The Border

by A. H. Lee

  “What do you think of the southern border?” asked Roland over his shoulder.

  “It’s very green,” said Sairis after a moment.

  Roland laughed. “It’s a little green.”

  “Recall that the woods around my tower are dying.”

  They dismounted in the early afternoon to eat elk meat and cheese with flatbread from Marsden’s supplies and water from their canteens. “I don’t think we’ll encounter a source of drinking water today,” said Roland, “so pace yourselves. We should pass a well tomorrow.”

  After they’d eaten, Marsden took a moment to walk back up their trail, scattering something from a vial. Sairis leaned against a tree with his hands in his pockets, looking out over the mountains as Roland tended to Cato. Roland watched him out of the corner of his eye. His burns had all but vanished, and he had the pink of healthy exertion in his cheeks. The wind ruffled his shirt and his dark hair. His eyes held a hint of cautious wonder. This suits you, thought Roland. “We should come here in spring,” he said suddenly. “The woods are full of flowers.”

  Sairis looked at him, startled. Before he could reply, Marsden came striding back up the trail. “Well, even a demon will have some trouble with that,” he said with satisfaction. “Let’s get moving.”

  They needed to cover as much ground as possible before they lost the daylight. Roland regretted his earlier comment as Sairis settled behind him. Presumptuous, Roland. Especially since he has no choice but to hang on to you at the moment. The Ridge Road was narrow, but with relatively sure footing. They rode hour after hour through the increasingly chilly mountain air with the wind in their faces and rolling gorges stretching below. If they hadn’t been riding to face monsters threatening everyone he loved, Roland would have counted it a pleasant day.

  They stopped just before sunset, when there was still enough light to make camp. Roland swung down from the saddle, feeling the familiar ache in his thighs and back. Sairis started to get down, wobbled, and then Roland caught him as he more-or-less fell off the horse. “Oh, gods.”

  “Sorry,” said Roland. “It takes some getting used to.”

  Sairis scrabbled to get his feet under him. Roland wondered how much of the afternoon he’d been gritting his teeth in pain. “I seem to have lost the use of my legs.”

  Marsden walked past and slapped him on the shoulder. “It’ll get better.”

  “I’m really not sure how it could get worse.” Sairis folded up on the ground. “I do not believe that horses agree with me.”

  Roland threw down his bedroll. “If it makes you feel any better, most of the new recruits feel the same way, even the ones who grew up riding horses. In this terrain, you really have to grip with your thighs.”

  Sairis gave him a suspicious, sidelong look, and Roland grinned. “That was not a double entendre. Unless you want it to be.”

  Sairis smothered a laugh with both hands. “I don’t know how I ended up so far from my tower.”

  By the time they’d collected some firewood, Sairis had revived enough to help spread out the bedrolls. He set their pile of wood alight with a casual flick of his wrist. They ate the last of the elk steaks and flat bread. “I’ll take the first watch,” said Marsden.

  Roland was pleased to see that Sairis hadn’t separated their bedrolls, although he seemed a bit shy about crawling in. However, once the fire was banked and Marsden had settled down to watch the forest, Sairis finally eased down among the blankets.

  Roland didn’t totally undress this evening. He didn’t feel as safe tonight, so he wore his trousers to bed and kept his sword close to hand. Sairis followed his example. He didn’t cuddle up immediately, but lay beside Roland on his back, hands laced together over his stomach, apparently lost in thought.

  They’d been quiet and still for several moments when Sairis spoke into the darkness. “Marsden?”

  “Hmm?”

  “What was he like? Before.”

  A long pause. At last, Marsden said, “Brilliant, sensitive, complicated.” He took a deep breath and added, “Also stubborn, uncompromising, and occasionally cruel.”

  When Sairis said nothing, Marsden continued, “Has anything changed?”

  “Not really.”

  Marsden spoke in a barely audible murmur. “I didn’t know him when he was your age. But if I had to guess...he was probably a lot like you.”

