The Master's Chair (The Chronicles of Terah)

by Morgan, Mackenzie

  “You need to be sure you’ve got the right person, and that’s the only way I can think of to check.”

  Xantha stared at Kevin. “And you want this message delivered how soon?”

  “Well, as soon as possible.”

  Xantha snorted and tossed his head. “What’s the message?”

  “Tell him that I want to offer both of them whatever protection I can. Ask them to come here, to the castle. Please, Xantha. It really is important.”

  Xantha nodded once, stood there for a minute, and then leapt into the sky and soared towards the moon.

  ~ ~ ~ ~

  Sunday morning, Laryn woke up as soon as the sun’s rays penetrated her room. She decided to go down to the family gardens to see if the early spring flowers would lighten her mood. She’d been so busy since Badec’s death that she’d had no time to mourn, and this morning his absence weighed heavy on her heart.

  She followed the gravel path to the inner court, the circle where Badec had first announced his intention to foster his son on Earth. She thought back to before that, to the days after Yvonne had agreed to marry her brother, when happiness had settled over the castle, and then she remembered the shroud of sorrow that followed her death.

  Badec had been very slow to recover, and for years did not seem to care whether he lived or died. A dark cloud had hung over the castle, dampening the spirits of everyone inside, until about five years ago, when he had begun to look forward to the future, to his son’s return. His eyes had begun to sparkle with life again and there had been a new spring in his step.

  To have his life cut down now, before he had a chance to get to know the son who had become his reason for living, was so unfair. Laryn sank to the ground beside the bench where her brother had always sat, folded her arms on the bench, laid her head on her arms, and let her grief engulf her. She cried until there were no more tears, and then she cried some more. Finally she was so exhausted that she fell into a light sleep.

  Steve had taken his sketchpad down to the river around daybreak. After a couple of hours of walking and sketching, he headed back towards the castle. As he passed the gardens, he heard a light sigh, so he followed the path to the inner court, where he saw Laryn sitting on the ground with her legs curled under her and her head resting on her arms on a bench. She looked so vulnerable in her sleep. He wasn’t sure if he should stay with her or leave her to her grief. He knew the desolation she must be feeling now that the ceremony of death was over.

  While he was trying to decide what to do, Laryn woke up. She was embarrassed to find that she was no longer alone and she knew her puffy red eyes would make it obvious that she’d been crying.

  “Don’t get up,” Steve said. “You look too comfortable there. I’ll sit over here.” He sat down on the opposite bench and took out his pen and ink. “I was just going to sketch a few of these flowers. Do you mind?”

  “No, not at all,” Laryn said as she stood up and stretched. “I used to do a little sketching myself, but it’s been so long I doubt if I could do it now.”

  “Like a lot of others things in life, you never forget how; you just get rusty. Here, why don’t you give it a shot?” Steve handed Laryn the sketchpad and pen. “I’ve already been sketching out by the river for a couple of hours this morning. I was actually on my way to get something to drink when I noticed that some of the flowers in here were in bloom, so I made a slight detour. Why don’t I go get both of us something to drink? Would you like some scog? Or would you prefer something else?”

  “Scog sounds nice,” Laryn agreed.

  While Steve was gone, Laryn looked through some of his sketches. She was surprised to see how good they were. She picked up the pen and started sketching the small clearing where she was sitting. Before she realized what she was doing, she had sketched her brother and Yvonne sitting on the bench on the north side of the circle. She was so absorbed in her sketch that she didn’t hear Steve’s footsteps on the gravel.

  He walked up behind her and looked over her shoulder. “You’re good,” he said as he handed her a mug of scog.

  “Thanks, so are you. I took the liberty of looking at some of your sketches while you were gone. I hope you don’t mind. Have you ever tried painting?”

  “Some. Not since Cathy died though.”

  “Cathy?”

  Steve told Laryn about his wife. “You never get over losing someone you love, but you do move on eventually. It just took me a long time, and a tornado.”

