I Swear I'm Not A Dark Lord!

Harvest Season

The harvest festival started out well. Taylor entered town wearing a mask nobody had seen before, a white face with a very different shape from his own, and mingled with the fairies, dragons, emperors, and saints. The chilly night was made warmer by the press of people around him, as he followed the flow up and down Main Street, soaking up the sights and smells. Tiny lizards breathed fire onto nuts to roast them fresh for customers. He ate fried food hot in his hand, wrapped in a cone of last week's newspaper. Sweet crepes and candied fruit were everywhere he looked. Performers in the park played and sang, and Taylor was made painfully aware he hadn't heard a single bar of music his entire time in Aarden. Jugglers threw dozens of balls of multicolored fire between them. Sword dancers displayed uncanny body control.

The best act was the illusionist, who played entire stories with his art. The storyteller was fascinating, not only for his detail and control but also for the things Taylor didn't understand. Every art form had a language, and he was sure he was missing parts of the show. The audience thought it was funny when the scene flashed red and the hero's eyes turned white, but Taylor didn't understand it. When a ghostly figure appeared on the scene, people clapped, but Taylor didn't see what it had to do with the story at all.

He was even more excited when the harvest goddess was brought out on a little palanquin, carried by marriageable young men and women drenched in perfumed incense to attract the goddess's favor, and placed her in the central square with great ceremony. Curator Jane got up to say a few words, with an old priest behind her, but Taylor never got to hear the speech. He was getting looks.

It was just one or two at first. Side-eye glances and the occasional pointed finger. But that was enough to send him scurrying for the thinnest part of the crowd. Someone pointed him out to a pair of uniformed men, whom he assumed were on the Town Watch. Taylor knew what their salaries cost, but since he'd never been in public, he didn't recognize them at first. Soon, he had four uniforms following him as he tried to leave town. He untied his horse and rode for home while the Watch observed, ensuring he left the citizens in peace.

A week after the harvest fair, Jane came out to Taylor's training camp to judge his progress. She dressed in a snug riding coat of deep green, pants with long boots, broad hat, and rode a high-stepping mare that tried to upstage Ted. Jane enjoyed the outing, breathing deeply from the autumn wind and its lie that summer would never end.

Ostensibly, she was touring the quarry, and he came with her to see the workers cut their last job of the season: blocks for his new carriage house. The oldest stonecutters developed innate skills through decades of practice and produced clean blocks in standard imperial dimensions by the ton. He would have plenty to raise his new building by the first snowfall.

Afterward, they went upstream to his so-called fishing camp, which all the cutters knew was for training his attack magic. How could they not, with all the noise happening upstream whenever Taylor visited? Instead of a tent or a lean-to, he had burrowed a nice apartment into the hillside, away from his target cliff. Curator Jane seemed amused at his home away from home and how comfortable he'd made himself, alone in the woods.

"First, show me the basic attack spells you have," she ordered, and he demonstrated the pointless standard ensemble of Earth Shot, Water Ball, Fire Lance, Wind Cutter, Lightning Bolt, Light Spear, and Invisible Fist. He thought their performance was well above average, and his ability to do them silently should be considered impressive, but Curator Jane looked ill.

"Really, Bilius?"

"These are just the basics everyone is supposed to do. My real spells are much better, I promise."

"That is the opposite of the problem here. Your so-called basic attack spells are abnormally strong, and you've demonstrated all the attributes. Most casters only have two or maybe three attributes. Light and Force are particularly rare. And you've learned to do them silently, without moving. This alone is more than enough to get you into the Imperial Academy. For an all-attribute magician, they'd pay a stipend to go with the scholarship you already have."

"Attributes don't exist," he scoffed, "it's just a belief system that gets in the way of doing magic properly."

"Of course that's what you would focus on, instead of the stipend part."

"We can stop if you're feeling overwhelmed." He didn't want to stop, but maybe she wasn't ready to see the real spells.

"No, no. Please show me the rest. You might as well. Show me the whole arsenal. I need to know."

He showed her the real repertoire he'd worked up. Slice, Spear, Pushback, Flare, Rock Shot, Fog, and Slip. He could also do a few kinds of barriers, which seemed to impress her more than the attacks. All of his proper magic was non-systemized, and some spells could be launched three times a second.

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Taylor braced himself for the last spell, which had a strong kickback he hadn't solved yet. Ted, who was familiar with the arsenal, knew the meaning of Taylor's changed stance and hid behind the biggest tree he could find.

"Here's the big one," he warned Jane, "cover your ears."

Dragon Shot caused a section of the cliff to collapse. Again. He'd repair it in the morning. By the time the last rock of the avalanche was still, Curator Jane had recovered most of her usual manner, except she was fanning herself with her hat.

"I have no fear you can protect yourself. You are officially hired as my deputy. Congratulations. Now, what can we do about this heat?"

They spent the remainder of that afternoon by the stream. Jane sat on a conveniently shaped rock with her bare feet in the water and read a book while Taylor waded deeper in with his newest fishing pole, far enough away to keep his curse from bothering her. He hovered one of Blake's hand-tied flies above the water, let it dip and float, then buzzed it around again. It was the last week of the salmon run, and he took enough to make dinner for two and continue his experiments with smoking fish.

