A Sorcerer and a Gentleman

by Elizabeth Willey

  “Don’t touch me!”

  “Come back. You’re tired; you need more rest or you’ll be ill again.”

  “What do you care what happens to me?”

  “You’re my guest,” Dewar replied.

  “Your guest! No! You just want to use me to get at Prospero,” Freia said accusingly. “I’m a line to him and you think that by trolling me around, bait, you’ll land him. Just like that hateful Emperor and Ottaviano and Golias. Well, he won’t bite. I’m rotten bait. He doesn’t care about me. I’m not worth his time and I’m not worth yours—so let me go.”

  “I want to help you!”

  “You do not! You want to use me to find Prospero, don’t you, and you leave me behind every time and I won’t go with you!”

  They glared at one another. Dewar, fuming, considered and dismissed several gambits.

  Freia sidled away from him. “Leave me alone.”

  “What do you think you’re going to do?” he demanded, moving toward her.

  “I’ll take care of myself,” Freia said, stepping back from him.

  “Oh? There’s nobody here but us, Freia, there’s no other person, nothing here but birds and water and fish.”

  “I can take care of myself.” She was shivering; her eyes stared too brightly.

  “You cannot. You’re sick and you said yourself you don’t know your way home.”

  They were moving in a circle, he trying to catch her, she backing away. “Stop chasing me!”

  “Stop running away. This is lunacy! What is wrong with you? I’m trying to help you!”

  “I said leave me alone! I don’t want your help.” Freia spit the words at him. “You want to find Prospero—then find him yourself. Leave me alone!”

  Dewar halted, folding his arms. Freia stopped a few steps away from him. “I’m tempted to take you at your word and let you drown in the marshes. You display the same single-mindedness you showed at Perendlac, and look where that got you!”

  “You left me there,” Freia said. “You left me.”

  “Prospero left you too,” Dewar retorted.

  The words’ effect on Freia was instant, as sharp as a twig’s snap. Her back went down; anger evaporated and she slumped. “I know,” she whispered.

  He couldn’t resist victory. “It was your own fault. You got yourself into it. You have only yourself to blame.”

  Freia half-turned away, covering her face with her hands. She said nothing more. Dewar took a cautious step toward her, then another, and caught her wrist. She jerked her arm, trying to pull out of his grip, then swung her free hand and slapped him with all her strength across the face; and in the same instant she burst into tears.

  The crack of the blow made Dewar’s ears ring; it caught him off-balance and staggered him, and he lifted his own hand to return the favor, glaring down at her with every thought drowned under his rage. Freia cowered, catching her breath in a sob and meeting his gaze with pure terror as her wrist wrenched and twisted in his grip, and Dewar recoiled from her look.

  Slowly he lowered his hand, softened his hold on her arm (but did not let go), and whispered, “I’m sorry. Freia—” He felt sick with the outwash of his anger, with self-disgust, and he caught her other arm, hugging her to him. “I’m sorry,” he whispered again. She flailed, sobbing, saying incomprehensible words. He held her still and stroked her hair down her rigid back, whispering, “Hush, hush, hush,” to her unsteadily.

  Now Freia wept convulsively, clutching him with knotted fingers. They stood in the hollow of the dunes under the sun, the dry, sharp-edged grass hissing around them in a rising breeze. Dewar tried to think. She wasn’t thinking: that was clear to him now. She was in such a distressed state that she couldn’t think, couldn’t be rational, and he had to think for her and help her no matter what she said or did. She was hysterical. He had been terrorizing her, treating her as other sorcerers treated their inferiors, domineering and violent. He had been ungentlemanly. She was his sister, his father’s daughter, and she had done him no harm. Striking her would be wrong. He must be patient. She was ill; she hardly knew herself, and she knew him not at all.

  “Freia, hush.”

  “Oh …” she howled, muffled in his shoulder.

  “There. There.”

  “I’m s-s-sor-ry-y-y …”

  “Shhh. I understand. I think.”

  Her breathing was raggedly slowing. Dewar admitted the truth to himself: he had left her twice in peril, in Chenay and in Perendlac. He had known her danger, and he had no right to her trust or gratitude. Indeed, if Prospero ever got wind of what Dewar had done, he might well take offense unless Dewar could make up for it somehow, could soothe and comfort Freia now. She gulped air, hiccuping, in his arms.

