The Magician of Hoad (4 page)

“He’s had a vision,” she said. “I told you! He’s one of those.”

And she peered at him, interested in his fear but untouched by it. This time the chorus was made up of Traveler voices, all agreeing with Azelma.

“Anna,” said Great-Great-Aunt Jen to Heriot’s mother. “What do you think?”

“Don’t ask her, ask
him
! He’s the only one who can tell you!” Azelma said. And she flashed a triumphant smile down at Heriot.

“Ask him!” repeated the voices. “Yes! Come on, Heriot! Pull yourself together. Why? What happened? What did you see?”

Heriot pushed himself up on his elbows and stared at Azelma.

“Come on! It’s not an illness!” Azelma said impatiently. “More likely a talent!” Heriot spoke, but he hardly recognized his own voice, it was so roughened by the force of his earlier screaming.

“I saw a man in black standing right behind Carron,” he said. “Face blacked out—hands, too. But his hair was red, and braided tight.” Everyone waited critically for him to continue. “He was still as stone—and Carron was talking on and on.…”

“I’ll bet!” muttered Radley.

“And then the redheaded one smiled and… and stabbed Carron, and Carron just—his eyes filled with blood, all his teeth were…” Heriot waved his hand. “When he smiled there was blood round every tooth but he kept on talking.…”

“He would, too!” Radley agreed.

There was an outburst of comment, as every Tarbas and every Traveler had something to say.

“Oh, come on! Don’t you recognize what the boy’s just told you?” Azelma’s voice sounded above the others.

Great-Great-Aunt Jen came round from behind him to look directly into his face. When she spoke next it was in a voice he had never heard her use before. “All in black?” she asked him. “With braided hair?”

Heriot hesitated, touching his swelling lip gingerly with the back of his hand. “It was red, his hair,” he said at last. “Not ginger! Red! Done up like a plaited cap. Dyed.”

Great-Great-Aunt Jen stepped back from him as if he had tried to spit poison at her. “Yes,” she said. “I’ve heard they dye it that color.”

She turned to Heriot’s mother. “Anna, your son appears to have seen one of the King’s Assassins giving Carron what they call the King’s Mercy. Mostly they have their faces painted white, but for assassinations they blacken up.”

For once the family fell silent. They huddled together a little, while at the end of the table, the Travelers drew slightly apart from them. Great-Great-Aunt Jen went on.

“I’ve heard stories about those Assassins—Wellwishers, people call them, giving a good name to a wicked shape. It mightn’t mean anything. Perhaps it’s nothing but his old illness after all, but with the pain turned into a bad dream.”

“Maybe Carron’s talk brought it on,” suggested Nesbit. “He’s been sounding off about the King. Boys’ talk! Silly stuff.”

“Get Heriot to bed,” said Great-Great-Aunt Jen. “Then we’ll talk about it.”

“Maybe he’s jealous that I’m the one who’s going to Diamond,” shouted Carron, as Radley carried Heriot out of the room. “Maybe he’s jealous because I’m moving on. Well, it’ll take more than Heriot’s babbling to frighten me.”

“But how could he get a picture of a King’s Assassin if he didn’t even know they existed?” Azelma was asking.

Radley carried Heriot upstairs, his mother coming up behind them, to the narrow room Heriot had shared first with Radley until Radley married, and then with Carron, until Carron grew too important to share a room with a younger boy.

“It’s probably a pinch of the old people in you somewhere,” Radley told him, helping him take off his shirt. “It showed up in Ma’s family from time to time. Didn’t it?” He looked over at their mother.

“In the Tarbas family too!” she replied. “I’ve always suspected Wish had it.”

“Wish?” Radley protested. “Not Wish! He’s straight enough!”

“Maybe,” she agreed. “After all, he’s a farmer, and they don’t make farmers—the ones who are taken that way. They beat themselves against the world, trying to get deeper and deeper into it. They don’t settle.”

Heriot was shocked. They were speaking together as if he couldn’t hear them—as if he wasn’t there.

“I
am
settled,” he cried. “I’m settled here.”

His mother started and looked down at him a little guiltily.

“Of course you are. I was just running on,” she said.

