It would become difficult, in time, to recall the first two decades of his life with any confidence, to discern the objective forms behind the violet-gold haze. But Lathenil knew they had been good years, those last years of Summerset unsullied.
He would not, perhaps, have thought so then. Even as a boy, he had been quick to defiance and stubborn to shift from it, and the cause he held to with such ferocity was, then, likely to be a petty one. He was forever diverted from his tutors by trifling curiosities. His promise was far the least of Landowner Carhenil's five children, and the folk of Sunhold, while not cruel outright, certainly didn't take care to hide that assessment.
In memory, it rang in purer notes. He had had a family then. Sunhold had been his city and his countryside to walk, its folk known to him, and they spoke of common truth unafraid.
The years in Firsthold had smiled on him without even the benefit of contrast. That Firsthold Academy had taken note of his symposium performance to begin with was, undoubtedly, a near thing: his mind tended to be soundly made up on most things he chose to dispute, and flexibility was the hallmark of a truly great symposial. He had even made more than his share of technical errors. But that did not in the least dim his pride in going.
That inflexibility also favored him, in a roundabout way, when, fresh to the campus, he came face to face with Master Varellis.
Firsthold Academy, at that time, allowed humans to attend up to the journeyman levels of study – any further was deemed a squandering of the short human lifespan – but the Masters were mer every one. It took centuries to acquire the knowledge necessary to become a Master of a field.
That was the theory. The fault in it was that, for all that longevity, a mer's skull had no more space in it than a man's. There always came a time when a mer must consciously choose what to remember. The Chamber of the Wise knew the secret Truths of their caste, of course, but it was said that after they had passed them on to their children, the vast structure of premises that lay beneath them were yielded, bit by bit, to the knowledge needed to adjudicate the decisions of the Chamber. Lathenil had met many a four-century-old mer who clung fast to what he learned in his first century of life, and more who were swept from their roots entirely in the current of the times.
Master Varellis' choices in this matter had been particularly poor.
At the end of the second week of seminary circle, the Master's model presentation on Queen Potema, which was to serve as the example for the apprentice-scholars' own historical research, was drawing to a close. Every historical perspective recorded on the topic had seen its day, and not a few perspectives on those historians themselves.
The last day, devoted to Potema's downfall, saw Maradora the Icebound hold forth that Uriel III fell because his mother had too often made the decisions for him, while Tertullius Scribus was quite sure she had ceased to advise him at a very early stage, and the boy had, understandably, failed to measure up. There were ample criticisms of both these historians, on the basis of presumed biases on their part which had nothing to do with the question of Uriel III.
Worst, a vast tract of time had been devoted to the theories of the Crystal Tower scholar Ma-Zeh (known everywhere but this seminary circle as The Mad), who had endeavored to prove that all accounts of the Wolf Queen's tyranny – accounts that had taken up most of the preceding week – had simply been fabricated after the fact to secure Cephorus' reign, and Varellis gave Ma-Zeh no more or less credence than anyone else.
And so, standing round in the circle. Lathenil had to ask the question:
"Forgive me, magister – which of the accounts do you believe speak truly? How do you judge?"
Varellis smiled indulgently at the question. "Ah, that is the core of it. There is no real way of knowing which is true. In fact, the only safe conjecture is that none are absolutely true – there are always vested interests at work, and flaws, and partialities. All we can do is to be absolutely comprehensive in our study."
Lathenil cleared his throat. "But Potema herself must have been actually born a Septim, or a bastard – Kintyra likewise. And she must have had a relation with her son. And been a tyrant, or not. Or a cannibal, or a part-daedra, or a vampire, or an underserved noble soul, or any of the other things we've discussed."
"No doubt," said Varellis, his voice turning a little loud and slow. "But there is no way of knowing. All we can apply is comprehensive study."
"To what end?" Lathenil's voice rose, and the deadly flush had come into his cheeks.
"The end is scholarship. That is why you are here." And Varellis turned his back on Lathenil to solicit other queries.
And so Lathenil never returned to Varellis' circle. He spent the next moons in the Library of Firsthold – the tuition paid for that as well as it paid for formal instructions, and the Library, rich in words and mute in foolish interpretations, was a palace of knowledge. There, books might be had from across all the Empire – in a scant two weeks, should the book happen to be in the Imperial City; ships from Firsthold to the capital always kept an Academy mer on board. And the book usually was there.
The service was not free, of course. The charge was actually quite substantial. So he made it up with piecemeal work, copying those pages that were worm-chewed or wearing, and as he did so, they were engraved into his mind. It was study and bread at one. He would, at times, bring pain to his wrist and be able to write no more. It was an intolerable frustration. But soon he had taught himself to write with his left hand as well as his right, that he could do the work with one hand as the other bathed in seawater to soothe it.
And he learned, he thought, some tricks of getting to the truth. He could not in good conscience dismiss a historian's vested interests out of hand. History, lived, couldn't help but cause strong passions. Still less could he count the personal flaws of the historians; these nearly always had nothing to do with the topic at hand. But the closer a writing came to the events, the closer to the truth – unless a source was written before a disaster had entirely unfolded, in which case it was like looking at a leaf and trying to determine the tree, but exposure to more such leaves always helped. Where the histories agreed on little but still held facts in common, those facts were to be deemed elemental. Where a historian had an obvious bias – at the very least, it told of that worldview.
And soon, the elemental threads of history began to show themselves: those courses of action and habits of thought that were always sound, or always perilous.
History was no meaningless exercise in self-justifying scholarship. It was a navigator's chart, marking routes, and harbors, and treacherous reefs. And the fact that no chart can be entirely accurate was no reason to draw deep, placid waters where rocks lie just beneath the surface. Beneath the rough map, there was always a real coastline, and every mortal plied it.
When his father burst into the copying chamber, saw him, and wept, Lathenil belatedly realized he had never informed him of his decision. A long, uncomfortable conversation ensued, in which Lathenil not only learned that he might have been dead in a ditch for all his family knew, but that scribing out full books paid much better, and that he might have thought to use healing potions on those wrists of his, and that he had better take a formal course of study or else come straight home to Sunhold.
He chose Alteration.
For all his love of history, Lathenil had no desire to leap into the field. He was only, at bottom, a guesser. He thought himself a better guesser than many, but guessing was the great Firsthold pastime, and there was no reason to add to the heap. And only a fool would wish to live through a history worth writing about.
But he never stopped returning to the library after the day's magical studies were done with. Never, until the day the daedra burst through the door of the reading room, maces upraised, and he barely escaped with his life. (The damage they wrought on the library itself was minimal; they came to kill, not to burn. He would have cause to remember that later.)
And, from that flight, refuge in Crystal-Like-Law.
He would often wonder what would have come if he had not been taken to that place. If he had not seen the great wonder of Summerset cast to the ground, if he had not witnessed the death and the horror under the coal-red sky, if he had not known his awful cowardice. Would he have spoken as a sane man? Would any in Cyrodiil have had cause to hear his words?
No. If he had never known in all horror the works of the daedra, the Thalmor lie would have meant little to him. If he had never witnessed the efforts of Rynandor, he would never have suspected that lie in the first place. If not for Crystal-Like-Law, he would never have spoken to begin with.
And if he spoke as a madman, even so, what could he do but speak?