  “A tornado?” Laryn asked with a light laugh. “What are you talking about?”

  Steve told her about Paul and how he had managed to get all of the Tellurians on the same bus and then hit it with a tornado. As he told the story, Steve made the whole episode sound like a comedy of errors, including their first impression of Kalen as a mad hermit. Laryn was soon laughing over their first introduction to Terah.

  “I’m surprised any of you stayed,” Laryn said between chuckles.

  “According to Kalen, going back was not an option, but none of us had anything to go back to anyway, except Kevin. It’s ironic that he was the only one who was happy with his life on Earth, and he was also the only one who absolutely had to come to Terah. The rest of us were searching for a way out of the life we seemed to be trapped in,” Steve explained. “After Cathy died, all I did was exist. I got up in the morning with the goal of getting through the day, and then I went to bed each night so that I could wake up and try to get through another one. Nothing was fun; nothing was interesting. I was ready to join her, and I probably would have before too much longer at the rate things were going. I have to admit that I’ve had a good time here and I have absolutely no regrets about coming to Terah.”

  “Tell me about Myron. What kind of man is he? How did he react to Terah? Most of our time together has been spent with me telling him about the people he’s going to have to deal with. I don’t feel as though I know him at all.”

  “I’m not sure where to begin,” Steve said slowly. “At the beginning, at Kalen’s, I think he was stunned. Finding out who he was, what was expected of him, was quite a jolt. But after the initial shock, I think he felt sort of betrayed, like he had been lied to all of his life, and then the guilt set in.”

  “Guilt? I don’t understand.”

  “Everything that Kalen told us about Terah made this place sound really dangerous, and none of us figured we had much chance of surviving. Kevin felt that it was all his fault that we were even here, his fault that we were in danger. He tried to force Kalen and Duane to send the rest of us back to Earth by refusing to go along with their plans, but that didn’t work because none of us wanted to go back. Once he realized that, he worked harder than anyone else. It really bothered him that he couldn’t fight as well as the rest of us. He tried so hard to learn how to fight that we were all afraid he’d end up hurting himself, but you don’t need to tell him that.”

  “I won’t mention a word,” Laryn agreed. “Go on.”

  “We decided to get a minstrel act together so that we would have a good excuse for traveling from town to town, and as it happened, we were pretty good, all except Kevin. He couldn’t play any of the instruments, and he really is tone deaf, so he volunteered to work as our stagehand. When we were in towns, everyone thought he was our servant, so no one looked at him twice. All in all, it worked out pretty well, until Rolan put a bounty on our heads, but that’s another story.

  “Once we reached Rainbow Valley, Kevin worked on magic seven days a week. I don’t know enough about sorcery to say how good he is, but I doubt if anyone has ever worked any harder at it, and it wasn’t because he wanted to be the Master Sorcerer. He didn’t, and probably still doesn’t. He’s not interested in power, and he’s more than a little scared of the responsibility that goes along with it. No, I think he worked so hard to sort of hold up his end of the deal, like he owed it to us for some reason, or at least that’s the impression I got.”

  “The seven of you seem to have worked really well togeth
er. Pallor did a good job choosing Myron’s companions,” Laryn said, more to herself than to Steve.

  “Now, tell me a bit about yourself,” Steve said. “I’ve been doing all the talking.”

  “There’s not much to tell. I’ve worked with Badec since I was eighteen. My life has been defined by my role first as his assistant and then as his second. I don’t know who I am without him,” Laryn said as tears began to well up in her eyes again.

  Steve nodded.

  “His death just makes me so angry,” Laryn said as she swiped at the tears flowing down her cheeks “I’ve kept the anger inside for almost a year now, but it hasn’t gone away. It’s getting worse, especially now that he’s gone.”

  “It’s all right to be angry with someone for dying and leaving you here to handle things alone. I was angry with Cathy for a while, too.”

