Hope and the Patient Man

by Mike Reeves-McMillan

  “The Countygold told me not to be a tale-bearer and sent me off in tears.” Hope didn’t recall ever seeing her mother cry, but her eyes were moist as she told her story. She still hadn’t looked at Hope. “Again, though, he must have said something.”

  There was a long pause while Mother tried to get her emotions under control. Her lip quivered, and her eyes spilled over, and her hands twisted round each other like snakes. Finally she said, in a choked voice, “I can’t tell it. You tell it.”

  Sincerity looked at her carefully, and must have concluded that it was true, because she nodded and picked up the story.

  “Vigorous waited until she was coming back from one of the outlying farms,” she said. “Lay in wait for her in that little wood over by Oakdown.”

  Hope swallowed, and noticed that her throat had gone dry. “What did he do?”

  “He forced her, Hope. Forced himself on her.”

  The anti-blushing spell didn’t keep the blood from draining from Hope’s face in shock.

  Her father had raped her mother, and Hope was the result?

  Suddenly, her entire childhood made a horrible sense. The way her mother treated her father. The way she wouldn’t look at Hope or address her by name or say anything good about her… She glanced at Mother’s face and found it fixed in a look of rage.

  “She told me,” said Sincerity. “Too late, but she did tell me. I was not long out of the university, older than you but not by much. I made her tell her mother, who the Countygold relied on a good deal — she kept track of the harvests and the stores. The Countygold, before we knew she was pregnant, went and tore six strips off Vigorous. His family were going to pay harmgeld, it was all settled — quietly, not even the current Countygold knew, nor does he now — and then she missed her bleeding.”

  Mother had recovered some of her poise, though not a lot. She picked up the story.

  “Well, my mother wouldn’t hear of anything but that we had to oathbond. Wasn’t going to have a fatherless child in the family. I yelled and cried, but she wouldn’t yield, and the Countygold agreed with her.”

  “I remember the night before your ceremony,” said Sincerity. “The three of us were in your room, you, me and your mother, and I remember how you’d stopped crying, you’d stopped protesting, you were all ice. Your mother tried to give you the usual talk that mothers gave in those days, and you cut her off.”

  “I swore,” said Mother. “I bound myself with a geis that I would never let him touch me again, and that I would make him pay for what he had done to me. And when we were oathbound, and alone, before he could do or say anything I said to him, ‘You owe me.’ And by that time the Countygold had torn him up, and his father had, and he was ashamed enough of what he had done that he agreed. And I put a geis on him never to touch me, and it took.”

  Hope had the irrelevant thought that she now knew where her mindmagic talent came from, at least.

  “I broke him,” said her mother. “I broke him down into the mouse he is now.” Her tone held sharp satisfaction.

  “Mother,” said Hope very quietly, “that’s terrible.”

  “I told you,” said Sincerity.

  “I understand now,” said Hope, “why you treat him the way you do. And why you treat me the way you do. Look at me, Mother.”

  Her mother’s head came up, slowly, as if moved by a stiff crank.

  “I understand,” said Hope, “but I don’t think it’s right. I didn’t act towards you with malice, ever. I know every time you look at me you must be reminded of that terrible thing he did, but Mother, it wasn’t my fault. I’m sorry that what happened to you happened, and it was wrong, but must you still be angry at me twenty-five years later for something I didn’t do?”

  Her mother focussed on her face, something that had rarely happened in Hope’s memory. She gazed at her daughter for three long heartbeats before dropping her eyes.

  “Verity,” said Sincerity, after nobody had said anything for some time. “Are you going to answer your daughter?”

  Mother stayed silent.

  “She’s an adult woman now,” continued the mage. “She’s got a young man, they’re probably going to be oathbound, from what she tells me.”

  “Mistake,” muttered Mother.

