Magician by K.L. Noone
Chapter 17
A lot of talking happened. That was, Lorre reflected, the part of epic heroic tales that generally didn’t make it into the story: negotiations and discussions and practicalities. Planning for the future, as it unrolled in grain shipments and bushels of apples.
The wind rattled tree-branches outside, but in an encouraging way. The hearth-fire crackled. Both large dogs flopped down on the braided rug, and in one case onto Will’s polished boot. Tea and Dan’s cinnamon-blackberry scones and a tower of sandwiches arrived and were consumed. Lorre listened to the world outside, and the world inside, sharing his attention with both.
Bemused Averenish guards had been told to go and enjoy themselves at the tavern or bookshop or Gareth’s favorite lake. They’d grumbled briefly, not wanting to not do their duty, but they’d given in to Will’s command and also common sense regarding multiple magicians and relative strength. They’d seemed to be getting along with the two spare bandits, or at least comparing sword grips and hilt styles, which Lorre had decided was promising and quite possibly also some form of specialized guardsman flirtation technique.
Gareth’s family, and young Hilda’s, would be all right. Dan had offered to assist Gunnar’s people with food, and the bandits would stop being bandits and would leave everyone alone, potentially in exchange for jobs guarding some of the merchant caravans; they were working that out now. Hilda would be going back with Lily for training; Will and Dan and Agatha were taking this opportunity to consider the prices of wool and copper, and imports and exports.
Gareth’s uncle stayed withdrawn, in the way of a man amazed at an unlooked-for pardon. But he answered, albeit somewhat startled, when Dan asked a question about the trade agreements of twenty years ago.
Gareth was being part of that conversation while also making sure everyone including the leaping fire stayed comfortable and well fed. He handed Lorre a piece of bread spread with honeyed cheese, and said, underneath the other discussions, “I think I understand about you and not wearing boots, but do you want a foot-rub, later?”
“Definitely yes, if that’s on offer, but don’t feel you have to?”
“You wanted to know about my fantasies.”
Lorre lifted both eyebrows at him.
“Oh, not like that.” Gareth managed not to blush this time, sincere and happy. “I mean taking care of you. Getting to sit with you, helping you relax and feel all the sensations, all warm and present and settled, and you can tell me more about historic gardens while I rub your feet…all right, never mind, it’s the universe’s most boring fantasy, I can hear it.”
“It’s not,” Lorre said. “I like it. Of course I do; it’s all about me lounging around being pampered.” He’d made space for Gareth on the small two-person sofa near the chattering fire; he balanced bread and cheese and honey in one hand, and curled up under his prince’s arm, head on Gareth’s shoulder. “Let’s do that.”
Glancing up, he discovered a lull in conversation; most eyes had swiveled their way.
“Shameless,” Lily informed him, but the disapproval was only halfhearted.
Lorre tilted bread at her, a shrug. “I’m too old to feel shame. At least when it comes to my own comfort.”
“About that.” Will, in the chair across from them, began to lean forward, looked down, and gave up on moving the leg and foot currently serving as a sheepdog pillow. “Your comfort’s historically been a problem.”
“All right,” Lorre said, “I do understand the concept of shame, thank you.”
“Do you?” Will said. “That would be nice.”
“We’ve already established that Lorre’s free to stay with us.” Dan set down a plate in much the same way another ruler might’ve drawn a sword. “We owe him that and more. And we trust him.”
“You do?” Lorre said.
Gareth poked him. “Don’t interrupt my brother when he’s defending you.”
Lily turned her teacup around in both hands, letting it warm them. When she spoke she was every inch the Grand Sorceress, someone who thought about power and control and responsibility; but she was also the person who’d talked a dragon back into remembering that he was a magician, once upon a time, with memories and words and connection. “I know you trust him. And you’ve made that promise. We won’t ask you to break it. But think, for a moment…the Mountain Marches would be the home to the most dangerous person in the Middle Lands.”
“I’m not sure,” Gareth said, “that dangerous is the right word.” His tone was mild, but his muscles had tensed.
“It is.” Lorre stopped leaning on him, or tried to; Gareth tightened the arm around him. “You know it is. You can have other words too, if you want, but don’t say it isn’t true.”
