The Making of a Mage King: Prince in Hiding

by Anna L. Walls

  Sean was appalled. “I see.” He terrorized entire towns and districts. Good lord. Who were those demons I so casually sent back here? What had returning to the source of their nightmare done to them?

  “Yes sir, he took someone almost every day. They normally don’t last very long up there.”

  Oh great, how do I undo that? It’s one thing to make reparations to families, but how do you make it up to entire towns, especially when so many of their hostages are now dead? Sean did some very rough math; if what Carris said was true, Ludwyn had put close to five thousand people through this place over the last seventeen years. What did he do with all the bodies?

  Before he could form even a ghost of a plan, Elias came in with the messenger in tow. “Messenger Franklin Tours, my lord,” he said.

  The man looked apprehensive, but he bowed deeply. “At your command, my lord.”

  “Good. I have a project for you and I picked you because you were bold enough to question me when you didn’t know who I was.” Franklin stood a fraction straighter at that. “I want you to speak to the people upstairs. I want them to write letters to anyone and everyone they want to write to. Provide them with writing materials, or write what they say for them if they wish, then I want those letters sent to their destinations with all possible speed. Draft as much help as you need. If we have to rape an entire forest to supply the necessary paper and empty the barns of our fastest horses, so be it. Are you up to it?”

  “Yes sir, and I’ll have a detailed report of what they write on your desk every evening.”

  “The only report I’m interested in is who didn’t write and why. I don’t need to know what they wrote. That information is to be kept between the folded pages of their letters, do you understand?”

  “Uh, yes sir, but what if they speak of rebellion or assassination?”

  “They can write what they please. It’s impossible to make everyone like me. Regardless of what I do, there’s bound to be those who will lump me into the same basket with my uncle just because the same blood runs in our veins, but I will still give them the right to do so. I’ll deal with any rebellions or assassinations that come, if and when they come.”

  “Yes sir. As you say, sir. I’ll get right on it.”

  Sean watched him leave to prepare to carry out his orders, and he noticed Armelle talking with Jenny and Mattie. Could I protect them from assassination? The thought was like someone clawing at an open wound in his heart. What would I do if someone struck at them? Just how tight a hold do I have on the concept of ‘right’ and ‘fair’? How much of my uncle’s blood flows in my veins? He could see himself making a very painful example of anyone who made a try for any of those three, and the thought made him shudder.

  Elias’s hand rested on his shoulder. “We’ll keep them safe, Seanad,” he said. “No one will ever harm them.”

  “I’ll hold you to that, Dad,” said Sean. He turned back to Carris. “Go and talk this over with your daughter. I’ll hear your decision tomorrow.”

  “As you wish, my lord.” Carris bowed and left the room.

  Sean watched him go, then he turned back to Elias. “Dad, I’ll be riding out in a couple days. I’ll be taking about a hundred men, if you can find that many who will ride with me. You, Ferris and Clay are charged with protecting my wife, my brides and my unborn children.”

  “Clayton was hoping to be going with you,” said Elias.

  “I’m sure he was, but neither you, nor Ferris, are good at air magic, so he stays.”

  “You mean for them to be taken to New York City if something happens.”

  “I’m not sure he could manage that, but safely away from here would give you an advantage. That reminds me… Gordon, can you hear me?”

  “(gasp) I hear you,” said Gordon in a whisper. “Just a moment.” After about five minutes he spoke again, this time more normally. “There, now I can talk to myself without someone thinking I’m battier then they already think I am. How are you? It’s good to hear from you.”

  “I’m well, thank you,” said Sean. “I find myself in a position where your books may come in handy. Are you ready to come back?”

  There was another pause, “You are…? Yes, I am, but I am not where the books are now. Allow me a few hours to finish packing, then I’ll be ready. Yes…I’ll be ready by then.”

  “Fine, I’ll get back with you this evening,” said Sean, and broke the connection.

