Court Wizard (Spellmonger Series: Book 8) Read online

  Court Wizard

  Book 8 Of The Spellmonger Series

  Beta Edition

  By Terry Mancour

  Copyright © 2016, All Rights Reserved

  Dedicated To Toni, Michele, Linda, Laurin, Deborah, Wendy,

  Ashley, Hannah, Kirsten, Morrigan, and Shelby:

  The Smith Women,

  the strongest women I know.

  Contents

  Prologue

  The Witch in the Wilderlands

  The Fair Maid of Vorone

  The Goddess In The Garden

  Chapter One Return to Vorone

  Chapter Two Husband And Wife

  Chapter Three A Duke’s Curiosity

  Chapter Four A Thaumaturgical Baculus In Duke Anguin’s Court

  Chapter Five Interview With A Courtier

  Chapter Six The First Great Council

  Chapter Seven Troubled Times

  Chapter Eight A Nest Of Rats

  Chapter Nine The Tumultuous State Of The Duchy

  Chapter Ten Count Marcadine

  Chapter Eleven The Woodsmen Of Vorone

  Chapter Twelve The Politics Of Alshar

  Chapter Thirteen Show Horses & Work Horses

  Chapter Fourteen The Council Of Vorone

  Chapter Fifteen The Letter From The Queen

  Chapter Sixteen The Office Of The Court Wizard

  Chapter Seventeen Battle By Moonlight

  Chapter Eighteen Lady Pleasure

  Chapter Nineteen The Dangers Of The Divine

  Chapter Twenty Trouble Brewing

  Chapter Twenty-One The House Of Flowers

  Chapter Twenty-Two Ishi Incarnate

  Chapter Twenty-Three Wheat & Iron

  Chapter Twenty-Four A Goddess At Court

  Chapter Twenty-Five A Conspiracy Unmasked

  Chapter Twenty-Six Dowager Countess Shirlin

  Chapter Twenty-Seven An Interloper In Court

  Chapter Twenty-Eight Plots & Preparations

  Chapter Twenty-Nine A Spell On Alya

  Chapter Thirty The Woodland Masque

  Chapter Thirty-One A Plague Of Passions

  Chapter Thirty-Two The Crypt of Murvos

  Chapter Thirty-Three Ocajon the Nemovorti

  Chapter Thirty-Four The Conclave

  Chapter Thirty-Five The Midsummer Raid

  Chapter Thirty-Six The Magewar

  Chapter Thirty-Seven Lady Amendra

  Chapter Thirty-Eight Dinner With Mother

  Chapter Thirty-Nine Pentandra’s Report

  Chapter Forty Attack On The Palace!

  Chapter Forty-One The Ungrateful Undead

  Chapter Forty-Two A Hole In The Hall Of Heralds

  Chapter Forty-Three The Grotto of Antimei

  Chapter Forty-Four Answers Over Breakfast

  Chapter Forty-Five Debate With Bezmiol

  Chapter Forty-Six Pentandra Confronts The Alka Alon

  Chapter Forty-Seven The Grace of Trygg

  Chapter Forty-Eight Taking Down A Goddess

  Chapter Forty-Nine The Council of Vorone

  Chapter Fifty Aftermath

  Prologue

  The Witch in the Wilderlands

  Old Antimei the witch coughed at the sudden rush of cold that disturbed the comfortable atmosphere of her cozy croft when her apprentice returned from the village market. It was early in the season, yet, but already the ground was covered with snow and the streams crusted with ice.

  That did not bode well, the witch knew. It would be a harsh winter for the scattered folk of the Alshari Wilderlands, she could feel it in her old bones. Old Antimei didn’t know how Alurra, her apprentice, was able to contend with the chill, even with a heavy cloak that was too large for her, but she seemed unconcerned by the cold. The girl was carrying a big willow basket full of supplies, which was a welcome sight. There were still a few folk in the village who had enough to trade. The raven on the girl’s shoulder flapped his wings and croaked a greeting to the old woman, who smiled and whistled a welcome in return.

