Court Wizard: Book Eight Of The Spellmonger Series

by Terry Mancour

  Pentandra paused, then picked up her walking staff from where she’d lain it and began drawing in the sand.

  “You see this?” she prompted, as she sketched a rough circle in the sand, with two lines below it, parallel. “What do you see?”

  “A . . . tree?” Dara ventured.

  “Yes, a tree,” the wizard nodded. “You see a tree, I see a tree, Minalan sees a tree, the beggar boys on the docks of Fest would see a tree . . . yet there is no tree. Indeed, it is a circle and two lines. How is that in any way a tree?”

  “It’s not,” agreed Dara. “But it looks like a tree.”

  “Are there not trees that look nothing like this?” Pentandra asked.

  “I can’t think of any trees that look anything like it,” Dara agreed. “And I’ve seen a lot of trees.”

  “Yet almost every human in the world who saw this drawing would see it to mean ‘tree’,” Pentandra continued. “The symbol has nothing to do with the thing it represents. This one is convenient, because it’s so common, but if you saw this,” she said, drawing another circle, but one with a smaller circle inside, “would you see that as a tree?”

  “No, more of a wagon wheel,” Dara said, shaking her head.

  “What if you were looking at a tree from above?” Pentandra suggested. “Like you do when you’re riding behind your bird’s eyes?”

  “Oh!” Dara said, seeing what the wizard meant. “These are the leaves on the outer circle, this is the trunk at the inner circle!”

  “Right,” nodded Pentandra, pleased. “But if you didn’t understand that, it would mean very little to you. You’d be looking at a symbol of a tree and seeing a wagon wheel. Unless you know the secret,” she pointed out. “Knowing the secret is knowing the metaphor.”

  “So this is a metaphor?”

  “Essentially. This is also the rune ‘selseth’, which is a simple rune meaning ‘year’ or ‘sun’.”

  “Which is it?” Dara asked.

  “Whichever it needs to be,” Pentandra explained. “When you are using it in the context of a spell with a temporal component -- that is, one that works over time -- then it means ‘year’. If you are trying to improve the growth of corn with a beneficial weather spell, it means ‘sun’.”

  “What about a weather spell . . . over a period of time?” Dara asked. “Could it mean both, or would you have to use two of them?”

  “Good question,” Pentandra smiled. “We’ll get to that, but the short answer is yes.”

  “That . . . to which one?”

  “Context,” Pentandra repeated. “But we’ll get to that. Right now, just focus on the idea that each of the Imperial Runes has a ‘secret’ -- many of them, actually. Their meanings are usually deeply intertwined, but in the end they are meanings that we assign to them, not powers intrinsic to the runes themselves. It doesn’t matter what the symbol looks like, it is the meaning with which we invest it that is important.”

  “But . . . but what if the same symbol can have two entirely different meanings?”

  “And now we come to the discussion on one of the mage’s most important skills: the manifestation of intent,” she began, taking a deep breath. “When--”

  “Pentandra?” came the voice of her new master from the narrow stairwell that led to his laboratory. Master Minalan’s head appeared from the floor, followed by the rest of him as he bounded up the stairs. Dara didn’t think he looked like a very dignified wizard when he did that, but then she wasn’t really sure what to expect. Most of what she knew of wizards were from stories and legends, not personal experience.

  “What is it, Min?” Lady Pentandra asked, with far more familiarity than one might expect from two professional colleagues. Even though Master Minalan was married to Lady Alya, who wasn’t gifted with rajira, he did not seem to mind how forward and familiar she was with him, even though he was the lord of the domain. She’d heard it whispered around the Great Hall that their handsome Magelord and the exotic-looking Remeran wizard were lovers, once, long ago.

  “Sorry, Dara,” he said, glancing at his newest apprentice for a moment before continuing. “This is important. I’ve just spoken to Terleman again. The hordes are definitely on the move in his direction. He’s already in trouble,” he added, without elaborating.

  “How many?” the dark-haired woman asked, concerned.

  “Far too many,” the Spellmonger said, his voice grave. “If they aren’t relieved, and soon, they’re going to be overwhelmed.”

  “You don’t think— excuse us, Dara, I think we’re done for the day,” Pentandra said, interrupting herself. “Why don’t you get some dinner in the Great Hall before you head back to the Westwood? Let’s get you here early, tomorrow, and see if you can’t get through a whole page, shall we? You don’t think Terleman would surrender, do you?” she asked Minalan, turning her whole attention to him after speaking with Dara.

  She might have felt miffed, had it been any other situation. But the Magelord was responsible for far more than just the domain of Sevendor; he was apparently helping the King, himself, against the goblins who were attacking the distant west.

  Dara shuddered when she thought about them. There were tales amongst the Bovali, the poor refugees who had narrowly escaped from the valley the goblins invaded first, Boval Vale, and they were not pleasant to hear. The goblins were possessed of a great hatred of humankind, Lady Pentandra explained to her once, and their armies wanted to push the humans off of their lands and sacrifice them to their Dead God. They were willing to do all sorts of horrible things to do it, too. She tried to stop hearing the stories, after the first few scared her, but it seemed nearly every Bovali refugee who’d settled in Sevendor had at least three horrific tales about the goblins.

