Treasurekeeper

by Ripley Harper

  “They’re true.” I frown. “Or have you forgotten what happened at the trial?”

  “Firemagic? I hardly think so! I appreciate the effort your keepers have made in trying to convince the Order that you’re a firemaster now, and I do realize that they did it for your own protection. But there’s no need for lies between us today.”

  “I’m not lying.”

  “Oh, come on. Apart from a few of the more fanatic seaprophets, nobody believes those old myths any longer.”

  “Did it feel like a myth when you were kneeling before me?”

  His eyes narrow slightly, and for a second I catch a glimpse of a fierce intelligence behind that pompous mask. “I felt the force of your will, yes. But my best guess would be that the compulsion was due to nothing more than a wild and untutored form of Enthrallment. My own research has proven indisputably that there’s no truth to any of the apocryphal magics.”

  “Your research is wrong; there’s nothing apocryphal about it. I can call on my firemagic whenever I want.”

  “You’re bluffing.”

  It’s true. I am bluffing.

  First, I have no idea what apocryphal means, and second, the very last thing I want to do is call on my firemagic right now. I’ve just spent months resting, and there’s not a single part of me that wants to hand over the wheel of my personality to a mildly psychopathic firedragon with a massive ego problem and superpowers.

  Then again, he doesn’t need to know that, does he?

  “Try me.”

  He plays distractedly with one of his thick golden rings, and then he must come to some inner decision because when he looks at me again all traces of the prissy English buffoon have vanished. “I’m here because I need more power. And the only way to get it is to pledge myself to you.”

  “Why?” For the first time since he got here, I’m genuinely interested in what he might have to say. “I thought pledging was just a formality keepers performed to become part of a clan, or to spark their magic when it’s late to bloom.” I wave a hand in his direction, indicating the suit, the tie, the rings, the shoes. But you’re the freaking Green Lord, so I don’t see how any of this applies to you.”

  He crooks an eyebrow. “Indeed. I am the ‘freaking’ Green Lord. Which, more than anything else, should tell you just how broken the Green Clan’s magic has become.”

  “The Green Clan’s magic is broken?” I ask, surprised.

  “Of course,” he says, clearly irritated by my ignorance. “It’s not as if it’s a secret. The deep skills of Earthmagic are Healing and Remembering, and nobody in the Green Clan has been able to master Remembering for centuries.”

  His words confuse me even further. “The Earthkeepers of the Amazon can Remember.”

  “Yes. We’ve heard those rumors too. And Clara certainly had a few tricks up her sleeve when she crept out of her hole twenty years ago.” The tone of his voice exactly mirrors the look of distaste playing over his features. “But those Earthkeepers—–if they can, in fact, even be called Earthkeepers—–don’t belong to the Order, and since they flatly refuse to leave their precious jungle in order to mix their bloodlines with ours, their rumored wild skills are of no use to the Green Clan.”

  I rub a hand over my eyes. “And this is why you’re here? Because you think that by pledging yourself to me, you’ll get enough power to master Remembering?”

  “That’s exactly what I’m hoping for, yes.”

  Because I get the idea that he’s finally leveling with me, I decide to return the favor. “Okay, so I guess you must’ve heard what happened to the Skykeepers who pledged themselves to me.”

  He doesn’t immediately deny it, which means I must be on the right track.

  “I’m not sure exactly what you heard, but you obviously didn’t get the whole story. Yes, it’s true that their magic did become a lot more powerful after that pledge. But something else happened during the process too. Something really weird that nobody expected.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  I hesitate, trying to decide how much to tell him. On the one hand, I don’t trust this guy at all; if he thinks it’s in the best interest of his precious Order, he’ll spill my secrets in a heartbeat. On the other, maybe if people knew what they were letting themselves in for, they’ll finally stop all this pledging nonsense.

  Oh, what the hell.

  “You know all those ritual words about offering your body and your life and your magic to someone’s service? So yeah. They kind of came true. After the pledge we were, I don’t know, connected in some way. Like seriously. Body and soul. I don’t know how else to explain it. They got into my mind, and I got into theirs. It wasn’t healthy.”

