The Forgotten Prince

The Falcon's Children, Interlude

In the mornings in Antiala, outside the apartments where Elfred Montair lived now as a student rather than a wastrel, there was a plaza built of yellow stone where the washerwomen came early on warm mornings to fill their tubs and buckets from the public pump.

Most of them remained in the square for hours to soak and wring and scrub, until the sun climbed high and they repaired to the university district’s tall apartment buildings, to hang skirts and shifts and tunics from the lines of rope that seemed to tug the upper storys toward one another high above the streets.

The water they took for washing was the surplus of the Mersana, siphoned up from a buried aqueduct that ran from the harbor district into the higher reaches of the city. The plaza that it served was shadowed from one corner by the statue of a long-dead Mandoran viceroy, but everywhere save in the maps kept by Antiala’s surveyors it was known by the name the women gave it: the Plaza of the Pump.

The Narsil prince’s balcony was on the north end of the plaza, high above flagstones that were crowded with stalls and peddlers three days out of every tenday and occupied by flocks of pigeons and sparrows for the rest. From where he stood, squinting in the morning light and watching the washerwomen fill the plaza’s far end with their tubs and scrubbing boards, their rounded shapes looked almost like a herd of sheep on the slopes below High House — except that along with ewe-white there were flashes of crimson, swabs of yellow, splashes of bright blue.

That was one of the ways Trans-Mersana was different from the empire: Even a washerwoman might have dye in her shawls bright enough to stir envy in any Rendale merchant’s daughter’s heart.

One difference, but hardly the most striking one. In the high-beamed room in Rendale’s Castle where he and Padrec planned their conquests, the unfurled map had always made the work look easy: The domains of Narsil sprawled across the parchment, vast enough to fit several of the southern kingdoms into their imperial confines, and there seemed no reason why adding Trans-Mersana or Great Salma should be that much more difficult than the conquest of Argosa or Erona.

The reasons had been half-imparted by his tutors, but the facts and figures had never made much of an impression; it took Antiala itself to bring the lesson home.

The simplest way to think about it was by comparison. The university district where he now kept his apartment, the network of streets around the academic towers where most of the students and schoolmen lived, had about as many inhabitants as all of Rendale. The Megara Quarter, the larger fraction of the city in which the University of the Archangels was embedded, was a touch larger than Cranholt, a touch smaller than Argosa. Which meant that Antiala entire, from the wharfs to the western gates, the Pelerin Hill to the Great Casino, was about four times the size of the Narsil Empire’s largest city.

And that was just the city proper. Outside its walls lay what were called the suburbs, a sprawl of towns, estates, temples, markets and carefully tended farmland that was more bucolic than Antiala but densely populated in a way that even the Heart could not begin to match. It took days of riding, in the days when the prince was invited by some faction or another to an “outlying” estate, to enter anything that resembled the countryside around the Heart cities, let alone the truly wild lands that lay just a few hours gallop from Rendale or Bluehaven or Ysan. And if you stayed close enough to the river, by the time you were in the proper countryside you were only a little distance from the suburbs of yet another city — Jophiela with its great temple, or Magebridge where the impossible double marble arch spanned both the Mersana and the Vigana, or Nessorica athwart the kingdom’s richest farmlands, all close to Antiala in size and wealth and sprawl.

His tutors in Rendale had tried to tell him: The empire’s domains were vast but they were mostly empty, while to Elfred’s eyes, the only word that described the parts of Trans-Mersana that he had visited was full.

At first those eyes had been hungry for the fullness. He had reached Antiala in late spring, with gardens in bloom and the trees on the Milvian Way in full flower, and though he could barely admit it to himself, bitter as he felt at being denied the promised battlefields, he had felt immediately better with the north and cold behind him.

Physically better, at first: The hacking coughs that usually lingered through Rendale’s chilly springs faded quickly in the warmer Trans-Mersanan sun. And then better, too, in his sense of his own importance, his place in the world, because no sooner had he arrived in the southern city than he was welcomed, taken up, into the whirl of the Elarial Palace, into a world of balls and revels in which he was a figure of fascination, a pale barbarian from the northern snows, whose awkwardness and difficulties with the river dialect were forgiven because everyone wanted to claim his exoticism for their clique.

So for his first year in Antiala there was little in the way of academic life, just some dutiful appointments with a university tutor who was clearly accustomed to the young nobility’s way of “studying,” and instead of making his home in the university district Elfred gladly accepted apartments in the Con Ivara, a former fortress from the days of Mandoran rule that was now a kind of annex for the palace, a place to stash country cousins and mistresses and foreign dignitaries. From that base he accepted every invitation, danced at every ball, lost his innocence to a courtesan and his heart, briefly, to a married, neglected marquessa. And he found himself enfolded, eventually, into one of the factions of younger lords who struggled — playfully or seriously, it was hard to say for certain — for advantage in King Restimar’s court.

