The Road To Sevendor - A Spellmonger Anthology (2 page)

As well as he understood it, he was just as happy to put it away and head back to the bakery, where he knew a meal beyond his imagination would be waiting . . . Minalan’s mother was an adept cook with a full house to feed, and Mistress Sarali prided herself on her extravagant table.  Tyndal walked through the door in anticipation of the accustomed evening feast.

To his dismay, he walked into a full-fledged battle.

Minalan’s mother, Mistress Sarali, a tall, gray-haired woman who seemed to constantly squint, was arguing lustfully:

“ . . . don’t see the reason my son should settle with any woman, my dear, it’s not
you
,” she was saying.  Tyndal didn’t know much about women, but she knew sincerity when he heard it – and he didn’t hear it.  “I was just suggesting that you take some time, get to know each other—”

“Two months in a siege was enough intimacy, thank you,” his mistress said sharply.  “Min and I went through hell in Boval Castle, and he’s not about to dump me off at the nearest convenient village while he finds a better offer!”

“I never said he should do that!” Mistress Sarali said, her hands on her hips, her lips jutting out.  “Ishi’s bosom, you are a stubborn girl!”

“I’m a stubborn girl?” Alya shot back in disbelief.

“She’s a stubborn girl?” one of Minalan’s sisters – Urah?  Dara?  He couldn’t keep them all straight – said at the same time.    The mother looked at her daughter like she had stabbed her.

“I am just trying to look out for the best interests of my family!” she declared, looking heavenward.  “Why is that so difficult for you girls to see?”

“I was under the impression I was going to become part of your family!” Alya said with a huff.

“Grandmother, you
mustn’t
question Uncle Minalan’s decisions!” Frentine, Minalan’s oldest niece, said in a louder-than-necessary voice.  He was very loud, very emotional, and she idolized her uncle the magi.  “You
know
he has given his love to this woman, and asked you to protect her and her unborn child.  The
least
you can do—”

“I will NOT be lectured in my own house about my responsibilities!” shrieked Sarali, angrily.  “Especially not by a stripling who has only seen
three
bloodmoons!”

Tyndal stood there, unable to move, lest he attract the attention of any of them.  He felt like he was on patrol again, hiding until a goblin picket passed.  Make one sound, one wrong move, and they would be upon you.  For one crazy moment he considered using the un
-noticeability spell his master had taught him, but he stopped. 
No magic.
Not if he didn’t have to – it could attract attention.

“Lad!” he heard a harsh whisper from the door on the other side of the room. 
“Tyndal!”
  He looked up and saw Hirth, Master Rinden’s senior apprentice, motioning to him frantically.  Taking a deep breath, he crossed the room with quick, quiet, determined strides . . . and to his amazement he managed to do so without getting caught up in the ongoing argument.   Hirth pulled him to safety while Borsa, Minalan’s second-oldest sister, came valiantly to Alya’s defense.

“I thought you might not want to participate in that bloodbath,” the dark-haired apprentice said, grinning. 

“I’d rather face a goblin,” he agreed. 

“So would the rest of us.  Master Rinden has convened a meeting in the woodshed.  You are cordially invited.”

“A meeting?” he asked, surprised.  “A meeting about what?”

“A meeting about not getting involved
in that,”
he said, throwing a thumb over his shoulder.  “He’s forbidden
any
of us from getting involved.  It’s the women’s problem to solve, he said.”

“He . . . he wouldn’t turn Alya out, would he?”

“Master Rinden?” scoffed Hirth, “Of course not!  He’s got a big ol’ creampuff in place of his heart, and he loves no one more than his son, excepting maybe the Mistress.   If his son asked for him to protect the girl, he will to his dying breath.  Against anyone except the Mistress,” he added.

Tyndal could see that.  Mistress Sarali was forceful, and she ran the household with an iron hand.  Tyndal couldn’t imagine anyone defying her . . . which made it even more horrible when her daughters, grown women themselves, did it so vocally, so viciously, and without the slightest regard for tender male ears.  Gratefully he followed Hirth, the volume in the kitchen behind him keeping up with his steps.

