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The Spellcaster's Heiress -- Chapter 14

 

 

By Christopher Leeson 


FROM DYAN'S JOURNAL
After Ceann fled from the scene of torture, I had followed  her, believing that she needed to talk.

"I hate this,” my former mistress said.   “Why won't he just answer the questions?"

I shook my head.   "He expects to be murdered, no matter what he says or does."

She looked into my eyes.  "And is he right?"

I shrugged.

Ceann looked at the moon, now sagging into the western skyline. "You're strong, like Rodin,” she said.

I sighed.  “If I'm as strong as Rodin, that's because that's who I am.”

“I know.   But things are different now.   There's something that seems so wrong about a woman torturer.”

I frowned.  “If you mean me, I haven't touched the fellow.”

“But you would, if you had to.   I can kill, and you know that I have killed, but...   I mean, causing as much pain as possible before...killing...makes me feel dirty.”

"You don't have to....”

She turned swiftly and stared into my face.  "Yes I do!" she insisted.   "If I ever stop feeling dirty about things like this, it will be the day that I die.”

I felt sorry for the girl.   I hadn't been able to protect her the expedience of staining her hands with enemy blood.   I had worried that performing homicide would change her, and I suppose that she had changed in some ways, but I hadn't stopped loving her.   “No,” I gently disagreed.   “You wouldn't die.”

“I don't mean that I'd die physically.  But I think something inside would die.   Weren't you different yourself, before you had to...?”

“I don't doubt that I was,” I answered with a shrug.   “Maybe that's a good thing.   Maybe you wouldn't have cared for the callow boy that I used to be.”

She shifted again and leaned back against the porch support.   “I wish that we had met back then, when we were two different people.   You a callow boy, and me, whatever I was....   I don't deserve to have any good things happen to me.   Maybe I've already lost myself, maybe there's no way to ever be made clean again.   Sometimes I think that my parents are looking down on me with shame.”  Ceann turned her face away, as if it were a mirror to her soul that I should not gaze into.

I sank back against the rail.  Sometimes I, too, missed the person -- the better person -- whom I once had been.   When had he slipped away?   I don't think it was during my guards training, nor when I had been learning at the feet of Cawdour.   It must have happened after I took the responsibility decide whom should live and whom should die.  

Suddenly, Ceann was speaking again.   "Will you kill...this one...even if he tells you what you want?"  As things stood, should our captive die, his blood would stain her hands as scarlet as the men's.

"I'm not sure," I said.   "Maybe he deserves it.   We don't know anything about him.”   I didn't like to kill honest soldiers, even if they served the enemy.

Ceann stepped away, becoming more remote, gazed out over the street.   "I know what you mean.  We all deserve to die, for something or other.   It is so easy to make ourselves undeserving to live."

"Not you."

She looked back at me.  "Myself as much as anyone else.   Rodin, aren't we always trying to do the right thing?   How can so many right actions become so wrong?  How did our road grow to be so cruel and dark?"

“Maybe it's not our fault,” I ventured.   “Maybe if we had the luxury of fighting decent people, we could stay decent, too.”

That was the root of it all.   I so much wanted it to be someone else's fault -- someone else's fault that I had become the person that my parents couldn't have recognized.

But if I could blame Harouck for my fall, who could Ceann blame?

Could she -- should she -- blame me?

* * * *

THE ROOT OF IT ALL

The Spellcaster's Heiress -- Chapter 13

FROM DYAN'S JOURNAL


I had long been fascinated by Cawdour's stories about the ancient race of gods that had dwelled upon the earth before it was totally given over to the province of Man. 

"What happened to the old gods, Sire?" I once inquired.  “If they are immortal, how could they vanish?  If they were supreme, who could have compelled them to go from this land to the Western Isles?”

"They still live, my boy,” he told me.  “They are not wholly supreme, but that is a complex matter.  They are with us more than we know, yet cannot be seen unless they wish it to be so.  Our ancient heroes were the sons of gods, but they no longer condescend to merge their divinity with our mortal clay.  But never think that they have lost interest in us, their earthly kin."

"How do they demonstrate this interest?”

Cawdour shook his sage head.  "Each of us has a guardian spirit, Rodin.  I have one myself.  My guide through life comes to me in dreams sometimes, or as a voice in my meditations, imparting wisdom.  Sometimes he approaches me in the trappings of a beast, or as a man or woman -- and when he does so, the god seems just as substantial as you or I."

