Disclaimer: I don't own Gargoyles.
The Magus, young Tom decided, was a very strange man, and he couldn't be sure if he liked him or not.
As they knelt and tried to figure out what was wrong with the wagon wheel, and Princess Katharine and Tom's mother looked for food, Tom thought. And thought.
The Magus had turned the remaining gargoyles to stone, possibly permanently. Tom's mother had described him as hotheaded, and if what the Magus had done to the gargoyles was any indication, Tom had to agree. What decent man turned others to stone?
He was very strange-looking, with a narrow, foreign face, slanted milky blue eyes and stark white hair, and he had a funny accent. He didn't talk like Tom and the Princess and his mother.
The Magus was very forbidding, Tom thought. At least he was to an eight-year-old boy.
But he never ran out of good stories.
"Did you ever hear of King Bran the Blessed of Britain?" the Magus asked, as he fiddled with the spokes of the wooden wheel, his brow furrowing. The man very much liked to talk, Tom knew that much.
But…
"Isn't it England now?" Tom asked, frowning at the way the Magus stiffened when he said that. "Down south, I mean. It's been called England for years now."
"It will always be Britain, Tom," he said quietly. "It will always be Britain."
.x.X.x.
Tom restrained hot tears from slipping from his eyes onto his baby-round cheeks as blood seeped sluggishly from the new, long scratch on his leg. His ribs ached.
Tom had heard the Princess say that they were near the sea, and he had wanted to see if he could spot it. Since the wagons were stuck again (the adults were in the process of freeing the wagons but it was slow going and he didn't think they would notice he was gone), Tom snuck off to find a tall tree to climb.
Well, he got near the top and he had a pretty good view of the surrounding countryside, but he couldn't spy the sea from the tree on the hill, and when Tom, disappointed, had tried to climb back down, he had slipped and fallen to the ground (thankfully still soft from recent rain) a branch tearing his trousers and putting a gash onto his right calf.
The fair-haired boy stumbled back to the wagons (he hadn't been gone long, and true enough none of them had noticed he was gone), determined to ignore the pain, and confident that it would go away if he just pretended it wasn't there.
But that night, by the time they had made camp and settled down, Tom's leg ached without cease and the familiar hard smell of blood rose unpleasantly in Tom's nostrils, robbing him of his appetite.
And he wasn't the only one who had noticed.
While Tom was trying to sleep, his leg burning and, insanely, itching, he heard someone kneel down beside him, and felt a hand light on his shoulder. He opened his eyes, and nearly jumped in shock.
It was not his mother's brown eyes that stared back at him, nor even Princess Katharine's gray eyes, but the light blue eyes of the Magus.
Tom felt something strange and wild fill him. He had never been in such close proximity to the man before; he didn't want to be. A mixture of fear of potent magic and old superstition filled the boy.
"Tom," the Magus whispered, "where are you hurt?"
Tom didn't answer. He flinched and scrambled away, closer to where the Princess was sleeping.
When he looked back briefly, Tom saw hurt flaring in the Magus's eyes, but the man said nothing. He drew to his feet, and silently walked in the direction of the wagons.
Tom's mother Mary, who had been stoking the fire, only shook her head and went back to her work.
Tom did not sleep much that night.
.x.X.x.
A few hours later, the fire cracked and popped, sending a small spark into the turf that fizzled almost as soon as it hit the ground, and Princess Katharine woke up.
Groggy with sleep, the Princess sat up slowly, blinking sleep out of her eyes.
She looked down at Tom and smiled. "Hello, Tom," Katharine whispered. "Are you still awake?"
"Yes, your Highness," Tom nodded, feeling his face grow warm.
Katharine laughed softly, but the humor abruptly melted from her face when she noticed the empty space across the fire.
"Mary," the Princess asked, "where is Magus?"
She didn't look up from her stoking of the fire. "He went to the wagons a few hours ago, your Highness, a few minutes after you fell asleep."
Katharine's brow furrowed. "And he's not been back?"
Mary shook her head.
The Princess frowned in worry, abruptly standing and swiftly walking the same trail the Magus had taken three hours previously.
Ignoring the pain in his leg, Tom snuck to the edge of the camp, for some reason insanely curious about what would be said between them.
He got to his hiding place in time to hear the Princess say, "Magus, you've done enough." The words were whispered and pleading. "It is not a cold night; come back to the fire and rest."
