Guild Mage: Apprentice [Stubbing August 15th] 387. Winter

Liv brought two bouquets of blue columbines to the crypt beneath Bald Peak. One, she placed on a marker which had been weathered and stained by the passage of years - by dustings and cleanings, by the passage of work crews who’d brought other stones and other urns of ashes as the years went by.

Margaret Brodbeck, the first stone read. 1190-1284.

The urge to trace her fingers along the edge of the stone nearly overwheld her, but Liv hadn’t co down to the crypt to think about her mother today. Instead, she forced herself to rise, and then made her way over to the newest marking stone. It was fresh cut, the edges of the letters and numbers clear and sharp. There was no dust yet, no stain, and the stone was polished to nearly a mirror sheen. There had been a bit of grumbling about placing soone who was not even tangentially related to the royal family here, but Liv simply made her wishes clear and ignored any and all objections, until her advisors and functionaries had to give way.

Rosamund Lowry. 1232-1299.

Liv set the columbines down, and closed her eyes for a mont, trying to rember just how a young woman had looked, covered in salt and sea spray, under the bright sun at Coral Bay. She’d tied her linen shirt up to expose her belly, Liv recalled, but it was so difficult to conjure more than a glimpse of how they’d looked, how they’d felt, so long ago.

“You know there’s nothing you could do, don’t you?”

Rianne’s boots scuffed against the stone floor as she moved from her grandmother’s marker over to Liv’s side. Liv felt her daughter’s hand rest on her shoulder, and allowed herself to lean into the touch, for a mont. “Even Professor Arjun never found a real cure for Blackwater Fever, and she was weeks out from the nearest waystone. It nearly wiped out the entire workcrew.”

“I know that,” Liv said, reaching up to place her hand over her daughter’s. “My mind knows that. But it doesn’t stop my heart from aching.”

Rianne shifted, and it was the sound of unasked questions. “I don’t really understand why you insisted her ashes be here,” the young woman admitted, after a mont. “I know she laid the foundations for the palace, and raised the curtain walls, and I know she was one of your friends at school. But you hadn’t even seen her for what, almost fifty years?”

“She ca to Caspian Loredan’s funeral,” Liv said. “You wouldn’t rember. You were very young.”

“I think anything else that happened then was overshadowed by the line of fire that stretched across the sky,” Rianne pointed out. “And being terrified that I’d lose both my parents at once.”

“You didn’t, though,” Liv said, standing up and turning to face her daughter. Rianne let her hand fall away from Liv’s shoulder, and co to rest at the handle of the wand on her hip. The blue light of the mana stone strips set into the ceiling glead off the girl’s hair, washing out the color until it looked almost silver.

She was coltish now, this daughter who’d beco less and less of a child, when Liv sohow wasn’t looking. Her legs looked too long for her body, and her hips were still slim. Sotis, Liv wondered how the girl managed to keep her balance and avoid knocking into things. “When did you get taller than ?” Liv grumbled. It wasn’t by much yet, but it was obvious: Liv’s eyes only ca up to her daughter’s nose.

Rianne grinned. “Almost two years ago! Now are we leaving, or what?”

“We’re going,” Liv sighed. Her daughter caught her by the hand, and pulled her out of the crypt, in her eagerness, for a mont, the little girl once again.

☙

The Frost Fair that year was the largest of Liv’s reign.

For the new year, and the coming of the thirteen-hundredth year since Miriam’s rebellion against the Vædim began, she’d spent a week making certain that the entire stretch of the Aspen River between Bald Peak and Whitehill was frozen thick enough to support the market stalls, sleighs, horses, wooden stages, and most of all the crowds. Not content to leave things to chance, she’d even created pillars of adamant ice beneath the surface, to brace the weight of thousands. With not a small amount of nostalgia, Liv had made absolutely certain that wherever hot springs emptied into the river, stout, chest high walls of ice marked off the dangerous places, so that no playing children or drunken revelers could get themselves into trouble.

Though she’d been presented with predictions, and had herself insisted on bringing in more supplies than her advisors had considered necessary, the actual experience of just how many people packed the river, from bank to bank, was overwhelming. It seed that celebrants had co from every corner of the Alliance, and the waystone had shot pillars of light into the sky at every hour of the day and night until every inn, even the Sign of the Terrapin at the southern end of the valley, was full to bursting.

There, half a dozen Red Shield hunters had set up an enormous tent, staked into the ice, with a brazier at the center which sent smoke billowing up through a hole in the middle of the canvas. Rough wooden trestle tables had been draped with every kind of fur that could be found throughout Varuna, from the pelts of giant river otters, to jaguars, to peccaries and red deer, and even the thick, leathery hides of those long, river-dwelling reptiles which loved to lounge on the rocks beneath the dam where the Eld had first made camp. Those, Liv understood, made excellent boots.

Next to that tent, Dakruiman rchants sold silk, tea, and incense from the east, while across the wide central street, a Syvän group of hunters and whalers displayed beautiful white fox and hare furs, carved whalebone, jugs of oil for lanterns, and jerky made from caribou. The particularly brave who ca to that tent were given seal-blood to drink, and every ti soone took up the challenge, cheers rang out.

