#falion

She would have harsh words, under any other circumstances, for a mage foolish enough to alter his own shape—but her Master of Alteration has walked the world as wolf and otter, elk and wild boar, since she was a child struggling to cast colored lights. When she turns from the window, she almost smiles to see him hunched hawkish in the cloak: a frail old man who, in three days, has flown a journey that would take her several sennights.

“You ought to have gone yourself,” he says anyway, patting his windswept beard back into place. He seldom looks weary after his adventures. The light in his eyes—one brown, the other bluish-green—is the light of one who has outraced clouds. “He never listened to old men. But to old friends, my dear, he may yet unbar his door.”

Mirabelle waves a hand. The sheafs of strewn paper stack themselves on her desk, probably out of order. “I’m needed here. I can’t be long away.”

“Phinis could.” Tolfdir helps himself to her tea. Miraculous, she thinks, that all his flapping hadn’t sent the cup skidding to Atmora. “I remember the three of you knocking about as prentices. Couldn’t separate you.”

Mirabelle tries to picture poor Phinis, who pales when asked to venture into town, on the next karve to the Hjaal. When she surfaces from the fancy, less plausible by far than the Synod’s treasure-maps, the old man’s welkin eyes are watching her.

“Why now, Master Wizard?” he asks, not ungently.

His tea, now, Mirabelle thinks. She goes to the shelf for another cup. “Pardon?”

“Falion left us years ago.” The eagle looks out at her from Tolfdir’s face. “You let him go. Why ask him back now?”

Mirabelle’s fingers pause in midair. Most of her clayware is chipped. Ancano, when she’d interviewed him last, had lifted the cup she’d set out for him with near-imperceptible amusement—as if, she’d thought then, he were indulging thoughts of dropping it.

“It seems to me,” she says, her voice hard for all its softness, “that we have invited enemies into our house, and shut friends outside.”

“Ah.” Tolfdir’s cup clinks on her desk. “I saw a knarr sailing this way, you know, while I was up.” He pauses, then clears his throat. “East Empire Company, I thought.”

* * *

When she takes the stairs of the Archmage’s tower two by two, wound tight with the news, Ancano is already in yarak. Perhaps he has his own eyes in the air.

“No good will come of a Haafing ship testing these waters,” he’s saying when she slips into the Archmage’s study. She’s come to know Ancano better than she’d like; whenever he’s pressing a point, as he’s doing now, his voice takes on the high, humming urgency of a kite’s whistle. “We must signal at once for it to turn about.”

“Turn about?” Savos Aren’s hand is already tangled in his beard. The bewildered crease in his brow unbends when he sees Mirabelle, but does not disappear. “The College of Winterhold is not a port authority, Emissary. Nor is it a lighthouse.”

“Indeed,” says Mirabelle crisply, taking a stand beside his chair, “I should think that much good will come of a merchant ship, under the circumstances—this is the first,” she points out, “since the leads opened in spring.” They’d lasted the winter, as usual, on lutefisk. Even she is beginning to tire. “Our stores are running low.”

Savos, heartened, tries weakly for a joke. “Much goods?”

Ancano’s golden eyes glint up at Mirabelle. He and the Archmage are at table, lit blue by the drifting magelights: Ancano leaning forward, Savos huddled in his robe of office like an old man in his shawl. He never drinks anything stronger than the watered-milk tea favored so far north, where vegetal life is scant. His cup sits untouched. Ancano has supplied, from some shelf of his own stores, a jug of wine.

“Mistress Ervine,” he says with a courteous smile. The magelights chase a shadow across his narrow face. “You must sit.”

She must do nothing. She holds her face immobile.

“I was sharing my concerns with the Archmage.” If Ancano sees the pack-ice in her eyes, he gives no sign of it. He waves a black-gloved hand. His servant, an ancient elf with a blotch like a winestain on his cheek, hastens forward to fill a third cup. “I fear that this vessel, if it persists in its course, will be seized by the Jarl as a prize for the Stormcloak fleet.”

Mirabelle ignores both the wine and the servant, who always smiles in terror when acknowledged. “Korir lacks the men.”

“Then the ship will blunder into Ulfric’s blockade.” Ancano’s smiling again, close-lipped and motionless as an Aldmeri bust. “That it hasn’t already is miraculous.”

“The College is not party to the recent—rising tensions, shall we say, between Haafingar and Eastmarch,” says Savos, who has as many euphemisms for civil war as a skald has kennings. “I fail to see how the requisition of a knarr—by either fleet, Emissary—is a matter in which we have any right to intervene.”

