Outside the cottage, the wind howled bleakly, swirling the falling snow in fantastic arabesques, lifting and falling. It rushed through the chinks in the walls, the gaps where boards had sagged and nails rusted, and made the lamps gutter; it howled in the chimney as the hearth-fire popped and crackled.
In front of the fire, an old wooden rocking chair creaked as it moved back and forth, the figure in it facing into the flames as if lost in contemplation of the dancing lights. At the window, a second figure seemed almost as transfixed by the storm outside. She stood, leaning against the wall, one booted foot up on an old wooden box.
"It makes a person think," she said softly. There was no need for Margarita Surprise to raise her voice; there were only two rooms in the cottage and this one was small, easily heard throughout. "It's a real devil's storm, the wind and snow. The kind of night where you expect restless spirits to prowl." She sighed and repeated, "It makes you think."
She was silent for a short while, watching the dancing patterns outside. There was a bit of reflection in the glass from the light in the room, so that it looked as if the snow was being blown through the ghostly image of her own face.
It wasn't as good a face as it had once been, she thought. As a teenager, she'd looked almost cherubic, but in growing up she'd lost that appearance. The apple cheeks had thinned, lost color, while the eyes behind her spectacles no longer danced with a spark of mischief. She supposed that it only made sense. A cherub was an angel, after all, and there was little that was angelic in her life any more.
"These past five years...were they really worth it?" she asked aloud. Of course, the question was rhetorical, so she wasn't disturbed when the only response was the steady creak of the rocking chair. "This life, this calling...that's what it is. Or at least what it feels like. A purpose to my life, a driving reason for my existence, defining my passing days."
She unsheathed her athame and held it up. Only the razored edges and point glinted in the light; the flat sides were dull, deliberately left unpolished so the naked blade would not accidentally give away her position when she was trying to be stealthy. Most athame weren't even sharpened; their use in ritual magic was symbolic, not literal. But Margarita had used hers; both as a magic wand to draw her Runes and in its more basic function as a dagger the athame was the primary tool of her work.
"They say that problems should be solved by those who perceive them, because those are the people who understand them the best. And I believe that, I really do. The Archmage was an evil man. Trying to bring him back was a horrible mistake. But...not all of his former followers are like him. Some are honest people who wanted freedom from persecution, or who had no other choice, or genuinely believed he was the lesser of two evils. They don't deserve to be hunted down as traitors to the Crown.
"And that's just what the government would do," she went on. "Calvaros scared them badly. He's the bogeyman to the nobles and ministers, maybe even Her Majesty herself. It was luck as much as anything that he was beaten the first time, and there was a lot of luck in how Lillet stopped him, too. After all, the looping time was certainly nothing that could have been expected as a strategy. For that fear, they would seek vengeance, and it's the innocent ones who would be the easiest to find and punish."
She sighed heavily.
"But not all of them are innocent. Some of them are just as evil as the Archmage. Sorcerers, murderers, genuine traitors. Their crimes deserve punishment—and their future crimes have to be prevented. And since they can't be given to the authorities for arrest, for fear that they'll take the innocent ones with them, then it has to be done outside the law."
So she'd appointed herself to the position: judge, jury, and executioner. The hunter who tracked the remnants of the Archmage's followers, determined the measure of guilt, and if necessary carried out the sentence.
The athame's edge was keen, in steel and in magic.
"But is this really the way? Is it actually just pride that makes me think I have the right to do this? Or that I'm fit to do it, if it needs doing?"
She'd been thinking about that more often, lately.
"And am I even asking the right questions?"
She put the athame away, slipped it back into its sheath. She'd read somewhere that there were knights and warriors in the olden times who'd believed it was disrespectful to their sword to unsheathe it without the intent to draw blood. Margarita's dagger had become as much a weapon as any sword, after all, a weapon of violence rather than a magician's tool.
"Maybe the question is, why me?"
Problems should be solved by those who noticed them.
"Does that make it some kind of obligation? Because I see something wrong, do I have to fix it, no matter what it costs me?"
Did she like the person that she'd become? Was it necessary that she became that person? Was it even important?
Or was it only a trick of pride, a touch of fear, a bit of wrath mixed together to create what had seemed to be some kind of grand quest, but which might just be a fool's errand.
Flickering lamplight made her reflected face waver, its image turn more insubstantial. The rocking chair creaked as it slowly canted back and forth, the old wood flexing.
"I've done some good, though, haven't I? I've protected people, saved innocent lives who might have fallen prey without me?" She didn't even have to speak about hypothetical future victims; there had been crimes thwarted, villains stopped before they could act.
But wouldn't they have been saved anyway? nagged at her. If she'd given everything she'd known about the Archmage's remnants to the Crown, wouldn't they have hunted those criminals down and saved the same people—and perhaps more besides? Margarita couldn't be everywhere at once. It had taken her time and trouble to find her targets, assess their situation, and eliminate those she felt deserved it.
"The truth is, I picked one group of innocents over another. I chose to protect the Archmage's followers from the Crown by risking those who would be those followers' victims." She gave a rueful little chuckle. "I wonder why it might be that I had more sympathy for the side that's like me."
Though that was a lie in one way, and even worse than a lie in another: it wasn't that she'd balanced the two sides and picked the one she had more sympathy with. Rather, it was that she'd never even thought about there being two sides to compare.
Another sigh.
She ran her fingertips along the glass, feeling the cold seeping in.
"I suppose it really doesn't matter, now. I had choices, once, and I made them. Maybe this was the right path, maybe it wasn't, but trying to turn back or step off would be far worse than following it through to the end. Otherwise...what was it all for?"
Margarita looked back over her shoulder at the figure in the rocking chair, as if he would have some kind of answers for her. None were forthcoming, though, and she would have been very surprised to get any. The sorcerer's glassy eyes stared unseeingly into the fire, a trickle of dried blood marring the pristine whiteness of his beard, the larger stain over his heart less obvious against his dull brown homespun robe.
As she watched, another gust of wind found one of the gaps in the cottage walls and the chair swayed once more with its burden.
Then, Margarita turned back to the window, and once more returned to the solitude of her thoughts.