The Warden, page 12
“I could,” Aelis said, “or I could teach you to read—and that would serve you better.”
The girl’s face scrunched up in trepidation. “Do I have to? Couldn’t you just read them…”
“Phillipa, if I agreed just to read them to you, you would hear the stories and perhaps remember some of them, but if I were gone, or I had no time, or my duties called me away, they’d just be so much ink and parchment to you,” Aelis said. “If I taught you to read them, you could read them at any time, you could take them into you in a way so that no one could ever take them away. The stories would be yours to remember and to read again—as would every story that’s ever been written down. You could write your own stories, if the mood took you.”
“How many stories is that?” The girl’s face screwed up in severe calculation.
Aelis shrugged. “More than I could name. More than anyone could read in a life, probably.”
Pips sighed heavily, a martyr heading to her doom. “Fine. I’ll try … but would you read me a story for each day we work?”
“I’ll read you part of a story,” Aelis said as she bent down to her bookshelves, scanning the spines with eyes and fingers both. She lingered over The Fighting Wardens, thinking of the grisly battle scenes described within. The woodcuts of Daevar impaling his foes upon his conjured animated spears might be a bit much for the child, she thought, before selecting Lives of the Wardens: The Good, the Great, and the Grim, and pulled it free.
“Let’s start by learning of Dahja the Gray, shall we?” If you’d wanted to be a teacher, why did you become a Warden, Aelis asked herself silently.
Oh, she answered, dismissing the worry, how hard can it be?
* * *
“It is so fucking hard,” Aelis breathed as she shut the door behind Pips an hour or two or twenty, she wasn’t entirely sure, later. “How does anyone stand a roomful of them at a grammar school? How does anyone stand two of them in a nursery?”
She leaned her back against the door, taking a deep, resigned breath. After endless frustration at trying to get Pips to read words and sentences, Aelis had ultimately settled on basic letter shaping and sounding, using their own two names as a basis. By the end, the girl had been able to scratch out something resembling both of their names, and identify each letter in them. Aelis had sent her home with her third-best pen, a tiny stick of ink, and two sheets of her roughest parchment, with instructions to practice forming letters.
As a consequence, Aelis had been obliged to read aloud the story of Widraw the Invoker from Lives of the Wardens, putting up with both her own indignation at the ridiculous depiction of magic—the Invoker calling down columns of fire the size of a siege tower, wiping away entire enemy formations with sweeps of lightning—and Phillipa’s constant questions.
The most prevalent one was, of course, “Could you do that?” almost always immediately followed up with “Why not?” Aelis had only just avoided repeating some of her early introductory lectures before students chose—or were chosen by—their Colleges. Finally, she’d had to set the book down and explain.
“No wizard, and no warden—for all wardens are wizards, though the obverse is far from true—can cast spells from every school. The most any one person has demonstrated any competence in, verifiably, was five—and that was an elven Archmagister who could only just manage Second Order Divinations on top of what was an impressive assortment of Conjuring, Enchanting, Illusion, and Abjuration.”
“Why’s it matter that he was an elf?”
“Because elves once lived a good deal longer than humans.”
“Do they not anymore?”
“Yes, somewhat. But not hundreds and hundreds of years as they once did.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know, and if they do, they aren’t telling such as me.”
“Did you know any very old elves?”
“One of my Abjuration teachers—my swordmistress—was reputed to have taught at the university for eighty years.”
Pips had sat up in her chair then, eyes wide. “Tell me…”
“Her name was Lavanalla Elysse Ymiris Cael Na Tenyll, and if you ask me one more question I am going to make you learn to spell it by writing it five hundred times.”
That clammed the girl up and allowed her to finish the story.
Now, in the quiet and solitude of her tower, Aelis couldn’t decide if she missed the life and the noise the girl brought with her.
Then she remembered the two precious crates she had stowed under a table, and the bottles of wine carefully packed in straw within, and she knew exactly how she’d pass the rest of the afternoon.
