The Making of a Mage King: White Star

by Anna L. Walls

  Reception at Ambiani

  Sean took them to the new campsite the next morning and found that it didn’t take as much out of him. Perhaps he was better rested this time; perhaps he was getting stronger. Regardless, they all remained in camp for the rest of the day.

  He tried to keep his pacing confined to his tent, but when that didn’t work, he took Laon out to see what he knew about the art of fencing. He found that Laon had no skill or finesse, but he did have a lot of speed and brute force. Few people would have been able to stand against him very long; he would simply bash past their first advances.

  They spent the rest of the day working together, Sean trying to teach him some of the more delicate tricks and learning some things about power in return. He could empathize with Master Mushovic now; teaching wasn’t as easy as it looked. They were forced to do everything slowly; Laon had to pay attention to how hard he hit because Sean didn’t want to ruin his sword with just lessons. They should have had Laon’s sword reground back in Rouen; the edge looked more like a wood saw than a sword, but he was learning and he was hungry for more.

  They broke for a cold lunch and again for supper, but before they reached the cookfire, Jenny had Larry tell them to take a bath. She probably had a point; Sean figured his last real bath had been back at the palace.

  They found a small back-eddy downriver from camp a short way, and between the two of them, they managed to keep the water warm enough so that they weren’t hypothermic while they washed. For the first time, Sean saw that Laon’s body was covered with scars. They weren’t thick ropy things anymore, but their presence and number was chilling. He couldn’t conceive of what he must have gone through.

  When they were done with their bodies, they washed their clothes then put them back on. Laon showed Sean how to dry them. Apparently, that had been one of the first things he had learned. His father didn’t like him going swimming in the river near their ranch, but he did it anyway, so to avoid getting into trouble for it, he’d make sure he was dry before he reached home. He was pretty sure that his father suspected anyway, but he could never be certain enough to punish him for it.

  When they came back to the fire already dry, Jenny gave them a critical look, but since they both no longer smelled of stale sweat, she didn’t complain. After supper, she sat Sean down and gave him a haircut. It ended up that she spent most of the rest of the evening giving haircuts; they all needed one. She had to stop when the light gave out.

  Alone in his tent with no further distractions, Sean was still left with the problem of how he should enter the city. He could enter the city however he wanted to, but he didn’t want to stir up a hornet’s nest and have the entire military force descend upon them, and they were camped too far away to just filter in a few at a time.

  In the end, he decided there was no avoiding it. To protect Seth and the others, he would gate the rest of them to a location closer to the city and enter with everything he had. No sane commander would throw everything he had at an untested fortification unless he was certain his numbers were the greater, but perhaps this would look like just a probe, a show of strength.

  Master Mushovic used to always say that fights are generally won or lost in each opponent’s head; well, this would definitely be a fight in the head. With Laon at his side, provided he could control him during a real fight, Sean figured they could deal out a lot of damage before their bluff was called. He hoped they wouldn’t have to fight, though. One can always hope.

  He picked the wee hours of the morning to approach the city. The four of them who rode Clydesdales were first in their procession, the senior officers and Hugh came next, then came the man who carried the White Star banner, who was point man of the rest of his forces.

  Sean expected a fuss as soon as the guards on the walls caught sight of them, but he didn’t expect to be greeted by cheers and the gates being thrown open. He could hear criers running through the sleepy city announcing his arrival, and the growing hubbub as people poured out to see. Because of the hour, many of the people were still in their nightclothes and bathrobes. Sean felt like the local hero home from war.

  Larry pushed up to ride beside Sean as they neared the gate. “You’ve been through here, right? What did you do?”

  Larry’s right. Supposedly, I came through here to leave my banner around the city, but for the life of me I have no memory of this place. I must have done something other than just displaying my flag.

  As they cleared the gate, Sean saw what he had missed during his flyover; his banner was still hanging above the gate, under the arch of the wall.

  Just as he cleared the gate, a runner came up to them, and through the din of screams and cheers, he yelled, “My lord, will you follow me, please?”

  Sean looked across the crowd. The different colors of magic sparkled through the people, but none of them were very strong, so he nodded. He felt like he was walking into a trap, and yet there seemed to be no one to spring it.

  The runner, a fairly small man, tried to push his way back through the crowd with little luck until Manuel rode up beside him and pulled him up beside him like a child. He didn’t trust the man enough to swing him up behind him, so he held him on one leg facing out. The man couldn’t have been happier; he was laughing and pointing the way. If this was a trap, Manuel would break him in two.

  The messenger’s pointing finger led them to the first guardhouse where the local forces held the people back to give them room to dismount. Cordan had men reinforce the human barricade and push the people farther back.

  “Please, my lord,” said the messenger, as he bowed and indicated that Sean should follow him into the building. They filed into the building and Cordan stationed no less than five men at each turning they passed.

  They were ushered into an office on the third floor near the back of the building. A man who looked to be in his fifties was still adjusting his clothes when they entered.