"What is he then, a male or a female?"

"He is pure spirit, lad, and spirit has no sex.  A god may change his shape as easily as you or I change our clothing."

"Well, I'm quite sure that I've never met a god," I remarked.

"Without the Blood, one is rarely favored with a personal visitation, but they are near nonetheless.  That famous luck of yours must be a gift of their bestowing." 

"My luck?  I'm the most unlucky of men," I said.

"Everyone at your age believes that, my boy.  But keeping a young hellion out of trouble is a tall order, even for a god.  Our divine clansmen do much to protect us, as far as their rules allow, but there is a limit.  It is for Fate alone to degree when our final hour has come."

"Are you saying that the power that stands above even the gods is Fate?"

The spellcaster stroked his beard.  "So it is said."


* * * * *

UPON ON THE ROOFTOP

The Spellcaster's Heiress -- Chapter 12

FROM DYAN'S JOURNAL

I had met Ceann back before I assumed captaincy of the Fyana.  For years, that day I laid eyes on her had seemed like one of the the pivotal moments of my life.  Now, looking back, I was no longer sure what, exactly, that day had meant.

Ceann's despondency had cast my every assumption about the two of us into doubt.  It actually made me ask myself  if she had ever loved me, or even whether I really loved her.  Why should that be?  Our years together seemed to have lacked nothing, but had something actually been missing?  Why had she turned away from me in her sorrow, instead of toward me, as I would have wished her to do?  I did not know. 

That troubling conversation made me think.  What did I still feel about Ceann, really?  I loved being with her.  But was this, the thing I felt, the love of lovers? 

I knew -- or rather sensed in my gut -- that what we still had wasn't the all-consuming passion that poetry likes to build its air castles around.   Somewhere along the road, we two had started to treat one another as dear friends, not soul mates.  The realization of this had only slowly crept in.  It had come upon us subtly, like a mouse moving inside a wall.  I hadn't thought a great deal about the matter, considering it merely a passing mood that would soon right itself.  When I had been wounded, I had been so overwhelmed by Ceann's display of devotion that it had caused me to see her once more as the object of my celestial love.

But true love, as I envisioned it, true love was immortal; it could not fade away in the face of a person's day to day adversities.  What made me wonder whether my own love ran deep was my lack of intense grief at the possibility of losing her.  I almost would have preferred to be devastated.  Instead, I was thinking that, should she leave me, I could go on, albeit with a heavy heart.

Had I grown cold?  Had she?  If what I had had with Ceann never amounted to true love, then what was true love?  I was at a loss to know.  We loved each other; of that I had no doubt.  But could it be that not every kind of love, no matter how wonderful seeming, could make true lovers of friends. 

I tried to force myself to see what she must have been seeing.  Ceann had to have suffered a terrible shock when confronted by my change.  Whatever she had once believed lay ahead for the two of us, it would have crashed at that moment.  Her desired future, no matter how vaguely or how hopefully conceived, could no longer exist for her, not even as a remote possibility.

Wasn't it natural that a young woman, looking at her life in the long term, would to start to think about where she had come from, where she now was, and where she might wish to go?  I had to face the prospect that Ceann soon no longer be a part of my life.  She loved freedom, she hated Harouck, but that wasn't enough to keep her at my side.  The simple fact was that the vital thing that had enabled her to endure the strange, harsh life of the woodlands was her bond with Rodin.  Did she see, even more clearly than I could see, that Rodin was, in fact, gone, even though I was still resisting that idea strongly?

I couldn't fully get my mind around the current situation, so I thought back to the first day that I had met Ceann.  She might have lived as the commonplace daughter of a minor nobleman, except that her beauty had attracted Sir Fultur, an odious creature beholding to Harouck.  Her parents supported her rejection of the brute, but the man obviously had gone running for help from the chancellor.  The latter's idea of rule was to dictate every detail of every other person's life.  Success had made Harouck expect that his every whim ought to be flattered with instant obedience.  He presumably thought that all the Trybalids needed was a minim of arm-twisting to make them see reason.  But the man's touch could never be subtle.  His clerks obliged him by finding -- or inventing -- anomalies in the grant of title by which the Trybalid family had held its ancestral property rights. 

