by Gwen Perkins
“And first he was on display at the docks,” Asahel remembered. Then he caught himself. “Aye, no, I don’t remember what you’ve said about the Plagues. It wasn’t like that for me at all.”
She leaned forward, still sitting at his desk. The sleeves of her dress brushed a stack of papers and he reached out to push them away from her before they could fall. Catharine didn’t smile at him but kept her gaze intent, encouraging him further simply by being silent. Asahel sighed once more, leaning into his own chair and letting it rock slightly off its front legs.
“Mother used to fear summer like I’ve seen you jump at a spider.”
“I do not—oh, go on.”
“Every few years, down here, by the sea, you could smell the sickness. It always seemed to come when the city was the most crowded. There’d be people everywhere, pushing and shoving, aye, and babies crying and not enough food to eat, then that’s when it would come.” He thought about it. “You survived. It would’ve been a miracle here. I don’t know how it chose who it took.”
“How it chose? You make it sound like choice was involved.” Her laugh was sharp as she stood up.
“You don’t sound any better when you say only the poor got sick,” Asahel retorted, about to try and match her sour face when he realized what it was that he’d said. It washed over him as he asked, “Honestly… it was rare?”
“Yes. Honestly.” Catharine searched his face. “What are you thinking of?”
“It doesn’t make any sense.” But it did. He rubbed his eyes. “It’s dead late. Too little sleep, I’ve had, with you about.”
That wasn’t true—in fact, his mind was racing with a new question. Why do the Plagues only come to the poor? And how’s it that it only happens when we’ve too many mouths to feed? And for that matter, why haven’t they announced Quentin’s crime? Or drawn attention to myself? The answers were starting to piece themselves together in his mind, too rapidly for him to risk sharing them with the woman in front of him. Catharine would act if she knew—he sensed that. It was too soon to take that chance.
There was one way that he could get confirmation and as he thought of the man that he needed to speak with, another piece of the puzzle slid into place.
“Asahel, say something.” Catharine’s hand fell on his shoulder. Not a small woman herself, her touch was firm enough to shake him out of his own thoughts. “I know that I’m not a magician, but he is my husband. He sent me here. You can trust me.”
But you don’t know that you can’t trust me. That he shouldn’t have.
“I need to talk to Felix. I think Felix will know why we’ve not been taken by the Council.” The room grew colder despite the heat of the words. Her skirts shifted as she stepped back, a slight breeze drifting into the space between them.
“He was there when Quentin was taken.”
“Aye, I know.”
“I told you what that meant.” Catharine was not a shrill woman—rather, her anger ran deep and he could see what it meant to live with it day in and day out in the way that the air seemed to still. “He hated Quentin in university. I used to think it was funny.” She blinked and he noticed that her lashes seemed damp. “He was always kind to me, even when he shouldn’t have been, perhaps because neither of us fit… expectations.”
“Would he send you to prison for delivering a message?” It was a simple question, but it took her a moment before she shook her head in response.
Asahel went to the chest in the corner and opened it, taking out a scabbard. His fingers brushed the hilt, feeling the slight tinge of Felix’s magic still lingering in the steel, and he knew. The scabbard rested on his palms as he carried it to her, presenting her with the sword as if it was a gift.
In a way, he thought, it was.
“That’s his sword. Everyone knows it—almost none of the magicians carry weapons,” Catharine said, staring at the leather against his skin. “And the Carnicus crest. There.” She gestured at the faint sigil worked into the scabbard, a sign that he hadn’t known himself.
Asahel nodded. “It’s his.”
“Why do you have it?” Her hand reached out, taking the sword from him and holding it firmly. The woman stood with it as if it belonged to her, protectively wrapping her hand around the grip even as she continued staring at Asahel.
“He asked me to carry it once.” To say more than that would be to tell her that he had betrayed her husband. Asahel knew that he had passed the point at which she could have been told—now, he needed her more as his ally. “And then… everything else happened.” He averted his eyes, knowing that he had never been able to lie.