  “White Star, I am so glad you have returned. We have everything prepared for you,” he said, as he gave his tunic an extra tug.

  “You have what prepared for me?” asked Sean; he had to, he had no idea what the man was talking about.

  “Your arrival has taken us by surprise, but in a few hours, we can have everyone gathered in the amphitheater and you can pass judgment on the prisoners we have taken.”

  Okay, if I am going to be king, I am going to have to pass judgment on people. I can accept that, but I’m still confused. What does this have to do with my previous visit? I’ll have to wait and see. If I question this man too much, he might have second thoughts about my authenticity.

  The amphitheater, a massive torch-lit structure carved out of the core of the sandstone bluff that held the bulk of the city, was an amazing chamber, and Sean had a hard time strolling to the stage as if he’d been there before. On the stage, eight men were gathered around a large table that reminded Sean of King Arthur’s Round Table, except that it was only half-round. Sean was ushered to a central chair and the eight men took seats on either side of him.

  Laon stayed at his elbow, and he kept Hugh close to his other elbow. Cordan made sure there were plenty more of his men stationed around in the shadows.

  “What’s he doing here?” asked one of the men. It was inevitable that Hugh would be noticed. He was the only man in Sean’s party who didn’t have the White Star emblem on his shoulder. His emblem was square and divided into four equal squares. The upper right and the lower left squares had bold green crosses on a white field; the other two squares had bold white crosses in them with something that looked like some sort of green plant in each corner on a red field. It was his family crest and obviously, these men recognized it.

  Sean made his introduction. “This is Hugh Picardy, and he is my guest. We will discuss his presence here after we finish our business. Shall we begin?”

  Hundreds of citizens had been filing into the seats arrayed around on tiered balconies surrounding the chamber until the place was packed. They waited
until the outer doors closed with an echoing boom, then a couple local guards brought a third man in chains to stand in front of them. Under questioning and with a little magical help, he told the assembly what had happened on the night in question from his point of view. Sean was surprised to discover that he had been a guard here. Apparently, Sean had incited a riot against the sitting governor and the city had been split. With the citizens far outnumbering the military, the citizens had won and the governor had fled.

  As he recited his story, Sean could find no fault with anything the man had done, despite the fact that what he’d done had been against himself; the man had been doing his job, he had been following orders to the best of his ability. The only crime was that he had been performing his duty against the White Star.

  Sean sent him back to his cell without passing judgment and called for the next man. He wanted to hear more about what exactly had happened and he wanted to think carefully about what he would do. His word could end these men’s lives and he wanted to make sure that they deserved it first.

  By lunchtime, Sean had a fairly clear picture of what had happened, but also by lunch, he had the bright idea to ask how many men there were for him to hear. He almost groaned at the number. If he spent about half an hour on each man, and he had already listened to about a dozen men; if he could manage to squeeze thirty men into a day, he had well over ten days worth of work to do here. He didn’t have that much time to spare.

  He made a few changes; he saw each man only long enough to determine whether they were an officer or an enlisted man. If they were nothing more than a level-one field-flunky, he turned them loose with one year of community service followed by two years of probation where they weren’t allowed to touch a weapon. A level two flunkey, meaning they were in charge of at least five men, was given a one-year prison sentence counting time served, then the community service and two years of probation. He considered everyone above that to be an officer.

  Under Ludwyn, there was no give and take. Under Ludwyn, you did what he said, or you died, or perhaps your family died. Ludwyn could be very cruel, and personally, Sean would not have killed a valuable officer. God, I hate thinking like my uncle.

  By the third morning, he had the officers arrayed in front of the table in a military formation. There were four commanders, each claiming the rank of captain commander; one had been in charge of each guardhouse. There were three shift commanders for each guardhouse and five company commanders in each shift. Each commander had been in charge of a dozen squads during their shift.

  Each of the company commanders were to receive one stripe of the whip for every person they’d killed, and under Sean’s compulsion, they had to own up to each one. They might not have been able to remember that kind of detail on their own, but the magic made it all very clear. After they recovered, they were to get two years of military hard labor, then never touch a weapon again for as long as they lived.

  When the company commanders had been taken away, Sean turned to the last sixteen men left in the room. He knew the kind of pressure they had been under; he had seen a sample of it himself. It’s difficult to punish someone in that kind of position. “Under my grandfather,” he started and watched more than one of those men take a deep breath, “actions as you have been forced to undertake would have been cause for life imprisonment at the very least.”

  One of the commanders fainted, so Sean waited until guards brought him around and stood him up again. Sean waited a few minutes longer until he was steadier. “I have seen how my uncle ran his military. So, since none of you were directly responsible for any deaths, you will be coming with me.” Sean felt every eye in the room rivet on him as he slowly stood. He had never cast a compulsion over more than one person at a time. “You will follow my orders and the orders of my commanders without question. You will never desert my service. Your loyalty to me will be pristine and unbreakable.” He let them go and more than one of them sank to a knee. “Go home and pack what you need. Say your farewells to any family or friends you have; we will be departing the city before dark.” He stood watching as they filed out of the amphitheater.

