“I’m not talking about the woman anymore.” Rob had two different kinds of mashed potatoes on his plate: regular (with lumps) and garlic. Maybe he hadn’t changed as much as he thought.
John had three plates, all of them covered with various meats—steak, brisket, roast beef, chicken, ham, and several things that Rob couldn’t immediately identify.
He wondered if the Atkins Diet meant you could eat as much meat as you wanted all the time or if John was ignoring some of the more important precepts.
“Listen, my friend,” John said. “You’ve been getting more and more morose as the years have gone on, and you were never a happy-go-lucky guy in the first place.”
“My friends were called merry.” Rob ate a cherry tomato, surprised at its freshness.
“In marked contrast to you. If you’d have had your way, you’d have talked about poverty and Good King John and the evils of government until the wee hours. The only reason we laughed back then was because of Friar Tuck, young Will, and yours truly.”
Rob sighed. “I suppose all our success in those days came from that lack of seriousness as well.”
“No need to be snide.” John ripped the flesh off a chicken leg. In that moment, with that movement, he looked like an old king—the kind Rob had always opposed—not King John the Pretender, however; more like King Henry the Eighth, a gluttonous, ruinous king if there had ever been one.
“Look,” Rob said, “we have a lot more important things to do than think about some woman I’m never going to see again.”
“I think we need to think about her.” John picked up a second chicken leg. The first one, reduced to bone, had gone onto a plate John used only for discards. “If we don’t think about her, you’ll miss the first chance you’ve had in decades, maybe centuries. And I, as a good friend and boon companion, can’t allow that to happen.”
“Why?” Rob asked, not sure if he cared about the answer.
“Why?” John waved the chicken leg as if it were a pointer and he was a professor giving a lecture. “Why? Because I’m the person who spends the most time with you. And it’s been a long, long time since someone has challenged you.”
“How do you know this woman would challenge me?” Rob found more cherry tomatoes buried on his plate. He set them aside. They all looked as fresh and good as the first one.
“Because,” John said, “she already has.”
Rob looked up. John’s mouth was smeared with barbecue sauce, and the chicken leg was half gone. John grinned at him like a little boy who’d just won a long argument.
“Being in that bubble was not a challenge,” Rob said. “It was an accident, I’m sure. I’m sure I built the thing wrong—”
“After doing it for hundreds of years? Not likely.” John gnawed the last of the flesh off the chicken bone, then set it on top of the other. If he remained true to form, he would make a small sculpture out of the remains of his food before the meal was done.
“Let it go,” Rob said.
John shook his head. “I’ve been puzzling over this all morning.”
“I don’t pay you to think about women on company time,” Rob said.
“You don’t pay me,” John said. “We’re partners, and I can do whatever I damn well please. I probably should be in Ethiopia right now, overseeing the new vaccination program, but I’m tired of watching children getting stuck with needles. I need a new focus, and I’ve decided that’s you.”
“Lucky me,” Rob muttered.
“Look, we have lackeys to oversee all the various giveaways and training programs and medical camps. I’ve done some of this stuff for nearly five hundred years. A man needs a break now and then.”
“So you’re focusing on my love life because you’re bored,” Rob said.
“Your love life?” John’s eyebrows went up. “Now that’s a phrase I don’t think I’ve ever heard you use. And, oddly enough, I hadn’t used that phrase in this context either.”
Rob finished the cherry tomatoes. The rest of the lunch looked like overkill. What had he been thinking, getting this much food?
He always felt a little discouraged when he was done with a buffet. So much went to waste when so many people went hungry.
He shook his head.
“And thinking about the poor unfortunates isn’t going to get you off the hook either.”
Rob raised his head, feeling slightly surprised that John had read him that well.
“Sometimes people need to spread out, do something new, get a different perspective. You’re running on fumes, Rob.” John grabbed a napkin and wiped off his mouth. “So the woman’s a distraction, but she’s a good one.”
“Who’s impossible to find, according to you.”
John shrugged. “If we keep our vow and only use our magic for work-related things.”
“That’s an important rule,” Rob said. “If we start behaving like every other mage and use our magic only to help ourselves, then we become no better than—”
“—the kings we used to fight,” John finished. “Blah-de-blah-de-blah. When was the last time you used magic for yourself? Hmmm?”
Then he blanched as he remembered the answer. Rob had used his magic to try to save Marian’s life, only to get reprimanded by the Fates.
He had been summoned in front of the Fates after working a successful spell to reverse the aging that had caused Marian’s organs to fail. The Fates had a temple near Mount Olympus, but the place wasn’t real. The sky was too blue, the grass too green, and the temple itself too white.
The women had had an otherworldly beauty as well, but at the time, he had seen it more as an abomination than as a blessing. How could they be so lovely—forever lovely—when his Marian had to wither and decay and die like a summer flower on a fall day?
Each life has a termination point, Mr. Hood, Clotho had said to him that day.
You have no right to violate the workings of destiny, Lachesis had added.
