Magician by K.L. Noone
Chapter 13
Back at the Hall, at the fireside desk that was not the throne, King Ardan welcomed news of some restored lands and food stores with relief. And with wry amusement. “One day you’ve been here, and you’ve rescued us, what, three times over? Not that I don’t believe you. It’s just hard, realizing we’re in a legend, now.”
“It’s what he does,” Gareth said, protective. He hadn’t let go of Lorre’s hand. “He saves people.”
“I absolutely do not,” Lorre said. “Maybe sometimes. Once upon a time, and I do mean once, or twice. If I thought saving them would be worthwhile. The canyons down in Penth ended up a different shape, two hundred years ago, because I was annoyed with their Chief Minister.”
Dan asked, “Was she that annoying, then?”
“Maybe not. I was in a prickly mood and she tried to bargain with me about a proposed site for a magician’s tower. She wanted me to come stand at her side during some trade negotiations, so it’d look like she had my support. I don’t like being used as a symbol.” He looked into the leaping fire, thoughtfully. Something’d snagged his attention, a bit of flotsam amid the net of his magic.
“So,” Dan summarized, “you made her canyons a symbol, instead.”
“I didn’t say I was proud of it.” Gareth’s brother, despite relative youth, had a decent understanding of politics. He would, Lorre supposed: they’d’ve done a lot of growing up fast, these past months.
The ancestral throne, polished but unoccupied, sat unremarked in the background. It did not comment about Dan’s choices. The weather’d been cold enough—magically so—that the king opting for a cozy chair and desk by the big fireplace also made sense, practically speaking, of course.
Gareth poked the fire, no doubt assuming Lorre wanted more heat. Wind whipped sheets of rain across windowpanes and wood and stone; the large doors of the Hall were closed against the weather, though anyone could still come in. No locks nor bars in place. “You never got your tower.”
“No, but by then I didn’t care.” Something had moved, stirred, woken. He touched the strands of his shield-net, asking.
“Didn’t you?” Gareth nodded at the fire, satisfied. He’d also picked up Lorre’s boots from the mud, before they’d come back to the Hall; Lorre hadn’t put them on yet, though Gareth’s eyes were clearly considering a comment about bare toes and cold flagstone floors. “You were looking for someplace to settle.”
“I liked the rocks. The colors and the arches and the wind and the sky. I’m not sure it had anything to do with the people.”
“You’d’ve been close to them, though. Close enough that they might come to see you. Or you could see them.”
“So that I could tell them what to do and what was best for them. I did a lot of that. I think…I think you’re likely to see your bandits sooner, rather than later. The cold’s on the move.”
Dan’s gaze sharpened. “How soon?”
“They’ll have to ride down…I’d say an hour or so. Maybe two.” He touched his guardian web again, brushed power and reassurance into it: the cold would not harm it or suck it away. “Don’t bother sending out any patrols or guards.”
“We learned not to. After we lost—” Dan, their king, bit off that sentence; after a second he exhaled. “After we lost people. What will you do?”
“Stop them, I would think.” Lorre plucked a blank piece of paper from the king’s tidy desk, fiddled with it, turned it into a folded frog—not with magic, only needing something to do with his hands—and then did use the tiniest drop of power to make it hop and jump. “Unless for some reason you don’t want me to.”
“Of course we want that. I’ll send someone out to make an announcement—everyone should stay home and indoors and safe—” He was opening a door, looking around, finding household staff engaged in replacing old candles with new, giving directions about going down to the tavern and letting everyone know. He came back, running hands through his hair. “What do you need from us?”
Gareth, who’d been quiet—letting his brother talk—said gently, “Lorre meant, what do you want to do about them? The bandits. And…Uncle Osric.”
Dan flinched as if struck.
Lorre made his stationery frog hop up onto the king’s inkwell. “Gareth suggested I not explode anyone, so there’s that.”
“I don’t know,” Dan said. “I truly don’t. I never thought…I didn’t know he hated us so much. And even if he does, how could he hurt his own people…the Marches…he’s family.” Heartbreak became the whole world, in that sentence: so large and anguished that it ripped floors and curtains away and left everyone rudderless in the storm.
Gareth’s voice was a steadying hand for his older brother. “Then we’ll deal with him. As family. I’d like to talk to him. To know why. And I don’t want anyone else to die. But…” He tossed a crooked smile Lorre’s way. “We’ve got the world’s best magician on our side.”
Lorre snorted. The fire flared.
Dan sighed. “We’ll cross that river when we come to it, then. Lorre, did you need anything?”
Lorre very nearly said yes, your brother in my bed, thanks, because it was true and he could never resist a good line, but now probably wasn’t the time. “Not as such, no. Just stay out of my way.”
“You should eat something,” Gareth said firmly, and went over and took the last two scones from the tea-tray on Dan’s desk. “Start with this, and I’ll make tea and have someone send up sandwiches.”
“What part of stay out of my way involves you finding sandwiches for me?”
“The part when you said it’d be at least an hour, and I’m not leaving you anyway, so don’t argue.” Gareth waved a plate at him, with scones and clotted cream and jam. Lorre took it automatically, and then rethought his own authority as the oldest and most powerful person in the room. Theoretically, at least.
