Chapter 6: Enchantments and Possibilities
They did not, in the end, have much time to plan. The whole irate advance host of King Carillon’s outrage came up the finished road just after dawn, in a clatter of hooves and armor and sword-steel and knighthood.
Garrett, having inadvertently made the bedroom—and then the kitchen, and then the long stone bench near Lorre’s garden pool—radiantly warm again, was in the middle of explaining why this loss of control was Alex’s fault, when the hillside shouted a warning. He grabbed Alex’s hand. “Your father—”
Alex said a word that should’ve scandalized the marble, if it weren’t beyond blushing. “Of course Lorre just showed up and took me—the rumor must be everywhere, the Grand Sorcerer kidnapped a prince—”
Garrett muttered the same word. “It’s still just us here—I can try to protect us, but I’m not Lorre—the earthquake offer’s still open—”
“The Second Sorcerer of the Middle Lands can’t kill the King of Averene.”
“No. I know.” He pressed fingertips against the spot between his eyebrows. It felt like a bruise. “Let me think.”
Something else touched his forehead. Cool. Smooth. Familiar. The headache vanished like a ghost at sunrise. Garrett opened his eyes, protested, “That wasn’t for me.”
“It was.” Alex, smiling crookedly, set the twelfth enchanted pebble into Garrett’s hand, closed their fingers around it. “I saved that one in case you had a headache and wouldn’t tell me.”
“You…I don’t know how many times I can say I love you. So many times. I would’ve told you to heal yourself with it if I’d known you had it.”
“I know. It was in my pocket. It’s been there for a while.”
Garrett opened his hand, held out the pebble: tiny, shaped by time and pressure, enchantment spent. “It can stay there. If you want it.”
“I do,” Alex agreed gravely, and took it back, and put it in a trouser-pocket, and touched the pocket after, gently. “Should we go talk to my father?”
They went. Both of them barefoot, Alex in Garrett’s borrowed shirt, with the half-finished School gleaming empty but luminous as pearl at their backs.
A few bouncing rocks and stones got up to follow their steps, curious, companionable. Garrett wondered whether that would always happen, from now on; he felt luminously happy himself, certain of his own wanting, despite angry fathers, despite confrontations, despite everything. Rightness lay under his skin, in every breath, each heartbeat. He felt like himself, more so than he’d ever been, with Alex’s hand in his.
They met the King of Averene outside the School’s east door as the sun drifted upward, shedding pinks and ambers in favor of seaspray blue. Pennants crackled; the breeze had returned. King Carillon, a greying red-faced bear with massive hands, shouted from his warhorse, “You took my son!”
Garrett’s backdrop of looming marble caught the echoes, all around, and ran them up and down merrily: until the words became nonsense, and died.
Alex’s gaze remained steady, though his grip on Garrett’s fingers was tight. “They didn’t. I chose to be here.”
“They’ve enchanted you. Bewitched you. Taken what’s mine.”
“No.” Alex’s other hand touched his pocket again, over the small grey stone. “I’m not yours. I love you and I love Averene. I love our people. But I have a choice. And I’m making it.”
“Useless,” his father rumbled, hand lifting as if it could cross the distance, “brainless, good-for-nothing—letting yourself be ensorcelled, tricked—one thing I asked you, and you failed even that—”
“I would be very careful,” Garrett said evenly, “what you say next.”
The king’s fury swung his way, baffled. “Who are you? You’re not Lorre.”
“Garret Pell. Second Sorcerer of the Middle Lands.” He let that sink in, piled on, “In love with your son.”
King Carillon stared at him. Then laughed, deep and ugly. “That one? You’ve got more of a sense of humor than I guessed, getting me up here for that.” He shifted in the saddle, added, “If you wanted a war, you could’ve found better excuses. I’d’ve rather had you on my side.”
Alex shut his eyes for a split second. That small defeat, that wound, broke Garrett’s heart. He yanked iron out of the hillside, pulled it into a deadly line, forged by love. Aimed it at a king.
Swords and pikes rattled. The king’s men tensed. The wind yelped.
Lorre’s voice said, from sunlight, “I can’t leave for a single day, can I? All of you stop everything right now,” and a grumpy blond-haired blue-eyed slender bit of wild magic emerged, arms folded, dressed in a diaphanous blue robe that hid absolutely nothing. “All right, look, we’re not having a war, sorry. Garrett, I really thought better of you, I thought—”
“I know,” Garrett said, in despair.
“I thought you’d just be having sex. No,noneof you can use swords, I said, put thosedown.” Lorre glared at knights; red-hot weapons dropped from hands, and curses arose. “I’ll make this very simple for you. Alex is a magician. We agreed that the School, and the Grand Sorcerer, would be responsible for magicians in the Middle Lands. Therefore he’s one of ours. Now go away.”