He stood before them, a rough-hewn man who hadn’t even known about the Greek Gods until he had come back from the Crusades—a campaign that had soured him on following the lead of other men.
He had gained respect for other cultures while away from his own. The other soldiers hadn’t. They had tried to destroy it.
We should imprison you, Atropos said.
He had felt alarmed at that. They were going to take away Marian’s magical good health and then imprison him so that he couldn’t spend the last few days of her too-short life with her.
If it were not for your history of good works, Clotho said, and for your love of the unfortunate Marian.
We are sympathetic to love, Lachesis said.
He had let out a small breath, his hands folded in front of him. He had felt so tiny, standing there. A single man warring against time and fate and rules he didn’t entirely understand.
However, Atropos said, we cannot allow love to violate the rules of existence.
Of course they couldn’t. Because every beloved of every mage would live forever then. As if that were wrong.
He wasn’t sure how that was wrong.
Much as we would like to, Clotho said with more gentleness than was necessary.
They hadn’t wooed him, exactly, but he felt a little better. At least he would be with Marian at the end.
Besides, Lachesis said, you have yet to find your soulmate.
What? he snapped. Marian is my soulmate. You know that. All of England knows that. I love her more than life itself.
And therein lies your problem, Atropos said. You have given too much too early.
No, I haven’t, he said.
You have a long life ahead of you, Clotho said.
One that will be lonely if you are not careful, Lachesis said.
Of course it will be lonely, he said. You won’t let Marian live.
She cannot. She has lived her life, Atropos said.
You knew she was mortal when you met her, Clotho said.
I thought I was mortal when I
met her, Rob cried.
Then you should not have left her to fight in those silly wars, Lachesis said.
Those silly wars were where I discovered that I couldn’t die, Rob said. He had learned, just outside Jerusalem, exactly what his powers were and how deadly they could be. He had turned away from them then; he’d never been a man to use his abilities to harm others.
War had been the exact wrong thing for him—the greatest mistake of his life.
He hadn’t needed these Fates to remind him of that, and all the lost years, the years away from his beloved.
You might miss your love altogether if you do not open your eyes, Atropos said.
It was hard for him to focus on them. The sadness that he thought he had put aside when he had tried to save Marian’s life was beginning to overwhelm him.
If you do not see how like follows like, Clotho said.
If you do not listen to the prophecy, Lachesis said.
You have never asked us your birth prophecy. It’s time you hear it. Atropos looked mysterious and strong, standing against the pillar.
You shall regain your true self, Clotho said.
And save the world for true love, Lachesis said.
If only you recognize that true love has many lives, Atropos said.
You denied me that life, Rob snapped. He could take no more. He clapped his hands together, casting a powerful spell that flung him away from the Fates and their so-called justice.
Later, he found out through Little John that the Fates had nearly imprisoned him after that insolence. Only John’s argument, and Rob’s obvious grief, prevented it.
“I didn’t mean that,” John was saying. “I didn’t mean to bring up Marian again. Really. I meant besides then. You know, in the past 800 years.”
Rob must have had an expression, then, something that told his best friend he had been reliving the prelude to the worst moment of his life.
Even now, he could barely think of that day, holding the frail shell of the woman he’d loved as she died in his arms, knowing that he had the power to save her—and everything he would do, everything he would try—would be reversed by those evil Fates.
“It’s all right,” Rob said, shoving his plate away. The food no longer seemed appealing. “I know what you meant.”
The good humor was gone from John’s face. He finally seemed to understand why Rob wasn’t going to use his magic for something as trivial as finding an attractive woman.
If he hadn’t been able to use that magic for something crucial, he wasn’t going to waste it on a whim.
“I just think it’s important, you know?” John said. “I think you had a sign last night, and I think you need to act on it.”
“A sign from the Fates?” Rob asked with more than a touch of bitterness.
John shrugged.
“I did what they wanted one too many times,” Rob said. “I don’t care about their signs.”
John sighed. “Maybe you should,” he said, almost to himself. “Maybe you should.”
Seven
“Do you know how impossible it will be to find this woman?” John Little asked over lunch.
Rob sat across from him, two plates loaded with meats and breads and salads spread before him. He had loved buffets since learning about them in Vegas in the 1940s. He’d been one of the first and best customers of Beldon Katleman’s Midnight Chuck Wagon Buffet at the original El Rancho Vegas Hotel. Now, of course, buffets cost more than a dollar, they were open for 24 hours instead of the few hours after the last entertainment show, and they had a wide variety of cuisines—not just steak and mashed potatoes and the occasional carrot.
But the food made him nostalgic for the Vegas he had lost, a place of clear skies and such corruption that no one realized honest businessmen could thrive here, too.
This buffet, in one of the downtown hotels, looked nothing like that old one. There were plants everywhere that blocked the patrons from each other. The only time you saw someone else was when you got up to stand in line.
“I’m not talking about the woman anymore.” Rob had two different kinds of mashed potatoes on his plate: regular (with lumps) and garlic. Maybe he hadn’t changed as much as he thought.