***

In the end Heriot slept and dreamed riotous, unwieldy dreams that slid away from him as the rain roared all night on the roof above his head. By the time he woke, it was early morning, and watery sunlight was slanting onto the floor. In spite of the storm the Travelers had moved on, and the farm was just the farm, a map that seemed to be inscribed on a parchment, a parchment that just happened to match up with Heriot’s skin.

Heriot wasn’t really ill, in spite of the two waking nightmares that had come at him so quickly, one smashing in on top of the other. He lay in bed, feeling as consumed as cold ashes, trying to will himself into being his earlier self once more. The whole family knew about his vision of death and blood, but the moments on the causeway, the dissolving of that black window in his head and the feeling that some alternative self had crept out from behind it to work its way into him in some different way—all this he kept secret. He didn’t want to add to the rumor of his own strangeness. And besides, he felt that if he didn’t share the memory, it might somehow shrivel and die away. Deciding this, he felt suddenly hopeful, as if, by some wonderful chance, he might be allowed to live through recent days again and do everything right the second time round.

He watched the ceiling of his room lighten still further, then got up, dressed himself, and went downstairs, intending
to enjoy everyday life as completely as he could… intending to take it in and use it to drive the strangeness out.

***

For Heriot there was to be no return to everyday life. His place in the world had been part of a compact that was now dissolved. He knew it at once when he stepped into the noisy kitchen, and an unaccustomed silence fell.

Heriot stared around at the women and children, at his great-great-aunt, his sister Baba, at Ashet (Nesbit’s wife) with her twin daughters, at Radley’s Nella holding her baby against her shoulder, and at Joan, Wish’s wife, moving to stand between Heriot and her little son.

“You think I’d hurt him?” Heriot shouted.

“I know it’s not your fault,” she answered nervously, “but if you see anything bad, I don’t want him to know about it.” Heriot stared from one to the other.

“Well, come on, Heriot,” said Ashet, who had always liked him. “Get yourself something to eat. There’s a bit of porridge left and some buttermilk.”

He sat in the homely kitchen. Masks of beasts and men carved on an ancient bit of wall looked out over his head, and below was a long inscription in a language so old that nobody could understand it anymore.

His family talked around him and over his head, but now Heriot was excluded when glances were exchanged, left outside of the magical flashing of eye to eye by which the family constantly kept in touch with itself. And later in the evening, when the Tarbas men came home and they all came together for dinner, there was a space around Heriot that no one seemed willing, or even able, to share with him.

Slowly, over the next few days of advances and retreats, he came to understand that he was no longer a simple, gardening brother. He had become someone through whom a prophetic beast might bleat or bray, making pronouncements of doom. At the kindest, he was now a presence with which even his family could no longer feel easy. Nesbit, Ashet, and Joan accepted him without complaint, as an injury they could not heal and must endure, protecting themselves by looking around him as often as they could. He began to imagine that, as he walked by, their flesh actually crept, and he tried to spare them by looking away. On the other hand, Wish began to single him out, but this only made him nervous, for Wish seemed nervous too, struggling to say something without knowing quite what it was he had to say. Even Radley’s warmth was touched with sadness, as if he were mourning a brother whose place Heriot had unfairly taken.

The only person in his entire family who seemed at ease with him was Baba, who was quite happy to share her kitchen work, such as peeling old potatoes, skimming cream, and churning butter. Her teasing and complaining was one of the few familiar things that did not change, so, for a while, he welcomed it and kneeled beside her in the kitchen, helping her chop onions for the soup pot that constantly simmered on the back of the fire bed. Heriot did most of the chopping, and Baba did all the talking.

“Well, I think you’re lucky,” she told him. “You’ll get away from here. They’ll do something… put you to work in Diamond, perhaps, though they’re not letting Carron go, not until he learns to talk a bit more carefully. But you—
you’ll get clean away. Something’s happened to you, but nothing will ever happen to me.”

The despair in her voice astonished him.

“Everything in the world’s going on out there,” she cried, waving her hand at the kitchen door and the view of the hills beyond, “and I’m stuck here. It’s not fair.”