  The men moved slowly. They were in shock both from Sean’s compulsion and from the simple fact that they still breathed. They had expected to die today.

  When the doors boomed closed behind them, the chamber came alive with the buzzing of hundreds of whispers and the elders turned on Sean. “What do you think you’re doing?” asked the man farthest to his left.

  Sean ignored the question and asked one of his own. “Do you have any demons here?”

  “We did, but we couldn’t send them to the…palace as you recommended, so we had them destroyed,” he replied, then he continued with his original subject. “What are you going to do with sixteen military criminals?”

  Sean sighed; the man would not be dissuaded. “I am solving at least some of both of our problems. I am relieving you of men who would never be more than criminals in the eyes of these people and therefore a burden upon this city, and I am gaining some much-needed experience. I am, after all, only eighteen years old.” They didn’t need to know that he hadn’t reached eighteen yet, but it was close enough; they could understand ‘young’. Sean turned and whispered to Hugh so that no one else, except perhaps Laon, could hear. “I want you to go stand out there in front of the table.”

  He stiffened with indignation. He didn’t want to be treated like a criminal, but he went anyway if only to preserve his dignity.

  “Now, gentlemen,” said Sean, “on to our next order of business. I set out on this tour of the country to reestablish the noble families and their connections to me. I find that my uncle was almost successful in eliminating that bloodline from this district, and because of that and recent events, a strong council of elders has evolved. I like this council, but I still want to reestablish the nobility, so I’m going to combine the two. I’m charging you with Hugh’s education and safety. It’s your responsibility to make Hugh into the kind of noble we both need here.” Sean turned to Hugh and saw his mouth open. “Hugh, you now have something no other man can claim; you have eight fathers to learn from. I strongly suggest that you learn everything they have to teach, even if they don’t really know how to teach it.”

  Hugh looked around at the eight gray-hairs around the table then took a half step forward. He was going to protest, but he clamped his mouth shut on his words and bowed.

  Sean had to smile. He looked up at the human mass in the room. “This council meeting is concluded,” he announced and the doors opened. As everyone filed out, the elders converged on Hugh, then on Sean. They wanted details and explanations, but Sean didn’t have any and refused to try. “The city is yours,” he said. “I’ll be in touch.” He left them amidst their unanswered questions.

  For their three-day stay, Sean and his men had been housed throughout the city taking up almost every available bed. When he came out of the council chamber/amphitheater, he dispersed some of his men to find the rest of them. They were running short of supplies, so he decided to take the rest of the day to restock. He had Seth bring up the packhorses to be loaded, though he had him wait outside the gates. He still felt like he was walking around in a trap, so he made the women stay in camp under guard.

  While the men were doing their ‘shopping’, orders from the council went around to the different merchants that there was to be no charge for their purchases. They were being treated with all possible deference, but Sean was still edgy. He went to the room he had been provided with, ostensibly to pack his belongings, but under heavy guard, he did a little unorthodox exploring.

  Sean walked through each of the guardhouses, going from room to room. He found no more than he expected: barracks, armory, training and practice rooms, a small infirmary, a cafeteria, the quartermaster’s office. There were no jail cells or rooms that looked like places were judging took place, so he went back to the amphitheater.

  Eventually he followed a back hallway and found the dungeons. In t
he cells, he found that every one of the three hundred plus men he had just judged were still being held. Those who he had authorized a whipping for had received that during their trial, but none of the troops he had released had been allowed to leave.

  I don’t like being second-guessed. If I’m supposed to be king, I expect to be treated as one, and my word, therefore, taken as law. If the council thought they could put me on a throne and then laugh at my decrees, they have another thing coming.

  Though the complex was stuffed, Sean managed to find an empty cell. He painted his emblem on a blank wall and welded the door closed then he brought all eight of the elders here. He was confident that they would be found soon and he was certain that someone would get word to him long before he left the city. To ensure that, he made sure that it would take a very good blacksmith to break these men out of their cell.

  Sean watched them for a moment as they tried to grasp their situation, then…

  …he opened his eyes. Back in his room, he did indeed pack the little he had here with him, then after waiting for his men to do the same, he went out to saddle his horse. Sean took his time. He was waiting for a messenger, or at least some sign of trouble.

  Sean’s signal didn’t come until he was almost ready to leave the city. He was sure they’d tried every other avenue they could think of before they sent for him.

  The messenger was breathless when he found him. Sean was just assembling his men around the wagons they had hired to take their supplies out to the horses. “My lord, my lord, the council of elders has sent me to retrieve you. They…they beg an audience with you before you leave. Will you come with me, please?” Sean knew what this was all about, but he was curious how they would handle it. He hesitated longer than the messenger was comfortable with. “My lord, please.” The man looked like he was about ready to get down on his knees and beg.