The woodshed was a separate building from the oven rooms, a huge, ramshackle affair that had been added to and repaired so many times over the years that Tyndal wondered how it stayed upright at all.  As its only purpose was to keep the rain off of the huge amount of wood the bakery required, it did not need to be pretty, he reasoned as he followed.

Master Rinden himself was holding forth deep in the bowels of the shed, in his private office.  His three journeymen-sons-in-law were also there, and they each had a mug of something in their hands.  While Hirth was the only apprentice invited – he was only two years older than Tyndal – he apparently had been here before.  He greeted his master, poured two mugs of beer from the big bottle on the workbench, and handed one to Tyndal.

“So, what are we doing?” he asked, after he took a hesitant sip.  It was rich and bitter, and took some getting used to.  His people preferred cider to beer, usually. 

“We’re waiting for the storm to stop,” said Askon, the second journeyman.  He was the one married to Dara, the willowy daughter, Tyndal remembered.  “When they get like this, that’s all you can do.”

“They’ve been going at it for hours,” grumbled Rask, the eldest journeyman.  Ladra was his wife, and Frentine the eldest of his daughters.  Tyndal had been struggling with just how everyone was related, and how that affected what they did at the bakery, but he was still wrong half of the time.   He had thought Frentine was Rask’s daughter, at first, because they acted so similarly sometimes.    He’d always been nervous around big families, particularly ones with as many fathers running around as this one had.   Rask continued, “I don’t even know what they’re arguing about!”

“The question is a social one,” Master Rinden explaine
d in his deep voice.  “My wife, Ishi love her and keep her safe, has run our house for more than thirty years, and she has had the reins firmly in hand.  When Tyndal found his Talent was the first time she couldn’t control what happened to her family.  Then there was that business with Ladra and that Farag boy, but she soon had her hand back on the tiller.  Since then, everything has gone well.  Her daughters have all married, her son is a success with great prospects for the future . . . and then a pregnant woman shows up at her door and says that she’s to be her son’s wife.

“Now, Tyndal, I know you are as loyal to your Master’s lady as a man could ask, and I mean no disrespect to you, she, or my son.  But from Sarali’s perspective, a stranger is in her house asking for all of the benefits of kinship.  While she knows that Alya and you are telling the truth – Minalan never would have told her . . . certain family secrets if she wasn’t – her heart hasn’t told her that, yet.  Women are prone to treat a new woman with suspicion, at first.  Nothing wrong with that . . . but while her heart is coming around to what her eyes can clearly see,  and she is . . . it won’t let her mouth say it yet.”

“Master, with all respect, I didn’t hear any of that,” Askon said.  “I heard an argument about where your son will live.  Nothing about heart, eyes, or mouths.”

“She can’t say that,” he explained.  “She can’t take this poor girl who her son has sent to her and turn her out.  She cannot even judge her before her boy makes his decision to wed, the way she did with all of you,” he said, indicating his sons-in-law.

From the wry expressions on their faces, Tyndal could imagine just how harshly each of them had been judged by the strong-willed Sarali.  He didn’t envy them, despite the satisfaction each of the men seemed to have in their marriage.

“Minalan has already plighted his troth with Alya with his loins, and loves her besides, if what Tyndal says about him is true.  So she can’t take issue with her, personally.  That loaf is burnt already,” he said, shaking his head.  “So what’s the next thing she can fuss about?  Not the wedding – it shall be here, if the gods see fit to carry my son back to me.  And Alya has no proper kin, it seems, at least no proper home anymore, so there aren’t even any in-laws to sharpen her claws on. 

“So what is the next thing she can control?  Where her son decides to settle.  And she wants him
here,
of course, under her thumb.”

