Carol Berg - Flesh and Spirit

“But the abbot says you used the guide spells that unlock their power. I’m sorry to press. My master is”—he cleared his throat and ducked his head, his gray skin taking on a rosy cast—“excitable. So I beg your indulgence. Whatever you can tell me would be valuable. I’m afraid he’s going to ask me to copy one of these before we leave the abbey.”

Though I didn’t begrudge him the knowledge, I sincerely wished the fellow would stop asking questions. Yet he was gently spoken and seemed a mournful sort. And I knew well of excitable masters who asked the impossible.

“You see this oval banner on the larger map,” I said. “It’s called a cartouche. Look carefully and you’ll find the words of the guide spell scribed there, or if the map is too small to have a cartouche, you’ll find it buried in the border decorations. But copying won’t give you any use of it. The mardane told me that the cartographer’s magic is in the rendering, not just the words and symbols.”

“Ah.” He sat up straight and sighed. “Well, that’s good news for me, if my lord will believe it. So how would you invoke the spell?”

“Speak the words of the spell while tracing your finger along your desired route. With the aid of the spell and a bit of common wisdom, your mind and senses will tell you when you stray from the path. It’s useful enough.” So I had been told. Endlessly.

“And that’s all?”

I sagged back onto my pillows. “If a fellow like me can do it, I’ve no doubt anyone can.”

Gram smiled again as he closed the book and stood to go. “I think you speak yourself an injury, sir. Your explanations were very clear, and you’ve surely a good head for maps and scouting. Someday perhaps I can return this favor.”

I appreciated his effort to be kind. Old resentments about family and books and written words could not but taint my answers. He had no way to know that maps were of no use to me. “Your employer…he would like to own such a book as this?”

“In truth, not. He gives all his books to Gillarine.” Gram cocked his head to one side, curiosity blossomed like a daylily at dawn. “But I thought you were taking vows. Don’t initiates give—?”

“Yes, yes, I am,” I said, gathering my wits. “But I wasn’t sure what to do with the book…or whether the abbot would actually want such a valuable one when the price of it could do so much in the way of almsgiving.”

Gram nodded and held out his palm again. “Abbot Luviar is very wise. He’ll guide you rightly. Heal well, friend, and thank you.”

Once he’d gone, I longed for some other visitor to break the evening’s quiet. Not right that such a gentlemanly fellow should lance old boils and leave me to suffer the stink.

No one came.

Rain entirely inappropriate to Ardra’s driest season drummed on the roof all night, slowing only when the blackness beyond the horned window yielded to gray. I slept fitfully, seeing far too much of both night and dawn. Daylight brought Brother Gildas.

Brother Robierre waved a wooden mallet he used for crushing seeds and pods, as he talked over my head with the dark-browed Gildas. “Ignore his complaining. Any man who can talk and eat as he does is fit enough to take wherever you will for an hour. Keep him moving, and send for me only if he collapses altogether.”

“Am I to have no say in this?” I said, spitting out the detritus of hulls and stems that showered from his implement. “My leg—”

“You have applied to take vows, including strict obedience bound by punishments both in this life and the next. If you insist on ‘having your say,’ perhaps you’d best reconsider your future.” Brother Gildas held up a white wool shirt he’d pulled from a black and white bundle in my lap.

“He’s not broken his fast as yet this morning,” said the infirmarian. He retreated to his worktable, where he dumped a bag of dried seedpods into a large wooden bowl and attacked them with his mallet as if they were a nest of Iero’s detractors. “Never saw a man relish our victuals as he does. Point him toward the kitchen, and he’ll keep apace.”

Shivering in the cold damp, I thrust my head and bare arms into the thick shirt. “There’s more folk eating bark soup than mutton broth of late, Brothers,” I mumbled. “Must I go barefoot?”

“Wear your own boots today. You’ll receive your cowl and sandals on the day you take your novice vows, which we do sincerely hope will be your choice.” Brother Gildas smiled as if to soften the sting of his earlier rebuke, while I fumbled with clean white woolen trews and black knee-length hose. When my tight shoulder bandage hampered me, he knelt by the bed like a trained manservant, smoothly tugging the stiff, heavy boots onto my big feet, tucking in the hose, and tightening the laces up my legs.

“Up now,” he said, rising and offering me his hand. “Don your gown. Then we’ll go walking to stretch your limbs, I’ll ask you a few questions for Father Abbot, and we’ll find sustenance before you wither.”

Ah, the questioning. No one had come to the infirmary on the previous day to test my knowledge of Saint Ophir’s Rule. Jullian, who had taken it upon himself to visit me at least three times a day, had reported that Brother Sebastian had not yet returned from Pontia, and Brother Gildas had been closeted with the abbot and “visiting abbey benefactors” all day “except when they went to see the progress on the lighthouse.” The presence of a lighthouse here, at least six hundred quellae from Navronne’s northern seacoast, struck me as an oddity, even allowing for my usual morning dullness.

The prospect of interrogation damped my already soggy spirits. Awkwardly I wrestled the common black wool gown over my head, not at all sure I could bring myself to take vows here—even for a season. Rules and restrictions and righteous preaching curdled my stomach like vinegar in milk. If I could find a buyer for the book of maps, then perhaps I could find a less restrictive haven, perhaps a lornly widow who needed pleasuring.

The heavy garment enveloped me from neck to ankles, an unlikely happenstance as I had never failed to be the tallest man in any gathering since I had reached my full height at nineteen. But even more extraordinary was the sense of safety that enfolded me with the thick black wool, the same as that worn by every other monk throughout Navronne. Sweet, blessed anonymity.

Most ordinaries viewed pureblood life as god blessed and couldn’t imagine why any of us would choose to forgo it. They didn’t understand about contracts and protocols, submission rules and breeding laws, all the things that had made me feel as if someone had bound me head to toe with silken cord and locked me blind and deaf in a coffin.

Under the oversight of the Pureblood Registry, pureblood families contracted out their magical services for a great deal of money. As Navronne’s nobles, magistrates, and clergy profited handsomely from the magic of our undiluted Aurellian blood, these parties had devised an inviolable compact a century ago, requiring every knight, magistrate, reeve, and sheriff to enforce the Registry’s rules. Not even a Karish abbot would dare disobey the fugitive laws. Harboring a common fugitive—a thief or a deserter—past his fourteen days of sanctuary would cost Abbot Luviar disgrace and ten years’ income—everything his abbey collected or produced—meaning ten years’ groveling to the local magistrates to return enough to allow the brothers to eat. But if the abbot was judged to have knowingly hidden a pureblood renegade—a recondeur—those magistrates would burn his abbey and his fields, and then they would hang him.

So they just couldn’t know. A recondeur with any sense learned quickly to keep his head down, his lies consistent, his past private, and his appearance unremarkable. I smoothed my warm, unremarkable wool layers and felt a grin split my face.