He tried to distract them by talking about other matters—witchcraft, sorcery, and their own lives, for the most part.
By this time he had learned the basics of witchcraft; the four women had taken turns teaching him what they knew. He was not particularly surprised to learn that most of the witchcraft these people sold was really the same thing as the sorcery the nobles of the empire employed. Love spells were emotional bindings, nothing more, and the potions sometimes dispensed to enhance them were merely herbal brews that made the subject more receptive to the binding. They would have worked just as well for any other compulsion as they did for provoking lust or devotion.
Healing was the same healing that sorcerers did—bindings to repair torn flesh, wards to drive off poisons and evil influences, and perhaps a little infusion of earthly energy to help the body recover its strength. This was at least as likely to be used on livestock as on the villagers themselves.
Witches were consulted to locate new wells or latrines, and that was done by sensing the flow of energy beneath the soil, just as a sorcerer would have done, had any sorcerer ever troubled himself with so mundane a task.
And prognostication, which the witches and peasants usually called fortune-telling, was almost completely fraudulent. These witches could no more see the future than could anyone else. They could, however, use their magic to make their customers more suggestible, and to read subtle clues that would guide them in telling their customers what they wanted to hear. A few vaguely worded predictions, some clever guessing, and the eager buyers would believe that the witches had read the contents of their hearts, had seen their pasts, and could foretell their futures.
That was perhaps the biggest surprise—that so much of witchcraft was made up of lies and deception. Sorcery certainly had its failings, most particularly in the sort of black sorcery that Lord Blackfield and the others of the Lantern Society campaigned against, but it was still more honest than witchcraft. The witches took credit for anything that could possibly be attributed to magic; common coincidences were claimed as subtle spells, good luck was the result of a witch’s blessing, and misfortune was a sign that someone had been cursed—though of course, never by the witch pointing out the supposed curse.
“For a small fee, I could try to remove the curse,” the witch would say, “but of course, I can’t offer any guarantees—the witch who laid this curse upon you may have powers greater than my own.”
There was never any curse. In fact, Reva admitted that none of them even knew whether curses were actually possible.
“I would think that certain bindings could reasonably be considered curses,” Anrel told her. “But I have no idea how one would cast them.”
Reva shrugged. “Who would want to?”
Anrel had no answer for that.
The journey was slow, but Anrel stayed with the witches. He could, at any of several stops along the way, have simply paid the fare and caught a coach to Lume, but he did not do so; he knew from the stories about Alvos that he could not yet hope to return to Alzur, and Lume was not intended as his final destination, so there was no hurry about reaching the capital. He was learning witchcraft, keeping track of the wild stories about his alter ego, and enjoying the company of his fellow travelers. A coach might take him to Lume in a matter of three or four days, but it would not bring him any understanding of how to use his magical abilities, and he thought it very unlikely that he would find himself with any companions more pleasant than Tazia and her sisters.
As well as his education in witchcraft and politics, Anrel learned a great deal about the Lirs themselves.
Nivain, the mother of the family, eventually admitted that when she had spoken of her “late father,” she had probably lied. She did not know whether her father was alive or dead, nor exactly who he had been. Her mother had been a shop keep er’s daughter who accepted the advances of a handsome young man who had claimed to be a sorcerer—Lord Perlitoun, he had called himself, according to Nivain’s mother, but no one in the family knew whether that was really his name, where he was from, or where he had gone. He had appeared in her town, stayed for a season or so, and then departed, never to be seen again. Two and a half seasons later, Nivain had been born.
Her talent for magic had manifested fairly early, lending support to her father’s claims of nobility, but her mother had done everything possible to keep that talent a secret.
