Pre-post

Blood for the Soil

               Clarice squinted at the small object in the distance. She squinted, and she concentrated. It didn’t come into greater focus, however it was growing steadily in size as it approached on the dirt path that cut through the gold and green western fields. But it was a slow pace. She looked down at the thick tree branch beneath her and the leather bundle resting there. She pulled at a loose string and unrolled it to reveal a series of glass discs of slightly different hues and moderately different sizes, each with its own pocket of soft fur. Clarice remembered the instructions of assembly, and went about arranging the discs in upright positions in little slots in the leather shell, then carefully re-rolled the bundle tightly around the round objects. She held it up to her eye and directed her attention toward the object approaching on the road. It was revealed to be a blurry smatter of colors. Clarice set the leather tube down, and considered what could be wrong. She tried looking through the tube the other way, then lost herself in experimentation, changing the position of the discs inside the tube and looking again.

               Before she had tried all the different configurations, she could make out that the approaching object was a carriage without aid, painted dark blue with gold filigree for accents. The man whipping the two horses was dressed in clothes that matched and even the bridles of the stallions were arranged in like design. For a moment, Clarice stopped putting the bundle back together and wondered. The carriage represented the tenth such visitor they’d had so far that season. She pushed against the branch beneath her and slid backwards until she could feel the trunk behind her, then she swung a leg up and over to climb down.

               Clarice hustled to where she knew the carriage was going. Others similar, bigger or smaller, less ornamented or more, lived just past the main building, not inside the stable but around it. The school did not have much more than a cart and a wagon and not enough horses to use both at the same time. The first two drivers were confused, but every messenger after that had assumed the space to be some sort of parking area.

               When she was within sight of the man and his carriage again, she could see he was opening the door to the inner compartment. Clarice stopped, hopeful. She watched him step up to reach inside and step back down with a long, narrow wooden box and a sheaf of paper of correspondence. She stopped moving then, and her gaze drifted down to the space between her boots. It appeared, with further examination, that this was the same kind of messenger with the same kind of message. They hadn’t all come with carriages, but each had brought with him a heavy burden.

               At a pace slower than before, she followed the trail of the latest driver’s boot prints up to the main building. The building was stone, made from smaller, semi-uniform, layered bricks. When the admixture had been finalized, they realized the school could be built anywhere so long as it was near the clay dirt that served as the foundation for the formula. Of course, they had put it to a vote. Clarice liked the location, far-removed from any city or even village, completely enveloped in the natural energies. There was a river near enough for fishing and forests not more than half a day’s idle walk. There were just enough thickets nearby for reclining at night to stargaze. She liked the location, but she loved the building.

               “Excuse me,” someone was saying.

               Clarice looked up to see the driver from earlier, with his dark blue and golds staring down at her with his hand on the front door.

               “Are you a,” but he paused. “Do you… are you from here?” He must have received specific instructions, because he was holding some. They evidently did not include how to talk to the people he was coming to see.

               “I’ll show you the way,” Clarice said. She didn’t mean to speak quietly. She just couldn’t get much force behind her sentiment.  This was the tenth. That meant a great many things, and Clarice wasn’t sure she favored any of them.

               She stepped up and used her eyes to move him from the door. She did not want to go inside, but she wanted less to have an awkward conversation with yet another messenger.

               Inside, the wide hallway stretched to reveal two doors on either side and terminated in an open area with a stairway at the very end. The door to the left was open, and Clarice could see some of the other messengers pacing and conversing among themselves. Clarice sighed as she closed the door behind their latest visitor, then marched forward into the room with the previous ones. Keeping her arms straight seemed to help.

               “M’Lady?”

“Has there been any word, Miss?”

               “Are you here with an answer, Lass?”

               Clarice turned on a heel to face the man in dark blue.

               “You may set your things there,” she said. “We are deliberating, and will come when a decision has been reached.” She was assuming again. Just because the man appeared similar, his manner and burdens near identical, did not mean he was there for the same reason.

               He looked at her, and scanned the room. He saw others whose clothes corresponded to the carriages he’d seen. He saw the table covered in long, narrow wooden boxes and long, wide boxes, and short narrow boxes.

               Even still, he neatly unrolled his sheaf. “I am here on behalf of the Baroness of,”

               “No, sir,” came a shout.

“Baroness?” someone yelled.

               “Oy, get in line, then,” someone else.

