Wolf Awert - The Reign of Magic

Never before had anyone heard Esara speak like this, and never before had Esara been as highly visible as she was now, here under the Holy Tree. Her presence seemed to fill half the village square, where normally she’d rather keep out of the spotlight. And if sometimes she stood in the bright light of day, the eyes of the villagers would avoid her, for that which you cannot see cannot scare you.

Esara looked at Roddick and said sternly: “Put the boy down, Roddick, he is old enough to stand.” She took the boy by the hands, broke through the ring of villagers, which opened only grudgingly, and walked with him to her hut at the edge of the village. She left behind her pensive faces. The sun had long settled before all words had been spoken and the village square regained its nocturnal calm.

So it came to be that the foundling grew up in the care of Esara the truth-teller. Yet the dark clouds that would overshadow his entire life were not driven away by decent food and a safe place to sleep. “The strange attracts the strange, and strange things will come of this,” the old wives of the village prophesied, and knew that good things came rarely from afar. Esara herself, too, had one day appeared out of nowhere like the boy, without past and without roots.

First of all, Esara peeled the boy’s travel clothes off and threw a nettle shirt that was far too large over his head, gave him food and put him to sleep. For a long time she held the amulet in her hand and hearkened. The wood was as still as a tight-lipped mouth. The moon had wandered a fair stretch when she finally said: “It is time you found some sleep, too.”

She wrapped the amulet in the boy’s clothes, put the bundle down in a corner of the hut and asked the whisper-willows’ roots to watch over it. That very same night the runic bones rattled on the pentagonal stone slab of prophecy, as Esara attempted, with the only light coming from the dying embers from the fireplace, to look into the future. She smiled at the thought that many of the unlearned believed that the future lay in the signs that revealed themselves after every throw. No, it was not that simple. These signs only sought connection to the sky, just like those signs that seemed to hide on the stone greeted the earth. An arcanist considered where the various bones lay on the stone and which was looking at which neighbor and whether one could read the signs only when changing his own position.

Yet in this night, not only did the signs hide, but also fate itself. Esara’s curiosity was replaced by an oppressive restlessness. For her and the boy, who had quickly fallen asleep in one of the corners of the hut, there seemed to be no fate, neither in the short nor in the long run.

“This one is not good,” a child’s fair voice broke the silence, and a small hand took one of the bones. All the other stones that had lain motionless upon the slab moved suddenly.

“Stop that, Chigg,” Esara said calmly, though behind her motionless face she fought to conceal her horror. “This isn’t a toy.”

Chigg, in Esara’s dialect, meant simply child or boy . The names parents give to their young are of no importance. True names are given by life itself, sometimes casually, sometimes brutally and violently, as only life itself can.

Chigg dropped the rune bone back onto the slab, where it rolled about aimlessly for a while. Esara collected all the bones anew and scattered them beneath the child’s watchful gaze. The bones rolled and fell over the stone, unable to find the right place. They only found it when Chigg removed one of them.

“Bad bone,” he said.

Esara took it from him and returned all the runes to a little sack. It was not always easy to recognize the will of fate, and often enough she was misled. But fate completely denying her was something she had never witnessed.

Fate, too, has a master it must obey , Esara thought and shook her head pensively. “If there were no more fate, the cosmic order would be gone, and no order would mean the end of the world. There must be another reason why I cannot see the future.”

Esara was too small and unimportant to solve this riddle. Her knowledge was barely sufficient for truth-telling. The power that ruled concealed by fate was beyond her reach.

Even though Esara was feared by many villagers, she was no sorceress and as such was not part of the ruling noble class. Still, she was no mere woman of the common people, for she knew more about the web that made up the world than any other.

“Everything was different once,” she tried to remember, tugging at the veil that covered the scenes from the past. It did not give, it was woven too tightly.

In a village where everyone was considered rich whose doorstep was passed over by hunger, Chigg suffered no shortcomings, for Esara had neither husband nor children. Neither she was likely to find a man. As an outsider, she had no family in the village whose support she could secure through marriage, and opinion was divided on the matter of whether her second face was a gift or a curse. The talent was certainly not a desirable dowry. Her charm, too, was limited, even in her youth, to her eyes. There may be places on Pentamuria that would have considered her red hair evidence of royal blood and as such highly coveted. Here in Earthland, as in the Metal World whose borders were in the foothills just a few days’ journey away, the people had dark hair. Red was neither the day nor the night. It was the color of morning and evening in Earthland, the short moments of indecisiveness between today and the near future. Red also stood for the Fire Kingdom, which never brought any good tidings.

While the houses and cottages of the influential kinships were grouped around the village square, Esara’s hut stood by the edge of the village where nobody else wanted to live. The other houses formed a ring along an invisible line where the downs met the valley. They stood where the earth was still dry and the ground was even. The damper grounds were too valuable to settle on. They were used to grow onions, and lush grass grew there too, which brought the herds through the dry season. The rights to the grass were negotiated anew every year under the Tree of the Court. Only Esara’s house stood where the ground was much too damp, where the Fever Spirits lived, who brought sickness to the villagers.

Yet for Chigg, Esara’s house was the most wonderful in the entire village. The cottages were mostly built out of branches, the gaps filled with grass and clay, for good wood was sparse. The Reeve’s house alone was made entirely of wood and even had a stone foundation.

Esara’s house, on the other hand, was neither a cottage nor a real house. Upon her arrival in the village she had planted four fast-growing whisper-willows, which had formed the four cornerstones of the house and grew larger and stronger every year. The low-alder grew between these living columns, a dense, short bush, barely taller than the average man could reach. On the inside, where the light was less abundant, the twigs had died. Yet they remained as pliant as ever, which Esara had learned to use to great effect. The twigs on the outside, however, kept growing, turning the small shelter into a blossoming palace encircling a small, well-protected room in the middle. Esara called her house Grovehall.

The ground was simply flattened earth, and despite the dampness of the area always dry, for the whisper-willows and the low-alder took the water from the earth.

The more the bushes grew and the larger the house became, the more birds decided to nest there, so before long the boy was woken every morning by birdsong. And every evening, the loud screeching arguments between the birds trying to find their rightful sleeping place reminded him that it was time to go to sleep.