Tom didn't hear the Magus's murmured response, and he was too busy hurrying back to camp so they wouldn't notice that he had been spying to listen.
.x.X.x.
Tom's leg continued to hurt him throughout the day, a dull, aching throb as he walked.
"Now you know I don't know the first thing about mending," his mother told him sternly as she drove one of the wagons. It was true; Mary couldn't have mended so much as a cut, and the only time she had ever tried to set one of Tom's father's bones after he'd broken it, she'd ended up breaking it worse than before.
Asking Princess Katharine was unthinkable. So that left…
Tom groaned internally. Common sense was telling him two things. Common sense was telling him that after what had happened last night, the Magus would not be too keen on helping him. And common sense was also telling him that even if he was, he probably wouldn't be too pleasant about it.
Eventually, Tom decided that a few minutes of discomfort would be worth it if his leg would stop hurting.
"Magus?" The Magus was walking beside the wagon Princess Katharine drove, strangely abstracted and bizarrely quiet, and turned when he heard Tom's small voice.
Tom walked over, feeling his face grow hot. "Umm…can you…"
Something that sounded suspiciously like a half-suppressed quiet laugh sounded above him. Tom looked up and saw what was obviously a sincere attempt at a friendly smile. "Sit down, Tom. We will have to stop for a minute!" the Magus called to Princess Katharine, who turned around, curious. The wagons abruptly stopped.
The Magus knelt down beside Tom in the grass off the muddy road. "Where are you hurt, Tom?" The words were an echo of last night's would-be conversation, and Tom felt his face get red again, this time from embarrassment.
"My leg, sir." Tom fumbled at the rip in his trouser leg, rolling up the leg.
The Magus's brow furrowed when he saw the long scratch. It had stopped bleeding, but had not scabbed over. "Well, at least it is not infected," he mumbled.
As he examined the wound, Tom noticed small red blotches on the man's sleeves, knowing where they had come from. Rope burns that had left his wrists raw and bloody, with deep, blackening bruises underneath the surface of his skin. Probably swathed in bandages now, as Princess Katharine's were; Tom had seen the Magus tying bandages around her arms a few nights past.
Suddenly, the Magus got up, digging into one of the packs in the wagon Mary had been driving.
"What's wrong with him?" Tom heard his mother ask, her voice sharp with concern.
"He has scratched his leg," came the slightly distracted reply.
"Well, if it's just a scratch…"
The Magus didn't answer. Mary took this as cause for alarm, and slid down from the wagon.
"Heaven above, Tom! How on earth did you do this to yourself?"
"I fell out of a tree," Tom mumbled, not meeting his mother's gaze.
Mary's face blanched bone white. "Have you broken anything?" she demanded urgently.
"No, mother."
The Magus chose that moment to return (Tom personally thought that he had very good timing), his arms laden with several objects taken from the wagon.
"Make sure he has not broken any bones!" Mary insisted.
A slightly sympathetic smile was cast in Tom's direction. "Mary," the Magus started in a conciliatory tone, "I am sure that if Tom had broken any bones on his journey down from the tree—" the secret smile transformed from sympathetic to conspiratorial "—we would have known about it by now. Will you hold this for me?" He handed her a roll of bandages.
The Magus laid down what he had brought with him from the wagon: two goat skin containers and a small earthen jar. After a moment, he picked up one of the goat skins and uncorked it. "This will not hurt," he promised.
Tom gasped as shockingly cold water hit his leg. After the Magus finished, he corked the skin and opened the jar.
As he applied a thick, white paste to the scratch on Tom's leg, Mary commented, "I didn't know court magicians were taught the business of mending."
In reality, court magicians often had to double as physicians (because they were the only ones there with sufficient medical knowledge to function as such), but that was not where the Magus had learned his small skills at healing.
"My mother," he replied slowly, "was the village wise woman. She taught me what she knew."
Tom smiled slightly, remembering something his father had once said, with an air of both disdain and respect. "The village wise woman is the one you go to when you're hurt, sick, or if you want a cow's udder to dry up." He shot a glance at the Magus. It made sense, it really did.
But then Tom's smile faded. He missed his father.
Mary frowned. "Don't wise women usually teach their daughters their craft?"
A slightly embarrassed laugh followed. "I was my parent's last living child. They had no daughters."