“This isn’t—I can’t believe he hasn’t come for it.”
“Aye. I want you to bring it to him.” He didn’t know if Felix would understand what he meant when the sword returned to its owner. It had been given as a guarantee of protection. Asahel knew he was playing a dangerous game to guess that sending it back to the other man would result in a meeting on ground that didn’t belong to the swordsman.
“What kind of message do I take with it?” She looked uncharacteristically bewildered.
“That is the message.” Asahel said.
The shipyards felt more like boneyards as the summer weeks began to pass. The men who remained at work were gaunt, their faces welted by pox and shadow. It was not uncommon to stumble on a shipwright polishing wood with his tears. It was an unlucky practice, but these were unlucky times and Asahel let it go.
He moved freely among the men, not constrained by fear of illness. Like them, Asahel had been bred to the sea and now that he was called, he took pleasure in leaving the desk behind. Magic could not touch a body, but it could move a barrel or carve a tree—these things, at least, were not prohibited. Every time he called energy out of the earth, he waited for the Geographer’s eye to settle upon him. If it did, however, he never knew.
The simplest things gave him the most satisfaction, however, for those were the things he was never asked to do.
As dusk began to fall, he was repairing one of the nets that had been torn on the winter voyage. It was a heavy mass of rope, frayed in places where it had caught on the rocks. His hands sought out the gaps so that he could wind them together and strengthen the bond with magic.
A low whistle stopped him. It was no song sung on a ship, at least none that he knew. Asahel lifted his head to see a solitary figure walking towards him, a sword banging against the other man’s hip.
Don’t stand, he told himself. Let him think you don’t notice him.
It was too late. Felix stopped where he stood close enough to be identified but not close enough for Asahel to read his expression.
“A man isn’t old until his regrets take the place of his dreams,” Felix looked as if he was quoting an old book, his mouth puckering at the corners. “I feel incredibly old today, Soames. And yourself?”
“You know how I feel, aye?” It was all the younger man trusted himself to say.
“I never did.” He came closer, edging up to the corner of the net. His foot nudged it, the rope so heavy that it barely moved. “Were you planning to catch me with that?”
“I’ve work to do. You’ve no idea, I’m sure, but we’ve lost a fair number of men to the sickness and the poxes.” Felix looked chastened then, settling himself on a piece of driftwood and gingerly lifting the edge of the net.
“I…” He wasn’t looking Asahel in the eyes. “Can I help with this?”
“I didn’t call you to help.”
“I could mend things, you know. I’m not just—” Felix stopped. Unlike the others Asahel knew, Felix didn’t plead or ask for sympathy. He never had. “Catharine doesn’t know all of the story, and neither do you.” His knuckles gripped his sword pommel but Asahel took up the net-weaving again. There was nothing threatening in the gesture—if anything, Asahel thought, it meant that Felix was afraid.
“I don’t. But I know that I’ve like to have killed a man at your suggestion.” The rope snarled and tang
led around his fingers, knotting up his left hand. “My best friend.”
“You call him your best friend but you’re clinging to someone you knew at university.” Exasperation cracked the air between them. “He never did anything to earn it afterwards, you realize.”
“Aye, and you and I were such good friends before I’d stumbled on your door?” Asahel struggled with the knotting, his face red as he blurted out the question.
“I turned him over. Is that what you need me to tell you? And I convinced you that telling the Geographer was a good idea.” He stared at Asahel’s hands for a moment, then let out an irritated snort. “Stay still.”
Kneeling next to Asahel, Felix’s fingers picked out the netting so he continued talking. “The two of you would have been caught. It wasn’t difficult to notice all of the grave robbing, for one. The magical energy so far away from the universities—those things stick out on a map.” Sure, steady hands loosened the web enough for Asahel to pull his own hand free. “I saved one of you—that’s something.”
“You didn’t save the right one,” Asahel murmured.
Felix caught his chin, holding it hard so that he couldn’t turn away.
