by Ted Neill
The manservant obeyed, then brought his hands together before him, his eyes focused on the space between himself and Gregor.
“The cat is dead,” Gregor said.
“My condolences.”
“I’m no fool. The milk was poisoned. The only reason you are standing there, alive, is because I think you knew.”
His eyes met Gregor’s. This was not the stare of a beaten and broken servant. These eyes were self-possessed.
“Speak freely,” Gregor said.
“I knew.”
Gregor leaned back against the table. “What is your name?”
“Derrick.”
“That is a lie. Take it from one who is a liar. What is your true name?”
“Haille.”
Gregor wondered if the name should mean something to him. He did not want to betray ignorance if this young man was indeed someone he should know.
“How did you know, Haille?”
“I saw Felix put the poison in the cream.”
“You are his co-conspirator then. Why do you choose to betray him?”
“I am not. He does not know I saw him.”
“So you are perceptive and discreet. You are also a slave. What obligation do you have to me, who enslaved you?”
“Someone once told me all life is precious, even the enemy’s.”
“Am I your enemy?”
“If you are not, then perhaps you are my ally, and that is better than a master.”
“Careful you do not forget yourself.”
“You said speak freely,” Haille said, holding his stare.
Gregor winced. Haille was right. Gregor changed tack. It was time to knock this servant back on his heels. “You know your letters. You speak as one who has been educated. I don’t imagine this is a life you ever envisioned for yourself. Is that why you always look so forlorn?”
“It is difficult being something you are not . . . .”
Don’t I know?
“You don’t think of yourself as a slave?”
“I thought much more highly of myself before.”
“A noble, from your upbringing.”
“A hero, from my deeds. A good son for my love. Instead, I am, this . . . .” He dropped his gaze and he offered up his palms.
Something in his disposition moved Gregor, this candor, this conversation as themselves, as if the shutters had been thrown open and sunlight and fresh air were streaming in, chasing away shadows, melting away the shapes of things as they were not. No facades, no characters to play.
“I am not reincarnated.”
Haille looked up now, his face a question.
“I am a fraud. A slave myself, to a master who is distant, who keeps himself hidden and the order of the Servior deceived. Why, I don’t know. He is powerful, so powerful.”
“Mystery adds to his power.”
“That must be his intention.”
“Who is he?”
“Not even I know his name. He took me from my own family when I was just a child. Already it was clear I had the gift in a powerful way. He took my family, my home, my identity.” Gregor heard surprising bitterness in his voice as the truth flooded out in a gush. “He gave me this role to play. Gregor Twiceborn, the last great master of the Servior reincarnated. Their chief who conquered even death.”
“But why?”
“To conquer death is the Servior’s greatest goal. Lachnor was their most powerful leader in generations, so I’m told. He had been obsessed with finding a way to come back after death. My own master knew this.”
“Your master served him?”
“My master killed him. But not to make himself vulnerable. So he put me in his place, a puppet, to control the order for him and protect himself.”
“Why are you telling me? Do you intend to kill me?”
“No. I tell you because the order is growing suspicious. At least Felix is. I’m in danger. Meanwhile my master is preoccupied. I’m alone. I need an ally of my own.”
In appearance, Gregor and Haille remained master and servant. But alone, as the weeks passed, they were closer to equals, one’s survival dependent on the other. Haille made himself indispensable in the kitchen, where he befriended the cooks and could watch Gregor’s food being prepared. He also was able to procure items directly from the stores where he knew them to be free of tampering.
Gregor, knowing how reliant he was on Haille, shared with him his luxuries when he could, inviting him to dine with him at the same table in his chambers. Haille was reticent about his past and his identity before coming to the island. Most days he hovered somewhere between brooding despair and shameful melancholy. But sharing food had some curative effect on his outward appearance. The hollows filled beneath his eyes and he lost his lean, withered look.
