Book Two Chapter 5: The Word for It

Book Two Chapter 5

The Word for It

“It’s a mercy. It just doesn’t always feel like that.”

Her words lingered in the warm room after she spoke. Roen kept working behind the bar, but for a moment, his mind went far away.

He had heard the word “mercy” used that way before. Long ago, in the life he had already spent, when he was young, new to the Tower and still believed the people above him knew things he did not.

There had been an attack on the Tower, a war upon it. A kingdom in the east had decided the Tower should answer to a crown, had gone about making it so, and some mages had sided with the attacker because a king pays well and the Tower was not so generous. It had not been a long war, as in those years the Tower rarely lost, although not as large, but having most mages on the continent was still the best advantage you could have. Roen remembered the end of it better than the beginning or the middle, better than he wanted to.

There had been a mage kneeling in the wet grass, younger than Roen, who was in his early thirties at the time, with his hands open and his power spent, looking up at the people who had beaten him with a blank exhaustion, the expression that you found on faces after fear passed. He had surrendered. He was no danger to anyone, kneeling there with nothing left in him.

Roen spoke up for him. By then, people listened when he talked, and he tried to help. He said the young man was done, that there was no need for more. He asked, “Allow me to take his oath, his name, let that be the end of it.”

The Archmage at the time listened to everything Roen said. Then, with compassion in his voice, he explained that a mage who would kneel for one crown would, inadvertently, kneel for another. Power left unchecked, without control and order, could end up in the hands of those who would do the most harm, and sometimes mercy costs more in the end. In his words, it was better to pay a smaller price now than a larger one in the future.

“It’s a mercy,” the Archmage had said. “To everyone who would be harmed by his actions in the future. They’ll never know they were spared. That is the shape of the work.”

Then it was done, and the grass, and Roen turned away and was quietly, thoroughly sick behind a supply wagon where he thought no one could see. He had spent a long time afterwards pretending the sickness had been the wound on his arm.

He had killed, in the life he’d lived. He would not pretend otherwise, even to himself. Monsters, and the corrupted things that wore the shapes of monsters, and, regretably, men who had left him no door but that one. He could do it, he had to, and the trouble had never been whether he could, but that he had stood in the wet field and watched a man be murdered for the good of people who would never know his name, heard it called a mercy, and something in him had refused it then. Had gone on refusing it for three hundred years.

“Roen,” Sera said through the room.

He came back to the room and the mug he’d been drying long past dry and the last few regulars finding their coats. Velan had risen from her table and was saying goodnight to Hilde with the easy affection she showed everyone, and the candle she had lit remained lit where she’d left it.

“Long day,” he said, to no one in particular, and set the mug on the shelf.

• • •

The inn emptied just as it always did, slowly and then as if all at once. Hilde went with Torben, who was arguing with himself now for lack of an audience. Velan thanked him for the room and the great company, then took herself up the stairs with her files. Kael followed not long after, then the house went quiet, and the only ones left below were Roen and Sera in her corner with the ledger she had quit pretending to write in some time ago.

She waited until the boards above had settled, then looked at him.

“You went away for a while there.”

“I was thinking.”

“You were somewhere with a worse view than this one.” She closed the ledger. “She got to you with the mercy nonsense.”

He came round the bar and sat across from her, which he did not often do, and the sitting said more than the words that followed.

“I’ve met her before,” he said. “Well…not her but people like her – mages. There are always been a few in the Tower who believe beyond the borders of what they’re told to believe. The Tower, before I took over, had a doctrine of finding the dangerous things, binding them, keeping the power where it can be watched, and most who do the work do it as any person does a hard job, because it’s the job, but then there are the ones who don’t think it’s a job at all. They think it’s the only true place a mage can be, that everyone with a gift belongs behind those walls and anyone who keeps theirs outside is a wound that hasn’t opened yet.”

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He turned the little salt dish on the table without any reason for it. “The Tower has never had to make her type. They make themselves, often the result of wounds, and they’re worse than anything the Tower orders, because orders can be disputed; you can argue with them. But this type… those mages, with them – you can’t. They’ve already had the only argument that mattered to them, with themselves, and won it.”

Sera took that in quietly.

“She’s one of those.” She said after a few empty moments.

“She believes she’s saving people, including whoever she’s looking for. She’d tell them so while she did it and mean every word, and grieve him after, properly, because she’d have wanted them to choose differently and they didn’t.” He stopped turning the dish. “That’s not the worst kind of enemy to have, Sera, but it’s the only kind you can’t talk out of it.”

“Then we don’t talk her out of it.” Sera’s voice had gone flat and practical, the voice she used when she had a real issue that required a solution. “We make sure there’s nothing to find. You keep quiet, I keep the town’s mouth pointed the right way, she fills her book with uselessness, and goes away.”

“Yes.”