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The Seer’s Apprentice
Anne Walsh
Sean t’Erin was born at midday, during the warm days of spring, to a poor woman and her hard-working husband.
His mother was overjoyed to have a son, since her previous three babies had been girls, and she had been worried that her name would never be passed on. As was customary, her husband Daniel had named their first daughter after his mother, Brianna, from whom he took his own second name. When Brianna grew to womanhood and married, her first son would be named Daniel t’Brianna, as his grandfather had been.
It was a fair system and good, and it had lasted all the hundreds of years since the Settlement of Trycanta (and what that had been, no one was quite sure anymore, only that it was the thing from which even the oldest texts dated themselves). Erin and Daniel were free to give their other girls whatever names they liked—only the firstborn of each sex was held by custom—and so their second daughter was called Michaela t’Daniel and the third Karen t’Daniel.
Erin’s father had been named Sean, and it was with pride that she bestowed the name on the baby. Sean t’Erin was held and fussed over and loved like any other baby, and he ate and cried and slept like any other baby, until the time that he was three and a half years old, just old enough to begin telling little stories. His mother and father were proud of his stories, although his father secretly wondered if his son might not have a bit too much imagination for his own good.
Certainly Sean’s stories were vivid, and well told for all the limited vocabulary of the teller. None of them were the same, but all began with the same words: “I looked out my secret window and I saw…”
When he began reading, his mother showed him that he could make the letters himself, with a pen or a pencil. Soon he was keeping track, in a scrawling, little-boy handwriting, of each story he told.
The earliest one he could ever remember was repeated over and over, as if it were important somehow, although he never told his mother and father of it after the first time, because they had looked horrified and his mother had told him never to say such naughty things again or she would wash his mouth out with soap.
“I walked over to the window and sat down on the windowsill. A dragon flew up outside the window and I got on the dragon’s back. Then the dragon flew away with me and the big red book.”
When Sean was four and a half years old, his life changed forever for the first time. The city of Alth, where he lived with his family, was on the shores of the Vast Lake called Monalo, near the point where the Monalo River joined the lake. The only housing they could afford was in the Lower City, which was built on the floodplain of the river itself. If the river rose high enough and fast enough, half the Lower City could be wiped out in an hour. But there were good weather-spotting towers upstream, and plenty of ways to get word down to Alth in time for evacuations.
So the official plans said. But official plans have a way of going wrong, in a way that is no one’s fault entirely, but many people’s mistakes piled upon each other to create a disaster. The lines of communication failed, and the river rose, and out of all the family of Daniel and Erin, only Sean survived, tossed by his frantic mother into a truck full of children being evacuated.
All through the long, nightmarish truck ride, Sean clung to a bag full of his possessions—clothing, identification papers, and his story notebook. A fighter born, he had bloodied the nose of the one older boy who had dared try to take the bag from him. After that, the other children left him alone, and he arrived shaken and frightened but unhurt.
The flood was never explained to anyone’s satisfaction. The Weather Bureau blamed their spotters, and the spotters blamed the Communications Department, and the Communications Department blamed the greatcats, saying that the huge animals had been digging up telephone lines and leaning and scratching on the poles that held power lines, so that they collapsed. Since the greatcats were only dumb animals, not able to understand what they had done, the blame could safely rest with them.
Sean grieved in a child’s way, wondering why his mother or father did not come to claim him from the dismal orphanage in which he was placed. He was told they were dead, and his sisters as well, but he did not really understand. A kindly nurse made sure he kept his story notebook, and found him a pencil so he could write in it, which he did.
“I didn’t cry when the nurse said that to me. I did cry when the lady said that to me. I said where is heaven and why can’t I go there. She said heaven is far away and it is good there but it needs to be good on earth for me a while longer. She said she will love me. I will love her too.”
He had grown into the knowledge of being alone in the world, or rather it had grown with him, always staying just as much as he could bear and no more. There were moments when it had the better of him, and he wept as a man weeps, silently and alone, being almost sixteen years old and having no close friend whom he could trust to see his tears. There were moments when he had the better of it, and he shouted and reveled like any boy in the glory of being strong and young and owning the world outright. But for the most part, he simply carried his knowledge throughout his days and nights, and it created a quiet reserve about him that most people respected. No one disliked Sean t’Erin, but he had no close friends, and very few of his fellow students or his teachers could even say that they knew him at all well.
On his work periods, Sean shelved books at the library. He had gotten good at it very quickly, so now he could do his four carts, plus one extra cart so he wouldn’t be accused of slacking, in three-quarters of the period. He used the rest of the time to browse the shelves, and one day, bored with the juvenile fiction collection (which was the only fiction collection), he walked around to the other side of the shelf to look at the picture books. Idly, he brushed his fingers along their tattered spines, not even bothering to look at the titles, remembering his mother’s voice reading his favorite story, his sister Karen curling up in a ball to peruse another, his sister Michaela screaming at their dog for chewing up her books…
His fingers touched something smoother and cooler than the usual tattered paper or cardboard, something more luxurious. Curious, he pulled the book off the shelf. It was bound in red leather, neither promisingly fat nor crushingly slim, and bore no ornamentation on it at all, only the title, in silver-inlaid letters: “The Tales of the Six of the Song.”
The Six of the Song… that sounds familiar… The Song of the Six, of course! It was a nursery tune, known to every Dulian child, about a group of great heroes who had saved the world from terrible dangers. Sean found himself humming the chorus as he flipped the book open to the first page.