He said, “Stubborn as your goats, and speaking of, I should do something about that…”
Still holding the plate, he reached out—invisibly, silently—and found pastures, grazing grounds, hills: small distant lives in the path of the icicle-pointed rushing presence. The white bitter cloud swirled and pulsed around a knot of intentions, minds, emotions: bandits on horseback, heading through the hills.
Lorre, who was to some extent the hills and the grass and even the goats, built deep iridescent reservoirs of power into his wards. Pulled up strength and light and the rhythm of time and the ages of the Mountain Marches, the bedrock of the North. The cold, as it passed, would find no purchase: it would slide and slip and glide away like angry water over glass. The shaggy goats and woolly cows would not be disturbed; they would not even be seen, because the glass showed nothing. Built of emotion and familiarity and self, Lorre’s wards would deflect anyone intending to harm that self.
It wasn’t the easiest sort of magic—more actively holding barricades in place, now, against a moving pressure—but it was a challenge. It’d been some time since he’d had a challenge. He did not mind it.
Besides, Gareth would be happy.
He focused back on the room, the firelight, the stones under his bare feet; he had Gareth at his side, and a plate of scones in one hand because he’d forgotten to reject it. He said, “I’m protecting everything in their path. But it’ll be easier—I’ll have less of that to do—if I go out to meet them.”
King Ardan, after a split-second silence, said, “You want to ride out. Not us, not our patrols.” It was a question: the question of a king who refused to sacrifice another person.
Gareth’s expression held a shock of emotion, unconcealed. He might as well have said it again, aloud: I don’t want to lose you.
Lorre said to him, to them both, “Well, I wasn’t planning to ride,” and took a bite of Dan’s second-to-last scone. “Pumpkin and ginger? Not bad. No, I thought I’d walk. More or less magically. Until I ended up in their path. Then we can do some talking.”
“You’re not going alone,” Gareth said.
“You can’t fight magic, and I don’t want to be responsible for anyone else in the line of fire. Or icicles, in this case. You brought me here to do this; let me do it.”
“I asked you for help,” Gareth argued. “Not to do it all yourself. And you might need someone watching your back. Or an anchor.”
Dan glanced from his brother to Lorre, and said, “Both of you be careful, when you go. I’m not losing either of you.”
“He’s not going,” Lorre said.
Gareth said, “You said you wouldn’t leave me.”
“Well.” Dan picked up a scone-crumb from the serving tray and popped it into his mouth. “That’s a fun development. Gareth…”
“Everything you’re going to say, he’s already thought of,” Gareth answered, more sharply than Lorre had heard from him before; unusual, from Dan’s surprise. “I know what both of you think. I’m not letting you go without me, Lorre. I’ll follow you if I have to.”
“You don’t know what I think,” Lorre said. “Don’t think you do.”
“You said you didn’t want to be cruel.”
That one hurt. Lorre had been trying to keep his prince safe, to not harm anyone, to do the right thing—
He shot back, “And I’ve had more practice at it than you. Don’t try. You didn’t even want to be the hero, in any case; you wanted to be ordinary. Human. You are. I’m not. Stay here.”
Gareth didn’t visibly flinch, but the stillness gave his pain away: a woodland animal, bleeding, trying not to move. He didn’t say anything.
Dan cleared his throat. “If you guessed about an hour, before…”
“Yes,” Lorre said. “I’m going.”
Gareth swallowed. Hard. Straightened his shoulders. “So am I.”
Lorre stared at him.
Gareth didn’t back down. “You can keep on trying to hurt me if you want. But you might need me. You did, earlier. And it’s my people, my land, and my uncle you’re facing. And I can’t do nothing, if there’s a chance I can help. So I’m coming with you.”
Lorre shut his eyes, breathed in, breathed out. Opened them. Set the scone-plate down, realized he’d set it on obliging air, shoved it onto the desk. “I could stop you.”
This time Gareth just looked at him.
“Fine. Fine. I’ll try to keep you safe. I’ll worry about you and ice-spears and bandit arrows while protecting your goats and dealing with their magician. If it’ll make you happy. We’re going now, though.”
“Now?” Dan said.
Gareth said, “Lorre, I—”
Lorre put a hand on his wrist, reached out for the threads of the universe, caught the harp-strings of melody and life and change and mountain passes in his other hand. Yanked. Hard.
He was almost instantly sorry. He hadn’t focused properly, and he needed to, in order to move these specific knots of life from here to there, in the larger swirling sliding ball of wild radiant threads. All his edges wanted to blur and scatter and fly off down various tracks, darting over there and up and under, chasing new shapes and possibilities like butterflies in a kaleidoscope, everything all at once and all himself and all too easy—
He did not have a destination in mind. He did not have a sensation, a sense, a self—because he was everything all at once, the stars and the soil and the taste of rain and the dripping green wetness of leaves—
But he was himself. He knew how to do this. And every bit of his familiar old arrogance stood up and laughed in the face of broken-mirror vertiginous dangerous magic, and said, yes, but I’m ME; do you think I’d ever get lost, being me?
