Magician Read online

  Magician

  By K.L. Noone

  Published by JMS Books LLC

  Visit jms-books.com for more information.

  Copyright 2021 K.L. Noone

  ISBN 9781646568314

  Cover Design: Written Ink Designs | written-ink.com

  Image(s) used under a Standard Royalty-Free License.

  All rights reserved.

  WARNING: This book is not transferable. It is for your own personal use. If it is sold, shared, or given away, it is an infringement of the copyright of this work and violators will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

  No portion of this book may be transmitted or reproduced in any form, or by any means, without permission in writing from the publisher, with the exception of brief excerpts used for the purposes of review.

  This book is for ADULT AUDIENCES ONLY. It may contain sexually explicit scenes and graphic language which might be considered offensive by some readers. Please store your files where they cannot be accessed by minors.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are solely the product of the author’s imagination and/or are used fictitiously, though reference may be made to actual historical events or existing locations. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Published in the United States of America.

  * * * *

  For my Internet Family, for always being there for me. And for Raelene, who bought the first version of Sorceress, years ago, and gave this universe and me a chance.

  * * * *

  Magician

  By K.L. Noone

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  The Tenth Garden: A Bonus Story

  Chapter 1

  The world’s greatest living magician, lying on his back on a rocky ledge halfway up a cliff and bathed in sunshine, felt the boat’s arrival on the island shore below like an uninvited knock at a private door. He did not enjoy it.

  He didn’t move for a moment. He did not feel like it, and there’d be no rush. Nobody’d get past his wards.

  He kept both eyes closed. Sun streaked red behind his eyelids; gold warmed his skin, his hair. His body soaked in the sensations of strong heated stone, sank into stone, became stone: learning how the rock felt when bathed in lush late-morning light. His edges blurred, softened: time slowed, thrummed, grew earthen and deep, salt-lapped and wind-etched. He might’ve been here for centuries, unhurried. Equilibrium and erosion, solidity and reshaping: a balance.

  He had needed balance. Something he’d thought he’d known, once. Something he no longer understood.

  He’d thought the island might help. Being rock for a while, or the wind, or the seaspray: being suspended amid them all. Being alone, because he was not sure he recalled how to be human, not well enough.

  The island was warm—Lorre had always shamelessly adored being warm—and far enough from the mainland that he’d been mostly undisturbed, and close enough to trade routes that he could occasionally walk on water out to a boat and barter some repairs or some healing for some news of the Middle Lands and King Henry’s court at Averene and the Grand Sorceress Liliana. Lorre had promised not to magically check in on Lily or their daughter; he was attempting to keep that promise.

  Equilibrium. Difficult. Sunlight was easier. Sunbeams were weightless. Stones did not have to think about human promises. Human perceptions.

  The knock came again. It was not physical, or not entirely. It was a presence, an unexpected intruder standing below, shuffling feet in the sand and no doubt wondering where precisely a magician could be found, being faced with a towering blank cliff and no visible habitation.

  Lorre sighed, pulled himself back from frayed edges and heavy sleepy light, and sat up, tugging on a robe on in an unfussy tumble of blue and gold, mostly just because he liked the caress of silky fabric on bare skin. His senses shifted, dwindled: more human, though not entirely. He’d been a magician too long to not feel the threads of brilliance—cliff, vines, fish, grains of sand, sea-glass polished by waves—all around.

  He peeked over the side of the ledge. Behind him the cave yawned lazily, reminding him of sanctuary: he could simply walk back inside, the way he had for several years now, and ignore the new arrival. That generally worked.

  He was rather surprised someone’d found him at all. He wasn’t exactly hiding—oh yes you are, said a tart little voice in his head, one that sounded like Lily’s—but the island, after a bit of work on his part, nearly always concealed itself from maps and navigation charts. At the beginning a few enterprising adventurers had managed to track it down, young heroes on quests or proving their worth by daring an enchanter’s lair or begging for Lorre’s assistance in some revenge or inheritance or magical artifact retrieval scheme.

  He’d ignored all but two of them. The illusion-wall kept everyone out, simple and baffling; the island had fresh water but little in the way of food. Mostly the adventurers’d given up and gone home, years ago; he couldn’t in fact recall the face of the last one. Two had become nuisances, loud and shouting; one of those had actually threatened to drink poison, melodramatically demanding Lorre’s assistance in collecting a promised bride from a glass mountain, claiming he’d die without her.

  The young man currently standing on the beach was neither loud nor melodramatic. In fact, he was calmly considering the sheer cliff-face, which revealed nothing; he stepped back across the small curve of beach, shaded his eyes, seemed to be measuring. After a second he put a hand up, obviously checking the edge of the cliff: having noticed the very slight discrepancy where sea-birds dropped behind the illusion-wall a fraction sooner than they should vanish in reality.

  Intelligent, this one. Lorre dangled himself over the ledge at an angle which would’ve been dangerous for anyone else, and watched.

