The First Confessor (29 page)

Warm as it was, as she passed throngs of people Magda, like many women, kept the hood of her light cloak pulled up. People down in the city weren’t as likely to recognize her as were people up in the Keep, but she had been the wife of the First Wizard and as such it often surprised her how many people she’d never met recognized her.

With time working against her, she couldn’t afford delays. As much as she would like to, she couldn’t stop to give guidance to people on the oath to avoid the dream walkers, or convey news from up in the Keep. There were also those who hated Baraccus and might want to give her a piece of their mind, or worse.

Most people understood that surrender was suicide at best, slavery at worst. But not everyone could recognize the face of evil when it presented itself in the guise of salvation. She could hardly defend herself if a mob wanted to stone her because her husband had decided that they would go to war rather than surrender.

Panicked people didn’t listen to reason and didn’t want to hear the truth. Sympathizers frequently stirred up resentment against the authority of military officers, the council, and even the First Wizard for being unwilling to accept the peace that the emperor had offered. Peace, these people said, was as simple as letting Emperor Sulachan rule instead of the council. They wanted to believe, and so they did, that the rule of either was the same difference in their lives.

If other people wouldn’t accept the wisdom of their notion of “peace,” the advocates were all too willing to use violence to make their point. It struck Magda as ironic that those who professed to want peace the most were quickest to use bloodshed to try to get their way.

Magda pulled her cowl farther forward as a knot of people moved past her. Unshaven men leered at her shape, even though they could see little of it under the cloak. They knew only that she was a woman, and therefore must be worthy of ogling. When a passing group of women happened to get a glimpse inside her cowl, Magda’s short hair told them that she was a nobody. They didn’t give her a second look as they went on about their own business.

At a cross street, Magda peered around the corner of a two-story brick building that housed a tailor. On the other side of the street was an inn with a blue pig painted on the sign hanging over the door. The narrow street around the corner followed rolling, uneven ground. Despite how confining and confusing this part of the city of Aydindril was, she knew that this was the turn she needed to take.

Magda had searched under the southern rampart but had learned that he was no longer living there. As much as she needed to find him, she hadn’t wanted to bring undue attention to herself by asking too many questions. Those kind of questions would sooner or later get noticed.

Isidore’s murder had made Magda more than a little cautious. She had nearly been a victim, too. A dream walker was no longer in Magda’s mind, but she had no way of knowing if one might be in the mind of any person she talked to. A dream walker could no longer follow her through her own eyes, but she didn’t want them following her through the eyes of others.

So, she had gone to Tilly. Tilly had been horror-stricken over the death of Isidore. At first she blamed herself, believing that if she hadn’t shown Magda the way, then maybe none of it would have happened.

Magda had convinced the woman that she was wrong. They were fighting evil, and the evil was not Tilly’s doing. Magda had told her that Isidore herself said that they were warriors in this war. Evil would not rest. It had to be fought.

Tilly had been silent for a moment and then asked if she, too, was a warrior in this war. Magda told her that indeed she was, and in fact she had been more help than any of the council had been. Magda said that since no one else would help her find Isidore’s killer, she intended to do it herself, and to that end she again needed Tilly’s help.

It had taken a few days, but Tilly had discovered that the man whose help Magda sought was nowhere in the Keep. After several more days of discreet inquiry she had finally been able to learn where he lived. Magda was surprised that he would have moved out of the Keep and down into Aydindril, and frustrated that it had taken so long to find where he now lived. She knew that time to act was slipping away.

After glancing around to make sure that she wasn’t being followed, Magda turned up the quiet street. There were no shops, only houses, mostly multi-family structures. She could see that trees beyond the buildings shaded an alley. The houses and two-story dwellings were tightly packed together and in some places connected with common walls. Out back people planted gardens and laundry hung on lines. She could hear chickens and a hog or two. A crudely painted sign on one gate said eggs for sale.

