As the same crisp breeze rustled the leaves, Rose closed her eyes again and listened to them dance.
“Meet me here,” a voice whispered, blowing warm breath directly into her ear.
Rose’s eyes flew open and she spun wildly, grabbing at the empty air. She looked desperately around the canyon for the speaker, but he had disappeared once more. A colored autumn leaf fell into her open hand. She looked at the golden foliage, daring it to speak.
Instead, she heard her sister’s scream.
Remembering suddenly that she had responsibility for three defenseless females, now alone on the main road, Rose tossed the leaf to the ground and raced back over the loose rocks of the canyon. Though it felt like she had been hiking for hours, she reached her family quickly.
Rose came upon the ridge overlooking camp to see Sara beating desperately at the back of a large man. He was, with little trouble, dragging their youngest sister Tobi further from the path. The man turned to swat Sara away. His blow caught her in the head and she fell back, dazed. Tobi screamed for their mother, but to no avail. Mama sat dumbly where she had been left, staring vacantly ahead.
Without thinking, Rose grabbed the large stones at her feet and threw them with all her strength. One rock hit the man’s shoulder and he wheeled around, howling in pain. Blood blossomed through his shirt.
He dropped Tobi, who fell back with a thud, and rushed at Rose.
She threw a stone that made contact with the man’s head, sending blood flowing down into his eye. He wiped distractedly at it as he barreled up the slope of loose stones.
Rose had expected him to move more slowly—expected to have the time to prepare herself for a grown man’s full attack—but with surprising speed, he was upon her. With a rock in her hand, Rose threw a punch, hitting him in the jaw with enough force that something cracked. Her fist exploded with the pain of the blow. His large arm swung heavily, catching Rose in the gut and dropping her to the ground.
The man gnashed his teeth, spitting red as he paced around her prone form. Seeing Rose attempt to get up, he aimed a heavy kick at her ribs.
Rose doubled over with the pain of it, dark spots invading her vision. He lowered his weight on top of her and wrapped his thick hands around her neck. The blood from his brow dripped onto her forehead.
Struggling madly, Rose shrieked through her gritted teeth. The edges of her vision blurred and darkened. Grasping at the scree around her, Rose felt a large, jagged stone. She lifted it unsteadily and let it come crashing down onto his head. Dazed, the man loosened his iron grasp.
Rose, coughing and gasping, took the opportunity to kick him off. He rolled to the edge of a cliff and stood, a shaken expression on his face. He dug a finger into the ear she had hit, then drove a palm into his head repeatedly, as though trying to shake something loose.
Beneath his feet, the brittle stone edge began to crumble. Rose watched as he lost his balance. Instinctually but without conviction, she reached for him. He toppled off, able to catch the resulting ledge with one hand only.
“Help,” he begged. “Please. Help me.”
Rose, hands clutched to her aching throat, stepped nearer. That the man could speak—could beg even—seemed a trick of magic. He was pretending to be a man, though he had already proved himself a monster. Rose was transfixed by the deep brown of his eyes, by the depth of his voice. The illusion was impressive.
“Who are you?” she asked him. The man knit his brows and, flailing, disappeared from view when the ledge gave way.
His wails followed him all the way down. With a sickening thud, the man’s cries abruptly ceased. Rose knew she ought to check on him—ought to make sure that he would no longer be a threat to her family—but she couldn’t find it in herself to look.
Instead, chin trembling, Rose wiped the man’s blood from her face and stumbled back down the rise to her two traumatized sisters and silent mother. Seeing that her Mama had not moved, Rose’s distress turned to anger.
“He came from nowhere!” Sara cried as Rose regained the road. She carried the crying Tobi in a tight hug and clung to Rose’s arm. “I tried to fight him off, but he was so big, and—”
Rose shrugged off her sister’s attention and marched directly at their mother who continued to sit as she had been left. She rushed the last few steps, grabbing her Mama roughly by the shoulders and lifting her to stand.
“You listened, didn’t you?” Rose snarled, shaking her mother’s limp body. “You listened as that man attacked us all. You couldn’t help? Not even then, when he could have killed us all? Or when he had his hands around my throat? What kind of a mother are you?”
