Magic's Genesis- The Grey

by Rosaire Bushey

  Wynter was shaking in rage, her words bringing back memories he had long ago suppressed, digging into a history he had thought removed from the world.

  “You were a paid assassin, working for the king,” her information was as accurate as the memories buried in his head. “You lied to me, to your children, to everyone. A simple bowyer and fletcher, you said. Ha! How many have you killed, Wynter? Including myself and your son, how many…”

  “Stop!” The word exploded from Wynter’s mouth. He was near a small stream and when he shouted even the water seemed to stop for several moments before he heard the splashing again. The leaves in the trees around him rattled as if they had been shaken and there was silence. Tears that had not fallen on his own behalf for years came to him now as he stood as still as the trees surrounding him. But they were only tears. They did not rack his body and he did not sob because he could not move.

  It took several minutes for him to realize his paralysis was not a simple matter of the heady rush one sometimes gets in a fight. He was frozen on land in much the same way his son had been in the lake. Aside from blinking, he was immobile.

  Panic like he had never experienced gripped him. He felt his heart racing in his starving frame, and the blood rushing in his ears blotted out the sound of the water making its way over its narrow course, but he couldn’t turn his head to see it. He was sure if he were pushed, he would fall on his face, unable to stop. And so, he stood, because he had no choice. And his wife did not come back to taunt him. Eventually, animals returned to the clearing near the stream. First the birds who looked upon him with hesitation, not trusting this new thing. The small animals were next. Squirrels and rabbits, walked up and sniffed his boots.

  “If a bear or mountain cat comes along, I’m finished,” he said in a whisper to himself, thankful at least that he was able to speak. Still, he thought, what could he do? Yell for help? There was no one to hear him, and in his present state he was unlikely to fare well with strangers. Speaking out loud was dangerous and so he waited, and the day passed, and the sun started to fall. He was hungry, and he needed to vacate his breakfast. The pain of not being able to do so was very real. All pain was real, he found. A bird found pieces of cloth from his ragged clothing suitable for a nest and in the process of pilfering it from him, pecked him several times. Mosquitoes were starting to find him as the sun set. “I’m going to die standing up,” he thought. “Of all the ways one can die, this is one I’ve never thought of.” It was, he concluded, far less desirable than an arrow that left one dead before hitting the ground.

  As he stood he considered the conversation he’d had with his wife. She was right. He had enjoyed his work. It was difficult at first, as a young man so full of life to be staring down a shaft of wood at a stranger. At a rich man, or an old woman, an eldest son, or a faithless spouse. But after a while, one stopped thinking of them as people; stopped seeing the blood; stopped wondering what their families felt. After a while, one started to examine the target and practice degrees of precision; fine-tuning weapons to ensure a job done quickly and quietly. One became, professional. Work, whatever form it took, was something to be proud of and do well. Ask anyone in any kingdom and they would say so, he rationalized to himself. Work done well was a noble and honorable thing. Unless the work involved selectively killing people. Most people took exception to that.

  Wynter had no such softness. Early on, he would take jobs for next to nothing, or shoot peasants that no one would miss. At first, he found the homeless, or the drunks – those with no families. He found artists who would pay him to bring corpses to quiet places, so they could study muscles and bones. He found healers who would pass a few coins to likewise learn from the dead. Wynter watched them attentively as they used small, fine blades to cut into the corpses. He saw the organs they removed, and in this way learned exactly where to most effectively place his shots. As he began to be paid by kingdom officials, he earned extra money from the armory’s blacksmiths who used the dead to try new armor or weapons.

  He was very good at his job and because of it, society had benefited, not only from the artists and healers, but also from the removal of ‘ugly’ elements. That was how he rationalized his actions. That is why, when the target was a child, or a family, he was able to draw back his bowstring, or casually slip poison into a bucket of milk, without hesitation or interruption.

  And now, he stood in the early dusk, unable to move and wondering if his last moments on earth would be spent as dinner for some passing forest cat, or bear, or, and he shuddered internally at the thought, a small fox or raccoon who would take ages before finally eating the part of him that would result in his death.

  After a time, Wynter’s thoughts turned to the silence that enveloped him. The only voice in his head was his own. The trees were still, and the birds had stopped twittering. The realization caused him to focus all his attention on his ears, even going so far as to close his eyes to hear more clearly.

  “Hello there.”

  Wynter’s first instinct was to spin around to see who had come upon him, but he couldn’t. He considered speaking, but waited, hoping the voice would go away.

  “Are you all right?”

  It was a woman’s voice. An older woman by the sound of it. That meant there was lodging, and possibly a town within a day’s journey. The crunch of her steps was getting closer. Her voice was old, but her steps were firm and quick, even as she skirted to the side to avoid coming at him directly from the back. Eventually, he could see her shadow move between the trees. She had kept her distance and approached from the stream, with the setting sun behind her. She was smart. He was in full view, and he could make out nothing of her.

  “Blink if you can hear me.”

  “I can hear you.”

  She drew a long thin blade from her belt catching the fading sun on its polished edge. It was a weapon not a tool, that much was clear. She held it firmly, and Wynter appreciated at once that this lady was very familiar with how to use such a blade. Given his health, he doubted if he would have moved even if he could have.

