• CHAPTER TWELVE •
Journey IV
MAGNUS STUMBLED.
One moment he had been propelled through a tunnel of light, and the next he was standing on a grass-covered hillside. He glanced around and was struck by how familiar his surroundings were, then he realized he was on the north side of Isla Beata.
He willed himself to his father’s study and a shock of pain struck him like a lightning bolt, knocking him to the ground and momentarily stunning him. He shook off his fuzzy-headedness after a moment and got to his feet. He took in a deep breath, then started walking.
While it was not a big island, it was large enough that to walk from the north shore, where he once had a personal retreat, a small fishing shack, to the villa took several hours. He listened, half-expecting to hear familiar sounds, but all he heard was the sound of distant breakers and the wind in the trees as he walked from the shore. Then he realized what was missing. There were no bird calls, no insect sounds. He wasn’t on his island.
Progress by foot was slow, and Magnus wished he had his usual staff and the old slouch hat he used to wear when travelling. They provided additional comfort and utility. The staff was useful for negotiating small streams and other places he didn’t feel like using his arts to bypass, and the hat had protected his very fair skin from the harsh sun.
As long as he was wishing, he thought, he might as well wish for a picnic basket with a fine, chilled wine.
‘Lovely place for a picnic, isn’t it?’ said a feminine voice from behind him.
Magnus hadn’t heard that voice in years, yet he recognized it instantly. ‘Helena,’ he whispered.
He turned and drank in the sight of her. She looked exactly as she had the day they had first become lovers. She had long, flowing wavy hair that reached the small of her back, and curled at the ends, unless the weather was dry – then she’d complain it was unruly. Her skin was naturally fair, but as she insisted on doing her studies outside and swimming as much as she could, she was always tanned. Her eyes were the dark brown of an island sable’s fur: almost black. She wore a wine-coloured dress, with a scooped neck and short sleeves trimmed in the palest yellow, almost white, and he knew she wore nothing under it, save sandals on her feet. She complained the island was too warm in summer, and wanted to be able to strip naked and leap into the ocean at whim.
He remembered her body. She was neither slender nor heavy, but exactly in the middle, athletic and strong, ideal from Magnus’s point of view, and her long legs were magnificent. Her nose was perfect, lacking the odd bumps and curves of most people’s. Years had passed and he occasionally wondered why he found her nose so memorable, but it was. And now he beheld it again, a straight bridge down to a tip exactly the right size, and perfectly centred and symmetrical. And below was her mouth, which most of the time was pursed as she concentrated on one thing or another; but then she’d smile as she did now, and his world became dazzling.
She was the only woman in his life who had captured his heart: no other woman had wounded it so deeply.
She pointed to the large picnic basket on a commodious blanket. In her hands she held his staff and hat, the one he had worn years before, larger-brimmed than the newer one. ‘You forgot your staff and hat, my love.’
He took a faltering step toward her and said, ‘How is this possible?’
She shrugged and glanced around. ‘Something’s different, Magnus.’ Then she closed her eyes for a moment, and he could see vitality flow away. At first she had moved almost as a dancer would, light upon her feet, then before his eyes he saw her manner change and her body settle into the movement of someone older, a woman with more years to carry.
‘I remember,’ she said softly. She came to stand before him and handed him his staff and hat. It wasn’t the staff he had lost leaping into the vortex, but rather the one he had carried as a youngster. The wood was still freshly carved, sanded and smoothed, and hand-polished by him every night in his room for hours over many weeks until he judged it just so. It was a youthful student’s affectation, for it was not a staff of power, nor was it even a sturdy yeoman’s stave, but really a very elegant walking stick. And the hat. He held it in his other hand and realized how foolish he must have looked as a youth, wearing this pointy-topped, broad-brimmed, floppy monstrosity. Though he did feel affection for it, and admitted it had been a very good hat for the many years he kept it. He couldn’t remember where he’d last seen it, over half a century before. And he was surprised to discover he was very glad to have it back.
