The Well-Favored Man

by Elizabeth Willey

  “No. I still get it sometimes. It hurts. It didn’t used to.”

  “Hurts?” He looked at me with sympathetic interest.

  “I am forgetting, Prospero. I do not want to forget her. She will slip out of our memories and soon we will not quite remember her voice, or the way she gestured when she talked, or how it felt to dance with her.” I tapped my foot and looked away. Tears sprang to my eyes. I ordered them back.

  Prospero inhaled slowly. “Ah, damn,” he sighed. “Yes, that is how it goes, at first. And later as hard time grinds on, you gaze on her likeness frozen in paint or stone, and you say, ‘I love you still,’ yet ’tis no longer clear why you love her, or why you ever loved her, and would you really love her still were she here today? As well love a snowflake or a blade of grass. The likenesses we treasure in early mourning are but soulless paint and stone. Oblivion claims us all, and forgetfulness seals our fate. There is no difference.

  “Methinks Gaston left because he couldn’t bear it. We stay because we must: heavy burden it is. I was more than half inclined to smash this all and blow the place back to the primordial Elements. I should have. It would be a cleaner end than this, this slow tormentous dissolution of the heart.”

  I thought of her husband. Gaston, Gaston, what must your grief be like if ours still twisted in our guts? Our love was bound by blood, yours by choice. On the first day of New Year’s, the Day of Reflection, she kissed you and said, Prospero and Dewar and Gwydion and I are going to investigate a peculiarity in the Catacombs. And perhaps you kissed her again and said, Be careful, love, to which she would tenderly reply Always, for you. She was careful, too. It was the rest of us who were careless.

  I shivered and stood, went to the Spring and looked in, and took my leave to hurry back to my rooms to loathe myself in decent privacy. For I knew better than Prospero: she was haunting us. She was there, trapped within the Spring, and she could only be freed if one of us offered himself in her stead.

  8

  WHEN I WAS MYSELF AGAIN, I had a whisky and then another and splashed water on my face. My eyes were red-rimmed, making the irises brilliant in comparison. Outside it was dark already and fireworks were booming over the Wye, flowers of colored light for Freia.

  A Summoning commenced to embrace me and then faded. “Cut it out, Mother,” I said aloud. “If you want to talk, do it.”

  I straightened and stared back at myself in the looking glass.

  When that had most recently happened, I had been on top of Mount Longview with Gemnamnon. Both times. Before that, in my study, reading, and before that—many times over the years.

  But that it came now, when I was thinking unhappily about my part in Mother’s death and continuance in that state, seemed to connect it to the occasional feeling I had that she was about the place still. Freia’s haunting was nothing ridiculous, you must understand, no lights and footsteps, nor moving furniture and sourceless music. Simply a feeling that if I turned around, she’d be in the room. Or I might think I heard her voice. That had happened rather more often. Mostly, I might feel an imminent Summoning that never came: a feeling of sourceless attention, of unexpressed intention.

  But when it had happened on Longview, it had apparently been the Sylph Ariel I’d sensed; I hadn’t been thinking of Mother at all …

  I stood for a moment, my thoughts skipping like a stone over half-a-dozen diverse topics, and then I ran to Dewar’s rooms, below my own. The door was locked, but it popped open for me easily with an elementary spell. He had never worried much about security here in his trusted family’s stronghold.

  Lighting a thick white almond-scented candle, I went to his workbench, which was a bit tougher, and finally managed to open it up and searched for his neat index of spells. It was an outside chance only that he would have left it, a remote possibility … Eureka! I found the boxes, names of spells and descriptions tidily filed alphabetically, and looked through them. Yes, here it was. Dewar was a careful fellow.

  Elementals: A Summoning of Elementals in the manner of my Lord Father Prince Prospero with particular note of Sylphs, read the card, and it indicated a certain notebook, title and page: a copy of one of Prospero’s grimoires. Prospero had destroyed his books, but by then Dewar had already gone through his collection and copied down a small part of the spells. This was one of them.