"So she dragooned you into it?" Mary let out a small burst of laughter.
The Magus's mouth twisted in a wry smile. "In a manner of speaking, yes. I was brought north to Castle Wyvern when I was Tom's age, maybe a little younger, and while she was not able to teach me a great deal, I do remember how to dress wounds."
Finally, the Magus took the bandages he had given to Mary, tore off a length, and wound them tightly around Tom's leg. "Do not take these off," he said firmly. "Are you still in any pain?"
"Yes," Tom admitted.
The Magus's blue eyes softened slightly. "Then drink a little of this—" he handed Tom the other skin (it contained wine), before returning the other items back to the wagon "—and go sit with your mother. You do not need to walk on that leg any more today."
Tom decided that he might have been wrong about the Magus, as he clambered onto the wagon with his mother. He supposed that might not be a bad thing.
.x.X.x.
Suddenly, the Magus just stopped talking. He didn't stop altogether, but he was disturbingly silent for the most part, and even the Princess had a hard time getting words out of him.
The wagons were stuck in the mud…again. Tom and the Magus were looking for a long, sturdy branch to use to possibly lever them out of the mud. The sky was overcast; thunder rumbled in the distance.
The trees were small and gnarled; they were unlikely to find any branch of proper size and strength there.
Tom frowned. He heard sounds on the wind, voices and the sounds of animals; up ahead. He picked his way through the trees, and came to a place where the ground broke away in a sharp outcropping of a cliff, a near-vertical drop of approximately fifty feet.
A long line of people, bearing livestock and wagons full of supplies, wound their way north, like a snake across a mud flat.
"Magus! Come look at this!"
The older of the two clambered through the trees, struggling much more than Tom had to because of his larger size.
"Oh, my," the Magus murmured softly, an unreadable expression coming over his face. "Oh, my."
"What is it?" Tom asked, confused by the look on the Magus's face.
"They are from Powys," he explained, behaving as though that explained everything.
It didn't. "Where's Powys?"
"It is a kingdom in the Welshlands, neighboring the kingdom where I was born."
Tom smiled suddenly. "I knew it."
The Magus frowned, just as confused as Tom had been a few moments before. "You knew what?"
"I knew you weren't from this land. You have an accent to your speech," Tom explained.
They just watched for a few minutes, as the line went on and on northwards.
Then, something happened.
As two men, one far younger than the other (Tom supposed they were father and son; they looked very much alike), examined a hoof of one of the horses driving their wagon, for whatever reason, the other horse took fright and reared, a shrill scream from the horse's lips splitting the crisp, windless air.
Tom watched in horrified fascination as the grisly scene played out far below him. He wanted to scream, to shout a warning, but his lips would not move. His legs felt as though they were cast in solid lead.
The older man saw the horse rear and dived out of the way. His son wasn't so lucky.
The younger man stumbled and fell to the ground—
—And the horse's hoof came down squarely on the roof of his skull.
A sickening crack rang through the air, searing the ears and eyes of all those who witnessed it.
Tom wondered if he should be crying. He only felt numb, as though his heart had gone cold and frozen the rest of him along with it.
A woman came tearing down the road, drawn by the noise. Abruptly, she stopped, stock-still, staring at the prone form on the road. Then, harsh, demented screams drew from her lungs at the sight of the young man lying splayed on the road. The others barely seemed to care what was going on around them; they were dull and lifeless, their flat eyes staring straight ahead.
Suddenly, like being drenched with a bucketful of icy water, the world began to move again for Tom. He had no words for what he had seen with his terror-stricken eyes. Tom began to shake, his body struck by tremors; cold, noiseless tears slid down his cheeks. His small hands reached for the closes thing he could clench that would maybe bring some comfort. That thing happened to be the muddied skirt of the Magus's robes. In response, the Magus silently wound an arm around Tom's slight shoulders, saying nothing, like him, able only to watch.
The woman turned on the older man, and started screaming and howling at him, sobbing and beating his chest with one clenched fist. Tom could put no name to the terrible emotion in her ravaged voice. He had no understanding of the language she spoke (and only later would he wonder if this was the same tongue the Magus had spoken as a child), but he could well guess the words spoken, and shuddered away from them instinctively.
