“Well, not exactly. I hadn’t been fully … incorporated into the Battlemaster then; I dominated it. The process of assimilation takes a very long time. During the War I could use the Battlemaster’s knowledge, but it did not have mine. Indeed it never does. Full subsumption is suicide—there have been a few of those, but I’m not going to be one. Splitting and running like this is, ah, unprecedented. Of course they’re furious, but I was bored, bored, bored.” She snorted with disgust.
“You’ll never be bored with Dewar around,” I said. “He seems to attract things.”
Her wicked smile came back, and she glanced at the varnished, closed hatch. “Yes. I knew another guy like that. He was a good friend of Freia’s. Always something happening, often not of his doing, but sometimes he’d stir it up just for fun.” She opened a capsule and sniffed, then tasted the contents. “Salicylic acid and B-complex. Whoa. And caffeine, among other things.”
Overhead, Dewar laughed.
We looked up. “It’s Freia,” Thiorn said. “By the way, is she going to abdicate or what?”
“You mean from Argylle … As far as she’s concerned, she says, she’s done. If I want to take a holiday and roam, she’ll substitute for me, but I’m the Lord of Argylle.”
“Big responsibility.”
I shrugged. “Not really. It runs itself, mostly, now. I expect that she’ll stay away for a good while, so that it is very clear that she is not ruling. People will have trouble getting used to the idea.”
“You don’t, though.”
“No. I’ve been brought up for this, I think.” I found cheese and bread in the breadbox and made a sandwich. “Although Dewar brought me up as much as my parents,” I added, chewing.
“He mentioned that you were his student.”
“Years and years. That was fun. But it always was clear that my place was in Argylle.”
“Nice to know where you fit in,” she said.
Dewar thumped on the cabin, a vigorous tattoo. “Your mother says hello,” he said, sticking his head in, “and since nothing is happening she won’t be around for a while. A long while. A very long while. She still seems … dazed.”
“Not surprising,” Thiorn said. “It’ll take her months yet. Big transition.”
I finished my sandwich, getting to my feet. “I’ll be going now,” I said to Dewar. “This was a good trip.”
“It was. Let’s do it again. I know great places to sail. I think you’ve never beer to the Cape of Storms, up north.”
“No, I haven’t.” I dusted the crumbs off my hands and climbed up the ladder. “So long,” I said to Thiorn, “and thank you.”
She nodded.
Dewar and I stood on the dock a moment, regarding one another.
“Freia said to tell you she’ll talk to you soon,” he said after a moment.
“Thanks.”
We looked at each other.
“Safe journey, Dewar,” I said finally, and he clasped my shoulders a moment, and then we embraced.
“Don’t work too hard, Gwydion. It’s supposed to be fun, isn’t it?”
“I don’t think I work too hard. I don’t play hard enough, that’s all.”
His laugh ruffled my hair. “Yeah. Right. This has been good, to play with you again. I missed you.” He hugged me harder, forced himself to relax a little, and kissed me on both cheeks.
“I missed you too. Not just because I didn’t know what I was doing, but because I missed you.”
There were tears brightening his eyes, I saw them when I turned my head. I hate saying good-bye. Part of me wanted to beg him not to go. I squelched it.
“Disappearing is an occupational hazard with sorcerers,” Dewar said, as if reading my mind. “We all do it, all the time. You’ll find out.”
“Is that the last thing you have to tell me?” I said, an old joke.
Dewar’s smile faded and he looked serious, then shook his head. “No. No. I can’t imagine what that will be, Gwydion.” He hugged me again, smiled into my face and shook his head again, then turned me around deftly and gave me a shove. “Away with thee, sister’s-son, and my blessing with thee.”
I shouldered my bag, walked up the dock, and looked back once when I was going down the pier, but Dewar was nowhere to be seen.