Interspersed with the rchants were stalls that sold food and drink. There had been so consideration given to whether it might not be better to concentrate all of that in one or two locations, but in the end Liv had decided that the stretch of river which had beco one long fair ground was simply too long. She didn’t want hungry children to have to walk or be carried a mile by their exhausted parents in order to get sothing into their bellies, and so it a local Aspen Valley farr turned sizzling steak tips on a grate over a bank of glowing coals right next to a middle aged woman doing a booming business in sheepskin coats. Her primary custors appeared to be those who’d co for the celebration of the new year, but had never actually experienced an Aspen Valley winter before.

Rei was swallowed up by the crowd almost imdiately: he’d begun his classes at the college just this autumn, and the move from the palace down to the student dormitories had been sothing of an adjustnt for all of them. No sooner had Liv, Keri, and Rianne arrived at the festival with the young man than he’d been absconded with by his classmates, and the whole mob of them had torn off toward the gas, and the tournants.

No one had ever quite managed a streak of bare-knuckle boxing wins to match the late Whit Cotter, whose entire family had been killed by Lucanian raiders - but Henriette’s son, Roe, which was short for Rowland, was already a prodigy at twenty-one to equal his grandmother, and had taken the fencing honors for the past five years. Liv had promised Ettie, Shooting Star and Ronja that she would go and watch her grand-nephew for at least a little while. Matthew and Beatrice, she knew, would have planted themselves in a cozy box, complete with braziers and fur throws, the mont the tournant began. No amount of cold would keep them from gloating over their grandson’s victories.

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

They passed one stage where half a dozen guild mages demonstrated the principles of transformative spells. One by one, Eld and human alike flickered between their solid, everyday physical bodies and clouds of mist, columns of fire, or rays of sunlight. When they were finished, Liv knew, a priest of the Trinity would preach on the Path to the Last City, and the Gift of Taimiris. She’d seen the text of the sermon, and approved it, a week before.

Rianne stayed with Liv and Keri for long enough to see them down to the entertainnts ant for children. There was a great ship, carved and painted with brilliant flas in red, orange and yellow, and suspended by thick ropes from a triangular fra, into which children tumbled themselves. Once they were arranged on the benches to the satisfaction of the burly n operating it, it was set to swinging back and forth, high enough into the air that the ship very nearly stood on end, and the children shrieked with glee. That had been Bryn Grenfell’s contribution to the gas: she was always on the lookout for sailors, and claid that she could catch the hearts of children young.

There was knife throwing, axe-throwing, archery, sleigh rides and pony rides, and a frozen maze that Liv’s father had constructed with such cackling glee that eventually her grandmother had been forced to step in and remind him that the children were actually supposed to be able to solve it, eventually. There was a great construction whose blueprints had been found in the personal effects of Professor Norris after his death: a central column of gears and cranks, powered by mana stone, which turned an octagonal fra from which swings were suspended from long chains. The thing spun with such force, once it got going, that laughing children rose thirty feet into the air as they went round and round.

Finally, there was a large empty space, sectioned off by a fence of sculpted ice, and containing little more than bales of hay heaped in great piles. The location had been carefully chosen, at the base of one of the steeper bluffs which overlooked the river, and a wood-frad tower had been erected atop the rise, besides, to a height of four stories. A staircase in two parts, first up from the frozen river to the bluff, and then to the top of the tower, had been constructed in advance, but it wasn’t clear at a glance just what was ant to take place. Still, a horde of children and even young adults had gathered, cramming themselves up against the fence in anticipation.

Liv’s guards, who still wore the symbol of a white mountain on a blue field, cleared the way with shouts. They carried muskets, but their bayonets hung in sheathes at their hips, and they wore winter cloaks of thick wool and white fox-fur, rather than armor. No one - other than Kaija - expected that Liv or her family would be in any danger here at the heart of the alliance, but they arranged themselves to form a periter anyway.

Arjun and Sidonie were waiting there, and Wren and Ghveris, though Aurora, as Liv understood it, would be at the archery field all day. Liv took a mont to embrace each of her friends in turn. She might not normally have put on such a display in public, but visiting Rose’s stone in the crypt had reminded her to be grateful for what she had, while she had it.

While the two Red Shields were as strong as ever, and Wren returned Liv’s hug with a squeeze of her own, while Ghveris pounded Keri on the shoulder, the Chancellor of Coral Bay had quietly grown old. Even Sidonie’s spectacles had changed: they were now a special construction, each side actually two joined half-lenses with different, precisely calculated curvatures. Liv couldn’t imagine using them without getting a pounding headache, but sohow her friend made it work.

Arjun, in the anwhile, had finally been forced to give up performing surgery himself, in favor of relying on assistants that he’d, of course, trained. Arthritis made his hands shake, and even the slightest tremor could be deadly when one was opening up a living patient. He’d also pawned off more and more of his administrative duties at the hospital, but Liv knew they would tolerate it without complaint so long as there was no one else who could match him in using the words of blood, bone, and wholeness in combination.