He also had Gareth’s wrist under his fingertips. And that old arrogance collided squarely with shocked newfound protectiveness and also presence.
He’d brought Gareth along, and Gareth was in danger now because of him. If Lorre got lost or abandoned him, his prince would stay here forever, trapped in the space between spaces.
Gareth’s arm felt real: the pulse-beat spoke to Lorre’s fingertips, which meant he had fingertips, which meant his body was real too.
He’d had Gareth’s arms around him. He knew how he felt when Gareth touched him, kissed him, wanted him, warmed his hands. He knew the feeling of Gareth inside and out.
And he was that good, and he was that arrogant, and so: he should get to work.
He couldn’t draw a breath, because no breaths existed here. He could picture where and what he wanted: a hard-packed mountain road, narrow and frost-rimmed, winding between trees. He had not been there in decades, but he had memory, his own and the land’s; he reached out, and followed a trace of recognition in earth and footfalls and seasons, bedrock remaining through time.
He wove them all together, and found the place he’d meant to land: outside the town, at a curve along the road, a few moments in advance of swirling coiling tendrils of ice. He could see it, coming into focus.
He held onto Gareth—not desperately, because he wasn’t desperate—and thought about Gareth, and guarded Gareth: that distinctive glowing spark of Northern plaid and loyalty and courage and straightforward generosity. The person who’d once found him, when he’d been alone.
He took a step, and pulled Gareth along with him.
They fell out of the air into frosty pine-scented silence, onto the road. The rain had stopped: too cold for that, Lorre realized. He hastily shoved some heat out of himself and into the world; the world and Gareth would need it.
Speaking of his prince, Gareth was leaning over, breathing, one hand bracing himself on a knee; but he straightened as Lorre released his wrist. “That one felt…different.”
“It was. I…” Lorre swung away, not able to look, to see accusation. He stared blankly at trees. They offered no sympathy that he could see. “I shouldn’t’ve done that.”
“I don’t know what you did, so I can’t agree or argue with you.”
“I wasn’t focusing. I could have—I might’ve—I told you I’d hurt you!”
Gareth paused. Lorre still refused to look at him, and wondered in the silence what the pause was for. Checking for injuries? Doubting the decision to come along? Choosing words that didn’t express disgust or anger, because Gareth was kind at heart?
What Gareth finally said was, “Well, I seem to be all right, so…whatever you think you did, you didn’t.”
The air was growing thicker. Ominous. Vicious. Winter made solid. “We’ve got about two minutes.”
“Lorre,” Gareth said. “You didn’t hurt me. You know that, don’t you?”
“I shouldn’t’ve brought you.”
“But you did.”
Lorre felt his fingers tense: with fire and with futile angry love.
“Look at me?” Gareth tried. “Please.”
Lorre spun his way. “You are honestly, literally, the most stubborn person I’ve met in three hundred years.”
“I know you were trying to protect me,” Gareth said. “I know. I even understand, I think. It’s the same way I feel about—about my people. But I can’t lose you—I can’t lose anyone else. I need to at least be here. To know what happens, to know I’ve done everything I could. I need that. For me. Don’t tell me to leave you, because I—I can’t, Lorre, it’s you and it’s my family and everything I care about—”
He wasn’t shouting, but the need in his voice was. It screamed and bled and wept, because Gareth was a protector at heart, and had already lost too much.
Lorre knew about need. About the pull to do something, to answer a burning question, to be the person he knew himself to be, inside.
He’d been born of magic and passion, and he’d wanted to be someone who’d change the world. Gareth was human through and through. And, in the face of loss, wanted to be someone who could help.
He had no words, so he took two steps over and caught Gareth’s face in his hands and kissed his prince with everything in his heart, every ancient beat and helpless tangle of love and frustration and yearning and amazement at the depth of this magic.
Gareth kissed him back, equally deep and passionate and fierce with emotion. And then pulled back. “What—why—don’t think you can kiss me into not arguing!”
“No. Never. Not you.” He touched Gareth’s cheek. “Not in three hundred years. Or more. I wish I’d known you earlier. I might’ve not turned into a dragon. Or not dropped armies into ravines. I wish I’d been someone you deserve.”
Gareth’s mouth fell open. With disheveled hair and just-kissed lips, he looked young and delicious and astounded and wonderful, like hope, like new mornings and glowing sunsets full of stubborn light that refused to fade.
Wind howled around the curve of the road. Frost crackled and burst—and hit Lorre’s power, lacing the grass and the trees, golden as a shield. Denied and angry, the cold stampeded ahead: a wall of white, hiding shapes, pounding with the noises of hooves.
“I’m trying to say,” Lorre said, conversationally, “that I’m fairly certain I’m in love with you, not that I know anything at all about love, so take that however you want, and don’t feel you need to do anything about it; I wouldn’t, if I were you.” He glanced away from Gareth, at the screeching spiky snarl of ice and death and onslaught.
He took a step forward. He held up a hand. “Stay behind me.”
“We’re going to talk about this!” Gareth shouted at his back; and then the burning biting battering cold hit. And time ran out.