Chapter 50 Fourteen Years Ago
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Fourteen Years Ago
The boy from the woods lived with the scholarly Compeller for twelve years.
Tarth’s manor in the Royal Riverlands was a vast, lavish estate with a household staff and hundreds of acres of lush green hills.
Two rivers converged on its grounds, and the boathouse at the fork was painted a handsome burgundy.
Everswallows—birds who could fly for years without tiring—swooped and dove across the fells, eddying in black and bronze smears against the sky.
Over time, the boy allowed himself to love the house, though he would never indulge himself the word home.
Tarth spent several months making sure the boy healed before entering into any mentorship.
First, as a show of faith and trust, he sat the boy down on the edge of a grand four-poster bed and removed the deminite shackles.
The boy’s mouth fell open as the cuffs fell away, exposing ankles so brutalized that it gave him a strange sort of thrill.
The skin was risen, welted, scabbing, weeping, some parts raised into scar tissue, others as raw and wailing as a fresh whip lash.
He supposed he’d forced the pain so far into the back of his mind that he’d ceased to feel it at all.
“Why take the shackles off?” he said hoarsely, feeling the well inside him surge and shimmer for the first time in most of a year. “I could do anything to you.”
Tarth spread his pale hands wide. “Do anything to me, then.”
The boy, of course, did nothing. The very thought made self-loathing rip through him like fire through a coal seam.
“Do your ankles hurt?” Tarth asked, frowning so intensely that his thick dark brows knitted together.
The boy shrugged. “I don’t let myself feel pain.”
Tarth studied him for several penetrating moments before disappearing to run him a bath.
Upon being asked his name, the boy found that he could not quite remember.
His attempts to wipe himself into a blank slate, to become a ghost, had been more successful than he realized.
And so Tarth offered him a new moniker, with a different surname to his own.
A fresh start. The boy took it, feeling a small wedge of distance open between himself and the beggar from the streets of Novarin.
The immaculate new clothes helped, as did the verbena bath oil, the hearty meals, the fire crackling in the hearth.
You don’t deserve any of this, he often thought, small and miserable, but the young child at the heart of him was grateful to Tarth for taking the decision out of his hands.
The boy spent the first few months tortured by the understanding that all of Tarth’s affection was conditional upon one thing: the beggar’s ability to compel.
The time would soon come when his mentor’s true motives emerged—the twisted mission he needed the boy for, the personal ends he hoped to meet.
This anticipation soured any relief fresh clothes and a warm bed might have brought.
He began every morning with a clench of dread, and when he fell beneath his blankets each night, unharassed for another day, his final thought before sleep was this is too good to last.
Tarth often disappeared for weeks at a time to fulfill work duties.
During these absences, the boy roamed the land around the estate.
He scaled small rock faces and ran up hills, climbed trees and swam in rivers no matter how strong the current, his body getting stronger, keeping the darkness from taking root inside his brain.
He perpetually sought the kind of mental blankness he’d mastered on the streets of Novarin—a corporal exhaustion so absolute that deep thought was almost impossible.
And then, of course, there was the part of him that believed the more fatigued he was, the less potent his compelling would be when his mentor finally ordered him to unleash it.
One warm, rainy day in Súdimiel, Tarth had the boy dress in his finest black cloak, because they were visiting a wandmaker in Novarin.
Upon their arrival at the nearest portari gate, however, the boy had shuddered so viscerally and immediately—images of Lorissa Rezaran’s corpse assaulting his inner eye—that Tarth sent for two axelmares instead.
As they rode side by side through the verdant valleys of the Royal Riverlands, it struck the boy for the first time that Tarth might care about him beyond his twisted potential.
A rich, heady exhilaration coursed through the boy as the axelmares pounded the terrain, their hoofbeats strong and rousing, the whip of the wind in his hair. He looked over at Tarth and whooped before he could talk himself out of it. Tarth smiled back, something paternal crinkling his eyes.
By the time they left the wandery, however, the merriment had died in the open grave of the boy’s chest.
Korad Somary was an Irisian wandmaker with crescents of gemstones circling his under-eyes—emeralds and sapphires and darkrubies and even ascenite studded into his creamy brown skin.