  His face pales slightly. “You’re telling the truth, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “This is why you’re so reluctant to accept my pledge.”

  “Yes.”

  He swears under his breath, then gets up and walks to the window. I watch his tense back as he stares at the miserable winter weather outside.

  Ha! Take that evil Superman.

  I’m petty enough to enjoy seeing him so rattled.

  Don’t have so much to say now, do you, mister?

  I’m about to leave the room when he mumbles something.

  “Sorry, I didn’t hear—–”

  “I’ll do it.”

  “What?”

  “I said I’ll do it.”

  “But… why? Didn’t you hear what I just said?”

  “I heard.”

  “So what the hell? Are you insane?”

  “No. I’m not. Nor am I some magic-hungry addict desperate for more power.” He straightens his tie as he walks back to the table and sits down, a grim but determined look on his face. “Personally, this is not what I’d have wanted, of course. But I’m not here in a personal capacity: I’m here as the Lord of the Green Clan, and as such I know where my duty lies. I will give up my freedom for my clan, and I will do it without flinching.” The way he says it, proudly and quietly, makes it clear to me that he dreads this pledge as much as I do.

  “Why is Remembering so important to you?” I ask, reluctantly realizing that I might be starting to respect this guy, just a little.

  When he pauses and starts playing with his rings again, I expect a lecture about the importance of traditions and stability and history. But he surprises me with a question of his own. “Do you know what the Green Clan has always called a true earthmaster?”

  I shake my head.

  “A Treasurekeeper. And do you know why?”

  Another shake.

  “Because our memories are our greatest treasures—–by far the most important thing we own.” He ignores my dubious look. “Have you ever wondered why we’re here?”

  “Um…”

  “What are we doing here? Why do we have these special powers? Why does the Order exist? Why the need for all the rituals and traditions and secrecy?”

  His face is completely serious, his voice completely earnest.

  “Well, the answers to those questions lie in the past. And the only way we can truly know the past is through Remembering.”

  Something about his words tugs at me, evoking that uncomfortable inner sensation I always get when I’m subconsciously reminded of something unpleasant. “Why can’t the Green Clan Remember?” I ask quickly, trying to shake off the feeling. “What went wrong?”

  “We’re not quite sure. But we do know that it was a direct consequence of the Great Abomination.”

  “The great what?”

  “Abomination.” He registers my mystified expression. “It’s a term used within the Order to refer to the unspeakable actions which led to the Pendragons being made Outcast.”

  Oh, for God’s sake.

  “The Pendragons broke the Green Clan’s magic?”

  “They certainly played a massive part. Which is why it would be so fitting, don’t you think, if our magic is restored here, in the very place where it was corr
upted in the first place.”

  Chapter 25

  In Western culture, however, dragons were usually seen as a threat to women, and there are countless tales of heroes battling dragons in order to save helpless maidens captured by these beasts. In reality, of course, such dragons would have been the mothers of the maidens so ‘saved’, but the point to grasp is that even in those seemingly ignorant tales, a young woman guarded by a dragon was considered worth the taking. Men would do anything to claim such maidens for themselves, even to the point of braving a horrifying and almost certain death.

  From Dragons in Folklore (1961), by Gordon Green

  “Like so many tragic events in history, the shameful saga of the Pendragons’ great crime originated in a lust for power. In their case, however, this hunger for power was not primarily linked to a craving for riches, or land, or influence. No, what they craved was blood. More specifically, they were driven by an insatiable hunger for the blood that flows in the veins of girls like you.”

  It’s about ten minutes later.

  I have finally convinced the Green Lord that I don’t know what the Pendragons did to get kicked out of the Order, and he’s agreed to tell me their story. It’s a role he seems to enjoy (his family, apparently, are keen historians) because he’s hamming it up, raising and lowering his voice with all the relish of a true storyteller.

