by Karen Miller
‘Nonsense, my love,’ said the king robustly. ‘This parade is a perfect antidote to the lingering tensions in the City. Look at the people’s faces. They’re loving it. The very last thing on their minds is the fright I gave them with that unfortunate storm. Besides, what Asher did was heroic and it would be churlish of us not to show our public appreciation.’
The princess, barely managing to conceal her lack of enthusiasm for their outing, spoke for the first time since leaving the palace. ‘Since you mention the storm, Papa, Conroyd Jarralt has done a wonderful job with the restoration effort. Don’t you think so?’
The king’s lips tightened but he had no choice other than agreement. Thanks to Durm, Morg knew as well as the rest of them that Jarralt had worked ceaselessly for days, alone and in concert with other Doranen magicians, to heal the storm-damaged City and send more teams of magicians into the surrounding districts to effect repairs there as well. Looking at the City now, pristine and sparkling beneath the blue and sunlit sky, a visitor would never believe the wrack and ruin left behind by the lashing force of the king’s fever-blasted mind.
‘Yes, Fane,’ the king said curtly. ‘Jarralt has done his duty, as have all my subjects. I would expect no less.’
She wasn’t a stupid girl: she knew when to hold her tongue. Pouting, the princess sank once more into silence. The king and queen waved at the gathered masses. So did Fane, after some sharp prompting.
He would have liked to wave himself, simply for the delicious irony of the gesture, but Durm wasn’t the hand-waving type, so he kept his fingers folded in his lap and instead took advantage of the opportunity to see Dorana City for the first time since his arrival.
It reminded him of the old Doranen capital, Manitala, where once he’d lived and loved as a mere mortal thing. Lost Manitala, long since destroyed by war and fallen into crumbled decay. That city had looked just like this one, with its brightly coloured houses trimmed with flowerboxes and carved frameworks, its bold shopfronts and broad, cobblestoned thoroughfares. With its wide open Central Square, its bubbling fountains, its tree-shaded gardens and its flocks of wheeling songbirds.
Barl had transplanted memories here, as well as magicians.
Wrenching his mind from that unprofitable destination he once more paid attention to the king and queen. She was speaking: ‘—threatened to take those wretched books away from him if he didn’t take better care of himself.’
‘Oh, Mama,’ said the princess. ‘Gar’s a grown man. He doesn’t need you fussing over him as though he was still three years old.’
‘A mother never stops fussing no matter what age her children are!’ the queen replied. ‘Rest assured, Fane, I shall be fussing over you and your brother when your hair is grey and your eyesight has grown dim. It’s a prerogative of motherhood. You may roll your eyes now, young lady, but you’ll be agreeing with me fast enough once you’re a mother yourself.’
As the princess begged to differ, groaning and laughing, and the king added his own opinions, Morg stopped listening. Drivel, drivel, drivel. Family and its attendant sentimental slop. Yet one more mortal bond he’d left behind without the smallest whimper.
He looked over the heads of the marching band and considered the cripple, still waving to the mawkish crowds. Closing his eyes, he extended his senses and quested for the shape and smell and taste of the spell he’d kissed into the runt’s brain. It must be grown and close to bursting by now …
With the sun on his face and the sweet scent of autumn roses blowing on the breeze, he smiled. There it was. Squatting in the depths of the cripple’s compost mind like a pustuled toad. Black and bloated and ripe with promise.
It was time.
We have been dragged along on this parade today to celebrate one peasant and his transitory moment of glory, he thought, gloating. May I suggest we celebrate this, instead?
With a single, searing thought he triggered the spell – and His Royal Highness Prince Gar fell from his saddle to the cobblestoned road like a poleaxed bullock in the slaughterhouse.
Everybody screamed: the crowd, the queen, the shocked marching trumpeters at whose stumbling feet the cripple landed. The king shouted and even the princess squealed, just a little. The touring carriage stopped in a clatter of hooves. The lout threw himself from the back of his horse, snatched the reins of the cripple’s fine beast and shoved them and his own into the hand of a City Guard who’d come running.