‘What do you remember?’ he asked.
‘My life,’ she said softly. ‘And my death.’ She gazed up at him with wonder and fear. ‘Magnus, how can this be?’
He looked down at her and felt his heart racing. He said, ‘I’m unsure. Tell me what you remember.’
She looked around, then knelt by the basket, opened it and began preparing food. ‘I remember all of it – my life, my family, up to the day I died. I remember our fight. I remember you not speaking to me after that.’ She sat back on her heels and looked up at him. ‘You could be the most stubborn person I’ve known, even worse than your mother.’
Magnus smiled. She was right about that. He had been a prodigy by any measurement. The flaws in him were not strength or intelligence, but rather a tendency to hold back at things. As a boy, the first time he had lost his temper once his talents emerged, he had caused a fire that had damaged a large part of his room. That’s why he was overly cautious. Another time he lost his temper and severely injured three boys who had been tormenting his little brother Caleb. Though he was slow to anger, when he did lose his temper his rage could be prodigious. It had been such a rage that had ended their love.
She resumed emptying the basket. ‘I know that when I asked your father to return to Stardock and continue my studies away from you, he didn’t ask why, so I knew you had said something.’
‘I didn’t,’ said Magnus. ‘It must have been my mother or my brother.’
‘Or anyone else on the island,’ she conceded. ‘No one on this island was ignorant of that ugly situation.’
He was silent for a moment, reflecting on those long-ago events. And this wasn’t ‘this island’, though he thought better than to correct her. He had a sense of fleeting time and did not wish to be bogged down explaining things to her that were unnecessary for her to understand. More, this wasn’t about her, he was certain, but about him coming to understand something.
He had been in love with Helena from the first moment he saw her. She had arrived in the morning, transported into the villa with three other students by his mother. As happened occasionally, promising students at Stardock, who might benefit from training beyond what the more structured regimen at the Academy provided, were recruited to come to the island, especially those who looked as if they might be useful to the Conclave.
Helena had been such a one. She was an enchantress, a conjurer, able to spin illusion so real that few were able to tell the difference. It was a seductive power that often led to an addiction as deep as the most potent drugs sold in the back alleys of any city. Instead of having to visit a dirty room full of pungent smoke to drift off into hazy dreams, she could provide as vivid and lifelike an experience as one could ask, seemingly lasting for days. For a dying man with means, a year again in his youth with those he loved most, while only one day passed before his death, was worth bags of gold. It was also why more ambitious slavers sought out those with this gift and used their own magical restraints to bring them to heel. For the gifted conjurer, life as a slave was a strong possibility: all it required was one cruel guard protected from the power of illusion. It was a rare and powerful ability, one the Conclave had concluded was potentially very useful to them.
But he had fallen in love the moment he beheld her, before he knew who she was or what her capabilities were. Now he was again with her on the first day she told him she loved him as well.
He found the scene disturbing in ways he could not begi
n to articulate. What had been the single happiest day in his life seemed so inappropriate in the context of what he and his father faced, that it seemed a pointless distraction.
He remembered how their relationship had ended, though. He had come upon her with another boy, together on the grass by the lake near his cabin. They had lain in one another’s arms, kissing. Magnus had almost killed that boy in his rage. He and Helena had not spoken a word since then. His father had sent him away, first to a temple of mystics in a mountain range on the other side of the world, not too far from the Pavilion of the Gods, to study how best to master his rage when it emerged. When he had returned, Helena was gone, returned to Stardock for the remainder of her studies.
He sighed in resignation, and sat opposite her on the blanket. ‘I can only assume there’s a reason this is happening, a reason that’s not frivolous or whimsical.’
‘I suspect you’re right,’ she said, putting a slice of bread on a platter and topping it with smoked ham and pungent cheese. She garnished it with small ripe tomatoes, sliced carrots, and a small bunch of grapes, and handed it to him.
He smiled: this was correct down to the last detail. ‘And you still forgot the mustard.’
