A Sorcerer and a Gentleman

by Elizabeth Willey

  Prospero shouted after him, “Look—” but was interrupted by a messenger from the flagship lying in the warm water offshore, and he stared angrily at Dewar’s disappearing back in the darkness as he answered the messenger’s question. Running off like Freia, he thought: damned disrespectful children. Dared they value him so lightly, selfish young creatures?

  30

  OTTAVIANO TACKLED FREIA AND BROUGHT HER down, knocking the breath from her as she doubled over a dead man’s breastplate.

  “No you don’t!” the Baron of Ascolet screamed.

  The Way was dark, gone. The uproar of flame and battle had stopped. Wounded survivors were moaning and calling for help. There seemed none unwounded.

  Freia gasped for air spasmodically, immobilized with Otto’s weight on her. He stood, cursing, and released her for a moment; she was still breathless and lay panting.

  “Shit,” finished Otto, after a pause, summing up the evening.

  Trixie cried out questioningly, looking for Freia on the other side of the central keep. She bounded around the corner, dark in darkness.

  Freia got to her knees. Otto hauled her to her feet, putting a knife to her throat.

  “Tell your animal to back off.”

  Freia still gulped at the air. She whispered indistinctly, hoarsely, then swallowed as the gryphon screeched and started toward them.

  “Trix—go—home—” she forced out, past the cold steel too close to her windpipe. “Trix—home! Now!”

  The gryphon stopped, confused. “Rrrrrrawwwwkkkh,” she croaked. The arrow by her eye bobbed as she moved her head from side to side.

  Four men carrying swords came from a door in the keep.

  “Home—now!” Freia ordered her weakly. “Now! To Prospero! Go home!”

  Otto twisted her arm as the gryphon jumped. But Trixie went up, not forward, with a long resentful screech, and she ascended around the keep before flapping away into the night.

  “Get these corpses out of here!” yelled Otto to the soldiers. “Tonight!”

  “Aye, sir,” one of them called.

  He turned his attention back to his captive, pushing the knife flat on her neck. “You son of a bitch, I’d like to disembowel you organ by organ.”

  Freia tried to turn her head away from the knife, not grabbing for it as it was too close to grapple.

  “So I will,” Otto went on, “but you’re going to tell me all about yourself while I’m doing it.” The uncontrollable, messy rage had left him cold and clear-minded.

  Freia closed her eyes and breathed in and out deliberately.

  “Starting now,” Otto decided, and he frog-marched his prisoner into the charred fortress of Perendlac, where Golias had failed to hold his prisoners.

  Otto forced her up a flight of stairs and down a hallway; he pushed her into a lamplit room and shoved her against the wall while he tied her hands behind her. He spun her around then and slammed her against the window-frame. With another thong, he tied her hands to one of the grates behind the iron shutters, which were closed and locked. It was too high; she had to stand on tiptoe.

  Lighting another lamp, Otto turned to look at his prisoner and plan the extraction of information.

  The prisoner stared back at him gravely, blood seeping from a dirty scrape on one cheek, a bruise where his fist had connected at their first meeting.

  Otto looked again.

  “A woman?” he said, his voice rising in disbelief.

  Freia tensed and her impassivity tightened.

  “Some friend of Dewar’s,” he mused.

  He studied her. Just before he’d brought her down, kept her from following her mates into the fire, she’d been screaming to someone. Father. Dewar’s daughter? Was he old enough to have a grown child? Hard to tell, with sorcerers. They changed as slowly as the Well. Otto had thought of Dewar as a young man, but he had also thought of him as a friend.

  Sorcerers. Had she been yelling at Prospero?

  “Or Prospero’s,” Otto murmured, folding his arms and leaning against the table, looking at her. Prospero’s. Yes. Her accent was like Utrachet’s. Dewar didn’t have an accent. She’d sent her weird animal to Prospero, home to Prospero. But she had arrived with Dewar—who was probably working with Prospero now, if he hadn’t been before. Tonight’s appearance clinched that. The animal had been seen around Malperdy, the castle where Prospero had been imprisoned.

