by Colin McComb
It’s not that we weren’t grateful for their help, but we all knew that the reavers had alliances with the other reaver tribes, and that they’d be looking for vengeance—not that year, likely, and not the next, but some time down the road when the knights were long gone. And who’d save us then?
Magus Underhill might, we supposed, and we had to hope for his aid. We’d never gotten much help from him before, but now that we had seen his power ourselves, we thought that he might bend it for our protection. It was a scant hope, but better than despair. If the tribes united, there was no chance we could stand against them, and the Empire wasn’t likely to have a garrison nearby—at least, not near enough to save most of our citizens.
But like I said, this was a slim hope for the time. Underhill was engaged in the business of teaching you, and we saw the old man less than ever. I suppose that’s because he had plenty of errands for you to run. We saw you more in a week than we’d ever seen him in a month. Underhill must have been working you hard, because every time you looked more tired than the last, your eyes always darker and more sunk. The main difference in how you were before and how you were as a new apprentice was the way you dressed: in the brown apprentice robe and that thick belt. Your aunt and uncle must’ve been scared off from talking to you, because while they muttered to their friends about how you were being treated, they always tried to avoid your sight (and how that must have hurt you to see them fleeing from you!). Give them some love in your heart, boy—they spared none from you in your time of need.
Remember how you used to start at the sight of the knights? If you saw one of them, your eyes’d widen and your hands’d fly to the belt, like it was protection (now I know that it was). The time I remember best is when, after the knights had slaughtered the reavers, you dropped that basket of food before you’d even paid for it, eggs and vegetables from the early summer pickings flying everywhere. The knights vanished almost before you realized what you’d done, and you were left to try explaining what happened to the shopkeeper’s daughter. You paid for the one spilled basket, paid for a new one, and then you paid again, I guess, when you got back to the tower—the next time I saw you, you sported a black eye, and that was the first we knew that maybe things weren’t so easy for you as apprentice to the old magus.
That basket must have been the signal for the knights to start shadowing you, when they realized they could spook you. They kept you on edge, like shadows around a campfire. If you’d been a little older, you would have realized that they wouldn’t dare touch you or else they would have already, and you wouldn’t have shown them fear. But you weren’t older, and you did show fear, and that made them bold.
Remember when that young knight tried to take your belt? I remember how the lightning that played around his head made him look like a painting of one of the saints. It stiffened him out, stretched him out on the street, and he didn’t move for several minutes. I didn’t bother going for help because I saw the knight’s companion draft a farmer, and because I honestly didn’t care whether the bully lived or died.
I suppose I should have been happy he lived. I was made happy that night when I sat in my accustomed seat and listened to Caltash in his office above reprimand the young knight. It went something like this:
Caltash: “I told you all not to challenge him directly, didn’t I?”
Knight: “Yes, sir.”
Caltash: “Then what, pray tell, were you doing?”
Knight: “Sir, I thought if I could take the belt, we could deal with the boy with impunity.”
Caltash’s voice was a whip. “The old man would have known exactly where the boy went, you idiot. Now he’s warned that we’re tormenting his boy, and the boy, if he has any brains at all, will know that you at least can’t touch him. That means I’ll have to start this campaign over entirely. And it is your fault.”
Knight: “Yes, sir.”
Caltash: “You will return to Terona tonight. Pack your bags, make ready your courser, and return to me for your reprimand and the letter outlining the reason for your untimely return.”
Knight: “… Yes, sir.”
I tried hard not to smirk at the knight's failure when he came down the stairs for the final time that evening. He looked much more like a boy than he ever had in my sight, and his left shoulder-plate was painted the deep red of disgrace. His steel courser waited outside, and he hurried through the tavern.
The next day, I understand, Magus Underhill came to speak to Caltash. I wasn’t there, having drawn patrol duty, but I heard that Underhill spent ten minutes in Caltash’s quarters. Nobody knows what they said, but shortly after Underhill came down, Caltash assembled his entire contingent and they left town, riding hard to the east. It was one of the finest gifts I’ve ever received, for it meant we could return to normal for the fall harvest and the winter festivals, and if it meant that people were a little more free with their words and their actions in the meantime, who’s to judge? We saw neither hide nor hair of them for three years, and that was beyond fine for all of us.
But it was right at that time, in summer ‘88, that we heard that King Fannon died. We’d known that he’d been struggling for life for over a year and that he’d passed off the main duties of rule to Duke Athedon. You remember the stories—you heard them even in Underhill Tower, I’m sure, or else you heard them when you came into town.
The queen and the young remaining princesses, the twins, had retired from public sight, standing faithfully by the bedside of the old king. The merchants who told us these stories said that the royal ladies had gone to visit the king in his sickbed, and that the one of the young twins, playing like young children always do, knocked a candle onto the bedspread. The flames engulfed the room, and rather than flee (and here the storytellers always paused to wipe away a tear), the royal family perished trying to help the king from his bed. It was all the more tragic because the girls had escaped the flames two years before, when one of their nursemaids had accidentally set the nursery ablaze, creating a fire that threatened to take the city. We’d heard about that, too—heard that it took military dirigibles to help put out the fires. This time, they weren’t so lucky, and so the line of Fannon disappeared.
