The Innocent Mage

by Karen Miller

  As one, they turned to look back at the township. Gar felt his mouth suck drier than summer. ‘Father …’ he whispered. ‘Father, what are you doing?’

  The lurid clouds were streaking towards them, blown by a howling malevolent wind. The harbour waters churned and rolled, great waves whipping up, dashing foam, blotting out the terrible sky. Thunderbolts rained down, hissing and spitting as they struck the turbulent water.

  ‘Do something, Your Highness!’ Westwailing’s mayor bellowed. ‘Or we’ll all be drowned for certain sure!’

  ‘I can’t!’ Gar shouted back. Hating himself. Hating the mayor for asking.

  A cold hand closed over his wrist. Asher. ‘You’re sure? You can’t even try?’

  Gar snatched his arm free. Swallowed bile. ‘You can ask me that?’ he hissed, even as rain sharp as glass began to drive through the murky air to strike flesh without mercy. ‘After a year in the City, you can ask me that?’

  Asher stepped back. ‘Sorry,’ but the word was whipped out of his mouth and shredded on the rising wind, ominously howling, banshee-voiced and battering. The inadequate fishing smack pitched and tossed, helpless in the face of the climbing waves. Gar and Asher and the rest flailed about the boat, catching hold of whatever could save them from falling, as their vulnerable flesh bruised and split and streamed rain-diluted blood.

  ‘I can’t save us!’ Gar screamed into the teeth of the wind, into their blank and fear-blanched faces. ‘I’m sorry!’

  And then there was no more time for talking, as the storm fell upon them in all its immediate fury.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Splinters flew as hailstones like rocks battered the deck beneath their feet. Ear-splitting thunder claps exploded in time with the scarlet lightning that rent the sky. Green and purple fingers of cloud stretched down to the white-whipped harbour, sucking up whirlpools of water. Fish plucked from safety spun and spun and spun apart. Flaming thunderbolts sizzled the air and pounded the boat. One struck the Mayor of Chevrock’s head clean off his smoking shoulders. Gar felt his stomach heave, tasted acid as he vomited into the howling wind. Then the boat stood on end and he was sliding face down along the deck, collecting splinters and fish scales, tearing his fingernails as he clutched in vain at the weathered timber beneath him. He cried out in pain as his soaked and suffering body collided with some hard wooden surface at the far end of the boat, then again in alarm as the shuddering vessel tipped the other way and he careened back the way he’d come, only just avoiding a plunge into the hold. The other men were shouting too, he could hear them, barely, through the savage noise of the storm.

  Something wet and warm ran down his face; he touched his fingers to it, expecting rain, and they came away red. He was bleeding.

  ‘Gar!’

  Muzzy, confused, he turned towards Asher’s anchoring voice. Pain pulsed in time with his hammering heart.

  ‘Stay down!’ Asher bellowed as he kicked himself free of a tangling net, blood dripping down his chin. ‘You’ll be safer that way!’

  That made him laugh. Safer? There was no safer, not any more. As though to prove the point, a giant wave punched the fishing boat like a fist, rolled it half over so that he had to throw his arms around the nearest solid something and hold on for his life. Somebody tumbled past him, yelping, to plummet head-first into the fish-laden belly of the boat.

  With a snapping crack the sail tore loose, sending the boom swinging wildly out of control. The boat plunged again with a twisting shivering shudder. Tossed into the air like so much soggy kindling, Gar found himself somersaulted to his feet, where he swayed and tottered and tried to get his bearings. Somebody screamed ‘Look out!’ and he turned, too late. The swinging boom with its madly flapping canvas caught him across the chest with a dull thud. Drove the gasping air from his lungs and swept him contemptuously into the air. Over the side of the canting fishing boat he tumbled, and into the unruly sea.

  An icy coldness closed over his head. Stinging salt surged into his mouth, up his nose, burned out his eyes and swamped his ears. Deaf, dumb and blind he tumbled inside out and upside down, insignificant and unremarked within the vastness of the ocean and the might of the storm. For one heartbeat he struggled, and another, and another. There was a roaring in his head that might have been the storm, or might have been all his trapped cries of protest dying for lack of air. I am drowning, he thought, and could feel only a mild regret. I wonder if Fane will cry at my funeral. I wonder if she’ll even bother to come. Then he stopped struggling altogether. Stopped thinking, because it was simply too hard. Instead he surrendered to the water and the dark and waited for death to come on slinking seaweed feet.

