“Too long.”
“The winds blew ill?”
“The winds blew fair, but the news I bear is ill, Lord Sparrowhawk.”
“Tell it, then,” the Archmage said gravely, but like one yielding to a child’s impatience; and while Arren spoke, he looked again at the crystal curtain of water drops falling from the upper basin into the lower, not as if he did not listen, but as if he listened to more than the boy’s words.
“You know, my lord, that the prince my father is a wizardly man, being of the lineage of Morred, and having spent a year here on Roke in his youth. Some power he has and knowledge, though he seldom uses his arts, being concerned with the ruling and ordering of his realm, the governance of cities and matters of trade. The fleets of our island go out westward, even into the West Reach, trading for sapphires and Ox hides and tin, and early this winter a sea captain returned to our city Berila with a tale that came to my father’s ears, so that he had the man sent for and heard him tell it” The boy spoke quickly, with assurance. He had been trained by civil, courtly people, and did not have the self-consciousness of the young.
“The sea captain said that on the isle of Narveduen, which is some five hundred miles west of us by the ship lanes, there was no more magic. Spells had no power there, he said, and the words of wizardry were forgotten. My father asked him if it was that all the sorcerers and witches had left that isle, and he answered, No: there were some there who had been sorcerers, but they cast no more spells, not even so much as a charm for kettle-mending or the finding of a lost needle. And my father asked, Were not the folk of Narveduen dismayed? And the sea captain said again, No, they seemed uncaring. And indeed, he said, there was sickness among them, and their autumn harvest had been poor, and still they seemed careless. He said -I was there, when he spoke to the prince- he said, ‘They were like sick men, like a man who has been told he must die within the year, and tells himself it is not true, and he will live forever. They go about,’ he said, ‘without looking at the world.’ When other traders returned, they repeated the tale that Narveduen had become a poor land and had lost the arts of wizardry. But all this was mere tales of the Reach, which are always strange, and only my father gave it much thought.
“Then in the New Year, in the Festival of the Lambs that we hold in Enlad, when the shepherds’ wives come into the city bringing the firstlings of the flocks, my father named the wizard Root to say the spells of increase over the lambs. But Root came back to our hall distressed and laid his staff down and said, ‘My lord, I cannot say the spells.’ My father questioned him, but he could say only, ‘I have forgotten the words and the patterning.’ So my father went to the marketplace and said the spells himself, and the festival was completed. But I saw him come home to the palace that evening, and he looked grim and weary, and he said to me, ‘I said the words, but I do not know if they had meaning.’ And indeed there’s trouble among the flocks this spring, the ewes dying in birth, and many lambs born dead, and some are… deformed.” The boy’s easy, eager voice dropped; he winced as he said the word and swallowed. “I saw some of them,” he said. There was a pause.
“My father believes that this matter, and the tale of Narveduen, show some evil at work in our part of the world. He desires the counsel of the Wise.”
“That he sent you proves that his desire is urgent,” said the Archmage. “You are his only son, and the voyage from Enlad to Roke is not short. Is there more to tell?”
“Only some old wives’ tales from the hills.”
“What do the old wives say?”