by Ted Neill
The Magus
Elk Riders Volume V
Ted Neill
To RaRu and Jojo
Table of Contents
Chapter 1 The Visitor
Chapter 2 Karrith
Chapter 3 Trial
Chapter 4 Amberlyn
Chapter 5 Tallia
Chapter 6 The Candelin
Chapter 7 Chattel
Chapter 8 The Revenant
Chapter 9 Rebellion
Chapter 10 Homeward
Chapter 11 Black Tea
Chapter 12 Of Slaves and Masters
Chapter 13 Thorn Apple
Chapter 14 Unraveling
Chapter 15 A Time for Steel
Chapter 16 Rivertown
Chapter 17 Beatings
Chapter 18 Chastain Manor
Chapter 19 Soledor
Chapter 20 Ginger Tea and Candlelight
Chapter 21 The City Gates
Chapter 22 The Causeway
Chapter 23 The Magus
Chapter 24 Anthor
Chapter 25 Thestos
Chapter 1
The Visitor
Nathan remembered the figure standing in the doorway, the light at his back, his face dark, the line of the horizon behind his knees. He remembered white towers of clouds resting on the blue bed of the sea; his parents’ faces, drawn with worry, resignation, or was it the shame of their humble fisher’s hut before this powerful foreign visitor? The nets drying on the wall, the cries of seagulls, the tinkle of the wind chime fashioned from seashells, even the first words of the foreign man as he stood in the doorway, all were still so clear in his mind.
“Is this the boy?” the visitor asked, dispensing with any greeting, introduction, or other pleasantries. Nathan remembered this slight to his people, his parents, even if he could not remember their names.
Nathan had had a name—a full one, first and surname—that day the visitor came to take him away. He was sure his parents had given both to him. Every child received both on their name-day and he was far beyond his name-day when the visitor came. The fact that he had memory of that last day with his parents was proof enough.
But his surname had slipped away, along with so much else, like dreams upon waking or a ghost seen out of the corner of the eye—once glimpsed it was elusive.
The visitor was accompanied by the chief. Nathan had forgotten the chief’s name as well, but his face, round, crowned by a balding pate, was long familiar to him and his presence was a comfort that morning when the visitor came.
Nathan’s own parents waited at his back, his mother’s hand possessively on his shoulder. His father was left to answer the visitor’s question.
“Yes, this is our boy.”
A silent pause followed wherein the visitor waited without moving. Nathan’s father cleared his throat as if to speak but before he could, the chief nodded and gestured to the bare table waiting in the center of the room.
“You may begin,” the chief said.
His father acquiesced, opening and closing cabinets with gentle efficiency. He gathered a bowl, a spoon, a spool of fishing line from the corners of the room and placed them on the table.
“Go ahead,” the chief said with a tentative smile.
Nathan felt his mother’s hand on his shoulder. For a moment he was confused whether to act or not. He understood what was wanted, but it had been so hard to tell when to move things without touching them and when it was forbidden. The power had always been in him, but often his parents had reprimanded him for using it. He’d never forget the flash of terror on their faces when he had sent a bowl of gruel across the room or a sweet zipping to his fingers at a whim.
“It’s all right, Nathan,” he heard his father say. And so he did. Nathan began with the spoon, lifting it up on its end. He turned it. It was difficult to see the face of the visitor, for he still stood silhouetted against the doorway, but he did not gasp, cower, or make a sign to avert evil. Quite the contrary he did nothing, as if what he witnessed was ordinary and mundane. Nathan felt more confident. He placed the spoon down and lifted the bowl into the air, levitating it in the middle space between ceiling and table. Now the stranger moved, reaching up to the bowl to pinch it and set it spinning. The sensation of dizziness that emerged in Nathan’s mind surprised him. Uncomfortable, he willed the bowl to slow and it did.
“Good,” the visitor said, now taking control of the proceedings. “The spool.”