Stories of foul play came and went, as they always do when a king dies. I myself heard that he was strangled by Athedon in his bed; that he was killed by agents of a foreign power—which power was always in dispute; that the old alliances of the Birdsnest War joined together to strike him down; that the reason Fannon was taken with his family was to fulfill a pact he made with a duke of Hell. In other words, it was all garbage. You’ve probably got the better word on what really happened.
How’d we feel about it? Tell the truth, not much. What happens in Terona doesn’t much affect us, it doesn’t seem. Taxes go up, and tax collectors appear. Taxes go down (with far less regularity), and the collectors disappear. Sometimes press gangs come through for one war or another. But mostly, what affects us directly are the dictates and whims of our nobles. We held our vigils for a week, as the old laws demanded, while the bodies lay in state in the capital. Of course the caskets were closed—I’ve pulled my share of victims from fallen buildings, and setting the stench aside, who wants to look at a fire-wracked body? The four caskets sat in the cathedral, and the clerics sat with them, the knights guarding the cathedral both inside and out. On that all the storytellers were agreed.
So Duke Athedon ascended to the throne. “In order to preserve the public tranquility,” he said. Since Fannon left no heir, someone had to take control, and rather than allow the great Houses to fall into chaos by struggling for the throne, Athedon-as-Regent ordered the armed forces and the nobility to swear fealty to Athedon-as-King. And that was what we knew going into the winter of ‘88.
That was the same winter we saw the magus work his magic for us for the first time, to turn aside that smothering snowstorm. You remember? You and he walked a distance around the town and the nearby farms, and Underhill appeared to be pointing out
features of the landscape to you. We walked a good distance behind you, but we were curious what you were doing. Every once in a while, it appeared that you’d stop and sprinkle something on the ground, or dig into the earth to plant something, and we steered clear of those spots—we didn’t want anything to do with the actual workings of your magic. Then you two stood on the ridge to the west of town. None of us was brave enough to approach you, but we watched from as close as we dared.
I don’t know what you did, but I remember seeing those clouds in the west, with darkness following in their wake. I remember the snow starting to fall and thinking that there was no way you’d be able to stop the storm—it was just too big. I remember him raising his staff, and seeing you tie something to a box at his feet, and then the blue light grew around the staff while Underhill thrust it at the sky. You know these operations better than I do, so you must know that it didn’t look like anything had happened when the light snuffed out, and we figured you’d written off the whole thing as a failure when you stowed your equipment and headed back to the copse near the tower. We never saw you come out of the copse—I found out why that was later.
Anyway, we kept waiting for the storm to break over us, but it parted before it reached the town, and the heaviest snows fell beyond our fields. You’d made a wall for us, and don’t think we weren’t grateful. Later, we walked out on the borders of the spell. It was like we’d been walled in by four feet of snow. Some snow had drifted or fallen in, but the borders of the spell were clear. They were exactly the route you’d walked.
That was the magic I saw that winter. The next year’s magic, in ‘89, was yours, and gods, boy, that was impressive. I don’t know what you’d been doing under the hill since you’d been taken by the magus, but your debut’ll stay in this town’s memory forever.
This is how it looked to us down here in the village: another massive snowstorm had passed us by with the help of your master, but it was disastrous for the farms and hamlets that lay outside Underhill’s purview. Snow banks trapped families in their houses, shutting off roads and cutting these people from the community. Food for the deer and rabbits was buried deep, and they migrated to the south to find their moss and twigs. Deprived of their usual prey, the wolves began looking for easier food—and the isolated families were helpless against large packs.
My six-man squad and I found the first of these families. The speaker, coward though he was, was also canny enough and caring enough to realize that some of the far-flung farmers might need supplies to get them through the winter, and he sent us to check on them. We left in the morning under a lowering sky and tramped across the fields on snowshoes, each taking turns blazing trail in the frigid air. We were nearly exhausted by the time we reached Farmer Hapgood, our first stop.
He asked for a greater store of firewood. When we asked why he hadn’t cut enough to last the winter, he told us of the wolves that howled in the nearby hills. He said he’d been burning through his cords to keep them at bay all night, and he hadn’t dared to take his boys out to the woods to chop more. He’d gone to the Connors farm once or twice since the great snowfall, and the second time had seen Connors barricading his windows and doors.
“You would, too, Hapgood, if you’d heard the wolves in the yard at night,” Connors had said. “The animals are safe enough in the barn, long as the doors’re closed, but they got to be fed sometime.”
“But wolves don’t hunt in big packs. Five, seven, maybe twelve, but bigger than that?” Hapgood said.
“Not usually, no. But maybe when they’re bringing down big prey… like humans, eh? I tell you, the ones been nosing ‘round here are more than twelve for sure. Lay in your firewood, that’s all I can tell you.”