  Otto decided to eliminate guessing. Furthermore, Dewar or Prospero might try to retrieve this lost baggage any minute. He closed his eyes and focused his attention inward, on the Well; Perendlac was near a Node, and the feeling of power ran tingling along his arms. Mentally he reviewed the necessary preventive Binding, a modification of a concealment. Simple and effective enough for now. He put his hand on her head, although she moved away as much as her limited freedom allowed, and put the Binding on her. Closed, hidden, wrapped, concealed, lie beneath the bright Well’s field …

  The Binding sat uneasily. Though she was not warded, it felt looser than it ought, but Otto supposed his own haste was the reason. Now the second spell, a Truth-Binding.

  She shook his hand from her head as the slight fogging caused by the spell touched her thoughts; Otto grabbed her chin and finished it quickly.

  She glared at him.

  “The first spell keeps you here, and the second makes it easy for you to answer questions,” he said, smiling. “What’s your name?”

  She put her teeth together and clenched her jaw, not allowing herself to speak.

  “Uh-hunh,” he said. She would speak truth when she spoke, but she could still resist speaking. “Am I going to have to invoke less pleasant compulsions?”

  Her look was an eloquent answer. Nonetheless, Otto disliked the idea of using violence on her. Golias had no qualms, but Otto thought of himself as a civilized, educated man.

  “You were looking for your father, hm? Prospero didn’t help you, did he.”

  “He will,” Freia whispered.

  “Oh, I’m sure you’ll be missed when he comes to counting noses,” Otto said, pleased. “A very important thing to leave behind, a daughter. Careless. What do you think he’ll do now? When he notices you’re not where you ought to be?”

  “He’ll look for me,” she whispered. “If you hurt me, he will kill you when he finds me.”

  “I don’t think so. Interesting accent you have. Odd,” he mused. She shouldn’t have an accent. He, having stood the test of the Well’s fire, should understand her perfectly without hearing an accent. Yet when she spoke, a lilt and trill colored the words he heard. If he concentrated, he could hear the incomprehensible language she actually used, but the unusual thing was that an accent was transmitted.

  Prospero’s troops had had some utterly foreign language which not even Otto, integrated with the Well and its worlds, could understand. Their commander Utrachet had spoken some Lannach. Otto had not had leisure to study the troops, which had struck him as strange in other ways, and now he regretted that.

  “Where did you come from?” he asked.

  She would not answer.

  He tapped his fingers. Dewar or Prospero would come looking for her. Then they could bargain. Simple and workable, if he took care of his own defenses. Dewar, he had decided, was manageable, and Prospero could be subdued with threats to the girl here. He would demand Prospero’s surrender in return for her liberty. He’d be able to get a lot of mileage out of that in Landuc. That meant he must put her someplace difficult to reach, guarded by better men than the fools at Malperdy.

  Otto’s mind pulled up short. If Herne or Gaston knew he had such a prisoner, she’d not be his for long. The business with this Miranda of Valgalant was still hot and he’d made an ass of himself losing Prospero from Malperdy. They’d take her out of his hands and he’d lose any credit, any esteem he might have recovered.

  And then two things connected in his mind, and Otto smiled in such a way that his prisoner began to sweat anxiously in her leather clothing.


  He put to himself: Was not a hold on Prospero also a hold on Landuc?

  Was it not so that something valued by Prospero would be valuable to the Emperor?

  What would the Emperor give for something guaranteed to bring Prospero humming after it?

  If she were Prospero’s, she could be a more powerful weapon than the entire Army, its Marshal, and the rest of the Empire combined. Even if she were Dewar’s, she could be used to bring him to heel and ensure his cooperation, or at least his noninterference. Blood called to blood.

  Otto opened the door and leaned out to shout, “Guard!” He kept one eye on the girl.

  A few seconds later, a soldier appeared, stopped at the bottom of the stairs and saluted, and started up. “Yessir.”

  “Get Prince Golias,” Otto told him. “I don’t care what he’s doing, he should leave it.”

