The Mage of Trelian

by Michelle Knudsen

  The man started shaking his head vigorously. “I will not, you’re not going to —”

  He stopped abruptly, and Meg gasped and tried to brace herself for more fire; she didn’t want to embarrass herself again . . . but this seemed to be something else.

  “Uh, Calen . . .” Serek said.

  “I’m just holding him still,” Calen said, his eyes still on the prisoner. “You keep an eye on the other one.”

  Anders shot a glance at Surly, who abruptly became very still as well. Then Anders went back to watching Calen, clearly fascinated and not wanting to miss a second of whatever he was doing.

  “Now,” Calen said to the man, whose eyes stared back at him in terror from his motionless face, “I won’t let you move until I’m finished, but just to be safe, don’t even think about telling me anything. Think about . . . I don’t know, anything else. Think about how much you’d like to kill me right now. Or about cabbages. Or whatever you like. Just don’t think about anything related to how you got here.”

  Then he slowly raised his hand again. Meg held her breath. She thought Serek and Anders were holding theirs, too. The prisoner still seemed to be breathing, she was relieved to see, but was otherwise completely frozen in place.

  After several minutes, Calen stepped back. He looked at Anders, who Meg was starting to guess was better than Serek at sensing magic. “Do you sense anything else at work?”

  “No,” Anders said. He looked at Serek, but Serek just shook his head.

  “All right, then,” Calen said. Meg didn’t see him do anything, but the prisoner suddenly sank back against the wall with a strangled breath that sounded more like a sob.

  “Please,” the man said. “Please, I don’t want that to happen to me.”

  “It won’t,” Calen said. “You’re free to talk now.”

  The man looked at Surly, who glared at him but still seemed to be held in place by Anders’s spell. Then he seemed to come to a decision.

  “It’s like Jenner started to tell you. We had . . . help.” He paused, and when nothing happened, went on. “Said he was Lourin’s new mage, and he had those marks you all wear, so I guess he was. Anyway, our captain seemed to know all about it. The mage did something to your guards before the shift change, and let us pass through the gate like we were invisible. We just walked right in behind your own men.”

  “We would have known if he cast something through our wards,” Serek said, “but not if he cast something on the guards outside, and then . . .” He shook his head in apparent disgust.

  “It won’t work again, at least,” Anders said. “Not now that we know.”

  Serek gave him a look that seemed to suggest that this was little comfort, but didn’t say anything else.

  “But I thought Lourin didn’t have a new mage,” Meg said.

  “I guess they have one now,” Anders said. “But I can’t imagine that the Magistratum would have assigned anyone to a new post, under the current circumstances. . . .”

  Calen looked at the prisoner again. “Can you tell us anything else about what the mage looked like? Did he mention his name?”

  The man thought a minute, then said, “Young, not especially tall . . . light yellow hair. One of his tattoos made him look like he had cat’s whiskers on one side of his face.” He looked at them, seeming slightly embarrassed. “I only remember that because some of the men were laughing about it. He never said his name, but Captain called him . . . something. . . .” They waited, letting him try to remember. “Sorrel? Something like that?”

  “Scoral,” Calen said. It wasn’t really a question.

  “Yeah! That was it, I think.”

  Calen looked sick. He turned to Anders and Serek. “He’s one of Krelig’s.”

  “Are you certain?” Serek asked. He looked a little sick himself.

  Calen nodded. “He was there. One of the first to arrive, in fact.” He added after a moment, “He does kind of look like he has whiskers.”

  Meg stared around at all of them. “What are you saying? Are you saying . . . are you saying that Mage Krelig helped them get inside? That he’s in league with Lourin?”

  “I swear I didn’t know anything about this,” Calen said. “He never mentioned anything to me.”

  “Well, of course not,” she said, but she didn’t like the way Serek hesitated before nodding.

  Neither did Calen, apparently. “Do you really think I would have kept that information to myself?” He threw up his hands in exasperation. “What do I have to do to prove to you that I’m not on his side?”