  “Mother, there’s something I haven’t told you either,” said Hope. “I had a lover. When I was at the university.” Her mother’s head came up sharply. “His name was Faithful, but he wasn’t. I caught him with another woman.” She faced her mother squarely and looked into her eyes. “Mother, I cursed him. I put a geis on him so that he wouldn’t be able to perform unless he was with someone he’d always been faithful to. And it worked.”

  Her mother stared at her. “Good,” she said at last.

  “But,” said Hope. “What I did was against university regulations. They made me take the geis off.”

  “Too bad,” said Mother.

  “Yes. But worse than that… You know about splashback?” Her mother shook her head. “Splashback is when you put a spell on someone and part of it comes back to you. I… cursed myself, by accident.”

  “Cursed yourself how?”

  “I couldn’t feel anything sexual for a man,” said Hope frankly. They were well beyond polite circumlocutions. “So when I met Patient, and liked him, and wanted to be close to him, that was a problem.”

  “You wanted to be close to him?” said Mother.

  “Yes. He’s a good man. Kind. Lives up to his name. He’s been a tremendous support to me. I hurt my head, Sincerity’s probably told you, and he was wonderful. So we went to a mindhealer together. Lily, her name is. She’s helping me, us, reverse the effects of the splashback. So that we can be oathbound and have a life together. A happy life. And the reason I wanted to hear your story was… I wanted to make sure that there wasn’t something that would… that would prevent us.” A tear slipped down her cheek.

  “Hope,” said her mother, after a long pause. Her name in her mother’s mouth was unusual enough that she immediately paid close attention. “I… Your father chose your name. He wanted to believe that something good could come out of… everything. And, you know, he was right. Curse him for a rat, but he was right about that, at least.”

  “Thank you, Mother.” Trained mindmage or not, Hope couldn’t have begun to disentangle the feelings sweeping through her.

  “Well,” said Sincerity. “We all have a lot to think about.” Mother wiped her eyes, and nodded.

  “Thank you, Sincerity,” said Hope, “for arranging this. And Mother, I know it’s hard, but… I’d like us to have some kind of, of relationship. As adults. Perhaps I could write to you?”

  Mother nodded again.

  “All right,” said Sincerity. “Thank you, Verity. Let’s get you tidied up, now, and back to your work. I’ll talk to you again soon, Hope.”

  Dear as Bucket was to Hope, it was Patient she needed to talk to. She pulled out her farspeaker and clicked in his code.

  “Can you talk?” she asked, when he answered.

  “Yes. What’s wrong?”

  “I just talked with my mother.”

  “Oh. Didn’t go well?”

  “It went… probably about as well as expected. But I found out something terrible.” She told him her mother’s revelation. She heard him suck in his breath through his teeth, as if he was in pain.

  “Hope, that’s terrible,” he said. “Makes me feel ashamed of speaking to her the way I did. Even though it wasn’t really to her, just to your memory of her.”

  “Yes, I’m… among everything else, I’m trying to, I don’t know, make allowances for her. I… all my life I’ve known that my parents didn’t get on, and that my mother resented me for some reason I didn’t understand. I didn’t realise that it was because my very existence is the result of an act of hatred rather than an act of love.”

  “You know that doesn’t change who you are,” said Patient.

  “Doesn’t it?”

  “No. You get to start
afresh, like all of us. You’re a person capable of love, and I love you, and that’s the important part.”

  “You know,” she said, “my mother… I don’t think she’ll ever forgive him, but she took a step towards forgiving me.”

  “What was that?”

  “She admitted that my father was right to give me the name Hope.”

  He said nothing, just waited for her to keep talking.

  “It’s funny,” she said. “I always thought he was the good one. He encouraged me, she never had a good word for me. He was proud of me. He… I think I represented his chance to be vindicated for his completely wrong decision.”

  “Sometimes things go right despite us,” he said. “Or wrong. Doesn’t change what our intentions were.”

  “No. I thought I’d lost all respect for my father, and I nearly have, but there is one thing, at least. He did think there was potential for good in my life.”