“We don’t pretend magicians are neutral.” Lily paused for a sip of tea. “We can’t be. We’re human—sorry, Lorre, mostly human. But we do have the formal request process, for aid, for assistance, and we’ve been setting up a voting council to handle approvals and refusals and assignments—we want it to be fair, or as fair as possible. Lorre…you’re not part of the school, you don’t have any oversight, and you do what you want. You always have.”
“Technically I think I’ve been excommunicated,” Lorre said. He recognized the need for Lily’s new system, though on a personal level he utterly loathed bureaucracy despite that recognition, and he’d literally physically never been able to wait for permission to do magic. “Unless that term only works for the Church. Told not to come back, anyway. From a school I founded. Which was entirely fair, mind you; I was awful at teaching, spectacular at getting into fights with priestesses and kings and queens, and even better at throwing apprentices into deadly situations because I could’ve handled them. Did you find the Wind-Summoning Horn of Nennius the Somber, by the way? I left it in the smaller vault, the one with the gargoyles, not the main vault.”
“You know we’ve rebuilt the school,” Lily said. “It’s not your original site. Not after those earthquakes. So, no, we didn’t find it. I didn’t know you had it. Does it work?”
“The one time I tried it, it blew me off the tower, so I’d say yes?”
Gunnar was looking from Lorre to Lily with astonishment: magic being casually debated, while his people had struggled with the consequences of Hilda’s power for so long. Hilda, for her part, was wide-eyed and sipping tea and taking in this new world, sitting on the rug by the fire and learning how heat and braided fabric and puppy fur felt, now that she was able to touch without harm.
“Magicians,” Will said, “you can find a wind-summoning horn later, if it’s not broken. Lorre, you can’t stay here.”
“Yes,” said Gareth, “he can.”
“No, I see the problem.” Lorre finished off his slice of bread. Licked honey from a finger. “It’s too much power in one place. And I don’t answer to anyone, I sometimes change the world by thinking about it, and suddenly the Mountain Marches could take anything they wanted, couldn’t they? Not that you would go around conquering anyone,” he added to Dan, who was looking horrified at the concept. “At best you’d ask me for a new oven.”
“I think,” put in Queen Mother Agatha dryly, “we’re all in agreement that the Mountain Marches don’t want to conquer anyone.” Osric said nothing, though his gaze fell. She went on, “My son—both my sons—promised Lorre a home. We’ve never closed the doors of this Hall to anyone seeking help. It’s that simple.”
“It’s not,” Will said. “Believe me, I wish it were.”
Gareth shifted to take Lorre’s hands into his, and asked, “Lorre, what do you want?” His eyes were concerned, soft earthen brown, and full of love.
Everyone paused again at that question. The fire snapped and popped and sparked.
Lorre shut his eyes for a second: feeling heat and light, feeling the weight of Gareth’s hands in his, feeling the wind and the earth and the hills beneath King’s Gate and the hop of mountain goats in the pastures. He tasted bread and honey and goat’s cheese and sugared tea, and wanted to kiss his prince.
He opened his eyes. “I don’t know.”
Gareth’s lips parted, a soundless betrayed breath.
“I love you,” Lorre said hastily. “You know I do. I want you. That’s something I want. I want everything you said, about your fantasies and foot-rubs and telling you about beautiful places, and then taking you to them, and then coming home—” He stopped, mostly because he’d had a thought.
“And that’s one more thing I’m never going to ask you about,” Dan said to his brother. “But that does answer that question, doesn’t it? If Lorre wants a home with this family, with Gareth, then he’s got it.”
Gareth’s expression had eased. Answering Lorre instead of his brother, he murmured, “I want you, too. And all of that.” To Dan, he added, “Thank you.”
“I’m still a problem,” Lorre said, picking up his own tea, which was exactly sweet enough. “I’m not arguing that one.”
“Lorre,” Gareth began.
“But I might have an idea. This can be home. We can come back here. But what if we don’t stay here?”
This got everyone to regard him with varying levels of confusion. Gareth, who understood him better than anyone else ever, said first, “Oh. Yes. You said it already. If we travel—”
“It’s not a flawless solution. There’s the problem of allegiances. Loyalty. But I famously never had any, and you’re the least selfish person I’ve ever met. If we’re not in any one place for too long, we spread my magic and my influence out around the Middle Lands, and if I promise not to wander anywhere without permission…”
“Would we trust you,” Will asked, “to keep that promise?”
