A Sorcerer and a Gentleman

by Elizabeth Willey

  He looked at Prospero again with a new expression of wonderment.

  “It was you,” he said. The dream-memory, brief and intense, ringing with the clarity of a true experience, flickered through his mind.

  “Was’t?” Prospero blinked, feeling the Well purl and catch at him.

  “You. Your tomb. Strange custom they have here.”

  “Barbaric. I’d liever be composted in a mushroom farm than trapped in one of yon ego-fattening marble mausolea. What of my tomb?”

  The other was surprised. “Do you not remember the geas?”

  Prospero caught at the Well, which, he recognized, knit the two of them together in an ancient pattern. “A geas.” He moved closer to the man, studying his face in the calmed candlelight for a clue, and found it in his remarkable eyes. But once before he’d seen such eyes, their intense color matched by their intense intelligence; he had seen them in a dream, a portentous dream on an important day, the memory now dredged from its bed beneath the sediment of intervening years. Yes, they had met after a fashion. “Aye. The geas,” he repeated. “Other things too,” he muttered, still studying the younger man’s face. “I do remember. Indeed. Come sit down.”

  “Why did you lay that geas on me?”

  “I desired to know why ’twas I should have seen thee in my dreaming, and I guessed that we were bound one day to meet: thus I wished to know thee. For such visions are never insignificant. Now. I trust Ariel did not drag thee through ditches nor drown thee in streams?”

  “Not at all. Not at all.” Slowly, Dewar sat down. The geas was strong. It rose in his throat and seized him, and before he could halt himself he stood, bowing, and said, “Dewar.” He sat again, fighting down the compulsion to say more. Some of the geaspressure was gone; the rest could be put off.

  “I am pleased to know thee, Dewar. I’m Prospero. Allow me to offer thee some of this port. Art hungry?” He poured, the deep-faceted decanter sparkling in his hand; the goblets were transparent frail crystal too, made solid by the golden port they held.

  Dewar shrugged noncommittally, but accepted a goblet, and Prospero laughed gently and rose. He pulled a bell-cord and returned to his chair.

  “I—” began Dewar, the word exploding from him, and Prospero held up his hand with a piercing look.

  “Not yet. Let us savor this moment. There is no knowing, for me or thee, what cogs thy geas’s release will set a-moving. Let us enjoy a moment of peace.”

  Dewar nodded, self-commanded again after the surge of the geas. His thoughts wheeled away from the past; he spoke without thinking, simply to speak and distract himself. “A strange thing from a man who has taken Landuc to war.”

  Prospero snorted. “I suppose. I am old enough to contradict myself when’t please me.” He tasted his port. Dewar did the same. It was very fine stuff.

  “Good,” Dewar murmured, his mouth warming and the rest of him beginning to thaw.

  “I daresay even Gaston would agree with thee. How fares he.”

  “I daresay you know, but he’s well.” Dewar found that he didn’t mind Prospero’s speaking down to him, and he thought it was for the same reasons he never minded Gaston: the men were ancient of days, wiser than Dewar, and superior to most everyone alive. And they were both courteous otherwise.

  “Uninjured.”

  “Not lately. No—pardon, he took an arrow in the knee joint of his armor. Twelve days ago.”

  “Ah. I hope he’s up and about.” Prospero was smiling.

  “Well, naturally.”

  “Naturally,” chuckled Prospero, and his smile faded. “I would like to spend another afternoon with Gaston and his palate,” he said, “one such as we had long ago, going through the wine cellars, tasting—never mind. Such mawkishness will kill me someday.”

  “Not if you guard against it.”

  “That’s a young man’s notion,” Prospero said, eyeing him. “A man who believes he commands himself and the world around him to whatever degree he cares to do so.”

  Dewar flushed and set down the port.

  “Thy work hath made an impression on me,” Prospero went on.

  “Thank you.”

  “I will further flatter thee by telling thee I cannot fathom how thou’rt contriving much of’t.”

  Dewar smiled, pleased though knowing the blandishment for what it was. “That’s good to hear.”

  Prospero looked at his guest, who had leaned back in his chair slightly now, relaxing, comfortable. “May I ask a professional question?”

  “I may not answer.”

  “Of course. I’ve wondered what thy fee might be.”