He wore his gray hair in two plaits tied off with leather, and his charcoal cloak was of the same brocaded velvet as Tarth’s.
Somary’s wands were things of rare beauty, the finest cuts of wood engraved with detailed depictions of great historic battles, gemstones and rings of ascenite embedded in the handles.
As Somary ushered the boy and his mentor into a plush back room filled with ornate furnishings, he swished shut a creweled curtain, lit a musky incense, and gathered a selection of wand boxes.
He clipped the ascenite cuff around the boy’s wrist, plunging the inner needles into his veins without a word of warning.
The boy, as ever, did not allow the pain to register.
“Have you felt any kind of pull toward a particular branch of magic, child?” Somary asked, his accent looping and swirling like the waves of the Vainian Sea.
The boy looked at his mentor for guidance. Tarth simply shrugged, giving his charge a half smile, as though to say, it’s your call.
Shaking his head, the boy said, “No. No pull.”
Somary unfastened a red ribbon from around a sleek, gilded box and pulled out a narrow whitethorn wand. “The national wood of Irisi. The first I like to try, though few young mages know quite what to do with it.”
As soon as the pale wood met the boy’s palm, a rush of cold, dark power plunged through his veins. All the air seemed to drain from the room, leaving behind an abyssal nothingness, an utter desolation—though ostensibly nothing changed. At least not visually.
Somary stared at the boy, and then the wand, with the expression of a mage recently bereaved. Not of a person, a love lost, but of a worldview, of a sense of safety and comfort, of his own understandings of the outermost bounds of power.
“Get out,” he muttered, a deathly whisper, existential horror weighing down each syllable.
Tarth did not look at all surprised or perturbed by the wandmaker’s reaction. He simply said, calmly and coolly, “No. We’ll be trying out the wands until one can match the boy’s ability. And then you will sell it to us, and then you will never speak of our presence in this shop again.”
Somary nodded blankly, all the fear wiped clean from his face, and the boy realized with a sickening jolt that Tarth had compelled him.
The boy was afraid to touch his new garnet grovus wand for many weeks.
Every time he looked at the gilded box, a sense of shame washed through him, a sense of utter despair. He had always known that his power was monstrous, wrong, but to have it so plainly confirmed on the bejeweled face of the wandmaker…
Tarth, however, was not content for the boy to wallow.
The grand library in Tarth’s house became their classroom. A small pair of desks were set up facing each other, topped with parchment and ink and quills.
“It is about time,” Tarth said, “that we see what you’re really capable of. You are reluctant, I know. But such raw power cannot go unchecked, unmastered. The effects could be cataclysmic. We need first to understand the depths of what we are working with, and then we must move on to said mastery.”
The boy stared dully at the unopened wand box, self-loathing spreading inside him like oil.
“I’d rather never use it at all. I’ll keep myself wiped clean, I promise.
I will not want. I will not hurt. I will be nothing.
It’s the only way to keep the world safe.
I managed for months on the streets of Novarin, didn’t I?
And I’m older now, better at controlling my instincts and impulses. ”
Tarth sighed. “There are many instincts and impulses you are yet to experience—instincts and impulses that are not so easy to tamp down. No mage in Ascenfall can control their every thought. Oftentimes, they rear up from the subconscious between one split second and the next.”
“But—”
“We could go back and forth for several minutes before I order you to do as I ask, or we could cut straight to the part where you obey.” A taut beat. “Open the box.”
The boy opened the box.
“Pick up the wand.”
As the deep red wood met his skin, again came that rush of cold, that roiling darkness.
Tarth leaned back in his chair. “Command me to do something.”
This was, in itself, a command. A command the boy had no choice but to obey.
“Blow a raspberry.”
Tarth—his immaculate, self-respecting mentor—made a noise of rather profound flatulence.
Despite himself, the seven-year-old fought to keep the smirk from his face.
Ten years went by.
The boy grew in confidence and diminished in self-loathing, although every time he was ordered to compel his mentor, a small part of him flinched and retreated.
Their lessons grew in intensity until, around the time the boy turned fourteen, their epic clashes of will became an exercise in self-flagellation for Tarth. The boy’s power was simply too strong.