A Wizard In The Way
Christopher Stasheff
ISBN: 0-812-54168-5
1
Someone hammered on the back door of the hut. Mira turned from the cookpot over the hearth and opened it, instantly worried—who was ill now?
Little Obol stood there, panting, eight years old, eyes wide with alarm. “Run, Mira! There are soldiers coming toward your house, and one has a parchment in his fist!”
Mira’s heart lurched; dread weighted all her limbs. It had come at last. She gave the boy a sad smile. “There’s no sense in running, Obol. If the magician wants one of his people, we’ve no choice but to go to him.”
“You can flee!”
“Yes, to have his dogs sniff me out and his soldiers drag me back to him. No, I think I’d rather go with my head high and my clothes clean. But thank you, lad. Run along home, now—we don’t want them to know you’ve been telling tales.”
She bent and kissed his cheek. Obol blushed; he may have been only eight, but Mira was very pretty.
Too pretty for her own good, Mira thought with a sigh as she closed the door. By the time she was thirteen, it was clear that the pretty child was going to become a beautiful woman—but her parents had warned her that Magician Lord Roketh would command her to his bed if she were beautiful, and Mira suddenly understood why the prettiest girls in the village wept as they went to the castle with the soldiers. She had thought it would be a fine life, living in the lord’s keep to cook or clean instead of doing the same work in a peasant but all her life. Now, though, she understood why, when the girls came back to the village to buy food or cloth for their master, they seemed either timorous and fragile or hard and brazen. She vowed it would never happen to her and took pains to hide her beauty, tying her hair back in a severe bun and staying out in the sun so that her face would become tanned. She practiced looking spiritless and glum, only letting her natural cheerfulness bubble up at home.
It had worked well for years, but as she turned eighteen, even the dimmest eye could see how exquisite she had become, and her magician lord Roketh was anything but blind.
As were his soldiers. A fist pounded at the door. Quickly, Mira twisted her hair into a bun, secured it with a bone pin, then hurried to open the door, squinting against the sun. She didn’t need to, but anything that made her look less attractive would help.
Four of Roketh’s guards stood outside, grim in their leather and iron. “Mira, daughter of Howell?” their leader asked. “I-I am she.” Mira tried to make her voice sound gravelly. “You are summoned to Lord Roketh, maiden. You will present yourself at the castle tomorrow in your best skirt and blouse.”
“Yes … yes, sir.”
“We shall come to accompany you, maiden. Be ready.” With no more ceremony than that, the guard turned, barked a command to his fellows, and led them away.
Mira closed the door, trembling inside. She might be a maiden when she went to the castle, but only for a day. She wondered how unpleasant that taking would be, then remembered Roketh’s seamed old face, his glittering eye, the touch of cruelty in his smile as he rode through the village, and shuddered at the thought. She went to a curtain, lifted a corner, peered up at the castle that brooded over the town, and shuddered again. The gray stone pile was a fearsome place of sudden gouts of fire and crackling thunderbolts. Worse, Roketh himself was ugly and malicious, using his knowledge of healing to bribe and threaten, using his other magical powers to intimidate.
Mira remembered the neighbor who had not been able to pay his taxes one year because the labor Roketh demanded on his fields had left the family with no time to cultivate their own garden. The thatch of their cottage had burst into flame in the middle of the night. They had all come running out—they were all alive—but they’d had to watch everything they owned burn to the ground.
Then there was old Ethel, who had sworn a curse against Roketh when he had taken her daughter. Ethel’s cow had gone dry the next day. Her pig had sickened and died, and her hens had lost their feathers and ceased laying. The next year, of course, she had not been able to pay her taxes, either.
Those she had known of her own witness, but there were many other tales: a man who had refused to go out to Roketh’s fields because his wife was sick abed and their child too small to be left alone had seen his own garden wilt and die. Another had refused to let his daughter answer Roketh’s summons and had died of a strange and disfiguring ailment. Soldiers who displeased Roketh were likely to have their own weapons turn upon them. None in her village had ever been rousted from their pallets in the middle of the night by terrifying, groaning, sharp-fanged ghosts, but she had heard of many who had, if their masters were ghost leaders.
Mira knew her beauty would not last long if she dared defy Roketh. On the other hand, she had seen what a night spent with him had done to the other maidens who had been ordered to his bed, and when he finally sent them home, grown too old to interest him, they were drained of all enthusiasm, turned into dull-eyed, spiritless drudges. Any questions about what the magician had done to them evoked only cries of terror and floods of tears. Rumor said they woke screaming from nightmares.
What could Mira do? On the one hand, she was terrified at the thought of the ordeal the other maidens must have endured. On the other hand, she didn’t want her parents or family to have to suffer hauntings, night terrors, or madness from having tried to protect her.
There was one other choice. She would probably be captured and brought back in shame, but she had to risk it. The soldiers would not come until the next day, so that night, Mira slipped out the door and stole into the woods with a pack of travel rations.
The forest was gloomy and filled with terrifying sounds, but she dared not hide and wait for dawn—she must be as far away as possible before Roketh could learn she was missing and send his soldiers searching for her. She could not have fled during the day, of course, or the soldiers would have been on her trail immediately—but oh, the night was terrifying! Thoughts of wolves and bears made her steps drag and the occasional moan that might have come from a ghost sped her heels amazingly. Thus, now running, now creeping, Mira made her way through the lightless forest with her heart in her throat and a prayer on her lips.
The peasant paused to lean on his short handled hoe, gazing off into the distance, his stare so vacant it was hard to believe he was seeing anything. His legs were wrapped in rough cloth cross-gartered to hold it in place; his shoes were wooden. The man’s only other garment was a tunic of coarse cloth. His mouth lolled open, his forehead was low, his hair a black thatch.
Then a better-dressed man with boots and a sheepskin jacket, bearing a cudgel, came by and barked at the peasant. With a sigh, the man lowered his gaze again and set himself once more to chopping weeds.
Alea couldn’t hear his voice, of course—the picture had been taken from orbit, and though light may travel twenty thousand miles, sound waves have more limited range. She turned to Gar—well, Magnus, really, but she would always think of him as Gar—and said, “Bad enough, but I’ve seen worse. In fact, I’ve lived through worse.”
“So have I,” Gar agreed. “This planet can wait. You must have more extreme cases on file, Herkimer.”
“Of course, Magnus,” the ship’s computer answered. “How extreme would you wish?”
“The worst first.”
“The worst is thirty light-years distant, Magnus, and there are two lesser cases on the way.”
“If they’re lesser,” Alea said, “they don’t need us.”