  Dewar began to speak and stopped, appearing embarrassed—at least, he looked away, at the tapestry of the laughing girls with their garlands of flowers held high. “I’d rather not say.”

  “Thy pardon for asking. Avril in the past hath refused absolutely to barter with sorcerers in any way, as thou’rt doubtless aware.”

  Dewar nodded. “He expressed a vehement dislike of me on principle—”

  Prospero snorted.

  “—I’m told. Of course he might have personal reasons for that,” and Dewar grinned mischievously, for although the Emperor might have personal reasons to dislike Dewar, the Emperor himself could not be aware of them. “No telling. Is he sane?”

  “Avril?”

  “The Emperor. Avril.”

  “Why, I know not. An thou hast doubts, perhaps not. I’ve never seen more than cold self-interested reason in his deeds: could call it sanity. On t’other hand, many of his habits could be considered symptoms of madness, the madness of the over-focused mind that seeth but one purpose. Ask Gaston. He’ll answer thee or not.”

  “He is good that way.”

  “Aye. He never lies. He’ll tell thee naught—sin of omission—but he’ll never utter untruth. He’s the last honorable man in Landuc.”

  “You have been away. Perhaps there are new ones.”

  The door opened and a shuffling, brown-robed and hooded servant entered pushing a serving-cart of covered dishes. Dewar glimpsed a long—was it furred?—nose within the cowl, and the hands that rested on the cart’s handle were short-knuckled, oddly twisted, and grey. His host was demonstrably a gentleman, and a dangerous sorcerer nonetheless.

  “Thank you, Ulf. ’Twill be all.”

  The servant bowed wordlessly and shuffled out.

  Dewar shuddered, and his geas twisted again in his throat as half-drowned memories of other such creatures rose to perturb his mood. Aië … the geas pressed upon him; Aië oppressed him, suddenly close. He drew his breath in sharply.

  “Cold?”

  Dewar mastered himself. “No. The fire is very pleasant.”

  “Winter …” murmured Prospero, uncovering dishes, rising and setting them on the table between them. “Nay, thou’rt my guest, sir; permit me. The lavabo’s through there,” he added, “shouldst thou care to recover thyself from Ariel’s attentions to thy person.”

  “Thank you, yes.” Dewar went through the indicated door; there was a chill, dark-paneled hallway with doors in the paneling to either side and another door, ajar, at the end. The lights were yellowish candles in reflective sconces shaped sensually like flowers, the candles glowing stamens emerging from the half-wrapped cones of the petals.

  Prospero laid out the meal and added wood to the fire. He stood at the flames, watching the new logs catch and burn.

  Dewar joined him there a few minutes later. Prospero glanced at him sidelong, and an odd feeling gripped him: anticipation, excited dread. This young man was barely a finger’s-breadth shorter than Prospero himself, and the haze of power around him was intoxicating. Prospero again felt the thrill of recognition, bone-deep, as if he had known Dewar for years and had but awaited him. Was it his death he saw here, blue-eyed and fair to behold?

  Dewar looked from the flames to Prospero inquiringly. In that moment of preoccupation, the geas rose up to claim him. He swallowed, teeth clenched, seizing control of his throat again
. He would not let it rule him.

  “Let us dine,” Prospero suggested.

  They sat. Prince Prospero poured the wine. Dewar, the Prince noted, was indeed hungry; he, the host, urged him to eat well and did not demand conversation.

  His guest seemed completely at ease. “This is very pleasant,” said he, smiling suddenly at Prospero, pushing his pudding-plate away from him at last. “I have not had a meal like this in long and long.”

  “I’m grieved to hear rations are so short,” Prospero twitted him.

  “I mean—oh, I don’t know what I mean. Never mind. I don’t mean the food, the wine—not just those anyway. I should not have spoken.”

  Prospero smiled and topped their glasses off with the last of the third bottle of heavy red wine that had accompanied their supper of onion-tart, venison, baked mushrooms, small game-birds in a sauce of currants and cherries, ham pie, and other rustically wintry fare. The cheeses lay before them still: a thick golden hemisphere with a criss-crossed rind and a richly turquoise-veined beauty, gently reeking.