The factions all had different colors: The reds were the circle around the heir apparent, Prince Tirimar; the greens were friends and allies of his younger brother, Prince Dominis; and the blues, to whom Elfred became attached, were organized around two siblings, the Grand Duke Galaris and the Grand Duchess Alaria, who were respectively King Restimar’s nephew and his niece. Their mother, Restimar’s sister, governed in Jophiela; by custom each of the great cities of the kingdom was held by a member of the ruling house, in imitation of the Mandoran way where the Blood held all the highest offices to place a ceiling on every lesser family’s ambitions. But this also meant that the great intrigues of the kingdom involved lesser families goading royal cousins into strife, encouraging plots that they hoped would enable them to rise.

The last time a great plot had succeeded was just twelve years in the past: Restimar’s father Petris had taken the throne from his own brother in a miniature struggle that folk in Antiala called the Fraternal War, and a brace of cousins and bastards from the royal house now plotted in exile in Great Salma and the river cities. None of them seemed particularly promising, as pretenders went, but they created an external locus of potential power — rivals for the king and his heir to watch and fear, and for Dominis and the twin cousins to denounce but sometimes cultivate as well.

Elfred came to understand these currents only gradually, as he gained a modest education — modest, but far more ample than his supposed education as a schoolman — in the politics of his new home. For a while that education was like his slowly-improving efforts to speak proper Mersanan, a sink-or-swim effort where all that mattered was gleaning enough context to make it through a ball or dinner without feeling like a fool. But by the time he reached his first Winter’s Eve in Antiala, he found himself beginning to take a little pleasure in following the threads of rivalry and intrigue.

That was when Welsten intervened. Adjutant Welsten, officially, though he only commanded the handful of men who had remained as Elfred’s bodyguard, and the rank seemed just an honorific, or perhaps just an excuse — a reason for him to be present, in some general inobtrusive way, wherever the prince of Narsil went.

Certainly he was vague about the details of his legion experience, and the only thing clear about his background was that he had worked for many years, in obscure capacities, for Lord Chancellor Arellwen. He had a round white face and a closely-shaved scalp, a thin beard and a single puckering scar that rested like a pink caterpillar on the left side of his neck. Like the chancellor he came from the borderlands between the Heart and Ysan, but though his accent had Ysani traces he spoke the Mersanan dialect fluently, indicating a certain experience in the south.

Through summer and autumn he revealed that experience mostly through the dispensation of quiet commentary as he shadowed Elfred through the Con Ivara’s meals and revels — a detail about a particular noble family here, a dose of context for a personal feud there, bits and pieces of recent history that seemed relevant to the prince’s conversations. All of it was offered neutrally, deferentially, laconically, to the point that Elfred found himself wishing his father or Arellwen had sent a more loquacious advisor.

Then came a winter night that only came back to him in fragments, involving Galaris and several other lesser blues, a bonfire, multiple taverns, a brothel, a bear (?), sliding on the ice of the Mersana under the largest moon he could remember and then a lost interval followed by a long morning and afternoon in bed with the worst headache of his young life.

He was still barely human, ladling stew beside a blazing fire, when Welsten came in, dismissed the servant, and sat beside him. After a while the older man spat in the fire and spoke in his usual dry tone:

“Now that you’ve had a season of fun it’s my duty to tell you that every man and a few of the women you drank with last night would happily put a knife in you tomorrow.”

The stew went down wrong and Elfred coughed it up in chunks. Welsten’s hand slapped him on the back, once, twice.

“Don’t worry, they aren’t planning on it. None of the plots growing in this city are ripe enough for that. But I’ve given you rope enough to play with, and it’s time you changed your ways a bit. Time you took the drink in hand, rather than letting it take your head. My reports to your father’s council will have to change a bit, if not.”

“I’m not — it was just one night … your reports …?”

A prince speaking to his bodyguard should be more commanding but Welsten spoke over him. “Aye, there are reports, did you think the emperor of All Narsil sent his spare off to a foreign court to be forgotten? But I keep my own counsel, I could see that you needed to feel like you were claiming your own manhood here, I’ve tried to give you the room to do it. Room enough, I hope — but things can’t go on like this or I’ll be escorting a corpse back up the great river, with my own punishment waiting at the end.”

“I don’t understand,” Elfred said, his bafflement sincere. “Why is my life in danger?”

