The Prodigal Mage: Fisherman’s Children Book One (5 page)

T
he feeling rolled through him as he wandered the cherry orchard Dathne had seen planted in the palace grounds. Not that there were any cherries to steal yet—the trees hadn’t even started to bud. But winter was waning: the merest hint of springtime warmth in the sunshine kissed his cheek. That meant the cherry trees would soon be bursting blossom pink and swelling with fruit. It was a cheerful thought, and he’d escaped out here to be cheered. To be alone. Just a snatch of peace and quiet in the fresh air, beneath the milky blue sky, before the demands of both Councils and Justice Hall dragged him under again.

And then the sickening surge of wrongness struck him, and he had to clutch at the nearest gnarled tree-trunk to keep his feet. Had to spit saliva to the damp, tangled grass, bent almost double, and hope he didn’t lose his lunch. This was bad.
Bad
. The worst yet. The first time he’d felt it when he weren’t asleep and trapped in dreams. And that meant he couldn’t pretend any more. Couldn’t shrug the feeling aside and call it too much apple pie and spiced cream close to bed. This time he had to face the awful truth. Something weren’t right in their small jewel of a kingdom.

Heart thudding, belly roiling, Asher closed his eyes and waited for the surging sickness to ease.

“Sink me,” he muttered, cautiously straightening at last. “Bloody sink me.”

It was a long, long while since he’d felt this afraid.

Wiping his mouth on his jacket-sleeve, he looked around. He was still alone, but since he’d told folk where he’d be it most likely wouldn’t stay the case. That ole trout Darran weren’t never happier than when there was something to nag about. He needed somewhere he could think this through. Somewhere he’d not be found. That nobody would ever imagine he’d be. But that were easier said than done. Being who he was—who he’d become, against his will—such a place weren’t so easy to find.

The answer came to him with a nasty jolt.

Barl’s Weather Chamber
.

Of course. Not only ’cause it were quiet, but…

His mouth still sour, his heart still thudding, he abandoned the sweet and peaceful orchard and made his way to the one place he’d thought never to set foot in again. The place where one Asher had died, and another was born.

Panting a little, brushing dead leaves and forest cobwebs off his wool coat, he stood in the mostly overgrown clearing and stared at the Chamber. So long since he’d been here. The day after Morg had brought down Barl’s Wall, he’d come, and never once after.

Ten years now, just gone. Sink me… it’s been that long?

Yes. That long. Because Rafel was ten now and that was how he measured the length of his life: his yardstick wasn’t Gar’s death, or the Wall’s ruin, but the miracle of his first child’s birthing. The promise of a future untainted by prophecy. A future he’d not been sure would come to pass.

In the days and weeks following Morg’s destruction, after the fall of Barl’s Wall, when feelings and fears were still running a mite high, there’d been folk who called for this Weather Chamber to be torn down brick by stone by timber by nail, to be splintered and smashed and burned to rubble and cinders. Ripped from memory, from history, as though it had never been. But he’d not agreed to that. Tear this chamber down, and in years to come folk might say it were only a story. The chamber, the magic, the way weather ruled in Lur. Folk might say none of that ever was. Things get made up, they might say. That ain’t nowt but a lullaby for spratlings.

And that was the time when old mistakes got made fresh.

In the raw aftermath of the kingdom’s desolation, with the royal family gone and life turned topsy-turvy, he’d had his way. He was Asher of Restharven, who’d slaughtered Morg the sorcerer. Anything he’d wanted he’d got without a fuss. The folk who’d bayed for his blood and then owed him their lives were eager to show him how bygones were bygones. No hard feelings. All friends now, eh?

“Don’t hate them,” Dathne had told him. “They were weak and afraid, Asher, but they’re not evil. Not like Morg.”

Which was true enough. And besides, who was he to point fingers and complain with Gar dead to save him and all those harsh words between them never put right? So he’d pushed aside his resentment, the most bitter of his memories—
rotten eggs, cruel jibes, crueler pikestaffs jabbing
—and done his best to see the kingdom restored to an even keel. Had succeeded, with the help of folk like Dathne and Pellen Orrick and those in the Circle who’d not been lost along with Veira.