  I turned to the dusty bookshelves and by the light of my candle scanned them, up and down the ladder, looking for the book in which this spell was written.

  Hunting and hunting, I peered and brushed at cobwebs and several times got shocks and nips from warding spells still set. I found nothing of the book I wanted.

  Conceivably, Dewar could have left it in his rooms in Landuc, but I happened to know, because he had once told me, that he had never left anything of the sort in Landuc because he didn’t trust anyone there.

  Regrettably, I had never had much interest in the Elementals. Prospero had seemed to disapprove of the idea of binding one as a familiar, and Dewar hadn’t had one, and somehow it had just seemed like something Not Done and I had concentrated on other areas of sorcery … Regrets, regrets. For if I had, odds were I’d have copied that and similar spells myself.

  I put the card files away (keeping the Sylph one for myself for some unarticulated reason) put his desk back in order, locked up again and left. I hadn’t been in there in a long time. It too was haunted, but differently.

  I sat down in my rooms and doodled on my workbench blotter. Virgil watched me from one of the shelves overhead. My other owl, Brahms, dozed on his perch. He was getting old. He’d always been just a pet, not a familiar as Virgil was.

  Now I thought I knew two things: that Dewar had somehow bound Ariel to him anew and that Dewar was using Ariel now to keep an eye on me and mine. Which was kind of him, but I would prefer that, if he were really interested in what was going on, he simply move back home or call.

  Sylphs, Sylphs, Elementals. I cudgelled my brain and wrote the few keywords that fell out on the blotter. Something about binding, unbinding. It was as difficult to loose them as to bind them. Was it not? And they were the ideal servants, especially when willing. Ariel had served Prospero willingly. They had had a good working relationship, one might say.

  An Elemental had the ability to be anywhere in its Element, if not instantly then very rapidly. Salamanders were swiftest, but being destructive made bad familiars; Sylphs were nearly as fast, Sprites third and the slow Sammeads last.

  The Spring, the Well, and the Stone were also Elemental in nature—Water, Fire, Stone of course.

  For the first time in my life, I wondered what connection the Elementals could have with the source manifestations. I recalled that Dewar had often denied vigorously that any of the great Sources had native intelligence, yet when the conversation was not about that subject directly he had always appeared to consider them as living beings with opinions, thoughts, and tempers. Furthermore, it is customary in Phesaotois to address the Stone directly and indirectly as “Ancient One” or “Most Ancient One” with plenty of deferential respect. The Stone was spoken of as a living being might be.

  My thoughts slowed down and began stumbling.

  Mother had been destroyed by the Elemental Spring, the Source of Argylle. More or less. How much of her might remain? I had thought of her as “haunting” the place. I knew that something had survived her immolation in the unrestrained power of the Spring. How long could she persist? Might she be gone now? I had not felt her this year. Exactly what happened to a person who died as she had, anyway? Did she somehow become an Elemental? Was it possible?

  I puzzled over this until I had a headache, and then I sighed and stopped. Virgil made soft friendly sounds at me while I paced aimlessly around my apartment, ending up at my desk in the study. I poured myself another whisky. This clandestine Elemental binding worried me. What was Dewar about? Why had he not told me? I would not have betrayed his trust, he knew that. I had kept other confidences.

  Considering the ci
rcumstances under which he had left Argylle, I suspected his secrecy had something to do with Freia and that horrible New Year’s Day. Dewar was an intense man; he kept a façade of glacial cool over emotions as strong and inexorable as tides. In the state of mind he had been in, he might have vowed anything—undertaken anything.

  Dewar, plainly having just completed the major preparations for a complex and far-sending spell of Passage, stood over the Spring below the Citadel in the midst of his spell’s golden web. His eyes were closed. His face wore an expression of deep concentration over the haggard lines of new grief. There was a bruise on his jaw where Prospero had hit him to knock him unconscious earlier.

  The Spring had slain Freia hours before. Dewar had always had a morbid streak.

  “Dewar?” I asked.

  He glared at me. “Be very quiet. Be sensitive. Open your ears. Close your eyes.”