“Again, I said, not the gravest danger, I wouldn’t let you make a sot of yourself otherwise. But why might someone seek your death? Think on it, lad: You are under royal protection here, the protection of His Majesty Restimar, Third of that Name, and were you to perish in some untimely manner it would create all sorts of interesting tensions between Trans-Mersana and your father’s empire, troubling a relationship that Restimar has no interest in seeing soured. His eyes are always looking south and east for trouble, he’s very happy to have Narsil busy in Brethony and his northern border entirely quiet. He would have greatly preferred not to have you here at all, but because he wants to keep good relations he decided not to give offense by trying to bar you from his domains — but precisely because killing you would unsettle his foreign policies he has you shadowed by his agents almost everywhere you go.”

“He does …?” the prince began but Welsten spat again and plowed onward.

“And that’s just the simplest reason someone might have a desire to put a dagger in you. You’ve fallen in with the blues so the reds and greens each might see an advantage in embarrassing Galaris and Alaria. Or someone in the blues might wish to see you killed in a way that casts suspicion on the reds and greens. Or Galaris might wish to embarrass Alaria, or vice versa, for reasons that you can’t possibly know until the blade goes home. Or one of the white roses from Argosa might imagine that a war between Trans-Mersana and Narsil might free their city, their precious little lost kingdom, from your father’s gracious rule. Or the king himself might have some scheme of his own involving the north that no one else is privy to, and your death might somehow secretly be in his interest after all.”

“And the truth, highness, is that most of these possibilities already exist — not in a ripened form, but as an idea in someone’s mind, a possibility. So the longer you act like a piece in their games, the more likely it becomes that the idea ripens, the plot takes shape, and someone sweeps you off the board.”

Elfred’s head throbbed and the stew no longer warmed him. “It sounds as though I should not be here at all,” he said.

“Aye but you’re a prince of the empire, you’ll be in a game of houses anywhere you live or wander, and you have to make the best of things. Which in this case means — ”

“— that my fun is over?”

“You’d be a poor guest if you refused all pleasures. You just need to refuse more of them — the kind that take you far out of my sight, the kind that you don’t remember in the morning, the kind that make you look so naked and innocent that it feels a crime not to take advantage. You’ve given the lords and ladies of Antiala their money’s worth and then some; it’s time to become a bit more circumspect. My lord prince.”

“Is that all?”

“Well, and it probably wouldn’t hurt to visit your tutor at least once a month.”

That conversation ended the first act of his Antialan play. The second act was more forgettable, until its bitter end: For half a year, from late winter’s thawing-out to late summer’s ending, he tried to stay sober, he accepted a third as many invitations, he attended slightly more to his studies, he made no more suburban pilgrimages, and he trained his mind, with only intermittent success, not to constantly imagine all his courtly friends planting a dagger between his shoulderblades.

In Welsten’s view, this was all a great success: His charge had passed from being a dangerously prominent character in the complex drama of the court to a secondary character, a background role from which Elfred was free to participate, observe and learn without being a primary target for anybody’s plot.

To Elfred it was something much more depressing: The slow strangulation of all the things that had made his first act in Antiala such a welcome antidote to all his private disappointments. If he was no longer a major character in this kingdom’s drama, just an observer whom the real players passed over or ignored, then his Trans-Mersanan sojourn was just recapitulating the unwelcome revelations of his final days in Rendale — the harsh realization of his true position, his vestigial status relative to Padrec and even Alsbet (whose marriage at least would be important, he told himself), his fundamentally secondary destiny absent the death of his own kin.

With the coming of autumnal colors to the city, the chill in the morning and the charcoal smell of fires rekindled every dusk, these sour thoughts threatened to turn into a self-indulgent brooding, and he decided to accept just one of the invitations — the pile had thinned a bit as he withdrew from the social whirl — requesting the pleasure of his company at an estate outside the city.

The villa belonged to a countess who had been many years before the mistress to the present king, and after being cast off following some intrigue had attached herself the blues, as a kind of jaded patroness to their youthful entertainments and debauchs.

She had daunted Elfred upon their first encounter, her mixture of mannered sophistication and frank sensuality a complete departure from his limited experience with womanhood, and months later she still retained some of that initial fascination. But she seemed much less fascinated by him than at their last encounter, and likewise the younger nobles were more desultory about including him in their games and sport, or just in making the effort to parse his accent and slow down their own speech.

He already knew that his withdrawal had come at a social cost, but after the first night’s drinking and the second day’s moveable feasts he had a clearer sense about how quickly fascination turned to boredom, how easily even a prince of the Narsil Empire could become part of the background, even part of the furniture, for the aristocrats of a warmer, richer land.

He was grimly contemplating his own superfluity, on a terrace overlooking a pool stocked with goldfish that he doubted could survive the winter, when Welsten made an unexpected appearance. The adjutant had remained in the city, deputizing two guardsmen to be Elfred’s shadows at the countess’s estate, and there was both an unusual air of sweat and haste and an unusual formality to his approach. The bow was deeper than usual, and when Welsten came up there was a letter in his hand.