“Hey, one to sing, and one to speak,
And one to mold the clay-o,
One to paint, and one to ride,
And one dance all the day-o!”
On the first page of the book was a black-and-white photograph labeled “The Six.”
Sean almost dropped the book. They’re for real? No, it can’t be. This must just be a picture of actors, or a drawing cleaned up to look like a photo. This can’t be…
The picture showed three young men and three young women, all apparently wearing tunics (the picture ended at mid-chest) and all with their right hands laid over their chests, to display the fact that each of them was wearing a bracelet with a gem set in it. They all had identically sober expressions. The picture seemed designed to be boring.
Sean was about to close the book and put it away when he felt something he hadn’t felt for years—the tingling in his head that meant his “secret window” was opening.
“So I tried it in real life, and sure enough, the picture came off. Underneath it was a picture of the same people, all making the ugliest faces they could manage. I had to laugh—they were so obviously making fun of themselves. Then I peeled at that picture, and underneath it was this gorgeous painting. That was the picture of the Six as they actually were. I don’t think I need to write about it—I don’t think I’ll ever forget it.”
Next to them sat two greatcats, tails wrapped neatly around their front paws. The male was tawny all over, with a sunny yellow gem on his pawband of gold. The other had the markings of a gray tabby cat, and the stone on her golden band favored orange more than yellow. Both of them seemed to be wearing smirks, but that might just have been the artist’s rendition of a greatcat’s natural expression.
On the other side of the humans were two dragons, one with wings open and the other with them closed. The one with her wings open had the markings of a female, with her green-scaled face, copper head and neck, and the two colors intermingled on her wings and arms. The male had a blue head and shoulders, but his chest and arms were silver, and Sean would have bet that his wings were silver on top and blue below. His armlet was silver with a green stone, matching the green wrap he wore, while hers was gold and blue, set off by her white drapery. Both of them were also smiling; in fact, the female had her mouth open in a grin.
Those are the Six? What are dragons and greatcats doing there? Dragons are evil, and greatcats are no more than animals…how can they be heroes?
Sean stared at the painting, touched it, rubbed his fingertips across it and on down the page, as if hoping it would peel off again. The picture didn’t peel…
… but a patch of the page below it did. Beneath the picture were now printed the three verses of the Song of the Six that gave details about each hero. Halfway through the second verse, Sean knew that he had never really paid attention to the words before, and by the end of the third verse, all he could do was stare at the page.
“Now she that sings shall fiery be
And fear no living creature,
While he that paints shall see the wind
And take it for his teacher.”
“Now she that rides shall ride the wind
On wings all like her mother;
Her love shall dance along the waves
On wings made by his brother.”
“Now she with fur that molds the clay
Shall save a king’s own life;
Her brother’s speaking to the earth
Shall win a princess wife.”
If two of the heroes had “wings,” and another had “fur”—and if she had it, probably her “brother” would as well—they could hardly be anything but dragons and greatcats. The two mentioned in the first verse were presumably the human pairing in the painting.
But this is impossible! Everybody knows that…
Everybody knew that there would be warning for the Lower City to evacuate, responded part of his mind. Everybody knew that your “secret window” didn’t exist—but it does. So what does that tell you about what “everybody knows”?
Sean shook his head and looked at his watch rather than think about these problems anymore. He jumped to his feet and ran for the entrance of the library; he was fifteen minutes late for dinner. It was only on his way up the stairs to the dormitories and washrooms that he realized he still had the book in his hands. Rather than return to the library and be even later, he tossed it onto his bed as he ran by his tiny room.
After dinner, and the inevitable scolding, and the after-dinner work of clearing away and washing up, Sean finally got back to his room. It was his alone since the boy he’d once shared it with had left some weeks ago and no one new had been assigned, and he was grateful for this tonight as never before. Supposedly, this time was for studying and homework, but his was done for the night, and all through dinner he had been thinking of the red book. If just the first page had opened his eyes so thoroughly, what must the rest of the book be like?
That was the second night that changed Sean t’Erin’s life forever. He read the book all evening and far into the night, almost unable to stop. He read about Kamin Windpainter, who had seen the images of a greatcat and a dragon—a lyrro and a mazo—carried on the breeze at sunset, and followed those pictures to find his first teachers in magic. He read about the beginnings of the Guvabor war, and of the coming of Shelena le Minal, who became Shelena Firesinger, Speaker to the Peoples.
He read about the ambitious Dowager Queen Rashmi, and the Princess Suasa, who did not want the throne her mother kept trying to place her on, and the efforts of King Bretar to keep his throne against his aunt’s machinations. He read about the doctor Jocan li Minal and his wife, Mirym, a gardener and scholar, how they rediscovered the daughter they had thought dead, and how she in turn helped them discover themselves, for Jocan was a healer and Mirym a seer.
There were pictures in the book, portraits of the people involved, and when Sean turned to the portrait of Mirym, he frowned slightly. Her hair was brown and curled, she wore glasses and a blue dress, and she was smiling kindly but with just a hint of absent-mindedness about her.
Where have I seen her before?
He shook his head and regretfully closed the book at the end of the first segment. There were three more to read, and he found he could hardly wait until the morning.
I know what the other three parts of it are, but I need to work out how they tie in with Sean’s story, and how to tell them. Thanks for reading, as always!)