“Be better if Humphrey and Miralla were here to drink it with,” she said as she prized the lid carefully off the crate and selected a bottle. Or Maurenia. She dismissed that thought as she lifted a heavy bottle, running her fingers over the vintner’s mark stamped into the glass and scattering hay over her worktable in the process.
With an air of a woman on a mission, Aelis hefted the bottle in her left hand, seized her sword in her right, and drew it from the scabbard. In one motion, with no hesitation, she cut upward and swept the cork and the neck above the ring clean off.
“Lavanalla would have my hide for that,” she said, “blunting the edge of an Abjurer’s blade. Still, it’s not as though I have a fire and tongs and ice or really any other proper way of doing it aside from smashing it against a table and hoping for the best.”
She set the bottle down and began searching for a suitable vessel to drink from, eventually settling on a clean bronze flask. “No sense in bringing silver without someone to polish it … I wonder if Pips could be taught to polish…”
Aelis colored in shame at her own thoughts of exploiting the girl that way. She decided the best method of recovery was to have a first drink as fast as possible, so she poured. After the first sip she amended her plan to enjoy a drink at a moderate pace, as the warmth of the wine, its forward spice and fruit, had her relaxing almost instantly. She examined the bottle; no older than her, being one of the only postwar Tirravalan bottlings that had really come into its maturity already.
Aelis took bottle and flask to a chair along with the book she’d been reading to Pips from, and settled in.
10
THE GOLD
Aelis woke with a start to a sound like sword banging against shield. She realized, groggily, that she’d been dreaming of her sword training under Lavanalla, of the constant advance of the tall elf’s three feet of curved bronze, like a scythe she could only ever just stay ahead of. In parts of the dream, Lavanalla had become Maurenia, and the practice duel had become both less and more real; more because she thought perhaps she stood a chance, and less because she knew nothing of how Maurenia would fight.
She was blinking all of this away as she stumbled toward the door, kicking over both the empty bottle and the empty alchemy flask she’d been drinking out of. The door seemed farther away than it ought to be, and she was forced to throw an arm out to steady herself against the table as she passed it.
Whoever was knocking at the door rattled it with a startling blow. Reasoning it must be her dinner, Aelis called out, “Just leave the basket and I’ll get it, thanks. I’m not decent…”
“I’m not here to bring your dinner, Aelis,” a voice beyond the door called out. “I’m here to fetch you to town. Hurry up about it. And bring your case. I hope you’re ready to ride!”
Slowly, it dawned on Aelis that the person speaking was Maurenia. The seriousness of her words was like a slap across the face. She threw open the door and saw the half-elf standing windblown on her doorstep in the dusk giving way to the light of the moons, and two horses step-hitched on the grass beyond the walkway.
“Good goddess, woman, you smell like wine,” Maurenia snapped. “Are you in any condition to—”
“Yes,” Aelis shot back, seizing control of her wandering mind. “While I gather my things, you will tell me what is going on.”
“A brawl has broken out in the village.”
Aelis’s head shot up as her hands, suddenly steady, buckled her swordbelt on. She absently checked both dagger and sword sheaths to make sure they were secure. “A brawl? Who started it?”
“Impossible to say—but it wasn’t any of the Thorns. We’ve been keeping Luth out of sight. I was upstairs when I heard the commotion start—the only one of us among it was Timmuk, and I’ve never known a dwarf less inclined to his fists when drinking. I only saw him acting to keep the peace, but that’ll change if Andresh gets involved. You don’t want to see the two of them go back to back against a roomful of farmers.”
“Damn it. What’s gotten into them?”
“I don’t know, but Rus seemed reluctant to wade in. He saw me at the top of the stairs and yelled to fetch you.”
She took a look at her orrery and almost reached for it, but pulled her hand back and turned to Maurenia. “Let’s ride.”