“For your eyes, my prince,” he said.

The dispatches were usually just reminders of his marginal position: a consistent pulse of notes from his mother and his sister punctuated by more formal letters with his father’s signature, all telling of developments in Allasyr, politics and war and his brother’s glorious victories.

The last note from the queen had arrived … when? … three tendays previous? … and he had barely read it, dashing off a perfunctorily filial reply. Had it been longer than usual, shorter, more strained, more crowded with advice?

He couldn’t remember, as much as he strove to summon up its contents, the act of recollection a temporary reprieve from reckoning with what lay before him now, the news written in his sister’s hand, the unbearable impossible brutality.

“May I extend my deepest condolences, your highness,” Welsten said. “And may Azriel and all the Archangels keep her majesty’s soul.”

His reply to Alsbet, scrawled the next day when he emerged from a stupor into the pain of unavoidable reality, was a single line:

You did not even tell me she was sick.

He did not write again for a long time, not to punish his sister (he told himself) but because he was incapable of writing. At first because he was drunk every day, for as many hours as his head and stomach would allow, drunk at parties and revels, drunk at brothels, drunk in his apartment in the Con Ivara, drunk enough to lose his sophisticated friends and replace them with the unsuitable dregs of the nobility. And then because the chill of autumn deepened and suddenly he was sick, sick in the old way but more so, not just with the hacking and heaving, the weakness in his chest, but with a fever that burned for days and drew him down into delirium, into visions of his mother and father, into dreams of the Brethony that he had never seen, visions of trackless forests where his brother wandered, always somewhere just ahead of him, while ravens watched from the branches and behind them both something hungry hunted, something that hated all Montairs, indeed all men —

and then he was alone in the deep woods, his brother was gone, and now he heard the sounds of a hunting pack, distant, baying, terrifying, and he broke into a stumbling run —

and then he was running through the streets of Rendale, trying to reach the safety of the Castle, except that a mist had rolled through the city and the buildings had turned ghostly and transparent, and instead of the familiar stone towers of his father’s keep there was a white citadel waiting for him at the end of every turning, beautiful one moment and sinister the next, and he didn’t want to reach its gates —

and then his path dead-ended at a double doorway painted with angelic faces, Mithriel with his sword and Raphiel with his arrows, and the beast was behind him again, or the hounds, or both, but from the far side of the doorway came a frightening roar, such that his hand jerked back reflexively from the handle

You have to loose the lion, one of the painted archangels said, as coolly and matter-of-factly as Welsten making some point about Trans-Mersanan etiquette; indeed maybe it was Welsten’s voice he heard —

Loose the lion. Be quick about it.

And then at last he came back to the world, to the gilt of his bedchamber, the painted seraphs on the ceiling and the adjutant dozing in a chair beside his bed.

When he had gained a little strength there was a warm spell and Welsten let him sit beside the window in the apartment’s outer room. Antiala below him had lost most of its glamour; he stared indifferently across the endless roofs for a long while, drinking cool water and chewing his way through a bowl of candied almonds.

“I have to write a letter,” the adjutant said to him.

“What kind of letter?”

“A letter to emperor and council, detailing the progress of your recovery, and advising them on the advisability of your return.”

“My return … to Rendale?”

“Six years is the usual requirement to be honored with a schoolman’s hat, but I think honesty bids me acknowledge that you are here for purposes besides being granted such an honorific. For political experience and for your health, I mean. You have had some of that experience. Your health has been worse this month than anything described to me before. So my duty might be to advise that the experiment be ended and your royal personage be kept close to the capital once more.”

Elfred took an uncomfortably deep breath with his not-yet-recovered lungs. “It might be. Or it might not?”

Welsten’s hand brushed absently against his scar. “I have a bad habit of bargaining with the heavens when I make my prayers. As a loyal servant of the emperor and council it was my duty to pray for your recovery, and at the worst of the fever I thought it unlikely you would live. So it seemed my duty to bargain for your life.”

“To bargain with …”

“With the only thing I have that’s worth anything — my honesty, my knowledge of the world. I promised the angels that if you lived I would offer you that.”

The prince laughed bitterly. “You mean you haven’t been honest with me so far? You’ve been prettying things up? Keeping me in the nursery? All sunshine and mountain daisies, that’s what you’ve given me?”

The soldier’s smile was extremely faint. “I have told you the truth about your situation here. I haven’t told you the truth about yourself.”

“My imperial self, you mean?”