Nathan obeyed, concentrating on the spool, turning it on its side, and unraveling the fishing line. As it collected in a pile he thought he heard his mother choke back a sob. The visitor put his hand up, singaling for Nathan to stop. He did.
“Tie it.”
This was novel: someone who was not only unafraid of Nathan’s abilities but wanted to explore them. Nathan studied his father and mother, unsure as how to respond. He looked down, scrutinizing the laces of his own boots, and swallowed.
“He cannot tie yet,” his mother said, her voice thick with emotion. “I still tie his boots for him.”
“He is very young,” the chief said.
The visitor nodded, pushed his cloak over his shoulder, and strode across the room, pulled a candle from its stick and pressed its end down onto the table so it balanced there amid the spoon, bowl, and unfurled fishing line.
“Light it,” the visitor said.
He might as well have asked Nathan to tie the line again. He was not allowed to play with fire. So many times he had been admonished to remain clear of candles and the cooking fire. But now Nathan was curious. Was this something he could accomplish with his mind?
Not alone, he knew, out of some unnamable instinct. Instead, Nathan lifted his hand, reaching for the candle, but stopping well short of it. He concentrated on the wick, blackened, cold, and bent, imagining a blade of light balanced on it. He imagined heat, burning even. The tips of his fingers felt warm. He moved with the sensation, almost like balancing a drop of water on the pads of his fingers until it felt most intense between thumb and forefinger. His digits became rigid just as a string of smoke twisted into the air above the candle, a speck of orange glowing on it like a tiny star.
A seagull cried as if to remark upon the breeze that had inexplicably grown weaker. There was a soft flutter, like a butterfly beating its wings, and the flame was suddenly there, burning merrily, cutting into the darkness.
Nathan dropped his hand, aware of how stiff his muscles had become and shook out his arm. His father’s and the chief’s eyes were wide and lidless. It was the look of alarm he was accustomed to when he used his powers. His mother’s fist was against her mouth, her eyes shut tight.
“I’ve seen enough,” the visitor said. “Have him sent to my ship. He is not meant for this place. Where I take him, he will be safe.”
“Praise be,” his father whispered. His mother sobbed. As if eager to be done with the place, people, and the whole business, the visitor turned on his heel and stepped out into the sunlight. The chief reached under his jerkin and produced a bag that jingled with the sound of coins. His eyes, brows, and mouth all seemed to bend with a sympathetic frown. His mother wept aloud now and reached out to clutch Nathan, but his father drew her hand away to his chest, wearing the same sad expression as the chief. The chief swept Nathan up from the floor, into his arms, and carried him to the door. Something was terribly wrong with it all. Nathan cried out, “Mama!” but at the sound of his voice his mother convulsed, burying her face deeper into his father’s shoulder. His father took one last look at him, his eyes glistening in the light of the candle on the table and said, “Go.”
Nathan cried out, fighting against the chief, this man he knew to be gentle and kind, so he felt no fear in striking him and struggling against him. But the strength of an adult was absolute an
d although Nathan screamed, reaching for the hut as it receded from his outstretched hand, the chief did not waver. Instead he made a shushing sound, much like the sound of the waves that was ever present on the island. “Remember, Nathan. Remember all of this.”
Nathan. That was his name. He remembered that at least.
He tried to remember the other details: the loaf-shaped stones of the hut, the thatch roof, the pen for animals, the racks of drying fish, the bright green grass growing at the edge of the path. Gulls wheeled in the breeze and terns nestled in the eaves of the huts they passed. A woman’s hand closed the shutter in a window.
The ship was larger than any fishing skiff Nathan had ever seen before. Previously he had not been allowed on boats, even though he watched his father and other men of the village sail out each morning for the early catch, too many times to count. This boat had high sides and a wide, flat floor like a house, uninterrupted by thwarts. Fierce-looking men stood by awaiting orders that came from the visitor himself, who barked them out over his shoulder as he walked back to his cabin. The chief put Nathan down on the deck, said a blessing over him, then scrambled for the gangway, his head held low.