“Yes. I did.” He paused, then said, “You’ve got ability, Asahel, but it’s tempered with morality. The sort that none of us ever learned, in all our petty little lives.”
“I don’t.” Asahel twisted his chin out of Felix’s palm, pushing the other man gently back with his hand. “You think—I thought—that I made the right choice, turning Quentin in, but I didn’t.”
“How do you mean?”
“There’s a proverb on the docks that goes,” the younger man hesitated. “’Death’s the universal mirror.’ Have you heard it?”
“Something about, oh, how every man sees the reflection of his own life just when he’s facing death?” Asahel nodded in response and Felix replied, “I understand, then—go on.”
“Aye, well,” the younger man continued. “As we—Quent and I—as we’d begun to understand what we were about and the consequences… he looked in the mirror and he thought that healing others was worth dying for. I looked and… I was afraid for my own life. I still am.”
“I don’t think that’s true,” Felix said after a moment of thought.
“It is,” Asahel pressed. “And I’m not the only one.” He looked at Felix, his gaze lingering on the other man’s eyes, so gray with confusion that they reminded him of a morning’s fog. Then Asahel let himself look down at the sword before turning back and fixing his eyes on the rapidly descending sun.
“Me?” Felix was still close to him, so close that Asahel could hear his breath quicken.
“You didn’t give me the sword only for protection.” It had been hard to think it but Asahel found it harder to say it out loud. Tell me I’m a liar, a voice inside his head willed Felix. Argue. Say it’s all wrong—you meant what you’d said. No denial came, just another long silence between the two of them. There was no comfort in this one at all.
“Explain what you just said.” It felt like an admission of guilt as the words sunk in, pounding into Asahel’s head as Felix spoke them. The older magician was still, his hands gripping the pommel of his sword once more as he waited.
Asahel let the netting drop. He stood up, letting Felix remain seated, his feet stepping on the beginning of the pier. The waves were lapping the pilings, white caps of foam brushing the wood and leaving it dark. By morning, there would be no trace that the waves had leapt so high—the wood would be bone-dry until the water came again. Asahel leaned into the damp railing that secured the pier, wondering whether the friendship that he’d had with Felix was just as momentary or as false as the sea dashing itself against the land in hope of remaining.
“You were always as much a Heretic as I,” he whispered. It floated away into the wind, not loud enough for the other man to hear. The only sign that Asahel had spoken was the moving of his lips, chapped red from the briny air that came off the sea.
Felix stood up, his sword clumsy as it banged against his legs. It no longer seemed naturally attuned to his movements, Asahel noticed. As he came up to the railing and stood next to Asahel, an elbow’s length away, the scabbard touched the other man’s leg.
“Whatever you said,” Felix’s hands rested on the railing, tracing the weather-worn grooves in the wood. “Say it again.”
“I said that you were always as much a Heretic as I.”
“And you’ve said it here, on the water, where the Geographer’s maps don’t travel.” Felix’s mouth twisted. “Clever. One might think you’d been at this a while.”
“I haven’t and you know it.” Asahel bristled. “Aye, and I’d no knowing of where the maps do and don’t go.” The wind rose slightly, whipping dark hair across his eyes. “I’ve no need to say it quietly, whatever you say.” That rang as false as he believed Felix and his face flushed with the sting of knowing that. All that he’s done and you wish he hadn’t done it at all. “Don’t change the subject.”
“Then you shouldn’t, either. Why call me a Heretic? It doesn’t do you any good, nor is it an idea I’d have expected you to leap to.” He smiled a little. “No, it makes sense when I see it. You think differently than most people—or perhaps, it’s that you think at all.”
“It’s your sword, that and your magic.” There was no warmth in Asahel’s face. “You told me that you can only channel magic through the sword. If that’s the case, then for you to use the magic, it’s got to be the sword that serves as the conduit.”
“Right.” There was a warning in Felix’s voice.