She shook her head and held out a small pot. ‘I did then, but whoever packed this did not.’
‘Is this one of your illusions?’ he asked.
‘Hardly,’ she said. ‘Until moments ago I was dead.’
‘Why?’ he asked.
‘Why are you here?’
‘Why are we here?’
She considered a moment, then suggested, ‘Perhaps there is something vital you need to learn, something lost between us? Or something you lost, something later in life because of what happened between us?’
Magnus absently chewed some bread and ham with mustard and said, ‘This is delicious.’
‘We had fun … for a while.’
He sighed. ‘I never thought of it as “fun”.’
She nodded. ‘That is so like you, Magnus. I think I could list every time I saw you laugh when we were together.’ She sat back on her heels again, nibbling at her food. Then she opened the wine and poured it into two clay cups she removed from the basket. Handing him one, she continued, ‘All relationships are unequal in a way, I think. What is that word you used to describe my nose?’ She laughed.
He could not resist smiling at her reference to the bumbled attempt at a compliment he had once tried to pay her. ‘Symmetrical,’ he said. ‘Equally balanced.’
‘Ah, so the word for not being equally balanced?’
‘Asymmetrical.’
‘Relationships are asymmetrical. I loved my husband, but not as much as he loved me, I’m certain. Perhaps it is as simple as women love differently than men?’ She shrugged, and he felt his heart stop for an instant. Every gesture, the sound of her voice, filled him in a way no one else ever had. ‘I know I loved my three children, but each uniquely, as your mother loved you and your bother, but each love was different.’
‘What is the point?’ he asked, sounding harsher than he intended.
‘With love comes risk,’ said Helena, her expression turning serious. ‘You were never adverse to risk, Magnus. You would do the most amazing things as a boy. The first time you just willed yourself to the other side of the island to see if you could do it, that terrified me. I was so fearful of telling your father you tried that so you could take us somewhere to be alone …’ She shook her head sadly in memory. ‘I felt relief when you returned a moment later, but I was also angry.’
‘I remember.’ He fell silent, sipping his wine and eating, though he really wasn’t very hungry. At last he said, ‘Not a day goes by that I don’t think of you.’
‘And I of you … when I was alive.’
‘Where did it go wrong?’
‘We were so young, Magnus. We were caught up in passions we didn’t understand. Perhaps it was being born here, with all this magic around you, but for me it was a bard’s tale, a magic place from a story. I came here and found wonder, and found you.’
‘I knew I was wrong in what I did the day I came back and found you gone,’ he said softly.
Tears glistened in her eyes as she softly asked, ‘Then why didn’t you ever come after me?’
‘I thought you were in love with Anton.’
Her expression turned sad. ‘You wouldn’t speak to me, and your father sent you away.’ She put down her food and stared into the distance. ‘Anton was fun. Nothing more. We drank wine, went swimming. We were just kissing when you found us.’
‘I thought …’
‘No, you didn’t think. You reacted. Badly.’ She stood up and came to sit down next to him. She put her hand on his arm and her head on his shoulder. ‘You have such deep feelings, Magnus. So easily injured, and you hold that pain in, close to you. I won’t say we would have had a good life together, and the one I had without you was good enough. But we never had the chance to try because of your refusal to let go of a boyhood injury.’ She kissed him lightly on the cheek. ‘Had you come to Stardock to get me, I would have come back here with you.’
Magnus was silent. He lowered his head and a tear ran down his cheek. ‘Once, when a young man I was teaching …’ He stopped. ‘His name was Talon and he was given to think he was in love.’ Magnus remembered what a beautiful woman named Alysandra had done to the lad, as part of his training by the Conclave. Alysandra was broken, and the Conclave knew that, which was why she was a dangerous weapon. She was empty inside, devoid of emotion, but she was stunningly beautiful, charming and seductive, and after only a few days Talon of the Silver Hawk, now Tal Hawkins, Ty’s father, had thought himself inextricably in love. Then, under Nakor’s instruction, she broke his heart. ‘It was a very harsh lesson, what we did to him. I asked Nakor if you had been such a lesson.’