  “Nothing,” Serek said, holding up a placating hand. “I know you’re not on his side, Calen. I’m just . . . I guess I’m just still adjusting. To — to everything.”

  “Well, hurry up,” Calen snarled. “We don’t have time for you to keep adjusting. He’s coming, soon, and we have to be ready. And we can’t be ready if you still don’t trust me.”

  Then he turned and walked out.

  Meg glared at Serek, who sighed. “Go on,” he said. “Anders and I will take this news to the king.”

  She started to go, then turned back and spoke to the guard. “See that the one who talked is moved to the upper level before Mage Anders releases his companion,” she said quietly. Then she ran to catch up with Calen.

  She found him on the path leading away from the dungeon doors.

  “Hey,” she said when she got close. He didn’t stop walking.

  “Hey,” she said, closing the distance and grabbing his arm. “Don’t you do that. Not to me.” Not ever again.

  He stopped, but he didn’t look at her.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m not mad at you, of course. I’m not even mad at Serek, really. I — I don’t know who I’m mad at.”

  “Krelig,” Meg said at once.

  He shook his head. “Not . . . exactly. I mean, I hate him, but that’s different. I can’t regret what happened, Meg. If I hadn’t gone, if I hadn’t learned all that I have, I don’t think we’d have even a chance of defeating him.” He raised his gaze to meet hers, and she had to fight the urge to step back from him. His eyes were hard and . . . closed, somehow. He looked like a stranger. The Calen she knew, his eyes had been like open windows to the person he was inside. These eyes belonged to someone else. Someone she didn’t know at all.

  “I just need some time alone right now,” he said. He was looking at her strangely, and she didn’t know if he could tell what she’d been thinking or was just distracted by his own secret thoughts that she no longer knew anything about. “I’ll see you later, Meg.”

  He pulled his arm gently from her grasp, and this time she let him go.

  Without really thinking about it, Meg headed back to the gardens and that quiet corner near the stone wall. But she wasn’t really surprised to find herself there when she arrived.

  And she wasn’t really surprised to see Wilem sitting beneath the tree near the wall, either.

  “Princess!” he said, getting to his feet. He looked at her in amazement. “Pela told me you’d been healed . . . but this is incredible.”

  She’d almost forgotten. “Yes,” she said. “Calen . . . learned a lot while he was away.”

  Wilem seemed on the verge of leaving, but didn’t. Meg sat down against the wall and waited to see what he would do.

  He hesitated a few more seconds, then returned to his place under the tree.

  “Calen has certainly become very skilled,” he said after a moment.

  “Yes,” Meg said. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Ah. Sorry.”

  She leaned her head back against the wall and sighed. “No, I’m sorry. I don’t know what I want to talk about, I guess. Calen’s new ability . . . it’s — it’s a good thing, of course. It just takes a little getting used to.”

  “Lots of changes are like that.”

  Meg looked at him. He was someone who knew about change, all right. He’d realized not that long ago that his entire life, or nearly so, had
been based on a lie. That his own mother was deceiving him in order to get him to go along with her evil plans. He’d done some terrible things based on those lies. He’d lost everything and started over — not just in a new place, but as a prisoner, surrounded by people who hated and mistrusted him. And now . . .

  “How do you do it?” she asked him finally. “How do you just go on, when your whole world has shattered around you? You seem . . . you seem almost content, and yet . . .”

  “I am more than content,” he said. “I’m being given a chance to try to atone for my crimes, to live a better life than the one I was living before. The world that shattered was not one that I would ever wish to return to. It wasn’t even real.” His mouth twisted at this, and he plucked a few blades of grass before looking back up at her. “Now, for the first time, I’m certain that my actions are my own, that my goals are my own . . . that I’m living as my own person, not the pawn of another. I have food and shelter and all the comforts I could want, and I have a place here now, with the army. I’ve made friends; there are people I care about. . . .” He trailed off. “I have regrets, of course. For the terrible things I was a part of. For the terrible things I was willing to do. But I can’t be sorry that I’ve ended up where I am now.”

