Chapter 5

From The Obsidian Crown, directed by Jillian Poe, starring Colby Kent and Jason Mirelli, introducing Kim Goh as Queen Alyx of Glassemere.

Sir Corwin, standing alone in the forest grove, feels the mist crawl like a living creature up his spine and down his arms and under his worn leathers. No: like multiple living creatures. Small and silvery and sinuous.

Magic. He represses a shudder. It's the unknown, the mystical, the untrustworthy, the not-exactly-human—

But his Queen is in danger. She needs allies. Who can fight curses, who can lift a siege, with counterspells.

And this magician—the Wizard of the Mists—is supposedly the best there is. No one's seen him, not exactly, in years, though the stories abound: sicknesses cured, villages saved from famine, floods diverted. He doesn't show his face outside of his grove, or maybe he does and no one knows; rumor says he looks different each time, young or old, dark-haired or light, bronze-skinned or moon-pale. Or sometimes just a voice wrapped up in a tumble of leaves or wind or rain or sunlight, no person to be seen at all. The magical healing and flood-diverting and crop-saving all works just fine, though. So the petitioners keep coming to the grove.

Corwin, personally, considers this to be showing off. If the Wizard of the Mists wants to help people, he might as well just show up and help them. Honestly. Face to face. Without mucking about.

He shifts his weight, his bulk. His feet are tired. His left knee aches where he'd once upon a time landed wrong, during a tourney, in happier days. One of Alyx's birthday feasts, when she'd been the Heir, not yet Queen. Years ago, that one. He's been serving the throne of Glassemere for most of his life.

He says to the mists, "I know you're listening." He does not, in fact, know. And he's grumpy about it. "Come out and talk to me. Your Queen needs your help."

Nothing happens except a few skittering pinpricks of cold along the back of his neck, like tiny lizard feet.

He says, "Here's where people come to ask you for help, right? So I'm asking."

Nothing continues to happen, but loudly.

Cor shifts his weight again. Glances around. "They say you help people. Maybe you don't. Maybe it's all just trickery. Fraud."

"Maybe," says a voice out of everywhere and nowhere, "it is. Would that make you go away?" The voice sounds younger than Cor was expecting, and also either annoyed or amused or both. It's elegant, musical, accented in a way he can't place. Magic, obviously.

"So you are here."

"Yes, and so are you. Unfortunately."

Cor turns, trying to find a shape to focus on. The mists close in. Diamond-white, flowing, ghostly, impenetrable. "I said. Queen Alyx needs your help."

"Most people come on their own behalf to ask." This time the voice sounds more annoyed, over on Cor's left. And also tired. "If they can't be bothered, then I certainly won't be."

"That's unfair and you know it. The Queen's under siege."

"And yet you escaped the Obsidian Palace, evaded no doubt countless enemy patrols, and rode for miles into the Whispering Forest, to arrive here. In my grove."

"Something like that," Cor agrees, holding on to his temper with both hands, "yes."

"Oh, a heroic one. Such a nuisance." The voice shifts, moves to a different spot within the mists. And sighs. "Aren't you the ones who're meant to defend the Queen? Her Guard? Part of the job description. Not mine."

"I am. I'm finding aid." He pauses, adds, "Unless you are a fraud."

"I'm not, but then of course a fraud would say that, so there we are."

"And you're hiding. Are you a coward? Too afraid to join a fight?"

The time the voice is very close, right at Corwin's shoulder. And definitely annoyed. "Do you know what I do to people who waste my time, Sir Hero?"

"Nothing, if you can't actually do anything?"

And just like that they're back to silence. With coiling restless mists. White and blank as pain.

Which means either he's guessed right about the trickery, or else the magician's secretly evil or at least unwilling to help. Selfish. Disloyal. Bastard.

He tries one last time anyway. "If you don't care about the Queen or the Obsidian Crown, at least care about the people. Glassemere. The land. They say you do help people. The farmers, the peasants. The woods and the earth. If there's a war—"

He stops. His knee's tingling. Shivery, under his skin. In his bones. The heat sizzles like molten gold, almost too much, almost beyond bearing; and Cor grits his teeth and moves to draw his sword—

And the feeling vanishes.

And, all at once, that knee feels good. Better than it has in—

"What did you do to me?" It is healed. He knows it is.

There's the impression of a shrug, in the voice or in the closest veil of ghostly white. "Something felt wrong. Old-wrong. Unhappy. I made it right. You're welcome."

"You're not a fraud."

"No," says the voice, "I'm not," and now the tiredness is winning, real exhaustion under spiked defenses. The mists choose—or don't choose—this moment to part, to swirl, to peel back eerie fingertips. To let Cor see.

His breath skips. Instinctive. Like the shock of gold, the heat lacing his bones.