And now here he stood, staring at the Chamber’s rough-hewn blue stonework, at the glass dome atop it, knowing in his bones Lur was in trouble, again.

Fighting down misery, sick with resentment, he stamped his feet to warm them… and then stamped inside.

The domed chamber was ezackly as Morg left it the day he died, with its circular wall still covered in charts and scribblings, legacy of that lost time when Barl’s will had ruled every life in Lur. Her magic map of the kingdom still took up most of the scuffed floor-space, too, nearly all of it spoiled by Morg’s vicious meddling. Hard to stomach, that was. Of everything Barl made, her Weather map was the most beautiful. It had enchanted him even when he’d been bludgeoned to moaning stillness by her Weather Magic… but now only a few scraps of its beauty remained.

Even though he’d come here to worrit and brood, he smiled at the spacious, grass-covered Dingles and the scattering of tiny untouched towns and villages. They were frozen, of course. Trapped between heartbeats, a forever reminder of the moment Barl’s Wall fell, and how that fall sundered the ancient marriage of weather and world.

He reached down to touch the Weather map’s nearest edge. Just to give thanks. To acknowledge Barl and all she’d done. For six hundred years she’d kept them safe and well. What happened ten years ago weren’t her fault. His fingertip made contact, lightly—and a sparking of power leapt through his blood where the Weather Magic slept fast, undisturbed for years.

Shocked, he pulled his hand back.

No. That ain’t possible. Barl’s magic died. Didn’t me and Dath and the rest of us feel her magic die? Didn’t we see it die when Morg brought down her Wall?

Heart thudding hard again, blood woken and singing, he touched the Weather map a second, cautious time. Let his fingers rest there as he held a long, deep breath. Yes. He could feel something. Barl weren’t quite dead yet.

Or… was it nowt but an echo? A taunting from the past, from a brief time when he’d been lord of this place, Lur’s weather, its magic—a king in everything but name.

Not that I ever wanted that, mind. Not that I did it for myself.

No. He’d done it for Gar, a good man. For their unlikely friendship. To thwart a man he didn’t like. For reasons that mayhap didn’t matter any more. He’d done it and he’d paid the price. And unlike some others, he’d lived to never tell that tale.

Oddly, the desperation of those dark days had mostly faded. He could remember being terrified. He recalled how trapped and put-upon he’d felt. There’d been panic. Confusion. An endless wail of
why me?

Of course, he’d been young then. Fractious and bloody-minded. He was older now. A married man, a father twice over, reluctant head of Lur’s Mage Council and sought-after voice on its General Council. Defender of the law in Justice Hall. He’d never wanted to be a leader, but ten years on still nobody asked what he wanted. Didn’t matter he never cared for it, he had the knack of bein’ in charge. And after the Wall fell, and folk were so fratched and disordered, even the Doranen, they needed someone to boss ’em. To chivvy ’em down the road in the right direction. Besides… after how he’d saved ’em no-one wanted to let him go. They refused to believe they could get along without him. So he’d stayed in Dorana City, even though he was desperate for the clean ocean. It was the only way he could think of to make his amends to Gar.

But it don’t make me king, no matter what that ole fart Darran says
.

Any road, it weren’t a bad life. How could he call it a bad life when he had Dathne and Rafel and little Deenie to love? When he had good friends like Pellen Orrick, and a purpose worth serving? An ungrateful bastard he’d be, if he sat on his arse whingin’ on how he didn’t have the whole world his own way. That’d make him no better than that dead sea-slug Willer.

And if ever he woke from dreams of snowstorms, of gentle rain falling and the turbulence of sprouting seeds, of Weather Magic like boiling wine scouring his veins, well… no life got itself lived without there weren’t some small regrets.

Beneath his resting fingers Barl’s map whispered and hummed. Not just an echo, but a real sizzle of power. Breathing out a slow sigh he drew back his hand a second time, then closed his eyes. Time surged like stormswell, and surging with it a single, searing memory: his first WeatherWorking.

