The Magic Council (The Herezoth Trilogy) (12 page)

Vane’s shoulders tensed. “She looked out for
your boys. It’s only right that someone should look out for her.”

The king smiled again. “You’re dodging me,” he
said. “Just like your mother used to do, constantly. It serves me right for
asking a direct question. Well, speaking of your mother…. Wait here a moment.”
Rexson went over to the desk. He opened the bottom drawer and returned with
something Vane could not quite see due to how the king held it and a
leather-bound journal, a small one, its cover water-spotted. The parchment
pages had yellowed, at least around the edges.

The king explained, “When the Crimson League
retook the Palace, I sent two or three people to the last place we’d camped, to
recover what we left there. This journal was among your mother’s things. I
haven’t read it myself, not a word beyond the first few sentences, to establish
what it was. I didn’t feel I should. You, however, have the right. The right to
keep it, if nothing else. You’ve precious little that belonged to your
parents.”

Vane took the journal gingerly, almost afraid to
touch it, not out of reservation but because it looked as though it might fall
apart at any handling. “Thank you,” he said. “Sincerely.”

“I don’t know what she wrote about me, if
anything. Don’t judge me too harshly.”

Then the king handed over a silver quill molded
in the shape of a feather. It sparkled as though he had recently cleaned it of
varnish. The nib was missing, but that would be easy to rectify.

“This was your father’s,” Rexson said. “He used
it constantly. He told me once it was a wedding gift from his father. The
ceremony’s date’s engraved on it.” So it was, at the widest point. “Zalski
overlooked the date’s significance, or he would have destroyed the heirloom. He
wouldn’t have wished you sentimental about your parents, your father
especially.”

Vane nodded, and Rexson said, “We’ll root
through the rest of your inheritance some other time, you have my word. But I
thought you should have something now.”

“Thank you,” Vane repeated.

He went back to his room. He lit the wall lamp
and the candle he had left on the bed frame, carrying the latter to the desk,
where he examined the quill and traced his finger along its edge. He tried to
imagine his father using it and pictured a man who looked more or less like he
did, with slightly smaller eyes, a thick, elegant moustache, and a well-trimmed
beard. That, at least, was how the king had once described the original Valkin.
Rexson was the only person Vane knew who had known his father. No, that was not
quite true. The queen must have known him, but she’d never mentioned him.

Next, Vane turned to the journal. He had light enough
to read, though only just, and as he turned the front cover, slowly, with both
hands, he could make out his mother’s pointed, slanted script, the same writing
as in the letter Teena had given him years ago. Then he closed the book, eased
it to its back, and opened it in the same cautious manner as before to the
final entry:

Two
days remain before the assault on the Crystal Palace. Two short days. If
someone had told me in the past I would meet my end attacking the king’s
domicile, I would have mocked him. But then, it is not the king who resides
there now, but Zalski, with her. The Giver pardon me, I abhor that woman. Every
fiber of my being detests the mere thought of her, her besmirching those
walls….

I
mustn’t distract myself. Two days is not much time, and I have to decide, I
must decide. My thoughts were clear before Zalski could lay waste our minds,
could rape our memories. Now, should he take any of us alive—and that’s a
certainty, he’s sure to capture at least one—everything I’ve done will be
for naught. My mind, Kora’s, Rexson’s, it matters not whose, they’ll all turn
against us when Zalski casts the spell now in his clutches. My brother will
find my son, before the boy is old enough to strip himself of magic. I couldn’t
bring myself to bind the boy’s powers that night at Wheatfield, and I was right
not to attempt it then. But now, now that very act may be the only way to spare
him, and in spite of everything….