Mama didn’t react. She bent like a dead fish under Rose’s strength. “Rose, stop!” Sara pleaded from a safe distance, trying to set Tobi down.
“How could you do that?” Rose demanded, shaking harder. “How could you hide away? How could you close your ears? How could you just sit and watch while he took everything that mattered to you?”
“Rose, stop it! You’re hurting her,” Sara begged. She rushed closer, pulling at her sister’s shoulder.
Rose spun around with a snarl and raised fist. She stood panting, slowly coming back to herself. “No one asked you,” she said coldly.
Turning away, clothes bloody and body aching, Rose set out again for the canyon and the tree. She didn’t care what happened anymore. She needed to hear Benson’s voice again.
Rose stumbled, tears streaming down her face, over the hills and loose stones and into the canyon, recognizing it immediately.
She recognized it, but there was no tree, no stream, and no cold breeze. She saw only a canyon throbbing under the hot summer sun—dry, dusty, and barren.
* * * * *
Rose dreamed that night that she sailed again at sea.
Her invisible dream-form flew down from the sky, approaching the ship with a bow shaped like an eagle in flight. Feeling the joyous freedom of the wind, Rose followed the breeze as it wove in and out of the tall sails.
She emerged with a final gust at the stern of the ship, spying a brooding man who threw an empty bottle overboard and then slumped over the ship’s aft rail. She recognized his dark, curly head, now hung low, and took solace in having returned to what she now considered a reoccurring dream.
Rose had decided to call him Captain. He was, in a manner of speaking, the man of her dreams. He was a natural leader of men (at the best of times)—a tall and charismatic character with sparkling eyes and a heart-stealing smile.
But tonight, Rose corrected herself sagely, was not the best of times. Part of her assurance that he was an invention of her hallucination was the sense that he, like her, had recently lost someone of great importance. She was drawn to his mourning, to his melancholy heartache. In some ways, she grieved through him, being unable to show weakness in front of her own family.
The Captain’s usually well-kept appearance displayed the extent of his sorrow. His unwashed shoulder-length hair burst free from the leather strap binding it. The beginnings of a full beard darkened his chin, which he scratched at in discomfort.
As Rose explored his pain, another figure approached. This man was tall and broad. He was an impressively chiseled specimen—his neck as thick as his jaw, his chin sculpted, and his elbow-length amber hair tied several times in a warrior’s tail down his back. His facial hair was well groomed and his light summer shirt was clean. This new arrival, by comparison, completed the Captain’s appearance as the sorriest soul to sail the seas.
“There is a rumor going round that you’re planning to join the silent ranks of the Mountain Monks,” teased the newly arrived sailor. “Don’t forget to invite me when you take the oaths. I’ll bring refreshments. Or, wait, do silent monks speak oaths?”
“What are you prattling about now, Hawkesbury?” asked the Captain with a groan. He pushed his unruly dark curls back from his face, scratching roughly at his facial hair.
“All I meant is that it’s been days since you’ve talked
to anyone, and the last time was to the masthead, so I’m not sure it counts,” said Hawkesbury with a swaggering brogue. He looked the Captain up and down. “We, the crew, couldn’t help assuming that you meant to be taciturn professionally.”
The Captain let this sarcasm slide. “Who can tell, anymore?” He sighed melodramatically, “I’ve lost who I am.”
The sailor displayed every inch of his pearly teeth as he broke into hearty laughter. Rose felt her hackles raise, knowing perfectly well what the Captain meant. Though incorporeal, Rose lifted a spirit hand to the Captain’s arm, offering him support.
On his own, the Captain blanched and made to escape. “How thrilled I am to provide such amusement—”
“Come now! Don’t walk away!” Hawkesbury grabbed the Captain’s left arm. To counteract this, Rose took a supportive hold of his right. “I don’t mean to laugh. Truly, old friend, I don’t. It’s just that…Captain Eli Kaille is the last person I would expect to utter such outrageously pitiable words.”