  “You should not trust him,” said Elias.

  “Don’t worry, I trust him about as much as I trust Carris; but like Carris, he is full of information I would like to have on hand.”

  Sean approached the three women. “Hello ladies,” he said. They all three showed him smiles that were surely schooled from childhood to melt any man with their glow. “I would like you to help Franklin convince our unfortunate guests to write to family and friends. Make sure they understand they can write as many letters as they want, and what they put in them will be strictly confidential. They need to believe they are free to go as soon as they are able, or they can have family come and retrieve them, whichever they prefer. If it hasn’t already been done, have Hélène send for every healer that can be spared to tend them while they are here. And Mattie, feel free to put any of them who can, to work cleaning this place up. I would like to turn this place back into a palace fit for guests. From what I’ve seen, it’s going to take an army to wash away the sanatorium look and smell my uncle favored.”

  “I’m sure the work will help them heal as much as what you’ve already done,” said Jenny. “It’s quite a mess up there.”

  “I know. Hire a couple muscle men from the town to move furniture, and a carpenter to fix what can be fixed. I’ll leave the interior decorations up to you ladies. Just keep in mind that the coffers aren’t bottomless. I haven’t collected any taxes yet this year.”

  Armelle twined her arms around one of Sean’s and beamed up at him with her green eyes sparkling. Jenny almost bit her tongue. “Can I do anything I want?”

  “If you embarrass me, I’ll tell Berrac,” threatened Sean.

  She gasped in indignation and punched him with a small sharp fist directly in his middle.

  He ‘oofed’ and doubled over her fist, and just as she was about to get worried that she might have hit something tender, he rolled away and headed for the stairs laughing. She likely would have thrown something at him if she’d had something in her hand to throw.

  His smile vanished within a half dozen steps up those stairs. He was heading back into his worst nightmare – into his uncle’s playground. The upper two floors had nearly twice as many smaller rooms, likely for household staff or the servants of guests.

  Sean worked through lunch. He couldn’t eat anyway. Fortunately, though he’d covered two floors, there was only half again as many victims as on that first floor. Unfortunately, the variety of tortures was now spread across both sexes. If he thought what his uncle could do to women was bad, what he did to men hit much closer to home and was therefore that much more sickening.

  By the time he finished with the second floor of the day, Sean was emotionally shaken and magically drained, but physically, he was jangling on a live wire. Needing the fresh air as much as the activity, he took up his ancestor’s greatsword and went outside to the stables, and the corrals behind them.

  “I’m going to be throwing this thing,” he told Manuel, “so get everyone and everything out of sight. I’m only going to have fence posts to aim at and I might miss.”

  Manuel watched, and Sean was sure others watched too, but at least none of them were in the line of fire – fortunately; he missed many times before his hits became more consistent. Every time he missed, he heard Master Mushovic’s voice. “Anyone who allows himself to be put in a position where he needs to throw his blade is either an incompetent or a fool.” And every time he had to wedge the heavy blade out of the post, he heard his teacher say, “If you ever throw your blade, be prepared to lose it.” He certainly hop
ed the damn thing didn’t stick this hard in flesh and bone; not that he was planning on throwing it at a person, but he could see himself throwing it at a horse.

  Sean turned his attention to the routines he had started the evening before. It wasn’t long before he was putting all his frustrations and all his anger into the swings. Every sun-bleached post became his very pale uncle standing there ready to work his evil. Every fence rail was one of his arms reaching out to snatch some innocent or shatter some family with pain and horror. After having effectively destroyed the corral, he noticed the fading light. His shoulders were burning and he was covered with sweat. He felt better, though, at least physically.

