Julian May - Sorcerer’s Moon - Part Three of the Boreal Moon Tale

I kept his secret, which would have disqualified him for the Cathran kingship even though his talent was very meager. In time, with a good deal of assistance from the powerful sorceress Ullanoth of Moss – and, I must admit, from me – Conrig inherited his father’s throne.

After winning a war against the forces of Didion, Ironcrown declared himself the Sovereign of Blenholme. A few years later he fulfilled his ambition to unite the four quarreling states of our island into a single nation. But this was to be only a first step toward Conrig’s ultimate objective: to emulate his ancestor, Emperor Bazekoy the Great, and conquer the rest of the known world.

Conrig Wincantor was a brilliant politician and a warrior of immense valor. Nevertheless he possessed a ruthlessness and an icy expediency that often troubled my over-tender conscience; but in spite of these misgivings, I served him faithfully throughout my adolescence. When I entered manhood at the age of twenty, Conrig knighted me, named me his Royal Intelligencer, and almost immediately entrusted me with a crucial new mission.

I was sent to the land of Tarn to search for the king’s vengeful divorced wife, Princess Maudrayne. Believed to be drowned, she had reappeared after four years and posed a unique threat to the Sovereignty. Not only had she covertly given birth to Conrig’s eldest son – who by law would take precedence over the king’s heirs by his second marriage – but she also knew that her former husband possessed weak magical talent. If she revealed his secret and convinced the Lords Judicial of Cathra that she spoke the truth, Conrig would lose his throne. Even if she were not believed, her mere accusation might fatally undermine the already wavering loyalty of the vassal states of Tarn and Didion and plunge the island into chaos.

Ironcrown was adamant that I should do whatever was necessary to guarantee Maudrayne’s silence, as well as eliminate the dynastic menace posed by her young son Dyfrig. I balked at the obvious solution – assassination – and conceived a plan that I hoped might save the lives of the princess and her little boy while still satisfying the king.

As I undertook the difficult task of finding the pair, I discovered that the stability of Conrig’s reign had a more overreaching importance: High Blenholme Island was about to be invaded by a horde of Salka monsters. Incited by the young sorcerer Beynor ash Linndal, deposed ruler of Moss and brother to his successor Conjure-Queen Ullanoth, the enormous amphibians intended to take back the island from which most of them had been expelled over a thousand years earlier by Emperor Bazekoy.

Both Beynor and the Salka planned to use moonstone sigils, instruments of sorcery empowered by the supernatural Beaconfolk, to bring about the reconquest. The auroral Beacons, who were also called the Great Lights, comprised two opposing factions that were embroiled in a mysterious New Conflict of their own. I had been drawn into it against my will – as had numbers of other humans who are also part of this Boreal Moon Tale – but by the end of the mission involving Princess Maudrayne and her son, I mistakenly believed I had escaped the Lights’ thrall.

The mission itself was both a success and a failure. With the help of loyal companions – and my reluctant employment of two moonstone sigils, which the ‘good’ Light called the Source had compelled me to accept – I rescued Maudrayne and her child Dyfrig from a strange captivity. I was able to convince the princess to recant her spiteful revelation of Conrig’s secret to the Sealords of Tarn. In turn, the High King agreed that young Dyfrig might be placed third in the Cathran royal succession, behind his twin sons Orrion and Corodon, born of his marriage to Risalla of Didion. The boy was to become the adopted son of Earl Marshal Parlian Beorbrook, a Cathran peer of uncompromising honesty. To assure the child’s loyalty to the Sovereign, Dyfrig would never see or communicate with his mother again.

Unknown to me, Ironcrown was too cynical to trust his former wife’s promise not to publicly reaffirm his secret talent. After having agreed that Maudrayne would be allowed to live in quiet exile with her Tarnian relatives, he arranged for her murder by poison, which was passed off as suicide. I was so disillusioned by the king’s perfidy that I left his service without permission. I fled to a remote region of western Tarn, accompanied by a young woman named Induna of Barking Sands, an apprentice shaman-healer who had earlier saved my life and also assisted in the rescue of Maudrayne and her son. For a few months I lived with Induna and her mother in a tiny village near Northkeep.

In the best of romantic endings I should have married Induna and made a new life for myself, secure from the Sovereignty’s tumult and intrigues as well as from the more subtle machinations of the Beaconfolk.

The reality was messier.

Shortly after my abrupt resignation from the intelligencer post, I sent a message to Conrig via his elder brother Vra-Stergos, Cathra’s Royal Alchymist, who had been friendly toward me during my years of service to the king. In it I apologized for my affront to the regal dignity (but gave no reason for my dereliction of duty), swore that I intended to continue guarding Conrig’s secret with my life, and said that I wanted only to be left in peace. I also returned the considerable sum of money vouchsafed to me by the Crown when I was granted knighthood.

There was no reply to my message, and none of my later attempts to windspeak Lord Stergos were successful. He and Conrig were occupied with more urgent matters. The king’s domestic enemies, Cathra’s Lords of the Southern Shore, had demanded that he defend himself against persistent Tarnian accusations that he possessed magical talent, was thus not the legitimate High King of Cathra, and therefore was unworthy of Tarn’s fealty.

The official inquiry was as brief as it was dramatic. No member of Cathra’s Mystical Order of Zeth could swear that they detected talent in the king. (The scrupulously honest Vra-Stergos was saved from having to condemn his brother because of the precise wording of the oath, even though he knew well enough that the accusation was true.) Maudrayne was believed dead and unable to renew her denunciation, and I was shielded by sorcery and refused to testify. Since there were no other witnesses against Conrig who had status under Cathran law, he won his case easily.

The Sealords of Tarn cursed all lawyers and grudgingly continued to pay the heavy taxes imposed by the Sovereignty. The wealthy Lords of the Southern Shore did the same, thwarted in their attempt to put Duke Feribor Blackhorse, their ringleader, on the Cathran throne in place of Conrig.

In the devastated little kingdom of Moss, far from the tranquil cottage on the edge of the Western Ocean where I dwelt with Induna and her mother, the Salka hunkered down in the lands they had overrun and pondered the next big step in the reconquest of ‘their’ island. They owned numbers of minor moonstone sigils which they had already successfully used as weapons, and hatched plans to obtain others that were more potent. Conjure-Queen Ullanoth, who had ruled Moss before the Salka invasion, was believed by most people to have perished through imprudent use of her sigils. Her scheming younger brother Beynor had dropped out of sight after quarreling with the victorious monsters, his former secret allies. No one knew (or cared) what had become of him.

With the security of the Sovereignty now his primary concern, Conrig garrisoned troops at crucial points along the Dismal Heights from Rainy Pass to Riptide Bay, supposedly making a land invasion of Didion by the Salka impossible. At the same time the formidable Joint Fleet of the Sovereignty, equipped with tarnblaze cannons, patrolled the waters off the island’s eastern coast in a show of strength designed to keep the amphibians in check. In spite of the blockade, the monsters made several waterborne forays against coastal settlements of Didion and Cathra. But finally, in a single decisive battle, the Salka stronghold in the Dawntide Isles was completely destroyed by the Sovereignty, and an interval of peace settled over High Blenholme.