  “Sorry I was late, Antimei, but the roads are thick with ice!” the teenage girl said dramatically as she set the basket down on the floor and shook the snow off of her mantle. “The bridge over the creek to Tolindir was near covered. Why won’t they build a cover over it?” she complained.

  Clearly, it was time for a lesson in wisdom.

  “Who is this ‘they’ you are referring to, Alurra?” chuckled the old woman from the comfort of her chair. Though once she was known as the Witch of the Wilderlands, the greatest hedgewitch in the north, she rarely left the chair, these days. She knew she would remain there for some time to come. “That rickety bridge serves to cross a creek to no one but me, now. Who would spend the time and money to repair it in these dark days?”

  “Antimei!” Alurra said, snorting indignantly. “You are the greatest witch in the northlands! They should be honored to help you!”

  Once they were, Antimei recalled. Once the common folk of the Wilderlands, from the Pearwoods to the Mindens, made their way to Tolindir, or Marsin, or Doss, and let it be known that they needed the Witch . . . and Antimei would mysteriously appear, as if she had known they needed the great witch’s help. Usually, because she did.

  “Again with this mysterious ‘they’! Child, I haven’t had a real client in a month and a half, and won’t for another, now that the snows have set in. Tolindir village is the last of the three I used to serve, and it is barely there, anymore. Six families left? Seven? And a few freeholds? They could barely get the harvest in, let alone waste time on an old bridge to nowhere. Is that the ‘they’ you speak of?”

  “Well, then the lords should do it, then!” the teenager fumed, impatiently, as she unpacked the basket.

  “The Wilderlords are gone, Alurra,” Antimei said, her voice becoming serious. “There were few enough of them to begin with, before the war. Now they’ve all died. Or been taken. Or fled beyond care.”

  “But it’s dangerous!” she said, with all the drama a thirteen-year-old girl could produce.

  “No, Sweeting, it’s a defense. While that rickety bridge may be treacherous to human feet, it can be dashed quickly enough to keep the goblins out, at need. They hate to get their feet wet. And wouldn’t, for the prize of one skinny old woman and one scrawny apprentice in their soup pot.”

  Alurra shuddered involuntarily. Her parents had been taken or slain by the goblins four years ago, when their savage warrior bands burst out of the distant Mindens and pillaged their way across the Wilderlands. That dark time still haunted the girl, and with good reason.

  The Wilderlords who were pledged under Duin to defend the people had rallied bravely to the banner call. Tolindir Village had sent twenty bowmen to the call in the party of Sire Grendei, who claimed the remote hamlet. None had returned. A week after their menfolk had marched away, the first wide-eyed refugees from beyond the river arrived. They told of horrific fights against a bloodthirsty enemy, and encouraged everyone to take what they could carry and flee before they had to face the angry gurvani.

  Some of the Tolindiri took heed, and left for the south or the east. Others scoffed at the idea of the goblins even finding the tiny hamlet. People who knew where it was had a hard time finding it, ran a local jest.

  A week later, the first gurvani raiding party descended on the remote region in the night. The hamlet of Marsin was sacked, its folk led away in chains to the west. Doss had been burned to the ground, the folk there slaughtered. In Tolindir village, the largest in the domain, the gurvani burned a third of the cots, enslaved sixty of the freemen, and torched the manor house when some poor folk tried to take refuge there.

  Th
at was the raid which had made Alurra an orphan – and worse.

  In the horror of that fateful night the terrified little blonde girl had encountered one of the foul goblin shamans in the midst of casting some powerful spell with his accursed witchstone. Whether her latent Talent for magic had anything to do with it or not, Antimei didn’t know – but something had gone wrong. The flare from his spell had burned out her eyes, the faces of her parents being led away by ropes around their necks the last sight she ever saw.

  Not everyone had perished or been taken that night. The once-robust community of three hundred had dwindled to a scant hundred people who tried to carry on their lives as best they could. When families had been torn asunder by death and despair, the brave folk of the Wilderlands consolidated their kin and their cattle and continued to live. In fear, in tears, but they continued to plow and sow and harvest and the herds. They looked after the orphans of their dead neighbors as if they were their own slain children.

