The fact that this moment had been inevitable, the long-foreseen culmination of a chain of events set in motion the day I left Aemillian Solirius and his shiny new crown, did not make it any less infuriating. I had had my reasons. They were good and valid reasons. And I had also rescued the teenaged crown prince. So, now, just short of nine years later, she was leading a court-in-exile, and – not being idiots – they understood that I was their only hope to take the throne I had already helped usurp once.
I had really hoped that they would make better arguments.
The people of So’renner had still been moving slowly when the prince, her companions, and I had sat ourselves down for an early lunch at Eril’s Stallion. By the time we had finished our discussion, the last-minute wedding preparations had well and truly begun. The gazebo we had erected last night was now draped in garlands of ribbon and flowers. Now safe from the morning dew, a dozen long wooden benches had been brought out of storage and dining rooms from a half-dozen families. Blankets and chairs had sprung up around them for additional seating. A pavilion had been raised off to one side, and tables set up underneath it where the wedding feast would be laid out.
A pair of small tents had been set up behind the benches, facing the gazebo, just out of earshot from each other, where groom and bride were separately being stripped, bathed, purified, and anointed in preparation for the sanctification of their union. Carl Hannan and Anora Redding were good kids: quiet and thoughtful, both smarter and more considerate than either of their parents, a good match. I was friends with both their fathers – well, Anora’s father and Carl’s grandfather. Carl was the youngest of three brothers. Their parents had died in an accident of some sort when they were all young, leaving their widower grandfather, Lough, to raise them with the help of a series of nannies.
Jarl Redding had been one of the first friends I’d made when I’d moved to So’renner. He’d helped me secure the rights to the land where I built my smithy and helped convince the townsfolk that they wanted a blacksmith more than they hated refugees from Vencar. Without his efforts, I might never have been able to build my home and workshop. He had also made a nuisance of himself, mistaking my smooth face and bright eyes for youth, and encouraging me to court his daughter. It had been easier to make up a wife who would some day follow me north than to convince him that I would prefer to marry someone his age than his daughter’s. Sara had thought that hilarious, until this morning.
Lough Hannan was a more complicated story. As a mason, he had been the most highly respected man in the gate-town before my arrival. Among the Georgi crafts and trades, only blacksmiths stand higher in the eyes of the gods and their people. I don’t know if he had better guessed my age than Jarl, or if believed the story about a first wife, or if he was just happy that I did not use my status as a blacksmith to poach from the eligible young women he considered to be his grandsons’ private preserve. And when I made it clear that I had no intention of claiming more privilege in So’renner than my smithy alone would provide me, or of disrupting his allegiances in the town council, he had made a point of belatedly taking me under his wing.
All of that would change quickly. Eril and his cooks would have held their tongues for a day or two, enough time for me to formulate a plan. By ill luck, though, the three most savage gossips in town had been nursing the hair of the dog and hiding from their responsibilities in the Stallion when the prince, her companions, and I had arrived. Whatever they had overheard, it would be enough. A man’s past was his own in Georg, just so long as no one was scandalized when it came to light. And there was very little of that conversation that the salacious Georgi would not find scandalous.
“So, yer a wizard,” Lough Hannan’s high, nasal drawl came from behind me as I approached the wedding preparations. He said it the way he always did when he asked about my old life in Vencar: snide, prurient, like he was asking me to share a dirty secret that he was half scared, half excited to hear. Today, perhaps a little more than half scared.
That had been even faster than I had expected.
“I am,” I said, turning to face him. There was no point in denying it. Bill, Raynard, and Hal might be relentless, remorseless, and malicious gossips, but they were meticulously honest. Besides. It was true.
Old Lough Hannan looked me up and down, leaning heavily on his cane and clutching his felt cap in his hand. What little hair remained to him, mostly around his ears and along the base of his skull, was white. Usually dressed in ostentatiously dour black, today he wore his feast-day best gold shirt under a bright green coat and doublet.
“You don’t look like a wizard,” he said at last. Now, instead of excited and scared, he sounded half skeptical and half disappointed.
“What did you expect?” I asked with sincere humor. “Robes embroidered with the moon and stars? A pointed hat?”
He had the good grace to look a little embarrassed.
“Robes, at least,” he said.
“Robes have been out of fashion in Georg since before the War of the Compact,” I pointed out. “And they’re dreadfully impractical when working a forge. I would prefer not to set myself on fire. I’ve scars enough, don’t you think?”