26
ANONYMOUS, LOOKING LIKE ANY SAILOR HOME with his bag on his back, I found a coach at an inn and rode home to the City. I walked to the Citadel from the Wyebridge Inn where it left me. It had been good, sailing and talking with my tutor-uncle-friend. I put my bag down on my bed and unpacked it slowly myself rather than having Villon do it. Melancholy over the end of this golden summer vacation, already wishing Dewar were still around to talk to as he always had been when I was his student, I went into my workroom, went out again, picked things up and put them down in my sitting room, and then went back to the bedroom and opened the windows to look into the garden.
I left the bedroom and went down the narrow tower stair that serves the family quarters of the Citadel only. It lets us in and out of the gardens and courtyard. From there I drifted along the paths until I ended up at a green-painted gate in a hedge, which I opened and went through. Mother’s garden.
It was perfectly tended, as always, but by the staff nowadays, not by Freia. I hoped she would be back again to enjoy it. I found a bed of late-blooming lilies and picked some, heavy-headed golden flowers on stiff stalks, and then I returned to my apartment and put them in a vase with water on the nightstand beside the picture of my mother and her brother. They looked well there, and their scent filled the room. I sat down on the bed, gazing at them and not thinking anything particular, just soaking in my mood.
So absorbed was I in myself that I did not really hear the click of my workroom door for several seconds. Then I started and glanced up, lifting my eyebrows, and then stopped.
Freia smiled, a small, slightly shy smile—rather like Ulrike’s. She leaned against the tall dark door, which she’d closed. Her dress was long, a sort of robe over a loose chemise, in the poppy-orange and golds of the lilies. Short-haired, head tilted, her brows raised a little …
“I hope I’m not intruding,” she said softly, as if she had never been gone.
I shook my head. “Come in—I mean …”
She was real, really there, not an image, an illusion, a hallucination. It wasn’t possible. It was. She was there.
I uncrossed my legs and stood and went to her, and Freia smiled up at me, looking me up and down and into my face.
“I was just …” I started, and couldn’t finish. Instead I put my arms around her, because she was hugging me tightly.
“Dear me, have you grown?” she joked, and we laughed.
I blurted, “You look about seventeen. Maybe you need to grow yourself.” She was solid, warm, breathing—real.
“That’s about right,” she said, smiling.
She did. The fine lines around her eyes were gone; the touch of grey that had been in her hair, just a few silver strands at her temples, was gone; the lines that years of care had worn into her forehead were gone; the physical marks of her long, not-always-easy life were erased, cancelled; and she seemed no older than Ulrike. But for the expression that had already settled around her eyes and mouth, one would have thought her so young, too. No seventeen-year-old girl had ever been so wise.
I trembled once, intensely, and she squeezed me again.
“Gwydion, my love,” she said, and wiped tears quickly from her eyes with one hand, keeping the other on my arm. “I’m happy to see you, Gwydion.”
“Come sit down,” I said, and we sat on the window seat and looked at one another.
“You look wonderfully well. Much better,” my mother said, putting her hand on my bearded cheek. “That holiday did you a world of good, I can see.”
“It did. I have just been regretting that it was over.” I took her hand and held it in both of mine—I had forgotten how much smaller than I my mother is, how her head barely comes up to my chin and h
ow her hands are but two-thirds as big as mine. Her hands were warm. She was real.
“All holidays end,” Freia reminded me.
I nodded. “Are you on holiday now?”
“Yes. A long one. I think it will be a few years, Gwydion, but I wanted to see you—really see you—and know that all is well with you … You know, with a beard now that you’re older you look so like Papa it’s scary.” She was still looking at me closely, inventorying me.
“He says he keeps thinking he’s walking into a looking glass.”
She reached up, stroking and smoothing my slightly-shaggy hair into place. “Where did you come by this diamond earring? It makes you a bit rakish …”
“Oh, Mother …” I chuckled.
“… but it suits you. I guess I don’t want to know”—she smiled—“and it’s none of my business—”
I shrugged. “Prospero says that children never stop being their parents’ business.”
“That’s rich coming from him.” Freia sniffed. “I’ll have to remember that. Hmph. Anyway.”