‘What did he say?’
‘Actually, I asked him if you were one of his, brought to the island to teach me the same lesson Tal had suffered, and he said no. I remember what he said next to this day. “That harsh lesson was of your own devising.” For the longest time, I thought he meant my poor choice.’ He looked at the most beautiful face he had ever beheld. ‘Now I understand.’
‘What do you understand?’
He paused for a moment before answering, then said, ‘I felt rejected for another, but that was the least of it; I felt betrayed. I felt a trust had been sundered, and for me that was the end.’
‘I neither rejected you nor betrayed you, Magnus. I was a foolish young girl who got drunk and kissed a boy. And you had never told me you wanted me and no other.’
‘I told you I loved you, on this very day.’
‘After a lot of wine, Magnus.’ She sighed. ‘You were not the first or last boy to tell me he loved me after drinking. I needed to hear that a few times, I fear, and at least one of those times you needed to be sober and not naked in my arms.’ She was silent for a while in reflection, then said, ‘We are our own worst enemies at times, my love.’
Considering once more his conversation with Nakor, Magnus said, ‘Nakor meant my poor actions, or lack of action. Apparently he agreed with your assessment.’
‘You think a great deal, Magnus. Perhaps too much at times. I think it’s a natural consequence of that hot temper you bury so deeply within.’
‘Even though I never saw you again, I never passed a day without you being in my thoughts,’ he said softly. She grabbed his hand and squeezed it, as he sat staring at her tears running down her cheeks. ‘I know the Conclave used your abilities occasionally. I heard the reports, and know how you served. Who you wed, your children … I knew where you were every single day.’
‘You punished yourself. Why?’
Now with tears matching hers, he whispered, ‘I really don’t know.’
‘There then is your lesson, my love. Something important is coming, or I would not have been snatched back to life for this meeting. My life is over. How I am not before Lims-Kragma, or again on the Wheel of Life,
I don’t know, but of this much I am certain: this has nothing to do with me, and everything to do with you. I lived my life, Magnus. I married a very good man, and loved him deeply. I never had the passion for him I felt for you, but I was not a hot-blooded child when I met him either. I rejoiced in our children and thanked the gods none of them had my gift or any other that would bring them to the Academy or this island. They all found common, boring, ordinary, wonderful lives.
‘I loved my grandchildren, and mourned my husband. My last days were quiet, and I sat on the terrace of a little room in my eldest son’s home, watching the days go by. One day I closed my eyes, and suddenly I’m here. Yet I feel time has passed.’
‘More than a century,’ said Magnus quietly.
She smiled sadly. ‘Either way, you would have lost me, my love.’
‘But I would have had you for those fifty years.’
‘And what? Stayed at home with me and our children?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said, taking control of his runaway feelings.
‘I think the lesson here is that you must accept certain risks you do not wish, but you must also take care of yourself. For if you do not, who else will?’
Thinking about what he and his father endured when his mother died, he felt he understood that now.
‘A battle is coming,’ he said, ‘and sacrifice is likely.’
She nodded. ‘Then don’t assume you need to be the one to make the sacrifice. Don’t hold your own needs as less important than other people’s.’ She reached for his hand again and squeezed it tightly. ‘I’m sorry you didn’t have the life you wished for, with me, but you have the life you chose. So when it comes to whatever it comes to, be glad you made the most of that choice.’
‘Is that all?’ he asked. ‘I’m here with you again to be told to make the best of things?’
She shook her head, disappointed. ‘Life is what happens, Magnus, no matter what you expect or want.’ She looked around. ‘If I had been asked for one wish before my death, it would have been to come back here and have this discussion, but with a different understanding at the end. I loved some men after you, and before my husband, but you were my first love, Magnus, and what saddens me most of all is that you never seem to have found another to love as you did me.