Page 8 of Never the Roses

Asomethingthat had changed, a subtle wrongness he couldn’t quite identify. Not yet, but he would. Casting his senses over the castle, he verified that most everyone was sleeping still. A few of the cooks had just begun to stir, unusually late for them. Bethany should be already in the kitchen, humming a tune as she punched down the dough she’d left to rise overnight for morning buns, but she had just left her bed. Nothing was as it should be for this time of the almost morning.

Including thesomething.

It smelled like magic—and not his own—but oh-so-faintly. In his younger days, he might’ve dismissed it as not important, the whiff was so barely there, but he’d learned over the years that sometimes the most elusive clues hinted of the worst dangers, especially in the fraught world of sorcerers. A light touch of magic could indicate an expert practitioner. Young sorcerers tended to paint the landscape with floods of magic, indiscriminate in both their resources and their wielding of it, drunk with the newfound power. As they aged, over the slow course of their extended lifespans, sorcerers good enough to survive their various battles—and the magical executions that were one of the few things thatcould bring an untimely end to their lives—learned to hoard their reserves and to wield power with skill. Having immense magical ability meant nothing if you exhausted it all in the midst of a battle. The precise attack, the one so honed and delicate that your enemy never saw it coming, that was what won wars. The showy stuff only sent up flags, painting a bright and shining target on the sorcerer.

So, this… this faint vibration of magic been and gone, inside his own castle, within his excellent and intact wards that evinced no sign of being tested, much less tampered with or crossed, this alarmed him greatly. So much so that he didn’t move for some time, careful to ascertain that no magical trap had been set while he slept away, blissfully oblivious to the intrusion. The possibility infuriated him beyond reason, but addressing it would have to wait. He’d castigate himself and review his errors after the immediate danger had been quantified and dispensed with.

At least, he eventually determined, the invader hadn’t been in this room. Not physically, though they’d left a faint dusting of enchantment behind. To accomplish what?

Moving slowly, just in case he was wrong, Stearanos crawled out from under the covers and stood naked in the center of his bedchamber, scratching his balls sleepily, in case this magic-worker spied on him via remote viewing. Psychic magic of that variety could theoretically slip inside his wards. He didn’t like to think so—he was by far the best wardmaker in existence—but he knew of other sorcerers who’d been taken in that way. Psychic or mentally derived phenomena didn’t operate in the same way as other magic, and it was the careless sorcerer who failed to account for that possibility.

Nothing stirred, however, the sense of thesomethingrapidly fading. Whoever they had been, whatever they had done, it was over, the trail cooling rapidly, evidence evaporating like dew asthe rays of the rising sun steamed it into nothing while he dithered. Stearanos hated dithering, in himself or in others, and that he’d become this person in his surprise at the invasion rankled. It made him feel slow and old, and—while he’d been feeling his years with a kind of grim weariness grittier than depression—he had too much time ahead of him and too many enemies to allow himself to deteriorate, even if he was on sabbatical.

He wasn’t exactly sitting in a rocking chair on the porch of the general store in the bleak steppe town he’d grown up in, jawing with the other oldsters about all the terrible ways the world had changed. There was a time he hadn’t been so cynical, so poised for disaster, but Stearanos had grown excessively cautious to the point of outright paranoia. As if part of himself couldn’t quite relax, catastrophizing every minute change in his surroundings, just in case envisioning the worst-case scenario could prevent it.

A paranoid and crazed recluse of a sorcerer. The rocking chair might’ve been better.

Yanking on his pants in short jerks of disgust at himself and at the world that had morphed him into this paranoid version of his former self, he bundled back his long braids and tied them off, then stalked barefoot and shirtless through the halls, sniffing out his prey like the timber wolves that preyed along the outskirts of that long-ago hometown. A few of the early-rising staff spotted his approach and vanished themselves, long familiar with his moods and the roiling magic that preceded him like outstretched claws and billowed in his wake, scouring the halls. He tried not to be too difficult to live with, but he was also no gentle man. That ship had long since sailed. He paid his staff well to tolerate him and willingly released those with too little resilience to withstand his moods.

No trail presented itself to his sorcerous senses, which confirmed that the intruder hadn’t traversed the corridors of hiscastle. Their magic lingered throughout, however, a sheen of it left behind on virtually every surface. They’d been everywhere and nowhere, which made him want to growl under his breath, though long discipline kept him as silent as his footfalls. With no trail to follow, he looked for the newest and greatest concentrations of the magic they’d left behind like pollen shaken from a lily, bright, leaving an indelible stain.

He ended up in his library, the intruder’s magic giving evidence of their actual, physical presence, and that they’d lingered there for some time. It gave him pause. Who went to the trouble of such a significant magic-working to evade his wards and invade his castle, only to visit the library? None of these books were objects of power. He didn’t store such dangerous artifacts on these shelves. Anyone with the ability to do what this sorcerer had done would have easily ascertained that much. They’d have known in an instant that he’d locked away all of his arcane artifacts, especially the malevolent, quasi-sentient tomes. He could get to them should he encounter a grave enough emergency, but otherwise they were safely beyond reach behind immutable wards layered into indestructibility.

Apparently, this magic-worker had come for ordinary books. And, yes, he knew that in some circles the reputation of his library eclipsed even his own as the greatest sorcerer in the world, but still… it seemed like a lot of trouble just to visit his books. Especially when a quick census revealed that none of them had been taken. His posotomancy, the ability to quantify anything, lay at the core of his sorcery and he did it reflexively. Some might say compulsively, but much had been made over the years about his obsessiveness, as if striving for perfection was somehow a flaw.

A soothing habit, his counting didn’t take much, if any, of his attention to assess the human denizens of the castle—seventy-nine,besides himself—or the plates in the cupboard—one-hundred and forty-three, which was one short because Ionos, the new washing lad, had broken one the day before and the replacement plate had not yet arrived—or the number of books in his library: ten-thousand, nine-hundred and fifty-three.