“She was afraid that if I let anyone know about it, they would take me away from her,” Nivain explained. “She thought my father might come back and claim me if I was acknowledged to be a sorceress. She didn’t want that—I was all she had. She wasn’t so foolish as to think that he might marry her, after so long, nor even foolish enough to want him to marry her. He had deserted her, and that had been enough to end her infatuation with him; she said he was a selfish, empty-headed fop, and she would not marry until she could do better for herself.” Nivain sighed. “She never did—at least, she had not married when last we spoke.”
Nivain herself, on the other hand, had married Garras when she was sixteen. He had been a big, strong, handsome, well-spoken man, and she had been eager to get away from her mother’s rather overwhelming attentions. That he had no trade, and no sorcerer had leased him land to farm, had not troubled her, as she had been sure that in time the Mother and Father would provide him with something suitable. That he was short-tempered and given to boastful exaggeration she had not noticed until after they were wed. She had kept her magic hidden from him for almost a year, but at last the secret had slipped out.
She had thought he would be furious with her for withholding this information, that he would either forbid her to use it or want her to face the sorcery trials, but he had surprised her; it was his suggestion to take up witchcraft and travel. Ever since, they had wandered back and forth across the empire, from Kerdery to Tralmei and Hallin to Pirienna, selling her services.
“For twenty-four years now, my home has been a wagon,” she said. She gestured at the vehicle Lolo pulled. “This one is our third.”
Reva had been born in their first wagon some twenty-three years ago, making her a year or so older than Anrel himself, and very nearly Valin’s age. Like her mother she had shown magical ability at an early age, and the question of whether or not she should face the trials had arisen. Garras had finally settled the matter—the risk was too great. If Reva were to become a sorceress, it was all too likely that she would attract official attention to the rest of her family that would eventually put Nivain’s neck in a noose.
The others had followed the same path. Tazia turned nineteen just three days after Anrel first met her, and Perynis would turn seventeen eight days after the solstice, but neither had ever considered the trials.
Reva took little interest in talking to Anrel, either on the road or when they had stopped for the night; she was more concerned with her own plans. She was saving up money and intended to strike out on her own, and anything that did not bring her closer to that goal did not command her attention.
Tazia, on the other hand, sought Anrel out at every opportunity, even before he admitted to being Alvos. She seemed fascinated by every mention of his past life; oddly, at least from Anrel’s point of view, she seemed to find the details of his life in Alzur, living in his uncle’s house, more intriguing than his adventures as a student in Lume. A simple description of leaving boots by the door for the servants to tend held greater appeal for her than the tale of how he had caught a drunken friend diving off one of the watchmen’s arches not a hundred feet from the emperor’s palace.
She was reluctant to say anything about herself, though Anrel coaxed her to do so.
Perynis fell between these two extremes; she would chatter cheerfully with Anrel about whatever came into her head, whether that meant telling a story about helping Nivain deliver a baby, or pondering what the squirrels by the road might say if they could speak, or questioning Anrel about the construction of the boat he had stolen from the boat house on the Raish
and abandoned in the woods on the Galdin. Anrel thought, though, that she might have been equally happy speaking to one of her sisters, or even to old Lolo.
Reva was tall and stately, with straight dark hair to her waist, though she usually kept it tied back in a thick braid; her face was strong and elegant, with dark eyes and prominent cheekbones. Perynis was second in height, matching her mother, and despite her youth she was the most buxom of the lot, her curling hair tumbling over lush and generous curves. Tazia was shorter and plainer, but Anrel found her charming all the same—her constant attentiveness was a part of that, of course, but he also admired the smile that seemed to make her whole face glow, and the soft laugh that so often accompanied that smile. Her hair was as dark as Reva’s, but almost as curly as Perynis’s locks.
Anrel also noticed that Tazia alone of the three daughters took after her mother in one regard—Tazia and Nivain were by far the gentler and more considerate healers of the four, and seemed as concerned with making sure their patients were calm and comfortable as with the actual magic. Reva could not be bothered with such niceties, and for that reason was generally given other work; she reportedly excelled at love spells and other coercion, and was always responsible for setting wards when the family retired for the night, to warn them of any intruders. Perynis seemed concerned with her patients, but had, as yet, no knack for comforting or reassuring them.
