marvel at what an extraordinary teacher you must have had. That can’t happen unless you tell posterity what you’ve been up to.”

  Athaya held up her hands in surrender. “All right, you’ve convinced me. I promise to start some sort of a journal the instant I get back to the camp.” As she browsed through the books and scrolls scattered across the table, she was forced to admit how grateful she was that their long-dead authors had recorded their thoughts and theories for her—and Nicolas’—present benefit. It proved Hedric’s point as nothing else could. “Maybe the work will help keep me from worrying about Nicolas. Damn them,” she said suddenly, as some of her former agitation bubbled back to the surface, “what sort of wizards would stoop to using spells like that, anyway?”

  “Ones who think that if a spell exists, it should therefore be used.” Hedric paused and his face went taut with old rage. “Rhodri’s disastrous experiments with the rite of assumption demonstrated the flaw in that argument long ago.” He snorted his opinion of his former pupil’s arrogance, but there was a glimmer of true regret behind his eyes—regret that such vast potential had been turned to such reckless and unethical pursuits.

  Athaya exchanged a sober glance with Jaren, history flashing vividly between them. In the year prior to her birth, the wizard Rhodri had befriended her father and persuaded him to assume the mantle of magic—powers that he was not born with, but that Rhodri promised could still be his by simply accepting them from a willing wizard. How could it be circumventing God’s will, he argued, if a spell to transfer power from one person to another existed in the world? It only took a clever wizard to set things right. Because of the king’s well-known interest in the Lorngeld and his wish to free them from the bonds of absolution, Rhodri knew he would not be able to resist such an offer. But in his conceit, too proud to admit that he might not know as much about magic as he imagined, Rhodri never revealed the dangers of the transference spell—dangers that had caused it to be forbidden among all ethical wizards for decades. Thus it was that years later Kelwyn’s false powers began to decay, and he rapidly plunged into madness—madness that ultimately led to his death, leaving a host of hopes and dreams unfulfilled.

  Hedric saw the troubled shadows in her eyes and swiftly reverted to his original subject. “From what I’ve read, Sarians rarely cast compulsion spells on other wizards—only on ‘the unblessed,’ as they rudely term the rest of humanity. Only in extreme circumstances would a Sarian inflict compulsion on another wizard. Fear of retribution, probably,” Hedric explained with a shrug. “I find it hard to believe that ethics are a priority with them.”

  Jaren concurred with a scowl. “Any group that picks its new l
eader by killing off the old one doesn’t have a whole lot going for it.”

  “It makes perfect sense to them, though,” Athaya added sullenly. “They think God intended magicians to rule the earth, and if that’s true, then the strongest magician is logically the most capable ruler since God obviously gave them more magic.”

  Master Hedric held up a crooked finger. “Basil’s army uncovered a bit of information about that. The Rite of Challenge.” Hedric rummaged among the scrolls and plucked one out of the pile. “Almost a century ago, a Reykan wizard found himself on Sare and wrote about his travels in a journal.” Hedric paused just long enough to toss a meaningful glance to Athaya. “This is only a partial copy, but it might shed some light on the subject. It says here that ‘once the witnesses have been assembled and the blood-wards have been cast,’ then any and all magic between the combatants is legal. In short, the rules are that there are no rules. The wizard to emerge from the blood-wards alive is the winner.”

  Athaya crinkled her brow. “Blood-wards… what are those?”

  “I’m not sure. Some sort of arena, I imagine, in which the competition can take place.”

  Jaren folded his arms across his chest and glared at the parchment in repugnance. “Whatever it is, Brandegarth doesn’t plan on having to use one again. If he becomes king of Caithe, the position of Sage is all but obsolete—and with it, the need for a Challenge.”

  “It would seem so. His followers interpret the prophecy to mean that he will rise from Sage to king. King of Caithe… at least for a start,” Hedric added ominously. He handed Athaya another sheet of parchment, this one badly yellowed with age. “That has been in the College archives for decades, but without any sort of context it was meaningless. Nobody knew what it was referring to until now.”