“Certainly, your highness. Your imperial self. You are the first prince that I’ve served, but in the legions I’ve served with many a highborn lord — and they’re most often lords like yourself, second or third sons making their way in the shadow of an elder brother. I’ve watched them rise, I’ve watched them sometimes fall. And the ones that fall all have something in common.”

“Let me speculate,” Elfred said savagely. “They’re sickly and naïve and they drink too much.”

“No, they’re all clogged up with what you carry, what you just vented to me: A thick gas of self-pity.”

The prince coughed, and the cough became a painful gagging that disgorged a chunk of phlegm larger than any of the nuts. Wordlessly Welsten held out a ceramic bowl for him to spit into.

“Your mother died, your highness. Archangels keep her. My mother died when I was seven years old. I watched her wither day by day and sobbed myself to sleep night by night.”

“I’m sorry for your …”

“Your father mistreats you, denies you your proper due, send you off to foreign lands. I never knew my father, he ran off when my mother fell pregnant. All my childhood I prayed that he would come home, until one day I started praying that he’d died a horrible death, in a Maeonwy cookpot or on some torturer’s rack. Neither kind of prayer availed me much.

“After my mother died I went to my uncle. He was a farrier, good with horses, good with coin. He made me serve as his son’s servant, my loving cousin Colafen. When I failed them, and there were many more ways to fail them than there are nuts in your dish there, my uncle whipped me till I bled.”

“You’re sick, your body betrays you, you need warm weather to feel whole. That one I can’t quite match. The cut that gave me this scar almost killed me but I wasn’t down for long. I broke a leg but it set well enough. I’m nine and thirty, ancient for the legions, but my old ass of a body still serves me well enough. So there I tip a cap to you, your ill health is a special burden I don’t know.”

“I’m not asking for your pity …”

“But I’ve known men maimed in war, men sickened with fevers that relapse and haunt them year in and year out, men who have watched love ones take on sickness and die every kind of death. For all I know your sickliness will kill you in the end — as something kills us all in the end. But I also know that such things can be borne, and mastered, if you have strength and will enough.

“Am I not bearing it?”

“Again I promised the archangels my honesty, so I must say that you bear it badly, highness. You have been given much suffering but also much power, much grace, and you show no gratitude for what you have, only self-pity for what you lack. You’re wasting too many graces … and what does the scripture say? Judge not a man by where he begins or ends, but by how far he travels on the road the angels open for his feet to tread. I always appreciated that one, it’s the best way I know to make sense of how unequal things are in this mortal life, how much some men get and how little Mithriel and the rest of them lend to others. And to me it means there’s no worse sin than waste, no matter what your burdens otherwise.”

Elfred was angry but the anger was a weak thing, stirred together with other emotions — guilt, shame, and even a flickering sentiment that he recognized as gratitude. As for his brother in Brethony, the feeling of being addressed honestly, treated as man among other men rather than a fragile prince, brought him an unexpected feeling of refreshment.

He pushed hard on the chair’s arms, levered himself up. “All right,” he said. “All right. Since you have so much wisdom, Adjutant Welsten, tell your prince what wouldn’t be a waste of what the archangels have given me, all my many gifts. Should I go back home and — what? Demand a seat on my father’s council? Should I refuse all worldly power and seek first the heavenly kingdom?”

“I think you’re a bit of a distance from being ready to wield any imperial power,” the older man said, “and an even greater distance from blessedness of any sort. You are, however, in a larger and more worldly city than any that your imperial family rules, and thus far you’ve availed yourself mostly of the pleasures of its great palaces and houses. There might be more of an education awaiting you outside the Con Ivara than within.”

Elfred thought vaguely of the Histories, of Commodian the Just living as a beggar to better grasp his duties as a king. “You mean, you think I should go out and live … as a commoner?”

Welsten laughed. “I’m not such a fool as to give that advice, highness. I said I was sworn to serve emperor and council, and I can interpret that oath flexibly … but if the little birds of Antiala sent word to the Lord of Secretariat that you had disappeared into the slums I think the council would reasonably mark me down as an oathbreaker.”

The soldier cast a glance into a far corner of the room, where a table held the weight of several untouched books. “Honesty, I’m to give you. So I’ll be even more honest and say that I have my own interest here, that after two score years in the cold north I’m quite happy to sojourn in this city; you are not the only one who has found pleasures in its streets.”

“But if we are both to stay here for some years longer, as I think we might, I was thinking that you might embrace the actual letter of your exile, and experience this great city for a little while as a prince who lives – well, not as a commoner, but as a student.”

