When Elana returned to our camp in half the time that any of us had anticipated, it was abundantly clear that her mission to recruit the legendary Derrek Rowan had not been successful. It was written in her stiff gait, in her hard shoulders, and across her expressive face. Rennin, close at hand, looked frustrated but thoughtful. Orland, with his back straight and his head high, looked vindicated.
Veralar and I stood as they approached, gathering the horses’ reigns.
“I take it he refused,” I said.
“Yes,” Elana said, nodding. “But not outright. He has asked me to convince him, and has offered us his hospitality.”
Lord Sir Orland Borgon laughed. He was a massive man. I have seen smaller bears. I appreciated his good humor, and both his directness and his discretion.
“He wants to refuse us more thoroughly,” he said. “And maybe take us to task for waking him so early on a Sun-day. I wouldn’t have thought it of him, from his reputation, but I think he drank far more than his share last night.”
Elana laughed, too.
“He did look quite the rake, didn’t he? Bristle-faced and disheveled. I think he threw us out to preserve his lover’s modesty. They’re very prickly about such things in the colonies.”
I raised an eyebrow. I had spent eleven years with my old master, and there had been a fair bit of history and culture discussed between the theory and practice of magic, and I had been travelling with the prince for just over a year, now. There was a still a great deal about human cultures that I did not understand, but I did know that the peoples of the Compact had won their independence more than two hundred years ago and did not like being referred to as “colonies”. Elana grimaced but was saved from the subject when Rennin spoke.
“He wants something from us, that’s for certain,” he said. “But I’ll appreciate the chance for a bath enough to take his hospitality.”
“To say nothing,” Elana said bitterly, “of the chance for success?”
A look passed between them. The three Vencari had been travelling together for long enough that they seemed to have an entire language of looks and gestures, much as I had with my sister and mothers. The looks between Elana and Rennin, however, were growing particularly intense since we had left the court-in-exile on this most recent journey.
“I do not believe that we have any chance of success, your grace,” he said, stiff and formal.
“And yet you convinced the council to support this mission.”
“Without a Derrek Rowan, our chances of ultimate victory are painfully slim,” he said. “Regardless of our chances, the attempt has to be made.”
Veralar Tann and I exchanged a look of our own. This was an argument that we had heard many times over the last months. She gave her head a small shake. I responded with a shrug, and let her take her reigns. The knights and their prince came and claimed their horses as well.
I had never seen a horse before joining the prince’s cause. My old master had told me that they had come from distant Shendril, barely more than a century ago. They were pretty animals, if uncomfortably large. I was still learning to ride and handle them properly, but I appreciated their company over the long journeys.
We mounted up and the knights led us into town. Veralar, less comfortable with her horse, even, than I was, took up the rear. The extra animal we’d brought in case of success trailed placidly behind.
“So, what was he like,” I couldn’t help myself from asking. “The great and mysterious Master Derrek Rowan of the Obsidian Cabal?”
“I don’t know,” Elana said after a short pause. “My initial impression was of a rake and a ruffian, but as Orland pointed out, we caught him indisposed. I think we have inadvertently put ourselves off on a bad foot.”
I nodded. I knew that Vencar and Georg kept different calendars. They counted the years the same, but where the Vencari divided the year equally into twelve months and named their days after the six wandering stars, the Georgi followed a lunar calendar, like my own people, and counted their days strangely, numbering the first five days, then celebrating their goddesses on one day, and their gods the next. My understanding was that while the Sun-day worship was somber, the Moon-day rites that preceded them were more boisterous. The wizards and priests of the court had divined the most auspicious days to depart and to approach our quarry. My own divinations had agreed. Had we all miscalculated?
“It was really funny,” Elana added, turning to give me a wide grin, “to see one of the most powerful creatures in the known world so out of sorts. Hung over. Bedraggled and dressed in homespun wool, and yesterday’s clothes, at that. His hair tangled and sticking in every direction. All the while trying to pretend that he didn’t mind strangers showing up on his threshold too early in the morning.”