  A sharp and sudden pain wrenched him out of complacency. He grunted, eyes slitting open. What the – somebody had him by the hair, there were fingers in his hair, tangling, tugging …

  Struggling anew he ploughed his leaden arms through the oppressive ocean, struck something soft and yielding. No. Someone. He wasn’t alone. There was somebody in the water with him, there was an arm around his chest, legs kicking behind him, he could see flashes above him through the watery prism of the heaving waves. His head broke the surface and he sucked in great gasps of air, coughing, sneezing.

  ‘I got you!’ said Asher, rasping in his ear. ‘Hang on tight now, I got you!’

  Teeth chattering, ice-cold to his marrow, Gar dragged his hair off his face and looked up into the whirling storm clouds overheard. Asher was a fool, he never should have bothered, the waves towered above them like Barl’s mountains, waiting to fall, eager to smear them into red stains on the surface of the sea—

  The purple and green sky lit up then, with an eye-searing flash brighter than the sun. He cried out and tried to hide from the whiteness of it. With the flash came a crack of sound like the end of the world. For a moment he lost consciousness.

  Then he thought he must be dreaming, because he could feel gentle sunlight on his salt-sticky skin and his ears were empty of the howling wind.

  Bemused, he opened his eyes.

  The storm was gone. Overhead, a limpid blue sky, cloudless. All around them gentle water, flat and calm as a pond. No scarlet lightning. No sizzling thunderbolts. Just out of reach the fishing smack floated like a duck, lightly, on top of the tranquil sea. Someone called, shakily, ‘Asher! Be that you? D’you got the prince?’

  The arm around his chest tightened, relaxed. Asher called back, sounding a little shaky himself, ‘Aye! We be here! Come get us in, eh?’

  ‘Hang tight, lad, we be comin’!’

  Limp as a neck-wrung chicken, Gar stared up into the pristine sky. Sharp pain stung him as his eyes filled with tears. ‘Father!’ he cried inside his head, his heart. ‘Father …’

  Soon after that the sky faded and, with it, all awareness.

  He wasn’t sorry.

  Dorana City was in a screaming uproar. Those streets and alleyways not choked with fallen roof tiles, with shattered glass, broken flowerpots and all other manner of debris, seethed and heaved with bodies, Olken and Doranen alike, as they stumbled about in consternation and full-throated dishevelment. Captain Orrick and his City Guards, as shocked as everybody else, struggled to maintain a semblance of order in the face of flooding due to cracked and gushing water pipes, fires and indiscriminate rushing about in a panic.

  Dathne, bruised and battered by shelves of falling books, escaped her upheavalled shop and joined her dazed neighbours in the street. Once sure her friends were for the most part unharmed she made her struggling way to the Tower stable yard to find Matt, and see if together they could make sense of this unexpected calamity.

  Prophecy hadn’t warned her about this. If she weren’t so shaken up she’d be furious.

  There were no guards on duty at the gate into the palace grounds. Hurrying through unhindered she saw where the earth had lifted and buckled through the garden beds and lawns, tearing the turf to shreds and revealing rich brown dirt like scars. Some trees had fallen; their roots scrabbled at
the sky.

  Ahead, beyond the gap-toothed circle of oaks, the prince’s Tower still stood sentinel. It wasn’t till she saw it there, untouched, that she realised the depth of her terror, her fear that it might have come down, pulping everything around it beneath gigantic blocks of blue stone.

  The Tower stable yard was buzzing with lads, some bruised and bloody, some whole, all intent on nurturing the nervous, wide-eyed horses who whickered and whinnied and kicked their stable doors in protest.

  ‘Where’s Matt? Where’s Matt?’ she asked them, and they pointed their trembling fingers at the path leading to the pastures beyond the yard. Picking up her skirts, she ran.

