We were up before dawn and crossed into Namora at first light. The landscape didn’t change instantly, but it was clear why the border had been laid where it was. The hills and fields of Georg were richer, woodier, greener. The Namoran Lowlands were grassier, more golden, marked by boulders that dotted the earth as if scattered by ancient giants.
We followed the river for two days. The first night we camped outside a fishing village too small to boast an inn. The second night we stayed at a great hall, a kind of inn I had only seen in Namora, where after dinner was finished, they moved the tables and chairs to the walls and travelers slept on the floor in front of the hearth. In deference to Namoran propriety, a series of screens were stood up between the men and the women, and I found myself wedged pleasantly in between Elana and Veralar.
The following morning, we caught a ferry across the river into Vencar. When we landed, a bored tax collector eyed our horses, took a few of our coins, and otherwise ignored us. We walked the horses through town, enjoyed a slow lunch provided by various Vencari street vendors, and took the Emperor’s road just far enough south to be certain no-one was looking when we took off cross-country, north and east.
With each crossing, the coloring and costumes of the people around us shifted. Humankind had left the shelter and company of elves and dwarves at the foot of Holy Mount Kashrin some generations ago, but it did not seem like enough time to produce the vast variety of phenotypes and fashions we saw. That diversity fascinated me endlessly.
The Vencari with whom I had lived the last year, and with whom I had so frequently travelled, were shorter than I, and most other elves, with skin in various shades of bronze, and with hair and eyes in every shade of brown. It seemed as if every trade and noble house had their own distinct costume, but careful observation revealed a handful of core garments arranged by pins and folds and ties and occasionally even tailoring into infinite varieties. Loincloths, and perhaps a breastband, for the destitute, laborers, and certain kinds of entertainers and showoffs. Simple tunics – of various lengths of hem and sleeve – or chitons – draped around the body and pinned at the shoulder – for any class or sex or gender, belted and adorned to flatter or cover as the occasion demanded.
The Georgi stood taller, of a height with most elves, and had paler skin like the Illustrians who had occupied the woods and hills south of Tanirinaal before them, with blue or green eyes and blue-black hair. They favored billowing skirts and pantaloons, and tightly tailored vests and bodices, and enormous sleeves for anyone who could afford them.
Namorans, the most ancient people of the Compact, were dark haired and dark eyed, with skin that ranged from pale olive to golden brown, and might be as short as any Vencarman or as tall as any Georgi. They, too, favored tailored clothes, but cut their pants and coats at square angles that fit comfortably – and bore an interesting resemblance to the oldest elven fashions – but flattered few.
I had never travelled to Handar, but those Handari I had met looked like Derrek and Orland: taller, even, than the tallest elves, with broad hips and broader shoulders, light colored hair and eyes, and pale but warm colored skin that burned under the sun. I was told that they favored tunics as square as Namoran coats, and knit leggings to keep them warm in the winter.
The passage into Vencar was also marked by a variety of changes in my companions’ demeanor. The most obvious, and least significant, was a change in costumes. Our first morning east of the river, Elana traded the minstrel’s gear that had made her invisible in Georg and Namora for a similarly gaudy green chiton, belted at the waist and tightened to her breasts by a yellow rope that wound around her neck and under her arms. Derrek, to my surprise, traded his Georgi peasant’s clothes for a short blue tunic that revealed lean but muscular arms and legs, and a golden brown chlamys around his shoulders. Rennin and Orland did not change their armor, but they adjusted the fit of their clothes, the fall of their cloaks, in ways that cast them less as men of the world and more Vencari. All four of them took their swords from their hips and hung the weapons from the pommels of their saddles.
Veralar, who would not forsake her vestments and was thus both easily the most recognizable of us and the one who would do the bloodiest of the work to keep us alive if we were recognized, grew tense. She sat straighter in her saddle, kept her hands close to her swords. She spoke even less, if that were possible, and when she did speak, her words were terse and clipped.
Rennin and Orland tensed at the border crossing, but grew more relaxed with each step closer to our destination. They conferred with Elana each morning and each evening, but spent the days scouting ahead of us, watching for danger and selecting a camp site. Elana, Veralar, and I all knew how to read the subtle signs they would leave for us, and we followed them without difficulty.
Elana took more time to engage with both Derrek and me. She asked Derrek about his time in So’renner. Like me, she was curious as to how he had settled there – “It was as good a place as any,” he told her, as he had told me but in less detail, “for me to ply my trades and listen for rumors coming out of Vencar without embroiling myself in the politics of the Compact.” – and about the woman he had left behind.
“Sara Kemm,” he told us. “We met my first year in So’renner. We were both out on the streets too late at night, and I rescued her from a pair of men who wished her ill. I offered to teach her fencing, and ended up teaching not just her, but a dozen middle-class young women of Renner, how to use a sword and knife to their advantage.”