Ancano’s face falls into a prim, prudent frown. “You must see, Archmage, how a disturbance in Winterhold’s waters would endanger the College’s neutral position—”

* * *

“—and on it went, like that,” Mirabelle finishes, stoic. “The Archmage remains undecided.”

“Of course he does,” says Faralda, reaching for the pitcher. “More blaand?”

She’d come to Faralda’s gatehouse to compare admission records—and, she admits, to cool a headache in the courtyard’s frigid wind. She’s stayed for supper. Her Master of Destruction is the terror and delight of the village’s braver children, who rattle her gate and barter foodstuffs for feats of witchery: fountains of sparks, sky-whales shaped of smoke, magefires juggled from hand to hand. One small petitioner had traded a fat square of blubber, now cubed and salted in Faralda’s only bowl, for a field of ice on which she and her siblings could play stickball.

Faralda refills their cups with the Vetrings’ creamy whey-wine, then takes another morsel from the bowl—with finger and thumb, as the villagers do. Her elbows brace the table like an old salt’s. “Company knarr, Tolfdir said?”

“Yes.” Faralda had been a ship’s mage, once. Mirabelle studies her for a moment—her hair that musses in all weather, the rigging-lines of laughter in her face—then rubs her forehead, resolving to drink no more blaand. “This ship. Why would it—”

Faralda, looking pained, says, “She.”

“—why would she sail into Stormcloak waters?”

A pause.

“You seek counsel,” says Faralda, a slow smile sharpening her face, “from your future Master Wizard—”

“Faralda.”

“East Empire Company,” says Faralda, as if that explains everything. She waves a hand that shines with grease in the firelight. “The Imperial Fleet can fit in a puddle. Mede could float out his toy ships to be rammed to flinders by Ulfric’s drekar—or,” she says, longships burning in her eyes, “he could let Cousin Vici and her mercenaries defend their searoads.”

Mirabelle frowns. “With one knarr?”

“A maiden to lure out the dragons, perhaps.”

Always evocative, Faralda’s fancies. Mirabelle pictures a line of dragon-headed longships gliding to the knarr, their oars churning, their painted snarls crusted with ice—and their hulls splintering, brittle as kindling, beneath the bolts and prows of a host of Company ships.

“Let us not speak of dragons,” she says, reaching wearily into the bowl. Since the recent news from Helgen, she’s caught herself eyeing the sky every time she crosses the quadrangle. “Ancano has the right of it, then, that this ship is likely to stir trouble.”

Faralda sniffs. “You ought to do the very opposite of whatever he suggests.”

“His counsel is often sound. That’s the trouble. If it weren’t, Savos—the Archmage,” Mirabelle corrects herself, “would not entertain him.” She thinks of dragons settling on the ramparts, crushing the crenels between their toes. “What can he want with us?”

“Remember how he tried to cram that monstrous desk up the stairwell? The one he brought out of Valenwood?”

“Solid graht-oak.” Enthir, pacing her office, had almost wept with rage. She can’t laugh, now, recalling how the thing had rained drawers on several Aldmeri attachés.

“He wants what that knarr wants.” Faralda’s smile is thin and taut. “Something costly to bring home.”

* * *

Evening creeps early, on misty feet, into the lumber-town of Morthal. The watchmen have been jumpy, of late, as well they should; their torchlights bob past the wizard’s window in twos, like great eyes gleaming in the dark, as they creak up and down the bridge. The fog muffles their steps. The wizard, going about his evening chores, smiles and listens.

“Is he in there?” asks one of the watchmen.

“Aye,” says another, and spits.

If he were out, they’d spit at that, too. The wizard raises his eyebrows, nonplussed, and scrubs a crust of pottage from a pewter plate—

Falion.

The plate clatters to the floor. When the wizard whirls with a spell on his lips and a washrag in his hand—anticipating fiends, fire, fool neighbors with pitchforks—he finds his hearthroom empty.

He stares about him at what his sister, with twinkling eyes, calls his instruments of sorcery: the great cookpot, the garlic-strings, the besom and staff by the door. Then he sighs and flicks the rag aside. “You would bespeak me while I’m scouring dishes.”

The voice, cool and familiar, rises in his mind like a wry notion of his own. I trust I did not catch you unawares.

“I will tell you what I told Tolfdir, and no more.” Things stranger than Mirabelle Ervine have spoken into Falion’s mind. He stoops for the plate. “My talents are much needed here. Much maligned, as well, but no matter—I have found in the marshes of Morthal my masters, my mystic tomes, my métier.” His own stern, seamed face frowns back at him from the pewter. “If Aren himself groveled at my feet, I would not return.”