The Wizard of the Mists is beautiful. There's no other word for it.

Beautiful, and young—not truly young, not a boy, but certainly younger than Cor himself. Tall and slender, elfin cheekbones, delicate features. Huge blue eyes, the kind a person could get lost in, and long flowing dark hair. The hair tangles into the mists. The young man's leaning against a tree, casually, dressed in a loose robe over practical trousers and shirt, with one boot propped up negligently in some leaves. He watches Corwin.

Corwin watches him right back. And, having been a campaigner for a long time now, studies the deliberate pose, the weight against the tree, the head-tip of distracting insouciance.

He says, "Are you hurt?"

And, for a single fleeting second, the Wizard of the Mists is surprised. Then he laughs. "I expect heroes are required to ask that."

"Maybe we are. Aren't magicians required to give true answers?"

"No, in fact. It's often good policy not to." The young man hasn't moved from the tree, which adds evidence to Cor's current evaluation, but he does wave a slim hand majestically. "I, however, haven't lied to you. Yet."

"And you didn't answer my question."

"Do you want me to continue helping you, or not?"

"You haven't done anything yet."

The Wizard lifts one perfect eyebrow. Glances at Cor's leg.

Cor, refusing to be intimidated by devastatingly attractive magical sarcasm, snaps, "That's not what I asked for."

"And that's actually not what I meant when I said it, so once again, here we are."

"Right. Because magicians lie. If it's good policy."

This time a flash of real irritation crosses those phantom-blue eyes. "Sometimes we look into the future. And we see certain paths. And we make choices. And we say or do what we need to."

"And you're making a choice not to help."

"When did I say so?"

"You—"

A thunderclap splits open clear skies, overhead. The clearing darkens. A whip-curl of bone-white mist cracks around Cor's throat. One around each of his wrists. His ankles.

Not hurting him. Immobilizing. Only that.

He stands very still.

Abruptly everything stops, and ebbs. Dwindling. Gone. No thunder. No mist. No restraints. No concealment.

The Wizard of the Mists has slid down the tree to sit in the dirt and soft moss beneath it. One hand's pressed against the tree-trunk, as if he's failed to catch himself. His face is pale.

Cor demands, "What happened?" Probably not the best course of action when he's just been freed, but he's both angry and having some other emotion he refuses to identify.

"Oh, what's not happening, really…" The Wizard laughs. Tips his head back against old sturdy bark, letting it tangle in his hair. His eyes are closed. "Tell me, which of the magics I'm currently holding would you like me to give up, to go and lift your siege? The siphon draining the tension from the earthquake that isn't happening up north at Perleon, or the barricade I'm using to keep those mages from the Sunless Army—the same ones who built those siege engines, incidentally, which is why you can't burn them—from breaching the East Pass? Or the spell working to restore the fields after the barley blight in Donhaven? Or the fever I think I've stopped from spreading down in Tam's Harrow, just now, which is where I was before I came home to find you shouting at my door-wardens. Which of those should I stop? Do let me know."

Cor can't say anything, for a moment.

"Yes." The Wizard of the Mists hasn't opened his eyes. "You're correct, by the way. I don't like interfering in purely human affairs. Saevel—my master—the last Wizard of the Mists—didn't either. Humans are humans. We try to heal the land, as much as we can. And sometimes also the people who care for it. I don't know anything about human politics. Kings and queens. Good and bad. They come and go. I'm here now."

Cor needs another second or two. And then he comes over and sits down—and his knee bends easily, readily, years of aching faded and gone—next to the exhausted heap of magic and scuffed boots and thinness. Too thin, now that he's looking. The moss isn't uncomfortable. "Thank you."

"I'm doing my job. Go away."

"How long have you been doing it alone?"

"Since Saevel died. I don't know. Why are you still here?"

"I can make tea. I have some, in my pack."

"I told you I don't like humans."

"You also told me you lie when you want to." Cor rests an arm on a pulled-up knee, offers, "Yes about the tea?"

"Mostly I need to sleep."

"And you haven't been, I'm guessing."

"Yes, I look terrible, thank you for pointing that out." The Wizard scrubs both hands over his face. Up close he's somehow even more impossibly lovely: elfin but also human, maybe literally—nobody's seen elves for decades, but Cor thinks they had even more pronounced ears, height, eyebrows, so this Wizard might be somewhere in between. But also in a different sense: he's real, in the sense of recognizable weariness, someone who can be hurt and who needs a good night's rest and a hot meal or six.

More tangible. More present and desirable—someone able to be desired—perhaps.

And what the fuck is that thought doing? Cor shoves it down hard. He's here for the fate of the kingdom. And the Wizard's not exactly a warm and approachable person. Even if Cor wanted to approach. Which he doesn't. Obviously.