I laughed, thinking on the tales that my old master had told me of the two Great Wizards, as he had called them. My master had been exiled, and my training begun, a few years before the rise of the Usurper, as he was known in loyalist circles. Still, he and his student, this man we had come to find, had already been figures of rumor and legend. Tales of their experiments and exploits had sounded more like the stories of the demigod children of Shemvarius, born to sorceresses and queens of my people when we were still new-come to the foot of Mount Kashrin, before the days of the Withering Plague. They had found and defeated monsters. Conjured and bound otherworldly creatures to their will. Seduced and wrested secrets from the gods and spirits of earth and sky. He had spoken of them as if they were no longer, or perhaps never had been, human. And now Elana, whose fate rested on securing his alliance, had seen him half-dressed and ungroomed, a mere mortal man roused from the side of his lover after a night of too much wine.
As funny as that image was, however, it was also a sobering thought. Many powerful people were deeply insecure, convinced of their importance and jealous of their dignity. To have so embarrassed him might well have doomed our quest. It might even have put our lives at risk. And yet all our divination had said that if our quest was to succeed, this was the day and hour to approach him.
The inn we had been invited to stay at – named the Stallion, according to Rennin, and marked by a rampant red horse on a black wooden shield – was one of the first buildings we saw as we approached the town. The boy who took our horses bragged that it was the only stable in So’renner, which I understood to be the name of this gate-town that had grown up around the southern gate of the stone-walled city of Renner. It was also the largest building I could see from the road, three stories rising well above the neighboring homes and businesses.
The lowest level of the Stallion was a large room full of tables and chairs, where a handful of other guests were already sitting down to lunch. A bar ran the length of one wall, and a staircase took up a large piece of the wall opposite it.
Derrek Rowan was waiting for us at the bar. He was every bit as tall as Orland – towering over Elana and Rennin, a little taller than Veralar and myself – but not as broad. He was dressed in peasant’s finery, a bright white shirt with enormous sleeves under a blue velvet doublet and tucked in to voluminous bronze-colored silk breeches, which in turn tucked in to artfully tooled and well-polished oxhide boots. His curling mass of golden-brown hair was pulled back from his soft, round face by a silver clip of beautiful but alien design and his wrists were graced by wide cuffs of woodgrain pattern welded steel. His eyes were a startling bright green. Even more startling was the pale and heavy scar that ran down the right side of his tanned and ruddy face, taking the middle out of his eyebrow and marring his cheek to the bottom of his jaw. That his eye had survived whatever blow had left that mark was a miracle of luck or healer’s art.
The scar and the hair and the eyes were distinctive, and he looked almost exactly like the portrait I had been shown back at the court-in-exile, but I would have recognized this man as one of the Great Wizards without knowing any more than that they existed. Dozens of wizards had come to fight for the cause of the deposed crown prince. I had met dozens more travelling the Compact with the prince, to say nothing of the man who had trained me. Not one of them had worn the nimbus of power that adorned this man, greater than any sorcerer I had met in my homeland. His presence filled the room like the heat from a bonfire.
What, in the words of a drunk and angry Orland Borgon, the absolute fuck?
He smiled at us, impersonal but genuine, and handed a coin pouch to the man behind the bar.
“A room for each of these folks, Eril,” he said. “Lunch for all of us. And whatever else they need. Let me know if that’s not enough.”
Eril was a stout man of middling height for a human, just a little shorter than Veralar and myself, with curling brown hair that had begun to thin on top. He looked back and forth between Derrek and our party, looking more confused with each turn of his head. But he smiled as he nodded and pocketed the pouch.
“Sure thing, Derrek. Anything your friends need.”
Derrek thanked him, then gestured for us to choose a table. Elana nodded, and picked a seat by the stairs, away from any open windows. Rennin and Orland followed her. Veralar and I followed them.
Outside the inn, we hadn’t garnered much attention. The Usurper’s war of succession was long past, and things had mostly calmed down, but there was still no shortage of armsmen on the road. Here in the inn, however, we were a strange lot to see: an armed minstrel, two armed and armored knights, a Shan Khul warrior, and an elf.
Whether Veralar or I was the most exotic of our band depended greatly on whether or not she had brought her signature weapon – a massive sword, as long as she was tall, its blade wider at the base than her hand was long from wrist to fingertip, without a scabbard so much as a handle that buckled on – in addition to her traditional Shank Khul katana and lacquered fighting sticks. Leaning that insane weapon against the wall behind the prince, she was absolutely the strangest thing in the room.
