Chance Read online

  “Come on, damn you!” Merric shouted, for perhaps the dozenth time that day, tugging hard at the strap. This time, being out of sight of the cottage, he lashed the little beast on the belly with the whiplike leather end. The pony gave a frightened leap, showing the whites of its eyes, and Merric turned away from it to lash fervidly at the trees. In a moment his shoulders slumped, his hands went slack. Frightened yet further by this odd and perverse flogging, the pony lunged away from him, snatching the lead from his loosened hands, and it galloped back toward the cottage, its hooves making a sound as of stamping rabbits.

  There was still the wood to be gotten in. Hardening his face, Merric followed the black pony.

  It had taken refuge with Wystan and was grazing placidly beside his loom when Merric plodded into view. He went to the pony softly and picked up the trailing lead strap. Wystan seemed to take no notice. Merric turned—

  “Do not go,” said Wystan tonelessly from behind the loom, “if you are going to beat the little black. I can fetch wood myself.”

  “I do not mean to,” Merric said in a muffled voice, but even as he spoke his arms stiffened, his hands clenched into fists. He flung away the lead line, let himself drop to the hard, dry earth, pummeled it.

  “Damn the beast,” he cried, “it was the power and beauty of it that I loved, to my shame. Now that it is a drudge, like me …” His tears sprinkled the sere earth.

  “Now I know for certain,” said Wystan coldly, “that you are, as you said, a child.”

  “Damn you too!” Merric shouted at him.

  So who is the child here? For all his spleen, I think he is not one to hide himself for long on a mystic isle.

  Merric was struggling up, tears spent, turning away, bound away somewhere, anywhere. Wystan got up from his loom and went to stand beside him, stopping him with a touch.

  “We are all children,” he said far more softly. “And the most part of grief is rage. So weep for your dead.”

  Merric faced him, unable to hide from his eyes, unable to do otherwise than face the one he had just cursed. “I lied,” he told him, hot fury shaking the words. “My father and brothers are not dead. I wish they were! I hate them!”

  Wystan nodded, odd glinting lights swimming into his gaze. “Yes … and the most part of your rage is grief.”

  “I hate them, I could kill them, I fled from my own hatred!” Merric shouted, tears starting again. “By my soul, Wizard, what manner of monster am I?”

  Wystan snorted. “You’ll have to study long to be a monster.”

  “But …”

  “’Twas not I who stayed your hand from flogging yon pony. I or anyone else. You did it yourself.”

  “But …”

  “But nothing!” Wystan roared. Furious. Furious at him for making me feel. “It is past noon; would you fetch the wood? There is no fuel for a cooking fire, and I am hungry.”

  “I—am sorry—”

  “Stop whimpering.” Wystan glowered darkly. “You are worthy of whatever friendship you can wring from me, and not because you are a prince, either. Because you are here; no better reason. Go fetch wood.”

  Merric went, afoot and with the baskets over his arms, leaving the pony to graze.

  The cottage stood silent that evening, and Merric went early to his bed. Much later, after Wystan was asleep, the prince got up and quietly went out. Wystan was awake instantly upon the soft closing of the door, following Merric anxiously with his mind’s eye.

  I—had not thought he was of the sort to run away. Not more than once—

  Then the sorcerer sighed and smiled, a genuine, warm smile with no one to see it. The prince had gone to the moonlit meadow, searching for a certain dark and shaggy form, and when he had found it, an ungainly, soot-colored lump dozing on the ground, he had curled up beside the warm, furry flank of the black pony. Wystan watched him for a long time as he slept with his face half-buried in the coarse mane.

  Merric came in groggily for breakfast the next morning. “You smell of horse,” Wystan told him.

  Merric said nothing, only made a small face at him over the food.

  “I can see them in your eyes now,” Wystan remarked after the eggs were gone. “Your father, your brothers. I do not think they intended to be cruel to you.”

  “Perhaps not.” Merric sighed, pushing his plate away. “Perhaps it is just that—they are interested only in power and the usages of power, indifferent to everything else.”