  Athaya scanned the document, conscious of a queasy feeling spreading through her belly. They were the exact words that the Sage had read to her over four months ago; the words of Dameronne of Crewe, who had founded the island cult and foreseen Athaya’s coming nearly two centuries before. “ ‘Our time will come,’ ” she read in a whisper, “ ‘when a woman blessed by both heaven and earth comes forth to lead the Lorngeld into glory. She will live among the high and the low and will wield powers unseen since the days of the ancients. She will obtain aid in her endeavor from an unexpected quarter, and in so doing will usher in a golden age of a great wizard king, and thus restore our people to glory. Until her coming, we wait in peace for our joyous return from exile.’ ”

  Athaya looked up, her face wry. “You think I’m the woman in this prophecy, too, don’t you?”

  “I’m certain of it,” Hedric replied without hesitation. “After all, I saw shades of your future myself. It’s the reason I sent Jaren to seek you out… oh, was it really two years ago? It seems like only yesterday.”

  Or a lifetime ago, Athaya added inwardly, knowing that she bore little resemblance to the unruly embittered girl that Jaren had encountered. Athaya grinned wryly. Jaren would likely claim that she was no less unruly now, but he had married her anyway, hadn’t he?

  She inspected the prophecy one last time. “ ‘Aid from an unexpected quarter’… that line isn’t very specific. It could refer to anything—the money Jaren’s father gave to us, the help Adam’s been offering, or even your presence here.” Then she laughed mirthlessly. “But aid from any quarter would be unexpected at the moment, thanks to the Sage.”

  Hedric reclaimed the paper and tucked it into a protective leather tube. “Whatever the ‘aid’ turns out to be, it’s one of the last things destined to happen before this ‘golden age’ commences.”

  “ ‘A golden age of a great wizard king,’ ” she quoted thoughtfully. “That’s not very specific either. It could be referring to the Sage, or to Mailen—even to Nicolas. There’s still an outside chance it could be Durek, but it’s extremely remote. He’s thirty now and magic almost never develops that late.”

  “Or it could refer to someone that doesn’t even exist yet. A son of yours and Jaren’s, for example,” Hedric added, with a hopeful tilt of his brow. “All we really know is that the next wizard to rule Caithe is said to be male, not female. That rules you out.”

  “Good,” Athaya replied emphatically. “I never wanted the job anyway.”

  She took a swallow of tea and grimaced at finding it had gone cold. “The prophecy may not state it implicitly,” she went on, pouring the rest of the offending liquid into a potted vine, “but the Sage is convinced that he is destined to be the wizard king. But if that’s true, then where is he? The reason I brought Nicolas here rather than take him back to Kaiburn was that I thought the Sage might come after him again. But it’s been four months now, and the Sage hasn’t even shown his face in Caithe.” After such a flagrant bid for power, the Sage’s continued absence scraped Athaya’s nerves raw. “Maybe something’s happened to him,” she suggested, knowing it was probably too much to wish for. “Maybe some other wizard has challenged him and has taken his place.”

  “Or maybe he’s just waiting for the right time to make a grand entrance,” Jaren added. His expression soured as he recalled his first and only meeting with the Sage; the man had been so cocksure that Athaya would ally with him against Durek that he’d been unpleasantly startled and embarrassed by her refusal. “He seems the type.”

  Adam Graylen selected that moment to join them in the lower chamber. “Shall we go to supper, friends?” He rested his magic book on the table, his place marked by a strip of red silk. “The earl’s table boasts fresh trout tonight.”

  Athaya shook her head as she rose to her feet. “Jaren and I won’t be staying. We’re going back to Kaiburn tonight.” Despite the earl’s generosity in allowing Nicolas to remain in Balmarre, Athaya knew that his Lordship was much more skittish when it came to herself and Jaren.

