The Awakened Mage (13 page)

Hooray.

A cleared throat behind him distracted his frowning attention. He turned.

“Is the staff dismissed then, Asher?” asked Lady Marnagh. “May I send them home?”

She’d never deferred to him like that before, not in all the time he’d known her. Yet he wasn’t the one who’d changed. Was this what he could expect from everybody now? Some of Gar’s kingly luster rubbed off on him? He nodded. “Might as well, m’lady. Ain’t no work to be done, and they’ll be wanting their families, most like.” “What about you?”

He shrugged. “Reckon I’ll be stayin’ on for a bit, till that crowd out there’s seen its fill and gone home. Might be something the king wants doing.”

“Yes, of course.” She hesitated, and fresh tears brimmed in her eyes. “Will you tell His High—His Majesty how sorry I am? How sorry we all are.”

“Aye.”

She brushed her fingertips across his sleeve. “Thank you. Good evening to you, Asher.”

“And you, Lady Marnagh.” . He watched as she gathered her staff together and herded them towards the rear doors. Outside, voices in the crowd swelled and crested like the restless, roaring ocean. Abruptly reminded, suddenly homesick, he turned on his heel and followed the tail end of Marnagh’s staff out of the Hall.

In the Hall stables where Cygnet had been left to browse on hay, Asher found Ballodair dozing in the box beside Cygnet, and a single stablehand polishing brass.

“You can go, Vohnie,” he said. “Since there ain’t no other horses to mind. I’ll wait here till His Majesty returns and see the horses come to no harm.”

Shy Vonnie nodded his thanks, lit the stable-yard lanterns against the creeping dusk and scarpered. Asher found an empty water bucket, upturned it and sat with his back braced against the wall between the two occupied stables. Passingly curious, Cygnet whuffled in his hair. Asher patted his nose. With no apples forthcoming the horse lost interest and withdrew to doze in the deep straw. Asher stretched out his legs, folded his hands in his lap and followed suit.

He woke some time later when somebody kicked him in the ankle. “Ow!” he said, and opened his eyes. It was dark and he was cold. “Where’s Gar?”

“He’s still out there,” said Dathne. She was buttoned

into a black woolen jacket and carried a cloth-covered basket in one gloved hand. “Hungry? I brought dinner.” He creaked to his feet. “What time is it?”

“Nearly half-seven.” She put down the basket and uncovered it. The air filled with the scent of hot cornbread; he sniffed appreciatively, suddenly ravenous.

As Dathne busied herself with the basket’s contents she added, “The square’s still straggled with people. They won’t go home till they’ve touched their new king, and he won’t send them away, even though he must be exhausted by now. People are singing his praises up street and down. If they were afraid before, or uncertain, they aren’t any more.”

He held out his hand and took the napkin-wrapped food she was offering. “How’d you know I was here?”

Her smile was brief and affectionate. “Where else would you be but nearby, waiting for him?”

He shrugged, his mouth too full for speaking. The corn-bread was soaked in butter; he nearly moaned aloud at the taste. She smiled again, enjoying his enjoyment, and took a dainty bite of fried chicken wing. He had melted butter running down his chin and inside his sleeve. He didn’t care. She’d thought of him and brought him dinner.

She said, ‘Tell me, if you can: how is Master Magician Durm? Really?”

“Not dead,” he replied, reaching for a plump seasoned drumstick. “Were you out in the square then? When Holze announced Gar king and he gave his pretty speech?”

“It was a pretty speech. It made a lot of people cry.”

He sucked butter and chicken fat from his fingers, watching her face. “You?”

“Would you like more?” she asked, and bent to the basket. “There’s plenty.”

He held out his napkin and she filled it again. Bloody woman. If she had cried, she’d never tell him. Did that mean she’d never be his, if she couldn’t even share that much of herself? He thought it might. Despair chilled him. He could feel his dreams and desires for her, for them, fading like mist in the morning. Once, just once, he wished he could know her true heart.

“What?” she said, staring.

He shook his head. “Nowt. This is good,” he answered, and filled his mouth with more hot sweet cornbread before he said something else. Something he could never take back and would go to his long-distant grave regretting.

“Everything’s going to change now,” she said, bending again to fuss with the basket. “Have you thought about that?”