  Chapter 18. Jonas

  Roland had them up again at first light. He’d taken the third watch, and the woods had been quiet. He hadn’t heard so much as a leaf crunch, and neither had the other two. However, as they started away from the camp, he was dismayed to find a number of large pawprints in the soil near the road.

  “It’s tracking us with magic somehow,” muttered Marsden.

  “Got to be the sword,” said Sairis. “You should let me look at it.”

  “Later.”

  They rode west as the sun rose behind them, bathing the hills in gold. They’d been quiet for about an hour when Roland said, “Whose turn was it to ask a question?”

  “Did you love your father?” Sairis shifted uncomfortably. “I believe it’s yours.”

  “When I was eight years old, my hunting party was attacked by walking corpses. We were in a patrolled forest, but somehow they got in. My dog tried to protect me and was torn to pieces.”

  Sairis was perfectly still behind him. Roland was afraid this conversation might open a rift, but he knew that if he didn’t address this issue soon, he might never do it. And that would be worse. The words would ferment inside him into vinegar that might eventually kill what was growing between them. So he continued, “My grandfather spent his whole reign fighting the dead.” He let the sentence hang. The creak of tack and the thud of the horses’ hooves seemed very loud.

  After a moment, Sairis said, “I didn’t hear a question.”

  Marsden spoke from a little way ahead of them, “Oh, for gods’ sakes, Sairis.”

  “You seem to resent my family,” said Roland quietly, “and hold Karkaroth in high esteem, but I cannot understand how his behavior was anything but evil. I know that my grandfather overreacted by outlawing all magic and persecuting magicians. There was a backlash against anything unusual, including men like us. That was unjust, but I understand why it happened. Your master’s behavior, on the other hand, seems simply monstrous.”

  There was a long silence. Roland could tell that Marsden wanted to say something, but was waiting for Sairis to speak first. At last, Sairis said, “The corpses who killed your dog. Do you remember what they were wearing?”

  Roland frowned. The image of Cupie’s agonized face had been burned into his memory, but the people around her were indistinct. At last, he said, “Peasant garb, I think. It’s hard to remember.”

  “And how do you think they died?” continued Sairis.

  Again, Roland hesitated. “Killed by other corpses?”

  Sairis shook his head. “It’s difficult for a necromancer to maintain control at one remove. In faery tales, the dead can propagate through a bite like rabid dogs, but in real life, a necromancer must give some of his own life force to a ghost to hold it on the mortal plane. Knowing a name helps. Having a piece of the person’s body helps. If a necromancer’s servants kill random people across the countryside, he has no connection to those people and it would be difficult to bind their ghosts.”

  Roland considered. “So how did those people die?”

  “I would imagine they were executed for witchcraft or sedition.”

  Roland frowned.

  “The winners write the history books,” continued Sairis. “It is a common misconception that the execution of magicians in Mistala began after Karkaroth’s reign of terror, but, in fact, it began before that.”

  Roland wished he could see Sairis’s face. He glanced at Marsden and the older man nodded. “He’s right.”

  “Why?”

  Marsden chose his words carefully. “Because there was unrest, and magicians were weapons.”

&nbs
p; Roland had a sense that his world-view was about to be rearranged. He took a deep breath. “Explain.”

  Marsden reined his horse back a bit to walk beside them. He glanced at Sairis behind Roland. Whatever he saw made him shake his head. “I was there, Sairis.”

  Roland cocked his head. “How old are you?”

  Marsden gave him a tight-lipped smile. “Is His Highness, Prince Malconwy asking? Or my traveling companion, Roland?”

  “Roland.”

  “Then none of your business, young man.”

  Roland smiled. “From your point of view, what happened?”

  Marsden considered. “By some estimates, the peasants were not well-treated before the Sundering. The burden of our wars fell disproportionately upon the heads of the farmers and laborers who made our land so prosperous. They were heavily taxed. Many of them were not allowed to own the land they tilled. Our kings took their sons for our armies and garrisons. Nevertheless, they had no difficulty feeding their children and the luckiest could still climb into the merchant class. They had hopes of advancement. Even when they did not advance, they never starved, because the land was so rich.