All three daughters were definitely practicing witches, though—which meant, Anrel knew, that all three might well find themselves on a gallows someday, alongside the mother who had taught them their trade. That prospect did not please him at all, especially when he considered that he might well be up there with them.
Four witches in a single family also meant that finding work for all of them in a small village was not likely; this was a large part of why Reva intended to leave. As it was, the younger girls sometimes found themselves reduced to healing torn ears on injured house cats, or setting wards merely to protect woolens from moths.
This meant that Anrel’s payments into the family coffers, which amounted in all to eleven guilders, were very welcome. It also meant that the family got very tired of rabbit stew, though once winter closed in and rabbits could no longer be readily snared they would undoubtedly look back on those thin and tiresome stews fondly. Food was not plentiful; the harvest had been poor for the sixth year running, so prices were high, and villagers less generous in paying the witches than they had been in good times. A good deal of grumbling was directed at the nobility for allowing this state of affairs to continue—surely there was something their sorcery could do! The protests by some sorcerers that they were trying their best with fertility spells were dismissed as self-serving exaggeration or outright lies. There was also much discussion of what would be the most efficacious way to phrase the prayers to the Father, the Mother, and all the ancestral spirits at the solstice rites.
The weather grew steadily colder as autumn wore on and the solstice approached; more than once Lolo’s hooves crunched through ice as he pulled the wagon along the rutted roads, and a few brief flurries left the brown fields speckled with white. Between villages Nivain’s cape, which Anrel wore to disguise himself when observing the witches at work, was (quite appropriately) wrapped around its rightful owner, so when the family was on the road Anrel wore his brown velvet coat over his blue jacket and kept his hat tugged down over his ears, more concerned with warmth than appearance, and wished that he had the good gray wool cloak that had seen him through four winters in Lume, and which he had left folded in a trunk in his uncle’s house—not to mention the fur-lined gloves that his cousin Saria had given him as a going-away present when he first left to take up his studies in the capital.
When the solstice finally arrived Anrel was startled to discover that the Lir women did not celebrate it—they said no special prayers, made no obeisance, and did not divert themselves from their regular route in order to visit a sacred site or family shrine. When he remonstrated with Garras, his answer was a cold stare and a flat, “We don’t have time for that.”
He began a reply, then cut it off short, before the first word had finished leaving his lips. It was none of his business. Still, it troubled him that women who had so obviously benefited from the Mother’s gifts would make no expression of gratitude.
They arrived that night in the town of Kolizand, home to some three hundred souls, of whom about a dozen were down with fever. Since the local burgrave had dismissed this illness as beneath his notice it would keep the witches nicely busy for two or three days, and then, if nothing else demanded their attention, they would move on.
“And that will be that,” Garras said, as they sat around the hearth in Kolizand’s one ramshackle inn, where they had paid for a night’s lodging by blessing the wine, so that it would not turn to vinegar before spring. The “blessing” was a ward against further fermentation, a spell which might or might not actually last out the winter.
“That will be what?” Anrel asked.
“That will be the end of our association,” Garras replied. “Didn’t you know? The next town beyond this is Beynos, where we cross the river and you leave us.”
“Ah,” Anrel said. He glanced at Tazia, who blushed and dropped her gaze.
Garras seemed to take it for granted that they would be abiding by the original agreement they had made the night Anrel first met the Lirs, but Anrel himself was not so sure. Not for the first time, he wondered whether he wanted to leave the witches.
21
In Which Anrel Arrives at His Expected Destination
in Unexpected Circumstances
The fever proved more intractable than expected; it was four long, exhausting days before the Lir women had finally restored all the people of Kolizand to health, and Anrel found himself musing whether the burgrave had misjudged the severity of the illness, or simply hadn’t wanted to be bothered with such unpleasant matters.