“Well, perhaps ‘Captain Eli Kaille’ is not the man you give him credit for,” muttered the Captain, fighting against the strong hands that clutched him.
“If that’s really how you feel, I suppose I may have been mistaken.” Hawkesbury had ceased to smile and now seemed to feel ill. He released Captain Kaille first, and Rose followed suit.
The Captain glared at them with menacing sadness before turning to retreat. His devastated eyes burned into Rose, though she was unseen. Rose was the last person to be described as sympathetic, but for reasons she couldn’t explain, her heart bled for him.
For his part, the mariner was not ready to leave his captain in peace. “A childhood friend is a terrible thing to lose. It’s harder still because he was such a good man,” blurted Hawkesbury, determined. “I can’t claim to have known Ben as long as you did, but I knew him a good while, and I know you too. You aren’t the kind of fool who would abandon his ship and crew because fate dealt the bleedingest worst card in the world. Ben would say the same thing.”
“Don’t dare pretend to know what he would have—” Kaille began.
“You mourn him.” Hawkesbury threw his arms in the air, raising his voice. “You should! He deserves every thought you can spare. As it happens, however, your thoughts are needed elsewhere at the moment.”
“Have not all the men on board lost a friend to that…disaster?” Kaille pointed to the dark ocean behind them. “We need time to remember them. The fallen deserve the honor of not being forgotten so quickly.”
“Indeed,” the sailor spoke, ire rising. “And how honored would Ben feel to see that his death has turned you into a cowardly shell of a man—”
“You go too far, Jas!” Kaille yelled, his reddened eyes awaking with anger. Many miles away, Rose’s body cringed at the venom in his voice.
“Too far?” Hawkesbury continued relentlessly. “By day you stay locked in your cabin, staring at your maps. By night you’re up here, emptying bottles of rum and cursing the world. Neither, you’ll notice, have anything to do with the running of a ship. In the meantime, your men are running themselves ragged to make up for the…for the smaller crew. Not a soul onboard has had a proper night’s sleep since the night of the ambush, and many of us have had it far worse.”
“All right, Jas. Stop being a coward and just say it already,” the Captain sighed. This wasn’t a discussion he wanted to have. “You think we ought to ‘honor’ our fallen men by replacing them with the first yokels we come across.”
Hawkesbury sighed. “These men love you and they’ll stay with you until we return to Quillain, but come the next time you intend to sail—if that ever happens—I doubt they’ll come aboard again. Not unless you act now.”
“What would you have me do, then?” Kaille asked, scratching irritably at his beard. “What grand scheme do you have that will save us all?”
“It’s as you said,” the sailor said with a shrugged, “we must make port when possible and hire ‘the first yokels we come across’.”
“Yes, obviously,” Kaille laughed derisively. “But where? Surely not this barren shore? This province is nothing but rivers and rocks.”
“This is a province of fisherman,” Hawkesbury began, “it’s perfect. There are plenty of ships who work the area—”
“Yes, those of Fishmongers,” spat the Captain, as though his point had been proven. When Jas remained unconvinced, Kaille began to tally their obstacles on his fingers. “The Fisherman’s Alliance runs all ships in and out of Kentshore. They keep their maps in strictest secrecy, so we couldn’t navigate to a port even if we wanted to. They’re exclusive—they don’t welcome strangers seeking help, so we would have to approach random men on the street, hoping they have an interest in going to sea. And even if we somehow sidestepped all of these concerns, I can tell you now that I will not have the rancid smell of a Kentshore fishmonger aboard my boat.”
Rose, though eagerly apologetic of the Captain’s foul mood, couldn’t help feeling offended by his words. Jas Hawkesbury championed her indignation, speaking cool reason. “Eli, come now, they don’t actually smell of rotten fish.”
“You say this because you’ve never met one,” said Kaille, becoming more animated with this much-needed distraction. “There’s a reason Fishing Alliance ships keep to themselves, and it’s because no one wants to be downwind of their foul stench.”
“That is an ancient and unfounded prejudice,” the sailor scolded. “One that is easily disproved, at that. Since when have you let prejudices govern your ship?”
