The Awakened Mage (50 page)

Ignoring the little slug’s snide tone, the temerity of his scolding, he continued to frown at the note. It was signed
Conroyd the First
and its contents betrayed both character and knowledge.
To quote yourself to yourself: “I disobey, and others suffer.” Heed my emissary’s demand without delay.

It was Conroyd’s handwriting, no question of that. And yet;.. and yet…

“Well?” said Willer, grown even fatter with arrogance and pride. “Must I tell His Majesty you kept me waiting? Fetch the Orb at once!”

“Ignore him, Darran,” said Gar as his secretary choked on a breathless imprecation. “He’s a cur dog yapping from the shelter of his master’s shadow.”

“Sir,” said Darran, and subsided, still bristling.

The Weather Orb was here, hidden safely in his bedchamber. He’d intended to take it back to Durm’s apartments then changed his mind in case the Weather Magics transfer to Asher had failed, or faded, and they needed to perform it again. In case he found his cure and was able to resume his role as WeatherWorker.

One thought unnecessary, the other forlorn. He retrieved Barl’s gift from its hiding place at the bottom of his blanket box and held it out. “Durm’s books and papers are unboxed and scattered. I’ll need time to ready them for—the King.”

Willer took the Orb’s box gingerly, as though it were alive and may bite him. “One hour. House Jarralt servants will come to collect them. Be advised—don’t make them wait.”

Gar smiled thinly. “And when you give King Conroyd the Orb, Willer, give him this message with it: he would do well to reconsider keeping Asher in a cage. Such unkindness sets a tone for his reign that some might find disconcerting.”

“You are the only one who thinks so,” retorted Willer. “Didn’t Darran tell you? They’re lining up ten-deep in the Square to get their look at the traitor from Restharven and pelt him with the refuse from their dinner tables and byres.”

A lifetime of controlling his feelings in public kept his face from revealing any pain. Contempt, though; contempt he’d reveal, and gladly. “And I suppose you couldn’t wait to join in, could you? You must feel very proud.”

Willer flushed, lifted his twice-doubled chin. “Durm’s books and papers in one hour … or deal with His Majesty’s wrath.”

“I’m so sorry, sir,” said Darran once Willer had departed. “I’d have kept him out if I—”

Gar held out Conroyd’s note. “What do you make of this?”

Baffled, Darran took it. Read it. “I… I’m not sure I know what—”

“It’s Conroyd’s penmanship. After two years on the Privy Council I’d know it anywhere. So should you by now. But…” He shook his head. “Don’t you think there’s something
odd
about it?”

Darran examined the note again. “I’m sorry, sir. No.” He frowned. “Perhaps it’s a trifle unsteady—”

“You do see it, don’t you?” Gar said. “It’s Conroyd’s hand … and yet it’s not. As though …” And then he stopped. The idea was too fantastical for words.

“Yes, sir?” Darran prompted. “As though what?”

He took back the note. “As though someone else’s hand was laid over Conroyd’s as he held the pen to write.”

“Oh,” said Darran. “I see. Yes. Well. That would be very odd, sir.”

“Never mind,” he said, and crumpled the paper. “I’m imagining things. Darran, I need your help.”

“Certainly, sir,” said Darran. He sounded relieved. “Doing what?”

“Durm’s books and journals. I want to go through them one last time before I have to give them over to Conroyd. I don’t know. It’s a slim chance but I keep thinking I might have
missed
it.”

“Missed what, sir?”

He took a deep breath. This secret was a luxury he could no longer afford. “As he was dying, Durm told me he’d found a diary. Barl’s diary. He seemed to think it was important. I want to find it. I want to keep it out of Conroyd’s hands.”

Darran’s eyes were opened wide. “Sir! If it’s true— why, it might change everything!”

“That’s what I’m hoping for,” he said, and pulled a face. “Praying for. Durm called the diary our only hope and its
my
hope he was right. He warned me against Conroyd. Somehow I think he knew disaster was brewing. But we’ve only got an hour. Breakfast will have to wait, I’m afraid. Ah your hard cooking …”

“Breakfast can burn, sir, for all I care,” said Darran firmly. “Let’s get at those books.”

When Dathne woke in the trundle bed Veira had made up for her, she saw through the partly closed sitting room curtains that the sun had crawled high in the sky. Around her, the cottage felt uninhabited. As she blinked muzzily, trying to arrange her frothy thoughts, she heard the ringing crack of an axe blade against wood coming from somewhere outside.