“You’d trust Gareth,” Lorre retorted, “wouldn’t you? He’s the hero. And I listen to him.”
The Grand Sorceress set down her empty teacup. “I trust you.” Her voice was matter-of-fact, though it rearranged the world.
Lorre, genuinely astounded, had no words. His teacup turned into an owl, porcelain-feathered and saucer-eyed, and then dwindled back into itself.
“I trust you,” Lily said again, “to try to do the right thing. And to ask for help when you’re not sure what that is. I know you don’t want to hurt anyone. I saw you today, protecting people. I felt it. And I never knew how badly you wanted a home.” She met his eyes across the present firelit room, and the older memories. “I’m sorry for that. Not seeing it.”
“Oh, well,” Lorre said. “It’s not your fault. I didn’t know how badly I wanted that, either. I think I had some growing up to do.”
And Lily laughed, rueful, accepting that answer. “Three hundred years was finally enough time for that?”
“Closer, at least?”
“All right,” Will said. “If Lily believes in you, and Prince Gareth’s willing to be your conscience, then yes. Averene will trust you to keep your promises.”
That meant the rest of the Middle Lands likely would as well. Where Averene went, everyone else tended to follow, not because they weren’t independent but because Averene was the richest, the most central, and the somewhat inadvertent home to Lily’s re-founded magicians’ school.
Lorre offered, to Will, “Thank you.”
Will sighed. “Are you going to want to visit? Because I’d like to know in advance if you’re going to turn into a dragon or a gryphon or a panther, especially around our daughter.”
“You’d let me see Merry?” He’d had that thought, too. Healing, and being there for someone, and coming home.
He wasn’t sure how he’d fit in—he knew himself, even this new version of himself, and he’d never been parental—but he could be an entertaining uncle, or godparent, or whatever Lily decided. Someone who’d love to see her grow up, and see the person she’d someday become. He wouldn’t be her father, because Will was that.
He hadn’t wanted to ask. He’d assumed the response would be no. That was also fair.
Gareth, who’d reached over to pour the Grand Sorceress more tea, almost set the teapot down too far off the side of the table, but caught it.
Lily thanked him for the tea, and then said to Lorre, “You remembered which name she goes by now. You did earlier, too.” Her smile was an answer. “Yes. I think we can sort something out. We’ll talk.”
“Oh,” Lorre said. “Oh. That’s…I…I’m…I promise not to shapeshift. Unless she’d like a unicorn the size of a small pony? I could be a unicorn for an afternoon.”
“She might,” Lily said. “We can work that out later. Right now, if Hilda’s feeling up to that, I think we should go and do something about all the layers of shields we’ve got on her, and see if we can’t make that less bulky and more under her control. Hilda?”
Hilda jumped a bit at being addressed, but promptly said, “Yes,” with the same backbone that’d wrestled untrained magic and managed at least a draw, all on her own.
“Excellent. King Ardan, can we use your library?”
“Our library’s all yours,” Dan said. “And I think we’re on a first-name basis, under the circumstances, so it’s Dan, only if you want, of course. Feel free to take all the scones if you need refreshments; there are a lot more, though I might’ve let the third batch get just a touch overdone, sorry about that.”
Will, who had—at least to Lorre’s knowledge—never touched an oven in his aristocratic life, let that remark go without comment. “You and I can sign some of those updated trade agreements, then, if we get some official documents drawn up?”
Lorre, fairly sure he’d been included in Lily’s we, got up as she did. Gareth came along, in part to point them in the direction of the library door, but also to take Lorre’s hand and murmur, “You stay warm enough, for me, all right? That’s only a small fireplace in there, what with all the books, and I never did find you gloves.”
Lorre made a face at him. “Fingerless, at least, please.”
“So you can feel the world. I’ll see what I can do.”
Lily stopped walking. Framed by hanging tapestries and rich color and the bones of the Hall, she spun to face them; the gold and brown of her hair tumbled in a fantasia of earthen gemstone color. “That is the other question, isn’t it. What you’ll do.”
Hilda, behind them, tactfully faded a few steps back, and went back to petting the biggest sheepdog, which had claimed her company.
“What do you mean,” Gareth said, “what we’ll do?”