The change in her tone of voice meant, down to business.
“Dewar said you had had trouble with Gemnamnon again. He would tell me no more than just that. What has happened?”
“Oh.” I nodded, looked away, looked back. “Cup of wine?” I’d need something to moisten my mouth for this long yarn.
“Why, yes, thank you.”
I got one for each of us. “As good as it ever was, or better,” I said, handing Freia hers.
“I should hope so.”
I sat down again and gave her the dragon tale, beginning to end, with everything in its proper place.
“He should not have come back,” Freia said, frowning, when I had wound down.
“But you weren’t keeping him off, once you had left the Spring.”
“Just that once—”
“Aha, so that was you.”
“Shhh.” Freia smiled mischievously and tipped her head back. “Don’t give it away.”
“I thought it must have been you. You were magnificent.”
“I was furious. I still am. If he is still around, you let me know. We shall think of a way to quash him for good. I can’t imagine he’d have survived your Disconnector spell. Think, dear: an Elemental is still made of something—he’s just not mixed in nature.”
“Dewar said so too. I wasn’t sure whether that made a difference, that he was Elemental—”
“It does not,” she said firmly.
“Needless to say, I shall agree with you both until we are all proven wrong.” I smiled, thinking how utterly typical this conversation was, how normal.
“Wise of you.”
I thought of another question, one I’d meant to ask somebody for a while. “Mother, in the past I have been told that the Spring will kill anyone not a member of our immediate family who drinks of it. Is that true?”
“Y-yes,” she said slowly.
“Then how did Gaston survive?”
“Why are you wondering this?” She scrutinized me.
“When Ulrike first came here, we couldn’t figure out if she was really your child or not—”
“Oh, I see. Ah … I suppose I can tell you this, but, Gwydion, you must not … We must not become like Pheyarcet, or worse, like Phesaotois. I implore you to keep it hushed and never to use it.”
I began to promise I would not, and instead said, “I know that protecting the Spring must be my first care. I would not taint it or Argylle by sharing it carelessly.”
She was satisfied. “Let that always be in your heart, in your thought, Gwydion, and all else becomes easy.” Freia took a swallow of wine, tasted it well before she went on. “The truth of it is that any initiate can attune another, just as at the Well or Stone. All the Elements are equal: equal in strength, in dominion, in importance; none may take precedence over the others—this is not conventional sorcerous wisdom, but I know it is so. The Spring will kill the newcomer if the burden of the power be too great or if the candidate be inharmonious; I have been told the Others will also. Yet there’s a way around that too.”
I waited for her to finish.
“I worked it out myself,” she said after a moment, organizing her thoughts, looking down at her hands. “Dewar told me later I was taking a terrible risk, but he also thought it made perfect sense. When Gaston and I wed, you see, we used a very old ceremony in Montgard.”
“You’ve lost me, Mother.”
“It involved, among other things, a drop of blood in a cup of wine—”
“Ha! Now I follow. You became affined, so to speak, to Gaston, and he to you.”
“Yes. So Dewar said, and so we saw it then. Dewar wasn’t here when we did it, of course, it was right after … Avril’s falling-out with Gaston.—I’m not a complete idiot about sorcery, you know, and neither is Gaston.” She looked at me sharply.
I diplomatically said, “No, but that is quite a connection to make—”
“It was apparent to me anyway. And to Gaston when I put it to him. So, since I was attuned to Argylle’s Spring when we wed, he was already … not attuned himself, but … I cannot think of a handsome technical word for it.”
“Harmonized, perhaps.”
“Yes. Thus drinking of the Spring, for him, was as passing Landuc’s Fire is for children of Well-initiated parents; they are unscathed, unlike those with no previous trace of the Well. A latent ability is awakened.”
“That must be quite a wedding ceremony,” I teased her, to lighten things up.
She laughed, blushing. “Brief but binding. Well-suited to the principals, a poor show for the guests.”
I laughed with her, and the strangeness of it caught me again. “I can’t believe I’m sitting here talking to you.”