John had three plates, all of them covered with various meats—steak, brisket, roast beef, chicken, ham, and several things that Rob couldn’t immediately identify.
He wondered if the Atkins Diet meant you could eat as much meat as you wanted all the time or if John was ignoring some of the more important precepts.
“Listen, my friend,” John said. “You’ve been getting more and more morose as the years have gone on, and you were never a happy-go-lucky guy in the first place.”
“My friends were called merry.” Rob ate a cherry tomato, surprised at its freshness.
“In marked contrast to you. If you’d have had your way, you’d have talked about poverty and Good King John and the evils of government until the wee hours. The only reason we laughed back then was because of Friar Tuck, young Will, and yours truly.”
Rob sighed. “I suppose all our success in those days came from that lack of seriousness as well.”
“No need to be snide.” John ripped the flesh off a chicken leg. In that moment, with that movement, he looked like an old king—the kind Rob had always opposed—not King John the Pretender, however; more like King Henry the Eighth, a gluttonous, ruinous king if there had ever been one.
“Look,” Rob said, “we have a lot more important things to do than think about some woman I’m never going to see again.”
“I think we need to think about her.” John picked up a second chicken leg. The first one, reduced to bone, had gone onto a plate John used only for discards. “If we don’t think about her, you’ll miss the first chance you’ve had in decades, maybe centuries. And I, as a good friend and boon companion, can’t allow that to happen.”
“Why?” Rob asked, not sure if he cared about the answer.
“Why?” John waved the chicken leg as if it were a pointer and he was a professor giving a lecture. “Why? Because I’m the person who spends the most time with you. And it’s been a long, long time since someone has challenged you.”
“How do you know this woman would challenge me?” Rob found more cherry tomatoes buried on his plate. He set them aside. They all looked as fresh and good as the first one.
“Because,” John said, “she already has.”
Rob looked up. John’s mouth was smeared with barbecue sauce, and the chicken leg was half gone. John grinned at him like a little boy who’d just won a long argument.
“Being in that bubble was not a challenge,” Rob said. “It was an accident, I’m sure. I’m sure I built the thing wrong—”
“After doing it for hundreds of years? Not likely.” John gnawed the last of the flesh off the chicken bone, then set it on top of the other. If he remained true to form, he would make a small sculpture out of the remains of his food before the meal was done.
“Let it go,” Rob said.
John shook his head. “I’ve been puzzling over this all morning.”
“I don’t pay you to think about women on company time,” Rob said.
“You don’t pay me,” John said. “We’re partners, and I can do whatever I damn well please. I probably should be in Ethiopia right now, overseeing the new vaccination program, but I’m tired of watching children getting stuck with needles. I need a new focus, and I’ve decided that’s you.”
“Lucky me,” Rob muttered.
“Look, we have lackeys to oversee all the various giveaways and training programs and medical camps. I’ve done some of this stuff for nearly five hundred years. A man needs a break now and then.”
“So you’re focusing on my love life because you’re bored,” Rob said.
“Your love life?” John’s eyebrows went up. “Now that’s a phrase I don’t think I’ve ever heard you use. And, oddly enough, I hadn’t used that phrase in this context either.”
Rob finishe
d the cherry tomatoes. The rest of the lunch looked like overkill. What had he been thinking, getting this much food?
He always felt a little discouraged when he was done with a buffet. So much went to waste when so many people went hungry.
He shook his head.
“And thinking about the poor unfortunates isn’t going to get you off the hook either.”
Rob raised his head, feeling slightly surprised that John had read him that well.
“Sometimes people need to spread out, do something new, get a different perspective. You’re running on fumes, Rob.” John grabbed a napkin and wiped off his mouth. “So the woman’s a distraction, but she’s a good one.”
“Who’s impossible to find, according to you.”
John shrugged. “If we keep our vow and only use our magic for work-related things.”
“That’s an important rule,” Rob said. “If we start behaving like every other mage and use our magic only to help ourselves, then we become no better than—”
“—the kings we used to fight,” John finished. “Blah-de-blah-de-blah. When was the last time you used magic for yourself? Hmmm?”
Then he blanched as he remembered the answer. Rob had used his magic to try to save Marian’s life, only to get reprimanded by the Fates.
He had been summoned in front of the Fates after working a successful spell to reverse the aging that had caused Marian’s organs to fail. The Fates had a temple near Mount Olympus, but the place wasn’t real. The sky was too blue, the grass too green, and the temple itself too white.
The women had had an otherworldly beauty as well, but at the time, he had seen it more as an abomination than as a blessing. How could they be so lovely—forever lovely—when his Marian had to wither and decay and die like a summer flower on a fall day?
Each life has a termination point, Mr. Hood, Clotho had said to him that day.
You have no right to violate the workings of destiny, Lachesis had added.
He stood before them, a rough-hewn man who hadn’t even known about the Greek Gods until he had come back from the Crusades—a campaign that had soured him on following the lead of other men.
Fates 06 - Totally Spellbound Page 10