After all, great things were happening in the world. Anrel’s first day in Kolizand was also the first day the Grand Council finally met, less than a full day’s travel to the east, in the ancient city of Lume, the eternal heart of the Walasian Empire. Who would blame the burgrave of Kolizand if he was preoccupied with following the news from the capital, and not interested in the boring business of running his own town?
Rumor had it that the makeup of the council was not what the emperor had wanted—he had hoped for a calm, cooperative group that he could direct as he pleased, and had called for the election of commoners believing that they would be overawed by his presence and too ignorant, too naïve, to present any resistance to his plans for revamping the tax laws. Instead, thanks to the work of agitators and revolutionaries like the mysterious Alvos of Naith, half the council was said to be made up of rabble-rousers and firebrands, eager to immediately right all the perceived wrongs of the empire.
The empress, who was due to bear her first child any day now, was said to be downright horrified by what had become of her husband’s scheme, and had allegedly told him the council should not be permitted to meet at all. His Imperial Majesty had known better than that; he had convened the council, and once that was done, he did not have the authority to undo it. His wife, being Ermetian by birth, did not appreciate just how impossible it was to refuse this most sacred of all Walasian institutions.
Anrel found that perversely amusing; he suspected that two years ago most Walasians had never heard of the Grand Council, yet now it was a sacred institution. Two years ago most of those who did know of the Grand Council had probably considered it an irrelevant historical curiosity, yet now it was seen as the very foundation of the empire.
Of course, Anrel’s studies in history had taught him that the original Grand Council really was the foundation of the empire. It had been the mechanism by which the ancient Walasian sorcerers were able to restore some semblance of order after the Old Empire disintegrated. The wizards who had created the Old Empire, and the bureaucrats who had administered it, had all van
ished over a period of half a season, never to be seen again, and it had been the Grand Council that had created the Walasian Empire in their stead.
But that council had disbanded centuries ago, and had been all but forgotten until the emperor decided he needed some way to make demands of the nobility that were not permitted under the existing laws and covenants. To Anrel, this new Grand Council seemed little more than a sham, a shabby stunt on the emperor’s part. If it was not working out quite as the emperor wanted, that was just as well.
By the time he and the Lir family finally made their preparations to depart Kolizand, though, the news from Lume had turned more dismaying. The emperor had refused to allow the Grand Council to meet in the palace, or any other official building, claiming that he did not want their deliberations to be influenced by the existing bureaucracy. Instead, they had been sent to an ancient, crumbling, little-used building, a relic of the Old Empire—a bath house, originally, though the plumbing that had once kept the baths filled, and the mechanisms that had heated the water, had all long ago corroded into uselessness. It was said to be haunted, though no one seemed to think that was a serious concern.
The more extreme populist members of the council had used this exile as evidence of the utter corruption of the empire’s present government, and delegates who had previously espoused moderation seemed more inclined to listen to their radical compatriots now.
The rumors about Empress Annineia had turned darker, as well—she was now said to have a coterie of hired necromancers from the Cousins acting as her personal guards, brought in with the Ermetian physicians who had come to help with the impending birth. It was even said that demons, presumably summoned by her foreign magicians, had been glimpsed in the streets around the palace, though anyone with any sense dismissed that as absurd.
Anrel was more disturbed by this than he cared to admit. He had always assumed that the empire’s governance was as solid and certain as the land itself. He had taken it for granted that the emperor would muddle through his economic woes somehow and retire his grandfather’s debts, that the recent crop failures would end, and that everything would then return to the same sort of peace and prosperity that the empire had enjoyed for half a millennium. Now, though, things seemed to be slipping further and further out of control, further and further away from the old norm. Necromancers in the palace, and demons in the streets of Lume? The Grand Council made up largely of disgruntled commoners, and meeting in a haunted ruin? Returning to normal from this might not be as certain as Anrel had thought.
A Young Man Without Magic Page 21