“The only way for you to use a sword is in violence against another person, creating Heresy.” The scabbard hung between them, a heavy presence that the two men were sharply aware of. “Unless you’d been cutting trees with it. But you’ve not been, not with a blade that fine and not one that’s passed from hand to hand. It was your father’s sword.” That was a guess on Asahel’s part but one that proved correct as Felix nodded. “And your father served the Geographer.”
“That he did.” Their eyes met and now there was not warning in Felix’s face, but relief. “You’re right about the fact that I have committed Heresy, but wrong about part of it.”
“What?”
“I didn’t give you my sword to hide what I’d done. Tycho—the Geographer—he knows. He’s ordered the actions that I took.” The other man said. “Except that one. He never would have condoned my giving you the sword, but it was the only way that I could think of to keep you from the guards while you went on your fool’s path through the city. Your plans were never subtle enough.”
“Why would you do that?” None of it made sense to Asahel, not if he ascribed ordinary logic to it.
“Because…” Felix bit his lip, something that Asahel had never seen him do. His gray eyes colored, a hint of blue creeping into the depths of his irises. “First, I wanted to know what it was that you were doing and then… because I wanted to know you.” He seemed to read something in Asahel’s eyes then, for he said, “It’s nothing now. You’re right to call me out for all that I’ve done and in a way, it’s a relief.”
Asahel stopped himself from asking more. If they were to save Quentin from his fate, he needed more from Felix than where he stood in the other man’s estimation. You’re falling into the trap that caught Quentin—this isn’t about you, or even him. It never was. He folded his arms, willing himself to focus.
“They haven’t charged Quentin yet. As far as I know, no one’s even said that he committed Heresy.”
“No, and it won’t be said,” Felix answered, falling back against the rail and watching the waves. “The Council doesn’t want anyone to know.”
“Aye, I thought as much.” He swallowed. “Why is that?” He knew, or thought that he did, but Felix’s next answer surprised him.
“The Plagues. They’re worried that it will cause people to look into the Plagues.” The other man pushed away from the railing then and began walking
farther out on the dock, his long legs carrying him forward swiftly. Asahel had to double-step to keep up with him, the two men walking until they reached the end of the pier. It was far from the shoreline, distant enough that nothing could interrupt whatever Felix had to say unless it came from the water.
“The two of you were—or were trying to—heal,” the older man continued, shivering at the chill from the breeze that whipped at his coat. “People think of the first Heresy only as a proscription against violence, but it was never meant for that. If it gets out that the Council is trying to stop two men from healing, that’s a difficult thing to understand. We’d be able to argue that you were causing deliberate harm, from the way that you went about it with digging up bodies, but someone else would need to have their crack at it.”
“And then what?” Felix asked Asahel. “How could we keep on saying that it was wrong? How can a government argue against the betterment of its people?”
“I don’t understand why you would,” Asahel whispered.
“We cause the Plagues,” he answered, trembling. “We are the ones who plot its course, who plan it out, who set it free through the Geographer’s maps. The sickness comes from the Council.”
Asahel closed his eyes, letting the knowledge sink in. This had been what he had feared when he had spoken to Catharine. Such fears could not have been confided to her—even now, he feared bringing his certainty to her. The ideas took on new shape, hearing them spoken with Felix’s dry voice. He respected Felix still even if he was uncertain whether he ought to trust the other man. You have something of his now, Asahel reminded himself. The truth could destroy him just as it could you. At least, in that, you’ve something to trust.
“Why have you admitted it then?” He asked, his voice hoarse.
“Look at me, Soames,” Felix said. The younger man lifted his chin even as Felix stooped slightly to even the distance in their heights. The expression Felix wore wasn’t frightened or jubilant or even relieved, so much as it was tired. Hollows under his eyes hinted at a burden carried so long that it had become a part of his skin. Asahel thought of the weight of the dark secret that now rested between them and wondered how long Felix had known it. He’d never come to the Carnicus estate so late or so early that Felix was sleeping, whatever the hour. He knew that both Catharine and Quentin spoke of the man as if he was as much an outsider in the glittering capital as Asahel himself. Was that the cost that Felix had paid?