  “Then came the Sundering. The rains ceased. The crops failed. Your grandfather should have reacted by reducing taxes and offering grain to the worst-off, but he was afraid. Everyone was afraid. Our ports and sea trade had vanished. The western quarter of the country had new mountains, entirely new geography, and many settlements had vanished overnight. There were rumors of strange creatures crawling out of the Shattered Sea. Survivors from western villages were left with nothing and turned to desperate acts to survive. Bandits and monsters roamed the hills, to say nothing of our rapacious neighbors, looking for any sign of weakness.

  “So the king poured money into our armies, castles, and forts. He took more young men from their family farms and did not decrease the taxes by a single penny. And whereas before, the peasants could at least feed themselves, that wasn’t true anymore. People saw their crops taken in tax without enough left over. They had to make hard choices about how much to eat and how much to replant. This went on for a few years, everyone expecting it to get better, but it only got worse. Then the rebellions started.”

  Roland stared out over the mountains from Cato’s gently rocking saddle. This was a very different story from the one his tutor had told him. “And the peasants fought back with magic?” he guessed.

  Sairis spoke, his voice full of dry irony, “Magic will touch a pig farmer as willingly as an earl. Magic is shockingly egalitarian.”

  Marsden nodded wearily, “Before the Sundering, magic was mostly weak and, above all, it was rare. Afterward, it was more common, stronger, and, as Sairis points out, no respecter of class. Magic put power into the hands of the mob.”

  “Into the hands of the people,” said Sairis.

  “Into the hands of anyone who randomly happened to receive it or kidnap it,” countered Marsden. “Bandits, warlords, and, yes, peasant rioters.”

  “So Grandfather outlawed it,” said Roland thoughtfully. “Instead of trying to harness it himself, he just tried to make it go away.”

  “You have to understand that nobody had formally studied the new magic or knew how long it would last,” said Marsden. “Many people believed it would subside over time. Suspicion towards magic had always existed in the more conservative segments at every level of society. Ideas about witches had been around for a thousand years.”

  “Your grandfather harnessed that,” murmured Sairis. “He harnessed hatred and fear of foreigners and freaks. He presented this as a national emergency—”

  “Which it was,” interrupted Marsden. “Peasants were burning their crops, rather than surrender them in tax. The whole country was in danger of famine, and our government had lost control.”

  “So my grandfather waged war on his own people?” asked Roland faintly.

  “He set out to reclaim control of his country,” said Marsden. “He waged a war against magic that killed many innocent people, along with some very guilty ones.”

  “And was Karkaroth innocent or guilty?”

  “Both,” said Marsden.

  “Neither,” said Sairis.

  Marsden looked at him sadly. “Jonas changed after the Sundering. He’d always been able to bind ghosts, although it cost him a great deal. He’d always been interested in other forms of magic, particularly those that involved binding an entity. I came home one day and found him talking to a demon that had been trapped inside an artifact we’d owned for some time. He’d allowed it to take corporeal form inside a summoning circle. This was considered supremely dangerous before the Sundering, and I couldn’t imagine that it had gotten any safer with magic leaking out of the Shattered Sea like water through a broken pipe. We had our first real fight. I won. Or at least, I thought I did.

  “Jonas dismissed the demon—not back into the artifact, but back to the astral plane from whence it had originally been summoned. I learned later that he’d promised to do this. He’d made a bargain with it, trading its freedom for information about the new magic. The demon had told Jonas how to reach the Styx...or, more accurately, how to return.”

  He paused and Sairis spoke, his voice curious. “He needed instruction on how to do that?”

  Marsden gave a bitter laugh. “It may seem like breathing to you, young man, but it was something different to those of us born before the Sundering. Jonas had crossed once by accident—following the ghost of a baby he’d been trying to save with the local midwife. He almost didn’t make it back. Later, he described being swept along through the Shadow Lands in a River between the worlds. He claimed to have glimpsed Faerie and spoken with ghosts and monsters.