Apprentices had been awed, once, by his dire proclamations: heed my words, and meddle not with each other's summoning-circles, and so. Never Mirabelle. Perhaps I wished only to speak to you.

“Speak to me, then, of the sorcery of Winterhold.” The face reflected in the plate would make a bitter meal. He sets it aside. “Of the marvels its mages have wrought. Of Mirabelle Ervine”—his voice gentles, then—“and her miracles.”

He can almost see her desk, cluttered with distractions of all description, and her terse smile. She strikes back. How is Agni?

“My young ward,” says Falion, after a pause, “shows some promise.”

To clasp one's mind with the mind of another mage—master, pupil, friend—is to do more than converse. He’s known Mirabelle since she was a prentice; the keen and steady stare that had followed him in his youth passes through him now, insubstantial, searching his mind for the child. The byre in which he’d found her—the reek of damp, the rotting straw. The murrain she’d spelled from Eivor’s cattle. Her first magelight, bright and startled as her smile. His terror that he’ll teach her ill, that she’ll end like his last pupil—

That, says Mirabelle softly, was not your fault.

“I know.” Falion flicks a taut hand. The fire in his hearth bursts up; the dishes, clattering like a draugr’s mail, stack themselves on the shelf. “And you know. And the rest of you, chasing shadows and squabbling over chairs—Mirabelle,” he murmurs with ferocity, sweeping his arm in an arc that rattles every shutter, “how can you stay?”

A pause.

These are tempestuous times. Mirabelle’s voice, to his surprise, is tinged with weary humor. If a dragon lands in the forecourt, who will remind it that we wizards are beyond worldly affairs?

Falion blinks. Then, despite everything, he smiles.

“If you need me,” he says to the empty room, “truly need me, my old friend—I will come.” He shakes his head. “But not before.”

“Falion,” calls a small voice from the doorway, “are you talking to dwarves?”

He turns. The child, picking sprigs of heather from her hair, greets him with a hesitant smile; she’s been in the marshes again, loosing coneys from his snares. The presence in his mind, with mingled frustration and warmth, flickers out.

“Agni.” He’ll scold her later. He raises an eyebrow and plucks a twig from behind her ear. “I was speaking with—a former colleague.”

“A wizard?” Her grin has a gap in it; the loose tooth must have come out. “A College wizard?”

“Were the snares empty again?”

“A College wizard, Falion?”

She’d been baking bread with Jonna when Tolfdir arrived. Small mercies. “Perhaps not for much longer.”

His apprentice still believes, somehow, in wonders: need-fires and marshfires, fish that grant wishes, wizards in the north that make the skylights dance. She frowns as if betrayed. “Why?”

“If you saw the College, child,” says Falion, kneeling to help her with her boots, “you would know.”

* * *

On the deck of the Valravn, the knarr creaking through the ice off the Vetring coast, a man in shabby furs smiles in surprise. His eyes have frozen shut.

“Sten, lad,” he calls to the steersman who’s been kind to him, kinder than he deserves, on the long, careful journey through the leads: a young man, quick to laugh, whose brothers have all gone south to war. They could be in his daughter’s centuria, he thinks, joking with her over a supper of mashed grain. They could be heads on spears. The wind saws his face like a carving-knife. “My pipe’s out.”

“Here you are, then, Master Clerk,” says a good-natured voice by his ear, followed by the mineral clack of struck flint. A hand swathed in fishskin turns his face for inspection. “Kyne caught you a nip, has she?”

“Don’t fuss.” His face is nearly too stiff to force a smile. “It’s only the lashes.”

“Well”—the hand tugs gently at his sleeve—“come away from the side. You’ll have your last cold bath, sir, if we meet a floe and pitch. And I want to watch you sell snow to those Vetrings.”

Lumber, in fact, and gruit, meal, mead. None are why the clerk is here; someone else will get rid of them, in due course. He doesn’t move. “In a moment. I want to see the school.”

Sten brushes the snow from his shoulders—fuss—and bustles off to haul some line or other. The wind that freezes men solid in their sleep closes around the clerk, whirling away the creak of rigging, the grumble of ice, the boatswain’s busy shouts. He’s alone with it again. When he breathes in deep, it burns on the way down like a clean, destroying flame; when he holds his pipe-bowl to his eye and waits for the lashes to thaw, the warmth is no different than the chill.

The dead in their doorways of fire, he thinks, must feel this way: blind, bright, with all that they love behind them. He leans forward a little. Let this sermon be consolation to those—

Something trickles down his face. His eye unsticks.

“Ai, cardehni,” he says, appalled. A great grin cracks the ice of his face. He steps back, leaning on his cane, and cranes his head to better see. “Sten, lad—what happens if a wizard sneezes?”