Chương 149: Chapter 170: Campfire Story

"For those with the visions and the wisdom, time is a substance of circles and stillness. What was long ago and what was last week? The gods tangle and unravel time. So let's just say it was long ago. Let's just say that this was ancient history. Nearly lost in annals and cobwebs of antiquity, certainly. Not these enlightened times.

"Long ago in the old country, a royal family was in trouble. The princess was dead and the land cried out for vengeance against the murderer, but there was none to be had. Though the king and queen reached out to knights and spies and thieves and lords, and even consulted the dread White Witch of Winterwane, none could ever find who had drowned the princess.

"The family mourned the dead girl privately, the tears of crowned heads are not for the viewing of abbots or archdukes or advisers, they gathered around the glass coffin that had been made to house the innocent girl. Frozen waters had claimed her, not a scratch upon her supple skin.

"Wailing, the queen cried that they merely needed to wake the child, she was merely asleep. Look at her peaceful brow, her untroubled eyes! Nobody lost to death and the deeps could look so serene, so untouched by fear! My husband, cried she, we must open this casket and shake her, wake her, rouse her from this slumber! I swear to you that I can see her breathing, shallow and slow but surely! I know the girl yet lives, let me go to her, let a mother's love rouse this peaceful child from too-deep sleep!

"But the king fought his own broken heart and his own poisonous hopes, and he held his wife at bay, his strong arms holding her that she would not break the glass and mar the dead girl's chilled flesh. He too wished to see this gentle daughter brought back to the world. There are never princesses to spare.

"But he bade the queen to hush and to peace, that her raised voice and pleading hands would not be the way to rouse this princess daughter, and he sent the queen away so that she would not see what he planned to do next. He put the queen to her tower with draughts to sleep, and sent away his guards and his chamberlain. Maids and valets were banished from the royal chambers for one night, and an eastern gate was ordered to be unguarded.

"The loss of the princess was the kingdom's second shame, you see. The king had traveled for years to beat the bounds, and had long ere found a drafty hut in the shabbiest swamp that ever a yeoman refused to claim. In that hut was a poorly person with scarred hands and a tattered homestead and a strong iron footlocker that had a stronger steel lock. The tattered hut had no bed within, but a mattress spread atop the locker so that none could open it in the night without waking the sleeping owner.

In that locker was forbidden books, and at point of sword the king had demanded their secrets. The poorly serf revealed that the secrets of necromancy lay within. The hands, you see, were not scarred and frost-bitten, but preserved. The peasant's hands had been destroyed in an accident years before, and these grasping grips were grafted from the dead, and brought to serve as living hands would.

"The king was revulsed but saw the potential, that the dead could be made to serve the living. And so rather than slay the necromancer as the law demanded, the king had long ere made a bargain, to allow the necromancer to practice dread arts in the bogs and meadows, and would come to the king's call in time of need.

"This arrangement was not secret enough, for the White Witch could see all things that the snow fell upon, and could hear every word carried on a chilled breeze. She had scratched at windows throughout the land, whispering the confidences of king and criminal.

'The lord of the land is in league with a lich,' she would tell one and all.

'The crowned king has compact with the most curséd of conjurers!'

"And though her words reached all who could hear the wind at night, the magistrates were deaf. Proof is not whispers, they said. Our courts are not the voice at the casement and the pane. We will not move to abdicate nor usurp on the slander of a sorceress!

"The first shame of the land was the king's collaboration with corpse-bothering conjury, and the second shame was the laxness that let a princess die a death made all the tragic by its meaninglessness and mundanity. But the kingdom was reaching a cusp of a third shame, as the eastern gate was unguarded and a tall, proud figure approached, carrying an iron lockbox in scarred, gnarled hands.

"When first the ruler and the necromancer had met, the hedge-mage had been a lowly thing, craven and bent and impoverished. But years of practice had straightened the spine, replaced the robes, and hardened the heart. A necromancer who first fled to the swamps because living as a hermit was better than living as a burden, was now a striking figure of power and wickedness. Summoning black poisons from death itself to experiment upon, the necromancer had learned terrible secrets and held them close.

So it was a proud and dangerous figure who now mounted the stairs to the royal apartments, and opened the door without knocking, and walked to the glass casket.

"The king explained his need, and the necromancer nodded. The girl was well preserved, unwounded but stone dead. With a dead man's hand the casket was opened with a lady's hatpin the body was prodded- the needle sunk in to the knuckle and it came out stained with dried blood.

"Good as new, the necromancer promised. Your daughter will be found wandering the moors, and she will be as good as new. She will remember her family and love them, she will be sweet and kind and beloved by the people. Your grieving queen will never know different, your brave son the prince will be glad to see her smiling. Do not worry about these past years, my king. They will be worth it you will see. No more do my creations leak poison where they walk, no more do they hollow out the soul and create murderers.

Your daughter will be her own person with her own will, not a mere dancing puppet for my dread power. Not like the others, my liege. Not like my failures, good king.