  I folded my arms and bowed my head, following his instructions. Ten minutes later I looked up slowly and met my tutor’s gaze through the rippling light. “Something is here.” It was clearer, stronger than the subtle draught of wrongness Tython had made in the Spring.

  “Something. Yes.”

  “Why did you come down here?” I asked suddenly. He could have opened the Way from his workroom.

  “It suited my purpose. You are too easily distracted, Gwydion,” he said coldly.

  I closed my eyes again and listened. The feeling was as if someone were about to speak, but it went on and on, an unexpressed thought hanging in the air.

  Dewar broke the silence again. “It’s much stronger as one works the Spring.”

  Another ten minutes passed. Dewar was wholly involved with the Spring, Summoning I realized, an intricate and powerful command whose object I could not guess. I watched, said nothing more.

  “Freia, I still love you,” my uncle whispered suddenly. “I would follow you … Where shall I find you now? Where?”

  A wave of light rose at the perimeter of the Spring, a roseate glow in the darkness, and rushed inward toward the center, discharging around Dewar like a fountain, its splash of energy dissipating along the lines of the web that supported and insulated him. My hair stirred with the power and the feeling of present personality was stronger: it felt as though she were standing in front of me, ready to speak.

  “Damn it,” cried Dewar. “If you can take her away, you can bring her back! Do it! I ask you by the Gryphon, by the Source of the World, by Stone and Sea and Sun and Sky!”

  Another shower shot up, a silent brilliant tower twelve feet tall, and fell back, rose again roaring loud as an ocean’s worth of breakers with a strange high keening note in its spectrum.

  “You don’t need her as much as I do!” Dewar shouted over the storm, nearly invisible inside the fountain of sparks and polychromatic light.

  I shuddered, covering my ears against the roar, and hid my face, expecting him to perish just as she had.

  “What good is she to you?” he screamed.

  There was a silence so abrupt my ears rang and I thought I hallucinated: “Dewar, stop shouting. I’m here.”

  He gasped. Opening my eyes, I felt faint. My mother, in the dusty red dress and Dewar’s blue-green cloak which she had been wearing when she disappeared in our Spring, stood next to Dewar in the web of the spell he had constructed over the Spring, which had become dark and perfectly tranquil as usual.

  For an insane, joyous moment, I thought: it was a mistake. All a mistake. All’s right again.

  “It is not simple,” she said very gently.

  He reached for her. “It has to be. It’s all the same, isn’t it? Matter converts to energy, energy to matter …”

  She shook her head and seemed to recede before he could touch her. “People have said I was the very soul of the realm, dear heart. I was not. Tython’s insinuation into the Spring meant that he was. I have displaced him. If I leave, he may find a way to return.”

  “We got along well enough before Dazhur stirred Tython up and polluted the Spring with her piddling amateurism,” Dewar said.

  She looked at him: one of her intense soul-peeling looks.

  “I’m sorry about the business with Luneté,” he added suddenly, a note of bitterness in his voice, looking down. “I was … a shit.”

  Freia shook her head slightly, smiling but sad. “I understand.”

  “You always do. Everything. It’s not fair. Were you really surprised by this?”

  “This what?”

  “The Spring … consuming you.”

  “I think the same thing happened to Panurgus and possibly to Primas. I’m not certain of that, but … I think it did. I’m new to the trade.”

  “What trade might that be, Freia?”

  She looked puzzled. “I am learning that still. It is here, being here … The view’s grand. I can see everything, all Argylle, if I wish.” She paused and her face changed, her graceful brows drawing together. “Gaston—”

  “He needs you. You’re his life. You can’t run out on us, Freia!”

  “On you.”

  “So I’m selfish.”

  She tipped her head on one side and looked at him, smiling. “Not so very,” she said.

  “Do we need a soul for Argylle? Right away? In the Spring? We didn’t have one before! What’s wrong with having it walk around with you?” he cried, anguished.

  “Dewar.” Her voice was a caress, a lover’s murmur.