  “Yessir.”

  Otto closed the door again. He would have to make it clear to Golias that the girl was to be questioned but not damaged. Where to hold her? Here? The fortress was filled with his men from Ascolet and Lys and Golias’s mercenaries; a lot of the Crown’s troops had died tonight when Prospero’s men had made their break because Prince Herne had had them guarding the prisoners closely, not trusting the levies. Prince Herne was a fool, and he wasn’t here; he was guarding the capitol. Otto thought it was an ill wind indeed that blew nobody any good. He folded his arms and leaned again on the table.

  “You will be confined and questioned,” he told his prisoner. “The more cooperative you are, the more comfortable you will be.”

  “Let me go,” she whispered.

  Otto laughed. “You are the key to my future happiness,” he said sarcastically. “I shall take excellent care that you not be mislaid.”

  “My father will be very angry if you do not release me now.”

  “Your father is on the run at the moment,” Otto reminded her, “and when he comes looking for you he’ll find all the opposition he can handle. He can have you, too. But he’ll have to bargain.”

  “He will not,” she said. “He’ll kill you.”

  “Then he won’t get you back, lady.” Otto smiled. With any luck, she’d be out of his hands by the time Prospero showed up anyway, and then the Emperor would have to cope with him—and the Emperor probably couldn’t, not having a sorcerer on call. But by then Otto would have signed and sealed articles from the Emperor yielding Ascolet and maybe Lys and a bit of Sarsemar. Ascolet could use a port on the Sovereign Sea. The more he asked for, the more he was likely to get.

  “You will regret this all your days,” she whispered.

  “I wasn’t careless like Prospero,” said Otto. “I think he’s the one who’ll be doing a lot of regretting.”

  Golias opened the door without knocking and entered. He scowled at the girl and then at Otto. “What the fuck do you want?”

  “Someone very important is going to come looking for this dropped penny, and we must be sure that he doesn’t find her easily.”

  Golias looked the prisoner up and down. “So? Who?”

  “Prospero.”

  “The great man himself? What makes her special? His mattress-warmer?”

  “Better than that.”

  Golias looked at the girl again, narrowing his eyes. He nodded slowly. “Kid?”

  Otto saw her swallow. “Yes,” he said, “it does seem that the Prince of Air has been foolish. We’ll keep her here for now, below. Heavy guards: everywhere. I don’t want a repeat of the Malperdy farce.”

  Golias smiled unpleasantly. “And then?”

  “What do you think the Emperor would give for her?”

  Golias laughed, grinning, and slapped Otto on the back, laughing still, and left the room, slamming the door.

  “The arrogant pup,” said Prince Herne, dropping the rolled paper on the table.

  Prince Gaston picked it up again and unrolled it, weighting the corners with map-weights.

  “We should have hanged Golias after he murdered Lady Miranda,” Herne said.

  “You’re jealous,” Emperor Avril said, smirking.

  “What?” Herne stared at him.

  “That they, and not you, had the good fortune and good sense to be where Prospero was,” the Emperor said, losing the smirk and glaring at both of them.

  Gaston looked back at him coldly. “Your orders,” he reminded the Emperor in a tone that indicated he might not have agreed. In fact he had not. He had doubted that Prospero would try a strike at the capitol, but the Emperor had been convinced of it, had insisted on Gaston remaining in Landuc after Lady Miranda’s funeral, had recalled Herne from Perendlac. And Prospero had struck there, not here.

  The Emperor retorted, “Your consent was ready enough; but here we are. The offer is tempting.”

  “He is probably bargaining with Prospero also,” Herne said.

  “Hm,” Gaston said. He read the letter again. Herne and the Emperor conversed in a circular vein of blame and speculation, and Gaston followed them with a small part of his attention while he read again the missive brought to them by one of the soldiers who had survived the uprising at Perendlac.