After following the street over several rises, she came to the place that was set back beside a two-story stone building. There was a forked plum tree in the front of the little porch. At the side of the small place she could see down the narrow passageway between the buildings that the back was heavily shaded by oaks. She also saw the corner of a shed along with wood scraps and odd bits of metal neatly laid out beside it.

On the porch, in under a low overhang, Magda tucked her small bundle under an arm and knocked firmly on the simple plank door. After a moment, she heard someone coming through the house from the back. He stopped on the other side of the door.

“What is it?” he asked without opening the door.

“Are you Wizard Merritt?”

“I’m sorry but I can’t see anyone right now,” he said from the other side.

“This is important.”

“I told you, I can’t see anyone now. I’m busy working. Please be on your way.”

She could hear the footsteps heading away from the door toward the back of the house.

“Please, I need to see you,” Magda called to the door. “I come with news of Isidore.”

She heard his distant footsteps pause.

As she waited in silence, Magda wasn’t sure if he would come back and open the door or not. She wiped away a bead of sweat trickling down her temple as she idly watched a lacewing hunting for aphids on the lush green leaves and stems of a vine climbing one of the posts holding up the overhanging roof of the porch. At last she heard his footsteps returning.

The door opened enough that Magda could see that he was as imposing a figure as Isidore had said. After all Magda had heard about him—from Baraccus, from the men down in the Keep, from wizards she knew, and from Isidore—she found it was a somewhat strange feeling to finally see him in the flesh. After all the things said about him, he wasn’t exactly what she had pictured.

He was somehow more.

He was tall, and without a shirt it was plain to see that he was handsomely built. He was a good deal younger than Baraccus. In fact, he didn’t look much older than her—maybe a couple of years at most.

Magda had seen hundreds of wizards. The Keep was full of them. Merritt, especially without a shirt, didn’t look at all like her idea of what a wizard looked like.

His skin glistened with sweat and grimy smudges. There were a few streaks of soot on his face behind stray, wavy locks of light brown hair that was struck through with a lighter, sun-bleached, blondish brown. Disheveled as it was, it added to his rugged looks.

Somehow, impossibly, the sweat and the soot made him look all the better.

But it was his hazel eyes cast with a shade of green that caught her breath. It felt as if he was looking right into her soul, weighing it for worth. At the same time, she felt that she could see in his eyes that he was open about who he was, without pretense or deception.

Though they contained the same basic trait, the eyes of the gifted tended to appear quite different to her. In some people, such as warriors, the glimmer of the gift that she saw had a menacing aspect to it. In healers it had a softer, more gentle appearance. The aspect of the gift in Baraccus’s eyes had been passionately wise, resolute, formidable.

Just as Isidore had said, Magda, too, could see both sincerity and competence in Merritt’s eyes.

Yet unlike Isidore, Magda could also see the gift.

In Merritt’s eyes, the gift was different from anything she had seen in her life. It was a look that was at once breathtaking and dangerous, but at the same time softened with an undertone of warmth. Under his intent gaze, she had to remind herself to let her breath out.

On second consideration, she decided he did indeed look to her very much like a wizard.

“What news have you of Isidore?”

His voice matched the look of him perfectly. It almost felt as if her whole being vibrated in harmony with the deep, clear tone of it. Magda swallowed and forced herself to speak.

“Before I can say anything else, I must ask you to swear an oath.”

His brow drew down. “An oath?”

“That’s right. I need you to first swear an oath of loyalty to Lord Rahl, which will protect your mind from dream walkers. Only in that way can I know that we are talking in confidence.”

He did the oddest thing, then.

He smiled.

It was an easy, warm smile that betrayed a shade of private amusement.

“A bold, if not highly strange request from such a lovely stranger at my door. We haven’t even been properly introduced.”

Magda pushed the cowl back off her head. “I am Magda Searus.”

The smile vanished in a heartbeat. “Magda Searus?” His face turned red. “Wife of First Wizard Baraccus? That Magda Searus?”

