The Seer - eARC

by Sonia Lyris

  Maris held up the book. “Behold the one thing. Valuable beyond any trick I could show you. Now we study.”

  He exhaled loudly, frustrated, just as Maris slammed the book flat on the table.

  “Samnt, you must attend to my words—”

  “—not the book,” he said loudly at the same moment, standing, waving his arms. “I meant—”

  “I know what you meant. I’m a midwife, too, Samnt. Why don’t you ask me about birthing babies?”

  “I’ve seen babies born. I don’t need to see more of that. Lots of blood. Now I want to see—”

  “In the Buravin Tel fire pits they bet on how many heartbeats the condemned will stand before they topple into the lava. Trust me in this: there are things better not seen.”

  But he was not listening. Too much curiosity, not enough sense. It tugged at her, his craving to understand, but it was a sharp blade and it would cut him if he were not careful.

  “‘Fear magic from a distance’,” she said. “Have you not heard this wisdom?”

  He waved it away. “I’ve heard it. I’m not afraid of you, Maris.”

  “Then you’re a fool.”

  How had her simple desire to teach this young man to read and write turned so sour? It was her own fault; she had been kind.

  Was this what came from being raised by loving parents? From being treated gently?

  He shook his head, refusing to be cowed. She could send him away, she supposed, but he would be back tomorrow, the same litany on his lips, the same hunger in his eyes. Reason would not convince him.

  “So be it.”

  His face lit up. “I’ll study after, I promise.”

  Maris nodded, feeling distant.

  “Maris, you’re not at all what I thought a mage would be. Friendly. Generous. I like you so much.”

  His words threatened to slice through the layer of numbness she now spun around herself, but she had learned her protections across the decades with Keyretura. Even Samnt’s innocence could not cut through that.

  “Sit down,” Maris told him flatly.

  He sat down in the chair, smile wide, face eager. She exhaled, went deep into his body. A touch here, a shift there.

  “Now stand up.”

  He didn’t move.

  “Stand up,” she said again, knowing he heard her.

  He remained still.

  “You wanted to see some magic, boy,” she said roughly. “Now you have. What do you think of it?”

  His only movement was shallow breathing. Maris turned away from him as something bitter and familiar settled inside her. She picked up her mug. She sipped at her tea.

  Again she had failed. Pain and suffering following in her wake.

  Again.

  The mother and fetus had not been working well together. She had given them all the healing herbs she could, and had delved deep into the woman’s belly with her focus, trying to smooth the child’s way out. One by one she tried to fix the many problems, but too much was wrong with the channels that connected them. Sunrise came, then midday, then evening. Another sunrise.

  It came clear: she could save only one.

  Somehow the mother had read this decision in her face and begged for her baby’s life. But a glance at the father, a taste of his unsteady, weak spirit, told Maris that the baby would not live long without the mother. So she touched the small entity within, gave it what comfort she could, and brought it from womb into life and then to the door of death. She put the small body on his mother’s breast.

  The woman howled. Maris had been young enough then to think an explanation of how life and death were two sides of one thing, how neither could exist without the other, might help ease the agony, but it did not. The woman cursed Maris, the power behind her words fueled by the power of childbirth. The curse set deep into Maris’s spirit with a penetrating venom that shocked her.

  Maris had left, sick in body and spirit, taking herself deep into the wilderness, beneath the tall trees and into deep loam. There she burrowed into the ground, in search of solace and healing. It had taken months to recover.

  It was a hard lesson, to discover that everything she had to give was not enough.

  As it was not now.

  The woman’s words hadn’t mattered—it was the intent behind them that had settled ill into Maris’s body and spirit—but Maris would never forget them. My grief to you, a hundred times, and a hundred times beyond that.

  Today, perhaps, Maris had made some payment on that curse.

  Her eyes roamed over the room, stopping at the books of her small library, that had been comfort and friend, aid and insight. Now they seemed entirely senseless, an absurd weight, a foolish indulgence.

  Much like her desire to teach this boy.

  She reached a bit of herself into Samnt to check how his body waited. The pathways from his mind to his body were slowed, frozen. Brain and blood and breath still moved, but nothing else. If she wished, she could keep him there until he starved to death.

  Keyretura would never have bothered with such a demonstration. He would simply have told Samnt how much the apprenticeship contract would cost, an amount that would ruin his parents as it had hers, and the conversation would have ended there. Samnt would have been disappointed, his curiosity about magic unfulfilled, but his body and spirit undefiled.

  Kinder, perhaps, Maris realized bitterly.

  Of course, if Keyretura had been master of the house, Samnt would not have been here at all. Keyretura did nothing for free.

  Maris turned back to the book on the table about farm animals that she had been using to teach Samnt. It seemed they would not need it today after all.

  “Stand up, Samnt,” she said, hearing in her tone the hopelessness she felt.

  Finally she forced herself to look at him, at his frozen, rictus grin, letting it make her feel wretched, taking penance for her mistakes. So many mistakes. Then she released him.

  He fell forward, slumping over the table, gasping for air. He pushed himself to his feet, the chair’s legs scraping against the floor, nearly toppling as he stumbled backwards toward the door.

