The Malicarn
THE SIXTEENTH WINTER IN THE REIGN OF QUEEN HANNAH I
There are two types of historians. The first looks at an old uniform and asks, “Who wore that?” The second looks at that same uniform and asks, “What does it feel like to wear that?” Buck Douglas was the second type.
About which wizard, and which battles, Buck never did learn much.
Frank Douglas did not speak of the past. When Buck’s father wasn’t drinking, he worked their small farm in the valley.
And when he wasn’t cursing his mules and pushing his plow, he was hitting Buck and shouting about how worthless he was.
The farm yielded potatoes and carrots mostly.
The orchard washed out in a flood, and the pigs all died of fever.
When Buck turned two the queen’s inspectors came and fined Buck’s father for keeping too many chickens.
The inspectors confiscated three, and that winter—with the crop failures and the lack of meat—Buck’s baby sister and mother died. His father drank more after that.
Sometimes his father would stumble in late, breath reeking of ale, and other nights friends of his dragged him home. They’d pour a bucket of water over his head and toss him into bed.
“He was never like this during the war.” They wouldn’t say more about it than that.
When Buck was seven, his father lost their lease on the farm and moved to a small room in one of the boardinghouses in Kingstown.
Buck started working, first for city granaries during the harvest and then as a hauler for stonemasons.
He lugged stone from quarry to worksite.
He was young but he grew strong. One of the masons suggested he take an apprenticeship, and when he was twelve he moved out of his father’s room into a small shack on the master mason’s land, attached to a barn, where he rose early every day and learned how to cut and shape stone, how to mix mortar, how to place the stone and bind it into place.
At night the master would invite the journeymen and apprentices to supper with his family, and that is where Buck first heard real tales of the old wars.
How there used to be hundreds of wizards, how the late King Prion, himself once just a lowly sheepherder, became the one to unite them against the Dark Mages, how the many men of the Malicarn were called to fight.
The master himself was a captain in the cavalry and told long stories about the glorious days of the war.
The only time Buck heard these stories from his own father was his final winter when he fell ill.
Old army friends rode up to the mason’s house in a hurry to find Buck.
When Buck came to his father’s bedside, the old man sweating while frost formed on the window outside, he talked for the first time about the past. About Buck’s mother, the farm, and most of all the war.
“We used to sleep in a circle, shifts of three at a time on watch, sitting on the edge of the camp. A whole company sleeping that way. We could never set up secure defenses, not unless the wizard was able to perform a hex of some kind. But usually the wizard kept to himself, sleeping and eating in his tent. Ours was named Ferguson. He would come out for marches, riding a horse, and of course he led us into battle. But even the generals rarely saw or spoke to him at other times.”
Buck wanted to know all the details: what they ate, what weapons they carried, how they lined up in formation for a battle.
There were things his father couldn’t remember, details he seemed to confuse, mix up, or repeat.
But still he talked. He could no longer drink, so nostalgia was the next best thing to distract his mind.
“One day we were searching a village for a company of mages. The houses appeared deserted, but my commander and I searched each room anyway. In one small hut, we found a shelf leaning against a wall. When we moved it back, there was a small child hiding in a tiny closet. With him were hundreds of spellbooks, wizard staffs, magical amulets. The mages were hiding all their artifacts there. The child was young, no more than six, but when he saw us he shot an arrow at my commander, who fell dead. Through the neck. I struck the child down with my sword. Later that night, the mages returned, but we were ready. We surprised them, and slaughtered them all.”
Buck’s father died after a day of sweating agony, screaming things Buck could not understand.
“Free me!” were his final words. Buck paid to have his father’s body carried back to their old farm to be buried beside his mother and sister.
It cost all the money he had in the world, and he had to dig the hole himself.
When he finished his apprenticeship, Buck heard about the young queen’s masonry renovations on the old castle.
He had never seen the queen, only knew her from his father’s curses, but the money was good and so Buck returned to Kingstown.
The town that had grown up in the few years since Buck and his father first moved there was remarkable, a maze of streets and a mix of styles that screamed chaos and meant life.
Kingstown was vibrant and alive and full of possibility.
The streets were also filled with the wretched, the poor, and the damned.
Buck worked hard there, helping lay the foundation and constructing the south wall of a new nave.
Some of the other masons he knew from the master’s house, former apprentices or journeymen, also came looking for work.
They heaved and sweated during the day and drank and caroused at night.
Their favorite spot was a brothel called the Broodmare, where Buck lost his virginity.
It was at the Broodmare where Buck met his first guildmember, a carpenter named Wallace, who overheard Buck telling a story about his father’s time in the war.
“You should come to one of our meetings, if you appreciate history,” Wallace said. “I think you would enjoy it. We have a special speaker at our next meeting.”
The Wizarding Reenactors Guild had dozens of chapters throughout the Malicarn, but Buck visited one that met in the antechamber of a church on the opposite side of the river, a respectable neighborhood of merchants and tradesmen who did business in Kingstown but preferred not to live in the middle of the mess.
The chapter was an all-volunteer group of about thirty men, a mix of the trades and wealthy benefactors, including one named Kreek, the smartest and most knowledgeable man there.
Kreek was famous, so Buck was told, for training the Council of Heroes in the final years of King Prion’s reign.
A knight himself, he continued to train young highborn children the art of swordplay by day, but in the evenings he preferred the company of the common man, those who were interested in the old tales but had never experienced magic themselves.
When Buck arrived at the church for the weekly meeting, Kreek was already there, standing in front of a row of chairs.
He was shorter than Buck expected, but strong and broad, built like an ox.
Buck himself sat toward the back, in the corner.
He nodded politely at Wallace and a few of the other men.
Shortly after, Kreek turned around and addressed the crowd.
“Thank you for coming out tonight,” Kreek began, as the last members filed in.
“A few announcements: If you have not yet decided to attend the Battle of Pine Run Reenactment, make sure you tell us before next week so that you have a spot in the carriage. We cannot afford more horses, so if you do not let us know you will have to walk. It is a full-dress event. If you do not have a uniform, please let myself or Wallace know and we can find a spare for you.”
Wallace, in the front row, gestured at Kreek.
“Oh,” Kreek continued, “and Wallace reminds me that afterward we will congregate at a pub to be determined. So be sure to bring some extra deniers for that. All right, well, with no further delay, let me introduce our speaker. I know a lot of you have been asking who it is, but we have kept it a secret so that we were not overrun with non–historically minded folk. Gentlemen, please welcome, to speak on the inner experience of wizarding and combat, the Last Wizard himself, Gregorian the Great.”
The place erupted in thunderous applause, but Buck was too shocked to clap.
He had seen glimpses of Gregorian, wandering to and from the castle, but the wizard was mercurial.
He would appear suddenly in a city square and then vanish again.
He often holed up in his tower, a black obelisk in the Old Village, sometimes missing for weeks on journeys far from the Malicarn itself.
His business was mysterious and unknowable.
There were always whispers that he was secretly in thrall to the Necromancer.
But the young queen trusted him, and so he remained a figure of respect throughout the realm.
Only once had Buck seen him up close. As a young child he went hunting with his father and they ran into Gregorian, who was on some errand.
The wizard, always renowned as charitable to the common folk, gave them his cart and horse and continued his own journey on foot.
This was shortly after his mother and sister had died, and Buck could not remember the words his father passed with the wizard as this kindness took place.
He was so young that the memory itself was mostly his father’s retelling of it.
But Buck always held a fondness for Gregorian in his heart.