Nathan did not like to remember what followed. Days of crying, weeping, calling out for his parents, asking when he would return home. This sadness accompanied by a seasickness that reduced him to a soiled mess on the boards of the deck. The sailors mostly ignored him. He was only quiet when he was too weak from hunger and thirst to continue. It was then that the visitor reemerged from his cabin, knelt down beside him, and offered him a cup of water and biscuits. Nathan took them without thanks and while he ate, the man, his face visible for the first time, stared at him with deep-set, pale eyes and said in a firm voice, “From now on, your name is Gregor.”
This man had given him food and water. This man was the only person he knew on the boat. He—Gregor, not Nathan—decided not to argue. But he did muster the temerity to ask, “What do I call you?”
“You, Gregor, will call me, ‘Master’.”
Chapter 2
Karrith
Haille thought he had left the demons behind in Sidon, where the bodiless shadows had tormented him and his friends. But now he knew better. Now he knew his inner turmoil could be as much a beast as a wolf in a cage or an undead shadow in a haunted forest.
So he ran. Otherwise he would sit in darkness, his own thoughts torture to him. He yearned for oblivion and only in the exhaustion of running through streets in the small hours of the night could he find it. In daylight he shut himself away behind locked doors, drawn curtains, and clenched eyelids. Even in that darkness there was no comfort from the endless images replaying themselves in his dreams.
His father wounded, coughing up blood so that drops caught on his lips and chin, like an old man dribbling some heinous meal down his face.
But his father was not yet old and what a catastrophe to die before then, to die at all. King Talamar’s once bright eyes mere shadows, the color draining from his face, and his breath smelling of copper, a smell Haille could only associate with a butchery. And then his father’s last words:
“Airre’soleigh.”
King Talamar’s wife. Antas’ queen. Karrith’s own daughter.
Haille’s own mother, whom he took after so much in appearance that strangers who had never met him knew him to be the prince. After so many leagues, fields, forests, and seas, his father never saw him. Instead Talamar spoke to a phantom of his own sorrow.
In the end Haille had failed. The prophecy from the old woman, Lorna—that his father was in mortal danger—was no prophecy but rather fate. There was no changing it.
Haille had been doomed to fail.
And so he ran. He ran so that his muscles burned like acid in a chemist’s crucible, his lungs drank fire, and his skin wept salted rivers. The Karrithians left him alone in those first long winter nights after the battle for their city was over. There were so many madmen and madwomen who wandered the streets at odd hours alongside orphaned children, all of them too traumatized by nightmares to sleep.
The smell of funeral pyres still hung in their air, an acrid replacement for the foul odor of the bodies that rotted, Anthorian, Karrithian, Maurvant, not to mention the horses that had borne men of both sides into battle.
Haille ran. He pictured the bones of his frame coming loose from his body, continuing ahead of him: a fleeting figure of death. Could he outrun his own life, his own identity? His feet pounded out a dirge, at a furious pace but a dirge nonetheless, one that all the other lonely souls of the night understood. Could he outrun his grief, his loss, his failure? On two occasions the exertions caused him to seize and, for once, he welcomed the unconsciousness, the relief from his own thoughts, and the dreamless sleep that followed as he lay undisturbed in the street, taken for just another drunk.
Nights passed. Haille ran. One evening a cat pranced out of his way, startled by his oncoming footfalls. The cat stuck out in his mind because he had seen so few cats in the days before, so many had been killed and eaten in the city which had been bursting at the seams with refugees. Gutters overflowed with filth and excrement. On the first few nights Haille had not known the streets and had fallen into those same gutters and returned to his bed chambers smelling of filth.
He had not bothered to wash since, the stench still clinging to him, but cleanliness was for day dwellers . . . those people who still celebrated the victory, those people within whom hope had rekindled, those people who had set about rebuilding, rehabilitating, refurbishing. Those people included his friends. How could he explain to them that he felt as if he stared at them from across a river, some tributary demarking the living and the dead, and he was a mistake—in the land of the living but no longer willing or able to endure.
