Sendra
He’d been a hellion in his youth. He’d hunted, stolen a little.
Snuck out and been too much in the backyards of Ceryon’s neighbours, seeing what wasn’t nailed down.
After his home ceased to exist as a community, easy enough to parlay that into brigandage.
And even in that he’d failed. Made just enough of a nuisance of himself that Lannesite’s people had come and smashed his camp and his gang.
Again, doubtless Daimlesse Regent hadn’t even known he existed.
Then he’d found Ilmoth, beneath the mounds. Ilmoth and her monsters. For a brief moment she’d made him Sendroth Sorcerer, and the name had spread far enough to trouble even the throne of Lannesite.
Ilmoth promised much, but thus far she had delivered.
The tower was theirs. And he thought, bitterly, that this could have been the greatest of all Enclaves.
A place where his teachers wouldn’t even have needed to scratch at the earth, but could have lived and taught and contemplated their philosophies.
Instead of which it would breed monsters to break a throne.
His gloves twitched about his hands. The magic ones, the glass gauntlets Ilmoth had given him.
Soon there would be new monsters, and he reached out to see if he could feel them yet, eager for his commands.
A host of arcane beasts waiting to do his bidding.
Not quite yet. Ilmoth was still mastering the intricacies of Nyrgoth Elder’s tower. But there was … something.
Something outside the tower. Sendra frowned.
A voice, speaking in that way his gloves could hear and his ears could not.
Communicating nothing but presence, as though magical things needed to remind one another of their location from time to time.
Probably there were many outgrowths of Nyrgoth’s domain amongst the rocks, here in the cold high passes.
Curious, he ambled over, breath pluming, drawing his cloak about himself. Warm enough in the tower, but out here it was bitter.
Tucked into the rocks, within sight of the tower’s door, was a child.
He blinked at her. She looked … two Storm-seasons, maybe?
A long hard climb from that village where the brigands were gathering, and she wasn’t dressed like some farmer’s kid.
Dressed well, and slightly strangely. A noble’s child, surely, with gold at her throat, and clothes of …
of a weave he didn’t know but had seen before.
She was staring up at him. Perhaps she was afraid, but not as afraid as a lone child should have been. Her eyes flicked to his gloves, and in that same moment his gloves heard her, or some accoutrement of hers. Magic. The things of wizardry, speaking to one another.
“You’re the sorcerer,” the kid said, and “Who the hell are you?” Sendra demanded.
The child’s eyes flicked past him, and if he’d been on his game he’d have realised they weren’t alone.
He was too thrown by her sheer presence, as though she was some changeling the tower had made, like those old stories about the Elders creating life from written incantations and phials of blood.
Then the sword-point touched his cheek and he went still.
The child watched with large eyes. Not eager to see his blood shed, but not necessarily against it, either. An observer, sworn not to interfere.
He turned very slowly. Normally he’d have held his hands out, but he didn’t want it to seem that he was invoking magic.
It was her, of course. Lynesse Second Sister.
Now he saw her face, the familial resemblance in the child was easy to mark.
Her own sorcerous clothes were silent, but probably that was because she’d wanted to sneak up on him.
“Your own kid as bait,” he said, trying for cool, very aware of the sword. “Harsh.”
“She’s supposed to be hiding while I scout,” Lynesse said to him. “What have you done with Nyr?”
Her friend, Nyrgoth Elder. And Sendra had anticipated some grand armed response from Lannesite eventually, preferably after Ilmoth had resurrected a pack of monsters for him to use against them.
What he hadn’t expected was someone just casually paying a call on the Elder because they were an old friend.
“What even are you?” he complained. Because there was an order to the world, important to none more than those who placed themselves outside it.
What point being an outlaw if everyone else was just going to disregard the way things worked?
“You’re the Regent’s sister. You don’t just wander the world like a… ”
“Brigand?” she asked. There was a wicked look to her, catching him on the point of the argument as well as the blade.
