I was born in Postfoedus 242 to a miller and her husband in the little town of High Vale, near the north shore of East Arc. In a just world I should sing their praises for the next twenty pages, for I owe everything (not owed directly to Montigo) to their tireless upbringing and their patient indulgence of my talents. But readers are always very insistent on matters of “pacing” and “economy of words” and “respect for their time”1 so I must promise to be brief.
My siblings and I read and read and read—the priest at the nearest academy up the road in Kingsworth was at first delighted and then a bit mortified that a trio of precocious bumpkin children had exhausted his library. Not just of fairy tales and little pedagogical devices. We had plowed through the books on foreign theology he kept locked in a curio cabinet lest they burst forth and torment him as they had in his seminary studies. Soon, he was requesting additional material from the larger academy at Arcpalace, and my dear mother began to worry about which of us might deign to see after the milling business2.
One evening found me sitting atop the wooden fence to the mill yard. I was facing the sun as it set, a painful blaze of beautiful orange melting behind the hills to the west, but of course I wasn’t actually looking at it. Instead, I was hunched over so its last rays of light would illuminate the pages of the little manuscript in my hands—a bundle of notes that had been left behind in the back of Logos Metallicum that I had found interesting.
Behind me, the gristmill turned and turned, grinding rye into flour, pulled in its steady cycle by our patient donkey.
“Shouldn’t you be working?” someone said.
I looked up. A sturdy-looking woman in a thick, long travel coat (gathered at the waist by a purple sash) and a wide-brimmed hat was leaning on a staff and regarding me with a stern look in her eyes.
“Should I be?” I remember saying.
“You tell me,” she said.
“Wait, didn’t you…”
“It was a rhetorical question.”
“Oh. Then, no, they don’t need me right now. I’m reading.”
“I can see that.” The woman seemed amused. “And it’s clearly not the Word of Ae. How old are you?”
“Twelve, and I’ve studied the Word, I swear!” I answered, taking a quick look around. My mother was inside, minding the mill, but my brother and sister were on the road back from the Kingsworth market with my father. The cheery little heart of High Vale, a little cluster of thatched-roof homes along a single packed road, was in shouting distance, but our view of it was well-shielded by the mill house at my back. It was just the two of us out there by the road.
“Of course, of course. And how does a twelve year old come to understand what a rhetorical question is?”
“Um. I read about it somewhere.”
“I see.”
“You’re Magister Montigo, aren’t you? Of Ilianath?”
“Oh,” she said, her silver eyebrows rising. “You read about that, too?”
“Yep.”
“That was also a rhetorical question. I mean to ask how you can tell.”
“Oh. I mean… the hat. It’s a wizard’s hat. And Brother Marinus wrote in the History of Court Wizardry about you!”
“Oh, I’m in a history book, now, am I?”
“Recent history!” I said quickly. “You’re the only old lady wizard in a hundred leagues,” I continued, completely undermining my initial effort.
Montigo laughed. “Well then. Have you read about the Golden Lion of the Eighth Hill?”
“… No.”
“Hm. You might try the Rexiary by Hebon, if the academies here have a copy.”
“Oh,” I said.
There was a pause.
“They don’t, do they?” she said.
“No, I don’t think so.”
“You would know, I suppose.”
“Yeah. If it’s there, I’ve seen it.”
“Hm! Anyhow, I’m off to find him.”
“Are you? To do battle with a monster?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
“Oh! Wow!”
Silence settled over us again. I fidgeted a bit.
“Not much one for adventure, are you?”
“Um,” I said. “I prefer history, mostly.”
Montigo sighed and shook her head, her wide-brimmed hat briefly obscuring her facial expression.
“Suit yourself,” she said. She had a look around: verdant hills rose in the distance over the treeline to the west and south, and the road rolled and wound over a wide vale to the north and east.
“You know, his great palace used to sit on that island, over there,” she said, gesturing at a wide mass of green land situated in a river fork near the other end of the valley. “It was said to be built from oaks he enchanted to grow into the shape of a palace and then harden into steel. He made a hundred rooms for his plundered treasure, and a great kitchen whose wicked fires roared all day and night to roast boars for his feasts.”
My eyes widened a bit. “Ohhh. Is that in the Rexiary?”
“Yes, but Hebon had most if it wrong. It was forty-six rooms and the lumber was dried spruce hauled in from the Hyng. By his subjects. You know he was a proper king once? With a domain and an army and such? The treasure wasn’t plunder, either. Mostly tribute.”
“Wow. Where’d you read that?”
“I heard it. From the Golden Lion. I asked him once.”
I stared.
“You can’t just believe everything you read,” she said.
She gave me a tilt of her brim and made to carry on her way, but just then, two men came plodding up the road from behind the mill. Both wore swords and mail under brown-and-white quartered tabards: the baron’s men, from Kingsworth.
“Magister,” one of them wheezed. “Your presence is requested…”
“Poppycock,” she said, sighing. “And it was poppycock the first time you said it, too.”
“You’re coming with us!” the taller man shouted. The smaller one noticed me, acknowledging me with a hasty, awkward smile that was meant to assure me of… something, I guess.
“That’s more like it,” Montigo said. “But I shall not. I do not need your lord’s permission to travel in this country. More to the point, I shall not be a hostage in his stupid game with Henri.”
“How dare you speak that way of Lord Ha—” the tall man was screeching. “Um,” the shorter man said at the same time. His gaze was fixed on the tip of Montigo’s staff as she held it aloft.
A peal of thunder split our ears and rattled our chests. I fell backward off of the fence and tumbled into an unkempt knot of tall grasses.
I gathered up the pages I had dropped, scrambled to my feet, and peeked over the fence. Montigo had vanished. She had left behind a little divot of churned earth in the road and a slightly burnt odor on the air. The shorter soldier stared, his shoulders slumped. The taller one danced about in a fury, emitting a great and voluminous stream of words I feel compelled to omit from this document.
I slowly backed away from the fence and slipped into the mill house to tell my mother what I had seen.
When I turned fourteen, I received a recommendation from the priest at Kingsworth and the happy consent of my family to be apprenticed to the next Magister accepting a student. That turned out to be Magister Montigo.
The physical limitations of the shelves of the Kingsworth academy ceased to restrain me. History was and remains my soft spot—both the hearty meal to keep the mind sated and the candy to sweeten the night—but arcana and logos became equally important fields of study and tools to the vocation I was being raised into. That vocation being, of course, Court Wizardry, which Magister Montigo practiced on behest of Marquis Henri I of Ilianath. They were happy years of fruitful study, which came to a rather sudden end.