Page 20 of Seducing the Sorcerer
“No preference at all?”
“Ain’t my place to have a preference, is it? The old king named her.” Fenn shrugged, as if to say, and that’s the end of the matter.
But the sorcerer wouldn’t leave it alone. “And what do you think of her?”
“Never met the lady.”
“You don’t think Lord Tullivo would make a better ruler? He’s thirty, a soldier, an experienced man. She’s a girl of twenty.”
“Ain’t my place to say.”
“But you are not against her taking the throne?”
Suddenly Fenn thought he understood the sorcerer’s line of questioning.
“If you reckon I came here to cock up the coronation in some way, you’re barmy. I never met the lady and it ain’t none of my business who takes the throne.” That had hardly been tactful. Shouldn’t have called the court sorcerer “barmy”. And yet Morgrim’s polite but intent expression hadn’t changed. Oh well, in for a copper. Fenn added, “But I think she’s done all right with her water carts and cheap grain. Whereas that Tullivo fellow’s never done nothing as far as I can tell except spend tax money on gold plate and fancy uniforms.”
Morgrim smiled. It was a bit grim, but it looked genuine. It reached his eyes, which softened for a moment.
For the first time, Fenn considered Morgrim not as a sorcerer, but as a man—a tired middle-aged man, on edge but pretending not to be, wearing what looked like robes of state in his own front room. He was haggard, like he didn’t sleep or eat enough, or perhaps spent his nights in unmentionable debaucheries, but he was very attractive, with his lean, clever face, his high cheekbones and neat beard, his daunting frown lines currently softened by the dim light.
Maybe Aramella was twenty years his junior, but maybe she actually loved him.
In fact, the longer Fenn spent in Morgrim’s company, the likelier that seemed. It wasn’t hard to imagine women or men of all ages falling for this graceful, dangerous, courtly man.
Then the smile faded and Morgrim the sorcerer was back.
“Enough of affairs of state. Let us go back to you, Mr. Todd, falling asleep on the sacking. You say perhaps you thought of horses?”
“Aye, maybe.”
“You’re fond of them?”
Fond? How could Fenn explain that horses were everything? That he loved them so much he dared not think of them too often, for fear the lack of them might cause him to break.
“They were my life, once,” he said.
“Of course. You were a groom.”
The sorcerer’s gaze left Fenn’s face and went to the horse again. The fire crackled. Rain rattled against the windows. There was silence from behind the screen. No movement, either. There had probably never been anything there. Or maybe it had been a rat. Aye, there’s a happy thought; a rat as tall as a man and standing on its hind legs.
“A man who loves horses, thinking of horses,” the sorcerer mused. “Lying on an old sacking horse that nobody wanted.”
Fenn waited, but the sorcerer seemed to have finished.
“You think that’s it? I wanted a horse so this one came to life?” Fenn frowned. “Sounds like bollocks—I mean, that just don’t sound likely.”
Morgrim contemplated him for a few moments, then said, slowly, “I suspect you have always had a spark of magic in you, Mr. Todd. Long buried, perhaps, but burning there, deep down. You love horses. You came upon a worple horse, with its memory of ancient magic. And it was your horse. You had worked for it. Rather hard, I suspect. I think the spark in you woke the memory in the horse. And suddenly—you’re flying.”
Fenn stared at him, a peculiar feeling in his chest. The sorcerer’s words made no sense.
“What do you mean it remembers magic? Begging your pardon, but what is a worple horse anyway?”
“It’s a piece of history. They were sewn together with magic by sorcerers in the olden days.” Morgrim pointed a slender finger at the horse’s chest. “That rune is ‘Vor’ or ‘Wor’ in one of the ancient magical languages. It means ‘to pull’. ‘Wor’ and ‘pull’, I suppose, led us to ‘worple’. And pull is what they did. They were used in great houses to turn spits and so on.”
“Ah. But, why is it so...so...” Fenn broke off. He wasn’t sure why, but he didn’t like to say it in front of the horse.
“You refer, perhaps, to its eccentric appearance?”
