RICHON’S HEAD ACHED with the weight of his weaknesses. He desperately wanted oblivion, and he wanted to be alone. He was not proud of himself for it, but drink had always given him both of those things in quantity.
At the next town that looked as if it were large enough to have an alehouse, he put down the sack of swords and told Chala he planned to go in. He half expected her to chide him. He had been so insistent they needed to hurry toward the army.
But she simply nodded and said that she would wait and look after the swords. She also made a face that reminded him of the time when, as bear and hound, they had come across some rotting grapes. His nose had been pricked by the reminder of the scent of wine, and he had licked at the grapes. She had turned her nose up, saying she knew where better food was to be found.
All he wanted was to not think about his own lack of magic for an hour or two. He went inside the alehouse.
The two men inside stared at him. One wore a patch over one eye and had a beard that looked as though it might be crawling with lice. The other was so drunk that he could hardly hold his head straight.
“Good morning,” Richon said after a long hesitation.
“More like good afternoon,” said the patch-eyed man.
Richon nodded agreeably and turned away, thinking that would be the end of it.
But he had miscalculated.
“What’s a man like you doing here?” The patch-eyed man waved at Richon’s finely made clothes, improved by his recent bath. “Spying for the king?” He laughed.
Richon felt his heart skip a beat, then pasted a sickly smile on his own face. Surely this man had never seen the king before. It was only a joke.
The drunken man mumbled a few words, then said more clearly, “Always pretending he had no magic, though we all know it’s not true.”
The owner of the alehouse noticed Richon and came over to him. “What will it be, then?” he asked.
“Ale,” said Richon, remembering how he had always had that when he was already well and truly drunk.
He turned back to the patch-eyed man. “You think the king has magic?” His throat was so tight he could hardly get the words out.
The patch-eyed man shrugged. “We all of us have magic, every one. It is only a matter of how much or how little.”
“Surely there are exceptions,” said Richon, drawn into the conversation despite himself.
The patch-eyed man shook his head. “If they live and breathe, they have magic, big or small. Those who think otherwise haven’t looked deep enough.”
Richon was annoyed. Was this man saying that anyone who had no magic just had not tried hard enough to find it? He was a man who had lived two hundred years and more. He knew what he had—and what he did not.
“Some say it’s those who have the strongest magic who hold it back the most,” said the patch-eyed man.
“They’re afraid of it, see,” the drunken man broke in, his words slow but clear. “Afraid of how much bigger it is than they are. And how it will change them.”
Well, that might be true of others, but it wasn’t true for Richon. He felt sure of that.
“Knew a woman like that once,” the drunken man said.
The patch-eyed man said, “He’s known plenty of women, but not recently, eh?” He smiled and made a rude gesture.
But Richon was impatient. “What happened to her? The woman you knew?”
“She died,” said the drunken man. “But she had at last found her magic. Took her sixty-eight years of life, but when she found it, oh, how strong it was!”
“Why did she die, then?” asked Richon.
“When she realized her magic, she saw how all her life she had done nothing for the animals around her. As a recompense, she joined with the wild man.”
“She was the hawk who did as the wild man bid, against the king,” said the drunken man. “She died of an arrow wound in the final battle. Killed by her own people, trying to save them from the king who hated magic.”
The hawk, thought Richon. He had a flash of memory of that hawk. The dark eyes, the flapping wings, the intense glare.
But he had not noticed the hawk dead of an arrow wound on the battlefield.
The truth was, he had not noticed any of the animals who had died. They had been no more than animals to him then.
Richon took another sip of his sharply flavored drink, very different from the ale from the palace. But he realized he was no longer here for oblivion. He was here to learn of magic, and found himself hoping as he had always refused to hope before.
“Tell me how you use your magic,” he said to the patch-eyed man.
He shrugged. “To call to the birds to get away from my field so as to have more food to harvest come fall. To walk through the forest and call out to the wolves to leave me be. To give the mice one loaf of bread to eat through a month’s time instead of watching them take bites of each loaf as it’s fresh from the oven.”
He turned to Richon, suspicious once more. “You don’t use your magic for such as that?”
Richon shook his head.
The patch-eyed man stood up. “You think you’re better than we are and won’t use your magic on ordinary things?”
“No, no,” Richon said.
But the patch-eyed man put up his fists and threw one at Richon’s face.
Richon flew several feet across the room and fell, crumpling a chair behind him.
He groaned.
The alehouse owner ran toward him, clucking his tongue. “Sir, let me help you up. Shall I find you a room? Do you need a physician?”
Richon was bleeding from a cut on the face.
He was stunned.
He did not know whether to think of it as a prize or an insult that at last he had been treated as a man rather than a king.
The patch-eyed man stood, finished the rest of his drink, and wiped his mouth with his sleeve. “Let’s leave this wretched place,” he said to the drunken man.
“Yes, go, go,” said the alehouse owner, bending over Richon once more.
Richon struggled to his feet. He wanted to call the other two men back. There was so much more they could tell him.
But then the drunken man took a step toward Richon.
“The great magics come latest,” he said. “And are most hidden. But they will out.” He nodded to Richon, then stumbled out.
Suddenly Richon found himself thinking of the royal steward, who had seemed to have no ear for music. He hated the sound of it, and was always complaining about the noise. He had not the power to ban it, but he often chose to absent himself from occasions where music would be playing unavoidably—dances, plays, tales sung by bards.
Yet Richon remembered a woman who had once played the harp at the palace. She had called to the royal steward and played a special song for him. It had not sounded particularly beautiful to Richon, but the royal steward was moved beyond words. It brought tears to his eyes and made him tremble so that he could not even sit on a chair.
“What happened?” Richon had asked, staring at the woman and at his steward.
“He has a sensitive ear for music,” said the woman.
“He hates music,” Richon insisted.
“No,” said the woman. “I have seen his like before. He only hates music that is not perfect. Absolutely perfect. And even of those who play music well, so few can play it perfectly. He has simply never had a chance to hear perfect music before. But now he has.”
Richon watched as the royal steward struggled to regain control of himself. Eventually he had made his way to his own chambers, though Richon had heard nothing from him for the rest of the night and much of the following day.
The woman with her harp had gone the next morning.
At last, when the royal steward had emerged, Richon asked if he should have kept the woman there, to offer more of her unique sounds.
But the royal steward had shaken his head, speaking as if to himself—for he had never been so open with Richon before. “Never again. It unmanned me very nearly,” he said quietly. He motioned to the place where the woman had sat, playing the harp. “She seemed to think it a gift in me that I could feel it so deeply and so rarely. But to me it seems more of a curse.”
Richon had thought he understood then. The royal steward had gone on as he always had, avoiding music whenever he could.
As for the woman with the harp, she had come to the palace some months later and offered to play again.
Richon went privately to the royal steward, but his answer then was the same as it had been the day the woman had left.
“I am not myself with that music playing,” said the royal steward, his teeth tightly clenched.
Richon had sent the woman on her way and given her a fine purse in return for her offer to play. But he also asked her never to come to the palace again.
“Ah, he is afraid of it,” the woman had said, nodding sadly. “I can see that. Those who are used to denying it can sometimes never learn to appreciate it fully. Well, I pity him.”
Richon had never understood why she might do so, until now.