In spite of the cozy apartment, they slept outside that night on bedrolls with a low wooden divider between them to block his curse. As the fire died, a thick spray of stars came to life in pinpricks of color.

"You're only nine, but soon you'll be every bit the magician your mother was at her peak. Have you thought about what you'll do with all your power?"

"Nine and three-quarters." He traced the shape of the galaxy to its hot, busy core, where stars were too dense to be counted. The galaxy's center was so violently hot, not even Mi'iri could build a civilization there. "I think about it. Staying here won't be an option forever. Nobody wants a cursed legate. The empire will want to take me in so it can use me, but I can't follow orders blindly. That's not the kind of loyalty I can offer to anyone. Not even the emperor."

"That could be a serious problem. If the emperor sees you as a threat, anywhere you settle down would be the stronghold of a rival."

"Then I'll wander. I'll fish every lake, every river, every sea, and help people when I can along the way. You haven't asked about my healing magic, but it's pretty good. With more study about dwarf and beastkin ailments, I could be great at it. Healers who charge reasonable rates are always welcome, right?

"And if I did settle down, it would be far outside the empire, somewhere the emperor can't reach. I'd make a place where all races are welcome, and everybody who wanted one could have a class. With all the classes working together, we'd have the strength to fend off monsters and keep our people safe. That's the dream, anyway."

"It's a nice dream." They lay within arm's reach of each other while coals in the firepit chimed. "I'd forgotten how much fun camping could be, especially with magicians in the company. Thank you."

"I liked it too," he said through the divider. "We should do this again, sometime."

The harvest was so good that year, Curator Jane doubled down on divine statues. She especially wanted them for the town's producers who had new classes. Every time she placed her order, the gods pulled Taylor into their void for a chat. They never told him anything substantial — that would have been 'interference' — but sometimes Nokomis (goddess of magic) and Shitukan (god of mysteries) would ask him about his plans for creating new magic. They didn't just read the answers from his head but let him form words and talk. He wondered if they were only being polite, killing time because they wanted him around for some non-obvious reason, or struggling to understand his otherwordly concepts.

"Some of all of that," said Nokomis, her phased moons orbiting her head. "I'm glad you're such a good sport about it."

"No reason I shouldn't be. The pantheon seems to take good care of my townspeople."

"We do. But, are they your people?"

He thought about his strained relationship, or non-relationship, with the people who lived in and around Mourne. "They're the people I have, so I look out for them."

He always left those little chats with a firmer image of the gods in his head and more questions they wouldn't answer. Questions like, if the residents of Township Mourne weren't his people, then who were?

His first real sword as Bilius d'Mourne was a straight, double-edged weapon with a short point, simple crossbar, black leather-wrapped hilt, and a small round pommel. There was absolutely nothing fancy about it except a minor mithril content, which let its wielder cast enhancements on the blade. Curator Jane presented it to him in her office, in the presence of the same watchmen who so recently chased him away from town. The sword came with a hard leather breastplate, warrant card, a heap of admonishments, and a very expensive communications tablet.

The tablet worked like a party line shared between curators and watches in all the nearby townships. It had channels for conversations between different groups of people, but there wasn't any security to speak of. Everybody who could access one could see everything. If they wanted to send a private message, they had to do so in code. There was a channel devoted to sensitive curator-only correspondence, all of it encrypted. To type on it, Taylor had to put his thumb on the corner of the screen and think the words, a trick that took him several tries to get the hang of.

Taylor's identity on the West Estfold network was Deputy-X. He got his instructions through the tablet, kept his curator updated on his whereabouts and progress, and checked the bounties channel daily.

In the runup to winter, most of his jobs were fixing roads. The town had money to pay for the work, thanks in part to taxes generated by Taylor's remodel, but not enough men available. Roads were something he knew a lot about, and he could fix a rutted lane with ease. For a little more coin, he could rework the roadbed into something entirely more durable and better-draining. Legate d'Mourne's masked son, along with his pony and constant companion, Ted, became a wandering presence in the township, making the roads safer for winter.

During his travels, Taylor collected seeds from every plant he could lay his hands on. It didn't matter if they were crops, trees, weeds, bushes, flowers, or vines. If it was a plant, he wanted a seed for it. He even collected spores from all the mushrooms in his parents' journal. It was an otherworld habit, learned in a culture where seed vaults had saved the lives of millions of people. He didn't have a specific use for them, and he couldn't be sure he had collected and stored them properly. But he soon had hundreds of plants represented in his collection, labeled in jars and boxes, cataloged, and filed away in his office.

He received his final delivery of stone a week before the first snow, and Bonce sent every man he had to erect the carriage house. The walls went up quickly, largely because the foundation was done well in advance, and they didn't have to wait for mortar to dry between courses. Masons maneuvered the stones in place with a thin slurry of quarry dust and water between them to fill the tiny gaps. When a course was done, Taylor extracted the water and welded stones with shaping magic, the same construction technique used on the main house. When the exterior walls were done, he blasted them with sand and water until they were polished just enough to show the stone's natural veins and colors.

The wooden beams were already on site, and Bonce's people finished the roof one day before the first snow. It took a little longer to get the second floor put in, and the doors and shutters hung, but they finished well before the season's first hard freeze. The space would stay dry, and they had a storehouse for all the other materials as they arrived.