The Wizard, clearly not listening to Cor's thoughts even if he can potentially do that sort of thing, finishes his grumbling with, "The hair's a disaster and I've got dirt under my fingernails and I haven't had time for a rose-bath in ages. As if I needed a hero telling me that."

"That's…not what I was thinking. You do care about the land. And you know what's going to happen if one of the Sunless Army gets to the Obsidian Crown, with all that power, all those centuries of land-ritual and coronations."

This gets him a long cool blue-eyed stare, which lasts slightly longer than Corwin enjoys. Unless maybe he does. A tiny amount. Being looked at like that.

He says, "And the Crown is still in the Obsidian Palace. Which is under siege."

The Wizard of the Mists says a word that Corwin wouldn't've expected forest-wild, perilously lovely, maybe-half-elven magicians to know. "Why isn't it at the Glass Citadel with the other Regalia?"

"Because Queen Alyx was only crowned two months ago, and no one thought moving it back was a priority?"

"Why," announces the Wizard of the Mists to the oak leaves above, "do I even bother doing my job? Humans will destroy the world anyway, someday. Very well. We're headed to the Obsidian Palace. I'll rescue the heart of Glassemere on top of everything else. Why not." The leaves rustle in sympathy.

"They can hold out another day. Maybe another two weeks."

"I thought you'd be in a hurry, hero."

"I am. But you said you just got home. From helping people."

One more of those glares: feline-sharp and just as wary, but in a way Corwin recognizes. He's always liked cats.

He says, "Will your spells keep working if you get some sleep?"

"I'd be a terrible excuse for a magician if they didn't."

"So we can leave tomorrow."

"I already regret meeting you."

"You don't. Because we're going to save the kingdom. Do you have a house, or do you sleep in a tree?"

The Wizard of the Mists wiggles fingers at him, probably not a real mystical gesture since no fireballs or flowers appear from thin air. "Oh yes. Master magicians all sleep in enchanted caves and hollow oak trunks and secret glass bubbles under the sea."

"Yeah, I've read that children's storybook too. Can you walk? How far is your tree? Is it that one? Or that one over there?"

"I think I don't like you."

"I know." Cor puts an arm around him, getting him off the damp moss and tree roots. A small forlorn finger of mist touches his shoulder: one of those door-wardens, he guesses. It's worried, or hopeful, or maybe trying to encourage him.

The Wizard's astonishingly light, not much weight to shoulder. Easy enough for Cor to support him and to keep talking, to keep him awake and talking. "I don't like magic-wielders either. Devious, my grandmother used to say, all of you. Where're we going? I'll make tea when we get there."

"You love being useful, don't you? It's just over there." This at first makes no sense, but one more gesture—smaller this time, ragged but practiced, real and not exaggerated—pulls stray golden light into view, between tree-trunks. It's an actual cottage, more or less, if a cottage had managed to wedge itself in between some oaks and then weave all its walls and rooftop out of branches and vines and flowers. But it's got glass windows, and a small round door, and it really isn't that far.

"That's not a no," Cor says, "about the tea. What's your name? I can't just call you the Wizard."

"Why can't you?"

"I'm Corwin. Sir Corwin Siebert. Of Her Majesty's Guard. But you can call me Corwin."

"Do I have to? And yes, thank you, I know who you are."

"Oh, do you."

"Don't think that means I care. I know who you are because I healed you. I had to know you for a moment, to do that."

"Did you?"

"Stop that. I can walk, you don't have to hold me up."

"Don't I?"

"Did I say I don't like you? I really, really mean that." But the Wizard hasn't let go. In fact he's leaning more on Corwin now. "I have tea. My own. Healing. But you can prepare it. If you want. If…you might need some. Having journeyed here heroically and all."

"Can I? Thanks."

"Will you stop doing that?"

"No, probably."

"Then I'm not telling you my name. I'm the Wizard of the Mists, anyway. That's who I am." Some other emotion darts across those eyes, though. Silver in the blue. Quick as a ripple, disturbing a stream. And gone.

"Maybe," Cor says, arm around him, being broad-shouldered support while his Wizard reaches out a hand to open the door with no knob in the middle of the Whispering Forest, surrounded by wistful curious mist-swirls. "Or maybe you'll tell me. Someday."

The Wizard tips his head to look Corwin squarely in the eyes. It's a challenge. It's amusement. It's another little tremble of gold, sun-hot and lancing, and this time it hits right under his breastbone, under his leathers, and leaves him strangely breathless.

"Maybe," the Wizard says lightly, leaning on him, "though it's extremely unlikely given all the mutual disliking, but I suppose I was taught to consider all the unlikely future branches, so in theory it's possible I'll tell you, perhaps, someday," and the door swings open through the mists to let them in.