  And found him sprawled in one of the fields nearest to the stables, his face smeared with blood from a cut along his hairline. In his arms he held the limp body of a young man. There was blood on his hands too, she realised. And down the front of his shirt. Before she could ask if he was all right—

  ‘It’s Bellybone,’ he said numbly, staring up at her with huge, hurt eyes. ‘He was trying to bring in the colts. One of them kicked him – look …’

  His stained hand parted the blood-soaked hair on the back of the man’s head. Bellybone? Ah yes. She remembered. At eighteen, one of Matt’s senior stable hands. A charming rogue, forever pestering her to play a hand of Cock Robin with him down at the Goose. She nearly always refused; her money was too hard-earned to go losing it at cards with a young man who’d made an artform of winning. She leaned a little closer. Frowned.

  ‘He’s dead, Matt. His skull’s been crushed.’

  He nodded. ‘I know.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  He turned his head. Following his gaze, she saw a group of gangly young horses huddled in one corner of the field. Another was stretched ominously still on the buckled green grass. There was the faint sound of many flies, buzzing.

  ‘That’s Thunder Crow,’ he said. ‘He broke both front legs. There was nothing I could do for him, I had to … had to cut his throat …’

  Which explained the blood. Crouching, her eyes hot, she touched her fingertips to his shoulder. ‘Matt, we have to talk.’

  Shuddering, he dragged his eyes away from the dead horse. ‘What happened, Dathne? Is it the end then? Has the Wall begun to crumble? Is the king dead?’

  ‘I don’t know. They’re not saying anything down in the City. There’s been no announcement. It’s madness there right now. But I think he must be. The Wall still stands for now, but I think this is the beginning of the end.’

  ‘Asher?’

  Her fists clenched, echoing her frustration. ‘I don’t know that either. I don’t know how far the storm extended or what other districts were struck. The coast is so far away, you’d think he’d be safe … but I just don’t know. I tried to scry him but the energies are all over the place. I couldn’t find a path to him. I couldn’t reach Veira either. Perhaps later tonight, when everything’s calmed down.’

  He nodded again, slowly. Looked down at dead Bellybone, then back up at her. ‘You didn’t see this coming, Dathne. Did you?’

  She lowered her face to her knees, perilously close to breaking. ‘No, Matt,’ she said, her voice muffled in her skirts. ‘No, I surely didn’t.’

  ‘What do you think it means?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ She lifted her aching head. ‘But I expect we’ll find out soon enough. Maybe Veira can tell us, once I can reach her.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Maybe she can.’ Then he frowned. ‘And what about you? Are you all right?’

  She waved a hand. ‘I’m fine. Which is more than I can say for my poor shop. It’s a mess, all the books off the shelves. Windows broken. Half the floorboards have sprung loose. Unless I can find a Doranen willing to lend me a magical hand it’ll take days and days to—’

  ‘But you’re all right,’ said Matt, with his dead stable hand cradled against his chest. ‘No bones broken. No need for a healer.’

  He was in shock, she realised. Ridiculously, it was the last thing she’d expected. Matt was her rock, her foundation, the shoulder she leaned on, the hand that she held in moments of quiet desperation. She needed him.

  And he needed her, at least for the moment.

  Kneeling, disregarding his uncoordinated resistance, she gently prised Bellybone from his grasp. Hoisted the limp form over her shoulder and got to her feet. He hadn’t been a big man, most stable hands weren’t, but still he was heavy enough to make her back and shoulders ache. But that was all right. She could manage.

  ‘Come on, Matt,’ she said gently, looking down at him. ‘We need to lay poor Bellybone somewhere cool and quiet and you need to get back to your horses. The other lads will be looking for you. It’s Meister Matt they’re needing now, more than they’ve ever needed him before.’

  Wincing, Matt stood. Without a word took Bellybone from her, turned, and started walking back to the stable yard. After a moment she fell into step behind him. She could just make out the dead youth’s eyes, half closed, as his head rested in the hollow between Matt’s neck and shoulder.

  Damn you, Asher, she thought as a shiver ran through her from head to toe. Damn you, damn you, damn you. You’d better be all right …

  Hands trembling, Darran added mustard powder to the bowl of freshly boiled water in front of him. The steam spiralling into his face turned abruptly acrid, stinging runny mucus from his nose and tears from his eyes. Well, at least he’d have an excuse now. Old fool, he scolded himself, and stirred the browny yellow water with a wooden spoon anxiously provided by the mayor’s cook. He’s not dead. You’ve not failed Their Majesties this time. He’s not dead. Think on that, not on what might have been. He added more mustard to the mix and sloshed it vigorously, blinking and sniffing.