The lord took the challnge to court, but the regime obstructed the family's legal defense.  Forgeries and destruction of archival documents had been suspected by Lord Trybalid's attorneys, but the papers sought from the government were withheld.  When the lord's family still did not yield to his conjoling on behalf of Sir Fultur, his response was again in character.  A hundred armed militia men appeared at the family's townhouse in Moyarien and escorted Ceann, her parents, and her siblings into the public street.  Royal agents took possession of their country estate at the same time.

Sir Fultur visited the clan at a city inn and strongly intimated that he had such influence with the chancellor that he could intercede.  All Ceann had to do was set a date for their nuptials. The maid gave him no certain answer, but asked for more time while she consulted with her father. 

She didn't have to.  The girl's parents were now certain that their family had become a playing piece in a game of rogues.  They saw no future for their clan in a kingdom so debased.  For that reason, they urged Ceann to go with a servant who would hide her with a friend's family.   The Trybalids hoped that if Ceann were not with them, the chancellor's spies would cease their watch.  They intended to take the rest of the family out of the country, to a place where the lord held investments enough to save them from a mean and disgraceful existence.  Once secure, they would send loyal retainers back to Arannan to guide their daughter back to them.

At the friend's house, Ceann soon heard that the entire Trybalid family had been murdered early in their flight, by “bandits.”  As horrifying as that was, it was further made known that “any surviving family members” would be taken under the wing of chancellor and become his ward.  To make matters worse, the family friends whom the girl was staying with grew fearful in the face of what was obviously a political assassination.  A servant of the house came to warn her that she would soon be turned over to the chancellor's care.  That moment changed Ceann.  It hardened her, made her willing to take unladylike risks.  Thus is was that a gently-reared maiden, one not yet twenty, fled alone into the night.

Ceann surprised everyone, and most of all herself, by managing to live, mostly by theft.  She displayed a knack for burglary and found a rogue to teach her the cutpurse's art.  Among the people she met, some thought that the Fyana might agree to champion her.  So, with the help of someone who knew someone who knew someone who knew someone, word came to our band regarding the fugitive lady in the woodlands.

I had not been Fyana leader that far back, and the cautious man who then held that honor thought that there was nothing to be done and that it would be best to steer clear of the wayward girl.  But the rumors, as I received them, had described a minx of allure.  That I could believe, insofar as it had been the curse of beauty that had first aroused Sir Fultur's unwanted attentions.  As for myself, I had been finding the forest camps socially stifling, and was curious to meet this intriguing the Cutpurse Coleen.  She sounded like a heroine from the rousing old stories.

I sought out Ceann and met her at cottager's home; that moment was like magic for me.  The fascination I had already been feeling not only continued, it achieved an even firmer grip upon my heart.  One customarily won a fair lady by lending her assistance, and so, when the lady suggested killing Harouck and Sir Fultur, how could I say nay? 

Despite my zeal to win the maiden's favor, assassinating the chancellor was obviously too tall an order; everyone in the Fyana had wanted him dead without result.  But the loutish Sir Fultur was another story.  We learned his pattern of movements, his moments of vulnerability.  At last, we took him between taverns.  Even without his assumed complicity in the murders, Fultur's other notorious deeds as a henchman for Harouck merited execution.  Neither of us felt any need to question the man. What could be gained?  What if he had been able to, say, implicate the chancellor in murder?  What if he had been an actual eyewitness to Harouck's riding along with the false bandits and striking down the maiden's parents with his own blood-stained hands?  In a kingdom like ours, accusations against a man who stood mighty in power were worth nothing at all.

How had Arannan come to this?  When men hear that a beggar has killed and robbed, they are instantly incensed and howl for his life.  But when these same paragons of righteousness hear about even worse crimes committed by a lofty official, they do not react at all.  Cawdour had told me that such passivity was not the result of mere fear.  People are flawed creatures.  They have difficulty imagining that those who hold the levers of power, who are charged with punishing crime themselves, could, or even should, be held subject to that same law.  The higher men of government stood, the less the people wanted to hold them accountable.

The mighty are, in fact, looked upon as if they were gods, and gods can do no wrong.  If persons of rectitude think this way, imagine the cynicism of those who have never been aught but scoundrels, rascals who benefit handsomely from a lawless regime.  Such persons -- Sir Fultur being one -- were willing to sacrifice any number of other peoples' lives in order to keep their benefactors in power.