  “What’s the matter with you, why don’t you move?”

  “I seem to be rooted to this exact spot.” The tone of his voice was one Wynter had used on many occasions. It was the voice he used when he’d been spotted before making a kill. It was a friendly voice. A voice that put people at ease and got them off their guard. The old woman was having none of it. She sniffed the air as if mocking his attempt at frivolity.

  She approached him and poked him with the blade and when he made no movement after she drew a drop of blood, she pushed him with her hand. He fell straight back and landed like a freshly cut tree.

  “Are you satisfied?” he asked as she stood over him, one eyebrow cocked skyward. “Well, I’ve never seen anything like this in all my years. I’m going to start a fire. You, well, you can just lay there for a bit.”

  She came back several minutes later and started a small fire before taking out a pack and mumbling to herself.

  “Interesting,” she said.

  “Who are you?” Wynter asked. He could see she was Eifen. He was familiar with the people but had seen few in his travels. The woman before him was as dark as night, but her eyes shown like gold and her ears, so different from those of the men of Wesolk, protruded about two fingers distance from the side of her head and moved backwards and forwards to catch all the sounds of the forest.

  “Well, it seems as if I should ask that question, but you beat me to it. My name is Haustis.

  NINE

  This woman, Haustis, was a dervish, Wynter thought. He had been laying like stone for an hour and she had been in constant motion. First, she made a fire, started a stew, and then she finally seemed to settle down when she took some oddments from a bag and began singing to them. She sang for a long time. She paced and walked around the fire in larger and larger circles, always singing, stopping only briefly to look at Wynter, or take a drink from a water skin. Wynter wanted to tell her t
o stop, but he had nothing else to do but watch. When she did stop, his relief was momentary as she put away her bag and turned her full attention toward him.

  “You are a troubled spirit. Perhaps more than one.” she said. Moving with a quick, efficient grace that belied the crow’s feet crowding her eyes and the light gray hairs that stood out on her top lip, stark against her dark skin. She ladled stew into a small wooden bowl and wafted the aroma to her nose. “Nothing like day-old meat for stew is there?” She smiled and arched both her eyebrows as if daring him to disagree. “So,” she started, holding her mouth open for several seconds to let the food cool before continuing to chew. “That’s hot. You’d think I’d be a better cook by now… I’m not going to be able to taste anything for days.”

  “Who are you?” Wynter’s voice inflected the second word more than he had planned. He didn’t like people to know he was curious. But, he decided, he didn’t like being paralyzed either.

  “I told you, I am Haustis.” She said nothing more as she ate, first with a wooden spoon and then after several minutes, she lifted the bowl to her mouth and shoveled the stew in with her fingers. When she was done she walked to the stream to clean her bowl before coming back and refilling her pack.

  “The big question, really, is who are you?” There was no denying the change in her voice. The woman who minutes earlier had seemed to be forgetful, mumbling over her stew and eating with her hands, turned serious. She crouched down so her knees were less than a foot from Wynter’s head, forcing him to go cross-eyed as he tried to see her face. Instead, all he saw was a knife blade resting on her leg, just above her knees, the hilt in her right hand. She was sitting on her heels, both legs tucked underneath her, and she stared straight through him.

  Wynter considered his options while they stared silently at one another. In Wynter’s life, hiding himself had usually resulted in the most effective, even pleasing outcomes. Even after giving up his life as an assassin, he hid that life from everyone else. Given his current physical condition, however, the situation presented candid truth as a reasonable option, and so he told her about his life in Thrushton, the plague, and even about his wife’s request to be put out of her misery and his son’s meaningless death.

  “Yes, that would explain the darkness that surrounds you,” she said finally, after considering his words for a time. “But that doesn’t explain the darkness inside you. You will soon recover your motion, Wynter,” Haustis said dismissively. The knife twitched ever so slightly in her hand. It would have been missed by anyone not forced to stare at the blade from mere inches away, but the twitch told Wynter his life was being considered.

  “Your spirits do not tell a noble story,” Haustis said after a lengthy pause. She didn’t relax her grip on the knife, Wynter noted, but her fingers shifted subtly, as if she were trying to decide how to gut the animal in front of her. Chest or throat. “You tell a story that, in its own way, is noble and sorrowful. You were asked to do cruelty to be kind, despite its effect on your own spirit. Many would consider that a warrior’s choice, to end the suffering of a brother on the field who is soon destined to fall to the animals or to his own misery. But your spirit… your spirit is divided. It pulls you and you follow.”

  Everything Haustis said had been lost on Wynter who fixated on her statement that he would regain his motion. Since those words crossed her lips, his defenses went up and he dismissed the notion that she might kill him. Surely, she would have done so already, he thought, and so he decided to try another tactic - belligerence.

  “What do you know of me, or my spirit, old woman Haustis?”

  More quickly than he thought possible, Haustis unfolded her legs and stood before him, leaving him staring at her boots. “You should show more respect to your elders, young man.”

  “I have no reason to respect you.”