"Yes," the Magus whispered (he did indeed understand the words passed below) as the woman broke from her diatribe and, with the most terrible cry of all like a whole world being ripped asunder, threw herself across the fallen man's chest, weeping without end. His father just stared, his hollow eyes huge as tears poured down his face and into his beard. "After all, how can you forgive another, if you can not forgive yourself?"
Tom looked up, drawing in a ragged breath. The Magus's eyes were glazed and haunted; whatever he was seeing, it wasn't what Tom had seen.
But as soon as he had fallen into his reverie, he snapped out of it. He leaned down, and effortlessly swept Tom off of the ground and into his arms, starting to walk back towards the road.
Without warning, Tom felt sick and drained and so very old. "I want my father," he whimpered without knowing why.
The Magus's eyes clouded. "I am sorry, Tom."
All thoughts of a tree branch were forgotten.
.x.X.x.
That night, they didn't stop to make camp; the wagons kept on rolling through the night.
Tom laid nestled in the hay with the eggs, a cloak, whose he didn't know, draped over him. Just half an hour ago he had abruptly started to get drowsy, just after eating, which was odd, considering before then he had been dreadfully wakeful, his mind preoccupied by what he had seen from the cliff.
Now, his mind buzzed with sleep and, in a detached sort of way, he really didn't know why he had been bothered about that, he was so tired. He didn't perk up with interest when Princess Katharine and the Magus started to talk from up front in the wagon, just listened with a listlessness that belied his normal curiosity.
"Tom seemed very upset," the Princess whispered, momentarily turning her eyes back towards him. When Katharine and Mary had learned of what the two had witnessed, both had fussed shakily over Tom, his mother especially.
"What he saw frightened him. I did not particularly like it myself."
"He is calmer now." One of the horses whinnied, and Katharine leaned forward to hush it.
"Yes. Mary and I decided to give him something to help him sleep dreamlessly tonight; she mixed it in with his food before he ate." Tom didn't bother to connect that with why he was so sleepy.
The Princess sighed. "That was probably for the best. I can not think of too many pleasant dreams he would have after seeing that."
They fell silent for a few moments. The wind whispered and rustled through the trees, oak and maple and pine; an owl cried somewhere in the distance.
"Magus…you are…fond of the boy, are you not?" Katharine's tone was strangely hesitant.
"Yes, your Highness." Where Katharine's inflection had been tentative, the Magus's was somewhat uncertain. He didn't know any more than Tom where she was going with this.
"While you were away, Mary and I spoke. When we arrive at my uncle's court, I am not sure of the sort of welcome we will receive." Her voice was horribly quiet. "I am not sure it would be safe; Mary fears for her son's safety, and I can only agree with her. Mary and I decided that it might be best if she and Tom were to take the eggs and go on to a safer place. All I ask is that you go with them."
"No." His reply was almost immediate.
An exasperated sound could be heard from the Princess's lips. "You did not even stop to think, Magus! Please at least consider it!"
"Do not ask me to do this." A small note of anger and some other emotion, carefully hidden but not quite gone, started to work its way in to his voice.
"You will just be putting yourself in more danger, yourself, Mary, Tom and the eggs! You all deserve to have a life beyond this, and where are going, we may only find death!" Katharine's voice hit a near-hysterical tremor, the strain of the past week and a half finally showing through.
"I will not leave you, Princess. Not now, not ever. That much, you can be sure of." The Magus's voice was strangely fervent, and a spark of finality was woven in the words.
Understanding that he would not relent, Katharine let the matter drop.
It was at this point that sleep finally overtook Tom. He remembered little of the conversation in the morning, and what he did remember he convinced himself had been a dream.
.x.X.x.
Tom had started out trying to avoid the Magus like the plague, so he wasn't entirely sure when he started actively seeking out his company.
"Do you know any stories about fish?" Tom asked, half-desperate, half-exasperated.
They were in front of a stream, Tom standing, the Magus on one knee. They were trying to figure out how to get the fish without a fishing rod or any kind of net.
Tom was desperate because the silence of the man beside him was at times disturbing, and he missed the sound of him talking. It was only convenient that the man was so good at telling stories.
He was exasperated because nothing they did to get the fish seemed to work.
"Well," the Magus said slowly, "I do know some stories about fish, but I can think of one you might like better. It is a true story."
Tom felt a small smile unfurl on his face. "Will you tell me?"
"Of course.