  The geas whirled around Dewar as the wine ran into his glass, surprising him in mid-sigh before he could resist. “Odile the Black Countess of Aië,” said Dewar suddenly, almost explosively.

  Prospero’s goblet was bumped from the table by his elbow as he jerked away, straightening.

  The wine spread over the carpet unregarded. The crystal goblet did not break.

  “What of her?”

  Numb with shock at what he had said, Dewar replied, “My mother.” Damn the geas, and damn Prospero for laying it! What had Dewar’s ancestry to do with anything? Odile was all the ancestry he had, and he had renounced her.

  How strangely her name lay upon his tongue. He had not said it in years, not since he had fled her house, not in the years with his master, nor after, not even on this side of the Limen between the Stone and the Well. People in Phesaotois knew better than to speak such a curse-freighted name lest they draw the attention of its owner to themselves. Dewar’s skin prickled into cold bumps, all in the instant as he realized what he had done.

  “Thy—” Prospero’s throat tightened suddenly, and he had to set the bottle down very carefully to be sure it stayed upright. A cold inevitability gripped him: here was his fate, here his nemesis, here his end. “Thy mother.”

  “Yes.” The geas lightened. Dewar could feel its ebb, as he had felt its presence for so many years. It left a curiously irksome vacancy in the underpinnings of his thought, and he wondered, afraid and then detached, how much it had influenced him.

  Prospero leaned on the table, over it, supporting himself on both his hands. “Thy father?”

  Dewar blinked, coming out of contemplation.

  “Who was thy father, then?” demanded Prospero more sharply.

  Dewar shrugged, puzzled. “I don’t know. She receives few callers. Some poor fool she ensorcelled, I suppose.”

  “Suppose.”

  “I don’t know which particular pig he might have been,” Dewar snapped. “How is it you know her? There seems to be little commerce between Pheyarcet and Phesaotois.”

  “Once I knew her full well,” Prospero said softly.

  Dewar looked at him more warily now. “She has no love for me,” he said. “Nor I for her.”

  Prospero stared at him still, quivering. “When wert thou born?” he asked.

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “It does!” The Prince’s blood pounded in his ears.

  Dewar stared at him. The geas pulsed; his tongue held the answer; he temporized. “I suppose you’re right,” he said, “it’s part of the geas—”

  “Dost know when?”

  Dewar withdrew from his intensity. “I might be able to figure it out,” he said. “A moment.” He closed his eyes, clearly calculating. “In the fifteen hundred and twenty-third Great Circuit, fourth dodecade, twelfth year,” he decided. “Give or take one or one and a half or so.”

  Prospero lowered his head, displeased, and growled, “ ’Tis hardly nice.”

  “Nothing in Aië is—almost nothing.” Dewar glanced at the door involuntarily, the door through which the hooded servant had departed. The niceties of Aië were unpleasant in their elegant rigor.

  Prospero resumed his seat. His foot struck the goblet, which rang faintly; he bent down and picked it up, frowning at the winestain, deeper red on crimson.

  Fifteen hundred and twenty-third, twelfth of the fourth. Or thereabouts. No end, but a beginning.

  He bore something of her face in his. Hard to tell with that beard, though. Her straight nose. Her brows were smoothly-curved neat lines, and his were nothing like that, angled and arched. Eyes … How could Odile’s son have missed inheriting Odile’s beautiful eyes, the dark windows on Otherness? Because he was a man, and there was no Otherness to him?

  “Prince Prospero, you are far from here.”

  “Aye,” Prospero replied curtly, and leaned back in his chair to study the man further. “I’ve seen thee in the battle, too,” he remarked after a moment. He had held his sorcery back one day to see what Dewar would do. Dewar had spurned the opportunity; he had not attacked. Instead he had held his defenses and had ridden down to fight in a melee beside a fellow in the old Ascolet colors, using earthly weapons as effectively as his sorcery.

  Dewar pushed his chair back slightly, slouched a little, put his right ankle on his left knee and steepled his fingers.

  “Who taught thee swordsmanship?”

  Dewar let his head tip a little to one side. “Sir, I think that is a piece of my history that does not concern you.”

  “It concerns me nearly, boy. Was it Gaston?”

  “No.”

  “No. Canst handle the blade like a gentleman born to it, yet … thou’rt a sorcerer.”

  “I am a sorcerer.”