Every bloody moment, waking and sleeping, since the horror of Salbert’s Eyrie. “A bit.”

“He’ll have no time for Olken administrating now. The WeatherWorking will swallow him alive, just like it swallows all of them.” She straightened. “I imagine he’ll ask you to take over for him for good. Olken Administrator Asher. Asher of Dorana, instead of Restharven.”

The words were a harpoon between his ribs. “You sound like bloody Matt,” he said, more roughly than he intended, or wanted. “So I’ll tell you what I told him. Dorana’s my home for now, not forever.”

“Fine. But while it is ‘for now,’ what are you going to do?” she demanded. “If the king asks you to serve him as his Olken Administrator, what will you say?”

He dropped his chewed chicken bone and the butterstained napkin into the basket. “What d’you reckon? I’ll say what I always say when he asks me to do things,” he muttered. “I’ll say yes.”

She reached out and touched his hand. Smiling now, temper forgotten. A shock blazed through him, lightning in a hot sky. “Don’t be so gloomy. There are worse ways to pass the time.”

“No, there ain’t,” he said, fighting the urge to take the fingers that had touched him and hold them captive till the end of time. ” ‘Cause it means I got to work hand in hand with that bloody ole Darran like he and I never wanted to kill each other every day from the first day we met. And since we did—we do—”

She laughed. “Oh dear. Sounds to me like you need an assistant. Somebody to save you from him … or him from you.”

“Of course I need a bloody assistant!” he said, glowering. Reaching again to the basket he helped himself to more hot cornbread, lukewarm now, and chewed savagely. “I’ve needed one ever since Gar got his magic and I been left to pick up the pieces of everything else.”

“Will I do?”

It took a lot of red-faced coughing and a few well-placed blows on his back to dislodge the cornbread that had gone down the wrong way. Eyes streaming, chest heaving, he stared at her.
“You
be my—ha! That’s very funny, Dath!”

Her smile was unsettling: cool and contained and faintly challenging. “It’s not a joke.”

He looked more closely and realized, no, it wasn’t. “What about your bookshop?”

She shrugged. “What about it? I can hire someone to sell books for me. I’ve been selling them myself for a long time now, Asher. Perhaps I’d like to do something different.”

He wiped his hands up and down the front of his breeches, heedless of grease stains. If she’d sprouted hooves and a tail he doubted he’d feel more surprised. Dathne as the Assistant Olken Administrator.
His
Assistant Olken Administrator. It was crazy. She’d want to run back to her books inside of a week. All that pettifogging detail and dealing with the guilds. She’d lose her temper and bite them on the nose at the first sign of contrariness…

“I handle people as much as I handle books, Asher,” she said, reading him. Drat her. “You’re not the only one who has to deal with the guilds, you know. And flibbertigibbet shillyshalliers who couldn’t make up their minds if their lives depended on it Plus I’m an excellent record keeper, and well-known in the City. Not to be immodest, but I’m well liked too. I could be very useful to you, in all sorts of ways.”

She meant it. She really was offering herself as bis assistant. “It ain’t great pay,” he warned her. “It’s long hours and lots of argy-bargy and aggravation and no matter how hard you try you almost never please everybody. And nobody thinks you got a life of your own, they think you’re there to listen to all their problems any hour of the night or day and then fix ‘em with a snap of your fingers. And when you can’t, or won’t, they pout and whinge and threaten to lay a complaint.”

She grinned. “Don’t you think I know all that? After a year of listening to you moaning into your ale down at the Goose, Asher, don’t you think I know exactly what this job entails?”

“And you still want to do it?” When she nodded, he threw up his hands. “See? You are mad.”

“If you don’t want me, you can say so. But don’t think I’m not serious.”

“What does Matt say?”

“What’s Matt got to do with it?”

He grimaced. “Seems to me you talk to him about practically everything. Seems to me every time I turn around there’s you and him nose to ear in a corner somewhere, whispering. Thought you’d’ve asked his opinion on this afore scarin’ the life out of me with it.”

“This has nothing to do with Matt,” she snapped. “It’s about you and me, and whether or not you want me as your assistant administrator. So. Do you?”

Did he want her? Barl save him, he wanted her so much he sometimes feared his bones would melt. The thought of working with her… of having her with him every day … hearing her voice, smelling her hair, watching her glide through a room, dividing the air like a beautiful knife. It meant he’d have all the time in the world, then, to learn that secret heart of hers. To coax it out of her close keeping and hold it in his careful hands.