  In the deep armchair behind him Gar shifted inside his enveloping blanket. Was that a cough? Had the prince caught a chill, or worse, from his fearful immersion in the ocean? You should have stopped him, Darran. Who cares what tradition dictates? You should have put your foot down. You knew it was foolhardy for him to risk himself on all that open water with only that Asher for protection. You know what he’s like. Any dangerous thing, he’ll do, and has done, ever since they told him he was – ever since he realised he would always be … different.

  Oh, how he remembered that day. Seared into memory, it was, and even into nightmares sometimes. Five, the prince had been, tall for his age and splendid, just like the early paintings of his mother that hung in the palace’s Hall of Memories. Silver-gilt hair and eyes that mirrored every blossoming hope, every dead dream. ‘No,’ he’d screamed. ‘I’m not a cripple, I’m not I’m not I’m not!’ Then he’d run away from his parents, from the Master Magician, from his unbearable life, to the stables. ‘Let him go,’ the king had said, his deep voice ripe with sorrow and regret. ‘The sooner he learns he’ll not outrun this, the better.’ And had punished the prince only for galloping his pony into the ground.

  He’d been a junior secretary then, and privy to the calamity only by accident and a handful of urgent letters. For himself he’d have cut the pony’s blue-black throat and drunk the steaming blood for breakfast, if it could have changed the terrible truth. If it could have given the prince his magic.

  From the armchair, another ominous throat-clearing sound. Barl knew the prince was hardy enough, not in the least prone to distempers and ill humours and the like. But this was different. This was a near drowning and something more terrible besides … a bad chest, or even worse, was a distinct possibility.

  His innards clutched again, fear yammering at him, twisting him. Old fool! He needs you! Control yourself! He took a deep breath and then began to cough himself, from the mustard fumes. The prince’s footbath was thickening nicely. Perhaps a drop more water …

  When it was just so, and perfect, he blotted his face and hands dry with a towel, picked up the bowl and turned a bright and resolutely calm smile on his employer. ‘Here we are, sir. A nice hot mustard bath to ward off any chills.’

  The
prince’s face still lacked colour, the bruises and scrapes he’d suffered standing out like spilt ink on snow. The minute they’d brought him up from the harbour, battered and bloody and stiffening with salt, he’d been put in a hot bath and ruthlessly scrubbed clean. Darran cast yet another prayer of thanks Barlwards, that the prince had been largely insensible throughout the entire unpleasant ordeal.

  Inside his nest of blankets Gar lifted heavy-lidded, glowering eyes. ‘Where’s Asher?’

  Years of training kept his expression unchanged. ‘He’s fine. Now if you’ll just put your feet in the bowl, sir, you’ll feel much better.’

  ‘I don’t want a damned mustard footbath, Darran!’ the prince snarled. ‘Unless you want to drink it, take it away!’ On his marked face a look all too reminiscent of the Master Magician’s, when that terrible man was not pleased with the chaff that served him.

  Darran put the bowl back on the table. He’s upset, he’s just upset, of course he’s upset. His hands were shaking again. He doesn’t mean it, you know he doesn’t, he never does. He hasn’t thought, he doesn’t understand …

  ‘I failed them, Darran.’

  He turned. ‘Failed who, sir?’

  The prince was staring out of the chamber window. His expression was desolate. Disconsolate. ‘Asher’s people. On the boat. In the town. As the storm hit us the mayor begged me to do something. To save them. I couldn’t. I failed. Useless, useless cripple …’

  ‘I’m sure you’re no such thing, sir!’ Darran’s heartbeat stuttered in panic. ‘I’m sure not even Master Durm himself could have stopped that dreadful storm.’

  But the prince wasn’t listening. ‘And I lost the heirloom circlet. It’s somewhere at the bottom of Westwailing Harbour.’

  ‘Never mind, sir. I’m quite sure that given a choice Their Ma—’ He stopped. Breathed deeply for a moment. ‘The queen would much rather have you back safe and sound than a circlet.’