Behind them, the remainder of the Privy Council had tumbled from its halted coach and was milling at the door of the touring carriage. Holze, the religious sot, was crying, ‘Barl save us, Barl save us’, as though his life depended on it. Which it did, though he was wasting his breath. Barl was long past helping anybody now. Conroyd Jarralt’s expression was harder to read; was that true concern or just a polished mask for public consumption?
Morg considered him carefully. A mask, he decided, crafted to hide an interesting face. In many ways it was a pity he’d been forced to take Magician Durm’s body. Conroyd Jarralt was a man much closer to his taste and temperament.
The king got out of the carriage, then the queen close behind and the princess soon after. Morg, mindful of Durm’s dignity, followed at a discreet distance. At his heels trailed Holze and Jarralt.
The lout was sprawled in the middle of the road, the cripple dragged across his lap. ‘I don’t understand it!’ he panted at the king. ‘One minute he were makin’ a joke, laughin’ at me, and the next he just went over! I don’t understand it! Someone ought to fetch that bonebotherer Nix, quick!’
Restrained and muttering on three sides was the crowd, flags and flowers forgotten. Ignoring them, the king dropped to his knees and pressed his hand to the cripple’s forehead. Morg watched, lending him Durm’s apparent, silent support. ‘He’s quite cool,’ said Borne, fear coated with calm. Leaning close, he patted his son’s cheek. ‘Gar. Gar. Can you hear me?’
‘He’s been working himself to bits over those mouldy ole books,’ the lout said. ‘But we had words on it and yesterday he seemed right as rain.’
The king spared him a brief smile. ‘It’s all right, Asher. Nobody’s blaming you.’
‘I’m blaming me!’ retorted the lout. ‘I’m s’posed to look out for ’im!’
‘And you do,’ said the queen, coming close. She held Fane’s hand in hers, tightly. ‘Why else are we all here?’ She glanced at the staring, muttering crowd, then at the king. ‘We should get him back to the palace, Borne. The carriage will be best, we can—’ She stopped, gasping. The cripple’s eyes were open, their pupils shrunk to pinpoints, and in their green depths burned an inky flame that flickered and darted like a black toad’s tongue. ‘Durm! Durm, look at this! Have you ever seen anything like it?’
No, Durm hadn’t. Neither had Morg, since this was the first time he’d ever artificially induced magic in another person. The effect was certainly impressive. He bent over to get a closer look and cleared his throat. ‘Your Majesty, we must proceed with care. I have a suspicion as to the root cause of this matter, and if I am proved correct …’ He paused dramatically, and waited for the unfolding enchantment to finish the sentence for him.
The unfolding enchantment obliged.
With a series of cracks like an exploding string of fireworks the cobblestones beneath the cripple’s body and all their feet rippled and split asunder. Pale green shoots erupted from the earth below them, rushing towards the sun. As those in the crowd close enough to witness the miracle shrieked aloud their surprise and consternation, and the lout cursed, and Holze began begging Barl’s mercy again, the green shoots darkened their colour, increased in size then burst into flower. Within moments the cripple and everyone within ten feet of him were surrounded by a riot of hollyhocks, roses, tulips and snapdragons.
‘No!’ cried the princess. ‘No, he can’t do this!’
Morg swallowed a smile. Oh dear. Well, he’d never expected her to be happy about it. But then he wasn’t doing this for her, was he?
/> At his feet, the cripple stirred. His mouth opened. His arms lifted, slowly, until his fingertips were pointing at the sky. ‘Ni’ala do m’barra. Tu-e. Tu-e.’
A hush, reverent and waiting. Then sighs, as a golden rain began to fall.
Gar was dreaming. He knew he was dreaming because he was doing magic, and that only ever happened in dreams. These dreams were particularly vivid, though. Visceral, in a way he’d never before experienced. He was bursting flowers from the ground and squeezing raw magic from the sky in fat golden drops. He could feel the crackle of magic at his fingertips, smell the burned-orange tang of discharged energy, as real as anything waking could be. But it wasn’t possible. Was it?
He opened his eyes.
‘Welcome back,’ his father greeted him. There were tears in his eyes.
‘Sir?’ he said, and was staggered by the sound of his own voice. Rusty as nails in a bucket, and thin, as though he’d poured too much of it from his throat and was now left with only dregs. ‘What happened?’
‘You don’t remember?’