“You’ve got quite a crowd,” Arjun said, after releasing Liv and taking a step back. “If I were in your boots, I’d be a bit nervous about living up to their expectations. I hope you have sothing special planned.”

“Don’t worry about that,” Liv said. “I know exactly what I’m doing.” She reached out for her husband’s hand, gave it a quick squeeze, and then stepped away from her friends and family, out into the open space just before the bales of hay. She let herself look over the waiting crowd for a mont, and waved at a few children who were watching her. Then, she turned away from her audience and faced the tower.

Liv had no wand anymore: she’d never replaced the stormwand that had once been Julianne’s. In the years imdiately after her trip through Ractia’s bridge to the Last City, her mana capacity had swelled to the point that, when she was honest with herself, Liv knew that she was mana, at a very concrete level. She’d even gone up to the heights of Bald Peak, up on the curtain wall which looked north into the mountain range, and allowed her body to dissolve into pure mana, riding the currents of power in between the peaks beneath the light of the stars before building herself a new body all over again. There didn’t seem to be much point in carrying anything with her that couldn’t go with her through the bridge, not when she knew that she’d leave it behind sooner or later, anyway.

Instead, she simply raised her hands, extended her Authority out to cover the riverbank, the bluff, the staircase, and the tower, and let her intent move. Adamant ice froze into place, beginning at the bottom, where the bales of hay rested on the river, and building upward from there. Liv built the supports first: pillars and arches that would be strong enough to hold dozens of children at a ti, and would last the entire length of the festival.

She sculpted them with her mories, back to the beginning. A young girl saved from the water in a grasping hand, and a huntress carrying a second child wrapped in her cloak. The sky above Castle Whitehill full of stone bats, and Baron Henry, still young and vibrant, setting out in a sleigh. There was a duel on the beach at Freeport, where two girls faced each other with wands in hand, not knowing that their fight was just one step further along toward a war which had been building for years.

There was Coral Bay, where waves broke on the reef, and apprentices fought enormous reef crabs. Jurian and Wren faced down Aariv and Manfred, while Liv herself stood atop a reef, waves crashing around her ankles, against an Antrian war-machine. There was the Well of Bones, where a wall of grasping hands that tried to pluck Isabel Tanner off a crumbling stair.

As the supports rose onto the bluff, an eagle’s nest atop a mountain peak ca into view, and then a garden from which a great tower erged. The lined face of Aira tär Keria, Liv sculpted carefully: she wanted to convey just how kind the old woman had been, but it was impossible. There was the Tomb of Celris, where Ghveris stepped forward from the machinery which had held him for so long, and there the throne upon which the Crown of Celris rested. The painted desert, and Silica; Nightfall Peak, and Godsgrave, and the council at the Hall of the Ancestors, and finally, the platform upon which Liv had stood, surrounded by Vædim.

Once the supports had been built, Liv laid down the tracks, three of them: looping and diving, back and forth, up and down, like a twisted ball of yarn which descended, inevitably, to co to an end just before those bales of hay, so that when the children ca flying out the bottom, as Rei had done so long ago at Mountain Ho, and as Liv, Emma and Kazimir Grenfell had done even earlier when she was just learning to use Cel, they would be cushioned by the hay.

When she finished, there was silence for a mont, and Liv turned back to the audience, to all the parents and children crowded around, even to her own friends, her husband, and her daughter, and saw that their eyes were turned up, wide, drinking in the thing that she had built.

This, Liv thought. This is what winter is, Celris, you monster.

“Watch your friends and lovers die, and their bodies cool,” Liv’s ancestor had told her, years before, in his tomb. “Watch my darkness swallow the light in their eyes. And when there is nothing of you left, you will co at last to my final truth: the end of all that is, was, and shall ever be. Silence and stillness and darkness. Co to , as do all that live.”

The monster had truly believed it, too.

If he’d ever woken to the blinding, pure white expanse of new fallen snow in the morning sun, tree-branches coated in glistening, brilliant ice, he’d forgotten that wonder. If he’d ever seen children shrieking with glee, stampeding their way up sothing like these steps, to where stacks of polished, round tal shields waited at the top of the tower, he’d forgotten how priceless he was. If he’d ever known that for every death, a child was born, a new light of hope in the world to carry on from those who’d co before, he’d lost that too.

This was Liv’s winter.

She watched her daughter, young for just a short while longer and so, so close to being an adult, pound her way up the stairs with all the others. Liv took a step back, and when Keri pulled her up against him, she settled into his side.

“It’s beautiful,” her husband told her. “You did good, Liv.”

“We did, I think,” she said. Liv glanced over to where her friends waited, Arjun and Sidonie, Wren and Ghveris, and put aside the fear that ca when she wondered which of them might join her in the Last City. There was ti enough to co.

“Let’s go and get sothing warm to drink,” Liv suggested. “The kids will be here all day.”