"There was on the west coast of a kingdom in the Welshlands named Gwynedd, a boy named Gwyn.
"Gwyn's father was a fisherman, and every day he and Gwyn's two older brothers would get on a boat and sail out into the Severn Sea to catch fish.
"Gwyn could not go with them, though he wanted to badly. He was too young, too small, and somewhat sickly—never mind that his skin burned easily in the presence of the sun." The Magus smiled wryly, as he touched the back of his neck, where the skin was bright pink from sun exposure. "So he contented himself to sit on the shore and watch them. The boat would seem but a small shape on a roiling blue gray sea, a shifting dream image.
"Gwyn sat and watched for many months, until his father decided that he was old enough to start to learn how to work on a fishing boat."
"What happened then?" Tom piped up; the fish in the stream were all but forgotten.
"Well, Gwyn's father put him to work with one of his brothers casting the net out into the sea. The waters were choppy, and Gwyn and his brother lost control of the net. Gwyn fell into the sea.
"Gwyn could not swim very well, and as I said, he was small for his age. His father had to dive into the sea and catch him before he drowned.
"It was winter, and while Gwyn's father was alright, Gwyn was not." The Magus laughed somewhat ruefully. "He was sick for weeks with a nasty cough. His mother would not allow him to set foot on a fishing boat again, and truth be told, he did not particularly want to anymore. He still liked to watch them though as they worked—until his mother called him in of course."
Tom felt an odd prickling on the back of his neck. "Did you know this boy?" he inquired curiously.
The Magus laughed again, a quiet, knowing laugh, as he peered into the stream. "That boy was me, Tom. A long time ago."
Tom looked at him, startled. "Your name is Gwyn?"
His eyes crinkled upwards in a smile. "It means 'white'. I have not been referred to by that name for several years now."
"Why doesn't Princess Katharine call you that?"
"The Princess doesn't know my name." Upon seeing Tom's raised eyebrows, the Magus attempted to clarify. "I was brought to this land speaking exactly five words of your language—my master the Archmage (who mercifully spoke Welsh) had to teach me to speak your language before he could instruct me in anything resembling magic. Princess Katharine's father Prince Malcolm was the only one at Castle Wyvern who ever knew my name; the Archmage did not care to ask. I was usually known as "Boy", "the Archmage's boy", or "the novice", which angered the local monks to no end. I was only later referred to as the Magus."
Tom wondered if this meant he should call him Gwyn now, but decided not to. It was just too strange to think of him as anything but the Magus.
A fish splashed in front of them, the sunlight reflecting off of its silver scales. The Magus cast a twitching smile at Tom. "Let us see if this works." He rolled up his sleeves. "I am desperate enough to try."
Tom started laughing as the Magus dived headlong after the fish. He laughed because his attempt had the predictable result; the Magus's face and torso became much wetter than it had been before. The fish got away.
It was somewhat comforting to know that even with his subdued behavior, the Magus still didn't quite know how to think things through.
.x.X.x.
It was raining. Staying out of doors for so many days had made Tom realize just how much he disliked rain.
"Tom." He and the Magus were driving the second wagon through the muddy road (both fervently praying to God that neither of the wagons would get stuck again), and being splattered with the light rain.
"What is it?" Tom looked up, and was met with a slightly uncertain look.
"You do trust me, do you not?"
He nodded, smiling slightly. "Yes."
"Then take this." The Magus pulled something from the folds of his robes. Tom's eyes widened. It was a small knife, unmistakably meant for attack. The Magus held it out to him.
"What…why…"
The older man gave him a small, almost sad smile. "A royal court is a dangerous place, even for a young boy. Though I suspect you will be far safer in a courtyard and a stable than the Princess will be in the great hall, and though I dearly hope you will never have to use this, I would feel better knowing that you have this, in the event that something does happen."
Tom nodded again, taking the out held knife and fingering it slowly. "Magus…you never did tell me that story…about King Bran."
The Magus looked just a little surprised. "Do you want to hear it?"
"Sure."
"Alright. Long before the Saxons or even the Romans came to Britain—" Tom ignored the fact that the Magus called England Britain "—there was a son of Llyr named Bran."
All further storytelling was abruptly cut off by a squelching, all-too-familiar noise.
"Oh, Lord on high," the Magus sighed. "The wagon's stuck again!"