No.
No, I mustn’t commit such an atrocity. I cannot have him grow to loathe me
because I deprived him of his magic. He’d curse my memory; that much has not
changed. Should Zalski steal him from Teena at the tender age of three, should
he raise him at the Palace, I can do nothing but pray that my principles and
his father’s are a part of him, a component of his blood my brother will find
himself powerless to counteract. I believe it’s so. Perhaps I delude myself,
but I feel it in my heart. It ran through every pulse as I held my son that
torturously brief night. In the same way, I doubt not that I myself will not
survive—but Bennie will, somehow. Surely that cannot be fancy? Surely,
were I imagining to be fact what I merely desired, I would convince myself that
I too might escape? I don’t regret telling Bennie where I hid Zacry. Kora
herself is ignorant of where her brother hides. She wishes not to know, for his
protection. But that is precisely why Bendelof must: somebody must in addition
to me, despite the risks.

Kora
assured me that, should our campaign fail, my boy, my Valkin, at Zalski’s
school of magic would have Zacry to protect him. To set him an example. And she
was right, so even should Zalski corrupt my son beforehand—the Giver
forbid it!—Valkin will meet Zacry, eventually. Their paths would have to
cross, and there would always be the chance Zacry’s influence would set him
right. I cannot know what will pass, but still I’m certain that, for better or
worse, I could not have summoned the mettle to erase Valkin’s powers two weeks
ago had Zalski appeared to rip the child from my arms, and I cannot do so now.
I must try to believe that his father and I will live on in him.

I
do believe, with all my soul, that my son and his father share more than a
name. I remember watching, on the morning of his death, the father hold the
infant as though he were flying, and the boy, how he laughed heartily, never
doubting the strong arms would prevent a fall. Moments like that leave a mark,
I’m sure of it, a mark like a scar to change one permanently, even when the act
lies long forgotten. I myself have done, if not the absolute best for my son,
the best that lay within my faculties and resources. And he’ll know that. He
will know that, from the woman who cares for him, and I feel a peace descending
like a mist now, the peace I have been seeking for three years. And yet, I
remember that morning, the morning of the coup, my family perfect, joyful, and
I cannot help but wonder at all that came to pass. I marvel at the sheer
improbability. Could I have stopped my brother? I used to think so. Now I doubt
I could have done a thing differently.

A full page remained, but Vane stopped reading.
He could go no further. He could not make out the words; his vision had turn
blurry as a watery film built up before his eyes.

Vane’s mother, in her one letter to him, the letter
she had written that night she rocked him to sleep in a barn two weeks before
her death, had not let herself express emotion. She never let on she had
considered binding his powers, though she gave him the incantation, in case he
chose to cast it on himself. She wanted Vane to have that option, because he
could throw his magic-manic uncle off his back no other way. Laskenay promised
Zalski’s word bound him to leave Vane be if the boy proved incapable of
sorcery. She assured that—Vane had read the words so often he had them
memorized—“Your father loved you immensely. Only his death could have
torn him from you, and I deserted you because I judged it to be the only way
you could have a normal childhood. It was not out of selfishness or want of feeling.
You could not have been secure in my care.” That was the extent of the letter’s
sentimentality. There was no plea for forgiveness, or for remembrance, no
advice or exhortation, no blessing of any kind. She had resisted the temptation
to bear her soul to her son, or had found herself incapable of such an act. It
was to this journal she had emptied herself.

Vane had known the name he went by was not the
one his parents gave him. It made sense for his Aunt Teena to call him
something else; the whole point of her raising him had been to maintain some
level of secrecy as to his whereabouts. Still, he had never set great store on
sharing his father’s name, and to read his mother’s thoughts on the subject was
painful, and consoling, and eye-opening all at the same time. Laskenay foresaw
her own death, and Bendelof’s survival, and even Vane’s close relationship to
Zacry Porteg, though under different circumstances. In truth, Vane considered
Zacry an older brother. Could Laskenay also have been right, then, in what she
said about the connection between Vane and his father? Had Vane’s parents, in
less than a year of caring for him, marked his soul in such a way that their
presence lingered in his life even now? Was it that presence that kept the
black spot on his heart from expanding?