Heriot realized his difference had set Baba free to talk about her own differences, as if they must now share a view of the world. But Baba wanted desperately to leave the very place Heriot wanted to get back to.

After a while the kitchen and the dairy and her pacing dissatisfaction worried him too much, and he took to wandering in the fields, edged out but unwilling to move away from the farm that contained all the warmth, all the food, all the companionship he knew. He would get up in the morning, cut bread and cheese, and walk up onto hillsides where sheep grazed. There he would hide himself in a copse or under a hedge, staring intently down into the grass or out to the blue tracery of mountains barely distinguishable from the sky. His silences became longer and deeper and his visits to the house more furtive.

He took food up to his room, where his mother sometimes joined him. She talked very little, but she had always been cool. Besides, Heriot knew, without resentment, that Radley, her oldest and simplest child, had always been her favorite, while he would always be linked in her mind with the death of his father.

He took to plaiting his long, thick hair in fine braids, just as the old traveling men sometimes did. He’d always admired this ancient style, and after all, he had plenty of
time these days. Out in the hills he sometimes pressed himself desperately against the earth’s rough skin, trying to force it to acknowledge him as its true child, commanding it to feed ease back into him. He felt acknowledgment, but of a strange, dry kind somehow beyond comfort. There was to be no simple way back.

It was quite by accident that he was at home one gray day in early summer when Lord Glass, the King’s Devisor, rode into the courtyard, searching for a Magician.

Late one afternoon, on the very day that Heriot Tarbas felt the black window in his head dissolve and the huge, possessing fragment of himself sweep out and over him, Linnet of Hagen, her mother, her nurse, her father’s marshal, and a small guard of campaigners came riding out of a winding pass and onto the edge of a high plain set around with mountains.

There, far in the distance, Linnet could make out the southernmost boundary of Hoad trembling with cold, yet bleeding fire out of its mountains, and between her party and those distant fires lay a battlefield. Fourteen days earlier, the seven counties of Hoad, including her own county, Hagen, had fought their eastern enemies, the Hosts of the Dannorad, to a standstill, and now the noble families were coming together to celebrate the victory and to witness the beginning of what was already being called the King’s Peace. History was being made, and they were to be part of it.

Linnet and her party made their way along a track that wound between mounds of broken wheels and weapons,
strips of shredded canvas, piles of dirt flung up to make temporary, frantic defenses… debris of the last battle. Among the trenches and mounds Linnet saw a drifting population of shabby men and women picking over fragments, searching for anything valuable that might have been left by the first wave of searchers, and she wondered, with a sort of captivated horror, just how it would feel to come unexpectedly on a little piece of someone… an eye staring up at the sky or a hand with a wedding ring on it.

As they rode toward the city of tents, another party came riding to meet them, bathed in the rich light of the late afternoon. Linnet made out a pointed helmet lined with blond fur, and a robe of golden velvet embroidered with roses set in delicate medallions of black. For the first time in her life, she was seeing the King of Hoad, and she thought the man beside him must be Carlyon, the Hero of Hoad. His handsome face sat squarely above a finely pleated, almost womanish, white silk shirt; a long white coat fell in swooping folds from his huge shoulders. It seemed that Linnet and her mother were to be greeted by both the King and the Hero, twin emblems of the land, both more myths than men. But Linnet looked eagerly past these legends, searching for her own father among the men who followed the King. His face, harsh yet smiling, made her forget all others, so that later, when she tried to recall the welcome, all she could remember was a glittering shape, golden but blurred, riding beside a shining white one. Later, she was to find herself half believing the King’s clothes might ride and rule on their own, without anyone inside.

Then Linnet stared at two young men, neither of whom
looked back at her with any interest whatever. The handsome one, being the taller of the two, seemed as if he must also be the older, but he was so good-looking he had to be Prince Luce, which meant he was a year younger than the slighter, round-faced, fair brother beside him, Betony Hoad, the King’s heir. Linnet knew she was considered a possible bride for Luce, so it was Luce she studied most intently, until her nurse, Lila, nudged her. She realized that, just when she most wanted to be regal, she had been gazing and gaping like a simple girl who had never seen such glory before.