After dinner one evening when the early winter sun had set, leaving just a purple ribbon on the horizon, Gregor was feeling particularly melancholy himself. It had been weeks since he had had an audience with his master; the revenant had been still and inert as a statue. Gregor could only guess at what urgent affairs were keeping his master so occupied. He stared out into the gloaming sky framed by the windowsill before turning to Haille, who appeared to be lost in his own thoughts, the darkness deepening in the room about them.
“Play a game of draughts with me,” Gregor said.
“Very well,” Haille said, not looking up from his own empty plate scattered with crumbs and streaks of grease. At times Gregor worried that he would lose his only ally to Haille’s private mourning. It felt like an untenable situation and, for the moment, reaching out to his glum companion was paramount to him. He cleared away the plates himself, opened the lid to the draught’s box, and set the board and pieces on the table between them. In the darkness, the pieces were nearly indistinguishable. Without much effort, Gregor snapped his fingers and conjured flames on the candles throughout the room so that they were bathed in warm light.
The twitch on Haille’s face did not escape his notice.
“Are you in pain?” Gregor asked.
Haille shook himself as if to ward off a chill. “Just a passing headache is all,” he said.
“Are you sure?” Gregor asked, then instead of arranging the pieces on the board by hand, he focused his energies to lift them out of their holders and set them in their places. He moved a few pieces through the air, passing them close to Haille’s shoulder.
He had not imagined it. Haille clenched his eye shut as if in discomfort.
“You have the gift,” Gregor said. When Haille did not reply, he clarified. “You can perform magic. You are sensitive to my enchantments.”
Haille kept his mouth in a thin line, his eyes cast downward as he rubbed his temples.
“You can’t hide it. You need not. How long have you known?”
“A few months. It was a recent discovery. But how can you tell?”
“Those who are sensitive sometime feel a secondary effect from the enchantments of others until they know how to put their own boundaries in place,” Gregor said, leaning forward in his chair and placing his hands flat on the table. “This is a stroke of luck. I can train you. By the stars, what other secrets are you hiding from me?”
Haille shook his head, staring at the pieces on the board. “The first time I saw someone make a flame appear . . . it felt like this tingling all over my skull.”
“That is it!”
Gregor feared he had misspoken, for Haille looked to the window, the muscle in his jaw flexing as if to hold back some expression of emotion.
“I only meant you have talents, latent power.”
“I understand,” Haille said quickly.
“It would help us both, if I could develop you in this way. Magic has always come easily to me.”
Haille pushed out his chair, stood, and walked to the window. “To what end? You have shown me mercy, but this existence cannot last. Especially if your own illusion is growing threadbare and your own people are turning against you.”
Gregor crossed hi
s arms over his stomach, which suddenly felt unsettled. “I have thought the same this very night.”
“We’re allies but we’re both still prisoners so to speak.”
“Soon my master will be sure to contact me. He—”
“He . . . you serve an order devoted to darkness. What does it mean that I’m helping you now?” Haille said, leaning his hands on the windowsill.
“You wish to leave?”
Haille shook his head. “I’m not sure where I belong anymore. But neither of us is safe here.”
Gregor was captivated by one of the candle flames for a moment. “My master has always taught me that the world is a wicked, chaotic place, overrun with fools and imbeciles that require order, power, control. Otherwise the forces of disorder will reign.”
“Who is your master?”
“I’ve said before, even I don’t know for certain, but the visions I see when I communicate with him,” he stopped, running his palms across his face. “What is the world, Haille, a good or bad place?”
“It’s just a place, in my experience.”
Gregor did not know if he was comforted by the answer. He was not sure which answer he had wanted. If it were bad, his master would have been justified in his bids for control and conquest. But that was not a world Gregor wanted to live in. If it was a good place, then what did that make his master, much less, him? “I’d like to see it again, for myself,” he heard himself say.
“You’d like to get off this rock?”
“Yes, I would.”
Haille turned back to him. “Then we both will need to learn from each other. Teach me to use magic.”