Derrek, for his part, watched us all with a small smile and half-hooded eyes that I am certain missed absolutely nothing. He answered our questions warmly, though not always completely, and kept his conversation meticulously polite. Polite, that is, except that whenever he saw an opportunity, he turned Elana’s questions over to me:
“I left the capitol the very hour I brought you from the palace,” he told the prince, early on. “So I’m afraid that I can only speculate on what the Usurper might have learned from the Rorgoth Throne, and what, of that, he might have shared with the Cabal or published more publicaly. Master Khanaarre would know better than I.”
Of course Elana had looked to me. Even without proper ears, her face had been a clear request to share what I know.
“My master and I were even further from the capitol than Master Derrek,” I said, trying to match his tone. “He had few friends with contacts among the Cabal. What I understand from his letters – which, as you know, I have shared with your other court wizards – is that the Throne gives him access to even greater reserves of power than the Illustrian shadow sorcery you unearthed together, and that it is a powerful focus for scrying and other divinations.”
Derrek Rowan’s face was as inscrutable as ever, but I suspected that the twitch at the more mobile corner of his mouth meant that he knew that much, at least, and probably more.
“The wizards of the Compact have been as reluctant to join our cause as their Kings,” Elana had said, a day or two later. “Do you believe that you will be able to entice them to join us?”
Derrek had shrugged.
“I cannot say,” he had admitted. “I made a few friends among the sorceresses of Tanirinaal while I was there, but none among the ruling class. And did not announce my presence by making friends among the wizards of Georg. Khanaarre has traveled the compact with you. She can say better than I.”
Again, Elana had looked to me.
“Some few more sorceresses may join our cause,” I had said, offering my own shrug, “if they perceive our chances of victory to be greater than they were. But nothing will entice my Queen and her Council to join a war that does not threaten our borders directly. Those wizards I have spoken with in Georg and Namora as we travelled? Some may join to defend the Compact, some for the chance to learn your secrets. More, I fear, will be even more reluctant to join for fear of being ground to dust between the two Great Wizards.”
All the while, he kept his hands busy. He had pulled a knife from his belt – an unusual looking long-handled thing, two fingers wide, sharp on just one side, with a chisel point and its hilt bound in an unusual crisscross pattern – and spent each day in the saddle whittling. When he could not find a piece of wood on the ground in the morning, usually left over from Rennin’s cook fire, he would pull one from his bag.
As we rode, whether speaking or in silence, he would carve. Any imaginable kind of figure might emerge from the wood in his hands: beautiful men or women; animals at rest and in motion; hideous demonic figures with bulging eyes. One night, he gifted me with a rod, a hand and a half long, carved to look like a pair of snakes that had coiled around one another. When Veralar admired the sleeping hound he had carved from a twisted root, he had given that one to her as soon as it was done. One or two he liked enough to pack into his bag. Most of the carvings, though, were fed unceremoniously into the fire at the end of each day.
It was our fourth full day in Vencar when Derrek finally asked me the question that I imagined he had been wondering on since we had first met: “How did you come to be apprenticed as a wizard?”
He had chosen a good moment. Veralar was riding back further than usual that morning. Elana was riding further ahead, lost in her own thoughts. We were as alone as we had yet been, or as we were likely to be on the road.
Elana had been more pointed when she had asked that question last year, but it was the most personal question that either of us had asked the other yet. I told him the same thing I had told Elana. It was all true, but not exactly the truth.
“A year or two before I would have left home in search of a teacher,” I said, pointedly leaving out that if my native talents had been greater, I would have had no need to search, “the man who would be my master began building a compound near my home. My mothers and sister and I helped him, as a neighbor ought – all taking turns, of course, so that my father was never left entirely alone for too long.”
He nodded. The sympathy in his eyes said he understood why Volalli could not be left unattended. How much time had he spent time among the llamenan?
“He had been exiled, he told us, over a tragedy. Someone had misused a thing he had made for them, and many people had died. He had fled to elven territory in hopes that he might find more sympathy there than in the Compact, but feared that he had underestimated the difficulty of living at the edge of civilization. After some negotiation with my family, it was agreed that, beyond helping him build his tower in exile, we would help keep him fed and safe; in exchange, he would teach me his arts.”
I did not name Maris Pello, my old master. Elana had never cared, Maris had been exiled while she was still a child, two years before the rise of the Usurper. But there was too good a chance that Derrek Rowan knew more about his disgrace than I did.
“I think,” I went on, “that he hoped the novelty of teaching an elf to perform wizardry would mend his reputation, or at least overshadow the tragedy. But he died before his exile expired.”
Derrek nodded, his gaze thoughtful and sympathetic. I was still learning to read his face. Humans, with their short, immobile ears, always felt taciturn. Derrek’s face, I was coming to realize, was not just marred by that long scar, but partially immobilized. How many genuine smiles had I misread as snide because the one side was too stiff?
“How did you come to be the Usurper’s apprentice?” I asked in return.
Scar or no, I was confident that the smile that question earned me was ironic.
“I was never his apprentice,” Derrek said. “Though I understand why so many make that mistake.”
I waited, wondering if he was going to leave it at that.