“Good banditry needs to know where to come home to, and how the land lies. Your wizard is the prisoner of mine, princess. I might be a sorcerer and you might be an apprentice, but neither of us have any skin in that game. It’s between them.”
He was aware of the child staring at him furiously. Another bloody apprentice, he guessed, got up in magic clothes and come to see her favourite magic uncle.
“Go away,” he told them both. “Ilmoth is dangerous.” He reckoned Ilmoth wouldn’t stir herself about these two visitors escaping. They wouldn’t matter, to the witch.
Or maybe Ilmoth would stir herself, if she reckoned she could use these two apprentices against their master. He weighed that, and found he didn’t want it.
Lynesse still had him at the sword’s point, though she’d drawn in her arm so the weight wasn’t straining her. “‘Go’?” she said, thoughts plainly running parallel to his. “You’re a poor brigand, you know that?”
“What brigand I am, your sister fashioned. Blame her for the workmanship,” he told her flatly.
“I just wanted to live in Ceryon. What ills I have wrought, what villain I’ve become, it’s all from your family’s quarrels.
” And then, bitter, furious at her just in that instant, “I only wanted your damn sister to know what she’d ruined. ”
He sat down on one of the oddly squared rocks that littered the pass before the tower’s gateway, evidence of its ages-ago construction.
“You can’t guess what it’s like, to have the world so big, to be so small, that regents and powers will just crush all you ever knew and never realise.
Like a bug you kill while turning over in your sleep.
Listen to me, Lynesse Second Sister. Go away, please.
Take your child and go. You might be my enemy, but I don’t wish Ilmoth’s wrath on you. ”
She regarded him levelly for a long time, then slipped the sword back into its sheath. Sat down herself; held an arm out so that her daughter came to her.
“My sister is learning about what she’s ruined,” she said. “And about time.”
He blinked at her. At the gorget hanging from her belt. Simultaneously an official of Lannesite and not, caught between two tales. She tilted so the tower’s light gleamed on the heraldry there.
“Let it be this way,” she said. “Nyr is my friend. I will help him if I can. And I know that this”—a tap at her sword hilt—“is no use in there. Not in the tower. Not against the witch. So let it be this way. Let me be an emissary of Lannesite, come to treat with Sendroth Sorcerer. Let me stand in for my sister, in recognising what has been ruined, and what might be put right.” She hugged the child to her.
And she could hardly send the kid off down the mountain on her own, but if it had been Sendra’s daughter he’d never have taken her into such a place.
“‘Let me be’ doesn’t suggest it’s true,” he observed.
“I can make it true,” Lynesse told him flatly. “If I can leave here with a story that my sister can be made to accept.”
He noted the language, and what it might say about the sympathies behind it. He stood.
“You’d better shift that to your throat, princess,” he said, of the gorget.
“If you’re going to be on the crown’s business.
If you’re sure.” One more chance for her to save herself and her child from wizard business.
But then, if they were both the old man’s apprentices, perhaps they’d always have been caught in the fallout.
The witch kills the wizard, his apprentices kill the witch, the sorcerer kills them, and where does any of it end?
Just the sort of idiot blood-and-thunder saga he’d liked when he was a child and foolish.
“Come on then, if you’re coming,” he said, feeling like a man with no good choices. When they stood, the child was casting about like she was listening for something.
“You hear the witch in there?” he asked her, because he could, too, or his gloves could. The ghost-words Ilmoth was plying the tower with, to get it to do what she wanted.
“I hear a big voice that is the witch,” the child told him solemnly. “And I hear a big voice that is Nyr. And a little voice that speaks under them. A little voice in a hundred pieces.”
He frowned at her. My gloves, she means?
The tower itself? But it wasn’t that because, somehow, her mentioning it had opened his ears to it, just for a moment.
A weird, fleeting voice, here and there and everywhere and in none of the spaces in between.
Strange and plaintive and utterly inhuman.
And then gone, as though it never was. And he met Lynesse’s gaze, and she was as thrown by it as he was.