"I'll keep that in mind," she replied, turning her attention back to her page. After a moment, Skif took the hint; she heard him slip out of his chair, and leave the room.
But her mind wasn't on the words in front of her. Instead, she gave thought to how much Skifs observations mirrored her own.
This was too easy. There was no reason why the Queen should have agreed to this, much less the Circle and Council. The excuse of the magical attack on Bolton, the Skybolts' deeded border town, was just that; an excuse. She had checked back through the Chronicles of the past several years, and she had uncovered at least five other instances of magical attacks on Border villages, all of which looked to her as if they showed a weakening of the Border-protections. The records indicated no such panic reaction as she'd seen in the Council Chamber; rather, that there was a fairly standard way of responding. A team of Heralds and Healers would be sent to the site, the people would be aided and removed to somewhere safer, if that was their choice, then the incident was filed and forgotten.
Farther back than that had been Talia's encounter with Ancar, that had signaled the beginning of the conflicts with Hardorn. There had been long discussions about what to do, how to handle the attacks of mages; Elspeth remembered that perfectly well. And there had been some progress; the Collegium made a concerted effort, checking the Chronicles following Vanyel's time, to determine how Heralds without the Mage-Gift could counter magical attacks. Some solutions had been found, the appropriate people were briefed and trained-And that was all. The knowledge was part of the schooling in Gifts now, but there was no particular emphasis placed on it. Not the way there should have been, especially following Ancar's second attempt at conquest.
File and forget.
For that matter, there was even some evidence that Karse had been using magic, under the guise of "priestly powers." No one had ever followed up on that, not even when Kero had made a point of reminding the Council of it.
There had to be another reason for letting her go on this "quest." Especially since there were overtones in the Council meetings she attended of "the Brat is getting her way." It would have been obvious to anyone with half a mind and one ear that now that the initial excitement was over, they regretted giving her their permission to leave, even to as safe a destination as Bolthaven, deep in the heart of her uncle's peaceful kingdom.
Even the Heralds on the Council gave her the unmistakable feeling that they were not happy about this little excursion, and they'd gladly use any excuse to take their permission back.
But they didn't. Gwena had said repeatedly that they wouldn't. There was something going on that they weren't talking about. And it didn't take a genius to figure out that, whatever it was, the Companions, en masse, were hock-deep in it.
And did it have something to do with her growing resistance to this compulsion to forget magic, to avoid even thinking about it?
Once her suspicions were aroused, Elspeth had decided that, before she ran off into unknown territory, she was going to do a little research on the Herald-Mages. Not just to find out their strengths and weaknesses, nor to discover just what the limits and gradations of the "Mage-Gift" were, but to see just how extensive the apparent prohibition against magic was; how deeply rooted, and how long it had been going on.
And what she had learned was quite, quite fascinating. It dated from Vanyel's time, all right-but not exactly. To be precise, it dated from the time that Bard Stefen, then an old and solitary man, vanished without a trace.
In the Forest of Sorrows.
At least, that was Elspeth's guess. He was supposed to be in the company of some other young, unspecified Herald, on a kind of pilgrimage to the place where Vanyel died. He never arrived at his destination, yet no one reported his death. Granted, he had not yet achieved the kind of legendary status he had in Elspeth's time, but still, he was a prominent Bard, the author of hundreds of songs, epic rhymed tales and ballads, and the hero of a few of them himself. He was Vanyel's lifebonded lover, the last one to see him alive, and Vanyel did have the status of legend.
Someone would have said something if he had died-at the very least, there should have been an impressive Bardic funeral.
No mention, no funeral He simply dropped out of sight.
Nor was that all; even if he had vanished, someone should have noticed that he disappeared; surely searches should have been made for him.
But no one did notice, nor did anyone look for him.
He simply vanished without a trace, and no one paid any notice. And that-possibly even that precise moment-was when it became impossible to talk about magic, except in the historical sense. That was when the Chronicles stopped mentioning it; when songs stopped being written about it.
When encounters with it outside the borders of Valdemar-or, occasionally, just inside those borders-were forgotten within weeks.
Fortunately those encounters were usually benign, as when ambassadors from Valdemar would see the mages in the Court of Rethwellan performing feats to amuse, or ambassadors from outside of Valdemar would mention magic, and some of the things their kingdoms' mages could do. The Chronicler of the time would dutifully note it down-then promptly forget about it. So would the members of the Council-and the Heralds.
Did they attribute all of that to boasting and travelers' tales? Now I wonder if, when other people read the Chronicles over, do their eyes just skip across the relevant words as if they weren't even there?
It wouldn't surprise her. Elspeth herself had noticed whole pages seeming to blur in front of her eyes, so that she had to make a concerted effort to read every word. She had initially ascribed the effect to fatigue and the labor of reading the archaic script and faded inks, but now she wasn't so sure. It had gotten easier, the more she had read, but she wondered what would happen if she stopped reading for a while, then came back to it.
She had even found a report from Selenay's grandfather, back when he was plain old "Herald Roald," and the Heir, about his encounter with Kero's grandmother Kethry and her partner.
Tarma shena Tale'sedrin, a Shin'a'in Kal'enedral, sworn to the service of her Goddess, was plainly some kind of a priest. In fact, much to Roald's surprise, she had achieved a physical manifestation of her Goddess right before his eyes. Never having seen a Goddess, he was rather impressed.
So would I be!
He'd described the manifestation; the impossibly lovely young Shin'a'in woman, clothed as one of her own Swordsworn-but with strange eyes with neither pupil nor white; just the impression of an endless field of stars.
Brrr. I would probably have passed out.
He and Tarma had become quite firm friends after that; Roald's Companion approved of both the priest and her Goddess, which Roald had found vastly amusing. But if Tarma was a powerful priest, Kethry was just as clearly a talented and powerful mage. Roald had quite a bit to say about her; it was evident that he was quite smitten with her, and if it hadn't been for the fact that she was obviously just as smitten with the Rethwellan archivist they had rescued, he hinted that he might well have considered a try in that direction.