She wasn’t the rider Maurenia was—the half-elf had simply jumped onto the horse’s bare back and seemed to will it to run—but Aelis, mounted on the company’s other riding horse, nearly kept pace. Mercifully, hers was saddled, so it was only moments before she was swinging down and running for the door of the inn, sweeping her sword clear and shoving the door open with her left shoulder.
Inside was a scene of chaos, of flying fists and broken crockery. Soon enough someone would break a chair for a cudgel, and then all the furniture would become so much firewood.
Holding her sword behind her hip and lifting her left hand toward the nearest pair of combatants—burly farmers with skinned knuckles and red faces whose names she didn’t know—she thrust a paper-thin ward between them, sending them reeling apart. This she repeated twice more, separating brawling pairs and drawing their ire to her.
Then she gathered as much power as she could and slipped her wand into her hand. Her fingers flexed and bent into channels for the forms she was calling on, and her arms rose into the air.
One of the first pair of fighters she’d separated came toward her, raising his fist, as she pointed the tip of her wand at the floor and bent down, stopping just short of smashing the thin reed of wood into the plank floor and releasing her gathered strength in one command. The word she spoke she couldn’t have pronounced without the aid of her gathered will, nor could she have written it out exactly, and none who heard it could’ve said exactly what it sounded like—each would’ve given it a slightly different sound.
The effect was the same; some inexorable force convinced them to be calm.
The fighting ceased. Farmers and tradesmen gave their heads disbelieving shakes and stared at their clenched, bruised fists in astonishment.
“NOW,” Aelis snapped in the silence her spell had won, “EVERYONE will sit down, and ONE person,” and here she pointed at the man who’d been about to try to hit her, “will tell me what happened.”
They began to act, Aelis reflected, rather like the sheep they tended; milling about, waiting for someone to tell them what to do, their eyes firmly on the floorboards and the toes of their boots.
“What,” she said to the man she’d pointed at, “is your name?”
She sidestepped to one of the tables, and steadied herself by resting a hand on it. She seemed to have shaken most of the wine off, but coupled with the power she’d expended, her knees were suddenly a bit wobbly. Wouldn’t do at all to let them see that, she thought, resisting the urge to sit and willing her legs to still themselves.
“Yohan,” the man murmured, speaking thickly over bruised lips and a cheek that would soon swell. He reached two fingers between his lips to pluck at a tooth; she reached up and snatched his hand, tugging it away.
“Stop that. If you’ve a loose tooth, give it a chance to heal and it might. Pluck at it and you’ll lose it for certain. Now. Tell me what came over you.”
“What d’ya mean?”
“Why were you fighting that other man?” She extended a hand and one finger to point to the fellow he’d been swinging great looping blows at when she walked in. He was more compact than Yohan, with a thicker trunk and arms, and looked none the worse for their exchange of blows.
“Me ’n Cab just sorta get to blows every now and then. We’re neighbors n’ old friends, it happens.”
“It doesn’t usually happen to the entire village all at once, does it?”
At that, Yohan could only muster a shrug. “Some nights it just gets into a body to do a bit of riot, ya know?”
“I am certain I do not,” Aelis replied. She looked out over the crowd and saw lips curling and fists clenching, muscles flexing along arms. Violence hung thickly in the air for reasons she couldn’t begin to fathom. Impulsively, she stood up straight and cleared her throat. While the faces of the crowd turned toward her, she gathered a trickle of power with her wand and tilted it upward, directing the stream into her voice.
“The inn is closed for the evening. Everyone is to return home for the night and not to leave it except under the conditions of direst emergency; that means it is life or death, and if you leave your house, you come seeking me. Do you understand?”
The tiny stream of power that she let out with her words acted as a mild suggestive, barely even a First Order Enchantment, and one dispersed to multiple targets, at that. She wouldn’t have liked to try anything stronger at the moment.
To a mild astonishment that she worked hard to keep from her features, it seemed to work. Alone, in some cases in pairs, they drifted wordlessly out of the inn, till the only people left standing in the common room were Aelis, Maurenia, Timmuk, and Rus.