The prince sat in the backmost corner. Her knights sat to either side of her. Veralar took her place beside Orland and I sat beside Rennin.
Derrek looked at each of us appraisingly, his gaze lingering on me a moment longer than the others. With a small bow of his head, he joined us at the table.
“I apologize for this morning’s meager hospitality,” he said. “I hope the fine beds and baths of the Stallion can make up the difference.”
The public setting had danced them neatly past the majority of formalities and courtesies that made up so much of Vencari culture. I could see Elana and her knights struggling with how to proceed. Derrek’s apology seemed to give them something to hold on to.
“The apology should be ours,” said Elana. “We came early and unannounced. I hope that you can understand why we did not send an embassy, first, to make arrangements.”
They had discussed sending an embassy. Or at the very least a messenger. But they had ultimately decided that any advance notice they gave of their coming might put him at risk as much as us. That Derrek Rowan had left Vencar immediately after the rise of the Usurper was common knowledge. Why he had done so, and why he had disappeared into obscurity were matters of deep confusion and wild speculation.
“I understand completely,” he said. Then, in a less serious tone. “I mostly wish that you had arrived after I had bathed, not before.”
Although Elana and the knights would probably been happy to continue the dance of courtesies for another hour or more, he had apparently gauged the shift well. Orland laughed first, Elana followed, and even Rennin cracked a smile. The arrival of our food – three loaves of bread and half a wheel of cheese and a cauldron of some kind of thick brown stew, from which we were to serve ourselves – briefly forestalled further conversation.
“If you’ll forgive me,” interjected Elana once the waiter had left. “You seem to recall myself and Sirs Rennin and Orland from your days at court. Please allow me to introduce our companions, Master Veralar Tann of the Shan Khul of Namora, and Master Khanaarre of the Elvenwood and the Order of the Black Mask.”
I am, so far as I know, the first and only elf to study and practice human wizardry, and by the rise in his brows, he had not heard of any others, either.
“It is a pleasure to meet you both,” was all he said, offering another dip of his head.
Seated, we could not bow properly in return.
“Now,” he went on, “so that I may enjoy the wedding this afternoon, please present me with your arguments. Why should I join your rebellion?”
I saw by Elana’s face that she had anticipated at least enough polite small talk to get us through the meal. She swallowed, hard. Washed her last bites of bread and stew down with a swig of ale and turned her full attention on Derrek Rowan. Her discomfiture was absolutely deliberate on his part. His use of a host’s courtesies, his abnegation of courtly formalities, his choice of set and setting … it all seemed very deliberate. Was it revenge for her embarrassing him this morning? For coming unannounced, or at all? Or was it a powerful wizard’s disdain for political power?
“You should join my rebellion because it is just,” Elana began. “You may disdain the Court of the Sun, but in matters of succession their word is law: as they anointed the rise of House Traianum when we deposed the Inimbri, so they anointed my father, when he was named heir, and then me. Aemillian Solirius and his new dynasty are illegitimate.”
Elana sat up straighter as she spoke. Derrek, opposite her, relaxed into his chair. Was that a smile at the corner of his mouth, or his scar tugging as he chewed? His small, round human ears were immobile, giving me no clues to his mood or thoughts.
“As I said this morning, the Usurper is impious, he favors the power of wizards over the wisdom of the temples. That impiety is a threat not just to Vencar, but to Compact as a whole. Even if the gods strike only our wheatfields with blight, from whence will Naal and Namora and Georg and Handar buy wheat? If the gods raise the River Naam in flood, will that not lay waste to Naal and Namora, as well?”
That point absolutely brought a frown to the wizard’s face. Did he not believe? Not agree? Or was it a matter of great concern to him? I was at the wrong angle to really know, I decided.
“The kings and queens of the Compact do not trust him. You speak of the danger a new war poses to trade, but what will happen to trade as Aemillian Solirius continues to expand his military training and exercises? There are already rumors that he seeks to break the Compact, that he aims to invade Naal in search of more treasures like the Rorgoth Throne. What will that war do to trade?”
That earned an actual nod and a grunt. I had heard all of these arguments before, of course. Before the Queen Rrallashyl in Tanirinaal. Before the King and Court in Georg and Namora. I understood that she had made such processions more than once before I joined her retinue.