“I was his protégé,” he went on after a pause. “I was an apprentice of the Obsidian Cabal, not of an individual master. I came to his attention shortly before my journeyman’s quest. He was the order’s Master of the Libraries, then, and some people were concerned about the directions of my research. Fortunately for me, and unfortunately for them, he shared my interest in Illustria and their lost shadow-magic, and he gave me unfettered access to the archives.”
His face softened and his gaze grew distant, just as it had when we had asked about Sara Kemm.
“Once my journeyman’s quest was formally begun, he was there with me, more often than not. In the library, or on expeditions to Illustrian ruins, or browbeating the librarians of other archives into giving us access to documents we only had references to.” He smiled, remembering. “And when I proved my theories, earning recognition as a full master wizard, it was he who introduced and backed me politically and socially. And people outside the Cabal, who didn’t understand exactly how our apprenticeship system worked, assumed that he was my master.”
There were those among Elana’s people who believed that Derrek and Aemillian had been lovers, and that it would be impossible to recruit him to our cause on account of that. Judging by his soft eyes and wistful tone, I suspected that they were half right. I wanted to ask, again, what had parted them, but he had already told us that it was none of our business.
===
What had parted me from my own master was simple mortality. Two days after the winter solstice, I had come back from a hunt to find him dead in his chair, gray-faced and slack, already ice cold to the touch. The fire I had lit that morning had died down to coals. The letter that had arrived just yesterday lay open on the table before him, along with a few pieces of the bright yellow cheddar cheese that had come with it, a small prize that had brought him great joy whenever it arrived.
Finding him thus was a shock, but not a surprise. He had not been young when we met, and a decade means more to the djuunan than the llamenan. We had both known that he was old, and we had discussed the things that would need to be done when he died.
The first task was to lay him to rest under the tree we had selected for that purpose. I called fire to thaw the ground and dug the grave as deep as I could by myself. There were no Servants of the Inevitable to purify me or his corpse, not this far from human lands, so I buried him in elven style, with a red elk skull that I had long ago prepared for this purpose, and then built a cairn of rocks over his grave. I prayed that that was enough to protect his human soul and corpse, and purified myself in the winter-cold waters of the divine River Venn. After that, things got more complicated.
As Maris’ apprentice, the tower – such as it was, a long house with four rooms, a pair of outbuildings, and an observatory at the top of the tallest tree on the edge of the clearing – and all its contents were mine. By the oldest traditions, that included his title as master. But if I wished to be counted as a member of his order and wear the Black Mask without contest, I would need to complete a journeyman’s quest.
Maris Pello had sometimes said that I was the closest thing he had ever had to either a wife or a child. I think he would have courted me, had he been young enough and able. I have always been grateful that he was not, for as lonely as I sometimes am, I have never been one so desperate for companionship that I have thought to look outside my species. But, recalling that, it was only a small surprise that his will also named me the heir to whatever worldly possessions remained to him in Vencar, including his family estate and the library that he had refused to bring with him into the wilderness.
So there were letters and packages to be sent to his various friends and family, allies and patrons, all those who had not forgotten him in his twelve years of exile. Some were ready and waiting. Others it fell upon me to write. I spent the rest of the winter completing those experiments of his that I could, in addition to my own, and seeing that the rest were rendered inert and harmless. As I did so, I made an inventory of everything I now owned. I began with the two wizard’s chests: his and my own.
Everything I might want to take with me went into my own chest. The Black Mask and the formal black and red chiton and himation robes that went with it. His wizard’s claw: a set of three rings of tarnished silver and red jasper, joined so that the wearer can still bend their finger and ending in a razor sharp point. My master’s spellbooks and my own. The best of the puzzle boxes that I had made under his tutelage, and the most likely of my own stable half-finished experiments. An assortment of tools and dictionaries and notebooks and inks. The Last Will and Testament of Maris Pello and the letters of credit and introduction that he had left me for this eventuality.
Everything I wished to remain safe and undisturbed went into what had been Maris’ wizard’s chest. His raw notes. His numerous tools for which I did not have an immediate need, such as the alchemical beakers and tubes and tools that I would not wish to carry with me, even in a wizard’s chest, but which I would want whole and clean when I returned to occupy this tower. His collection of magic mirrors, puzzle boxes, enchanted rods and wands.
When spring came, I packed my wizard’s chest into my travelling pack along with my few clothes. I spilled blood and wine, laid protective enchantments and enjoined the spirits of the land who had watched over us for the last decade to keep the tower safe from vermin and bad weather. And I left.
I still had no idea, however, what to do for my journeyman’s quest.
“No less than a year,” my master had described it to me, “no more than seven. An apprentice wizard goes out into the world to prove themselves resourceful and inquisitive. You return when you have proven your mastery in the eyes of the world or bearing a secret unknown to the order from which you come.”
That last point was of some small concern. Trained in exile, away from my master’s Order, I had no way of knowing what secrets they might have. Which meant I needed to focus on deeds of renown, such that the Order of the Black Mask could not help but welcome me with open arms.
“No pressure,” I murmured to myself, and set out for home.
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