And that was the last Hapgood had heard from Connors, and that was our goad in getting over to the Connors farm next. I mean immediately. I sent three of my men back to town with torches to put in the word that the wolves were ravening this winter, and to tell the speaker to gather the remaining farm families into town until the prey animals returned. The remaining four of us went across the snows to the Connors farm. It took us an hour to get there, but we smelled burned wood in the air, and under that we smelled burned meat. As we climbed the ridge, we saw the last wisps of the greasy fire that had ravaged the Connors farm, and when we came down, we saw the mass of footprints that told us the size of the pack that had slaughtered the family: at least twenty, maybe more. A bloodstained drag-trail led into the woods. We came up three short when we counted the fire-wrecked bodies in the homestead’s shell, and no human prints in the snow told us of lucky refugees.
Turns out the Connors barn was stronger than the farmhouse, with stone walls dug deep underground for the foundations. The wolves had been digging but gave up after a couple feet. We opened the barn to take the animals inside back to town. We roped them together, and we were ready to cut them loose one at a time if we got threatened by wolves on the way back. Good thing, too—we lost two on the journey, and we were grateful that the wolves went for the easy prey.
We tried to send to Northvale and Fallsmouth for help, but the farther our men got beyond the barriers of Underhill’s spell, the deeper the drifts piled. Our men turned back before too long, exhausted and frozen. We visited twelve more farms over the next couple of days and brought seven families back to town, with five that were dead before we showed. After the fifth, the speaker told us not to bother—the wolves were getting too thick, coming from miles for the easy food. A couple had even come past the borders of Underhill’s spell to raid the farms under his protection. So far the wolves had only taken animals, but it wouldn’t be long before they grew bolder. After a pack of twenty penned in one of the outlying farms for a night—we went to their aid after they fired a flaming bolt like a flare into the night sky, and we drove off the attackers—well, that’s when the speaker decided to ask you two magi for help.
I don’t know how he summoned you down from Underhill Tower, and I don’t know what he said to you. I was on patrol, me and my squad, with torches, bows, and pikes. When I came back to the Goat’s Beard that night, I found out that Underhill had agreed to help, and that he’d need three days’ time to prepare a suitable spell. He said he’d need three cattle, too, to be brought to the market square on the third day. We stayed indoors as much as possible for those three days.
Then that new storm came, broke through the old spell. It brought more cold than snow. The next day broke clear, clear as I’ve ever seen it, and our breath was sharp from our lips. It fogged the air before it shattered inches from our mouths. When we got to the square, you and Underhill were there waiting. You didn’t look very magical, with your heads all bundled in scarves and hoods and those thick leather gloves. Even that old leather case looked more like a traveling peddler’s than a magus’s.
The speaker arrived moments later, with Ecclesiast Vlanders in tow. Vlanders had called in the lesser ecclesiasts from the nearby chapels, keeping them in town and away from the dangers of the winter, and having nothing better to do, had invited himself along. You know the beanpole as well as I do, and you know there’s no love lost between that officious ditherer and the guards, so I’ll spare any further description.
I don’t know if you noticed how surprised we were when you took the lead. You asked for the cattle, and your voice had started to deepen. Your eyes were sharper, too—like they held some secrets deep inside. Well, we told you we had ‘em, and you made us rope them up and we headed to the north.
I know you remember all this, but I want to tell you how it looked to us, and why things turned out the way they did. Because you remember what the speaker said: “Wait one moment! I thought this was to be Magus Underhill’s task! Are we to entrust our lives to a stripling?”
And then you answered. “Speaker, perhaps you’d care to wait before you pass judgment on my skills.”
The man blustered, but you were cool and in control. “As you can see, my master is here beside me. Should my… magic… fail, he i
s more than able to assume control. Unless it fails, though, I suggest you treat me as a magus in my own right, for you can be assured that I will remember it if you don’t.”
The man’s face turned red under his muffling layers. He faced Underhill and began to shout. “Are you going to let your apprentice speak to me like this?”
“Yes,” Underhill said. “My apprentice is worth a master in any of the trades of this town.”
This statement hung in the winter air between us. For three breaths, none moved or spoke, until finally you said, “We are going to take the cattle to the outskirts of town, or we are returning to the tower.”
The speaker ground his teeth—we could hear it—and finally good sense won out. “Let’s see to the cattle,” he said.
I thought this exchange meant that you were ready to be a man, and I thought this meant that Underhill did too. I guess we were both wrong—but that came later.
We tethered the cattle and led them outside the town. You checked the wind, nodded to Underhill in satisfaction at its course. You opened that case, revealing heavy iron stakes and three shining metal balls. We drove the stakes into the ground at your direction, about fifteen feet apart in a triangle, with the point of the triangle to the north. We tethered the cattle close to the stakes, so tight that they couldn’t move their heads. Once that was done, you put on your butcher’s smock and took out that sharp, sharp knife. You killed those animals quick and clean, better than any knacker I’ve seen before or since. That blood was so red on the new snow…
And that was when you brought out new gloves, thick leather things with the fingertip pads clipped off and replaced with metal. I’ll never forget the way the case started humming when you touched them to your belt.