“And what a loving, warm-hearted, and
thoughtfully
oppressive thumb it is,” Hirth said, earning a chorus of chuckles.  As the junior apprentice, he was allowed a certain latitude with his humor, which suited his character.  While Master Rinden’s shop was all-business, it wasn’t the sort of place where the Master thundered at everyone for being incompetent or stupid, the way some craftsmen did.  After dark, and especially out here in the woodshed, the unofficial rule was casual leniency, though disrespect wasn’t tolerated even then.

“Does the village
need
another spellmonger?” asked Askon, shrugging.  “There are two, now, and the way they go on there isn’t enough business for even one of them.”  As curious as he was about other magi, Tyndal had resisted the urge to visit them, lest they suspect something was not quite right.  He’d heard enough about them both by now that he was confident that even he – with the use of irionite – would have bested both of them put together. 

“That southern fellow is still pissed that I let Minalan did the spells on my house and ovens,” chuckled Master Rinden.  “But no, this village couldn’t hold a third spellmonger.  Nor is Baron Lithar unhappy with his court mage.  But that’s beside the point: the point is, Minalan is his own man, he’s going to choose where he lives.  About that Alya might have some say, and his mother none at all.”

“So why does she argue if she knows that?” asked Rickin, the intelligent-looking husband of Urah, the youngest of Master Rinden’s daughters. 

“Because she
can,
boy!” laughed Rinden.  “Or at least she can ‘offer her matronly advice’.  And Alya might even listen to it, but
she
knows it will be up to Minalan.  She was polite enough about it . . . before my girls got involved.   Now their feminine sensibilities are invested in the argument, even though it will be for naught.  But it isn’t . . . because it really has nothing to do with that at all.  It has to do with my wife’s fear of losing control, and my daughters’ desire to gain control from their mother.  Minalan, Alya, the new baby, where they live, you, me, the gods and the spirits of our ancestors have no bearing on the matter in the slightest.”

“So . . . they’re arguing over something completely different than what they’re
actually
saying,” reasoned Askon. 

“Oh, it’s worse than that,” corrected Master Rinden, taking a healthy pull from his glass and wiping the excess away with the back of his hand.  “Ladra and Borsa are seeing an opportunity to get over on their mother, and by arguing for Minden living afar they wound her for past slights and challenge her for control.  They’ll lose, of course – Sarali won’t stand for that sort of thing from her girls for long.  But knowing her boy is in danger, hunted by those . . .”

“Censors,” supplied Tyndal, automatically.  “They hunt . . . errant magi.”  He swallowed, hard.  Master Rinden and his family did not know
exactly
why the institutional warmagi were after Minalan, because the less they knew, the less danger they would be in.  They had accepted the story of an administrative misunderstanding without looking closely at its teeth.  

Trying to explain that their son had unwittingly stumbled into a trove of illegal magic that meant the executioner’s blade under the Bans, even though he was fighting a desperate battle to survive, might involve explaining a whole lot of things that Tyndal didn’t want to try explaining to the simple bakers.  He barely understood it himself, half the time.  

“They could come through at any time,” he continued, quietly.  “It’s not us that they want, exactly,” he said, his heart heavy.  “It’s Master Minalan.  But he warned us that they might try to use us as leverage to summon them.    As . . . hostages.”

“So what will these Censors do if they catch you?” asked Goron, quietly.  He was concerned for his family, of course.  Tyndal didn’t blame them.

“Probably clap us in irons and take us to one of their castles.  They have a few, and a big one up in Wenshar.  I . . . I don’t really know, after that.”

“I’m not having my grandchild born in a dungeon,” Master Rinden vowed, picking out each face around him until they met his gaze.  “Minalan asked for our help, we shall give it to him.  And so far the only hazard has been Sarali and the girls.  If these magi appear at the door, Alya is a
cousin.
  You all know the story,” he reminded them. 

It was clear from his voice he would feel betrayed if any other story was ever offered.  “But with that hanging over our heads, it makes all of the women nervous.  And when women get nervous, they get excitable.  And loud.”

“So what are
men
to do?” asked Hirth.