  “S-something—snapped, I’m so sorry,” sobbed Freia. “I—sorry—I never hit anyone like that ever; I’m sorry—you’re trying to help—I’m sorry—”

  “Forgiven. Forgotten. The fault’s mine, for teasing you so. Hush.” He waited for catharsis to steal over her, for the wild tears to exhaust her, and eventually Freia was calmer.

  “Dewar—”

  “I’m sorry, Freia—”

  She shuddered, gulped again, pushed at his chest. “Let go, I—I’m going to—”

  The symptoms were too familiar; he held her shoulders and steadied her as she was sick. Afterward, he wiped her sweaty forehead and her mouth with his handkerchief, scuffed sand over the mess, and led her a few steps toward his house.

  “Don’t,” Freia said, pulling weakly away. “Please don’t. Please stop. Please.” She was weeping again, not the great wracking sobs but a steady tremor this time.

  “Let me help. Freia, it is my fault. I shouldn’t have left you. I’m sorry you got hurt. You need help. I want to help you, and I can help you. Let me.”

  “Don’t. Leave me alone. You can’t help. You can’t. Nobody can help.” She shook her head emphatically.

  “I can. I know I can if you’ll just let me try,” he insisted.

  Freia tossed her head back and glared at him, streaked and reddened with salt tears and sun. “How do you know you can help?” she demanded. “You don’t even know what’s wrong!”

  “If you’d tell me, I’d know, and then I’d help you,” Dewar said reasonably, squelching annoyance again. Her contrariness was enough to provoke a stone.

  “You want me to tell you this and tell you that and I don’t trust you,” Freia said, the hysterical edge coming to her voice again. She yanked her arms away from his hands. “You can’t help and you don’t believe me and why can’t you just leave me alone?”

  “Because I’m your brother,” he shouted back at her.

  The color drained from her face and her eyes grew wide and dark, staring up at his face, disbelief fading into shock. He seized her arm, steadied her.

  “How—” she whispered.

  “Prospero is my father,” Dewar said.

  He had said it to Lady Miranda, still stunned by the revelation, and sworn her to silence. He had not said it, even to himself, since then.

  “But—” Freia couldn’t make words fit her tumbling, shattering thoughts. She closed her eyes.

  “Now will you let me help you?” Dewar pressed her, exasperated. “What ails you?”

  She looked at him again, cold in the hot sun. “I’m pregnant,” Freia said.

  Prospero’s sweeping cloak was the color of the twilight sky, its lining midnight-black. Head low, he galloped on tireless Hurricane through the vast forest called Herne’s Riding, hypnotizing himself with the beat of the horse’s four hooves on the cold road. The obsessive rhythm crowded out other thoughts, doubts, and the gut urge to turn around and get out of here, to consider himself lucky to have what he did and live without more. He carried his damnation in a rolled tube in the saddlebag—damnation and a fragment of redemption.

  He congratulated himself on his forethought in emancipating Freia. He had not intended that the document should be used, but had done it, four years before he
’d opened his war, out of a sense of justice; it was the closest he had come to contemplating defeat. Were he to go down, she’d not fall with him, remaining free of the claws of the Crown. Or so he had hoped. Had the disobedient chit but obeyed him, neither of them would have come to the present pass.

  The existence of the emancipation invalidated, he thought, the treaty-clause in which Avril claimed the right to bestow Prospero’s daughter. That Avril would have thought of it at all, Prospero thought, showed what a base mind the man had, and that he had insisted on it showed him mean and subhuman. Gaston was less than he made himself seem, to serve such a worm.

  Hurricane leapt a creek without losing the beat of his gallop.

  Thus, to frustrate some of Avril’s desire to grind his allies, Prospero had made the lands over to her. She would keep them for him, and he would still have sway in their governance—not that he cared for any but Argylle. The others were all smoke, veils of dust to conceal the gem that was Argylle.

  He could not contemplate it further. He returned to counting hoofbeats.