“Yes.”

The frown revisited his expression. “I was there, among all the people at the ceremony the day your husband’s remains were purified in the funeral pyre. I saw you there that day, in the distance. You had long hair.”

“Well, with Baraccus dead, the council wanted it cut off. They were quite insistent about letting the world know that without Baraccus I am a nobody. Elder Cadell, personally, saw to cutting it.”

He dipped his head respectfully. “I’m sorry about the loss of your husband, Lady Searus. Baraccus was a truly great man.”

“Thank you.”

He stared into her eyes a long moment, head still bowed, then remembered himself and straightened. “Please,” he said as his face reddened again, “wait there a moment, will you?”

He abruptly shut the door.

Magda realized, then, what else was different about him from most men. The entire time he had been in the doorway, he had looked into her eyes, his gaze wandering no farther than to her hair. The gazes of most men invariably wandered elsewhere. Merritt hadn’t done that, even though the black dress she was wearing under her light cloak did tend to reveal her shape to advantage.

Magda heard him stumble over something inside that then rolled across the floorboards. There was a thud as something heavy hit the floor. Then, it sounded like a chair fell over. A few more things clattered when they fell. It went silent inside the house for a time.

Magda glanced up and down the street to see if anyone else was hearing all the noise or paying attention to the visitor at his door. She saw a woman across the narrow street and up a ways come out and shake a rug. She folded it over and arm and went back in without noticing Magda in the shadows of the porch. Through small gaps in a screening lilac bush, Magda could see a few people in the distance talking, but they were too far away to be able to see her standing behind the greenery.

The door finally opened wide. Merritt was still tucking in a dark shirt. The long, wavy locks of his light brown hair had been hastily brushed back, revealing that his face had been hurriedly wiped clean.

“Sorry to make you stand out there, Lady Searus.” His face flushed again. “I’m afraid that I was out back working on a few things and—” He paused, apparently afraid that he was beginning to ramble. He made himself start over as he lifted a hand out in invitation. “Please, won’t you come in?”

As Magda stepped through the doorway, she could see an overturned chair and a small statue lying on its side. The place was small, with the strangest things stacked everywhere. Strange metal objects, not unlike the things she had seen Baraccus make, sat all around the room, making it difficult to tell what she had heard fall to the floor and what had already been there.

As odd as everything was, there was a strange kind of order to it all. Books stood in tall columns in places at the side of the room. A wicker couch also held books, but they were lying open and piled one atop another, as if to keep a place marked. A variety of small tables held mounds of scrolls between candles, bottles, boxes, and bones.

A small, tightly rolled scroll sticking out of a shelf had a variety of small clay figures collected all around the end of it. As far as she could tell, they were all floating around the end of the scroll with nothing holding them up. It was an inexplicable and disorienting sight.

There were also profoundly beautiful statues standing in random places around the room, not as if they had been placed to be admired, but simply, it appeared, put wherever there had been an empty spot at the time. There was a soldier about to unsheathe a sword carved from a gray stone, there were several smaller statues of men in robes carved from pale butternut wood, and, carved from pure white marble, there were several statues of the most graceful women Magda had ever seen.

Draped over the table beyond the overturned chair was a large square of red velvet. The tabletop was the only place in the entire room that wasn’t cluttered. A single gleaming sword sat in the middle on a raised portion of the red velvet.

Magda noticed an ornate gold and silver scabbard attached to a baldric lying on the floor. The scabbard was so striking that it could only belong with the sword.

Merritt righted the chair, then hung the baldric and its scabbard over the back before he hurriedly removed books from the wicker couch. “Sorry for the mess. I don’t ordinarily live in such clutter. It’s just that this place isn’t as roomy as my place at the Keep. Please, Lady Searus, won’t you have a seat?” He looked around. “Tea. I should make tea.”

“No, none for me, thank you,” she said as she made her way to the wicker couch.