  Which was very similar to what Calen had said, Meg thought.

  He studied her for a moment. “But your world isn’t shattering, Princess. It’s coming back together. Your friend has returned; Kragnir’s forces are coming to join us . . .”

  “But everything is different!” She sounded like a child, but she couldn’t seem to help it. “I know things change, that they must change, but I thought . . .” She sighed. “I suppose I thought that once Calen came back it would be . . . like before. But it can’t be. He’s different. I’m different. The world is different. We can never go back.”

  “No,” Wilem said. “You can’t go back. But you can go forward. Sometimes forward is better. I think . . . I think most of the time it is.”

  “They’ve asked me to fight full-time with the army for the duration of the war,” she said abruptly. “Starting tomorrow.”

  He looked . . . not surprised, exactly. Thoughtful? “Will you do it?”

  “Of course. It’s where I belong. I think everyone kept hoping the war would somehow just end on its own, and they wouldn’t have to put me in danger. But of course it didn’t, and then they did let me fight, and then I almost died. . . . I don’t think it was easy for my parents to agree to send me back out. But they understand that no place will ever really be safe if we don’t win this war. And we have the best chance of winning if Jakl and I are part of the fighting.”

  Which suddenly reminded her forcibly of what had just happened in the dungeons. She sat up. “It’s even worse than we knew, Wilem. We just learned that Mage Krelig is conspiring with Lourin.”

  “What?”

  “It’s how they were able to get inside our walls. And that means . . . well, all kinds of things. Gods, I should go report in. The mages are telling my parents now.” She was a little ashamed of herself for coming here at all. But she’d been so thrown by the interrogation and then by Calen’s strangeness. “I just . . . I just needed a few minutes before facing up to everything again, I think.” She didn’t know if she was explaining to Wilem or to herself.

  “I think you’re allowed to give yourself a few minutes now and then,” he said. “It’s why I come here, too. You can’t give your all to something else if you don’t take care of yourself.”

  “That sounds very wise,” she said. “But it’s probably just what I want to believe right now.”

  “Can’t it be both?” he asked, smiling.

  Meg smiled back. “Maybe it can.”

  They were quiet a moment, smiling at each other.

  “I like your hair that way,” Wilem said.

  “Oh,” Meg reached up to touch it. “I keep forgetting. I mean, thank you. It was — well, you saw.” She laughed before she could stop herself. “Pela was horrified.”

  “That your hair had burned away, or that I saw it?”

  “That you saw it. She took the burning in stride. It was the being seen in such disarray that she had trouble with. She was very embarrassed on my behalf.”

  “Battle scars are nothing to be embarrassed about,” Wilem said seriously.

  “I know. I feel the same way. It’s important to remember what we’ve been through, I think. What we’ve accomplished, and what we’ve survived.”

  “Yes. Well said, Princess.”

  She rolled her eyes at him. “Will you not call me Meg? We’re both going to stay in Trelian for the foreseeable future, it seems. We’re fighting in the same army! You might as well call me by my name.”

  “Are you certain? I didn’t wish to . . . I know, before, it was . . .”

  “Things change,” Meg said. “I think . . . I think they’ve changed again.”

  He hesitated, then nodded. “Very well. Thank you, Meg.”

  She grinned at him. “You’re welcome, Wilem.”

  Meg got back to her feet and headed toward the castle to find her parents. She looked back once and saw Wilem watching her as she walked away. He lifted his hand in a wave, and she waved back before she continued on. She thought she might have moved beyond not-hate with regard to Wilem. Moved on to . . . something else. She didn’t know what. Something far less cold and distant. Whatever it was, she couldn’t deny that she rather liked it.

  And maybe that was okay.

  Wilem was right. They couldn’t go back. But they could go forward.

  And sometimes forward was better.