  “Now Magnus Pendragon, Jack Pendragon’s great-grandfather, a few generations removed, was a trueborn son, and as such magnificently gifted in magic. He became the Red Lord by the age of nineteen, and by the age of twenty-one he was married to a woman called Morgaine, a keeper so powerful in her own right that she became the Red Lady not long afterwards. Under their leadership, the Red Clan became more powerful and influential with every year that passed, but even the massive amounts of bloodmagic they wielded together was not enough for them. They burned with the ambition to master all kinds of magic—–earth, sea, air and blood—–and to do this without having to rest for months on end. What they wanted, in other words, was nothing less than the power of a dragon, but since neither of them was able to transform, they decided to steal the power from one who could—–the Red Lord’s younger sister, a trueborn daughter called Medousa.”

  Something in my body resonates at the sound of that name, as if a gong is ringing deep inside me. I’ve heard that name before.

  No. I know that name.

  Something inside me knows that name as well as I know my own.

  “Like her brother, Medousa was directly descendant from the Third, her lineage unbroken from mother to child—–body to body, blood to blood—–since time immemorial. Even then there were not many like her left, and she was closely guarded by her keepers, an old and dedicated Black clan family who drilled her most diligently from an early age. Medousa, however, was a particularly powerful ward, and she withstood the First Protocols so well that her keepers rushed her into the Second Protocols immediately afterward. When she withstood that too, with her health and spirit largely intact, they were so afraid of risking her full transformation that they decided to forgo the Third Protocols in its entirety and to move directly on to the Fourth—–a mistake, in my opinion.”

  I listen to his story in silence, careful to keep my face expressionless. But the casual way he talks about what basically amounts to the brutal torture of a little girl causes such a painful rush of emotion inside me that I feel my face heating up despite myself. Even now, after everything that happened, I can’t bear to think about the drills. If I allow myself even the slightest—–

  No.

  I give him my blankest stare. “What happened?”

  “Medousa’s body withstood the rigors of the Fourth Protocols, but unfortunately her mind was so completely broken that she lost the will to live. Her keepers could not get her to eat, or sleep, or even move, and with every day that passed they had to watch their ward wither and fade. At their wits’ end, they finally decided to allow Medousa a period of direct contact with her brother in the hope that some residual family affection would sway their ward from her stubborn path of self-destruction. Trueborn daughters are not traditionally allowed to see their families, of course, but since Medousa’s brother was the Red Lord, and as such a trusted leader of the Order, no one blinked an eye when Magnus and Morgaine were allowed to visit the ailing girl. Of course, at the time nobody understood the scope of the Red Lord’s ambition or realized the depth of the Red Lady’s depravity.”

  Jesus. Like it’s not depraved to torture a girl until she wants to die.

  “When people think of bloodmagic, they immediately think of Enthrallment. There’s simply something about being blinded by illusion that creates an almost childish sense of wonder in most people. But, in my view at least, the most dangerous skill of bloodmagic is not Enthrallment but Seduction—–and it was this dark skill that those infamous two bloodmasters used to steal Medousa away from her keepers.”

  I sit up straighter. “Are you telling me Magnus Pendragon seduced his sister?”

  The Green Lord smirks unpleasantly. “We’ll never know what happened behind closed doors, of course. But in the letter Medousa left for her keepers to find, it was her love for her brother’s wife that she confessed. Overwhelmed by her obsession with Morgaine, the young ward slipped out one night, slyly escaping her keepers’ most careful precautions, to run straight into the arms of, as she called it in her letter, ‘her very own true love’.”

  The look on his face makes it clear what he thinks of that concept.

  “To this day, nobody is quite sure how that villainous pair whisked Medousa away, or how, afterwards, they evaded her keepers’ frantic search for their stolen ward. What we do know is that she paid dearly for her little rebellion, for Morgaine’s ‘love’ was nothing but the purest Seduction. That nasty woman never wanted Medousa’s love for a second; what she lusted after was not the girl herself, but the power slumbering in her blood.”

