Аврам Дэвидсон: Vergil Magus: King Without Country

“An she were here,” said Petronella, “I could tell by looking in her een. They always shows there, boy or girl.”

A shiver went up Vergil’s spine, for occulomancy was an old witch’s trick, and he remembered stories he had heard about the Empress’s past. Weaving… how was it the revered sage of Terra Incognita Occidentalis had phrased it, a passing reference in a long conversation through a brass tube that had occurred years after the man’s ostensible death?… “weaving counter-spells against the witcheries of the Petchenegs and Scotes…” Something like that.

And with that the last piece of the puzzle fell into place.

The Black Man had refused his offer of money because his pedigree was insufficiently old. Whose, then, could he respect? Not Count Mar, who was (by the Black Man’s standards) something of an upstart.

Some titles, however, were older than Rome. Older than civilization. Older than anything that can be named.

He cast a sharper look at the creature he had at first taken for some mongrel breed of lap-puppy and now recognized to be no such thing. No such animal as this was existed. On this world, anyway. Such creatures existed on the physical plane only as familiars.

Quickly, Vergil slid from his stool onto a single knee. “Eldest,” he whispered, and then a word of homage in a tongue that not a dozen men alive could speak.

“Hush,” Petronella said sharply. “Sit back down, thee. Have a hazzlenut. Festy sent me a bushel just last calends. Should be some not rotted yet.”

This line of conversation was interrupted by the abrupt reappearance of Ma. He carried a cup of the same steaming suffusion with which he had earlier unraveled the knot of knowing that had so bound Vergil. He thrust it at Aunt Pet.

“You wish to know about child,” he said. “Drink.”

Horrified, Vergil reached to stop the royal hand. But it went, instead, to a nearby honey-pot (it was the honey of thyme, not clover-honey or wildflower-honey; there was in Idalia no lack of thyme), there to dip a spoon and stir, once, twice, thrice, and up. A golden glob of sweet and amber-brown honey came up with it, and descended into the drink. Her majesty stirred, set aside the spoon, tasted.

“Nowt half bad,” she decided. “Might go nice with a touch of cream.”

The Chinese wizard waited until the cup was near-done. Then he took it back, and before Aunt Pet’s shrewd eyes gone suddenly gullible, swirled the liquid in the cup around and around. In which instant Vergil saw, with an intuitive occulomantic leap of his own, that among the next basket of trinkets and favors to be begged of the Emp. Festus IV, would be one requesting the custodianship of a certain young outland magician.

With a crisp turn of his wrist, Ma snapped the cup down onto the table. He lifted it away.

They all of them, even including the Varlet to the V. of I., leaned low over the leaves. Such is the miracle of a child’s birth that, though it happens every day a thousand thousand times over, interest in it never dims. The wonder is ever-green.

The Chinese wizard spread his hands in joy. “A boy,” he said. “A boy!”