  “And they assume that your interests are the same.”

  “I must wear a royal cloak, ride a tall horse—” Merric stopped himself, recalling how he had missed that horse. “I am not so much unlike them,” he admitted. “But—they are indifferent to the other things in me, things they do not care to see—”

  “Poetry,” said Wystan.

  And magic too, I think. Though I will not say so at this time.

  “I suppose,” said Merric in some small surprise. He gave the sorcerer a searching glance. “How did you know?”

  “I merely surmised,” Wystan hedged, and the boy did not persist, for another thought shadowed his face.

  “I daresay I should go back.” Reluctance dragged at the words. “They will be looking for me, and they will be angry.”

  “I think not angry,” said the sorcerer, for he knew family. But he had been doing some questing, three days past, and he had seen no sign of searchers in the forest beyond the lake or the meadows beyond the forest, the villages, the strongholds, no one looking for the golden-haired prince. Odd. Sufficiently odd to make him uneasy.

  “Stay a few days yet,” he told Merric. “If anger there is, it will have passed into fear by then, and they will welcome you home the more ardently.”

  “I am willing enough to stay,” said Merric.

  Rain had come to water the garden. They spent the day in the cottage, animals and all. Merric brushed the cockleburrs from the black pony’s mane, then turned to Wystan for amusement. Presently the sorcerer found himself showing the boy his books, talking of his craft, telling tales, describing wonders, talking as he had not talked to another mortal in perhaps a decade. They did some small magics at the table, laughing, making a marvelous game of it. Supper was late. Rain darkened into dusk and wind and thunder, fearsome, but the cottage felt snug. Merric slept peacefully on his bed of straw, and that night Wystan slumbered soundly.

  Thus it was that he did not sense the stranger’s coming.

  The man pounded at the door in the darkest of the dark hours before dawn, and Wystan stood rigid, shocked stark awake in consternation. No one had ever come upon him so unawares, not since he had withdrawn to his magical island. No one.

  I have let down my defenses, somehow—

  Merric merely stirred drowsily on his pallet of straw.

  “For the love of mercy!” the man cried in the night, and Wystan stirred up the fire for light, then moved stiffly to the door, his face a mask. The stranger stumbled in, soaking, out of the downpour.

  “Sorcerer,” he appealed, “I am the most miserable of mortals.”

  A stocky man, one who was losing the battle with age. Face pulled downward now in long, haggard collops of flesh that looked gray even in the firelight. Wystan let his mask slip for a moment in his astonishment, for this was the man he had seen in Merric—though the fellow’s look then had been one of authority.

  “I am King Emaris of Yondria.” Just a hint, a flash, of the authoritarian in those words, at once gone. “Or, until four days past I was.… My sons have turned against me. My sons, my very own blood and get, have turned on me to strike me down.” The king spoke in a torrent, tempestuously, glaring all the while intensely at the sorcerer, scarcely noticing the youthful servant or apprentice who stood in the shadows beyond the hearth. “My eldest, Morveran, and the next younger, Emerchion, they who were supposed to be the comfort of my old age, though as of yet scarcely past their passage—they have plotted together and seized my crown and throne. Only by grace of my wits have I escaped wi
th my life. And the youngest, Merric, has gone into hiding somewhere, in league with them to get himself out of the way of their scheme—”

  “I have not!”

  Merric strode forward to confront his father.

  No loving reunion, this.

  The prince was full of shock and wrath. “I would never—I have been here all along. I abhor—if you knew how I despise all such schemes of power—”

  But Emaris did not answer the anger, for all his passions were lost in astonishment. “Merric!” he whispered. “But—when did you come here? And how did you come here?”

  “Five days ago. Or six …” The youngster stood more quietly before his father. “The black swam me across.”

  “But—that crossing—” The king shook his head dazedly. “It is fearsome. The haze, the gloom, unnatural. Only my desperation gave me courage to try it. And my despair gave me no choice.… And my dapple-gray carried me through the darkened day and into the tempest of the night, until finally it foundered and sank, and I swam on alone. And only at the limit beyond limits of my strength did I make the shore. So how could you, a youngling …?”

