Sycorax did not know what to feel, but now she was truly alone.
The feasting had gone on for three days now. Sycorax was tired of it. “I can't wait until it's over,” she kept saying to her husband.
Stamos smiled at her patiently every time. He was fifteen years older than she was, his soft, thin hair graying, wisdom etched in every line of his face. The news of their engagement had been greeted with a mixture of surprise and humor. Publically he was heralded as a rock of stability, but she saw through the empty diplomacy. He was the third son of a smaller house. In the past people would stare blankly when his name was mentioned. It had never been mentioned very often. Their betrothal had led to a panicked maneuvering of alliances. Everyone wanted to catch the favor of the new Prince Consort.
He seemed oblivious to the social uproar around him. She liked him for that. He was a small hollow of calm ground on a plain ravaged by whirlwinds.
But even that was not why she had married him. She chose him because he was kind. It wasn't a learned kindness, either. It was the fabric of his soul. It was all he knew how to be. It was her fervent, secret hope that he would lead her onto a better path than the one that haunted her visions. The one that ended with her complete despair.
He smoothed the tension from her forehead. “Keep frowning like that and you'll be as furrowed as I am in no time,” he teased. “Enjoy yourself. You've earned this reward. Your father is strong, his throne secure, the land is safe and prosperous, the people admire you.”
“The people admire my father. They're terrified of me. And I didn't miss you calling yourself my âreward.'”
He grinned and pulled on a loose lock of her hair. Stamos knew how to take her words lightly. “They're still grateful for the party. You should be as well. You're eighteen years old, married to a pillar of wisdom, and your long happy life is stretched out before you.”
His words were a statement, but she knew they held a question. It was the same question behind every pair of eyes that ever looked into her own.
What will become of me?
She might be only eighteen years old, but for thirteen years she had been facing and ignoring the same desperate plea. It had left her jaded. Six years ago when a courtier asked her to read his fortune she had barked, “You will live. And when you are done with that, you will die.” No one had ever asked her the question since, but it was still there, faltering on the tip of every tongue.
She brushed it away. “I thought I married a man, not a pillar,” she said. Her words stumbled. It was a poor joke.
“Lucky woman, you have both,” he said, and nibbled at her neck in a way that irritated her even while it made her laugh. She let him swallow her up in an embrace.
The celebrations did end, in time. Sycorax grew accustomed to Stamos' quiet shadow in the corner of her life. She reminded herself that she ought to be happy. Her country had been at peace for so long, a generation. Her father's people had become comfortable, even prosperous. Buildings were springing up that celebrated architecture rather than fortification.
Her spells had made the country so, and kept it so. But it was a gem whose gleam was now perceived and valued from afar. Rulers of distant empires rubbed their avaricious hands and increased their armies. The name of her land began to appear on maps that once had left it unmarked and overlooked.
Sycorax was not afraid of any of them. Her power was greater than any army. But she would have to be ruthless to keep them out, and she knew that making such magics, even as a defense, would poison her soul.
She knew it from experience, though no one guessed. She was the Wizard Royal, the Great Protectoress, the Heir Apparent.
Murderer
is what the flames called her.
Sycorax shook her head and turned her thoughts away. She would write her own fate. A wave of fatigue swept over her. That had been growing more common lately. “It's only natural,” the physicians told her. “You'll need to rest so the child within you grows strong.”
Child. Sycorax pulled back her shoulders and stood straighter. She didn't know how to be a mother. The whole idea was faintly ridiculous, though she was the only one who seemed to think so. The birth of an heir was a great comfort to her father and her people.
Sycorax's own mother had died bringing her into the world. She wasn't worried about that. There were simple magics that any wise woman could do. Herbs and water and soothing words were all that were needed. Her foolish mother had been afraid of magic and had banished it from the birthroom. So the queen had perished, while Sycorax lived, wizardry in her bones.
Sycorax rubbed her swollen abdomen. It was a daughter that grew inside her. She refused to see beyond that. When the morning flames tried to show her more, she snuffed them away. It was a foolishness of her own, no doubt. Knowledge was a tool.
A weapon
, whispered an imp in her mind. She wouldn't listen to that either.
“I protect my people,” she said aloud. Her voice was harsh, rasping. She had been silent too long, alone too long. Stamos was somewhere nearby; she felt his anxiety slithering under the door like an autumn draft. She was keeping him away. He was so pleased about the child. “I'll be a father!” he had crowed. So ignorant and naive, like a child with a new toy sword announcing he is going to war.
Did he not realize that his child would also be hers?
“I protect my people,” she whispered again.
Her father â old, blind, mad, decrepit â sitting on a crumbling throne.
Sycorax shook her head again and began to walk around the room. The rhythm of her steps brought quiet to her mind.
Stamos would worry if he saw her. He didn't like it when she paced like a beast in a cage.
Stamos named the child Thalia. It had seemed laughable to Sycorax that such a red, screeching thing should have a name at all, let alone one taken from a muse. “The muse of comedy,” Stamos had replied, as though that made it reasonable. “Besides, it's a beautiful name, and she's a beautiful girl.”
“Your wits are addled,” Sycorax said. But she agreed to the name. She couldn't think of any alternative. And everyone else thought it was a lovely choice.
“I must get back,” she said, handing the squirming bundle to the far more expert arms of the wet nurse. Sycorax rose and smoothed invisible dust from the folds of her dress.
Stamos nodded to her absently. His eyes were fastened to his daughter's face, now quiet again and happily chewing her own small fist. Sycorax doubted that he heard her leave the room.
Well, it was she who had pushed him away. It had been nothing to twist his thoughts from her onto their child.
Let him have some happiness
, she told herself. Keeping him at a distance was the best way to protect him.
