“I’m sorry, Magda,” he said, “I truly am. Please believe that this does not change the way we feel about you.”
Magda lifted the length of brown hair and stared at it. The hair didn’t really matter to her. What mattered was being judged by it, or by the lack of it, rather than by what she had made of herself. She knew that without the long hair she would likely no longer have standing to be heard before the council.
That was just the way it was.
What mattered most to her was that those whose causes she brought before the council would no longer have her voice to speak for them. That meant that there were creatures without an advocate who very well might die out and cease to exist.
That was what having her hair cut short meant to her, that she no longer had the standing needed to help those she had come not merely to respect, but to love.
Magda handed the severed hair back over her shoulder to Elder Cadell. “Have it placed where people will see it so they might know that order has been restored, that tradition and customs endure.”
“As you wish, Lady Searus.”
With her place in the world now corrected, the six councilmen finally left her alone to the gloomy room and her bleak thoughts.
Chapter 5
Warm summer air rising up the towering outer Keep wall and spilling over onto the rampart ruffled Magda’s shortened hair, pulling strands around in front of her face. As she made her way along the deserted rampart, she reached up and drew her hair back. It felt strange, foreign, to her touch now that it only just brushed her shoulders rather than going down to the small of her back.
A lot of people, women mostly, paid very close attention to the length of a woman’s hair because, while not always absolute, length was a fairly accurate indication of their relative social standing and thus their importance. Ingratiating oneself to the right person could bring benefits. Crossing the wrong person could bring trouble. Hair length was a valuable marker.
Being the wife of the First Wizard meant wearing her hair longer than most women. It also meant that many women with shorter hair often fawned over her. Magda never took such flattery seriously, but she tried to always be gracious about it. She knew it was not her, but her position, that drew the interest of most of them.
To Magda, having not been born noble, her long hair had merely been a way to open doors, to get an audience and be heard on matters important to her. She had cared about Baraccus, not how long she was allowed to grow her hair simply because she was married to him. While she had come to like the look of it on her, she didn’t attach worth to that which she had not earned.
Since her long hair had begun to be a part of her life for the year Baraccus had courted her and the two years since she had been married to him, she had thought that she might miss it.
She didn’t, really. She only missed him.
Her grand wedding to Baraccus seemed forever ago. She had been so young. She still was, she supposed.
With the long hair gone, in a way it felt as if a weight had been lifted from her shoulders in more ways than one. She no longer had a responsibility to live up to what others expected of her. She was herself again, her real self, not a person defined by an artificial mark of worth.
To an extent, she also felt a sense of liberation from her standing, from the need to act in a manner befitting her place as others saw it. Now, she had no place, no standing. She was in a way free of the prison of standing. But none of that mattered now, for far more important reasons than the length of her hair.
Baraccus had given her a new life because of what they meant to each other. Without him she had no life. Her standing didn’t really matter in that equation.
Reaching the right spot, the spot forever burned into her memory, Magda stepped up into the opening in the massive, crenellated outer Keep wall. She inched out toward the edge. Beyond the toes of her boots peeking out from under her skirts, the dark stone of the wall dropped away for thousands of feet. Below the foundation of the Keep, the cliff dropped even farther to the ledges and boulders below. Feathery tufts of clouds drifted along the cliff walls beneath her. It was a frightening, dizzying place to stand.
Magda felt small and insignificant up on the top edge of the towering wall. The wind at times was strong enough to threaten to lift her from her perch. She imagined that it might even carry her away like a leaf in the wind.
The beautiful city of Aydindril lay spread out below, flowing across rolling hills that spilled from the foot of the mountain. Green fields surrounded the city, and out beyond them lay dense forests. From its place high on the mountain, the monolithic Wizard’s Keep stood watch over the mother city sparkling like a jewel set in that verdant carpet.
Magda could see men leading horses and wagons as they returned from their work in the fields. Smoke rose from chimneys all across the valley as women prepared the evening meal for their families. Slow-moving crowds, visiting markets, shops, or going about their work, made their way through the tangled net of streets.
While she could see the activity, she heard none of the hooves of the horses, the rumble of wagons, the cry of street vendors. From this distance the lofty world up at the Keep was silent but for the calls of birds wheeling overhead and the sound of the wind over ramparts and around the towers.
Magda had always thought of the Keep, more than anything, as mute. Though hundreds of people lived and worked in the enormous stone fortress, went about their lives, raised families, were born, lived, and died there, the Keep itself witnessed it all in brooding silence. The dark presence of the place stoically watched centuries and lives come and go.
These massive battlements where she stood had watched her husband’s life end. This was the very spot where he had stood in the last precious moments of his life.
She thought, fleetingly, that she didn’t want to follow him, but the whispers from the back of her mind overwhelmed those doubts. What else was there for her?
Magda looked out at the world spread out far below, knowing that this was what he would have seen as he stood in this very place. She tried to imagine the thoughts he must have wrestled with in his last moments of life.
She wondered if he thought of her in those last moments, or if some terrible, weighty matter had taken even that from him.
She was sure that he must have been sad, heartbroken even, that he was about to leave her, that his life was about to be finished. It must have been agony.
Baraccus had loved life. She could not imagine him taking his life without a powerful reason.
Still, he had. That was all that mattered now. Everything had changed and there was no calling it back.
Her world had changed.
Her world had ended.
At the same time she felt shame for focusing so narrowly on her own world, her own life, her own loss. With the war raging, the world had ended for a great many people. The wives of the men Baraccus had sent to the Temple of the Winds still waited in silent misery, hoping their loved ones might return. Magda knew that they never would. Baraccus had told her so. Yet they still clung to the hope that those men could yet come home. Other women, the wives of men gone off to war, wailed in anguish when they received the terrible news that their men would not be returning. The corridors of the Keep often echoed with the forlorn cries of the women and children left behind.
Like Baraccus, Magda hated the war and the terrible toll it took on everyone. So many had already lost their lives. So many yet would. And still there was no end in sight. Why couldn’t they be left in peace? Why must there always be those seeking conquest or domination?
There were so many other women who had lost their husbands, fathers, brothers, sons. She was not alone in such suffering. She felt the heavy weight of shame for feeling so sorry for herself when others, too, were going through the same agony.