  Freia’s revelation eclipsed his own. Dewar felt his face go slack with shock, his jaw drop to a graceless gape. Memory tumbled incidents together.

  “—rape,” his lips shaped voicelessly. No marvel now her distraught thrashing, her desperation. Golias—it had to have been the sham-bastard Golias. Otto had no taste for force, and Gaston was a true Prince and a man of honor. Dewar looked away, ashamed to have badgered and baited her. “Did the Emperor know? Or Gaston?” he asked. “Are you certain?”

  She snorted.

  “No.”

  Freia shook her head.

  “Freia.” He put his hand on her shoulder. “If you are not sure—”

  “Dewar, don’t say anything else stupid. Please. I cannot bear it,” she said in a taut, high voice. She pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes.

  Irked, he began to retort, “I’m sorry for you—”

  “I don’t want your pity.” She pulled back again, distracted from one pain by another.

  “You have my compassion and my earnest desire to do you good, if you can bring your pride to accept them. We are bound at least by blood, at best by more.”

  Freia said, a quaver in her voice, “I find it hard to believe you.”

  “He said it himself.”

  “Oh, well, a man would know, wouldn’t he.”

  Dewar took a moment to hear this as sarcasm, and then he flushed. “I assume he has reason to know,” he said coldly, “and I am inclined to believe him.”

  “What has your mother got to say about it?”

  “I don’t know. I have not seen her in many, many years, and she hates me with all her heart. She is a dangerous and evil woman. And yours?” he added.

  Freia shrugged.

  Dewar decided it was a poor subject for conversation now. He drew his breath in, let it out slowly. The straightforward task of rescuing Freia from the Emperor had just become a maze. “Come with me,” Dewar said gently, “and let us talk somewhere quiet out of the sun, where we may sit and be easy. And it may be you think I have no business with you still, but if you will let me I’ll help you.”

  “Avril,” Gaston said, “ ’tis less than manly and less than kingly to wittingly seal a false bargain.”

  “If he returns and says he will covenant with us, then it is of no concern—”

  “You have nothing to return to him. His daughter’s gone. You’ll stoop to fraud? A market-charlatan’s pea-and-shell game’s more honorable than this,” said Gaston.

  “So, Gaston, we should let him go free. Scot-free. Not a mark on him. To draw back and plan another strike. We should shake the serpent and drop it on our foot to bite or not as it chooses. We find these sentiments difficult to believe, coming from our Marshal,” the Emperor hissed, twisting and staring back at Gaston.

  “Cannot uphold your side,” Gaston insisted. “The bargain’s void ere it’s made. An’a come, tell him she’s fled.”

  “This is not a matter on which we have requested a second opinion, Marshal.”

  “ ’Twill bring ill to the Empire if you press on, Avril. Prospero’d not yield without some plan to repay evil for evil, to you and the Empire. ’Tis well, ’tis needful that he be defeated, but not thus, not with a lie and a false vow.” Gaston, not waiting for permission to leave the Emperor’s presence, turned away in disgust and strode toward the door. It opened as he approached. Herne stood there, horsy and smelling of his cold dry forest.

  “Prospero comes,” Herne said, and he showed his teeth in a smile.

  37

  THEY SAT ON OPPOSITE SIDES OF the white-scoured table, and Freia ate nothing as Dewar wolfed down his long-delayed luncheon—little shellfish steamed quickly in a hot pan in the coals and buttered, a salad of sharp greens, toasted bread. The day’s stresses and sorcery had left him hungry, though he forbore to point this out to his sister, who sat with her head in her hands.

  He finished with hard-skinned fruits from the low bushes around the house, slicing them neatly and eating them by scooping the seeds and pulp into his mouth. Red juices flowed.

  “Freia, you must eat something.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Why not?” he probed.

  “I’m tired of vomiting.”

  She had a knack for answers which were unanswerable, thought Dewar, and looked at his fruit with less relish.

  “I thank you for your patience with my appetite,” he said, rising and going to the kitchen pump. He washed his hands and dried them, watching her sidelong.

  Freia said nothing.

  Dewar sat down opposite her again and put his hands on hers. “Lady,” he said, “tell me your desire.”