               Clarice looked at a man sitting on the floor in a corner. He was older, maybe the oldest present. She knew under his cap his hair was more white than brown. The beard he’d been growing since he arrived matched, a patch of brown and gray, growing in wavy patterns. He, she knew because he’d told her, was from the capital of Mallahorn. They had received a request from as far away as the top of the world. The man said nothing, but he did look up at her, and smiled a friendly smile. Clarice left the room, trying not to appear to hurry. She didn’t want to hear the argument, not that one, and not the one happening upstairs, but she turned left in the hallway anyway. She put one foot in front of the other, until she was on the second floor.

               After that she only had to follow the voices of discourse and smell of puff pipes.

               The school was very simple in design. The rooms of study were identical, large and square with a single door and a row of windows. What happened within was what made them special. Clarice knocked twice and waited for the pause then stepped inside.

               “And here I was hoping for a tie breaker,” Shan said. She was sitting backwards in a chair off to the side. Her voice carried even obstructed by the pipe clenched between her teeth. She cut her hair short because she hated the popular fashions, whereas Clarice cut hers short to keep it out of her face.

               Rufus met her at the door, hands out, face smiling. “So, how did it go?” His hair was the longest of anyone present, dark, beautiful curling fingers that went down to the middle of his back. When he smiled his eyes glowed.

               She handed him the leather bundle. “Well, I know which arrangements don’t work for long distance viewing.” Her smile was genuine, but it soured when she turned it on the rest of the room. “And we have another guest.”

               “Colleagues,” Wigfall shook his gray head, but he stood, though with the assistance of his cane. When he approached the center of the room with his tired gait, he eyed Clarice especially, though his gaze passed across all the others. “I believe we are reaching the breakpoint.”

               “That’s what I’ve been saying,” Shan was the only one of them who never waited for Wigfall to stop speaking, but she always did it mostly under her breath.

               “I cannot in good conscience vote to appease the nobles,” Rufus said, stepping towards the center. “I know that some of you disagree,”

               “It is not that we disagree, necessarily,” Gavin was sitting directly across from Shan, but was in direct opposition to Rufus.  He was a wider man, but was very careful how he stood and where he stepped. He had a delicate way of holding his pipe to his mouth. “But I believe we can all agree that there would be consequences to turning them away, ones that we cannot see, but the school would definitely feel.” The words were new but the positions were the same. It was all deconstructive in a way Clarice could feel; the room was filling with a sticky ardor. It was forgetting its original purpose.

               “I agree,” Jade had arranged herself near Gavin, for the sake of transparency. She was very small, and very pretty.

               “And what of the consequences of us going through with this?” Erick was not sitting. He preferred activity, but for all his wanting to move, he could also be very stubborn.

               “We are not responsible for their actions,” Gavin said.

               “We are if their actions would otherwise be impossible without our assistance,” Rufus spoke slowly, emphasizing each word with his hands and gesturing with his leather bundle.

               “They’d kill each other either way,” Gavin’s reply was half smoke.

               Clarice did not know how to feel, or what to think. She thought both sides were right. It was true that there would probably always be conflict, and where there was conflict, violence would always be one of the resolutions. There were tools for every skill of man, and war was no exception. That was only logical. But magical weapons? That felt like their responsibility. After all, they were magicians.

               “How long was it between the second and third messengers?” Wigfall asked. He was still standing in the center of the room, though his cane wobbled every now and again.

               “Near a week, I think, more,”

               “And how long between the latest and the next previous?”

               “Three days,” Clarice said. She hadn’t noticed how they had been accelerating until she was up in that tree. It seemed as though no one inside had realized except for the wisest among them.

               “Well,” he said, putting a stabilizing hand on his cane. “No matter how we disagree, we cannot deny that we must do something.” He looked around the room again. “I say we vote,” and he stopped to look at Clarice. “All of us this time.”

               “We should have at least one more debate,” Rufus said.

               “There’ll be no convincing either side,” Jade folded her arms.

               “You’re that set on this?” Erick stepped away from the wall.

               “We just don’t think we shoulder as much responsibility as you do,” Gavin also talked with his pipe, a gentle sweep with the narrow end.

               “So, you agree that we shoulder some,” Erick lifted his chin to point with his nose.

               “I can’t stay if we go through with this,” Rufus said what Clarice was thinking. “So, I don’t think I should cast a ballot.”

It was no longer deconstructive. Clarice felt something actually break. 

               “We’re going backwards now,” Shan grumbled into the silent moment.

               “How many of you feel as Rufus does?” Wigfall asked. “That if we go through with this, that you could not stay?”