  The young man had dark reddish-brown hair, the color of autumn; he wore it tied back, though a few wisps were escaping. He’d dressed for travel, not in shiny armor the way some knights and princes had: sturdy boots and comfortable trousers, a shirt in nicely woven but also practical fabric, a well-worn pack which he’d swung down to the sand. He wasn’t particularly tall, but not short: average, with nicely shaped shoulders and an air of straightforward competence, not trying for impressive or intimidating.

  Lorre, despite annoyance at the interruption, couldn’t help but approve. At least this one had some sense, and didn’t walk around clanking in metal under the shimmering sun.

  The young man called up, “Hello?” His voice was quite nice as well, not demanding, lightly accented with the burr of the Mountain Marches but in the way of someone who’d been carefully sent to the best schools down South. “Grand Sorcerer?”

  Lorre mentally snorted. He didn’t have a proper title, not any longer; if anyone did, it’d be Lily. His former lover, now wife of the brother of the King of Averene, was by default the last Grand Sorceress of the Middle Lands; she’d started up the old magician’s school again, welcoming and training apprentices. Lily always had been better with people. Lorre was not precisely welcome in Averene.

  The young man said mildly, “I expect this is a test; I thought you would do that, you know,” as if he thought that Lorre might answer, as if they were having a conversation; and looked around. “I’m meant to find you, is that it?”

  That was the opposite
of it. Lorre on a good day barely recalled how to be human, and certainly wasn’t fit to interact with them. He’d lost his temper with the melodramatic poison-carrying prince, strolled invisibly onto the shore, asked the poison to turn itself into a sleeping draught, and then poured it into the idiot’s water flask. Then he’d found a passing ship and dumped the snoring body onto its deck. He hadn’t known the destination, and hadn’t bothered to find out.

  His current young man was looking at driftwood. Lorre wondered why. He was getting a bit dizzy from leaning nearly upside down; he considered the sensation with some surprise. A swoop of gold swung into his eyes, distracting and momentarily baffling; he pushed the strands of his hair back with magic.

  The young man found a stick, one that evidently met his standards for length and strength. He kept it in front of himself; he walked deliberately toward the cliff, and the illusion.

  Oh. Clever. Avoiding traps. Testing a theory. Lorre found himself impressed, particularly when the young man watched the tip of the driftwood vanish and nodded to himself and then set rocks down to neatly mark the spot.

  The island was not large, and the beach even smaller: a jut of cliff, a tangle of vines, a small lagoon and a trickle of water down to the shore. The illusion hid the cave-opening, but there wasn’t really anywhere else for someone to be; the young man figured that out within an hour or so of methodical exploration, and returned to the shore, and looked thoughtfully at the cliffs. He’d rolled up his sleeves and undone the ties of his shirt, given the heat; he had a vine-leaf in his hair, along with a hint of sweat.

  Lorre, in some ways still very much human, couldn’t not stare. Something about those forearms under rolled-up sleeves. That hint of well-muscled chest. The casual ripple of motion, broad shoulders, heroic thighs.

  “I suppose,” the young man said, very wry, still looking at the cliff as if perfectly aware Lorre was watching, “I should introduce myself. I think I forgot to, earlier.”

  I suppose you should, Lorre agreed silently. Since you’re here. Disrupting my life.

  He ignored the fact that he’d had no real plans. Meditation. Quiet. A hope for calm.

  A hint of dragon-fire slid through his veins, under his skin. A memory. Restless. Beckoning. Dangerous.

  “My name is Gareth,” the young man said, “Prince of the Mountain Marches, if the title matters to you. King Ardan is my older brother. And we need your help. Desperately.”

  Lorre found himself obscurely disappointed by this ordinariness. A request for aid, a desire for quick magical solutions. So small. So earth-bound. Just like all the rest.

  He flipped himself back up onto the ledge, getting up. He had spiced wine in the pantry, and a book on the theory of sea-witches, magic-users hidden in the ocean, which no one had ever verified, but which might be possible, down in the deeps.

  “The mountain bandits have a mage,” the young man—Gareth—told the air. “This year. They’ve always come—but it’s worse, it’s so much worse—and the villages need us, and we’ve never had a standing army, we’re a small kingdom and we mostly have a lot of goats—and they have magic now, and then my uncle betrayed us, and—” He stopped, voice exhausted, defeated. “You’re here. You must be here. Are you listening?”

  No, Lorre nearly said. I’ve been an ancient oak, a speaking raven, the bones of the earth. I’ve nearly killed a king and then saved him again, mostly because my former lover asked and I felt generous. I’ve turned myself into a dragon to see whether I could, and I could, though I got lost in the doing of it. I’ve watched rulers come and go, and magic’s still been here, and I’ve still been here. Why should I care about you and your goats?

  But he thought suddenly of sunlight on his skin. Of the way he liked sensation, the whisper of silk on his legs or the taste of strawberries.

  He thought of Lily’s voice, and his daughter’s face. He’d been younger then, and so had Lily; they’d thought they were, if not in love, at least made for each other, the strongest two magicians in the world. They’d made Merlyn—Merry, Lily called her now—and Lorre had complicated feelings about that, too.

  He wasn’t sure he’d ever been meant to be a father. He had not thought about the reality of a baby, and he had not known what would be expected of him; he had not, in all his long life, spent much time with uninteresting small babbling humans.