So the third and longest stage of his Antialan sojourn began. They left the Con Ivara rented rooms in the city — these very rooms, looking down on the Plaza of the Pump, an entire floor comprising Elfred’s large apartment and another one where Welsten and his men set up camp. And instead of just accepting a new reading from his tutor every month and letting the words of some tedious historian lull him off to sleep for a few nights, he had asked the schoolman — a pale, pinched-looking character with a thin beard and a long pipe — to recommend a set of lectures that he might profitably attend.

The first few were mostly tedious – lectures in the history of Mandoran expansion, a version of his readings enlivened not at all by the scritching sounds of two dozen robed students taking notes. But then came the warm firstday when he found himself alone — well, not exactly alone, he was shadowed as ever by one of Welsten’s men, a heavy soldier named Osmund with a hangdog air — high in the galleries above a rostrum, where a celebrated schoolman was lecturing sonorously on the history of the Magi, their great feats and eventual disappearance.

This was old Ursilon, who in his youth had studied with the gray priests in the Zakkad, the famous Zadkielan Academy in Nevus Albina, and whose great treatises were still read in the great schools of the south. Or so Elfred would learn later; at this point all he had was the scrawled note from his own tutor, Ursilon on The True and False Theorems of Magic, with the time and location noted underneath. And a headache, and a sense of mild confusion about why there were so many students crowded in the benches around the dais, why there was a current of energy running through the hall that seemed entirely unrelated to the schoolman’s disquisition.

To the prince’s ears the lecture offered little more than a feastday sermon’s worth of scriptural quotations adorning an argument that seemed tediously pious, all about magic being a gift from the archangels, not something that could be learned or practiced absent a heavenly gift …

“I know you. Your highness.”

Did he know the young man who had manifested himself on a bench just below him, inclining upward toward him with a friendly smile, dark hair, a mustache with waxed tips and the season’s fashionable stubble up his cheeks? Maybe a hanger-on from the blues, some minor lordling with whom Elfred had shared drinks on some of his lost nights? Or maybe there was a family resemblance to someone … maybe to the Count of Strabez, on whose vast suburban estate the prince of Narsil had spent a long Midsummer’s Eve …?

“The prince of the great northern empire,” the youthful student said, softly but loud enough, still smiling. “I heard you were attending lectures now, but you must have a real taste for the action to be here today.”

“A taste for the what?” Elfred said, instead of asking for a name.

“Ah, you don’t know? You don’t know about the clubs?” A significant glance down below them, to the stirring groups around the droning schoolman. “Here by accident? Good, good: But of course there are no accidents, are there?”

“I don’t … I’m sorry, I don’t think …”

“Viz. Viz! Vizalaga.” The young man was snapping his fingers now, toward a clutch of students, several of them women, sitting just a little further down below them. The women in the University were a mystery to Elfred — there was a special women’s college, he knew that much, but all its students were sisters from the reds and greens and grays, studying a circumscribed curriculum suited to their respective orders’ work. There was supposed to be no admission for women otherwise, and yet you saw them here and there, always in distinctive robes and head coverings, and when he had asked his tutor about it once the old scholar had said something he didn’t understand, some word in Mandoran, and he had never asked again.

Now one of them was looking at him, lifting her skirts to clamber up over to their spot, and her skin was dark, the earthy brown of Azania, and she had the darkest eyes and a smile as white as mountain snow.

“Viz, it’s the prince of Narsil. The pale prince of the snows, come to see the show.”

“Your highness,” Vizalaga said, with a half-curtsy, half-bow. “The most auspicious sign yet! But I must ask — are you a Technical or one of us?”

Her accent, low voice and rolling consonants, was the first of its kind that he had heard, and he had no idea what she was talking about. “One of you? Who are you?”

She looked at the young man, who grinned back at her. “We’re the future, Prince Elfred of Narsil,” he said. “The bright dawn after too much dark.”

“It’s coming now,” one of the nearby clutch of students hissed up at them. “Hush your gab.”

They hushed. Below Ursilon’s voice was rising toward a peroration –

“… a heretical falsehood that the greatest of the Magi, were they to rise from their holy sleep to stand before us now, would assuredly anathematize. The chasm between the power they wielded and the incantations and cantrips that go by the name magic among presumptuous mortals is as fixed and absolute as the chasm between angel and mortal itself. The gift of the archangels, given to just a few glorious cooperators for a time, has plainly been withdrawn and cannot be reclaimed by mere mortal effort. Attempts to do so are impious where they are not blasphemous, and all works of power claimed for such … hermetic magic can have only two sources: The evil of fraud in most cases, and in a few perhaps the greater evil of consortion with the Damned …”

“Doctor Ursilon!” It was a youthful bellowing voice, hale and friendly, from somewhere in the pack. “Doctor Ursilon, is it not the case that the Archmage Trismegon performed his greatest works despite the clear judgment of a tribunal pronouncing him a heretic? How are we to square those achievements with the claim that magical power flows as a pure angelic gift …?”