               Clarice did not raise her hand until Erick raised his, but it shot up harder than she intended. She waited for it, but Shan’s hand stayed trapped under her chin as she leaned forward against the back of her chair.

               “And the rest of you believe we should go through with their requests?”

               “We believe it would be less prudent to deny them,” Gavin stepped forward.

               Wigfall looked from Erick to Rufus to her. He had aged again at some point between standing up and now. “We will have a… last meal together,” he gripped his cane and did not look away. “Then in the morning we will properly welcome our guests.”

               “We’ll be gone before dawn,” Erick said and stomped out of the room.

               Rufus looked how Clarice felt, like he could hear the pieces of whatever it was tumbling to the floor. Hear them, but no matter how he looked could not find them.

               Clarice had a hole in her stomach, and not doubling over took effort. She could not help but touch her middle, though, to make sure she was still there.

               Shan was the first to move, up and out of her chair, breaking the silence with her whisper. She took Rufus’ hand and put an arm up around Clarice’s neck. “Come on,” it was just a whisper, but it was the loudest thing in the room.

               The main building was for experimentation, storing supplies and drawing circles. Their personal items were in the smaller building next door, which was just a long, open floor plan with cots and bedrolls. There was discussion of a third building. They all thought that eventually they would have students, people who came to the gift at younger ages. As they were, they were an assortment of magically inclined types that banded together to learn from one another, to further their educations. They had all come to magic individually, and it was strange and people around them were frightened. Ostracization was natural. It was all so new. And now it was over.

               “Excuse,” someone said from the room where the messengers were. They stopped as soon as they saw Shan, who whipped her head around to stare. Light shone out of her pipe, not just smoke.

               The moment Clarice sat down on her cot, with the understanding that she had to pack all her things together, she closed her eyes so tight, but that just seemed to make the tears come faster. She didn’t know who was embracing her, but it was more than one person, and it was welcome.

               The dinner didn’t go the way she imagined Wigfall wanted. They ate in silence at a long table in a setting that was normally a scene of noisy discourse. The food always went quickly and then the plates were replaced with notebooks and tomes, questions and theories flying all around the room. Sparking the beginning of new understanding was a literal nightly event, little lights and strange smells abounding. Now, not a plate was empty, and not a word was said. It was so quiet, they could hear the other dinner happening outside, among the carriages and their drivers. Again, Erick left first. She could almost see it. First Erick would leave, and then Rufus, and her, not wanting to be alone, would follow immediately after.

               And that’s exactly how it happened. Wigfall insisted they take the horses. The rest of them would commit, but they would not do so thanklessly. They would build that third building, and a fourth if necessary. They would educate future magicians on the topic of history. Clarice hoped the old man lived long enough to keep his promise, but she hoped from horseback, trotting through the night, gripped tightly to Rufus. It made a certain kind of sense, her going with him. She wouldn’t have known how to leave by herself.

               She asked where they were going before she realized the answer didn’t mean all that much to her.

               He replied that he wanted to understand what had happened. He admitted that part of him thought that if he knew that, if they all knew, then maybe things could change.

               They had been told a story by the first messenger, and had corroborated parts of it from tales of those that followed. A small nation to their south, nestled in a valley with seemingly no aspirations for expansion, had been attacked. The king and queen were slain, leaving their only daughter to watch over the bloody proceedings of the fall of her nation. A magician not unlike Rufus and not unlike Clarice was an advisor to the royal line. In some of the stories it was anger, and in some of the stories it was compassion. Whatever the reason, the magician imbued a series of items with bolstering magic and linked them to the princess’ blood. The girl went out to the battlefield, but not to surrender, and turned the tide of the invasion into a crusade of conquest. She could not be killed, the storytellers said. She could not even be slowed. She was a flower that was growing on the field of battle, soaked in the blood of her enemies. People called her the Rose.

               The assumption was that where one magician could enhance the effects of a child, a school of magicians could bless the armaments of nobility. They would even pay. Gold, jewels and titles, whatever the scholars desired.

               At least, that’s what they were told. Rufus had a mind to discover the truth, but Clarice did not ask what he was to do with that truth, what he thought the truth could change. Back in the direction where the sun was rising behind them, their colleagues, former colleagues, were agreeing to sharpen blades and give weight to axes. Clarice wondered at the process and reasoned if they meant to bind the weapons to the blood, they would need the line in question close at hand. That would mean travel back to the cities from which the weapons came. Maybe they could do something. Maybe they did have time.