  When he returned inside, he found Lindleyan and Armelle in a heated argument, with Sloan, Cézanne and Campi looking on hostilely. They all went quiet the instant he appeared, but Sean could see that Armelle was in tears from Lindleyan’s verbal assault, and Sean was certain that none of it would have ever happened if Armelle didn’t happen to be the youngest of the five of them. He waded in. Sean took Lindleyan by the scruff of the neck and gave her a nun-to-gentle shake. He was tired and he had no patience left. “This,” he waved at Armelle, “will never happen again. Armelle is my wife; that makes her your queen. If I must choose sides between you, I will always choose her side. If you ever say things to make her cry again, I will send you to the farthest convent I can find, and when your son is born, I’ll see to it you never see him. Now go to your room. You will remain there until you can apologize for this profusely.” He sent her toward the closest stairs with a harder than necessary push and glowered at the others who dispersed like so much smoke.

  Sean wrapped his arm around Armelle’s shoulders and said, “Come on, let’s go sit down. I’m tired.”

  “You’re all sweaty,” she commented as she sniffed and dashed away her tears.

  “That’s why I want to go sit down.” Her eyes didn’t stay dry. “Want to tell me what that was all about?”

  She sniffed again and tried valiantly to blink back another flood. “No,” she said in a small voice.

  “You must have been arguing over me then. What was it; I’m not sharing myself enough?”

  Sean was surprised when she nodded. He stopped and turned her to face him. “They are here because I am a young idiot who fell under the spell of the Dance. Then I fell under your spell. There’s just no competition, okay?”

  She started crying all over again, so he pulled her to him and just held her. He looked over her head and saw Jenny and Fernand pouring over a table full of papers and folders. The sight reminded him that he was due to get in touch with Gordon again. He guided her into the throne room, where he pulled a heavy chair over to the dais and sat her in it, then sat himself on the step at her knee. “You are my queen. You are my other half. Without you, I would be a ghost. Now, pull yourself together. I need to bring in another person to help me build this country up.”

  She dried her tears, straightened her dress and displayed herself in the chair like the queen she was, while Sean called Gordon. “Gordon, can you hear me?”

  “I hear you, my lord. I’m ready. I have…nine heavy boxes here.” His voice sounded hasty and breathless. “Perhaps…I should stay here.”

  Sean felt Gordon’s unease and it left him with a chill between his shoulders. “Guards,” he called, then he pictured Gordon and his nine boxes facing away from him. “Nonsense, Gordon, I need you here.” He stood to stand between the incoming Gordon and Armelle. He brought him just as Ferris, Elias and eight guards entered the room.

  Gordon expected to appear facing the man who was bringing him; his posture said so, but it also covered his actions. He crouched over his boxes, using them for cover. He opened fire at the first moving target he saw. Sean wasn’t fast enough to stop him, but Elias was successful in preventing a second shot. The gun was melted into slag far faster than the unspent gunpowder could explode; the hot metal started a box on fire.

  Sean was across the floor in only a few strides. He put the fire out before he had covered half the distance, then he pulled the man around to face him and bent him back over his boxes. He glanced past him at Ferris who looked up at him from where he knelt over the body of one of the guards; he shook his head.

  “That was supposed to be me, wasn’t it?” said Sean, as he looked into Gordon’s wide eyes. “You don’t get another chance.” He let Gordon’s lifeless body slip from his hand. His hand was shaking. That was quite enough magic, emotion and stress for one day. “I’m going to my room. I’m tired.”

  He spun away from the scene and strode from the room, scarcely avoiding a stagger. Armelle caught up to him and pulled his arm around her shoulders before he reached the second floor and he leaned on her more than he wanted to. She dumped him on the bed, and as she lit the fire in the hearth, he drifted off. Then she slowly undressed him while giving him a sponge bath, but he was fully asleep long before she was finished. Somewhere along the line, she rolled him under the covers.

  Sean’s night was riddled with demented laughter and insane giggles. Dear Uncle Ludwyn was laughing about something. The laughter was punctuated by the harsh report of a pistol, and every time it went off, someone died.

  Armelle shook him awake. “He’s dead. It’s over. Stop thinking about it,” she said, after he finally opened his eyes to look at her. “Now get some sleep.”