That won a real laugh from him, followed by a hacking cough.
When he could breathe again, he looked at me seriously.
“Is that how you got yourself out of trouble with the Iron Crafter’s Guild,” he asked me. “Back when you first came to town?”
“The trouble that you got me into?” I asked, raising my unmarred eyebrow. He tried to look shocked, offended, and I rolled my eyes. “The very day after I sold my first sword. The very restaurant where you took me to celebrate. Of course I knew it was you. I paid my fine, proved my skill, and then paid my tithe. And I went on with a better understanding of life in Georg.”
He glared at me, trying to decide if I had meant the insult. I had, of course. But in the way of many clever men, Lough Hannan overestimated himself by underestimating everyone else.
“No, Lough,” I said, running my hands over the polished woodgrain steel cuffs on my wrists. For a moment, I wished I had my wizard’s claw on hand. “I am a master smith, just as I am a master wizard. Trained and guilded.”
He shuddered. Then looked guilty.
“If you are who they say you are,” he asked, “then why are you here? Why aren’t you sitting at the side of your old master, buried in luxuries?”
I smiled, slow and sad.
“Because I’d rather be here,” I said honestly, “surrounded by decent folk where it’s pleasant and quiet and I can work my experiments in peace.”
He blanched at that, horrified at the implication that magical experiments had been taking place in his home town, so close to where he and his family lived. It was almost a thousand years since the Shadow War had ended in the fall of the Illustrian empire, but cruel men and monsters from beyond the Veil of Shadow still raided when the moon was full, and the Georgi people’s bone-deep distrust of magic was not entirely misplaced.
“Folks will be hurt,” he said, eventually. “When they learned that you were only pretending to be one of us.”
“I wasn’t pretending.” It was only half a lie. “But I understand why they won’t see it that way.”
He was clearly looking for an answer when he saw his grandson emerge from his tent, half-initiated into the rites of adulthood and unsteady on his feet. It was to Lough’s credit that he barely hesitated before muttering a hasty, “good luck” and hobbling off to make a fuss over his boy.
I had lied to the prince when I said that I had duties to attend to. I had made absolutely certain last night that everything I was responsible for was done before the first dance was called and the first keg was cracked. So, now that Lough had left me, I was at loose ends.
That they would come had been inevitable. I had considered a dozen ways that it might happen. That my true identity would be scandalously revealed and the community would turn against me had absolutely been a possibility that I had planned for. I was mostly surprised at how much it hurt. Reminding myself that it had always been a possibility did not make it hurt less.
Watching people move and talk and whisper, I could practically see the fissures opening up in my life. It was going to take a lot of work to fix. To refine the identity that I’d built here. To rebuild trust. Some would never forgive me. I hoped that Sara would not be one of them.
Looking around, I saw the elf woman, Khanaarre, watching from the far end of the field. An elf studying human magic. Fascinating. Of course she had been taken in by the Black Mask. The order was devoted to pushing boundaries, and elves were fascinated by masks. Who had her master been? How had she come to be trained as a wizard, not a sorceress in the traditions of her own people?
She was tall and uncannily thin, like so many of her people. Her red-brown face, the color of sandstone from the Namoran badlands, was heart-shaped, with a sharply pointed chin and cheekbones that could cut glass. Her eyes were enormous, and she had long, narrow, triangular ears that stuck out from the sides of her head. She wore her hair in a multitude of gold-capped braids that were pointedly not a fire dancer’s braids.
Much of the Order of the Black Mask had sided with Aemillian and House Solirius, so I was not surprised that she had disdained the order’s usual dramatic black and red robes and the enchanted mask from which the order had taken its name. I was intrigued that, aside from her not-quite-sorceress’ braids, her costume gave no indication that she was a magical practitioner. Instead, she wore upscaled hunters’ garb, almost certainly a gift from the prince: dark green with black trim and embellishments, narrowly tailored in the elven style, but with silver buttons and leather details that spoke more of Vencari aesthetics than Tanirinaalou. She did not even wear her wizard’s claw, though I could see a pouch on her waist that probably held it. I wondered what she knew of me, beyond the common rumor. What did she think of my legend, and what she’d found here in So’renner? What did she guess? It had been a long time since I’d matched wits with another wizard. This was going to be fun.
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