  “I am no stranger to despair,” said Merric very quietly. But he had never known such despair in his father. King and youngest son stood gazing at each other as if they had never seen each other before, and watching, Wystan forgot to harden his face.

  I—have let myself be drawn nearer to that peopled shore. My island floats closer to it, even as I sleep. Else he would never have attained it …

  “My mother?” Merric asked at last.

  “She is in safety on your uncle’s estate. In hiding. There is a small cottage in the wood.…” Emaris let his words trail away, thinking. But it was the boy who voiced his thought.

  “My brothers are not evil youths. They would not have harmed you or my mother, I think. They let you escape.”

  “Yes. However roughly.”

  “They are impatient. They think too much of power.”

  “I have taught them all too much of the usages of power,” said Emaris, and for the first time he looked kingly, speaking his regret. He straightened himself, and the haggard look left his face. Wystan stirred uneasily.

  “King,” he addressed him, not calling him liege, for he gave allegiance to no monarch, “King, what is it that you want of me?”

  “Hope.”

  Food and a warm fire, dry clothing and sleep half answered that, and the wizard bestowed them. Emaris slept past noon of the next day. But Merric was wakeful and troubled, and wandered the woods with the black pony as Wystan sat at his loom.

  “What ails you?” the sorcerer asked him curtly as he sat by his father at the evening meal of bread and cold mutton.

  Merric did not hesitate, though he had to swallow twice before he spoke. “I feel that what has happened is somehow my fault,” he said softly, and Wystan snorted.

  “How so?” he demanded. Emaris listened intently.

  “My—spleen, my hatred—”

  “That is a child’s talk. Feelings don’t count. Deeds do.”

  Child’s talk, is it? Feelings have made me flinty. Feeling breached, invaded. How long has it been—?

  “But,” Merric said, words rising on a wind of desperation, “I—thought of something like this, or imagined it, blood shed for the sake of power and the throne. I—and I did not face it, it frightened me. I fled from it.”

  “So that is what sent you here,” said Emaris, wonder in the words.

  “I—should have stayed. Perhaps—they would have been ashamed, in front of me.”

  “It was a cruel time, lad,” said his father with fervor. “Far too fearsome for a youngster. You were well out of it.”

  “And speak no more of fault,” Wystan told Merric sternly. “Of foresight, perhaps, but not of fault. The Sight, misunderstood.”

  Emaris turned to him. “You mean—the boy has—”

  “The Sight, and perhaps some powers. Yes. I think so.”

  “Well.” The former king stared at his son. “He was always—different. And I, like a fool, I combatted it.”

  “If his powers can now be nurtured, he might yet mean your hope.”

  “We can go to the cottage, join your mother, bide our time.” Emaris leaned toward his son. “And when you are ready—the throne. Perhaps not for me. Perhaps for you.”

  Merric stood up, shaking, his face taut with anger no longer hidden. “I detest such schemes of power,” he said in a voice potent with fury. “I will have no part of plots of power, now or ever, power of magic, power of the sword; I do not want them. Nor do I want the throne.”

  “You’ve small choice, my son.” Emaris stood up as well, but not to intimidate, nor to plead, only, for once, to speak truth. “Your brothers will quarrel—see if your Sight does not tell you the same. There will be turmoil, black times for courtiers and common folk alike. The throne wll tremble. Invaders will come, they who always lie in wait. Yondria will fall—unless the rightful king can save her.”

  Merric turned and ran outside, into the gathering dusk, fleeing over the meadow to take refuge with the black pony.

  “Where has he gone?” Emaris exclaimed.

  “Never mind.” Wystan stood, keen-eyed, nodding to himself. “He will be back soon enough. He is not one to hide for long.”

  Unlike one whom I know. It was not the father so much, the mother—though they did not understand me, they tried to love me, but I would not let them, and I scarcely understand myself, I, the great sorcerer. And it was not the comrades who had their own concerns, or the sweethearts, the ones who spurned my timid courtship, or even that one special beloved, she who loved another. So I swore never to let myself be hurt again. But it was all these things—and no one of them nearly as bad as what has happened to this man, this boy. And they will soon find their way back to the fray.