  CALEN’S DAYS IN TRELIAN HAD FALLEN into a strange and distorted reflection of the time he’d spent with Mage Krelig.

  In the mornings, he had private lessons with Serek and Anders. Although in this case, he seemed to be the one doing most of the teaching. Or at least, they weren’t attempting to teach him anything. Mostly Calen just continued to demonstrate all the new things he could do.

  And despite their assurances that they were not, the mages mostly just continued to seem rather horrified.

  Even Anders, although he did have occasional moments of bright interest when he seemed to forget how horrified he was. “Face melting! I’ve never seen that,” Anders said when Calen described (but did not demonstrate) the terrible spell that Cheriyon had sent at him but ended up enduring himself. He did demonstrate a lot of the other spells, though. And the techniques — slowing down another mage’s spell or turning it back against its caster. Most of these things Anders and Serek could do perfectly well themselves, of course. They just weren’t prepared to see how easily Calen could do them.

  They were still uneasy about the early-colors thing, too, he thought. He could see the early colors all the time now.

  Calen still hadn’t told them very much about how Krelig conducted his lessons. He didn’t tell them about the various punishments — the burnings, the cutting, the slicing off of the tips of ears. He wasn’t sure why. Partly he just didn’t want to talk about it. He also didn’t like the idea of how they might react. He already felt somewhat . . . tainted, he supposed was the word. For how he’d learned what he’d learned. And from whom.

  It doesn’t matter, he tried to tell himself. The important thing is that you learned so much. Enough to make a real difference.

  He thought that was true. He just wished Serek and Anders could get past feeling horrified and start focusing on how they could use Calen’s abilities to fight Krelig.

  He also wished, very much, that the other mages had spent more time learning and preparing while he’d been away. From what he’d seen so far, they were nowhere near ready.

  And Krelig would surely be coming soon.

  Now that they knew he was working with Lourin, that probably meant a physical attack as well as a magical one. Serek’s time had been divided between working with the mages and meeting with the king and the commander to discuss how the mages could help now that they knew other mage
s were involved in the war. That changed the rules, concerning what and how much the mages (the good mages) were allowed to do. Of course, since the group here had already set themselves up as separate from the Magistratum, Calen thought they could just make up their own rules, but he could see that Serek was trying to walk a careful line.

  And Calen could see the sense in that, too, of course. They didn’t want to be like Krelig, abandoning all rules in order to achieve their ends. But he still thought Serek could stand to bend a few more.

  Serek had taken charge, though, and the other mages were listening . . . but Calen was afraid many of them still didn’t understand how ruthless Krelig was. How he was teaching the other mages under his command to be just as ruthless. That they wouldn’t hold back. When the time came to fight, Krelig’s army wouldn’t be constrained by any rules or conventions or even morals. They would be driven by terror of Krelig and by the knowledge that, if they didn’t win, there would be nothing left for them afterward. They could never return to the Magistratum after joining forces with the enemy. There was no way the other mages could ever forgive them for what they’d done.

  In the afternoons, when they joined the other mages for group practice — there were more of them now, a little over sixty, with others still on the way — Calen struggled to hold his tongue. They were so slow. And so polite. There seemed to be more time spent discussing whose turn it was to do what than actually casting spells. Finally Calen pulled Serek aside and told him how Krelig organized his group practices. “They’re ready for anything,” Calen said. “He’s made them ready for anything. And our side . . . they’re too nice, Serek. Can you get them to be less nice?”

  Serek seemed to think this over. “Maybe,” he said at last. He strode to the center of the hall.

  “Mages!” he said. “My apprentice thinks you’re all a little too soft to face Krelig’s army, based on what he’s seeing right now.”

  Calen winced. He hadn’t wanted Serek to say that!

  All the mages looked at him. They didn’t seem to appreciate the criticism.

  “Calen and I are going to demonstrate the kind of practice Krelig is holding with his secret army,” Serek went on. “As a motivational exercise.” He beckoned Calen forward.