“I mean the two of you.” She pointed at their linked hands. “I didn’t bring it up in there because it’s personal. For you two, not the rest of us. But…Lorre, you’re three hundred years old. And—Gareth, I’m sorry, you’re what, twenty-two?”
“I’m twenty-seven,” Gareth protested. “Magicians and your sense of time…”
“You’ll need to think about time,” Lily said. Compassion lay in her gaze, a bandage prepared for an imminent wound. “Lorre, you’re not human, not completely, and who knows how long you’ll end up living. You could offer him magic, and it might even work—but even before getting into that decision, and you’ll need to, there’s the practical. If you’re back in the world, not in exile on a tiny island…what does the most powerful magician in the Middle Lands do? Where will you go?”
“I don’t know yet,” Lorre said. “I’m working on it.” He couldn’t quite look at Gareth, though every piece of himself was aware of that solid presence beside him. “I think…whatever I do, it’ll be about healing. I’ve found that I like that, I think. Making things brighter.”
Gareth had begun to smile. Lorre caught the motion of it at the edge of his vision.
“This land,” he added, “the Marches, first. There’s more to be done, up in the mountain passes, where it’s been so frozen for so long. And then we’ll see. We said we’d travel, and if there was something wrong here, there might be more places that need help. Problems we never knew about, too far away or someplace we weren’t looking. More magicians in need of some training. I could send them all your way.”
“More lands,” suggested Gareth, “in need of your care.”
“Sometimes the world does need help.” He held on to Gareth’s hand, still not able to meet his prince’s eyes, unsure of the reaction waiting there. It was too big, too important. “I don’t mean I’m setting myself up as the hero or the judge or the arbiter of what’s right. I’ll ask first. I think that matters. If the earth, the foxes and birds, the trees, the people, all tell me it’s welcome…there are things I can do. Restoring balance, maybe. If something’s unhappy.”
“Being a caretaker,” Gareth said. “Our caretaker.”
“Something like that.” He would’ve shrugged, but he had a hand in Gareth’s; the closest tapestry did it for him, a ripple of cream and sea-foam and midnight fabric. “It’s a thought.”
Gareth gathered up his hand and kissed his fingertips. Lorre glanced up at Gareth’s face inadvertently, and was left speechless by the happiness awaiting him there.
“I think,” Lily said, “it’s not a bad thought. Being a guardian, caring for others. Come and help work with Hilda, for a few minutes? I know you don’t work exactly the same way we do, but it’s your magic tied into hers, and I want you to unweave it while we show her how to build her own shields.” For Gareth, she added, “That part’s mostly the same; it’s just that he’s annoyingly stronger than the rest of us, and better at working in every element of the world, not only one or two. But the structure’s similar. And if we can get her to build her own, that’s one less little drain on his magic.”
“Not,” Lorre said, “that that’s a problem. It’s tiny. Very small. I don’t even notice.”
“I’m in favor of that,” Gareth agreed. “Find me when you’re done? I want to talk to Dan and Mum, anyway.” He brushed a kiss across Lorre’s mouth, leaving: affectionate and tender.
Lily watched him go, arms folded, eyebrows up. “He’s very sweet.”
“He is.”
“You didn’t answer that first question. About—”
“I know.”
“You love him.” Her gaze softened. “More than I’ve seen you love anyone. Ever.”
“I do,” Lorre said. “He’s stubborn and idealistic and human and wonderful, and I love him more than I knew I could love another person. It’s just…everywhere, inside of me. Everything I’m feeling. And I don’t know what to do.”
Lily tossed him a familiar pixie grin. “Never thought I’d hear that.”
“I never thought I’d say it.”
“I’m not you.” She came over, put a hand on his arm: soothing, and to his surprise he felt comforted. “I won’t ever be you. And I won’t pretend to know what I’d do, if I were three hundred years old and likely to live three hundred more. But I do know about love. Especially when it’s unexpected and messy and upends a kingdom’s politics.”
He caught the glow in her eyes: thinking of her William, who’d been an illegitimate son but was a devoted brother, who’d gone to a disreputable sorceress for help when King Henry’d fallen ill, and who’d married that sorceress in a fabulous public ceremony drenched in jewels and delight and happy endings.
She finished, “Talk to him. Ask him what he wants. And listen. That’s the most important thing you can do. Just listen.”
“I’m working on that one,” Lorre said, “too.”