He felt so empty. And light. As though he’d float right off the bed and out of the open window if the blankets weren’t pinning him to the mattress. Remember? Remember what? ‘What day is it?’
‘Still today,’ his father said, and straightened the edge of his sheet. ‘You fell off your horse three hours ago.’
‘Where’s Mama?’
‘With your sister. She’ll be here directly.’
The dream lingered, fresh in his memory. The tang of burned orange. Within his mind, a difference. Intangible, but there. It was impossible, of course. Grown and magickless men did not spontaneously burst into flower.
Impossible or not, he had to ask. ‘Sir, when you perform magic …’
His father leaned close. ‘Yes?’
You fool, you fool, it was only a dream … ‘Do you smell anything afterwards? Say, burned orange?’
‘No,’ said his father.
He had to close his eyes, turn his head to the opposite wall. For one brief and burning moment he’d actually believed the dream.
‘For me, it’s a sharp kind of lemon smell,’ his father said. ‘Your mother swears it’s fresh baked bread. Fane won’t tell us what she smells. It’s different, you see, with each of us. Nobody knows why. Something individual in the blood reacting with the energies. Whatever it is, it’s personal. Certainly it’s not discussed outside the family circle, so I don’t recommend you run around asking everybody you meet what they smell when they perform an incantation. It might lead to unpleasantness.’
His heart pounded, booming like a drum. ‘It was a dream. I was only dreaming.’
‘Were you?’ his father whispered.
With fear like an anvil on his chest he lifted one arm from the bed and held out his palm. Recited, silently, the words to conjure glimfire, the first incantation a child is taught. The one Durm had tried to teach him a hundred times, a thousand, and could not. Failure had seared the syllables of the spell into memory.
His flesh crawled. His fingertips tingled. His nose wrinkled: burned orange. He opened his eyes … and there was glimfire.
Durm said, ‘I told you, did I not, that the spell was an easy one?’ He’d been shadowed in a corner, unnoticed. Now he came forward to stand by the bed next to the king. He was smiling, one hand on the king’s shoulder. It was the face he’d worn all those years ago, before the truth had soured them both. With the snap of his fingers he plucked a dead, dry stick from thin air and held it out. ‘Make me a rose, Your Highness.’
The king stared. ‘Durm, are you mad? Four hours ago he couldn’t even make glimfire! He can’t—’
‘Can’t?’ said Durm. ‘Who are you to say what he can’t? We have no idea what his capabilities may be. For all you and I know, Borne, for Gar there is no “can’t”.’
As his father and Durm locked gazes Gar took the outstretched stick. It was rough and dry to the touch. Truly dead. ‘I don’t know how to—’
‘Use your imagination,’ Durm suggested. ‘Close your eyes and think of a rose.’
Gar shrugged. It couldn’t be that simple. Even Fane had found the translation a challenge, and Fane was gifted beyond living memory. But he had nothing to lose by trying; it wasn’t as though he were a stranger to failure, after all. He closed his eyes and thought of a rose.
Burned orange. His blood like boiling wine. Searing. Intoxicating. Power, filling him in an unstoppable wave, rolling through him and over him, dragging him under, flinging him high.
‘Ow!’ he said, and opened his eyes. There was a bead of blood on the tip of his thumb and a rose in his hand. He laughed, a harsh expulsion of air. ‘I forgot about the thorns.’
Durm said, very quietly, ‘Fane practised that translation day and night for a month to get it right.’
His frowning father reached out and took the rose from him. ‘There is no precedent for this.’
‘There is,’ said Durm. ‘And then again, there is not. Records show that a late assumption of powers is not unknown.’
‘Records show that before today the oldest Doranen to finally exhibit his magical heritage was twelve and a half years old!’ retorted the king. ‘Gar is almost twice that!’
Durm shrugged. ‘Nevertheless … it is not unknown.’
‘So,’ said Gar. He thought he should be screaming. Dancing. Laughing … or crying. He could do none of those things. With the taste of burned oranges still lingering on his tongue and the memory of a power so grand and grim thrumming yet through his bones, all he could do was breathe. ‘I am a true Doranen after all.’