She went to her room. Not to her chambers. Those were full of servants and companions. No, she went down, by the stone stairs her art had formed, to the underground crypt no one else could enter.
It was cool there, even in midsummer heat. As ever Sycorax shivered, briefly, when the door fell shut behind her. She reached for her fine wool robe and settled it around her shoulders, no longer having to look or even think to do this.
Not that she could see. No light penetrated this room. She moved through the blackness to her worktable. There she held her hand over a wax candle, and a quick blue flame sprang from the wick. It flooded the room with an unusual amount of light. But she did not look at the fire itself. She was very careful to avoid chance visions.
She had trained herself to be blind.
The smooth wooden table was neatly organized. She was systematic in everything. Three walls of the small room were entirely shelved. To her right the shelves contained glass flasks, filled with the tinctures and potions and preserves she needed for her work. They were all stoppered against corruption. On the opposite wall were the objects she required: murderer's hair, hollow stones, small dried animals with their spirits trapped within them. Behind her, on the wall punctured by the door, were the books and scrolls she had gathered and written. Some texts were so ancient that she kept them whole with a constant spell. It was a small thing, no strain.
Before her was the great map. It filled the wall, and on it was drawn the entire known world. At the center was, of course, her own land. With it she could watch any threat brewing against her people and turn it away before it even approached.
The map was her own invention. She had created it five years before, when she was only fifteen years old. Prior to that she had joined her magic with that of the palace wizards to turn aside enemies. That had been a more obvious, dramatic spellcasting, but this was far greater. Her map divinations gave the people of her land the gift of constant, unthreatened peace. She managed all of it here, alone. The other magic-users rarely met with her, and they almost never consulted her. Their arts were all used to provide bountiful harvests, healthy children, and vigorous workers.
They were the sunlit heroes, now. She was a mythical figure, spoken of with fear and whispers. Servants treated her as though she were sacred. Some would no longer say her name. They called her “The Lady.”
Sycorax pushed back her resentment and got to work. Her regular regime of watchfulness had faltered. It had been easy to fill her days writing lists and making notes for some future time. She had even gone out into the countryside to gather supplies, which was ridiculous. Servants had done that for her from the time she was twelve.
Wandering around had only made her feel more isolated, anyway. She had no place there, among common people. They needed her to do what only she could do. So she had stopped her foolish roving and returned to her post.
In the corner, where the potions met the map, there was a small hand pump. She used it now, filling the silver basin beneath the nozzle with the earth's deep water. Carefully she brought the basin to the table and placed it in the center, where she could easily glance from it to the map before her.
Flame showed greater variety, but the images were swift and fleeting and gave little context. Water was also constantly changing, but the visions it provided moved more slowly and gave a broader sense of time and place. She gazed into the basin. Her own reflection looked back. Even the rippled surface could not hide her sadness. She looked past it.
To the South she saw internal strife. Kings plotted and moved against each other, with no thoughts to spare for her land. It had been that way for some time. She moved on to the East. Grave threats had come from there in the past, but she and the other wizards had taught them caution. They would not return for at least a generation.
The North was a barbarous place, and their most common enemy. It had wizards of its own, but none to match her. Their threat was like a rheumatic ache: always there, but never overwhelming.
Sycorax turned to the West. These were lands her country traded with, but distance had kept terms civil. She sifted through the visions mechanically, expecting the usual results. Then abruptly she checked herself.
There was a future king whose eyes stared directly back into her own.
She looked up at the map. The vision sped toward its source, a small land of grapes and grain.
And it had something she wanted.
Sycorax stood at the wide window, gazing out to the distant sea. That smear of quiet blue she had seen had been the wild road that brought her here. She had used its power to draw Alonso to her, with a useless army at his back and false dreams of glory in his mind. He had answered her call without ever hearing her voice, never realizing that his thoughts of conquest were not really his own.
When he found himself a prisoner in her father's kingdom, his soldiers caught like flies in the amber of her magic, it had been so easy to win him. He had snatched at her offer of help like a drowning man grabs any floating bit of wreckage. She snared him, and together they fled the trap she had set.
Now she was queen in a foreign land. It should not feel so strange. She was a king's daughter. From her childhood she had commanded servants and walked the corridors of state with confidence. Her only hope was that she hid her bewilderment well. It was not yet clear whom she could trust.
No, that was untrue. It was all too evident that she could trust no one. Even her new husband had become cold, remote. Her belief that they were two trees from the same root was gone. She had given up everything for this land where eyes did not seem to match words. Her decision to betray her home and run away with Alonso had been made carefully, without hesitation. But not without consequences.
And now this new country did not want her. She had used her gifts to master its language. A queen must be able to speak to her people, she had reasoned. She had been wrong. They whispered the word “witch” every time they spoke of her. The servants crossed their fingers behind their backs in her presence. Children were kept away from her. Pregnant women avoided her. She had become a curse.
She would not cling to Alonso. He had used her to win his freedom. The bond they shared was born of his desperation and her cunning. It was not real. She saw that now. But she was too proud to weep at her foolishness. As long as he treated her with dignity, she would find a way to thrive in her new home.
And he would treat her well. He knew her power. No one knew it better. She had wielded dark forces to give him the strength to fight free of her father's enchantments and traps. He had seen her pull power from the moon to shift the tides and send them out to sea. He had lain silently in the boat and watched as she drew the winds around her and sent them flying over the waves, back to his land, back to his throne.
She twisted her hands together, as though wrenching her fingers could tear away the memories she knew were coming next. Because it had not been just a glorious spell of freedom that had set her on this path. She had used her magic to kill Stamos. The thought of him hammered her with fresh condemnation.