She looked past the bar to the kitchen and saw Martin, his face pale, looking hesitantly out from above the counter. There was a creak on the stairs and she whirled about, lifting her wand to point and her sword to a guard position. Andresh stood on the second step from the top landing, his hands slowly lifting into the air, one bushy brow raised. He rattled off some words in Dwarfish, of which she’d none, so she looked to Timmuk.
“Wants to know if all the fun is over,” the dwarf relayed. Aelis was prepared to roll her eyes until Rus hissed at her from behind the bar.
“What do you think you’re doing?”
“I think I already did it,” Aelis answered, sheathing her sword and slipping the wand back into her sleeve. “I spared you a good deal of time repairing your furniture in addition to the coin you’ll spend on new crockery, and I stopped blood from being shed.”
“But ordering folk about like that, confining them to their homes, it’s…”
“Well within my rights and authority, and what’s more, it is an accomplished fact, so I’ll take no whining over it,” Aelis said. “I can order folk confined to their homes for up to three days pending an inquest, indefinitely if I suspect them of a more severe crime.”
Leaving Rus gaping, she wheeled on Timmuk. “Dobrusz, does trouble follow your company? In the days since you’ve arrived, we’ve had a bear slaughter half a herd of sheep and the entire village lose its mind in a bar brawl the likes of which I’d wager Lone Pine has never seen.”
“Now, Warden Aelis,” Timmuk said calmly, spreading his hands, “you can’t go blaming us for ill luck and clouded judgment. And you doubtless studied enough logic at the Lyceum to know that our arrival preceding the events you’ve named does not mean our arrival has caused them.”
“I’m well aware of the fallacy you’ve alluded to, Master Dobrusz,” Aelis said, her voice cold, her mouth twisting sourly as she thought of her torturous logic classes. “But I do not greatly believe in coincidence. The past two days have been troubled.”
“That they have, and the Thorns of the Counting House stand ready to assist you in whatever capacity you require,” Timmuk said smoothly. “But we have come here intending only to trade tales and gold.”
When the dwarf said “gold,” something clicked in Aelis’s mind: the glimpse she’d had of the bag of glittering coin the dwarf had paid Rus with when they took rooms, how it had seemed to grab her eyes and refused to let them go, how the bright orange glitter of it had drunk the light from the room.
“Timmuk, Maurenia, I have two questions: Where in the frontier did you find the gold you’ve been trading with these past two days, and whom have you paid with it?”
* * *
“A Warden is always observing. A Warden is always recording facts,” Bardun Jacques yelled, pounding the floor of the lecture hall with his steel-tipped Invoker’s staff. In truth, what the old Warden carried was rather more a cross between club and walking stick than it was a proper staff, with a thick knot curling around a dark red crystal at the head. It came only to his waist, and he leaned on it, right hand clenched white-knuckled around it, left leg never quite bending properly. “Every fact is part of a larger whole, and you will never know how they fit together unless you are constantly recording them, assessing them. These,” he suddenly shouted, lifting two fingers to point to his eyes, “and these,” the fingers stabbed toward his ears—one of which was a smooth hole in the side of his head—“are your best tools. Not your staff. Not your sword, not your diadem, not your mirror, not your dagger, not your wand, not your orb, not any piece of thaumaturgical mayhem you cling to in order to call upon your all-too-pathetic power.”
As he lectured, he limped back and forth across the front of the room. Bardun Jacques—though the Lyceum’s Aldayim Chair in Magical Praxis, he refused the titles of Professor, Magister, or Archmagister, despite being well entitled to them all—taught without notes, without a lectern, and without standing still for more than a few moments at a time.
“Many of you think you’ll be able to record your facts just with your eyes and ears. Almost all of you are wrong,” he shouted, his voice more suited to a parade ground, Aelis had thought, than a lecture hall. “But we’re not going to talk about boring minutiae like proper note-taking. Let the fourth and fifth years teach you that. We’re going to talk about hunches.”