  “Magic,” Maris said. “Now you’ve seen it.”

  From the look on his face, he would never want to again.

  Well, she had given him that, at least.

  His eyes darted around the room—the jar on the table, the book, back to her. A look of terror that she recognized.

  There were other things that she could have shown him. A spark of light. Pictures drawn in the air as if with smoke. An ant following her finger. But these would only make him want more.

  No demonstration was as powerful as the one that touched you deep inside, where, until that very moment, you had never questioned your own control. It was something Keyretura had taught her.

  Samnt fumbled behind himself, feeling for the door handle, unwilling to take his eyes off her.

  “You may go,” Maris said unnecessarily.

  He opened the door and turned, running, leaving the door wide open.

  It was some time before Maris noticed the cold.

  Another storm came and went, another foot of snow atop the last, as if the sky felt an urgency to produce as much of winter’s fruit as it could.

  A tenday passed, then another. Absurd as it was, each day she prayed to the nine elements, the snow, and anything else she could think of, that Samnt would not return. As the days went by, that bitter wish seemed fulfilled.

  But he was young, and she had given him a shock, so she waited a little longer to be sure.

  The snow melted, the rains came, and the roads cleared.

  Samnt was not coming back.

  At last she collected her clothes, herbs, and most of the books, loaded up her pack, and wondered yet again how it was she kept accumulating things everywhere she went. More things than she could take with her.

  She took one last look around the room. On the table sat the jar of applesauce, unopened and untouched since the day Samnt had brought it. Sh
e could hardly lift her heavy pack as it was, but she took the jar anyway.

  Maris hiked to the coast, wondering if it were time to get a freighter home to Perripur, to her isolated home in the Shentarat Mountains, where she would not need a supply of wood to stay warm, or the help of a farmboy to get through the season.

  At a harbor village she found a public house with the encouraging name of the Ill Wind, its facing gouged and dented from years of coastal storms and neglect. Exactly what she needed.

  The Ill Wind was as gloomy inside as the name promised, walls slimy and dark, floor poorly swept and into corners where it had been addressed at all.

  Maris rapped the edge of one of her few remaining coins on the table to get the tavernmaster’s attention. In moments she had a bowl of stew in front of her. She hadn’t needed coin for a while, indeed hadn’t worked for it in some time, so to discover she had only a few remaining, while disappointing, was hardly surprising. She’d spent the last of the previous collection on wood and foodstuffs in the mountains.

  Even mages must eat.

  Ship’s passage, food—these things required money.

  Mages could always find work in the cities. All she need do was go north to the capital. But the thought took away her appetite. She wanted to be no closer to the horror that was Yarpin than she already was.

  Worse than the misery and stink of that city was the chance of running across her own kind. From high cuisine to imported twunta to ship’s passage to lucrative contracts, mages went to Yarpin for the same reasons she was now considering doing so. She had no desire to cross paths with most of them.

  The one in particular. All the world in which to roam, yet there he had been, at the very Yarpin bookseller where she stood amidst high shelves of books, so absorbed in a heavy tome that she did not even notice him there, watching her. He had spoken, she did not remember what. She dropped the book and fled the city.

  He would not be in Yarpin now, not these decades later. He disdained Arunkin. He’d be back in south Mundar, in his garish mansion of glass and water of which he was so revoltingly proud.

  Perhaps she could find work here in this village, wherever here was. If someone had money and the work was not too offensive.

  Or, of course, she could find a Perripin-bound vessel and trade on her robes, boarding with Perripin sailors who superstitiously believed that mages brought good weather.

  No, she would not sink so low as to pretend to have value merely by wearing the right clothes and breathing, like the Arun aristos, or her own Perripin statesmen. That she could not stomach.

  But she could sign on as crew without revealing what she was and work for her passage. The briny winds off the sea tempted her. A roundabout way to get back to Shentarat, to be sure, but there on the ocean, the chaos of undirected human passion was at least limited to the crew, giving her time to sort out the pulls and pushes among them, the wounds and past that each carried, slowly weaving it all together into a serene and settled braid.

  She had even achieved a bit of a reputation this way, without anyone knowing she was a mage. When Maris was on board, some sailors said, the crew got along as smoothly as an anknapa’s kiss, making for calm voyages that lacked unpleasantness.

  She was not quite ready to be away from the land that long. The last time she’d been months with crew it had taken her time to recover, wandering mountains, deep forests, baking deserts. Then she had traveled to the high arid lands of Mirsda, toward the Rift, to see Gallelon.

  The long lives of mages and the etherics they handled meant complex, tangled relationships, rarely based on anything as simple as affection. Gallelon was as close as she had to a friend among her kind. He was another sort of sanctuary, though necessarily a brief one; it did not take many months for the two of them to reach the limits of their tolerance for each other.

  On their last morning as they lay together, her head nestled on his arm, she ran her dark fingers across his pale body, wondering at his body’s ancestry and how he came to have the hint of ginger in the hair on his chest.

  “Where do you go next, Marisel?” he had asked her.

  “Home, perhaps.”

  “You should consider the capital. Yarpin would do you good.”

  “Do you jest? What a foul place.”