He watched his shaking fingers draw the sigils as a voice he scarcely recognised recited the raincalling incantation. Watched the sigils burst into fiery life. Saw blue flames dance up and down his arms. Felt magic’s wind rise, gently at first, then stronger, and stronger still, till it buffeted him like stormbreath racing inland over the open sea. His blood bubbled with a power that remembered the ocean. He couldn’t have stopped even if he’d wanted to.

Barl save him. He didn’t want to.

The air above the map begin to thicken. Darken. The power he’d raised gave tongue in rumbling thunder and tearing cracks of lightning. He was hot and cold all at once. Shaking and utterly still. His body tingled, like the kissing of a hundred pretty girls. His hair spat sparks, and his fingers, and all the world shimmered bright and blue.

Then the rain burst forth… and the world washed blue to red in a heartbeat as his blood exploded through the confines of his flesh, poured burning from his eyes, his nose, his mouth. And everywhere he turned there was pain.

Shouting, heart banging his ribs, Asher staggered back from the map. There was sweat on his face, running hot down his spine. He touched his nose, his eyes, then stared at his fingertips, expecting to see them daubed with blood.

They were clean.

Blotting his forehead on his woollen sleeve, he paced around the room, carefully not looking at Barl’s ruined map. Slowly, too slowly, the woken pains in his body slunk away to hide. His breathing eased. The vivid, wrenching memory receded.

All done now. All done. I ain’t livin’ that madness any more.

“Sink me,” he muttered, listening to the uneven thud of his boot heels on the scratched parquetry floor. “Don’t do that again, y’gawpin’ great fool.”

His voice sounded shocked and ragged, breaking the silence. And then he heard swift footsteps on the Chamber’s stone spiral staircase.

“Asher? Are you up there? Asher!”

Dathne
.

She came through the open doorway and stopped short, seeing his face. “Jervale’s mercy, are you all right?”

He could cross Barl’s bloody Mountains himself and vanish in the shadows, fall into an endless, lightless abyss, sink himself to the bottom of Westwailing Harbour—and he reckoned she’d still find him. She’d come to drag him home. She
was
home, and always would be.

“I’m fine, Dath,” he said, halting.
Don’t tell her. No need for her to be scared. Not yet.
“I’m just—just hidin’ from Darran.”

Dathne’s gaze was keen. “Darran and Rafe are book-buying down in the City.”

“Ah,” he said. “Good. I’m safe a while, yet.”

Still Dathne stared at him, skeptical. “Hmm.”

Ten years and two spratlings later, she hadn’t changed a whit. Sometimes, caught looking at her, he thought he’d see Matt any moment, so like her younger self did she seem to his eye. The Dathne of Dorana’s Market Square, that first day, and the Dathne who frowned at him now, they were the same woman. Small and lean and lithe, dark hair long and careless, clothes careless too. An important Olken she’d become, but you’d never know it to look at her. She wore silk like tired cotton and laughed when he gave her jewels.

“Asher…” Dathne crossed the empty space between them and rested her palms against his chest. Tilted her head back to stare up into his face. “This isn’t about Darran.”

A strand of hair escaped from braided confinement tickled her sharp-boned cheek. He curled it round his finger and tugged, gently. “Course it is.”

“Asher,”
she said, pinching his chin between her thumb and forefinger, “don’t treat me like a fool. No-one comes to this Weather Chamber. Not any more.”

“You knew where to find me.”

She smiled. When she smiled like that she near melted his bones. “Well… yes. I’m Jervale’s Heir, remember?” Lightly her fist punched above his drubbing heart. “Or used to be.” Her glorious smile faded, leaving her face and eyes sombre. Shimmering with fear. “So no more games, my love. I know why you came here.”

And she did, he could see it. Feel it. But he didn’t want her to say it aloud. Once the words were spoken, what he’d felt in the cherry orchard, in his dreams, would be true—and he didn’t think he was ready to face this truth. Ten years of peace, they’d had, and continued prosperity.

Ten years ain’t long enough. We deserve longer than that
.

“Something’s stirring in Lur,” she said, a hint of sudden tears in her voice. “ Something—not right. It’s been making you restless at night. And a little while ago—that same sense of unease, stronger than ever. Don’t tell me you didn’t feel it too, for I won’t believe you.”