"The king was grateful. Only he and the queen would know that she had been found before, the people would be pleased to see their lovely innocent princess returned. They had worried and fretted. They had mourned. The queen would believe her daughter had slept, and had walked in her sleep to the moors. The prince would believe that his sister had fallen ill but was returned. A conspiracy of two, a secret held in a handshake.

"The princess's casket was loaded into the iron box, set alongside the books of secrets. The steel lock was affixed and the necromancer carried the iron box like a pack mule, down the stairs and across the unguarded gate. The princess was brought to a tower that had been filled to the brim with grim mishaps. Every secret pried from death's grasp came at a cost of trial and error, and those errors were gruesome twisted bodies that perverted the line between the mourner and the mourned, between peace and finality.

Seething and snarling monsters had filled each level of the tower, and when a chamber was filled with fiends, the room was sealed and the necromancer moved up one more level. And now only the topmost was bare, a tower stuffed full of monstrosity with only the cap of it still pretending at control. The stones were filled with snarls and shrieks, as the iron box was opened and the casket was laid upon the operating table.

"The White Witch had despaired of these plots and had thought her whispers came to naught, when a Grand High Master of the Triangle of Justice came to her domain. He called out and she replied. He told her that the people of the kingdom have fear of necromancy, that dark magic is afoot. The whispers are yours, the accusations are yours. Either deliver the evidence or stand charged of slander.

"The magister rode in his chariot and he followed the Witch, who rode upon shining wheels of pure white. Across the land they traveled and found the necromancer's tower in midday, far from civilization. While the necromancer worked wicked wonders above, the magister pried open the tower's front door and brought fire and vengeance upon the distorted creatures within. A hundred shapes with a single terrible will, and one foul charnel odor that infected the air within.

The magister worked against the clock to destroy those cursed remnants that guarded the stairs, to reach the top floor before the terrible work was finished. And floor by floor, he followed fire towards justice.

"At the top... they found all. The White Witch blasted the necromancer apart with all the power of a day-long blizzard storm compressed into a single moment. The magister found proof and tragedy, and sadly the two of them did what the king and queen should have done, before yearning and grief had maddened them.

"The magistrates and the courts stood idle still, but the news was carried to the land: necromancy has been vanquished, evil is purged, and the vile poisons through the kingdom have been cleansed. The king and queen knew what this meant, and fell to wailing. The queen would never hold her daughter again, and now they finally began to mourn properly.

"Maybe this happened long ago. Time is a mist to the eyes of a mage, and what a mage may know, maybe a mage cannot tell. Maybe truths are couched in supposition, and maybe speaking too directly is the perquisite of station. Years ago could be lost to time, or just as close as yesterday. And sometimes tragedy is the softest part of a story." If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation. I did feel bad.

It was grossly unfair of me to use Lachel's memory for this. I was implying to all these people that the reason that her funeral was being held this week was because her father had been planning to use the Cachexia to raise her from the dead. It is unfair, manipulative cynical, and just plan tacky. She was a nice girl. I did like her. I don't want to cast her as the dead princess who drives a king mad enough to resort to the blackest crimes. But if I don't, her family will use her death to ruin me.

Not just by shutting down a party I'm throwing. Not just by snubbing my events. Everyone knows that she and I had feuded. We were quite public about it. When she disappeared I was basically everyone's number-one suspect. And for good reason, I did do it. But I did beat the charges, based on little but the fact that I gave a terrific declaration of my innocence to several top-notch character witnesses, and that there was no evidence of my involvement at all.

And, that I openly offered to help them find the girl, but my price was that the royal family admit its complicity in the Blight. So I am officially off the hook, but off the record everyone is still convinced that it was me. After all, I am a known murderer. I am recognized for killing people in the name of vendetta. And to most people, there is only a very fine line between a feud and a vendetta. Would I kill because I had been attacked? Yes, as proven.

And to them, that means that I would kill if I feel I have been provoked. But that's easier than trying to tell them the truth. That she loves my brother. That she would push her father to move troops to protect my family. That changing the tide of a war will kill so many people. That by the end of this, we will barely have enough people to hold the borders, that losing that many people will tip the balance and doom us all. There are things I can't stop.

The world is huge and its momentum is more than I can stop, slow, or sidetrack. But there are things I can change. Pressure points I can leverage. One of the things that hurts me is that I know there absolutely is a reasonable chance that I could have talked Lachel out of it. It's easy for me to picture the conversation in my head.

"By the way, your Highness, don't ask your daddy to move the third division eastward to protect Meadwhite Castle." She's not stupid. She's not unreachable or unreasonable. But she's also capable of changing her mind. She's capable of being charmed by my brother. Or mentioning off-handed to her father that she had considered it, and he might move the third division eastward just to surprise her. Or she could just lie to me about whether she would even listen to me.

I could try to trust that if I spoke to her, she would listen. But that plan could fail in a dozen ways. And I would never know until it was too late. Until the die was cast and the people were dead. It grinds me that I did this, because I know it was unfair. But when you put your hand on the trolley lever, you choose to kill someone innocent. And the only defense is ' it needed to be done'. Knowing that it needed to be done is what keeps me level. She died and it was my fault but it needed to be done.

But dredging her memory to hurt her father feels different.