  Unto His Radiant Majesty Avril Emperor of Landuc, Greetings from Ottaviano Baron of Ascolet and Golias Prince of Landuc. Our earlier report of the Raid by the Duke of Winds to free his Cohorts has doubtless reached your Hands. Yet it is an ill Wind indeed that leaves no Good behind. For on this Raid it was the Duke’s Misfortune to lose and leave behind his own Daughter. This Person is presently in our Custody closely warded and confined. And it seems to us by this great Stroke of Fortuna’s Hand that we have been given the Means for rectifying certain Inequities which the Crown in bargaining with us separately and jointly hath imposed on us. By way of opening Discussion between us then we propose that we shall yield up the Person of this Daughter of the Duke of Winds Prospero to the Crown in return for the Crown’s Concession under Seal of certain Items below listed:

  1. That the Barony of Ascolet shall be returned to its former Status as an independent and untrammeled Kingdom;

  2. That the Crown shall recognize Ottaviano presently Baron of Ascolet as King of Ascolet;

  3. That the Lands of Preszhëanea, Lys, and Sarsemar shall appertain thereto and owe Fealty to the Kingdom of Ascolet henceforward;

  4. That the Borders of this Kingdom of Ascolet shall revert with these Additions to their Locations on the Accession of the late King Laudunet of Lys;

  5. That the Crown shall grant to Prince Golias the revived Duchy of Sillick, the Borders of which shall be those which held on the Absorption of that Duchy by the Crown …

  There was more, less audacious. The Fireduke concentrated on the major points, noting wording and order. Otto’s tenacity was admirable, Gaston thought. And his nerve. But was this true? Gaston could not quite believe that Prospero might have been so careless with a daughter as to let her be taken hostage. It was believable that he could have a child. It was not believable that he would put her at risk. Surely he was smarter than that.

  And Gaston thought of lithe, dark-haired, bright-eyed Dewar, his smile, his brilliance, his dexterity. There was more in him than had yet been shown, though Gaston had glimpsed something. Prospero knew Dewar’s mother. Prospero, calling a truce of sorcery at the last minute before that final battle, had crippled himself and lost the war. He would not do that for any ordinary reason.

  But Gaston had no proofs for his theories, only inferences and leaps of intuition.

  In his present high-strung frame of mind, hearing unsubstantiated suspicions would make the Emperor accuse everyone who had been there of treason. Gaston kept his thoughts to himself.

  “We’ve no ground for faith,” he said in the silence that had followed Herne’s and the Emperor’s winding down, “that their hostage is Prospero’s daughter. I counsel that we not parley until we have confirmation.”

  “Our idea exactly,” the Emperor said.

  “What would confirm it to you?”

  “Prospero himself
,” the Emperor said after a moment’s thought. “Yes. The girl would say whatever she was told to say. If Prospero comes around looking for her, then it might perhaps be true. We proceed from there.”

  “And their terms?” Gaston said.

  “The Crown shall take those under consideration,” the Emperor said.

  Prospero’s frown was deeply graven into his face. Above his aquiline nose his brow was crevassed by profound displeasure.

  “And thou didst allow her to fare hence,” he said. “Scudamor, I am disappointed in thy warding.”

  “My Lord, I could hardly stop her,” Scudamor said, inclining his head to accept the blame despite his denial. “You know her. She would not stay.”

  Prospero sighed and sat back in the high-backed black stone chair, looking through his Seneschal. The man stood, hands behind his back, at ease a few steps below him. Prospero gazed at the tall candles around the painted and bas-relief carven pillars, the high double door. The vast, vault-roofed room was empty save for the two men, one seated, one standing.

  “Tell me what she said to thee, her words as thou heard them.” He looked again at Scudamor.

  “That she would seek you out. We feared the worst had befallen, my Lord. There had been no word for so long after you had said you would return.”

  “So thou didst not hold her.”

  Scudamor glanced away. “We were anxious, Lord,” he said softly. “There was no word.”

  Prospero had to acknowledge his own fault in this. “Wounded sore I was, and weak, and must be hidden while I mended, and I could not travel hither,” he admitted. “Nor did I think ’twould be so long.”