  “Damn it, I’m not challenging thee. I brought thee here with the intent of arranging such a match, but I think now ’twere unwise.”

  “You flatter me.”

  “Hardly. I dislike killing people; ’tis difficult to undo. Wasteful.”

  “How odd that both you and Prince Gaston have expressed similar sentiments about killing, yet both of you—”

  “Don’t be fatuous,” Prospero snapped.

  Dewar didn’t finish the statement.

  “With whom didst thou apprentice in the Art?” asked his host more softly after a brief, uncomfortable silence.

  The younger man said nothing, but his gaze was disdainful.

  Prospero sighed and his left eyebrow quirked up. He regarded Dewar, memorizing him, noting the tautness of his jacket over his shoulders and arms and the steadiness of his hands, the length of leg and angle of rest, the brightness of his eyes, his attitude of readiness. He was a thing of deadly beauty, and like most such, wisely to be destroyed. It lay within Prospero’s power to do that. He had the fellow here in his palm, and though between them they would destroy the province down to the primal fire below, Prospero would be victorious in a duel. That would be great shame, a vandal’s way to deal with such a fine creature as this courtly young sorcerer. Herne killed things out-of-hand. Prospero knew better.

  “Lord Dewar,” he said at last, in a heavy tone, “I shall send thee away now, unchallenged.”

  “I am sorry to hear it.”

  “Why?”

  “It would save a great deal of trouble if we settled it between us, but, on the other hand, if I lost, I’d die, and I cannot imagine a cause worth so much of my talent as that. Not Landuc, to be sure. Perhaps the Emperor would strike a deal: if I lost, Esclados dies—”

  “The Emperor’s incapable of bargaining with sorcerers.” Prospero reached over the untouched cheeses to the nearest candle and closed his hand around its flame. He concentrated a moment and then opened his fingers; a brilliant spark of gold light darted out of them like a fish, zigzagging through the air.

  “Follow,” Prospero commanded Dewar, putting the Well into the word, catching him off-guard.

  Dewar
stood, his eyes fixing on the spark—an ignis fatuus.

  “Farewell,” said Prospero to him, standing also. “We’ll meet again, and then I’ll tell thee of thy ancestry.”

  Dewar did not seem to hear; he slung his cloak absently around him and followed the ignis fatuus out of the room. Prospero sat and listened to his light footsteps descend the stair.

  Gaston heard crashing and thrashing as he crossed the coarse wooden bridge they’d thrown up to replace the stone one destroyed in a battle. He recognized the voice cursing after half a minute’s surprise and reined in. The pre-dawn sentry inspection could wait.

  “Lord Dewar!”

  “By Flame and Ice!” Less-intelligible expostulation followed, and suddenly a fireball erupted out of the brush-filled gully. A few twigs in its vicinity glowed briefly and fell, instant cinders, and by its bobbing light and his own lantern’s glow Gaston saw Dewar, scratched and torn and wet, clambering up the steep side of the gully. The sandy, gravelly slope must be nearly impossible for him to scale, and Gaston considered offering to fetch a rope, but then reconsidered as Dewar, grim-faced and determined to rise without assistance, began going sideways.

  Gaston dismounted to help the sorcerer past the overhanging, crumbling lip.

  “Thanks,” gasped Dewar, scrambling over, sitting on the ground.

  The Fireduke bent over him. “Art injured?”

  “I’ve pulled a muscle. Be fine. Damned ignis. Bastard! I’d swear he did it a-purpose— Ouch.”

  Grabbing Gaston’s arm, Dewar tried to rise and wobbled.

  “Here,” Gaston said, and helped him up. “Where’s thy staff?”

  “Not with me. Else there’d have been no problem. Ouch. Maybe I broke it. Ouch.”

  “Lord Dewar, what’s passed here?”

  Dewar, leaning now on the horse, looked away and shook his head a little, then looked up at Gaston. “I’m not sure.”

  “Yestereve came a windstorm hath blown half the camp away—”

  “I’m not surprised.” Dewar snorted. Ariel the Sylph had been sent away on other business, having dragged Dewar into Prospero’s hands to be entertained: the Prince was a thoughtful host and a wily enemy.

  Gaston grabbed his shoulder. “Thy doing?”