CHAPTER SIXTEEN #2
“And what if the next king is worse?” Bertrand replied.
“What if the high-ranking nobles get rowdy over this little quest and replace him with someone more vicious? What if he dies without an heir and we’re invaded by Preule, or by the Marchess Empire, made to adhere to their customs, made subservient to their economy?
What if parliament takes over and nothing ever gets accomplished because none of the pompous shits can agree?
Better the devil you know. And if the devil is ageless, then we’ll get to know him very well. ”
“I know him well enough,” Sy said quietly. Well enough to know he must do anything to be free of him, whatever the price.
“How well do you know him, Sylas?” Bertrand asked, implication thick on his tongue. “People do say the wildest things.”
At that, David rose quickly to his feet and stormed into the brush. To Sy’s relief, he took his pen kit with him. It would do no good against bears or carnivorous fruit, but it could protect him from other humans, at least.
Bertrand watched not David, but Sy. He returned Bertrand’s stare evenly. “Anything else to add?”
“What about you?” Abruptly, Bertrand rose, gripped the bottle of whiskey David had left behind. Grimacing, he took a drink. “Go on. You’ve been dying to ask me what I’m doing here.”
“I really haven’t,” Sy said, rubbing his temples. His headache was worse than ever, and his fatigue, chased away by adrenaline, now crept back into his limbs.
Bertrand continued as if Sy hadn’t spoken. “You know I’m studying to become a physician.”
“You’re going to use your knowledge of the body and David’s of magic to compose a spell, then split the prize. Am I close?”
“Jealous?”
“We’re through,” he said coldly. “If that wasn’t painfully obvious.”
“It wasn’t. I wouldn’t need the prize if I had a sovereign for every fight between the pair of you.
” Bertrand cast a glance in the direction David had gone.
“Your huntress is going to catch it, anyway. Good work setting her on the trail,” he added bitterly.
“If she wasn’t a target already, she will be, now. ”
Sy’s eyes snapped up. Bertrand shrugged. “Others will be stalking her, tracking her. They’ll wait until she catches it, then steal it from under her nose. Or her neck.”
Sy felt his chest tighten. “Others like you?”
In reply, he took another drink.
“You have an idea. Don’t you?”
“Spoken like a man who has one of his own.” Sy mimed brandishing a hand of cards. “Show me your hand and I’ll show you mine.”
Bertrand weighed his offer. Sy knew his guesses were worth their weight in gold to the others; they were in the forest on his hunch, after all. At the moment, he held all the cards.
Perhaps not all of the cards, anymore.
Bertrand finally made his decision, brandishing his red glove with an ironic flourish. “Are you familiar with the concept of metempsychosis?”
“Can’t say it rings a bell, no.”
He pulled a stick from their unlit pyre.
In the dirt around it, he began to draw.
One circle, then another. “Simple, in theory. In modern times, it’s sometimes referred to as palingenesis.
The concept stems from ancient medicine; the most ancient.
It means the transmigration of the soul.
More specifically, the idea that a person’s soul can enter another vessel after death.
Whether another human body, or an animal, or even a plant.
The phoenix creates its own vessel. It’s self-sustaining. ”
“After death,” Sy repeated dryly. “Regicide is generally frowned upon.”
“That’s where I keep getting stuck.” He tapped the stick thoughtfully against the first circle.
“The ancients believed the soul was located in the heart. Their experiments in that realm proved fruitless, but their understanding of magic was elementary compared to ours. And we can’t very well cut the king’s heart out and replace it with a bird’s. ”
The fingers on Sy’s left hand twitched. Perhaps he had not imagined the glyph for heart on his palm. He kept his eyes trained carefully on Bertrand.
“You’ve explained all this to David?”
“Of course.”
That presented a problem, for David knew more about Sy’s mark than the others. Had he ever studied it, late at night, by the glow of a candle? Surely not. Not well enough to jump to the same conclusions Sy had.
“And what of your hand?”
Sy involuntarily curled his fingers closed. Bertrand meant his figurative hand of cards, of course.
He weighed the others’ advantages. They had no weapons that he could see, but were well supplied with food and water.
They were as unfamiliar with the Lichtenwald as he was, and sure to get as lost as he had.