  “Don’t say my name!” He turned away from her abruptly and pounded his fist in his hand.

  She was silent a moment. “But I know I am the right one for this.”

  My stars, I thought. I knew that tone. She was wavering. I sat transfixed on the iron bench and watched her, luminous creature of blood-red and sea-green. Dewar spun back to her.

  “What if I followed you, jumped into the Spring? Right now? What would happen?” he shouted.

  Frightened, she cried, “Don’t! No! I don’t know!”

  “At the least, I would die, true?”

  “That’s what we’re always told—”

  Dewar snarled, “Panurgus was a notorious liar. You’re not dead. You’re transformed.”

  Freia spread her ghostly hands. “Death is a transformation. Let us not start on that. We have agreed to disagree, long ago.”

  “Why does the Spring need a soul, Freia?”

  “Something must … inform it. To … make it … persist.”

  “The Spring should already have a soul: Father’s. He opened it—we say he made it, gave himself to it; he founded the City. Why should it need another? Why you and not him?”

  “Just making it is not sufficient. Tython was able to invade our Spring because there was nothing to ward it.” She seemed to think or listen for a moment, head tipped again. “It is said in Landuc that the Emperor … is the World.”

  “The idea of identifying the ruler with the realm is standard. Avril’s still running around making a nuisance of himself.”

  “Panurgus … is not … but he is, still.” Freia spoke so softly I had to strain to catch the words.

  “Do you mean to say that he has become part of Landuc’s Well? That he really is Landuc, is Pheyarcet, as the Well is?”

  “Yes …” She nodded slowly. “I can … hear him.”

  “What is he saying?” Dewar’s hysteria had calmed, subjugated by his curiosity.

  “I … think I shan’t say. It is rather coarse.”

  “Flaming old bastard. All literally true.”

  She laughed, a sweet sound that echoed through the colonnaded darkness, her hands going up to cover her mouth.

  “So why can you not continue to be part of the Spring and still have a body, the way the Emperor does? And why you and not Prospero? He started this!”

  Freia was clearly struggling, trying to understand it herself as much as to explain it to her brother. “Prospero … He has already … done all that he could do. He … his nature is not … it does not allow him to … he is too volatile.”


  “And your nature is stable. Yes. Were we right about transfiguration, that time with Esclados? Is that what has happened, but on the Elemental level—to the Spring in your case, the Well in Panurgus’?”

  “A different kind of being. Yes.”

  “You’ve made the transition successfully?” He spoke with professional briskness.

  “I am still … making it. Every minute … it changes, I change. Together.” She gestured, lines that hung in the air.

  “So you could still be unchanged. Restored!” His hopeful note tore at my heart.

  “I don’t know.”

  They stared at one another, her chin tipped up to regard him from her lesser height, he with hands on hips.

  “Ask Panurgus. We need you more than he does. Horny old lecher. I bet—”

  “Dewar!” She started laughing again, interrupting his rage.

  “Think about it, sister! Think. And do you tell Panurgus, if he will not teach you to reverse this, that he shall not tenant the Well of Fire much longer.” Dewar snarled the last sentence.

  My blood froze. A deep stillness fell in the Catacombs.

  “You wouldn’t …” she said in a hushed voice. “Dewar?”

  “I would. And he can think about this, too. I will go in unprotected as you did. No ritual, no preliminaries, no buffering. Displace him, if my guess is correct. Or possibly, given my nature, I’ll destroy the Well. He can wonder which will happen. It is of no consequence to me.”

  The silence grew heavier.

  “You wouldn’t …” she whispered again, becoming less substantial.

  “What have I to lose?” he half-shrieked.

  Freia looked at him. She darkened and was less transparent again. She searched his face.

  “You see I’m sincere.” Dewar folded his arms and regarded her defiantly, wild-eyed, quivering with tension.

  She whispered, “I can see it.” She listened again. “Panurgus says, there is a price.”

  “Nothing worth having is free. I know that.”

  “Someone has to …” her voice trailed away.

  “Whoa. Ransom your soul with his? Take your place? Provide a body?”