Captain Kaille had no answer to this. Rose felt smug to have the angry, though endearing man put in his place.
“Taking on new crew is a risk,” said Jas Hawkesbury in a lighter tone, addressing the real root of the Captain’s reticence. “The last risk you took had a terrible price attached. But here we are, weeks from other options. Come now, Eli, you have never been a man who would rather run than stand.”
“Perhaps I should be,” the Captain scratched violently at his stubble, looking quite mad and disheveled. He eyed the dark ocean behind them. “If we had run—”
“Ben and others might be alive, aye,” Hawkesbury finished for him hurriedly, “but maybe not. Maybe the pirates would have snuck behind and hit us directly, instead of being trapped behind the sinking hulk. We couldn’t have withstood a direct attack. Then we would all be dead—us and the four survivors we rescued from the wreckage. We can’t know anything for certain, old friend. We can’t know if things would have been better or worse. But we do know this: that ship was flying a banner for help. We did what any decent men would have done.”
“Oh, I see. It isn’t the act of risk-taking, only the price of decency that’s too high,” said the Captain, taking slow, resolute steps towards his cabin. “Leave me alone, Jas. I can’t take any more of this.”
Jas Hawkesbury watched his friend shuffle away, considering things he could say to incite further reaction. There was nothing more at the moment. Rose had almost decided to follow the retreating Captain when she saw Hawkesbury gesture for a man to come closer. Staying still so as not to be seen, she watched as a massive, dark-skinned man emerged from the shadows nearby.
Rose wanted to hear their conversation, but with her movement towards the Captain she had set uncontrollable energies into motion. She floated above them, slowly being pulled away.
“You were right, Hector. It didn’t work,” Hawkesbury said as the hulk of a man joined him.
Hector spoke with a low, resounding voice, “I am sorry to hear it.”
“Talk to the crew,” Jas directed him, folding his arms, “see if anyone is familiar with Kentshore or the Fisherman’s Alliance. We need to navigate towards a local port.”
Hector nodded. “Some of the crew might consider your orders as mutiny.”
Rose had floated too far to hear Hawkesbury’s response, but she saw him nod. There was not a lot that Rose knew about sailing ships, but she knew that a mutiny was bad. It was when
a ship’s crew rebelled against their Captain. Was this man—a man who proclaimed himself a friend—planning to take advantage of the devastated Kaille and his ship?
Rose’s eyes snapped open in the dark, coming instantaneously out of her dream. The stars shone brightly in the night sky as the echo of her mother’s wailing cries still bounced around the distant canyons.
*
Chapter 4:
The Madness
* * * * *
On Choice
A Modern Guide to Ancient Magical Theory
Section 15, On Ambiguity
By Dundimer Banks
*
It is a common theme in our shared written history that “all magic requires a choice.” It is a whimsical way of seeing things, one can suppose, but is ultimately false. This idea stems from a small but significant misreading of an ancient magical text, which states, “Ahl maggicka dousda negestitate uhn grahndient choisenvoder,” or, translated (correctly) from ancient Gaelinian, “all magicks require complete balance.”
As ancient wizarding texts would have us believe, currents of “magical energy” flow all around us. Without a mage’s interference, this movement is most easy felt as the push and pull of luck and fate. When manipulated by a magician, the energy will give way where requested, re-forming to achieve the goal he desires. Like a wave in the ocean, however, a surge in one area leads to a lull in another. Thus, no magician may accomplish his task without also keeping in mind that once the energy has risen it must also crash back down. A small spell may have almost unnoticeable consequences, but a large spell could cause such aftereffects as may topple a kingdom.
A strong enough wizard will see several options for filling the lull he has created. In such special cases, this may indeed create the illusion of choice. What he does not have is the option to delay or cancel the balancing. It will always come.
In the legend of Benson Rose, this balancing is presented as a choice between immediate and delayed rewards. He is given a box and a raft and must choose either to be happy while his family suffers or to suffer himself in the act of seeking them, with only a vague hope of being happily reunited someday. Both of these options are far too specific for the magician, The Man of the Mountain, to control, but it is a fine way of illustrating a point.