Unless, of course, they found a willing guide – say, a hunter in need of a spellscribe’s protection and a buyer for the bird once she caught it.
But he had to offer something. Giving them the vague location would seem generous, but offered them no true advantage over him. “There’s a meadow,” he said. “Augur Meadow. The hunters think the phoenix resides there.”
“And any ideas what we should do with it?” His question was half in jest; but only half.
“None,” Sy lied. And his was only half a lie; he had no ideas he was certain of, anyway. “And as an apprentice physician, what do you make of the viability of King Edgard’s request?”
“Only that after what we saw today, I am hard pressed to find anything completely beyond reason.”
“But…it doesn’t make sense, does it?” Sy said, unable to help himself.
Bertrand had knowledge he did not; knowledge that may fill in some of the gaps in his own reasoning.
“What happened today was magic – there’s nothing else to call it.
And yet, glyphs are the highest, most advanced form of magic, but they can’t manage anything of the sort. Has such a thing even been attempted?”
“Such a thing would be highly unethical. Against our oath,” he added, mockingly. Sy was sure Bertrand found it at least as hypocritical as he did.
“Not if one performed such experiments on oneself.”
“And are you willing to be Edgard’s laboratory rat in addition to his pet?”
Sy bristled and leaned back.
At his withdrawal, Bertrand huffed a humorless laugh. “They look down on me far worse than they do on you, you know.”
“I wasn’t aware we were competing for the honor.”
“Of course we are.” He threw the stick he had been toying with into the brush. “You weren’t supposed to succeed and did. I was supposed to and didn’t. You’re a wonder; I’m a fool.”
“You weren’t talented enough,” Sy said bluntly, not interested in pitying Bertrand, competition or no. “There are hundreds more who would rise higher than either of us, but they’ll never have even the chance.”
“That’s the way of the world.”
“So it is,” he snapped. “And long ago, the way of the world was mud roads and illiteracy. The best men like us could hope for was an early, painless death, or endlessly raiding castles for the will of stronger men, for the fleeting reward of gold and glory. It is does not mean it must be.”
Bertrand’s lips twitched. “And how much has changed, really? Think of the bear your huntress killed. Her livelihood itself. Competition is the way of nature, and the way of man. We are always in competition. It’s only that it’s easier to overlook surrounded by wallpaper and liquor cabinets.
” His demeanor shifted, his voice louder and brighter.
“But you’re right – we don’t have to be, not us.
Work with us, David and I, and split the – what did you call it? The gold and the glory.”
“You know I can’t do that.”
“I was afraid of that,” he said quietly. Then, louder, “I will say nothing further without David around to hear it.”
Sy hadn’t forgotten that David was the reason the Lichtenwald was full of scribes.
Nor had he forgotten David’s motivation to win the prize. His father’s factory; his sister’s education. His family. His future, the one he had been promised, vivid as a golden sun. Splitting the prize in half would be hard enough, let alone splitting it three ways.
And Sy could not split it at all.
His heart ached almost as much as his head.
“And I will say nothing further at all,” he said wearily. “I need sleep. I won’t impose longer than I have to. I’ll leave you at first light.”
As he spoke, a rustling in the undergrowth signaled David reemerging from the dark. He stepped slowly forward into the lantern light. His right hand was clenched into a fist, and the open fingers of his left trembled.
“What is it?” Sy demanded, sitting up. “Are you hurt?”
David let out a sound somewhere between a laugh and a groan, then shook his head.
“Go on, David,” said Bertrand. “I got what I needed.”
Before Sy could even think to question Bertrand’s odd remark, David kneeled before him.
And before he could question why David would do that, he had pressed his clenched right fist to Sy’s chest, over his heart.
In a familiar gesture, he slid his other hand behind Sy’s ear.
Then, with a soft breath, David pulled him into a kiss.
His first thought was surprise.
His second, a familiar, welcome impulse, was to kiss him back; all forgiven, all forgotten.
His third was of hesitation. Was of…Anya.
As he puzzled over the mess of his thoughts and remembered he really ought to be focused on Bertrand, who he thought had said something threatening, David pulled away, and said, with all the remorse of a man on his deathbed, “Sy. I’m sorry.”
Then he raised his clenched fist and opened it, revealing a glistening ruby dust. He blew the spell into Sy’s face.
Everything went black.