After using the chamber pot and dragging on fresh clothes, she poked about the rest of the cottage, just in case her feelings had fooled her and Veira was there to talk to after all.

But no. The cottage was empty of both Veira and Matt, so she let herself outside through the kitchen door and into the cottage’s tree-fringed back yard. Where Matt was chopping firewood. He glanced at her. Not angrily, but not in a friendly way either. “Veira’s taken the pigs for a walk,” he said, lining up a fresh round of timber on the block. “There’s

no saying how long she’ll be gone. I left oatmush on the hob for you.”

“I smelled it,” she said, and perched herself on a handy tree stump. The thought of food was revolting. Her belly was greasy, rolling with nausea. “Maybe later.” She kicked her heels against the stump; the three black and white chickens scratching the grass nearby took frightened offense and scattered, squawking.

He nodded.

Drenched with regrets she watched him continue his chopping, distant and entirely self-contained. The man she’d known in Dorana was vanished. In his place stood this stranger with hooded eyes and a grim mouth and no exasperated pleasure in her company. In the midmorning tight the chasm between them looked no easier to cross than it had last night in Veira’s kitchen.

Before drifting off to sleep she’d replayed over and over in her mind the sequence of events that had brought them to this time and place. The decisions she’d made, the choices she’d discarded in favor of silence and subterfuge.

Try as she might she’d not been able to imagine herself doing anything differently. And whether that meant that as Jervale’s Heir she’d been right and was guided by Prophecy, or as her plain self she’d been nothing but a stubborn slumskumbledy wench, she had no idea at all.

In heavy silence the haphazard pile of wood dwindled as Matt reduced the rough lumps of seasoned timber to tidy logs and kindling, his horseman’s hands gripped tight around the axe handle, his weathered face severe with concentration. The useful stack of firewood grew taller and wider and still he did not speak, and neither did she.

Her heart and head were aching; she wasn’t sure she’d ever been so sorrowed or felt so helpless in all her life.

Because it hurt so much to look at this shuttered and newly unknowable man she looked at her surroundings instead. A goodly garden had been created around the back of the cottage. There was a vegetable patch sprouting carrots and tomatoes and suchlike. Three scraggly apple trees. A riotous herb bed and a hodgepodge of flowers. A clovery lawn patched the spaces between cottage and cultivation. Veira’s pony cropped grass in a small paddock attached to a tumbledown stable off to the left, and on the right was a mildly odorous pigpen. Next to that the henhouse, its jaunty red paint faded and peeling. It was all very .. . rural.

Aside from the sound of Matt’s wood-chopping, the sharp calls of hidden birds and the answering cackles of Veira’s hens, the forest hush was absolute. Unsettling, after the steady humming bustle of the City. But there was a kind of peace in it too. A balm to her lacerated soul. On any other morning she’d have reveled in the solitude and thought of this interlude as a holiday, embracing it with passion.

But all her passion had died. She’d killed it, with arrogance and pride and a refusal to consider she might be wrong. That Matt could be right. That being Jervale’s Heir did not make her infallible.

She wanted to tell him that. To say she was sorry and beg his forgiveness. But his shuttered face defeated her. Made her more tongue-tied, and unfairly angry. So she sat unspeaking and watched him cut wood.

Eventually there was none left Matt buried the axe blade in the chopping block with one mighty swing and said, sweating, “Could be you were right after all.”

For a moment she could only look at him, slumguzzled into silence. Then she found her meager voice and said, uncertainly, “What do you mean?”

He inspected his palms for blisters. Found one and popped it, frowning. “I mean about not telling Asher the truth.”

Asher.
Images from the scrying basin swam across her inner eye. She felt her heart constrict and her mouth suck dry. “How so?”

“What you saw was done to him… the way that Jarralt hurt him …”

She thrust away the bloodshed and the haunting echo of screams. “What about it? How can that mean I was right?”

Matt looked elsewhere, into the distance of tangled trees. “Who’s to say what a man can know and not talk of when that kind of thing’s being done to him? With all the will in the world, if he’d known who he is and what we’re about, it’s more likely than not he’d have told it to that poxy Doranen bastard and then where would we be?”

She shook her head. “No. Asher’s strong. He’d never have broken.”