  He chuckled. “Excellent cuisine. Splendid wines. Passable ale. Some of the cleverest of the Iliban. Also some extraordinary collections.”

  Of books, he meant, knowing her weakness.

  He was right about the food. The last time she had eaten in Yarpin, the chef had worked mightily to impress his Perripin guest. Fish from the ocean, goat from the high hills, spices from Perripur, rare ferns from Arapur. It was an artistry of subtle flavors, a symphony of scent and texture. A splendid meal.

  Which the bowl in front of her now, here in the Ill Wind, was most certainly not. She couldn’t even guess what the greasy lumps floating in a sluggish sea of brown might be, but she was hungry enough to eat anyway. A quick touch of her attention into the unattractive sludge assured her that consuming it would not harm her, so she reached for the spoon, but then hesitated, her hand hovering over the crumb-strewn table. From the cracks in the wood, antennae quested out, followed by the thin segments of a centipede. The creature took a large crumb from the surface in its pincers and slowly retreated to the undertable.

  Maris pushed at the creature with her intention to make sure it went in the other direction, but it pleased her to share her table with the locals, as long as they weren’t humans. She preferred places like this one for much the same reason she no longer wore black robes: sitting here, eating greasy soup, and sharing her table with insects, she could almost imagine belonging to the world.

  Around her sat dour-looking dockhands, grubby in overalls padded against the ocean chill, slumped over cheap drinks, bowls much like her own. The glances they gave her were mere curiosity at a plainly dressed dark-skinned Perripin traveler and nothing more.

  She’d worn the black for a time after she had been created, until the looks of hate and fear had become too heavy. It was a bad time for her, newly created and trying to find her way. She had gone to the Shentarat Plains and walked barefoot on the sharp ground until her feet bled. At the edge of the plains where the smooth rock gave way to barren ground and then hopeful grasses, she had stripped the robes off and buried them in the ground to rot.

  Simpler clothes, she had discovered, made for a simpler life.

  Now, catching the eye of the tavernmaster, she indicated someone else’s drink and that she would have the same. He nodded.

  Best of all, though, the Ill Wind had cats. On a high shelf amidst jars and curled atop a pile of burlap bags was a black and white feline, ears twitching in sleep. From a corner, an orange tabby roused itself to stroll into the kitchen. And overhead, against the high windows through which a fog-filled sky shone like a lackluster pearl, was the silhouette of another cat, sitting still as a statue, looking down on the room.

  With a finger of intention, Maris reached up to touch him.

  Male, a few years old, his feline blood pulsing easily through his lithe, powerful body. He had the glow of recent sex about him, a contented relaxation through the groin, the warmth of hard use across his shoulders, the taste of female nape in his mouth. At her pull, he turned his head to look at her.

  Softer than a whisper, she spoke a few words. Sounds more than anything sensible, the words being irrelevant. Her soft vocalizations were an invitation. Did he want to be stroked, she wondered. Perhaps some food, a bit of meat from her stew bowl?

  The cat blinked slowly, eyes on her a long moment, then he looked away and began to groom a paw.

  She laughed silently. She could not even summon a cat to her side. And people were afraid of mages.

  With a thunk the tavernmaster put a ceramic mug in front of her. Glazed deep brown, inside and out—to make the liquid seem darker, she knew from discussions with brewers. As a matter of habit she dropped her focus into the cup to be sure
it didn’t hold anything she would have to fix once it was in her body. It didn’t.

  “Something else, ser?” he asked her. A large man, gone well to fat, brevity near surliness.

  “A room for the night,” she said, putting a falcon on the table. Overpaying, she guessed. He slipped it into a pouch beneath the apron, stained with enough colors to be a clumsy painter’s spill.

  Then, ambling from foot to foot, he drew himself upright. “We got a room, sure.” He looked bemused, as if he couldn’t figure out why she was here if she had that much to spend.

  It calmed her, his lack of effort to please. Other than money, he wanted nothing from her. Like the cat’s disregard, it comforted her.

  After he left, a thin figure entered into the room, looked around, came to her table. Blood-shot eyes looked out from behind dark, stringy hair, a face slick with sweat, gender indeterminate.

  A Sensitive.

  Male, possibly, she thought as he swallowed nervously. She could touch into his body to find out, but it seemed an intrusion and so she refrained.

  “Yes?” she asked.

  “High One.” A deferring dip of the head, breath shallow and short, tone flat. “I have been asked to contact you.”

  She sighed, lamenting the loss of anonymity this implied. A bit surprised as well: this far from the capital she had not expected to be so quickly recruited.

  If mages were a sort of family, Sensitives like the one in front of her were a distant, disfigured, and disowned relation. They were among the large portion of people who fell below the line to be considered for apprenticeship, yet were also not quite Iliban. Outcast among mages, deviant among Iliban, ostracized by all. She ached a little for him—with no choice about what he was, with no way to become more, his life could not be easy.

  He might even be one of the extraordinarily rare Broken, those failed apprentices allowed to live. Unlikely; failure to finish the study was not well-tolerated. She remembered Keyretura dragging her, coughing and retching, from the deep water where she had tried to end her own. Not at all well-tolerated.