Another voice, the speaker hidden, the tones nasal and officious – “These are questions for a tutorial not a lecture, the doctor is not to be interrupted …”

Ursilon waved a hand. “I can see that our students are feeling rebellious but authority need not fear such easy questions. Plainly angelic gifts are not withdrawn simply because the gifted fall into some theological error, anymore than natural endowments of the body or mind are withdrawn from heretics …”

“Doctor Ursilon!” A different student, a southern accent. “Is it not the case that Archmage Esmegal was notorious for keeping harems in ports outside the High King’s rule? Is it not the case that he was reputed to use magic to bind women to his perversions …”

“Angelic gifts need not be withdrawn from sinners either, and those are rumors only, with no foundation in reputable history! In the Histories it is clear enough that the great works of magic can only be undertaken in the service of the High Kings and the holy revelation …”

“Doctor Ursilon! Surely you must concede that the thaumaturges of El Abbad worked some kind of great magick in the last days of Arabbasyn Wars, else how could the fleet of Vessalion have been …”

“I concede no such thing! The Histories are a sure guide to …”

“Doctor Ursilon!” This voice was louder, aristocratic, from a knot in the crowd where many of the students wore red and gold. “Is it not in fact the case that both the thaumaturgy of Arrabas and the great works of our Magi are in fact the fruit of technical manipulation of the deep elementals of existence, imputed to supernatural powers to conceal the secrets of craftsmanship passed down by their guilds from the most ancient …”

The rest of the intervention was lost in a chorus of boos and shouts — heresy! show us your inventions, then! To the river with the Technicals! — and a wider stirring in the crowd around the rostrum that sent Ursilon back a step or two. Elfred saw him glance left and right, into the alcoves of the hall, and then seemingly gather himself and speak over the rising tumult.

“There is no evidence, you absolute child, not a shred of evidence, for this mad view of what was wrought, what you can see wrought even now, rising at Magebridge, in the walls of Nevus Albina, in the Great Canal where today a thousand ships will pass, in all of Mandor, in the Testing itself …”

But at the Testing the noise of the students, which had died a bit, rose anew —

“Doctor Ursilon is it not the case that the red priests keep the Testing, that the magic is a farce …”

Heresy!

“Doctor Ursilon does not every High King who passes the Testing prove their own personal magical ability …”

To hell with the Hermetics!

“Doctor Ursilon is not the case that beneath the doors of the Testing lies a machine of such artifice as to …”

Down with the Technicals!

“Doctor Ursilon what of Doctor Velegra’s claim that parts of the Book of Magi has no historical foundation, and the Book of Law encodes plans for machines …”

“Fevered madness!” the schoolman roared. “He has been stripped of his cap …”

“Doctor Ursilon what of the Prophecies? What of the suggestion in the seventeenth verse that all magic …”

If the mention of the Testing had brought the hall to a boil, with the mention of the Prophecies everything spilled over — the end of the question was swallowed by a general tumult, there was a surge of students toward the rostrum, some angry shoving between differently-colored knots of young men, and Elfred looked about him and realized that the young man and the Azanian girl had vanished, their friends with them, pulled down into the scrum —

Fuck the Hermetics!

To the river with the Technicals!

Heretics and liars!

— and now Ursilon had fallen back, his hands flapping, and a huge golden-bearded young man in a deep blue robe had hoisted himself up above the crowd, balancing where the schoolman had been standing, bellowing something about an age of wonders, an age of wonders can be ours …

— and then from the shadows into the melee there came suddenly men in red tunics and leather jerkins, men with clubs, men Elfred had seen around the University district but never thought much about, guards for someone he assumed, but they seemed to have moved at Ursilon’s direction, surging into the crowd, laying about them eagerly. The students fighting one another seemed to suddenly find common cause against the newscomers, but other students fell backward, and as the clubs rose and fell they began to stream up into the galleries, some of them cursing the enforcers, some cursing one another, but many others still shouting and laughing as though it were all the greatest lark imaginable …

Elfred was caught up in this exodus, pulled away from Osmund whom he saw struggling toward him through the press, pulled up to the exit and then down the spiraling staircase to the building’s entry hall, all high windows and scholastic statues, where the surge of students met a larger group of men with clubs coming through the doors to the outside, and behind them was a tall thin figure in a reverend father’s stole, red for the Raphielites, the inquisitors, and his face blazed with something like satisfaction —

— a memory from a languid, wine-soaked evening a year earlier, a drawling comment from one of the more intellectually-inclined of his aristocratic companions: you know, the red priests are just itching for a chance to impose a visitation on the University …

— and then the swirl of students, falling back from the new threat, carried Elfred with them through a side door, down more steps and out into a courtyard, into springtime dusk, white blossoms in the air, and as the students scattered toward the different archways someone pulled at Elfred’s sleeve.