               They followed the king’s road west toward the crescent cities, the half ring of stone settlements that circled Mallahorn. Along the way, Rufus finalized the configuration of his long-viewing device. In the first village they found with a horse for sale, he traded the excess lenses for their best horse. He even taught the people how to use one of the shards of glass, a small disc of very light blue, how to start a fire with the light of the sun, or see things too small for an eye to view unassisted. Clarice asked if any of them had seen a man with sharp eyes and a short temper, a single rider in traveling clothes. She described Erick down to the manner of his speech and body language, and still no one had seen him.

               With two horses they traveled much more quickly, sweeping south about the crescent road but skipping the cities entirely. As they went, they heard stories of the Rose coming north from her little nation. In almost every account, the princess was described as an otherworldly creature of limitless prowess. The people wondered with shaking heads what they had done, and who would save them.

               Rufus spoke at night over campfires about innovations that had come to him as they rode. Similar to his looking glass, his magic was rooted in his strong desire to reveal. Sometimes he woke up in the middle of the night with warped images of distant futures. His spell book was filled with his reckonings of magic and its functioning, as all of theirs were, but he’d gone back over each page with details from his prophetic dreams. When the first had come true, the page in question had become a kind shiny gold. But now, the farther they rode, the more they heard, his side of their conversations turned to occlusion. He had discovered that seeing things so clearly had allowed him the ability to change what it was people saw. Clarice watched him weave illusion like a knitted scarf. They were frenzies of color in the beginning, strange and warped and weird, even fun, but by the time they completed the crescent, it was difficult to tell the difference between his reality and the one they rode through. She never saw his spell book again, as if it very pages, its spine, had become invisible.

               Clarice could feel herself changing, too. It wasn’t conscious, and maybe it happened because she was aware of it after it was too late. She had first felt the power surge through her when she held the broken-winged bird in her childhood hands. She didn’t know if she had healed it using stores of her own energy, or if it was more a process of setting things back to their natural state. She thought it was the latter, but by experimenting with it, her hair was white before she was marrying age. It made her that much stranger, and that much easier to discriminate and shun. When she had first met him, Wigfall seemed to be younger than her, even though the opposite could not be truer. And thinking of that, and all that she had lost, as they twisted through the ominous premonitions of war, took her magic from her, turned it into something else. Asking about Rufus’ discoveries made it easier to hide. She even became practiced at silent crying, rolled up in her blankets at night.

               But nightmare persisted on into the day. Three days ride south of Vannis, the end of the crescent, they saw the pillars of smoke. Rufus had grown determined to know the truth, even used his new knowledge to obscure them from sight to do so. There had been a battle. No fire had been used during, but funeral pyres had been used afterward. The Rose’s losses were trivial compared to Berith’s. A field of ruined corpses darkened the grasses in a semi-circle a moderate stretch from the winning side’s mourning flames.

               “Do you think she would tell us the truth?” Rufus asked.

               Clarice opened her mouth, but nothing came out. What she hoped for had become so small that it no longer had a voice.

               “Do you think she can even see it, at this point?’

               She knew that he was beginning to lose his way. Or maybe he had already lost it. Maybe they both had; Clarice wondered if any of her former family were able to hold onto who they were after committing to recent acts.

               “Maybe not her, but someone knows, I’m sure,” she put her hand on Rufus’. It wasn’t because she believed the words, but because he deserved to hear them.

               They completed their journey to the little valley nation at first because of a wavering to their resolve. They were numb, like stones bouncing down a rock face, they moved in the easiest pattern. After a time, Rufus reasoned that there was someone they needed to see, the only one they could speak to.

               There were guards at the border, and there were guards along the road. Rufus practiced his deceptions and he perfected them. Clarice watched, important parts of her breaking as she watched him lose his. Curled up in a ball at night, she dried of tears. She realized that the hole in her middle was her power turning into something else.

               They ended up in a quiet, lonely audience hall like ghosts that haunted the place. Clarice imagined that the old man in front of them was Wigfall’s distant cousin. He did not appear as advanced in age, but something had broken down his spirit and his body was following. Even if he was surprised, he did not jump at Rufus’ voice.

               “You are the steward of this place?” it was more of an indictment than a question.

               The old magician understood immediately. He even seemed to know the two people before him were his contemporaries.