“You can’t know that for sure. So the way things fell out it’s best you held your tongue and made me hold mine.” He glanced at her. “That’s the only thing you were right about, mind. As for the rest of it…” Faint color tinged his face. “The frittering …”

“What about it?” she said tiredly, feeling her own face heat. “You deny Asher’s charge that you’re jealous ‘cause he’s known me and you haven’t, and never will. But how can I believe you? You act like a man feeling robbed.”

For some time he didn’t answer. Then he shrugged. Glanced at her again then let his gaze slide sideways into the woods. “Believe me, Dathne, if ever once I loved you I got over it soon enough.”

And that hurt, not because she wanted him to love her, at least not like that, but because there was a hardness in him now that before this moment she’d only ever noticed in herself. She’d done that to him, and wasn’t proud to learn it.

“I do love him, Matt,” she said, worrying at a pulled thread in the fabric stretched over her knee. Needing him to believe her. “It’s not an excuse for what I did, but I suppose it is a reason.”

He nodded. “I suppose.”

“I’m not sure
why
I love him, mind. The purpose behind it, I mean, not the bits and pieces of him that make me soft round the edges. And there must be a purpose, Matt. Mustn’t there? Prophecy wouldn’t have thrown us together for so long and in such a way that we fell in love if there wasn’t a purpose?”

“You’re asking the wrong man. I’ve never much understood Prophecy or its workings.”

“And yet you’ve followed it all your life. Followed
me.
Why?”

He gave her a painful smile. “Why does a dog chase rabbits, Dathne? Because it’s in his nature.”

In all the years she’d known him she’d never heard him sound so defeated. “We can’t afford to doubt now, Matt. We’ve come too far. Risked too much, and sacrificed more. We must see this through to the end no matter how bitter it might be.”

“I know that,” he said tersely. “I’m here, aren’t I?”

She longed to touch him, but was afraid he’d rebuff her. “What I did with Asher… it was never a trivial thing. I meant what I said about us being sworn in marriage, Barlsman or no Barlsman. His heart is mine, Matt, and mine is his, no matter what.”

“I know,” he said. “If I thought it’d make a difference, I’d say I wished you happy.”

She felt tears well, burning her tired eyes. Never before last night had she cried in front of Matt. It had been a matter of pride and, she thought, necessity. But such things seemed pointless now so she let them fall. “It makes a difference,” she whispered, fisting her fingers in the folds of her skirt. “Never think it doesn’t make a difference.”

“Good,” he said. “I’m glad for that.”

“I can’t believe he has their magic,” she said. “He made it snow, right under my roof. How can an Olken do that?”

Matt shook his head. “I don’t know. Unless .. .”

“Unless what?”

“Could he have Doranen blood in him?”

The idea was outrageous. “How? Our peoples don’t mix, it’s forbidden!”

That made Matt snort. “Olken magic’s forbidden, Dathne, yet here we are. Aren’t you the one who says all things are possible with Prophecy?”

“Yes, but…” She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. He has their magic and I didn’t feel it. How could I not feel it? It’s my business to know the Innocent Mage better than he knows himself! And now because I’ve failed him he might die!”

Matt moved to her then, and folded her in his strong, sheltering arms. He smelled of sweat and leather, his jerkin warm beneath her cheek as he held her against his chest. “You mustn’t lose faith, Dath. We have to trust in Prophecy.”

“I do,” she sobbed. “I do. Oh, Matt, I’m sorry I sent you away. I’m sorry I’ve always been harsh with you, keeping you distant. I thought it was best. I thought I was protecting you.”

“I know that,” he said, and rested his cheek on her unruly, unbound hair. “I always knew. And even though it irked me sometimes I never begrudged you your snappishness. It’s a sore burden you’ve been carrying all these years, Dath, and my only true sorrow was in knowing I couldn’t carry more of it for you.”

“You carried a lot, Matt. You’ll never know how much. There were times I thought I could never keep going. I’d have despaired if you hadn’t been with me, encouraging. I owe you so much. I owe you my sanity and I never once told you. I’m sorry.”

“Hush now, hush,” he chided, rocking her gently. “You’re Jervale’s Heir, you’ve a task laid on you like nobody else. Especially now, in the Final Days.” .

She pulled away a little and looked up into his face. “I may be the Heir but you’re the Heir’s conscience, her wisdom and her strength. Is there anything you can tell me, Matt? Is there anything you’ve felt that can show me a way out of this mess we’re in?” She let out a long and shuddering breath. “That I’ve put us in?”