  One such mended family had taken poor Alurra in. Only ten years old, the blind girl had been put to work in the kitchen and the yard, doing what chores a blind girl could do on a freeholding. She’d collected eggs, swept, snapped beans, plucked chickens, scaled fish, and done laundry with increasing skill for a few years. It was a shame, everyone said behind her back. Such a pretty girl, and so smart and well-tempered. But her eyesight was a handicap it would be difficult to overcome in the rough life ahead of her.

  In better times they would have sent the girl south with a nun to one of the temple houses for the blind and forgotten about her. But there were few priests walking circuits anymore, and nearly every human temple and shrine within the range of the goblins’ reach had been turned into a ghastly mockery of itself, often with the shredded, tortured remains of the former pilgrims turned into macabre mockeries of worship in their ruins.

  Alurra was Tolindir Village’s problem. The surviving villagers hoped that, perhaps in a few years, if she survived, she could be married to some poor fellow with a bigger heart than head. Working a freehold was hard work, and it required sight; everyone knew that. But perhaps there was a hard worker who was willing to overlook her faults. She was a comely girl, after all. Surely Ishi would be gracious enough to provide a good man with an unfortunate face to match her.

  But then one night her fate changed again when Alurra woke in her borrowed bed, screaming, her sightless eyes streaming with tears. She had a dream, she insisted, a horrible nightmare about an endless army of goblins that streamed out of the west. Her descriptions were so vivid, so terrifying that they had brought her out of a dead sleep. Her dream alarmed the other children instantly, and many of the adults who feared another attack on Tolindir more than anything.

  Some began to murmur that the girl was possessed by some malicious spirit. Perhaps, it was whispered, it would be better to lead her away into the forest and leave her fate to the gods.

  But wiser, more compassionate heads prevailed, and Old Antimei was summoned from her hidden croft. She was, after all, the authority on such things, and her wise judgment would appease the hearts of many. The hedgewitch was ready to make the nearly six mile walk into the village when the two lads they sent arrived, surprised to find her packed and waiting.

  She’d known she was going on a trip. She had foreseen it.

  Antimei examined the girl in front of the others, as tradition demanded. She rarely practiced that kind of magic anymore, but once learned the most basic spells always returned as strong as before. Her arcane inquiry only confirmed her prophecy: the blind girl had rajira arising in her spirit, and it would be a strong Talent. She would be of magekind – and not a minor power, either. Though her blindness would make instructing her challenging, Antimei had a duty to train her. There was simply no one else who could.

  She was destined to take up the task. She had foreseen it.

  Antimei agreed to take charge of the girl on the spot, calmly informed the village that the army she’d seen would pass them by as it streamed toward the southlands along the Timber Road, and that all was well. Her words calmed a great many, and the grateful people packed Alurra up and provided her with simple gifts before she went. Antimei had not mentioned the river of ice, or the dragons, or the desperate struggle to come. For the people of Tolindir village there was safety . . . for now. That was all they really cared about.

  For two years and more Alurra had lived here in the croft with her. She had lectured the girl constantly on her new craft, and found her both intelligent and engaged. Having already accepted the reality of her blindness, accepting the novelty of magic seemed easier to her than in most neophytes. After making her at home in the croft, Antimei ushered the girl through the painful process of adjusting to her Talent. It had seemed an endless psychic crisis as the Talent re-made her nervous system into its eventual form, but the pain and suffering involved in the process had brought them close together in a short time.

  At first Antimei had been perplexed about how to proceed with Alurra’s training, since without sight the girl could not read, or use magesight. Many spells required magesight to even begin, and without vision Alurra could not learn magic the way that Antimei was prepared to teach it.

  But where there is will, there is possibility – and magic always found a way, her experience told her. At first she read aloud to the girl and explained the words along the way. She shaped sticks into the form of letters and runes and let the girl hold them and feel them until she knew them in her heart. It was a long, slow process, but Antimei was persistent. Eventually she had to find new methods of explaining concepts that would have been best seen by eye.