It is an age-old concern.  When those who govern do evil, who can hope to punish them?  Who but a daring assassin as any hope at all to exact justice against the fortress of their power?  King Cathmor, a mere cipher, would never act against his over-mighty servant, and, in fact, he lacked any real authority to do so.  It would have been certain doom for him to make some vain gesture in the cause of decency, which is an undervalued thing.  So, Harouck's life was safe.
Sir Fultur alone could be made to account for his deeds.  Ceann asked for my dagger, but I knew that killing a man changed a person, and I did not want my bandit girl to be changed, not by one wit.  So I did her a knightly service.  Some men slain by me I have deemed to have honored my blade.  But running Fultur through was like dispatching a rat; his blood did naught but befoul it.

Ceann was not much cheered.  What did it matter that some small beast had been hunted to the kill if the great beast still prospered?  But what was more immediately important to me was that Ceann should not go back to thievery.  For that reason, I supported her as best I could, which was an uneven and spotty venture.  Sometimes I was spent down to the very lint in my purse, and I worried that poverty would drive my lady to do something unwise.  About that time, our leader's death brought about my election to the captaincy. 

Rank has it privileges, but I did choose to bring the maid into the Fyana at once.  I had to show the band that their captain had a brain, not just emotion.  I got them used to Ceann by letting her accompany me when I gathered with rebel friends.  After I accepted the lass's offers to spy for the Fyana in places where a man could not easily go, she proved her worth.  Little by little, Ceann affirmed to one and all that she was not like the women whom the stalwarts of the Fyana hand known before.  She reminded them of the adventurous goddesses of myth.

At last, before I even realized it, my beloved had become as much a part of the band as any man in it.  When she started attending the gatherings, we wisely refrained from sharing a bed.  We were already known to be lovers, but we respected the moment when important matters needed to be discussed.  Flaunting my mistress would have affronted my comrades, who would themselves have liked to keep their women with them. 

In those days, Ceann and I took daft chances and survived.  It seemed as though our companionship was blessed.   It was a magic time and I thought that naught but the death of one of us could end our happiness.  I was wrong.  All too soon, time would teach me that, just like there are many types of love, there are many types of death. 

At Bronell's inn, the crisis had come and, apart from the obvious, I didn't know why.  If a maid can love a prince bewitched to be a forest cat, as might happen in the old stories, why couldn't Ceann love me now? 

On the other hand, what else should I expect?  Who could stay with such a creature as myself?  Stories are stories and life is life.  When I stand back and take a look at myself, I have to ask what can I possibly offer to anyone?  I see in the mirror a misfit, one that can scarcely hope to love or be loved again.  It seems that all that is left to me, before the book of my life closes, is the chance to work for vengeance.  And if vengeance can only come at the cost of my life, that is something that I am willing to accept.

But I want to go to the Western Isles only after I have arrayed everything that I possibly can in my favor before casting the dice.  It is not so much that I want to live, I simply believe that it would be too galling to fail.

* * * * *

The Opposite of Victory

Just Christopher For Now

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The Spellcaster's Heiress -- Chapter 11

By Christopher Leeson

FROM DYAN'S JOURNAL

My life was changing incrementally; every day I became more aware of my inexorably strengthening link to the world of magic.  I had never asked for such a life and having to accept it was a daunting prospect.  Did this reversal of fortune bode aught but ill, or did it offer valuable opportunities?  During that cold night in Moyarien, I was nowhere ready to answer such a question.

Looking back, I realized that Cawdour had lived long and well by magic, but he ultimately died at the hands of his enemies for having become a magician to be feared. 

Should I have pitied the man for his being cursed with magical skill?  Without magic, he would have died at least a century before I had ever come to know him.  And I had to ask myself, what would his life have been if he were born into to an ordinary life?  I could, perhaps, see Cawdour as an officeholder of some sort, possibly a magistrate striving for fairness and justice, or, even more likely , a pedagog at an academy, fashioning the young minds that were destined to inherit the future.
  
What would Cawdour have taught?  Alchemy?  Perhaps; I understood that most alchemists were not wizards, but scholars of well-schooled intellect.  Or, more likely still, Cawdour would have excelled as a philospher.  Everything that he cast his gaze upon, he seemed to see deeply, more than the visible surface showed.  I envied him for his acumen and wished that I could, one day, discipline myself do the same.