The idea was obliterating. In the blink of an eye his world was filled with possibilities. A wife … a family … the right to stand equal with the rest of his race …
Smiling, weeping, his father leaned forward and kissed him on the cheek. ‘Yes, my son. Yes. You are a true Doranen.’
If one more person tried to squeeze into the Goose, thought Dathne, the walls were going to split asunder and the roof would crash down on all their heads. Matt had to press his lips against her ear and shout to make himself heard above the din.
‘But what does it mean, Dathne? It don’t make any sense. One more magician in the Usurper’s House makes the Wall safer, doesn’t it?’
‘I don’t know what it means, Matt!’ she shouted back. ‘I told you, I’m stuck. Can’t see any further forward than around the next corner, and that’s only if I stick my neck out. Looks like we’re back to waiting.’
‘Waiting!’ said Matt, disgusted, and drained his tankard dry. ‘I hate bloody waiting!’
She had to grin. ‘You sounded just like Asher, then.’
‘Aye, well, reckon I—’ Matt began, imitating, then broke off and pointed at the door. ‘Speaking of …’
A huge clamour from the Goose’s patrons rattled the rafters: Asher had arrived. The walls and roof remained intact, just. Aleman Derrig’s customers mobbed their man; hands stretched to pluck at his shirt sleeves, to tug at his elbow, to hold him fast and make him answer their quarrelsome questions. He withstood it for a minute then shoved all the shovers aside to climb up onto the bar.
‘Shut your damned cakeholes, all of you!’ he bellowed. ‘Shut up and I’ll tell you what’s the business! Or at least as much as I can!’
A ragged silence fell. Dathne exchanged a raised-eyebrow look with Matt and sat back in her seat, waiting.
‘Right,’ said Asher. He was still dressed in his parade finery, though it was looking a little the worse for wear. He was looking the worse for wear, too, strained about the eyes and tense in the shoulders and back. ‘His Highness is fine. The king’s seen him, the Master Magician’s seen him, Royal Pother Nix’s seen him. If they thought it’d help they’d get in a vitinery to see him. He ain’t dyin’. He ain’t even sick. He’s just got his magic, is all.’
A fresh wave of clamouring questions. Asher let it rage for a moment, looking tired, then lifted both his hands till the racket died down.
> ‘That’s all I got to say. There’ll be a royal announcement presently, I reckon. In the meantime you could put yourselves to good use and start spreadin’ the word.’
Laughter, protests and a few jeering catcalls. Asher ignored them. From her booth up the back, Dathne caught his eye. Crooked her finger at him and beckoned. He hesitated, then shook his head and indicated the Goose’s door.
‘He wants us to meet him outside,’ said Dathne, and pulled at Matt’s arm. ‘Come on.’
The street was almost as packed with people as the inn. Every second one of them recognised Asher and stopped to beg him for news. ‘This is bloody ridiculous,’ he muttered, and led them round the back to the Goose’s service alley. It stank of stale beer and rotten cabbage.
‘The prince is really all right?’ said Matt. ‘You’re sure?’
Asher glowered. ‘No, I just said that ’cause I felt like lyin’.’
Dathne shoved Matt with her elbow. ‘What happens now, do you know?’
‘With Gar?’ He dragged his fingers through his hair. ‘Don’t have a bloody clue. But I’ll tell you what’s about to happen with me. Come tomorrow I’m goin’ to be the only body in that whole bloody Tower workin’ as any kind of Olken Administrator. I’m goin’ to be up to my bloody eyeballs in Meister Glospottle’s piss problems and Mistress Banfrey’s lace shortages and Barl bloody knows what else!’ His eyes widened in horror. ‘Sink me! I might even have to sit court at Justice Hall!’
Indeed a horrifying thought. Dathne took a deep breath, choked on it, and said, ‘What about Gar? This magic, it’s unprecedented. Do you know how, or—’
‘Why no, Dathne, I’m afraid I don’t,’ said Asher with exaggerated care. ‘My best friend Durm and I ain’t had time for today’s cosy little chat over afternoon tea.’
‘All right,’ she said, recognising incipient revolt. ‘Clearly this isn’t a good time.’
‘No, clearly it bloody well ain’t!’ said Asher.
‘Don’t shout at her,’ snapped Matt. ‘None of this is Dathne’s fault.’