  He had been disappointed, back then, when Merry had not shown any magical ability at all; he’d only cared about the power, or at least the person he’d been then had only cared about power.

  But he’d thought he’d been fighting for them all: magic, magicians, their welcome at Court, in the face of growing Church opposition. He’d burned with it: righteous anger, a cause, his own temper.

  Which had, he reflected ruefully, ended in banishment. Not that he’d cared; he’d simply lost himself in the magic, in testing himself, in explorations. More and further and deeper. Seeing what he could do, what he could become, simply because he could.

  Lily—and Merry—had saved him, then. Reminders of this self, this person: someone who liked summer and sweetness and satin, who might be a terrible parent but would never, never even in dragon’s form, harm his daughter. He’d found a way back.

  And he’d left again, because he was not entirely human, and he was reckless, and he was single-minded and self-indulgent, and he knew all that. He could not be someone else, someone like the ridiculously beautiful king’s brother Lily had fallen in love with, fiercely loyal and burningly devoted to family and country. He could only be himself, and so that self was probably best far away from anyone he might harm. He’d been trying to achieve enough distance.

  He thought, the pinprick of it sleeting in like autumn rain: I like goat’s milk cheese. And honey. And pleasure. Little things that this body enjoys. Perhaps Prince Gareth enjoys his goats. And doesn’t want them stolen.

  He peeked down again. The prince had sat down, disconsolate, on a large rock. His shoulders slumped.

  Lorre considered options. He did not help people, famously so. If he did so once, others would expect it. If he reappeared, he’d disturb the world: a power reemerging. If he took sides in a ridiculous tiny Northern border conflict—

  He was actually considering it. He’d spent too long with rocks for company.

  Gareth got up. Lorre blinked, startled, and paid attention.

  The prince spent some time gathering stones. Setting them out. Making a message on the sand: PLEASE HELP US.

  That was also fairly clever. A constant reminder, not as obnoxious as hurling stones at the barrier, but visible.

  The day had become afternoon, all gold and green and blue and white, sun and sea and sky and sand. Lorre, sitting on his rock balcony, one leg swinging, listened to the leap of distant dolphins and felt the purr of the world under his hand, resting on stone. The waves coiled and crashed, steady as tides.

  Gareth was making a shelter out of branches and fronds, building a small firepit, evidently having decided to settle in. Lorre had had heroes attempt to outwait him before; it never worked.

  Gareth, once satisfied with the shelter, added a new rock-message. This one said: I CAN WAIT.

  He meant it, too: he pulled out a book, and sat back down on the big sun-warmed rock. After a few minutes he took off his boots, and wiggled toes in hot sand.

  Lorre caught himself wanting to laugh. He’d done the exact same thing upon first finding this island: boots off, bare skin, luxuriating in the feel.

  And the prince had even brought a book. So well prepared. And so literary. Lorre could count on about three fingers the number of mighty-thewed questing heroes who’d done that.

  He rather wanted to know what book it was.

  Gareth said, after a few moments, “I see why you like it here, you know.” Once again he sounded utterly at ease with addressing the air, as if they were having a conversation. “I do too. It’s warm, and peaceful, and there’s not a world out there, waiting…you can be alone. And I expect magicians nee
d to be alone. I feel like I would. I imagine it’s like being a prince, everybody asking you for help, for solutions…”

  Well. Yes. And no. Lorre stopped swinging his leg and leaned in again, halfway up a cliff.

  “Or it’s not like that at all. I wouldn’t know. Not being magical. But the problem is…I am part of the world. I can’t not be. And so are you. You must be.” Gareth glanced around. “It is lovely here. And you haven’t thrown me out yet, like you did with the Prince of Thistlemare, so you are listening.”

  “I am not,” Lorre said, half irritated and half fascinated; and then he realized that of course emotions became deed for him half the time, and the prince had definitely heard his voice.

  “I thought so,” Gareth announced, somehow managing to be smug without being too obnoxious about it. “Of course you care. You’re only seeing if I’m determined enough to be worth helping, right?”

  Lorre, properly horrified, snapped, “Not at all. I’m waiting for you to give up and go away. What book are you reading?”

  “This?” The prince held it up, turned it about. The gilt letters on the scarlet binding flashed in sun. “Come out and I’ll tell you. Do magicians like being bribed with books?”

  “I’m not a kitten and you’re not dangling a fish.” And this was now easily the strangest conversation he’d had in literal years, not counting attempts to wrap his head around being a rock. “I could simply take it.”

  “But you won’t.”

  “What makes you think I won’t?”

  “You haven’t yet.”

  “I’ve decided I ought to dislike you.”

  “I’m very sorry about that,” the prince said, and he even sounded genuinely apologetic. “Will that matter? If I’m asking for your help?”

  Lorre slid down from the ledge. The fall would’ve hurt if he’d been someone else, including his younger self once upon a time. This afternoon he merely stepped down through air, let himself become air fleetingly, let the impact dissolve and fade. He left his illusion-barrier up, and kept himself unseen, walking over.