Yes, he told himself. It was his parents’
influence, but not in the way Laskenay imagined. It had nothing to do with his
blood. It was the presence of his parents as represented by the authority
figures of Vane’s youth: Teena, proving the claims of Laskenay’s letter by
describing how the mother, distraught and weakened after fleeing Podrar, had
begged her to save her child; Rexson, when Vane asked why he had named his
eldest son what he had, revealing that Valkin’s warnings the day of the coup
had saved Rexson’s life even as they cost Valkin his; Kora, who swore up and
down that Laskenay’s shame on Zalski’s behalf was so heartfelt, and Laskenay so
meritless of the burden, that Kora herself had nearly broken into tears on
multiple occasions because of it; Zacry, who once had said in passing he wished
he could have met Vane’s father, that the man Laskenay would marry must have
been “an impressive bloke” and “someone who understood the things that really
matter.” Laskenay and Valkin had lived selflessly, had made sacrifices, and
through their actions forged a legacy among those close to them that was by far
the greatest inheritance they left their son, one Zalski never could have
confiscated. Even had Zalski survived to raise Vane himself, preventing his
nephew ever coming in contact with Rexson, or Kora, or Zacry, even then there
would have been a sector of the nobility to reach out to the boy and pass on
the truth of his origins.

Vane thought back to the one time he could
remember being near his mother: the night referenced in her journal, two years
or so after she had left him with Teena. He remembered gazing up into ice blue
eyes as he lay curled in her lap and she stroked his hair to help him fall
asleep. He imagined, for the first time, shallow wrinkles in her brow as she
debated whether she should strip him of his magic.

I
still could cast that spell. I have it with me, I have her letter. I could take
away my sorcery, and no one could object to me taking up my father’s title.

But could Vane take that step, any more than his
mother could? His magic had rescued three children that very day. Surely
nothing that drastic would happen again. But then, how could he know? Sorcery
was an asset, not only to him but to others, and he felt he would be self-centered
to give it up.

Another part of Vane thought, had always
whispered in the back of his mind, that he had an obligation to do away with
his powers. It honestly seemed the only decent thing to do from time to time,
considering his uncle’s murders. Especially should Vane decide to live in
Herezoth,
especially
if he wished to
become a public figure and join court: could he live with himself if he
accepted his inheritance without casting that spell? That was what he needed to
discern. The nobility would coexist with him either way; no other dukes or
counts knew about the spell’s existence.

I
don’t need to decide just yet, not about the spell, and not about the title.
Maybe I could talk to Zacry. Or August.

The thought hit Vane with a constriction
somewhere in the area of his chest.

Zacry
wouldn’t understand how I feel a duty to cast that spell. He couldn’t, but
August would. She’d get it, what with Ursa….

A business-like rap on the door, succinct and
brisk, disrupted Vane. Clumsily, he closed his mother’s diary. A man from the
kitchens was waiting in the hall with a covered tray; he looked some years
older than Vane, with hair almost black, a nose that came to a point, and deep
dimples around his mouth when he talked.

“The king sent your dinner. Said you had
business to attend to and needn’t bother eat with him.”

Vane glanced back to the desk, to the
water-spotted diary, and nodded. The servant entered and placed the tray beside
it. “What’s your name?” Vane asked.

If the stranger was taken aback by Vane’s informality,
he made no show of it. He turned and introduced himself as Treel. When he had
gone Vane pushed the food to the side of the desk, ignoring it for the moment,
determined to finish reading Laskenay’s last entry.

No
matter. It is the future with which I must concern myself, not a past forever
lost. If I am to die two days from now—and I feel fated to—I shan’t
suffer my brother to survive me. I have contemplated, but do I dare?

I
realized yesterday that with Zalski in sight I need only cast one spell, the
single incantation to bind two lives, and…. Yes, I shall summon the nerve. I
shall cast that spell and kill myself afterward if need be, destroy myself to
ruin him. That duty falls to me: our lives began together, and together they
will end. I can fathom no other way to ensure his death. This spell he cannot
block, for I may cast it on myself, on either party according to that book, as
long as the second is present. If I aim to kill, without the bind, and he kills
me instead…. No, I will not have that. That beast will keep his distance from
my son.