  “Well, he was right about that, if nothing else.”

  Chapter Twenty: First Seminar

  The Institute so far lacked lecture rooms big enough to hold the expected attendance for Hope’s first seminar, at which news she had swallowed with some difficulty, so on the appointed day she drove to the university itself and entered a familiar building in which she had often been on the receiving end of lectures.

  Rooms looked much larger when you were at the front. She’d noticed that before.

  She still had a numb, tense feeling in her midriff after her mother’s revelation, and a set of thoughts chasing round and round her head that had nothing to do with her lecture.

  She arranged and rearranged her notes as a diverse crowd trailed in: students, mostly older ones; professors, recognisable by their long scarves; senior mages; members of the Institute, both humans and gnomes. Several of the professors had taught her, and she had to chant a calming spell to herself.

  When the room was about three-quarters full, the Master-Mage entered through the lecturer’s door and strolled over to her, looking as cheerful as usual. “Nerves all right?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “You’ll be fine. You know your topic, you’ve prepared well, that’s all you need. Now, I’ll introduce you just after the bell. You have the usual half a bell to talk, but I’ve allowed up to another half-bell for questions afterwards. You did provide for that?”

  “Yes, Master-Mage, just as you asked.”

  “Good.” He consulted the clock at the back of the room. “I’ll give them a little longer, some of the Institute people couldn’t fit on the first ferry.”

  After an interminable time, during which the room filled almost to capacity, the Master-Mage rose from his seat in the front row and came to stand next to Hope.

  “Greetings, everyone,” he said. “Today we will hear from one of our distinguished graduates, Mage Hope at Merrybourne, who has been working with the Realmgold’s clever man and has recently agreed to come and join our Institute. While at the Clever Man’s Works, her achievements included the creation of the farviewers and farspeakers, based, in fact, on her senior project here at the university. In my many years of teaching, I have seldom seen a young mage who possesses a comparable grasp of magical theory and also her ability at practical application. Today she will be opening to us the system of mathematics which her colleague Dignified Printer, Victory’s clever man, created, and which they have jointly used to such remarkable effect. Mage Hope.”

  He sat down to polite applause, and Hope looked up the sloping rows of seats and, with a feeling much like that of diving off a cliff into the sea back in the Western Isles, began her lecture.

  She stumbled and said “um” a lot to start with, but not long after she began someone in the second row asked a question which led straight on to her next point, and she picked up confidence, though she still stumbled over her words. The university had invested in some of Dignified’s erasable boards, and she sketched diagrams and figures on them, bouncing from one to another, forgetting about her notes as she became caught up in the ideas.

  As she did so, she was aware of a slowly growing headache, or the promise of a headache, like a storm forming on the horizon. She ignored it.

  “Excuse me, Mage Hope,” said a voice. She spun around and located the speaker, a mathematician, she thought, although there seemed to be something wrong with her vision and his face came in and out of focus.

  “Yes?” she said.

  “Don’t you have that backwards?”

  She turned to look at the board, which seemed to be rotating slowly to the left even as it remained in the centre of her vision, as if she and the board were both on a turntable. She tried to bring the equation she had just written into focus by squinting.

  Abruptly, her head seemed to split open as the promised storm arrived. Her vision flashed, and she dropped to the ground, which was now spinning rapidly. She heard a babble of voices.

  Rapid footsteps approached, and someone knelt beside her. “Is there a healer in the room?” asked the voice of the Master-Mage, even as he worked a pain-spell. Her headache eased back to merely crushing. She could see nothing through a haze of tears and flashing lights.

  The voices receded down a dark tunnel and everything went black.

  She woke in an unfamiliar room.

  After a bit, she figured out that it was in a healing house, like the one she had been put in down in Gulfport, the night of her head injury. She really did not want to make a habit of waking up in healing houses.

  “Hello?” she called. “Is anyone there?”

