Andre Norton - The Magestone

My valiant Doubt—if you could see me writing this journal, you would smile. No, not merely smile; I am certain that you would laugh to behold this aged Daleswoman wedged below decks at the height of a winter storm, striving to impose some order upon what the Sulcar fondly term their cargo accounts.

I should have been reduced to fingering my tally sticks in the dark had I not recalled the clever bracket you crafted to steady a lamp no matter how violent the motion of a ship. Persuaded of its virtue by my sketches, Captain Halbec ordered his carpenter to construct several brackets for our cabins. Expecting the winter drafts that surge through every passageway, he had prudently stocked ample numbers of horn-shielded lamps.

While my lamp light is thus fairly assured, my perch on this writing bench is erratically precarious. I must wield my quill most deliberately to avoid frantic blots and smears. I vow the effort is more frustrating than writing on horseback; at least while riding, I was always able to curb my horse. Would that this heaving ship were governable by bit and bridle! The Dames who taught me in childhood would be sorely disappointed by the appearance of this page. It is fortunate that the secret trade script you and I devised so long ago requires no fine sweeps or flourishes. If I am jarred much more often, not even I shall be able to make sense of these marks.

Oh, Doubt, I miss you. I cannot number the times I have thought and written those words these twenty years past. With every new dawning, I long for the sound of your voice, the touch of your sleeve against mine at the work table, the glint of sunlight on your hair.

The way of life we once shared together has been ripped away. What now prevails is beyond any of my earlier imaginings. So much has changed . . . but not the ache of parting from you. That pain gnaws as if it were only hours ago, not years, that you kissed my hand in farewell. Just as my Clan duty forced me to preserve what I could of our family trading business, so yours drew you to defend your home Dale against Alizon’s ravening Hounds. Unlike all of our previous partings, from that final one there was to be no joyful return.

When that unspeakable year broke upon us, we might as well have been stricken by the very scourge of its Year Name: the Fire Troll. Our Dales were seared in spirit as well as flesh when the invading Hounds boiled ashore. I heard accounts of the metal-sheathed man-carriers supplied by their Kolder allies, creeping monsters that spouted liquid fire and battered through gates and walls along our coast. I thank the Amber Lady that your death was clean, by swordblade. Even now, when my dreams are troubled by fragments of remembered battles, I burn with regret that I was not at your side, to live or die together with you.

But I was away, traveling far inland when Vennesport was attacked and our trading storehouses were plundered. Those were times of waking nightmares. As I fled toward the western mountains, a fellow refugee passed me word of your fate. I think if I had been alone, I would have turned back then, to seek my death in the fighting—but I could not ignore my Robnore clan obligations. Uncle Parand was among those killed in the sacking of Vennesport. All of Mother’s remaining brothers and most of our coastal trading colleagues were suddenly gone. The surviving remnants of the Clan turned to me for leadership. Grieving and distressed, I felt they were making a hopeless choice, but I could not deny their pleas for direction.

For weeks of torment that stretched into months, I scarcely ate or slept or paused to think. Always, always I longed for you. I stumbled onward, forcing myself to envisage what you would have done to meet each new crisis. Memories of you served as my anchor; without them, I would have been overwhelmed by despair.

Constantly, I reminded myself that we had been separated more often than we had been together. You said once that our letters linking us while apart could comprise an ample chronicle—except no scribe could read our secret script. Despite the turmoil of the war and my travels since, I have preserved some few of your letters, together with the little sketch of you that Halbec made during your long-ago trading voyage aboard his ship. These documents are my most treasured possessions—your lasting legacy to me.

Another very different legacy has driven me to endure this unseasonable voyage. I suspect that you would shake your head ruefully at the surface appearance of my recent behavior. You would ask how, after more than sixty years as a trader, I could turn my back on all that I knew to pursue the flimsiest of hopes? I can hear you say it—chasing moonbeams or catching snowflakes would be more profitable than this journey promises to be. Yet if only I could lay my reasoning before you—of all the people I have ever known, you would be the most likely to understand why I must dare this quest. I believe you would urge me to seize this chance, however slight or foolish it seems.

Dear Doubt . . . you were always an eminently cautious, deliberate man. Uncle Parand once said you were the most prudent risk-taker he knew, for you constantly weighed every possible gain against any potential loss before you committed yourself. No matter what later obstacles arose, you would press on until you accomplished your task.

I had observed a similar strain of persistence in my mother. It was her force of will that converted Father’s improved breed of sheep into the foundation of our trading success. I have been told that I am as obstinate as she was, so the three of us shared the trait, for I recall times when each of us accused the others of excessive willfulness.

Habits honed in one’s work, especially when rewarded, often spill over into other aspects of life. I think of the hours you and I spent together compiling kinship lists. How excited you were to discover that one of your forebears claimed blood-ties to our Robnore Clan. You rode leagues to search for verifying documents, and brought half the dust from an abbey’s archives back with you. We pored over lists for so many families. I shall never forget those parchments stored in the wax-lined sea chest from Wark. You said there could be no doubt of that clan’s devotion to their trade, since every bundle of records for generations reeked of fish!

Here am I, all these years later, still asking questions about kinship. But these particular questions do not concern missing names from the kin lists of other folk; these questions concern my own kin, and the farther I pursue them, the more my disquiet grows. I cannot rest until I find answers. For years, I did not know where to search. I had only guesses, suspicions, fragments that made scant sense by themselves. It was as if I sought to plan a trading journey without knowing where I was to ride, or what goods I should take.

Then, nearly two months ago, in the Month of the Shredbark Tree, Dame Gwersa’s letter reached me at Vennesport. I am certain she did not intend it so, but her news was the firebrand that ignited my accumulated store of worries. From your visits to Rishdale Abbey, you would recall the Dame’s special devotion to the preservation of old records. Since the war, she has endeavored to restore the archives at her own abbey as well as several others tragically damaged in the fighting. Dame Gwersa is now very old and blind, but she dictates occasional letters to me, her student from almost seventy years ago.