  “No, that’s not …,” Laryn began, but immediately stopped herself. What was she doing? She’d almost told this complete stranger her deepest and darkest thoughts. But the longer they sat there in a silence that was more comfortable than it had any right to be, the more she felt that talking to him was the right thing to do. Finally she said, “What I was starting to say is that I’m not angry with Badec. I’m angry with the one who killed him.” When Steve didn’t immediately say anything, Laryn continued. “Sister Agnes and I have known that he was poisoned since a few days after he became ill, but we didn’t dare tell anyone.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because we can’t prove it. And because we don’t know who was responsible. There are a lot of people who would have been so ready to find someone to blame, some outlet for their anger, that innocent people could have gotten hurt. We couldn’t say anything to anyone,” Laryn said quietly.

  “Do you have any idea what it was?”

  “We think the poison was made from a rare mushroom called Sleeping Angel. It causes the mind to more or less shut down. The victim usually dies within a matter of days, or weeks at the most, but Sister Agnes came up with a way to feed him and give him water, and that kept his body alive. We moved him around a lot to keep him from getting sores and she spent hours every day moving his arms and legs around so that the muscles wouldn’t draw up, but we’ve known the whole time that he’d never come out of the coma. No one has ever survived Sleeping Angel.”

  “And you’re sure that it was deliberate? It couldn’t have been an accident?”

  “No, there’s no way it could have been an accident,” Laryn said forcefully. “Sleeping Angel doesn’t grow anywhere near here. It doesn’t even grow anywhere in Camden.” Laryn sighed and stared out into the distance for a minute. “There was a mug of tea by his chair the next morning with only a couple of swallows gone. I think the poison was in the tea. It acts quickly, but it isn’t immediate. He wouldn’t have started feeling bad for a couple of hours.”

  “Does everyone know about Sleeping Angel?”

  “No. I’d never heard of it, but Sister Agnes had. The valley where she trained is one of the few places on Terah where it grows wild. She nursed a few people who had eaten some of the mushrooms without realizing they were poisonous. That’s why she recognized the symptoms.”

  “And no one else at the castle or in Milhaven got sick?”

  Laryn shook her head. “There must have been just enough for one cup of tea.”

  “Is there any way to find out where it came from?”

  Laryn shook her head again. “Local farmers bring us fruits, vegetables, and baked goods almost every day. Our cooks carry things to them, too. It’s all part of being good neighbors. Someone could have given something to one of the kitchen workers and said that it added a lovely flavor to tea and suggested that they let Badec try it. Or some traveler could have traded it for a plate of food at the kitchen door.” Laryn shrugged and then continued, “I don’t even know for sure what form the poison would have been in. It might have been boiled down to a thin broth, ground into a powder, or possibly even dried and mixed with some tea leaves.”

  “And there’s no way to find out who might have known about this poison?” Steve said as if he were thinking out loud.

  “Not really. And besides, just because a person knows about the mushroom doesn’t mean he’s the one who poisoned my brother.” Laryn shook her head slowly and looked at the ground. “Steve, no one intentionally poisons someone else here. It’s unheard of. When someone on Terah wants to kill someone, it’s either with a knife, his fists, a sword, or an energy bolt. Whoever this person is, he’s really dangerous.”

  “You have to tell Kevin. He could be next.”

  “I know. I just hate to tell him something like this and not be able to point my finger at someone. I can’t even say for certain that it was another sorcerer. It could have been planned by anyone, from anywhere.” Laryn sighed. “Let him have today. I’ll tell him tomorrow morning.”

  Chapter 53

  The Sorcerer of Camden

  After breakfast Monday morning, Laryn asked Kevin if she could speak with him privately, so they went into Kevin’s office while Chris stayed in the outer office to help the pages get started on the task of answering all the notes that Kevin had received after Badec’s death.

  Once she was seated, Laryn said, “I have something that I need to tell you about Badec’s coma.” Kevin slowly sat in his chair and leaned back to hear what she had to say. When she finished explaining what she and Sister Agnes suspected, she said, “I have the feeling that nothing I’ve said surprises you.”

