of magic in the City of Elabon as a young man, back in the days when people could travel back and forth between the northlands and the heart of the Empire, but had to give up that and history both when the Trokmoi killed his father and elder brother and left him baron of Fox Keep.
'I hope you do,' Van said. Pulling broken bits of silver from a pouch he wore on his belt, he made for the dice game. Before he could sit down, Duren sprang at him like a starving longtooth. He laughed, grabbed the boy, and threw him high in the air three or four times. Duren squealed with glee.
Gerin made for a little shack he'd built over in a back corner of the courtyard. It was far enough from the palisade that, if it caught fire, it wouldn't burn down the castle outwall along with itself. Thus far, he hadn't even managed to set the shack ablaze.
'Maybe today,' he muttered. He was going to try a conjuration from a new grimoire he'd bought from a lordlet to the southwest whose grandfather might have been able to read but who was himself illiterate and proud of it. As with most spells in grimoires, it sounded wonderful. Whether results would match promises was another question altogether.
The codex of the grimoire had silverfish holes on several of its pages, and mice had nibbled its leather binding while it lay forgotten on a high shelf in a larder. The spell in which Gerin was interested, though, remained unmutilated. In a clear hand, the mage who'd composed it had written, 'A CANTRIP WHICH YIELDETH A FLAMING SWORD.'
That yieldeth had made Gerin suspicious. Along with wizardry and history, he'd studied literature down in the City of Elabon. (And where, he wondered, will Duren be able to learn such things, if he should want to? The answer was mournfully clear: in the northlands, nowhere.) He knew Elabonian hadn't used those archaic forms for hundreds of years, which meant the author was trying to make his work seem older than it was.
But a flaming sword… false antique or no, he reckoned that worth looking into. Not only would it make ferocious wounds, the mere sight of it should cast terror into the hearts of his foes.
He hefted the bronze blade he'd use. It was hacked and notched to the point where it would almost have made a better saw than sword. Bronze was the hardest, toughest metal anyone knew, but it wasn't hard enough to hold an edge in continued tough use.
Gerin had the crushed wasps and bumblebees and the dried poison oak leaf he'd need for the symbolic element of the spell. Chanting as he worked (and wearing leather gauntlets), he ground them fine and stirred them into melted butter. The grimoire prescribed olive oil as the basis for the paste, but he'd made that substitution before and got by with it. It was necessary; the olive wouldn't grow in the northlands, and supplies from south of the High Kirs had been cut off.
He was readying himself for the main conjuration when someone poked his head into the hut. 'Great Dyaus above, are you at it again?' Rihwin the Fox asked. His soft southern accent reminded Gerin of his student days in the City of Elabon every time he heard it.
'Aye, I am, and lucky for you at a place where I can pause,' Gerin answered. If anyone had to interrupt him, he preferred it to be Rihwin. The man who shared his ekename knew more magic than he did; Rihwin had been expelled from the Sorcerers' Collegium just before his formal union with a familiar because of the outrageous prank he'd played on his mentor.
He walked into the hut, glanced at the sword and the preparations Gerin had made for it. He'd stopped shaving since he ended up in the northlands, but somehow still preserved a smooth, very southern handsomeness. Maybe the big gold hoop that glittered in his left ear had something to do with that.
Pointing to the wood-and-leather bucket full of water that stood next to the rude table where Gerin worked, he said, 'Your precautions are thorough as usual.'
Gerin grunted. 'You'd be working here beside me if you took them, too.' Rihwin had been rash enough to summon up Mavrix, the Sithonian god of wine also widely worshiped in Elabon, after Gerin had earned the temperamental deity's wrath. In revenge, Mavrix robbed Rihwin of his ability to work magic, and left him thankful his punishment was no worse.
'Ah, well,' Rihwin said with an airy wave of his hand. 'Dwelling on one's misfortunes can hardly turn them to triumphs, now can it?'
'It might keep you from having more of them,' Gerin replied; he was as much given to brooding as Rihwin fought shy of it. He'd concluded, though, that Rihwin was almost immune to change, and so gave up the skirmish after the first arrow. Bending over the grimoire once more, he said, 'Let's find out what we have here.'
The spell was no easy one; it required him to use his right hand to paint the sword blade with his mixture while simultaneously making passes with his left and chanting the incantation proper, which was written in the same pseudoarchaic Elabonian as its title.
He suspected the mage of deliberately requiring the left hand for the complex passes to make the spell more difficult, but grinned as he incanted: being left-handed himself, he was delighted to have his clumsy right doing something simple.
The painting and passes done, he snatched up the sword and cried, 'Let the wishes of the operator be accomplished!'
For a moment, he wondered if anything would happen. A lot of alleged grimoires were frauds; maybe that was why this one had sat unused on a shelf for a couple of generations. But then, sure enough, yellow-orange flames rippled up and down the length of the blade. They neither looked nor smelled like burning butter; they seemed more the essence of fire brought down to earth.
'That's marvelous,' Rihwin breathed as Gerin made cut-and-thrust motions with the flaming sword. 'It-'
With a sudden foul oath, Gerin rammed the sword into the bucket of water. A hiss and a cloud of steam arose; to his great relief, the flames went out. He cautiously felt the water with a forefinger. When he discovered it remained cool, he stuck in his hand. 'Cursed hilt got too hot to hold,' he explained to a pop-eyed Rihwin. 'Oh, that feels good.'
'Which, no doubt, is the reason we fail to find blazing blades closely clenched in the fierce fist of every peerless paladin,' Rihwin answered. 'Many a spell that seems superb on the leaves of a codex develops disqualifying drawbacks when actually essayed.'
'You're right about that,' Gerin answered, drying his hand on the thigh of his baggy wool breeches. Everyone in the northlands wore trousers; the Trokme style had conquered completely. Even Rihwin, who had favored southern robes, was in breeches these days. Gerin inspected his left palm. 'I don't think that's going to blister.'
'Smear butter or tallow on it if it does,' Rihwin said, 'but not the, ah, heated mixture you prepared there.'
'With the poison oak leaves and all? No, I'll get rid of that.' Gerin poured it out of its clay pot onto the ground. After a bit of thought, he scooped dirt onto the greasy puddle. If the sole of his boot happened to have a hole, he didn't want the stuff getting onto his skin.
He and Rihwin left the shack. Shadows were lengthening; before long, no one would want to stay outdoors. Ghosts filled the night with terror. A man caught alone in the darkness without sacrificial blood to propitiate them or fire to hold them at bay was likely to be mad come morning.
Gerin glanced to the sky, gauging the hour by the moons. Nothos' pale crescent hung a little west of south; golden Math, at first quarter looking like half a coin, was about as far to the east. And ruddy Elleb (pinkish white now, washed out by the late afternoon sun), halfway between quarter and full, stood well clear of the eastern horizon. The fourth moon, quick-moving Tiwaz, would be a waning crescent when the serfs went out to work just after sunrise tomorrow.
As if Gerin's thinking of the serfs he ruled had brought them to new life, a mournful horn blew in the village close by Fox Keep, calling men and women in from the fields.
Gerin looked at the moons again, raised one eyebrow in a characteristic gesture. 'They're knocking off early today,' he remarked. 'I think I may have to speak to the headman tomorrow.'
'He'll not love you for making him push the other peasants harder,' Rihwin said.
Who does love me, for any reason? Gerin wondered. His mother had died giving birth to him; maybe because of that, his father had always been distant. Or maybe his father simply hadn't known what to do when he got