“You asked this morning how my restoration will benefit the world,” Elana said, slowly. “And I think that I have given fair answer to that. You also asked, then and now, why you should join me.”
He nodded, slowly, watching her shrewdly.
“Do you want me to state the obvious?” Elana pleaded with him, now: holding her hands out with palms upturned in the traditional Vencari posture of supplication. “That so long as Aemillian’s aegis holds, he can never be deposed? That so long as he holds whatever power the two of you unearthed in your quest for the secrets of Illustrian shadow-magic, he is the most powerful creature in the world? That no one should wield such magical power and the might of a nation at the same time? That you are the only person in the whole world who might possibly balance the scales? That without a Great Wizard of our own, no other nation will support us openly?”
Derrek stiffened at these arguments. I watched Elana stiffen her posture in return.
“Do you want me to make it personal? Do you want me to offer you the chance at revenge for whatever hurt or slight your former Master offered you? That drove you from the Obsidan Cabal and the Imperial Palace to hide as a blacksmith in a Georgi bordertown? Do you want me to offer you riches and titles, if only you will stand by our side?”
Elana closed her eyes and took a deep breath.
“What would you ask of us, Derrek Rowan? What would you have, now and when we are Emperor?”
Elana Traiana folded her hands and briefly lowered her eyes, indicating that she had reached the end. Rennin and Orland sat straight-backed and still beside her, as formal as they could be in this inappropriate setting. Veralar did the same, and somehow managed to look languid at the same time. For my part, I did my best to watch all of them at once – to gauge and measure, to see and discern. By the cant of his neck and the hood of his eyes, by the way he shifted in his seat … I thought that Derrek Rowan might have been moved. Moved, but not convinced.
“What came between he and I,” Derrek said, a hitch in his voice that I did not believe was theater, “is and was and shall remain between he and I.”
He drew a breath and adjusted his shoulders, settling into his chair more comfortably.
“As for title and riches,” he shrugged. “Those I could have had if I wanted them. Could have now, as a wizard or a smith, if I so chose.”
He shook his head.
“No, your grace, I will not join your rebellion. You have convinced me of your goodness, and your sincerity, but not of your cause.”
“Why, then,” Elana choked. “Why? Why did you save me that day? I know it was you. I always suspected, and you left that damn iron mask on your shelf by your bed. I had nightmares about it for years. Why save me then, only to abandon me now?”
Elana’s outburst shocked me, and the rest of our party, too. I had heard the brief version of the story, of course: the white-robed, iron-masked figure that had led Elana and Rennin out of the palace through secret passages, and then left them with only cryptic warnings and a magical talisman to protect them. That it might be this man, here, had never crossed my mind – nor Rennin’s, despite having probably seen the mask this very morning.
“To burn a tree root and branch,” Derrek said softly, “is an abomination, and I would have no part in it.”
Was that the wedge that had come between the two Great Wizards? Legend among the loyalists had spoken of them as master and apprentice. Some had guessed them to be lovers. Others had simply believed them loyal to the same cause. Was it simply that Aemillian Solirius had a stronger stomach for slaughter?
The others looked as stunned as I felt. After a long moment, Derrek rose.
“I have some few duties left in preparation for the wedding,” he said. “Please. Enjoy my hospitality here at the Stallion. Stay for the wedding. I will see you off in the morning.”
And so he left.
“Well,” said Orland, “shit.”
“Yeah,” said Elana. “Shit.”
Rennin ground his teeth and then threw back the rest of his ale.
“Fuck,” he said.
“Yeah,” said Elana. “That, too.”
“Thoughts?” asked Rennin.
“We might as well enjoy the hospitality we’ve been offered,” said Elana. “It’s a shit consolation prize, but I want a bath.”
“Only reason not to is if we want to insult him,” agreed Orland. “Which … I’m against, in case that needs saying.”
Rennin grunted. He agreed, but he didn’t have to like it.
Elana looked to Veralar and I.
Veralar shrugged.
“I like Georgi food,” she said.
“I agree on all points,” I said. “And the horses could use a rest.”
And I could use a day on my own two feet.
Elana nodded. “Rennin, Orland, go ditch your armor but keep your swords handy, just in case. Veralar, Khanaarre, make yourselves at home, just try to stay withing shouting distance on the off chance of trouble. I’m abusing my rank and calling first dibs on the bath.”
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