  Kevin leaned forward in his chair and said, “I don’t know if you’ll believe what I’m about to tell you or not, but Yvonne’s spirit came to see me while I was in Rainbow Valley. She didn’t much think the coma was due to natural causes either. She didn’t have any theories as to what had happened, but poison makes sense.”

  “Did she have any idea who might have been responsible?”

  “I’m not sure. I asked her, but she said that she wouldn’t speculate about who might have been involved until we knew for sure what had happened. I got the feeling that she had some definite thoughts on the subject though.”

  “Do the others know about her visit?”

  “Chris does. I kept meaning to tell the others, but it just didn’t seem to come up.” Kevin paused, trying to decide how much to tell Laryn about Rolan. “Saturday morning, before we went to Milhaven, Freddy told me that he sensed a heart of pure evil close by, and that he had sensed the same heart once before, the day before Badec became ill. When I asked him if he knew who it was, he said that it was Rolan.”

  “I wonder why he never told me.”

  “He didn’t know who it was until this past Saturday.”

  “It’s not proof, but it is interesting, isn’t it?”

  Kevin nodded. “We can’t move against him without something concrete, but at least we have an idea where to look now.”

  “Is that why you asked me to point Rolan out to you in Milhaven?”

  Kevin nodded again.

  “I thought it was because he had put out a bounty on the minstrels.”

  “I would have waited for the council meeting had it not been for Freddy’s warning. When I turned to look at him, our eyes met, and it was like two dogs sizing each other up, heading for an inevitable fight. I know that sounds melodramatic, but that’s the way I felt. It was eerie.”

  “Don’t underestimate him, Myron.”

  “I don’t plan to. He’s a dangerous man,” Kevin agreed.

  Laryn nodded and then said, “Shall we move on to the requests and complaints in the top right desk drawer?”

  “Let me get Chris.”

  After Chris came in, Kevin took the letters out of the drawer and spread them out on top of his desk. “Maybe the first thing we should do is sort them.”

  “Not all of them have dates on them, but I did keep them in order. The most recent ones are on top,” Laryn said as she stepped up to the desk to help.

  “I was thinking more like easy to handle, need more
information, need some thought, and then, in the last stack, those that we have no idea how to address,” Kevin said. “That way we can get the easy ones out of the way.”

  Laryn nodded and said, “At least you’ll be able to make a dent in the stack that way,” as she began sorting through the letters.

  A lot of the letters were complaints against district sorcerers who had overcharged for their services. Some of the complaints were made by individuals, but some were documented by district ministers. One sorcerer in particular had ten separate letters dealing with a variety of complaints resulting from his arrogance and greed.

  There were also some letters from district sorcerers requesting transfers. Most of them were looking for higher paying positions, but a few were looking for less strenuous posts. Several letters were from young sorcerers asking for an interview, and one was from an older sorcerer asking that a new sorcerer be found for his district, as he and his wife would like to retire.

  At the bottom of the drawer, there was a letter that was different from the others. It was written on high quality paper and had been sealed with a wax impression. When Kevin opened it, he found that it had been written by Robyn, one of Rolan’s brothers. Robyn wrote that he believed that Rolan was directly responsible for his father’s death and suggested that it would be helpful to interview one of the castle slaves, a man named Taelor.

  After Kevin had read through the letter, he read it aloud to Laryn and Chris. “I wonder when this came. Is there any way to tell?” he asked Laryn.

  “No, not unless the letter itself has a date on it. Was it opened when you took it out of the drawer?”

  “I’m not sure. The wax impression was loose, but it hadn’t been broken. There’s no date anywhere that I can see,” Kevin answered, handing her the letter.

  “If Badec opened it before he got sick, he didn’t mention it to me,” Laryn said as she handed it to Chris. Then she looked at Kevin and asked, “What are you going to do about it?”