Brown eyes in a brown face, impish smile, robe askew, cleavage, a spiced scent, a gathering of students behind her.

“Great fun, wasn’t it?” Vizalaga said to him. “Where are you running to now, your highness?”

There was no Osmund to be seen, no lecture anymore, no obligation whatsoever.

“Where should I run to?” he said. “And you didn’t tell me who you” — he gestured at the panting gaggle — “who all of you are.”

She giggled lightly. “We’re the seekers after hermetic wisdom, silly. Scourges of orthodoxy, enemies of technique. And you should run with us, Prince of Narsil, if you want know the truth.”

“The truth about what?” he said, loudly because there was a burst of shouting and a noise from of broken glass somewhere up above.

“About what? Why, about everything! But about magic most of all.”

Now that wild spring day was two years behind him. Two years of actual study, of steady surprise at finding that the books that he and Padrec had disdained could be interesting, illuminating, even intoxicating if read in the right spirit, with the right friends, for his own purposes rather than out of princely obligation. Two years of courteous, careful correspondence with his sister and occasionally his father, designed to minimize his family’s interest in his situation and pre-empt any summons home. Two years without balls or revels, without a single visit back to the Con Ivara, with only the most perfunctory appearances at Restimar’s court. Two years of almost paternal satisfaction from Welsten, watching his young charge become something other than a wastrel — satisfaction that Elfred was careful not to disturb with a complete accounting of what had taken the place of the nobility’s revels and rivalries in his thoughts.

Two years of nights like the prior evening, whose residue still lingered in his chambers when he turned and left the view of the plaza, the washerwomen and the pump, and closing the door looked about his sitting room, at the mess that waited for a servant’s attention, once he was ready to summon one and disturb his early-morning thoughts.

Candles burned to stumps. Tin cups sticky, a cask spiked and empty. Cushions scattered off the divans to make a dozen or seats. A waterpipe abandoned in a corner, the sent of fruited tabac still heavy in the room. Disarray that would have been familiar enough to the aristocrats with whom he had once caroused … but those young swells would have been startled to see it combined with all the other materials of the evening, the stacks of books, the sheaves of parchment on the table, the scrolls and codices jumbled on the floor.

And one paper was new that morning, delivered by Welsten shortly after sunrise, the knock coming early enough that Elfred had cursed the noise and then braced himself when he found the adjutant at the door —

— who is dead this time?

— not a death, highness, a marriage

— and now he picked up the letter, this time the hand of Arellwen sending news, with an added request that was not exactly a summons, Welsten didn’t think it counted as a summons, but it was surely about as close as you could get. And perhaps an explicit summons would be forthcoming if he declined the implicit one, because the news was strange enough that surely someone in Rendale would want the missing prince of Narsil back again, his sister would want him (you did not even tell me she was sick), his father would want him, Padrec would want him, and what did Padrec think of this, what logic lay behind this, what was his father thinking?

The answers lay back north, back home, in Rendale, on Winter’s Eve the letter said, Winter’s Eve she would be sealed, the cold north, the frost, the mountains, Winter’s Eve ….

A date of great power, he heard his friend Lomaz say, that golden mane aglow and the deep voice rolling, and he remembered their efforts the prior winter, the feeling of something almost happening, something just out of reach beyond the veil, the smoke from all their candles, the writing on the floor, the things that Welsten didn’t know about, that Elfred kept out of his own apartments, that happened in other houses, other rooms, with his guards waiting unknowing down or up the stairs.

Did he want to be back in Rendale for the next day of power, or the one after that? To return to a realm where his title mattered officially but conferred no potency, and abandon a quest that might be the making of him? To return for whatever purpose his father or the council intended for him, whatever political duties and marriage of state awaited him, and abandon everything he had gained for himself here?

His pacing had brought him to his bedroom door, which he had left half open when he came out to answer Welsten’s knock. Inside the room the curtains were still drawn but the bed hangings were pulled back, the blankets were tangled at the foot, a single glass lay discarded on carpet, and a long brown leg stretched out from the midst of finely-patterned sheets.

He heard her voice, thick with sleep, asking him to come back, come back to our bed, and then behind Viza’s drowsy enticement he heard his sister’s voice, placating and condescending amid the drumming northern rain, listing diplomats to salve his wounded heart –

Nessorian the Peacemaker, Ornvinn the Crafty …

“Elfred the Mage,” he said aloud. “Why not. Why not?”

The woman on the bed stretched luxuriantly and called for him again, and the younger prince of Narsil crumpled Arellwen’s letter in his fist.