  He pauses, as if choosing the best way to present the rest of his story.

  “The most powerful earthmaster of modern times, indeed, perhaps of all time, was a sorcerer named Faustus. He was a distant great-granduncle of mine on my mother’s side and a trueborn son, directly descendant from the Seventh—–body to body, blood to blood—–in an unbroken line that stretched back into infinity.”

  His repetition of that strange phrase—–body to body, blood to blood—–stirs something inside me: a floaty sense of disconnection, a vague memory of long-forgotten dreams.

  I clamp down on it immediately. Whatever it is can wait. I’ve avoided learning the truth about the Pendragons for far too long.

  “For some reason or the other, it is rare for trueborn sons to choose earthmagic as a discipline, which might be why Faustus decided to walk the independent path of a sorcerer rather than to take up the mantel of leadership within the Green Clan. Such a decision was highly irregular, of course, and there were many who had grave misgivings about his unconventional choice. But even the direst pessimists could not have foreseen the scope of the calamity which was to result from that decision.

  “By the time Faustus became a sorcerer, Magnus and Morgaine Pendragon had been in hiding for almost a decade. After their unforgivable theft and abduction of a Black ward of childbearing age, they were made Outcast but suffered no greater censure—–primarily because nobody could find any trace of them. This situation could not be allowed to continue, of course, and eventually the leaders of the Order decided to make use of a sorcerer’s services to seek out the despicable pair. They needed to be punished for their crime, publicly and viciously, lest others become tempted to imitate their outrageous deed, and as fate and the devil would have it, the Order approached none other than the earthmaster Faustus for the task of locating the Pendragons.

  “Faustus used his sorcerer’s trick to find the runaways, and it’s a testament to the strength of his magic that he did this within a period of less than a year. An astonishing feat, truth be told, as Magnus and Morgaine h
ad fled all the way to the New World, where they’d settled beside a pristine lake in a godforsaken wilderness known only to small groups of roving tribespeople. Naturally, those savages were easily Enthralled to forget all about their former hunting grounds, and by the time Faustus found the thieves they were living in splendid isolation with only their stolen young ward as company.”

  Another pause. It’s clear to me that the Green Lord finds far less pleasure in this tale now that a member of his own family plays a starring role in it.

  “We do not know why Faustus decided to approach that despicable pair rather than report back to the Order immediately, but we do know that he underestimated the strength of the power of Seduction just as massively as Medousa had. And indeed, it wasn’t long before he was just as infatuated with those bloodmasters as poor Medousa, and together the four of them began to work together to defeat, not only the deepest held tenets of the Order of Keepers, but also the most basic rules of decency and propriety. For the Pendragons wanted the impossible: to wield the full power of a dragon without suffering the consequent loss of their humanity and so, with the help of a trueborn sorcerer and the Black ward they had seduced, they attempted to create a new kind of power entirely. We do not know who came up with this loathsome idea, or exactly how it was realized. But we do know that Medousa fully transformed for this process, and that Faustus used blood from her dragon’s body, together with the blood of an unholy mix of self-replicating animals—–wasps, lizards, boa constrictors, sharks—–to concoct an unspeakable potion which he then magicked into Morgaine’s blood.”

  I grimace, remembering those sad, misshapen half-animal creatures I saw that day at the lake.

  But the Green Lord must mistake my expression for ridicule, because he sends a withering look my way. “You can smile if you want. I’m well aware that today people talk about gene splicing and genetic engineering and heaven knows what else. But Faustus did his work without a laboratory, or any modern equipment, or without knowing even the most basic scientific facts regarding DNA sequences, or enzyme and protein structures. His was a feat of magic, pure and simple, an intuitive process that used the deepest insights of earthmagic—–an understanding of how organisms grow and change—–to create something as wondrous as it was evil. And evil it was, make no mistake, for this act of dark magic caused each of Morgaine’s female descendants to be born with a magical twin: a creature who could carry their magic for them so that when the time came, the girls themselves would not have to transform into dragons in order to fully wield their magic.”