See? That sum demonstrated right there he wasn’tthatcompulsive about numbers or he’d either have collected forty-seven more books to round up to ten thousand, ninety-one hundred, or—ideally—eliminated nine hundred and fifty-three to achieve an even ten thousand. He’d strongly considered the latter, but that was a lot of books to cull and he couldn’t think ofonehe could do without, let alone nearly a thousand.

He prowled through the library, following the taste of foreign magic to its strongest point. Realization dawned as he neared the shelf that contained his current read. Surely not…

But yes, there—wherehisbook was supposed to be, where he’d personally replaced it the night before—an imposter occupied the spot. A growl of utter rage welled up in him, almost immediately silenced. He yanked the offending tome from the shelf and glared at it.Dragon Anatomy: From Tooth to Talon, a treatise that had been copied countless times and could be found in any of the hundreds of magic academies, far from unique or interesting. Nothing to compare to the exceptionally rare book on the cultivation of Veredian roses that he had been studying, with an eye to adding those finicky bushes to his garden. That was, if any could still be found in all the world, since the last known specimens were lost on the island of Govirinda when it was destroyed. Worst of all, the new addition didn’t even fit the theme of the surrounding books!

With effort, he mastered the surge of irritation at the mismatch, suspecting that his unknown visitor had done it on purpose, the person somehow divining that it would upset Stearanos’sworld in a meaningless and yet profound way. Was that the entire purpose of their visit, simply to aggravate him, to put him off-balance? Wars had been waged and won on the backs of such subtle tactics. In the arcane realm of sorcerers, confidence could make all the difference between victory and ignominious defeat. Undermining an opponent’s belief in their skills, especially in the sanctity of their home—in his case, particularly in the impenetrability of their wards—could launch a gradual erosion of their ability to muster a solid defense, much less an aggressive offense.

Still, why taunt him in such an innocuous way? If this sorcerer had been hired by an enemy, then laying such subtle groundwork seemed excessive when a conflict had yet to be declared. Because if there had been even a whiff of a conflict, King Uhtric would have summoned him immediately, ignoring the sanctity of a sabbatical. If this sally stemmed from a smaller squabble, then everyone involved would already know that he’d taken a sabbatical. He wasn’t available for hire at the moment, and this sorcerer should be off harassing some other magic-worker, not him.

Unless this was some sort of clever subterfuge on the part of one of his disappointed would-be clients. A number of them still sent messages, imploring him for a few days of his time, offering enticements should he agree to one more job. As if he wanted to spend his time and energy telling people what to do. A few cited their longstanding relationships, claiming friendship, even kinship, as if he meant something more to them than a tool in their wars of greed and pride. Maybe they thought to circumvent his determined refusals by drawing him into a personally fueled conflict.You know that sorcerer who’s been harassing you, infiltrating your home? Well, they’ve been hired by the Narphesiens. Here’s your chance to destroy them on a fair field of battle. Wouldn’t you like that?

The final possibility was that this was personal.

That seemed to be the most likely scenario. He’d made many enemies over the years and no friends to speak of. Everyone he could count on as an ally either worked for him, owed him something, or held his leash. He suspected that this was true for all the world, and the concept of friendship a mass joke perpetuated on the gullible. He didn’t care that some might call this a paranoid and cynical view.

HoldingDragon Anatomy: From Tooth to Talonin his hands, he plumbed it with his senses. Psychometry wasn’t the strongest of his talents, but it extended naturally from his native ability, and he wielded enough to immediately discern that whoever had left this book in place of his had excised their own remanence with deliberate skill. They hadn’t wanted him to know who left this substitution. But then why leave one at all? And why take his harmless book on growing roses so difficult and prickly in every sense of the word that they were almost certainly extinct? Stearanos cared about Veredian roses, but for his own reasons. No one else did. Wars were not won or lost because of rosebushes.

Forcibly calming himself, he paged through the book, searching for clues. There were none to be had. Stearanos had read the book back in his academy days, quite a long time ago, and it seemed exactly as he remembered it. In fact, he already possessed a copy. Fetching that one, he sat at his desk, laid the two copies side by side, and did a line-by-line analysis comparing the two.

They were nearly identical, with only the minor variations that came from hand-copying by the apprentices assigned the task. The two books had likely been sold to the magic academies and private tutors in the same batch. The comparison told him nothing he hadn’t known before.

At last he closed both books. Leaving them side by side, he went to his reading chair to think, seating himself and lookingout at the view, which calmed him under normal circumstances. Not this time. Unease crawled under his collar.

The intruder had stood here, he realized, and had remained stationary for quite some time. They hadn’t been so reckless—or so deliberately provocative—as to sit in his chair. He ran his hands over the bloodred leather, verifying as much. No, they hadn’t touched his chair, but they’d lingered, leaving behind a concentration of their passive magic, which tended to sift from the physical bodies of magic-workers like dandruff and stray hairs, hanging in the air like the heavy perfume from a social-climbing courtier.

Why?The mystery plagued him. He was not the sort of person who could be sanguine about unanswered questions and unsolved riddles. Which any enemy of his would know—which brought him around full circle to the conclusion that this… thistauntingwas personal. Whoever it was, they wanted to show him their power over him. None of the details mattered here, not the book they’d taken, nor the one they’d left behind. The entire point had been to get under his skin and send him into exactly this tailspin of doubt and obsessive wondering.

The question was: How to respond?

Surely this person would return. They’d left their book behind for a reason, as a message, perhaps. They’d rubbed his nose in their ability to evade his wards and frolic through his house as he slept. All of it had been too easy for them to be able to resist a second visit.

---