  “Ah, you’re awake,” said a healer’s assistant, striding in and giving her a smile. The young man helped her sit up and drink some water and asked her how she felt.

  “As if I was hit by a cart,” she said.

  “Headache?”

  “Vicious.”

  “I’ll get you some willow tea.”

  “There are amulets in my bag, if it’s here.”

  “I’ll look. Yes, here we are.”

  With the amulets on, her headache receded. “Now,” said the healer’s assistant when he returned with the tea, “the Master-Mage wanted to know as soon as you woke up. I noticed one of those new farspeakers in your bag. Do you want to call him?”

  “Yes, please,” she said, and he fetched the device.

  The Master-Mage was solicitous, and dismissed her worries about the seminar. “Don’t give it a thought,” he said. “All sorted out. You rest and recover, now, and we’ll talk more when you feel better. I’ve sent notes to your home, and to the lab, and I’ll let them know you’re awake. Is there anyone else who should be informed? Mindhealer Lily, perhaps?”

  “Oh!” she said. “What day is it?”

  “Still Threeday.”

  “What time?”

  “It’s still morning, just,” said the mage.

  “Then I’ve got time to call Patient before he comes up. No, no, I want to do it. But could you send a note to Lily to cancel our session?”

  Hope called Patient, then lay back, exhausted. The young healer’s assistant wandered by again, gave her more tea and something to eat, and bustled out again.

  Hope must have fallen asleep, because the next thing she knew Briar was beside her bed.

  “I’m going to start calling you Mistress Goodluck,” said her friend.

  “Why is that?” said Hope in a fuzzy voice.

  “You collapsed in a room with four healers and three mindhealers.”

  “Oh.”

  “Which also means that they’ve checked you very thoroughly, and the original healers did a good job on you, but you’re not all the way healed yet and you should avoid overstressing yourself.” Briar said the last three words with a firm emphasis, and frowned at her.

  “All right,” said Hope. “I don’t exactly feel like taking on the world right now anyway.”

  “I daresay.” Briar took her hand. “Is Patient on his way?”

  “First ferry he could get. What time is it?”

 
Briar told her, but Hope couldn’t do the simple calculation needed to tell her when Patient might arrive. “Can you get me some water?” she said.

  Water provided, she slumped back in the bed, exhausted. “B,” she said.

  “Here.”

  “I’m scared.”

  “You’ll be all right. The healers have checked you over six different ways.”

  “Yes, but… B, I can’t think properly. If I can’t think, who am I?”

  “You’re the woman I love,” said Patient’s gentle baritone from the door. Briar rose, but he said, “No, don’t go, Briar, not on my account.” She settled back into the chair, but perched on the edge. Patient came over and leaned in to kiss Hope gently.

  “How are you feeling?”

  “Terrible. But Briar tells me I’m lucky.”

  Patient glanced inquiringly at Briar.

  “I’m just repeating what I got from the healers’ assistant,” she said.

  “Aren’t you supposed to go to Gulfport?” said Hope suddenly.

  “I’m going on a later ferry. Wanted to make sure you were all right.”

  “Good,” said Hope, in a vague voice, and drifted out again.

  She wasn’t allowed to go home that night. Patient stayed in her room, sleeping in a chair. In the morning, she felt, if not well, at least able to carry on a coherent conversation. She was doing so with Patient when the Master-Mage walked in.

  Patient stood respectfully, but the Master-Mage gestured him back down. “How is she?” he asked.

  “Better,” Hope answered for herself. He looked at her closely, and an unaccustomed frown crossed his usually cheerful face. “You must not have been very well, then,” he said. “In fact, I know you weren’t.”

  Hope nodded, and winced as her headache twinged.

  “Once you can get out of here, I want someone staying with you until you’re better. I’ll arrange it.”

  “Master-Mage, you don’t have to…”

  “No, but I am going to, so no more argument. I consider myself partly at fault, here, so let me do this for you.”