The Bone Doll’s Twin. Lynn Flewelling

      Document Fragment Discovered in the East Tower of the Orëska House

       An old man looks back at me from my mirror now. Even among the other wizards here in Rhíminee, I’m a relic of forgotten times.

       My new apprentice, little Nysander, cannot imagine what it was like to be a free wizard of the Second Orëska. At Nysander’s birth this beautiful city had already stood for two centuries above her deep harbour. Yet to me it shall always and forever be ‘the new capital’.

       In the days of my youth, a whore’s cast-off like Nysander would have gone unschooled. If he were lucky he might have ended up as a village weather-caller or soothsayer. More likely, he would have unwittingly killed someone and been stoned as a witch. Only the Lightbearer knows how many god-touched children were lost before the advent of the Third Orëska.

       Before this city was built, before this great House of learning was gifted to us by its great founder, we wizards of the second Orëska made our own way and lived by our own laws.

       Now, in return for service to the Crown we have this House, with its libraries, archives, and its common history. I am the only one still living who knows how dear a price was paid for that.

       Two centuries. Three or four lifetimes for most people; a mere season for those of us touched by the Lightbearer’s gift. ‘We wizards stand apart, Arkoniel,’ my own teacher, Iya, told me when I was scarcely older than Nysander is now. ‘We are stones in a river’s course, watching the rush of life whirl past.’

       Standing by Nysander’s door tonight, watching the lad sleep, I imagined Iya’s ghost beside me and for a moment it seemed as if it was my younger self I gazed at; a plain, shy nobleman’s son who’d shown a talent for animal charming. While guesting at my father’s estate, Iya recognized the magic in me and revealed it to my family. I wept the day I left home with her.

      How easy it would be to call those tears foreshadowing – that device the playwrights are so enamoured of these days. But I have never quite believed in fate, despite all the prophecies and oracles that shaped my life. There’s always a choice in there somewhere. I’ve seen too often how people make their own future through the balance of each day’s little kindnesses and cruelties.

       I chose to go with Iya.

       Later, I chose to believe in the visions the Oracle granted to her and to me.

       By my own choice, I helped rekindle the power of this good strong country, and so may rightly claim to have helped the fair white towers of Rhíminee rise against this blue western sky.

       But on those few nights when I sleep deeply, what do I dream of?

       An infant’s cry, cut short.

       You might think after so many years that it would be easier to accept; that one necessary act of cruelty could alter the course of history like an earthquake shifts a river’s course. But that deed, that cry, lies at the heart of all the good that came after, like a grain of sand at the heart of a pearl’s glowing nacre.

       I alone carry the memory of that infant’s brief wail, all those years ago.

       I alone