  “It had clearly been a terrifying experience, and yet he talked about it for years with longing and fascination. He wanted to go back. I knew that. He was a necromancer. Death was his native element. I figured that, like all of us, he’d get his chance one day. I hoped it wasn’t any time soon. Jonas had other ideas.”

  “Was there no spirit-walking before the Sundering?” asked Roland.

  Marsden shook his head. “Not like that. Summoning circles were, well, for summoning! They were for bringing things from somewhere else. No human magician would have dreamed of putting himself inside such a tool and trying to go the other way. But that’s what the demon described. It gave Jonas the technique and the proper runes, and Jonas got busy.

  “It took him a bit to work out the details, but one day he lay down in his circle and went away for hours. The Styx seemed to fill the whole cottage—the ghost of death itself. A portal like that creates a weak place. I hated it.

  “He came back at last with a gleam in his eyes that I’d never seen before. He went bounding around the cottage, gathering pre-made spells and artifacts, chattering away about the transition from life into death and how he’d never really understood it properly. I was horrified to realize he intended to return at once. He had research to do, he said, so many things he could learn. I told him how much I disliked it. He tried to get me to come with him. I said absolutely not.

  “Things got worse over the course of the year that followed. Abominations came through his portal on four occasions—two ghosts, one chimera, and some kind of predator from Faerie. The predator escaped the cottage and nearly killed someone before we could chase it down. All this was alarming, but the prisoner was the worst. That was when I knew I couldn’t stay.”

  “Prisoner?” echoed Roland.

  Marsden nodded. “A sot from the village who’d been beating his wife and children. One evening, he hit the little boy so hard that the child didn’t wake up the next morning. His mother went to the village council for justice. The council sentenced the man to death.”

  Roland felt a combination of anger and deep unease. “They gave him to Karkaroth?”

  “The town of Arabis had always been on good terms with Jonas,” continued Marsden. “He’d grown up there, and he was very much a local shaman. He healed their sick, did what
he could to improve their crops, occasionally settled disputes, and protected them from other magicians. It was a mutually beneficial relationship. He warded their lands, making them a part of his personal territory. This allowed him to draw power from the natural deaths that occurred there. They were a source of magic for him, and he was a source of protection and assistance to them. He lived a little way out of town and wasn’t social, but he was theirs.

  “It was the year following the Sundering, and the rumors coming out of the west were terrifying. Jonas wanted a condemned criminal so that he could test strong magic that might protect the town. They gave him the man without argument.

  “Jonas proceeded with a full ritual killing. He wanted to see what he could do when he used everything he’d learned over the last year. He held nothing back.”

  Roland felt ill. Sairis would never do something like that, would he?

  Marsden hesitated. “I won’t say the man didn’t deserve it. He certainly deserved death, and I can’t even say that he didn’t deserve torture. He’d tortured his family for years. I didn’t like it, but I suppose I could have gotten my mind around it as a necessary evil. But Jonas... I left halfway through the ceremony, when he didn’t need my assistance anymore. He came back to the cottage hours later, and he was...alight. I swear to you his eyes were glowing. He hadn’t touched me in a month, but that night, he pushed me down on the bed, and it was the best—” Marsden stopped himself. Roland and Sairis were quiet as mice. “It was the best time, and it was the last time,” said Marsden softly. “I left before he woke. I couldn’t be with someone who took such delight in suffering. I just...couldn’t.”

  Chapter 19. Villain

  “Did you go home, then?” asked Roland cautiously.

  Marsden laughed. “Hardly. When I ran off to marry someone whom my father referred to as a ‘yokel hedge wizard,’ my family turned their backs on me. Truth to tell, I’d always been an embarrassment to them, what with my boyish ways. I hadn’t gone out in public without a glamour for many years, and they would never have recognized me in my preferred form. Besides, I was heartsick and afraid. I thought that if I didn’t leave Mistala, I’d go back to Jonas. So I decided to take a closer look at this new world of the Shattered Sea.”