  In the morning the boy was at the door with the pony. The little black had been brushed until its shaggy fur shone; its full mane had been brushed and combed into a silken fall, its ebony hooves polished with oil.

  “Is that—your charger?” Emaris let his jaw drop in astonishment.

  “I like him like this.” Merric hugged the black pony around the neck; its head stood no higher than his. “But if he is to carry my father and me homeward,” the boy added with a reluctant glance at Wystan, “I suppose he will need to be tall again.”

  “Stand back,” said Wystan. He came forward, caressed the pony under its chin, and it shot up again into a war-horse of eighteen hands’ height, powerful and graceful.

  “Well.” Emaris swallowed. “We must both thank you, Sir Sorcerer.”

  Wystan said nothing, only brought a packet of food and a blanket, new woven. He glanced at Merric, gave a small, wry smile. There was that between the two of them that went deeper than words, than thanks. The wizard stood by silently as the boy bridled the giant black.

  There were no surprises for me, anymore, until these two came.

  “You take the reins,” Emaris told his son. “He is accustomed to you.” The man mounted, helped the boy up before him.

  “Come back, someday, and be my apprentice,” Wystan said to Merric. “I will send the island to meet you sooner next time.”

  “You …” Merric gaped at him. “You did that?”

  “Even as I send it closer to the shore now, for your sake.”

  “Come with us, rather,” Emaris offered, “and be his tutor.” But Wystan shook his head.

  To leave my longtime refuge? Unthinkable …

  It was an awkward parting. Father and son rode away, hands half-raised, hesitant, in farewell, and the wizard stood darkly, wrapped in himself. His hands did not move out of the folds of his tunic. Before the black horse had traversed the meadow, the boy chirruped, and it broke into a canter, then passed out of Wystan’s eyesight, into the lapis forest.

  Nor did he watch it any longer with his inner eye.

  Mount, man, and boy found the island shore. Beyond the quiet water of the l
ake, the mainland showed plainly in the distance, unobscured by any hint of mist or haze. Sunlight rested on the green hilltops.

  “Forward,” Merric ordered.

  The black steed leaped into the water, swam strongly. The mainland soon grew nearer, but the shore just departed seemed to fall no farther behind. Merric glanced back at it, puzzled, and then Emaris. It took the two of them several moments to comprehend.

  “By my body,” the former king exclaimed at last, “it’s following us!”

  Black hooves caught on gravel bottom. The horse carried them onto the shore of their homeland. Once on grass, Merric pulled his destrier to a halt, turned. Father and son watched as if spellbound while the island glided up to the main as gracefully as a tall-masted sailing ship coming to port. It joined almost seamlessly to the shore.

  Wordlessly they got down off their horse and waited. In a few moments Wystan appeared from between the blue trees, walking fast, with a neatly wrapped bundle on his back and a staff in his hand. He stepped to the mainland. But the feel of that unmagical earth seemed to stagger him for a moment, and Merric and Emaris went quickly to his side. Wystan let his hand rest on the shoulder of the boy.

  And as they watched, the island sailed away, into the distances of the nameless lake, into a bright sunlit haze, into oblivion.

  I—swam out there, years ago, thinking to drown. The island formed itself out of my dreams as I went under.… I climbed back to life by clinging to the roots of it. Now it is gone.

  Not even the great black steed could carry three.

  “Well,” said Emaris gruffly, “let us all walk together, then, and the horse can bear the packs.”

  “A pack animal,” Wystan stated, “ought to be of a more manageable size. Do you not think so?”

  Emaris merely smiled, but Merric nodded eagerly, his eyes shining.

  Then Wystan turned to the mighty war-horse. It put its head down to greet him, and he laid one hand on the glossy mane between the ears. The steed whinnied gladly, gathering, shifting shape beneath his touch. When he took his hand away, standing on the shore was a small, bright-eyed black pony.