He was silent.
She added, “We’re safe now. Thanks to you.”
He glanced back over his shoulder at Victor’s tree, its two halves now absurdly unbalanced. The sun shone between its branches, making Simon squint.
His mother said, “I just hope now you’ll be happy.” She began to walk away.
He called after her, “What does that mean?”
She paused and looked at him, then at the grave marker. “You know, Simon, that dreadful girl always had a most unwholesome influence on you. That’s all.”
He said slowly, “Mother, I have a terrible intuition that much of what has transpired of late has done so according to some design of yours.”
“Of mine, dear?” She laughed. “Oh Simon, you always were such a brooding, mistrustful child. I blame myself. Silly, I know.”
She turned away again. He was about to say more when there came a horrendous creaking noise that filled the valley. As the Archimagus family watched, aghast, Victor’s tree began to list to the right, from the weight of so many Franklin branches. Then the tree toppled, slamming to the ground, dashing those branches to pieces and raising up a massive plume of dust that could be seen for miles.
Simon Archimagus galloped his horse along a moonlit ridge. He’d been going on more and more of these solitary rides lately. He liked the calm, the peace. When his horse ran, its hoofbeats and the wind sometimes drowned out his thoughts, for a time.
Finally he rode back to his tree — the tree he’d thought to one day share with Meredith and the children they would have together. Sometimes, on nights like this, as his horse sprinted through the dark, reality seemed less certain, and he would imagine that it had all been a mistake, that she’d survived somehow, secretly, and would come to him. Or that their duel had been just a terrible nightmare, and that his dreams of a life with her were the true state of things.
He passed through the gate, beneath the portcullis of thorn branches, and into the stables.
He made his way up the staircase.
“Dad!” called a boy’s voice. “Dad!”
Simon wandered into the kitchen. A blond boy poked his head through the door and said, “Oh, hi Simon. Have you seen my dad?”
“No,” Simon said. “I just got back. Is something wrong?”
The boy scowled. “Jessica took my horse and she won’t give it back.”
“Your… horse?”
“My toy horse,” the boy said. “Dad gave it to me, and I told her not to touch it, but she took it and now she won’t give it back, even though it’s mine.”
Simon said, “Well, maybe you should just—”
“I should kill her,” said the boy, without irony. “Like you killed that evil witch Meredith.”
Simon stared. “Look, Brian—”
“I’m Marcus,” the boy said.
“Marcus.” Simon sighed. “Let’s go find your dad, okay?”
The boy trailed Simon through halls and up stairs. Books and toys were scattered about. Sometimes children barrelled past, heedless.
Simon found the adults up at the top of the tree, lounging on the balcony. Bernard was there, and Elizabeth, and Simon’s other brothers, and a few other relatives. It’s only temporary, Bernard had promised, just until we can find someplace else to live. But they showed no signs of moving on, and had even begun hinting to Simon that he should command his tree to grow larger, to better accommodate the children.
Simon’s mother stepped from the shadows, holding a glass of wine. She beamed at all her sons, together under one roof again, at last.
“Oh, Simon. There you are,” she said brightly. “Welcome home.”
Susanna Clarke is the best-selling author of the novel Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, which won the Hugo, Locus, Mythopoeic, and World Fantasy awards. She has also written several short stories, which have appeared in The New York Times, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and on the BBC’s 7th Dimension radio program, as well as in anthologies Starlight (Vols. 1–3); The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror; Black Swan, White Raven; Black Heart, Ivory Bones; and Sandman: The Book of Dreams. Most of these tales have been collected in The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories. Clarke currently resides in Cambridge with her partner, fellow writer Colin Greenland.
It’s good to be the king. You’ve got it all — castles, servants, feasts, horses, clothes, jewels, and power. Power most of all. You command armies, your word is law, and everyone kneels and calls you “your majesty.” It’s wonderful.
Wizards have power too, and if you’re the most powerful sorcerer in the land, someone who can transform a pig into fish with a wave of your hand, well, that’s a pretty darned good place to be as well. So who’s more powerful? The king or a wizard?
And what if the king of the nation and the most powerful wizard in the realm are one and the same person? Wow, now that’s power. Nobody can stand against you, right?
Well, before you get too cocky it’s always good to remember that no matter how lofty your position may seem, there are always greater powers out there. Even a wizard lord must bow before the hosts of heaven, and all the powers of a sorcerer king may prove futile against the power of pure pig-headed stubbornness. (And the humble hero of our next tale is very cantankerous and very, very stubborn.) Wizards of the world take warning.
John Uskglass and the Cumbrian Charcoal Burner
Susanna Clarke
This retelling of a popular Northern English folktale is taken from A Child’s History of the Raven King by John Waterbury, Lord Portishead. It bears similarities to other old stories in which a great ruler is outwitted by one of his humblest subjects and, because of this, many scholars have argued that it has no historical basis.
Many summers ago in a clearing in a wood in Cumbria there lived a Charcoal Burner. He was a very poor man. His clothes were ragged and he was generally sooty and dirty. He had no wife or children, and his only companion was a small pig called Blakeman. Most of the time he stayed in the clearing which contained just two things: an earth-covered stack of smouldering charcoal and a but built of sticks and pieces of turf. But in spite of all this he was a cheerful soul — as before unless crossed in any way.
One bright summer’s morning a stag ran into the clearing. After the stag came a large pack of hunting dogs, and after the dogs came a crowd of horsemen with bows and arrows. For some moments nothing could be seen but a great confusion of baying dogs, sounding horns and thundering hooves. Then, as quickly as they had come, the huntsmen disappeared among the trees at the far end of the clearing — all but one man.
The Charcoal Burner looked around. His grass was churned to mud; not a stick of his but remained standing; and his neat stack of charcoal was half-dismantled and fires were bursting forth from it. In a blaze of fury he turned upon the remaining huntsman and began to heap upon the man’s head every insult he had ever heard.
But the huntsman had problems of his own. The reason that he had not ridden off with the others was that Blakeman was running, this way and that, beneath his horse’s hooves, squealing all the while. Try as he might, the huntsman could not get free of him. The huntsman was very finely dressed in black, with boots of soft black leather and a jewelled harness. He was in fact John Uskglass (otherwise called the Raven King), King of Northern England and parts of Faerie, and the greatest magician that ever lived. But the Charcoal Burner (whose knowledge of events outside the woodland clearing was very imperfect) guessed nothing of this. He only knew that the man would not answer him and this infuriated him more than ever. “Say something!” he cried.