“Are magic and alchemy brothers,” I suddenly asked my patron one afternoon as we lunched in the roofless court at the heart of the ministerial palace.  “Or are the two studies entirely different?”

He nodded thoughtfully.  “Ahh, my boy.  That is an interesting question.  I would gauge that the difference between alchemy and magic is even greater than the difference between magic and sorcery.”

I blinked in surprise, but held steady.  He was playing with me, trying to make me ask, “What are the differences between magic and sorcery?”  He had, time and again, admonished me to focus, like an archer concentrating on a target, and thereby avoid irrelevancies.  Even so, the possibility that sorcery and magic were not the same fascinated me.  I wished to please my patron, however, and so refused to take the bait.

“Then the difference is small?” I ventured.

“No, not small.  I would say it is fundamental,” the mage replied.  “Think of magic as the application of a diverse body of knowledge that the best minds have compiled, knowledge regarding the forces that energize the world.    Alchemy, on the other hand, is a philosophy which focuses primarily on the properties of materials and how to change them into nobler substances.  It is, by comparison with magic, quite a much young discipline.”

He paused, as if expecting some sort of a response.  “In other words alchemy has grown from its origins as a subset of magic?” I offered.

“Not precisely.  Magic and alchemy together seek all wisdom.  But neither can discover it all.  One study goes where the other does not, and so both are needed in order to understand the entire working of the spheres.”

“Then you say they are compliments?  How do they comprise the whole?”

“Understand that two forces rule the universe –- what is chaotic, and what is orderly.  Man's spirit is an ember of the gods' spirit, and his will is like the will of a god, though on a diminutive scale.  The willful spirit is, by its very nature, chaotic.  It tries to channel the free energy, the original creative force, to is own end.  But while the gods at the beginning of the world sought for order, they used the power of chaos to achieve it, and whim follows no set rules.  What you must remember is that the primordial creative essence still exists and that the magician seeks to channel it, like the gods once did, to bend reality to his own desire.

“This is to say, though the gods created order, they did so by disorderly means.  Paradoxically, the world they forged could not exist unless it existed on the basis of established rules.  Rules were needed because the workings of the world is vast and the gods did not want to be bound to it, forced to create every new horse, or pig, or insect by a new act of will.  They instead established a dictum for how the world and the creatures in it would develop and interact.  That is, how animals would breed, how plants would grow, germinate, and flourish. 
 
"They made rules governing how the weather and the other elements would come together, like the working parts of a finely crafted machine.  The interacting properties of the world produce wonders, but they are wonders that follow an established pattern.  They operate so predictably that mankind has come to call them Nature and overlooks how wonderful the patterns is.  He considers Nature a given and sees no marvel in it.  It is the alchemist who knows better and studies all his life to ascertain what the rules of the world are, and he strives to bend these rules to his own ingenious ends –- for example, how to plate base metals with copper.”

“So the magician works by understanding chaos, and the alchemist by understanding order?”

“Approximately.  But any scholar, however learned, is doomed to go adrift if he obsessively embraces his own field of endeavor and ignores –- or, worse, derides –- the other field.  Both are valid, both have much to teach us, and together they comprise the team that pulls the cart of intellectual discovery.”

* * * * *

Custin the Magician

The Spellcaster's Heiress -- Chapter 10

 By Christopher Leeson

FROM DYAN'S JOURNAL

The old struggle continues; I see no end to it.  All that has changed is the manner of the fight.  Over the last few months, I've had to learn to use different weapons, and I'm still learning. 

There was a time when I lived in a different kind of world, when the Fyana would start upon a raid with no more than a kit of bread and a skin of wine.  After the first night, we very well might be dependent on the generously of supporters along the way for even our most basic provender.  Sometimes we had no recourse but to tighten our belts and chew a plug of bitterroot to slay the gnaw of our appetites, trusting that our excitement would give sufficient strength to our limbs at the crucial hour.

We experienced misery and fear in great quantity, but the most fearful in the land were not the Fyana but its supporters.   The loyal, generous people who opened their hearts and homes to us did so at an awful risk.  Too often we would learn that a yeoman's family had been massacred by a militia patrol for having given us aid.

Occasionally, the peril would come down on their heads even while the warrior was lodged with them.  More than one Fyana swordsman had laid down his life on the very threshold of his host.  And when the victorious militia tramped over his dying body, the family sheltering behind him would be put to the sword...

*****
The Speaker in the Shadows