“You are. When I go you’ll have two wine-cups to prove it.” Freia clicked her cup on mine; we saluted one another silently and drank, and she was serious again. “How is Ulrike?”
“She is well. She has drunk of the Spring.”
“… yes …”
“She is very eager to see you.”
Freia smiled. “I know. Gaston and I have decided she shall come to me, to us, and soon; it will be a few months, perhaps half a year, by your clock. I missed her so …” Her smile softened and became sad. “All grown now—it isn’t fair. You, Dewar, Papa—you haven’t changed, Gaston hasn’t changed, but I have changed and she has.” She shook her head, fingering her cup’s engraving. “There is so much to say, and so little time to say it before she takes wing on her own.”
“She speaks of you often.” To leave an infant, small and helpless, and return to a young woman—yes, I thought, that would be hard.
Mother caught her lower lip between her teeth and looked down at her hands. She patted mine absently. “As for Ulrike,” she said, “Ottaviano was here around New Year’s …”
“Oh. Hell. Yes, Walter invited him. Avril had sent him to renegotiate the Empire–Dominion Compact.”
“I just wondered what was going on. I misliked the way he pounced on her,” she added, lifting her chin.
And something in the gesture, the topic, and the set of her mouth clicked.
“Gryphon,” I said, involuntarily.
“I beg your pardon?”
“That was you too!”
Freia looked away, and her throat and neck became red.
I opened my mouth and closed it. “That night,” I said finally, “that was one big letdown, let me tell you, lady.” I began laughing and blushing too. “What a perfect patsy I was …”
Freia didn’t say anything, but still blushed.
“I’m sorry,” I said “I’m laughing at me, not at you—again, you were magnificent. I fear you know me too well.”
“Anyway,” she said, “he’s not to be trusted. She is too young to know.”
She was discomfited. I squeezed her shoulder and leaned forward to look around at her. “Freia,” I said, “thank you for caring about us and keeping an eye on us.”
>
“Little good I did you, nor may I do more now.” She still didn’t look at me.
“You were good enough for me, but to have you out is better. You did the right thing, Freia. Never doubt it. Please do not doubt that. Dewar was right. We need you alive and breathing more than we need you … otherwise.”
She turned her head back, very serious, still flushed. “I hope so.”
“I am more certain of that than I am of anything else in the world.”
“You’re kind. So all’s well …”
“Don’t worry about anything. Go back to Gaston and relax and do what you will and never worry about us.”
“I think. I can do all of that but that last.”
“Then the Lord of Argylle will command it of you.”
Freia smiled at me and reached up and kissed me on my bearded cheek. “Good,” she said. “So be it then.”
I blushed, embarrassed by my flippancy. “I didn’t mean—”
“I hope to heaven you did, dear.” Mother set her cup down and stood. “I must go, Gwydion. If something comes up, send a bird to me.”
“I won’t,” I promised, standing also, and shook my head, looking down at her.
After a wide-eyed moment, she nodded. “You’re right.”
I smiled and bent down and kissed her on both cheeks, Argylle’s way, and she kissed me back and told me to take care of myself.
“Always,” I said. “Give my love to Gaston. I liked seeing him.”
Freia nodded. “Good-bye for now,” she said, and opened my workroom door. I thought she must be going to see Prospero, or perhaps Ulrike, and I followed her just in time to see her vanish into a Mirror of Ways without any preliminaries.
Hm. She must have learned a few shortcuts in the Spring.
I closed the door again and went back and picked up the wine-cups and looked at them. No, she’d really been here—I could still feel her kiss on my cheek, hear her voice in my ear.
I set the cups down, had a whiff from the lilies, and went to my office. On my desk was a note from Utrachet citing figures from the new wine-share agreement which Prospero had negotiated and asking, very frankly, where in Hell my Lordship intended to store the stuff, for there assuredly would be no room in Argylle. Grinning, I reached for my Map.
The Well-Favored Man Page 44