“Done. What will I learn from you?”
“Do you know how to use a sword?”
Gregor was caught off guard and slightly embarrassed. “No, I have never needed to. My talents lie elsewhere.”
“We’ll change that. We’ll need to if we’re going to escape.”
Chapter 13
Thorn Apple
Their conspiracy began in earnest the very next day. Gregor took pains to be punctual for his rounds with the novices and his appointments with advisors, especially Felix in an effort to keep up appearances. But in their spare moments, he and Haille met in the north wing to exchange knowledge.
Haille was of the same age as most of the students at Drahlstrom, but he lacked the guile, ambition, and the edge of cruelty that the Servior cultivated in their selection process. It allowed Gregor to enjoy teaching his craft in a way he had not in many years. Haille understood the basics quickly but with little time to practice, his progress was slow. Gregor began to bring him to sessions with the novices so he could witness further instruction even if he could not practice.
In the afternoon, roles reversed. Gregor and Haille trained with unsharpened swords that Haille had stolen from the armory. Their sessions ended with Gregor panting, his arms aching, and his legs trembling, for it was a sort of physical fatigue he had experienced rarely before. Now he welcomed it, such a contrast it was to the exertions of the mind. Haille’s training ran deep, his natural talent even deeper, although he would often bend at the waist, hands on his knees, and lament the decline of his own conditioning and strength.
“It has been so long since I practiced,” Haille would say.
Yet the parries, attacks, down strikes, side strikes, upthrusts, and the flourishes that accompanied them seemed to come so easily to Haille. He executed moves with the grace of a dancer and the certainty of a master instructor. Gregor noticed Haille’s disposition brightening, especially in those instances when Gregor was able to exchange a prolonged series of strikes and blocks without faltering.
“Well met, apprentice,” Haille said after one such exchange of volleys. The phrase struck Gregor and he laughed. “What is it?” Haille asked, moving to the corner where they had a barrel of rain water to drink from. He dunked the ladle and lifted it dripping to his mouth.
“My master says the same thing to me when I have impressed him with a spell or a conjuring.”
“Funny,” Haille said, his mouth puckering as if the water’s taste disagreed with him. “So did my sword instructor.”
“Perhaps mentors are not so different around the world—Haille?”
Haille had doubled over, clutching his hand to his throat. He gagged and let out a ragged moan. As he coughed, blood spluttered on his lips. He touched his hand to his mouth and at the sight of scarlet on his fingers and palms, his eyes grew wide. He dropped to a knee, his face pale, his eyes darting back to the barrel.
“Poisoned.”
They had let their guards down. Gregor had been so taken with having a co-conspirator, even a friend, he had forgotten to nurture a healthy distrust. The rain barrel, isolated in the north tower, they had assumed was safe—but clearly his enemies had infiltrated even this haven.
Haille was his senior and taller, so it took great effort for Gregor to move him, but with Haille’s arm across his own shoulder, Gregor carried him to his chamber and let him collapse in his own bed. Gregor brought the chamber pot over, rifled through his own stocks of herbs, roots, and other medicinal plants and fungi. The room rang with the clack of his pestle in his mortar as he mixed an emetic.
“We have to get you to vomit what you drank.”
Haille nodded, coughing into the pot, his hands clutching the rim, the tendons of his neck cording.
“Then I’ll need to determine what was in the water. It was meant for me, I’m sure.”
“Both of us,” Haille said between hacks.
The process of cleaning out Haille’s stomach was a painful one that left him trembling as if with a fever. If it was exhaustion or an effect of the poison, Gregor was not sure, but when Haille’s fingertips turned a shade of purple and his lips blue, while his eyes became bloodshot and tinged with yellow, Gregor knew.
“Are you thirsty?”
“Yes,” Haille said.
“Thorn apple, I know the signs.”
Gregor’s master had taught him how to make the very same poison. It was useful for assassinations, especially because there was no known antidote.