  That’s when Alurra’s Talent intervened. The girl began waking from strange dreams where she was a raccoon, or a racquiel, or a wolverine, a mouse, a faun, a rabbit or a raven. It became clear to Antimei that Alurra was bilocating. She had the rare beastmaster ability as part of her natural Talent . . . and that began to affect how she learned magic.

  Teaching her apprentice to do consciously what her subconscious mind did was easy, compare to teaching her to read with sticks. Antimei worked with her until she mastered the art of bilocation at will, and experience the world from their perspective . . . and with their eyes. Using her animal companions, Alurra could “see” again, within limits.

  Within weeks she was able to tame a young raven to ride on her shoulder and “see” the world on her behalf. She learned how to easily slip behind the eyes of mice, chickens, turkeys, and songbirds that haunted the croft. Alurra’s awareness of the world expanded significantly.

  But though she could now navigate the croft no matter how often Antimei re-arranged the furniture, none of the creatures Alurra had mastered could look at a page of text and read. It wasn’t a matter of vision – the animals could see the parchment, see the contrast between black and white . . . but none of them had the capacity to understand it. Alurra remained illiterate.

  Still Antimei persevered. The good-natured girl developed a mastery of some forms of the Art, while remaining almost ignorant of other aspects. For every cantrip she easily mastered, there were five she could not even attempt, unless her rajira found a way around the component of sight. Antimei tried her best to adhere to the standard Imperial Magic course of study, but neither her inclination nor her disability could give Alurra the discipline to adhere to it. She had become, by default, a Wild Mage.

  That didn’t really bother Antimei. It wasn’t like there were many Censors wandering around in the Alshari Wilderlands, and even less since the war. That was entirely the reason she had come here in the first place.

  Figuring out exactly what to do with the perplexing girl was becoming a pressing issue. Old Antimei was old, and she had no illusions about how much strength there was left in her body . . . or just when she would pass from this world. The girl learned what magical theory she’d been capable of teaching her and was learning how to manifest that power without the benefit of sight largely on her own. After two years of work Alurra could
slip her consciousness into dozens of creatures, now, allowing her awareness beyond what mere human sight could provide. And her understanding of what she was experiencing was growing admirably.

  Alurra was becoming a decent apprentice, but it was time to prepare her for her greater purpose. That did not include succeeding her as the next hedgewitch of Tolindir Village. Antimei regarded her carefully as she began feeling her way around the small kitchen to prepare their supper. The old witch heaved a great sigh.

  “My girl, it is time that you learned of how and why I came here, to this beautiful land, so far from my home, my life.”

  “Antimei?” Alurra asked in surprise, her hands clutching unconsciously at her apron. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine, Alurra,” she assured. “Leave that, for now. Put the kettle on and let me tell you about one of my Gifts.”

  “I . . . I know about them, Antimei,” Alurra said, quietly, as she took a seat on the low wooden rack covered with a tick that passed for a couch in the dusty croft. “You have the Gift of Prophecy. Which I must never, never speak about.”

  “That is correct, Sweeting. Just as you can easily force yourself into the mind of most creatures, I, too, have a gift that most other magi lack. In my case it is more curse than gift, because it is the forbidden gift of prophecy. Even before our ancestors conquered the Magocracy prophecy was forbidden. Foretelling the future is a professional sin, and always has been. Never you forget that.”

  “But why?” Alurra asked as she set the kettle onto the fire without seeming to pay attention to it. Thanks to her raven friend, Lucky, she knew precisely where the tiny fireplace was, and where the iron hook was positioned. “What’s so wrong about telling the future?”

  “When we issue prophecy, we bind ourselves to Fate,” explained the hedgewitch, after a moment’s thought. “When we say what will be or what will not be, we surrender the ability of free will . . . and will is the most potent tool of the mage. Rarely are prophecies heeded in a useful way – quite the contrary. Usually they do nothing but condemn us to tragedy and misfortune. Few have the wisdom and wit to hold them close, ponder them, and use them wisely.”