And without another word, the mage padded in bare feet to the staircase and up it. Kordas turned to Hakkon. “Did you know anything about this?” he asked incredulously.
“Well, obviously I’ve known he’s been working non-stop on this since your father’s time,” Hakkon pointed out. “But no, I had no idea he’d . . .” Hakkon paused as the enormity of it all hit him. “By Klathor’s Axe. He did it, didn’t he? He really went and did it!” Hakkon’s eyes widened and a wicked grin spread over his face. “We’re going to be able to do this! We’re going to get out of this place!”
“Slow up, old friend. Not without a lot of planning and a hell of a lot of secrecy,” Kordas pointed out. “In fact—” and now the enormity of the task that faced them hit him. “The work we’ve been doing all these years is nothing compared to the work that’s ahead of us.”
“But now we know the goal is provably possible,” Hakkon pointed out.
He nodded. Now we can see it, not just dream about it.
“I’m going to go check on the warehouses,” he said. “And then I need to get someone with a better head for math than I have to tell me how many thousand more hulls we’re going to need. This . . .” He scratched his head. “ . . . is going to take a lot of whiles. But first, let’s go talk to the Circle.”
Hakkon groaned. “Not those old coots! Kordas, they’re half drunk and all crazy!”
“They’re not as drunk or as crazy as you think they are, though they’d like you to think that,” he retorted, and led the way down the stairs again.
The “Circle,” as they liked to be called, were six incredibly old mages who all lived in the same tower. They looked and acted today exactly the same as they had looked and acted when Kordas had first been old enough to notice them, and Hakkon had confirmed that they had looked and acted that way when he had first arrived. For all Kordas could tell, they’d been here since his grandfather’s day. When they were not asleep, they gathered in a comfortable room at the base of their tower, sitting on the floor on enormous cushions stuffed with buckwheat hulls or crushed nut shells that had molded over time to exactly fit the shapes of their skinny behinds and backs, positioned just out of slapping range of each other. Pages brought them their meals and wine. Mostly wine—although Kordas had done some discreet monitoring, and had discovered that they didn’t drink nearly as much as people assumed, or that they would like people to assume. They all went by single names—if they had last names, no one here at the manor still knew what they were. Ponu, Dole, Wis, Koto, Ceri, and Sai.
They never seemed to actually do anything. They certainly didn’t seem to use their magical workrooms in the tower. Mostly they sat in their circle and gossiped about—well, everything. As a child, Kordas had sometimes snuck into their room to listen quietly, and somehow they seemed to know literally everything that was going on, not only in the Duchy, not only in the neighboring holdings, but even in the Emperor’s own Court.
Most people dismissed them as senile and crazy. “Why do you keep them around, Father?” Kordas had once asked. Kordas’s father had actually gotten down to Kordas’s level so he could look his son straight in the eyes.
“First, they have nowhere else to go that is safe for them,” he’d said, carefully. “The Emperor would use up their last years in a heartbeat if he got hold of them. But second—just because you don’t see them working, doing magic like Jonaton and the others do, it doesn’t mean they are doing nothing. If you ask the right question, if they know something they think you need to know, or if there is danger to the Duchy and us, listen to them, and they’ll tell you things worth knowing. It’s when they stare directly at you and point fingers that you had better listen carefully. They’re each wise, but put together, they’re more wise than just six people.”
He hadn’t needed to consult them very often, but when he did . . . in between the insults and the in-jokes he didn’t understand, he discovered that his father had been right.
“By the way, how much do you know about Jonaton’s larcenous side?” he asked as they went down the stairs.
Hakkon coughed uncomfortably. “Uh, well . . . yes. That Snatch-Portal he talks about ‘hypothetically’ making? He already does it, when there’s something he needs. He just opens it to the marketplace, looks around to see if what he wants is there, and helps himself. Oh, it’s never anything big or expensive!” he hastened to add. “And I have finally gotten him to leave payment for what he takes! But . . . aye.” Hakkon sighed heavily. “‘Light-fingered’ is putting it mildly.”
“Hrm. My parents told me they rescued him from a mob that was chasing him because he was wearing women’s clothing. How much of that chasing was because of what he was wearing, and how much of it was because he’d helped himself to something that wasn’t his?” Kordas wondered out loud. “Stolen dress, you reckon?”
Hakkon snickered.
“We’ll probably never know. He says that when he needs something immediately, he doesn’t see anything wrong with taking something that someone isn’t at that moment using.” Kordas looked over his shoulder at his cousin, to see if Hakkon was serious. It appeared that he was.
“Well . . . that’s an original way of looking at things.”
Hakkon shrugged. “Mages. They’re all at least a little bizarre.”
“I—am a mage, you know,” Kordas objected.
Hakkon grinned, a grin that said more clearly than words, Yes, I do know.
By that time they were on the ground floor and nearly at the Circle’s tower. “The way I see it, it doesn’t matter too much if someone is ‘eccentric’ or ‘bug-jumpy moon-touched,’” Kordas stated firmly. “It matters if they’re functional. People can be any kind of weird as long as they aren’t harming anyone. Hells, that makes them victorious—that’s their truth, they get to live it.”
“Glad you’re the Duke,” Hakkon answered. “I’d never have assembled a house like yours. I’d have frustrated the lot of ’em, and not seen their value like you do.”
Kordas quipped, “We mages all have our spins off the beam, Hakkon,” and took a few moments to lean with his back to the hardwood inlay of the paneling. “I couldn’t really feel happy until I accepted what I’m made of, so now I play to it. My truth is that I’m opportunistic, I’m a little deceptive, and I love picking out the value hidden in what others ignore. I can’t seem to turn it off.” Kordas paused a moment, and said more softly, “You made me feel safe enough to figure that out.”
Hakkon just replied with a silent nod.
“Not every future mage gets to be raised as a good person. I got lucky,” the Duke concluded. He reached for the loose latch of the sub-door, and rattled it to announce visitors were coming. “Brace yourself. For pipe smoke and wine fumes, if nothing else,” Kordas said, as much to himself as to Hakkon. “Here we go.”