  “Tonight? But it will be dark in just a few hours.”

  Athaya smiled knowingly at him. “That won’t matter. We won’t be going home the same way we arrived.” Because of Hedric’s bulging satchels of books and scrolls, the three of them had chosen to ride to Belmarre rather than translocate there. And much as he would have loved to experience his former pupil’s talent, Hedric worried that if any of them were to drop one of his precious bundles during the jolt of passage, it could never be reclaimed from that mysterious and lethal between-realm. Now that the satchels were staying in Belmarre, Athaya and Jaren could travel home by magic, unencumbered.

  Adam winked his understanding. “Ah, I keep forgetting. But what of you, Hedric? I pray I can interest you in a meal at the earl’s table?”

  Hedric placed a bony hand atop his belly, which obediently rumbled its readiness. “You pray correctly.”

  “Why don’t you two go ahead, then?” They had done what they could for Nicolas this day and Athaya was fast growing as weary as Hedric. She leaned down and gave the Master a farewell peck on the cheek. “I’ll come back in a few weeks to check up on things.”

  “Don’t worry about us,” Hedric told her, easing her fears with a pat on the shoulder and an encouraging smile. “You’ve got a crusade to run.”

  “Run,” she repeated, rolling her eyes heavenward. “You mean salvage.”

  “Come now. Things haven’t gotten that bad, have they?”

  “No, not really,” she admitted. “But we’ve never been able to fully recover from the Sage’s blow. We still get new wizards at the camp every week, but not in the same numbers as before. A lot of people don’t trust me any more—not that many of them ever did—and more are sitting on fences waiting to see what happens. The Tribunal is coming down even harder on us—did I mention that five more Justices have been assigned to every shire?—and that only gives people more reason to think that I did try to bewitch Nicolas into killing Durek.” Athaya’s shoulders slumped despondently. “And things certainly won’t get any better now that Jon Lukin is not only Chief Justice of the Tribunal, but Archbishop of Delfarham as well. Did I tell you that Ventan died in April? Apparen
tly his bouts of indigestion were more serious than anyone realized. Durek nominated Lukin to take his place, and the Curia approved him on the first vote. In short,” Athaya finished with a sigh, “Caithe has been close to a stalemate since February—little has changed to push things definitively in one direction or the other.”

  Hedric frowned deeply. “It won’t be a stalemate for long, Athaya. The Sage will make his move eventually. And when he does, you must be ready.”

  “I just hope he does it soon,” she said, exasperated. “All this waiting is driving me out of my mind.”

  Once Adam and Hedric departed for the Great Hall to claim their supper, Athaya wrapped her arm tight around Jaren’s waist in preparation for their journey home. But it was more than love that kept him snug in her embrace; she had seen what it did to a man to slip from her grasp during the hurdle between one place and the next and never cared to witness such horror again. Whatever the between-place was, it was no place for human flesh; were one to stumble off the magic roads, the body was rent apart like carrion, leaving only the spirit behind.

  Athaya brushed aside those morbid thoughts and relaxed, conjuring the image of home in her mind. She saw the city of Kaiburn first, then set her vision north through the depths of the Forest of Else until she spied the once-abandoned monastery, now a makeshift magic school. And focusing even further, she saw each detail of her cozy, ramshackle room—the tattered curtains made of discarded cloaks, the table fashioned from an upturned ale barrel, and the straw pallet that served as her and Jaren’s marriage bed.

  When the image was clear in her mind’s eye, Athaya whispered the potent words of translocation. “Hinc libera me.”

  The jolt came instantly—expected, but still jarring despite all her experience, like missing a step at the bottom of the stairs. Next came the eerie sensation of being detached from her body for a fraction of time; a creature of consciousness alone. She sensed Jaren only as a presence at her side, a solid form within the dizzying array of colorful sights and chaotic sounds swirling around her, all of them passing too quickly to be identified.