  Her hysteria had faded. “I want to go home,” Freia said listlessly. “But truly I should not. He will be so angry at me. I wasn’t supposed to leave at all. Now—He was angry before, but he—he won’t—like me.” She shook her head.

  “Why should he be angry with you?” Dewar wondered. She had followed Prospero everywhere, trying to help him. How could the sorcerer Prince take such devotion amiss?

  Freia shook her head again, not looking at him, staring at the wooden table. “He won’t want me the way I am now. I should just take a knife and gut myself.” Her hands became fists.

  He pulled her hands away from her head and made her look up at him, sad-eyed. His heart seemed to move in his breast, and she, tired and grief-bitten, in an instant became unbearably precious and dear. Dewar knew dishonored women sometimes chose death. He would not let her do that. “You’re not going to die.”

  “I want to. How could you have any idea—how could anybody—I didn’t want—I don’t—” She moved away from him jerkily. Her voice rose; she was nearly shouting again, the edge of wildness returning.

  “Freia,” Dewar said, and he went around the table and sat beside her on the bench, conscious of the cutlery lying casually on the table and dresser and of how fast she could move. He took her hands again, but lightly. “It is your will to return home.”

  “He won’t want me there.”

  “Your will, Freia. Not his. And don’t try to guess his will—”

  “He’s always saying that, too,” she muttered, and pulled her hands a little away from his, but not far; their fingers still touched. “You’re much like him.”

  “What’s he like?”

  “Much like you,” Freia said wearily. “Self-centered, unreliable, kind on a whim, and ill to cross. I suppose all sorcerers are like that.”

  Dewar frowned. “You’re quick to damn, aren’t you.”

  “I guess all Landuc people are like that,” Freia mused on in an undertone, half to herself.

  “Freia,” Dewar said, “if you have nothing good to say about me or anyone else to my face, when I have been expending considerable effort to help you—”

  “I don’t need to get home to Prospero,” she said. “I can take care of myself anywhere. I know the plants, the animals.”

&
nbsp; “You’re not yourself, Freia,” he pointed out. “And you’ll not be well—”

  “I’ll be fine; there is an herb there I need to—to be myself, and I know where to find it,” she said.

  Understanding substantially redirected Dewar’s thoughts. He drew a breath and savored it. “Herbs,” he said. He was moving onto unfamiliar ground; he had never studied more than rudimentary medicine or surgery, but he had travelled widely and he thought he knew her better than he had. “Perhaps I can help you find the herb you want—to be yourself,” he said, using her phrasing delicately.

  Freia stiffened. They regarded one another, combatants or allies.

  “What’s this herb called?” he asked.

  “Mayaroot,” she said.

  “Mayaroot?”

  “It’s not a root truly, it’s a fungus that grows on the roots of old veil-trees in the seaside marshes,” Freia said.

  “Why do you want it?”

  “If you must know,” she said, drawing away from him, “to bring a miscarriage.”

  Dewar nodded slowly. “Are you certain of it? Certain that it will work?”

  “Two women—” Freia began, and she stopped herself.

  “Trust me,” he said, frustrated by this slow eking, word-by-word, of pieces of stories. He seized her shoulders. “I will not abandon you, I swear it. I will help you. I have not brought you so near me to leave you. I will not see you suffer a day longer if I can help you. I’m no herbalist, but I know plants vary in potency. The mayaroot might fail you. There are better remedies. Trust me.”

  Stiff and withdrawn at first, Freia relaxed as he spoke. “Trust you,” she repeated softly.

  “Please.”

  “I trust you.”

  Dewar moved toward her and embraced her, grateful. “Thank you,” he whispered, and whispered it again when he felt her arms go around him, her weight fall against him. With her trust, he could undo what had been done, erase the vile evidence of his own failure and restore her to happiness. He could set all right for her, with her trust.

  “Two women,” she whispered to the wall, her voice creaking, “they were with child, and they were gathering crabs, and they ate the crabs with mayaroot. It made them sick. It was terrible. They were very sick, and then they bled some days, and they—their pregnancies ended. Another woman—Cledie—had had the crabs unseasoned by the mayaroot, and a few men, and none were ill save those women and a man who ate the mayaroot, and Prospero said it was poison.”