Page 38 of Seducing the Sorcerer
“Aye?” Morgrim’s tone filled Fenn with dread. Whatever it was sounded dead serious.
“I...I would talk about Mandillo. I would like to clear the air.”
Oh strewth. He knew. He knew about Fenn’s past. About prison and all that. Fenn felt as if the strength were draining from his body. The deed of years ago, turning up like a phantom to poison his life yet again. Morgrim must have made enquiries. He must have checked the records and found out.
“Ah,” Fenn said heavily, staring off into the cavernous gloom that lay beyond the brightly lit table. “Well, reckon you got the right to ask. Me being your guest, like.”
“Thank you. I...” Morgrim bowed his head, as if he couldn’t bear to look Fenn in the eye. “I want to know if you blame me? If you’re angry?”
Fenn frowned. What on earth did that mean? What could Morgrim have possibly had to do with it? Morgrim would have been here at the time, a hundred miles away.
“Why would I blame you?” Fenn asked, warily.
“You’re from Mandillo, are you not?”
“Aye. But I don’t see—”
“It burned. With balefire. In the war.”
“Oh. That.” Relief flooded Fenn, warmer than wine. He’s talking about the war. He don’t know about me. “I wasn’t living on Mandillo then. I’d left. I was on the mainland at the time.”
“But do you not blame me? Many do, I know. They say I let it burn.”
Fenn had heard that. It was one of the reasons some people hated Morgrim.
“Ain’t what I think. For starters, wasn’t just you, was it? There was the army and the navy and the government and the king and all making decisions. And anyway, I don’t blame anyone but the bastards what attacked. Way I see it, wasn’t much choice in what you did. Had to protect the mainland, didn’t you? Couldn’t let them get a toehold. So, you pulled back to get the defences ready. Aye, you sacrificed Mandillo, but you won us the war.”
“Many people think I should have done better.” Morgrim’s voice was low.
“Aye, well. There’s a lot of pain in losing your home.”
Morgrim nodded, once, as if bowing his head in shame. “I want you to know: I really did do my best. I couldn’t stop the balefire on Mandillo. It took time for me to learn how to counter it. And we gained that time by leaving them to burn it. It was a harsh tactic. But it wasn’t because I didn’t care, or didn’t try hard enough.”
Morgrim sounded so anguished, Fenn said, “I know. It’s all right, mate.”
The mate just slipped out. Fenn winced, internally, but Morgrim gave him a watery smile.
“You’re a gracious man, Fenn Todd. All the same, I’m sorry. I’m sorry you can never go home.”
“Ah. Well. Aye.”
Fenn looked down at his plate again. He was so touched Morgrim should think to apologise to him about Mandillo that he felt a bit teary eyed. But he wished he had the guts to tell Morgrim the truth: that his home had been lost to him before the war, that Morgrim owed him no apology.
They finished dinner and Fenn’s heart began to gallop again. Because would Morgrim now suggest a tour of the tower—a very short tour, direct to the master’s bedroom? But Morgrim lit a crystal lantern and offered to take Fenn to the library. They went through a gap hidden in the side of the fireplace. The stairs were dark, narrow and spiralling, but the worple horse scuttled up behind Fenn, nimble as a spider.
The library was vast; the size of the hall below, with a mezzanine floor built in above to house even more books. It smelt of paper and leather and beeswax and dust. There was an open space with a desk and chair near one window—that must be where Morgrim had been sitting when Fenn had flown in last night. The rest of the room was as crammed with bookshelves as a comb is with teeth. There was just room for a person to walk between the shelves without knocking anything over, and the idea of the worple horse blundering around in there made Fenn break out in a cold sweat. The bookshelves would go over like dominoes. And think of the cloth bindings!
Morgrim pointed to the rows where the books and documents were kept from the era when worple horses were common. He offered to hold the horse’s lead rope while Fenn had a look. Fenn took the lantern and inched down one of the rows, hemmed in by books and scrolls and toppling piles of paper. It was impossible to know where to start, and he wanted nothing more than to forget about this search, which now felt futile, and to simply spend time with the horse itself.
But it felt rude not to show willing, so he picked a squat, black, leather-bound volume at random from the shelf. It had a sturdy heft but wasn’t too big or heavy. There was no title on the spine and the front was similarly unadorned. He opened it to the first page and mouthed out, “Being a Treatise on the Ineffable and Subtle Magicks used in the Continuation of the Search for a Theory of Delineations or Geometries of Puissance; and Being Also an Exploration of the Parameters of Those Unseen and Malign Influences that are by some Termed Hexes or Over-lookings”.
Gods! And that was just the title.
The author was one Palevila Gargol.
But the pages turned easy and it was likely no worse than anything else in here. He found a picture of a lot of circles jumbled together like frogspawn. At the centre of each circle was the exact same rune the horse had on its chest: Vor, Morgrim had called it, or Wor. The shape of an unstrung harp.
Underneath the picture it said, “Theory iii: An Ideal Arrangement: Spheres of Influence Do Not Affect One Another”.