  As he closed his eyes, he remembered Gordon’s. They had been wide and strongly under compulsion. He had been whispering something, his words carried by barely enough breath to make them more than just the workings of his lips. ‘Kill the king. Kill the king. Kill the king…’ over and over until Sean took the last of that breath from him forever. I was never in any danger from him, not until I made it this far, not until I ruled from the throne. Now I know the last bit of Gordon’s secret; he killed my grandfather, the king at the time. Earth magic can kill just as well as black magic, and Ludwyn simply hadn’t had the time, or likely the inclination, to remove the spell. Did he kill my father too? Probably not. I can’t see Ludwyn sharing too much of the pleasure. Then he remembered what Elias had said about that day. Both his father and the king were in the throne room. Maybe there were too many guards.

  Sean slept late and woke only when his stomach reminded him that he’d missed supper. He dressed quickly and made his way down the stairs. A glance into the throne room showed that all signs of the events of the evening before had been cleared away. He had one more floor to go, and unless there were some surprises in the attic, he would be done here. He was looking forward to being out on the road again.

  Only thirteen men were on the fifth and topmost floor of the palace. Though they each had a healer with them, they were all scarcely this side of death. The likes of these men Sean had seen before. They were in the last stages of their ‘education’. Should they survive, they would be demons like Manuel had been when Sean had first met him. It’s really amazing the amount of damage the body can take before the mind starts to crave it.

  It had taken all he could do at the time to redeem Manuel; he wondered if he was strong enough to handle this many. He delved his healing into them as hard as he dared, but their physical condition was much more fragile than Manuel’s had been and he was not so successful. The thread that kept them this side of death was so thin that he only managed to save half of them – the four most recent arrivals and three others who had been past most of their ‘education’. All that could be said for the rest of them was that they were no longer in pain when they died and it was a relief to let go; they didn’t want to hang on any longer.

  Seeking some solitude after this latest disappointment, Sean paced the empty halls of this floor. He discovered one badly warped section. The first thing to catch his eye was several doors hanging from one or another of their hinges. He tried to fit one into place, only to discover that the hinges didn’t match up and the doorway was no longer straight. Standing next to the wall now, he cast his eye down the hall; the entire section tipped sideways
just a bit. Many doors farther along the hall weren’t given the room to break loose from one hinge and swing free; the twisted floor forced them from both hinges and they lay where they had fallen.

  When he entered the room near the end, he recognized it. Here was where he had spent a short time as his uncle’s guest. Blood was on the bed – he’d seen many examples of that – and on the chair in the middle of the room. The bloody knife still lay near the chair. Cisco had tried to gut him in her search for the stones. The memory made his stomach clench.

  Preparations

  Sean spent the rest of the day in the library. The first thing he found were the boxes Gordon had brought with him. They were indeed full of books of all sorts. He had tried to hold to our agreement. The palace library was a treasure trove of the written word, but what Gordon had managed to accumulate dimmed what was already there. There was everything he had asked for, as well as books on the making of many different simple machines. The detail was glorious. “I’m sorry you had to buy these with your life,” he whispered to the ghost of Gordon. “I would have liked to go over them with you; I always liked going through books with you.”

  Sean pulled himself away from the boxes and dug out what he could find of maps. He found one that had obviously been drawn by a skilled mapmaker. A man named Horace had signed his name at the bottom. The map showed the contours of the land and many of the major roads, some of which continued across the border. I wonder what kind of trade we have with our neighbors. He toyed with the idea of diplomats, but he had to get his own country under control before he made any offers to his neighbors.

  The map he liked best showed the boundaries of all his districts and their names, which were presumably the names of the royal families that were supposed to control them. The names of the capital cities were represented by red, which made them easy to spot. Those were the cities where he would begin his search for the families he sought; if he couldn’t find them, he didn’t know what he would do.