               “You have deft illusions, my boy. Yes, I am. Or, I was.” He was not sitting in the chair of the advisor, off to the right of the king and queen’s. He was seated on the floor, leaning up against the arch that hung over the officious seats. There was a staff resting out of arms reach and he made no move to retrieve it.

               “We have come a long way to learn the truth,” Rufus stepped forward.

               “To save our friends,” something else Clarice had long stopped believing, but maybe it would save the friend in her reach.

               The old magician chuckled. “What I have done is unlikely to lead to the salvation of anyone.”

               “And what did you do?” Rufus was even closer.

               Close enough for the old man to look him right in the face. “I gave war to a child.”

               But that they knew. Rather they knew the fact, but only recently were they able to absorb the feeling. They knew what the man had done, but only he knew fully what it meant.

               “Tell us what happened.”

               The old magician spoke of the princess at play, a chubby girl with matching tails of hair. The servants adored her. They carried her away well before her parents asked them to, before the meetings with foreign dignitaries and mysterious envoys. The country had been invaded first with smiles and lies from the south. Over years, there was talk of alliance, then of annexation. It ended in assassination. Berith invaded from the north before the pyres were cool.

               “Her shoulders were so small,” the old magician said. “But she told me she loved her home. She told me she wanted to defend it. I had failed her parents,” and he paused, then, “and I supposed I failed her as well.”

               Clarice could see it in her minds eye, the spectacle of the Rose’s thorns, the bedlam of large-scale conflict, and the escalation of retaliation. She could see Shan and Gavin and Jade. All the others in places she promised herself she’d visit one day. All the students that they talked about teaching.

               Rufus swallowed. He had something he wanted to say, or maybe something he couldn’t help but feel, and instead he pushed it down, down into his middle. He looked nauseous. He didn’t know what to do either.

               Eventually some servant in the palace discovered them, and the three of them had just enough wherewithal to explain away their presence. It was over a course of days Clarice lost track of. Every idea she had spiraled out of control, down into a dark abyss of horror and blood. There was just no way to stop it. Every morning, though, every time she woke in the night with a scream, she tried to think of another way. The one solution that kept coming back to her was the obvious thing, the terrible thing. Gavin had said that the nobles would kill themselves regardless. And certainly without magic, the tiny kingdom would have fallen, to one of its larger neighbors. The Rose would never have bloomed on the battlefield, but maybe that would’ve been better. Clarice could not help but believe that magic was the root cause, or at least the greed of it, the envy of it, the fear. She could not help but understand how to unravel it. Much like Rufus, she went back to her spell book, and took down new notes on her understanding, overlapping everything she thought she’d previously known. Rather than the pages turning to gold, there was a kind of erasure. Pages went blank at her touch. Not even her tears returned.

               Rufus broke the malaise first. He had always been the strongest.

               “I think,” he said, quietly as if not recognizing his own voice. “I think Wigfall was right.” He looked at her over a stack of books in the royal library. They had sought refuge in possibility, but even though they had found nothing, the place was a comfort.

               “What?” Clarice welcomed any distraction.

               “We wanted a place where we could think and grow unfettered,” he said, looking out of a nearby window. “But such a place would be a refuge, an oasis. We don’t need a haven for good ideas. We need a haven for the dangerous ones. To learn why and why not. Magic is already a classroom in the impossible.”

               Clarice was so ashamed and so proud to hear him work his way out of the darkness. She thought he’d been lost, a magician emboldened by a search for truth and then fallen into a mastery of deception. She thought he was like her, twisted and bent.

               Rufus outlined his plan, which was Wigfall’s plan, but not to make his school in a world apart, but apart of the world.

               Clarice smiled at every step, even when he asked her to come and build it with him. She lied and told him that she was going to go her own way. She was going to advance her understanding of the healing arts. She promised she would not give too much of herself. In truth, she had learned much about medicine and herbology while there. It was a place to start.

               Rufus beamed.

               Somehow, when they were saying their goodbyes, she felt like the old magician could sense her lie. Indirectly, he had been a destroyer, and he had known regret. She felt like he looked at her with an air of understanding.

               At the fork in the road, Rufus went south, and Clarice turned north. Back to Berith, back to the beginning. It was a spur of the moment decision. She knew that wherever he was going, she could not follow, not with what she had intended. Destroying magic would be disavowing that little girl and the years she gave to give that bird back its wing. Destroying magic would be dishonoring the sentiment of that innocent wish. But destroying magic was something that no man could ever do; for those who did not understand its cost, it could only be imagined as a thing to be coveted.

               It could only be done her. Afterall, she was a magician.