  But now the invasion from the northlands was pushing into the south, from what she understood. That was causing all sorts of problems, and when the Duke had problems he called upon his best wizard to help. That was Magelord Minalan, the Hero of the Wilderlands. Her new master.

  Dara descended the stairs through Master Minalan’s laboratory and through his bedchamber until she exited to the grand Great Hall of Sevendor Castle. She never thought she’d get used to the sight, so much larger and more lordly than the Westwood Hall manor where she lived. Though the castle was over a hundred years old, the stone gleamed bright white - the accidental result of a spell Master Minalan cast last winter during a snowstorm, to save his wife and baby in childbirth.

  The spell had splashed out all over the vale that fateful night, and many who never suspected that they had a store of rajira discovered that they were suddenly sensitive to magical energies. Including Dara. Indeed, she’d learned, the gleaming white snowstone that spread out nearly two miles in every direction from the castle apparently reduced the natural resistance to magic that most places had. Now Sevendor was the easiest place in the world to do magic.

  If you knew how to do it in the first place, that was.

  The Great Hall of Sevendor Castle was far nicer now than when she’d first seen it, a few years ago when the disreputable Sir Urantal was in charge of the domain. Then it had been dingy, dusty, dirty, and dark.

  Now, under Minalan and Alya, the snow-white stone was gleaming, and magelights hovered permanently over the hall. The great stone fireplace at the head was crackling with a constant flame that reminded her of home, and the banners that hung from the rafters now were recent and free from cobwebs.

  The entire place made her feel safe and protected, and she valued that. Compared to how the Sevendori viewed the castle under its previous management, that was a major change. The folk of the vale now looked at the fortress with hope and security, not dread and despair. That, if nothing else, was worth all of the other changes the Spellmonger brought to Sevendor.

  The hall was starting to get busy as it prepared for the evening meal. Guards and grooms, laborers and staff were beginning wash themselves at the great basin at the door of the hall, while drudges began to set up trestle tables an
d the servants began to set the stone high table in front of the fireplace.

  Dara would always have a fond place in her heart for the Great Hall. It was where she was hailed as the winner of the Spellmonger’s Trial, made Master Minalan’s apprentice, and celebrated in front of the entire domain. That night marked a dramatic change in her life, from when she’d gone from being just Dara of Westwood, youngest daughter of the Master of the Wood and nascent self-taught falconer, to Apprentice Dara, the Hawkmaiden of Sevendor. That night would always be one of the most special in her heart.

  There were far more people at the castle than usual, and more servants than usual preparing for the additional guests. The Magical Fair just ended, and the disturbing news from the west quickly overtook her dramatic victory at the Trial. Many of Master Minalan’s friends and allies who’d attended were anxious about the sudden attack, and looked to her master for guidance. There were also merchants and tradesmen from the fair who still had business in Sevendor, or who tarried merely out of curiosity or the opportunity for bargains after the fair.

  “Dara!” called a familiar voice - Gareth, she realized, already sitting at the first line of tables in the hall.

  The mage was hardly an imposing figure. He’d come to Sevendor early in Minalan’s tenure to audition for a witchstone as a warmage, but he’d failed the Spellmonger’s rigorous tests. He was just not physically large and strong enough, he was a bit clumsy, and he was just not belligerent enough to warrant a warmage’s witchstone. Indeed, he was nothing like the proud, strong, tough warrior-magi Dara had met at the Trials.

  Yet he’d stayed in Sevendor as Minalan’s loyal man after his rejection, instead of resenting it, and learned as much as he could from the Spellmonger and his friends. Gareth ended up serving Master Minalan in many capacities, she’d learned, not the least of which was organizing and running much of the Magic Fair. Dara was glad to at least see a friendly face amongst all of the strangers in the hall, and she decided to wait for dinner with him.

  “Magic lessons?” he asked, as she sat down at the bench.

  “Lady Pentandra,” Dara nodded. “The first set of runes. Magic as metaphor,” she said, with more exasperation in her voice than she’d intended.

  “Oh, that’s a good one,” the wizard smiled, fondly. “One of the basics, upon which all other magic depends. You’ll probably have an easier time, one-on-one with Lady Pentandra than I did at the academy with a room full of other students, trying to keep up with the lecture . . . but it does explain why so many of the Archmagi were also poets and writers,” he concluded.

  Dara couldn’t imagine writing anything for fun. It was hard enough reading.

  “I understand metaphor,” she insisted. “When I’m riding behind Frightful’s eyes, it’s not like being a falcon, it is being a falcon. I just have a hard time seeing a couple of squiggly lines as the same as being a tree, or something,” she said, frustrated.

  “It is harder transferring the concept to inanimate objects or abstract concepts,” he nodded, sympathetically. “But it’s also essential. Until you can make the mental commitment to the metaphor and really mean it, your spells won’t work. And the first sets of runes are all the easy ones, the Statics and the Ordinals. When you get to the Mutables, the Ephemerals, and the Actives, that’s when you can really start to go mad. We won’t even speak of the dreaded Cardinals, Transits and Scalar runes,” he said, with foreboding.