  “Perhaps not, but a deer that fails to know its place in the herd will be set upon by the leader of the herd.” She moved slowly as she spoke until her feet were opposite his groin. “When that happens, the leader will often wound the youngster. Not so that he will respect the leader, but so that he will not endanger the herd.” Haustis continued to move around the prone form of Wynter until her toes contacted the back of his neck.

  “Are you going to injure me then, to keep this magnificent herd that surrounds me safe?” It was a bad move, and Wynter knew it, but bravado made as much sense as lying on the ground.

  Haustis paused and chuckled, lowering her head so that her dry lips were just above his ears. “I’m not going to hurt you, Wynter. I’ve spoken with the spirits and they have told me what I should do.” She paused again waiting for a response that Wynter didn’t provide. “The spirits tell me, as they rarely do, to send you to your wife so that your family can be together again, and you can be whole.”

  “Then, do it.”

  “Among my people, I am known as a wise woman,” Haustis went on, lowering her voice to a whisper and causing the hair on the back of Wynter’s neck to stand up. “But many years living in the wild and communing with the spirits has made me trust my own instincts perhaps a little too much, so I choose not to kill you.”

  “You don’t obey your spirits?”

  “The spirits do not control us. They guide us and bring us to the path we were meant to travel. I do not know what path you are meant to travel, Wynter. The spirits believe it to be a dark path. But knowing that, you can now choose a different route.”

  Between the frustration of not being able to move and the nonsense of the spirits, Wynter was losing his composure. He knew his path and he was content with it. His path was dark. He was embracing it as his only hope to regain his freedom from his past. “Why don’t you just kill me or leave me here?”

  “Because I know something you need to know.” However it was possible, Wynter didn’t know, but Haustis’ voice got so low he thought it may have entered directly into his head when she said, “I know why you cannot move.”

  Wynter’s response was stuck in his throat. How could she know this? “Why is that?”

  She considered his request as she completed the circle around his body and methodically folded herself back into the sitting position she had abandoned moments before. She once again readjusted her grip on her knife and this time brought it alongside her right leg, held to be ready to thrust straight forward into his lower gut – not a fast death, but an inevitable one, he knew. “Your darkness is very deep,” she said. “If I were a true friend of the earth, I would cut you open and leave you to the scavengers.”

  He studied her eyes and saw there the strength and conviction of her words. The shock of Haustis saying she knew why he was unable to move, coupled with her knowledge that he would regain his movement, had worn off. Wynter regained his mental balance and realized it was time to tread lightly. A wrong answer at this point and she would make good on her threat, with the spirits’ blessing – he had no doubt.

  “But, you’re in luck. My path tells me that for every time of darkness there must be a time of light and for every hill to climb, there is another that a free spirit may run down with joy. You, Wynter, represent a challenge to that balance.”

  Haustis pushed her blade point into the dry ground and reached up to her neck and removed a necklace he hadn’t noticed from his restricted vantage point. It looked to be made of woven hair, probably from a horse, and each end was capped. One end with bone and the other with a stone that could have been made of darkness itself.

  “Do you understand the concept of Grey, Wynter?”

  It wasn’t a rhetorical question and she waited patiently for an answer. He tried to shake his head and realized he still could not, so he clearly and quietly said, ‘no’ with as much humility as he could.

  “You understand good and evil, though, yes?”

  “Of course.”

  “Many people think of good here,” and she held out the necklace and offered him a view of the bone cap which was separated by a finger’s width from its opposite,
“and evil here.” She traced her hand along the length of the braided hair until she reached the black cap. “The Eifen have known for generations the truth; that is, that good and evil are more accurately understood as an incomplete circle, like this necklace, with the farthest reaches of evil and the farthest reaches of good nearly, but not quite, touching. The further you move from either good toward evil or evil toward good, that is the cloudy area where almost all things live. No one is wholly good, and no one is wholly evil. Even you, Wynter, are not entirely one or the other.”

  “What about the space between good and evil where the necklace is broken?”

  Haustis smiled. “That, Wynter, that is the Grey. That area where the most noble and the most evil, live side by side, each doing what they think is right; because they believe they have been blessed with answers the rest of us are too common, or simple, to understand.”

  “What if they do?”

  “They never do.” Haustis took the hilt of the knife and flipped the blade casually, probably unaware she was doing it. The point was now away from Wynter, but her fist was wrapped around the hilt and the blade’s edge slowly pivoted to lie parallel with his prone body. He knew she watched his eyes follow the weapon and he didn’t care. He couldn’t do anything about it, but he would be damned if he were to be killed by surprise.

  “The Grey is not for mortal men, Wynter. It is certainly not for the likes of you. It takes great fortitude and strength of character to live in The Grey and not be seduced by its lies.”

  “Are you calling me a coward?”

  “No. I’m calling you a man.”

  Wynter choked back curses that crossed his mind as he felt the flat of her blade land squarely on his testicles. “Should I call you not a man, then? Be careful, Wynter, for pride is a selfish bitch.”

  Haustis said the last with an inflection and raised eyebrow that made Wynter think she might have heard him the previous day, or somehow read his thoughts. Had she been following him? No, that was ridiculous, he thought. That had been in the wasted trench and there was no one around – except the woman with blue and green eyes.