At least not medicinal.
Gregor raced back to his study, scanned his bookshelves for a seldom used volume of healing spells. “You always wanted me to be a killer, not a healer,” he said as if to his master, taking notice for the first time how the dozens of volumes of spells inflicting pain, wounds, and death outnumbered those of healing. Gregor sighed and picked one of the three books of spells for convalescence. “Let this be the right one.”
He worked late into the night, weaving a tapestry of enchantments around Haille and mixing herbal brews for himself to keep sleep at bay. Gregor realized with a tightening in his heart that Haille had become his first real friend. He called on his gifts and pressed himself to unexplored limits in order to influence the battle raging within Haille’s twitching, feverish body. The sun had long set and the candles guttered but the room was bright with the aura of spells of health and healing that Gregor replenished over Haille’s prone shape throughout the night. Still, despite his concoctions, Gregor’s mind became addled with sleep in the small hours of the night as he tried to decipher unfamiliar spells and ancient writing.
The stars faded and the waves on the rocks of the isle grew quiet with low tide. Eventually the runes with their flourished serifs blurred before his eyes and Gregor nodded into sleep. His dreams were a re-creation of the very reality he had just endured. In his imagination, Haille still struggled, gasping from the bed, Gregor unable to allieviate his pain. The other men whom they had sent to the seawall gathered at his bedside, the wounds on their backs weeping blood and puss, their hands and feet split with blisters, their faces pale and ghostly, like men who had drowned at sea. They regarded Gregor with pleading eyes—there were so many of them. Behind them waited other men, slaves from earlier seasons, men who had perished from exhaustion, disease, or starvation. Their faces were dry and stretched and in some places rot had opened gaping h
oles in their flesh.
Stalking among them was the cat who had died, that had first signaled to Gregor his danger, but the cat turned, twisted up on two legs and all at once its fur grew dark and long, into a cloak. Its eyes shaded to slits of blue and from a mouth of saber teeth, he heard his master speak.
Gregor.
But Gregor was not his true name. He changed his shape, as an arch mage might, and he flew in the form of a sea hawk over the exposed sandbars, along the leeward side of the island, leaving Drahlstrom behind, a dimple on the surface of the sea. He bent his wings to the rhythm of the winds, soaring above the atolls and archipelagos. Not the razor crags of his prison, but the sun-bathed terraced hillsides with homes built of mud and wattle and thatch. Homes where families sat around tables and broke crab legs open to eat the steaming meat together, where fishing nets hung on the walls to dry, and fires burned in the hearths. This was a place for neighbors and friends; leisure and laughter; not a place of study or ambition, deceit or subterfuge.
The sun slanted in through windows but the lamps were lighted anyway, giving off light, so much light that Gregor could see faces that he recognized. Mother. Father.
Nathan. My name is Nathan.
The sea pressed close, just down the hill from their home with its smooth walls and swinging shutters, thatch eaves rustling in the wind. The sea, the sea was ever present, pressing here too in this steel-gray outpost of guano-stained basalt, where winter clouds scudded, where the blood of slaves stained the rocks, and the morning bell tolled like a dirge.
Gregor snapped awake. The room was gray with the weak light of dawn. The morning bell was indeed tolling on the far end of castle Drahlstrom. He was lucky, the wind was just right that morning, gusting just enough to carry the ringing and not to overwhelm it.
He would be expected at the morning assembly.
At least he would be by those who had not conspired to poison him. An opportunity occurred to him in which he might unmask his adversaries simply by noting the surprise on their faces when he did show that morning. But first he turned to Haille. His friend was breathing the deep, slow breaths of sleep. Some color had returned to his face but the skin beneath his nails was still an unhealthy shade of violet. Gregor was loathe to leave him alone in the north wing knowing that this once inviolate space of his was now compromised, but he knew the importance of keeping to schedule, lest his advisors come looking for him.