  “By the Flame!” Dara said, her eyes wide. “How many runes are there?”

  “In the basic Imperial system?” Gareth asked, pleased to be her resource. “Hundreds. But don’t worry, you’ll only use a few dozen, most of the time. But you have to know as many as possible. And then there are hundreds more in the apocryphal systems, the specialties, and when you get into advanced thaumaturgy, it’s like each spell has its own new set of supplementary runes.”

  Dara felt ill. She’d learned only a handful of the very first set of the most basic runes, and she’d yet to actually learn how to use them. The task before her as an apprentice seemed daunting, at best, and impossible at worst.

  “Don’t worry!” Gareth laughed, kindly, when he saw her expression. “You’ve been at it a few days, at best, and it takes years to learn. Once you master the basic concepts, you’ll be picking up a few a day after a while. And eventually, you’ll do what the masters do: you’ll look it up in some reference when you actually need it.”

  “It just seems like . . . a lot,” she said, trying to conceal her anxiety.

  “It is,” Gareth conceded, “but it’s very worthwhile. And it's just part of your education as a student of Imperial magic, although an essential one. The whole foundation of Imperial magic is that we all learn the same runes and symbols so that we can work together. Once you learn the runes by rote, you’ll have to learn thaumaturgical construction to put them together to actually make stuff happen.”

  “That’s how Lady Pentandra explained it,” Dara sighed. “You put the runes together like letters in a word.”

  “Exactly!” Gareth agreed, pleased.

  “. . . only I have a really, really hard time putting letters together in a word,” Dara said, despairingly. Gareth blinked at the admission.

  “Oh, compared to actually doing magic, reading is easy,” he insisted. “You’ll pick that up in no time. You’ll have to,” he emphasized. “You won’t be able to do much as a student until you do.”

  Dara resisted the urge to put her forehead down on the cool wood of the smooth oaken table. Terribly hard.

  “I suppose it can’t be as hard as training a bird,” she sighed, calling mentally to Frightful. Even when she was not in rapport with the bird, she and her falcon shared a connection, and it only took a tug at Frightful’s mental jesses to summon her, now.

  “No, but it involves butchering fewer rabbits,” Gareth offered.

  “A point,” she conceded. There were many beautiful things about a falconer’s job. Butchering the kills and the meat for her bird was not among them. “But I’m still kind of confused about my duties as an apprentice,” she confessed, quietly. “I keep expecting someone to explain, but everyone’s been kind of occupied by the news from the west.”

  Gareth’s face changed immediately. “Yes, the Gilmoran invasion. That’s the heart of the western Riverlands. There are hundreds of thousands of people there.”

  “That’s what I understand. But since Master Minalan and even his other apprentices have been busy, they haven’t . . .”

  “. . . had the time to give the new girl her orientation,” Gareth finished. “Well, I suppose I can help, though I learned in the Academy, not from a single master, but the basics are well-known.”

  “Teach me, oh master!” Dara said, with exaggerated adoration.

  “It’s pretty simple, actually,” Gareth said, as one of the cooks placed a trencher of stale bread in front of each of them. “You are supposed to do pretty much whatever your master needs you to do. In return, you slave away at ridiculously hard lessons until you face the mind-twisting horror of the journeyman’s exam.” He considered thoughtfully. “Oh, your master is required to feed you one meal a day, provide you a place to sleep, and give you one new suit of clothes a year at Yule.”

  Dara stared at the wizard. “Is that it?”

  “It’s indentured servitude, near to slavery, for some,” Gareth considered. “It really depends on the master. Some are horrible,” he said, in hushed tones. “Rondal’s former master, for instance, was particularly poor. He’s the only apprentice out of three who survived the Siege of Boval Castle, from what people say . . . largely because of how horrible their master was.

  “But Master Minalan is academy trained, like me and Lady Pentandra,” Gareth assured. “His expectations are likely going to be much, much different than a traditional master. That doesn’t mean lower,” he emphasized. “Master Minalan is a Magelord. He has duties to the duke and the entire land. The gods alone know what he might ask of you, at the moment,” he sa
id, philosophically. “Indeed, if my suspicions are correct, he might not be able to spare the time to instruct you for awhile. The war in Gilmora,” he reminded her. “If I know the Spellmonger, he will find some way to go. He will insist on it. The magelord who is in need is an old war comrade of his, and the Spellmonger is passing loyal.”

  “So he would just . . . leave?” she asked, suddenly worried. She knew the situation was dire, but the war was hundreds of leagues from Sevendor. Indeed, Sevendor was still recovering from its own small war, one in which she’d played no small part. The idea that her new master would feel compelled to go somewhere else to fight when he’d just won back his own domain frightened Dara.

  “If he felt he needed to . . . and if I know the man, by the look in his eyes that need is growing. I figure he could make the journey within two weeks, if he hurried downriver soon. But the Fair Folk are involved,” he added, with thoughtful gravity. “They have magic beyond what we can do, even with witchstones. Even with Minalan’s Witchsphere.”