“What?” she said as he cloaked intemperate desire in a fresh fit of coughing. “What’s wrong, are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” he said, and banged his chest. Grinned. _Every day… every day… _”Indigestion. Must be some-thin’ I ate.”

That made her laugh, and smack the side of his head. “Ungrateful lump! That’s the last time I—” And then she stopped, the smile vanishing. Sober, serious, she dropped to the ground in a deep curtsey. “Your Majesty.”

He spun about. Gar. Looking exhausted and exultant and subtly not himself. “Sir,” he said, and bowed.

“You waited,” said Gar.

“Course I bloody waited. You all right?”

Gar’s eyebrows lifted. “Shouldn’t I be?”

Dathne took a hesitant step forward. “Sir, if I may—if it’s not presumptuous—I’m sorry. Your family was deeply loved, and will be sorely missed. I know you’ll make a fine king, I don’t mean—it’s just—oh dear—”

It was the first time Asher had ever seen her tongue-tied. Disconcerted, he watched as Gar stepped close, kissed her gently on the cheek and said, “I know. Thank you, Dathne. Now you should go home. It’s late, and I have more work for Asher.”

She curtseyed again, then snatched up her basket. “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir. Asher, we’ll speak again soon?”

“Aye,” he said. “Soon.”

In silence they watched her hurry away. With his head still turned, Gar said, “Do you know the worst thing about all this?”

He folded his arms across his chest. “No.”

“Everyone is so sorry. In such pain. For me, for themselves. I tell you, I’ve been wept on so much tonight my tunic is soaked right through. They tell me how their hearts are broken, they tell me how wonderful my family was, they think they’re giving me comfort but what they really want is for me to comfort them.” Gar laughed softly. Ballodair stuck his head over the stable door and whickered. Crossing to him, Gar smoothed a tangle from his forelock and gently tugged one curving ear. “So I do. I hold them in my arms, even though I know Darran for one would faint at the thought, and I let them weep against my chest and tell me how hurt they are that my family is dead. And then I give them the kiss of peace and promise that no harm will come to them or their children now that I am king. And they smile at me, because that’s really what they came to hear, and they go back to their living family and someone else steps forward to take their place.”

“The
Doranen
do that?” he said, staring.

Gar’s sideways smile was derisive. “What do you think?”

After an uncomfortable pause, he cleared his throat. “You know I’m sorry, right?” Gar nodded. “Of course.”

Another pause. He inspected his shirt cuffs, wondering what Gar was. waiting for. “That were quite the show you gave them out there tonight.”

Gar shrugged. “I had to do something. They had to see I’m a cripple no longer. But sparkly lights and flower petals won’t hold them forever, Asher, Olken or Doranen. They believe in me now because they’re shocked and grieving and, as you say, I put on a convincing show. Unfortunately their belief won’t last long. Not without something more .. . tangible … to back it up.”

He pulled a face. Gar was right, drat it. “Ain’t much you can do about that.”

“On the contrary,” sajd Gar. “I can call rain. And not just here in Dorana, but all over the kingdom.”

He choked. “All over the
kingdom!
Are you mad? You ain’t never even called rain in a teacup!”

“Not in a teacup, no. In a test globe. The principle is the same, it’s just a question of degree.”

“Of degree? Have you lost your wits? Not even your da made it rain over an entire kingdom! You’ll kill yourself!

Why not wait a day or so? See if Durm comes round. If he does, you can ask him what—”

Gar’s look was dagger sharp. “I can’t afford to wait that long. I can’t afford to wait at all. If I don’t do something definitive the people will cease to believe in me and Lur will crumble into chaos and despair. Conroyd Jarralt will make his move and I’ll lose the crown my father spent his life serving. I’m calling rain, Asher. Tonight. And I want you with me when I do.”

“Me?”

“Who else?”

He stepped back a pace, aghast. “Anybody but me!” “You’ll be quite safe, I promise.” “You don’t know that! You ain’t never done this before!”

‘True,” Gar conceded after a lengthy silence. “But for all things there must be a first time. For me, for Weather-Working, tonight is that time. Asher, 1 can do this alone. I just don’t want to.”