Sadness. Failure. Loss.
His eyes blurred with tears, the torchlights on the walls of the city turned into halos of orange. Fire had saved the castle, or so they said, the Karrithians turning the flaming rampart against the invaders, an avalanche of heat and smoking debris that had turned the tide of battle.
His father had done the same at the city gates, serving as the decisive force, the inspiring leader at the time when he was needed most. Haille ran past the portcullis now and heard the voices of soldiers. He could smell the scent of their pipe weed as they smoked to pass the time. He turned up the wide boulevard, the sky behind him lightening. Haille hated these open spaces. He wished to disappear in the maze of side streets where he could slip behind corners, avoiding the gaze of onlookers. His strength was failing, his throat raw as he turned into a narrow alleyway and splashed through muck. A cock crowed. Morning was not far and neither was exhaustion and the relief of sleep.
Haille came to the manor house that had been granted to him and his friends to stay in after the battle. The sentries knew his habits by now and offered no salutation as he passed through the front gate into the courtyard. He heard the horses stirring in the stables, huffing and stamping in the cold. He imagined wings of breath spreading from their nostrils.
He had to hurry to avoid seeing his friends awake. He slipped off his shoes, his pulse still pounding in his head, stole up the stairs, passing closed doors before coming to his own, opened it quickly and collapsed on the other side, the curtains already drawn, a chest of drawers standing by, ready to be pulled across the doorway.
The first few days they had knocked and called to him, Val, Katlyn, Chloe, Cody, Gunther. But nothing and no one would draw him out. He had let the voices merge with the visions of the battlefield he still saw in his nightmares, where he experienced his father’s death over again, the blood on his hands reminiscent of the blood already there from the death of his mother. He was complicit in that death as well, his own birth, his own life, the cause of her demise. So it was with his father, too. Had he not ridden a beast of the same breed that had killed the king, an elk of unknown origin? Together, he and Adamantus had been a force, a thunderbolt renting the Maurvant lines apart. Haille and t
he elk had beaten a course straight for his father’s banners. But, lo, what waited there but three more beasts, these dark and twisted cousins of Adamantus, but elk nonetheless, who had rammed the points of their antlers into his father’s broken body.
He had failed. Not only that, Haille was guilty. To what extent he was not sure, but perhaps it did not matter. Adamantus had fled with the Maurvant, what more obvious sign was there of the elk’s own guilt? Now Haille felt his own life was forfeit. What would the world care if he died at sixteen or eighty-six? Perhaps justice would call for his death sooner rather than later. Perhaps then all would be righted with the world.
So when the banging grew so loud that it woke him, and the Karrithian soldiers stormed in and opened the curtains, the unwelcome light burning his eyes and reflecting off their drawn blades and polished armor, he did not resist.
“In the name of King Oean of Karrith, we place you under arrest,” their captain said.
Val, Chloe, Cody, and even Katlyn had followed them in, the concern on their faces obvious, Katlyn’s eye gleaming with tears to see how thin Haille had become over these days of self-imposed isolation.
“On what charges,” Val said, moving between Haille and the captain.
“Regicide,” the captain answered.
Haille, surprisingly, felt no reaction whatsoever, even if his friends appeared confounded. Chloe and Cody’s hands moved towards their swords. He had learned to read them well over the past weeks and knew they were ready for a fight. But he wanted no more bloodshed. He got up from his bed, slipped on the trousers that were sizes too big for him, and offered his wrists to the nearest solider who clamped shackles around them.
At least the dungeon would offer some darkness.
Chapter 3
Trial
The court chamber was a pit: a circular amphitheater in the bowels of the castle, it was deeper than it was wide, with rows of seating, one row teetering just above the next. This carried the sound of the proceedings, but more strikingly resulted in the accused appearing to sink into a hole while rows of eyes looked down in judgment.
