The Way of All Things

by ncfan

Sickness comes to Castle Wyvern, and leaves change behind it.

Disclaimer: I don't own Gargoyles.

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It started in the cooling time between summer and autumn, when the summer flowers in the fields, the lavender-magenta willowherb, the delicate clematis, the steadfast wild rose, were beginning to wilt and sleep in wait for the new summer to dawn in time, and tawny gold gilt and scarlet began to touch the bold green of oak leaves.

In Scotland, a pale, invisible phantom was tearing across the countryside towards Castle Wyvern, and death trailed totteringly in its wake.

.x.X.x.

In that year, the Viking raiders had begun to pillage the southern coast of Scotland again. A band of refugees had been granted sanctuary in Castle Wyvern until such time as they could return home again. As usual among such a band, disease ran rampant from the lack of sanitation and so many bodies in close quarters with one another. And masked by all those small and petty illnesses, something else got in.

The sickness was not plague; it had no name. It was one of those periodic scourges that routinely descended upon the land with ravening fury, reaping a virulent harvest, leaving madness, hysteria and death in its wake. Within days, two of the refugees were dead from it.

The infected were struck down with burning fever and eventual loss of lucidity, until the end when lucidness returned in the moments before death. It was contagious, highly so. The duration of the sickness was anywhere from a few days to a month, and there was a roughly half-and-half chance of survival if the sufferer survived the first, most violent bout; if they lived to see the fever break the first time, they would either recover or die.

Meanwhile, the sickness depopulated whole villages and towns in indiscriminate search of bodies to ravage.

.x.X.x.

"Why have you suddenly decided to mend every book in the library?" Katharine enquired curiously, placing the stack of venerable leather-bound tomes on the old, pleasantly worn wooden table. Honey-gold sunlight, neither hot nor cold but cool with a pall promising winter, filtered in through long, narrow clerestory windows carved in ancient, secret-bearing stone, thanks to the wooden shutters flung open to take advantage of the pleasant weather.

"Not all the books, my Lady," the Magus defended himself, carefully depositing his own share on the table. There were nine in total. "Just the ones most damaged."

Katharine smiled.

It was the fifteenth year of Katharine of Wyvern's life, and already she felt as though she had watched an entire lifetime pass before her eyes. She had reveled in swift, glorious summers and experienced the bitter cold of the deepest winter. She'd watched with primal fear from an embrasure in the stone walls as battle raged on the turf below, and felt her stomach clench all the more after night fell and the gargoyles of Wyvern descended without mercy upon their foe. Katharine had felt joy, pain, sorrow, and love, and was fated to feel it all again many times before she passed into the next life.

Castle Wyvern was possessed of a better library then most of the castles in Scotland, there being a little over fifty books in that small, well-lit room, but to Katharine it was small and seemed to be growing smaller with each passing day, as she read her way through more and more of the books housed there.

One of the books in particular that the Magus seemed so intent of repairing, as he sat down at the table and drew, among other things, needle and thread near him, was one Katharine recognized well. The Iliad should be in need of reparation, Katharine thought with a wry twitch of the lips. She and the Magus had gone through that book many times in the past; to Katharine, reading every fascinating word it had made the arduous process of assimilating Latin worthwhile.

As she lightly brushed her fingertips over the friendly, familiar, time-beaten cover of what Katharine considered the best piece of literature she had ever laid her eyes upon (and Heaven forbid Father Fionnlagh discover that she preferred reading "pagan rubbish" over devoting her time and attention to the Holy Scripture), Katharine was suddenly struck by wholesale dizziness. Her head felt light, her stomach swarmed with unsteadiness. Her legs went weak; her sight swam.

Katharine's knees buckled, and she steadied herself on the table. The dizziness went away as quickly as it had come upon her; the Magus didn't seem to have noticed, from the way he was poring over the book he was repairing, stitching loose vellum pages, soft with age, back into the binding with almost loving care.

Katharine frowned; what had that been about? She had never been given to bouts of weakness in childhood, and she didn't think that was going to change now. Then Katharine remembered. The wine at last night's table had tasted a bit…off. That must have been it. She brushed the incident off.

Normally, Katharine would not have found the repair of ancient, careworn texts to be much to her taste, but at that moment she would have done anything to break the sheer monotony that had fallen over the castle.

"Magus?" Katharine let her eyes rest on the clerestory window, peering through to the sea beyond, rough waters sparkling stormy gray and smooth malachite green closer to the shore.

"Yes, my Lady?"

"Why were you not in the Great Hall last night during the evening meal? You were not ill, were you?"

A small, short laugh followed. "I was quite well, my Lady. I had a great deal of work to do; I came down later in the evening."

The Magus must have noticed the slightly strained movements of her facial muscles and the twist of her lips. "Why? What happened?" His voice went from easily disinterested to tense and concerned.

Katharine winced; she hadn't meant to show her concern. "Constantine pressed his suit again." She forced her voice to be light, but in truth she was terrified that her father might actually listen to the tall, brooding young man. Handsome Constantine may have been, but agreeable to the idea of marrying him Katharine was not. He had left that morning, just as dark and intense as ever.

"And this troubles you?" A sympathetic look was shot in her direction; here, Katharine knew was someone who would bear her opinions in confidence.

Katharine shook her head, her dark brown hair flying as she did so. "I may just be acting foolish, but… There is something not right about him. His smiles never reach his eyes, and I feel like he is just acting for our benefit, keeping his real self buried down."

The Magus tucked a white strand of hair the color of old, bleached bone behind his ear to stay out of his face while he worked. "Lady Katharine, you have absolutely nothing to worry about," he murmured clinically, moving on to restore the text itself, coming to a page where the ink of the Latin words—he would have to leave alone the beautifully elaborate artwork in the margins, which in any case had not faded nearly as much as the words—had faded and began to go over the text in fresh ink with an enviably steady hand. "Constantine may be a persistent man, but that does not change the fact that he is a landless son of a deposed king. Prince Malcolm and King Kenneth may humor him for now, but the point is, my Lady, they will never allow his pursuit"—the Magus spat out the word pursuit "—of you to go beyond flattery." He looked up and smiled wickedly. "I do not like him either."

Katharine burst out laughing. "You do not like any of them, Magus!" It was true; the Magus had always despised on first sight any of the men, young and old alike, who had pressed for Katharine's hand since it had started over two years ago. Katharine had no idea why, but she found it oddly comforting.

The bout of dizziness came on again, but Katharine ignored it.

The Magus laughed under his breath. "You will excuse me if I do not find any of them trustworthy." He dipped the quill in his inkpot, and the acrid smell of the ink hit Katharine hard upside the head. She'd never noticed how acrid it was before.

Katharine grinned. When they had first met, it had been a child talking to a child. She'd first noticed him as a small child, because he was, like her, someone who really didn't fit in anywhere, who didn't associate with the other children because for whatever reason they avoided him, the way they avoided Katharine because of her rank. Katharine had warmed up to him almost immediately and found extremely dysfunctional ways of showing it; it included hair-pulling (the unusual pale color of his hair had unfortunately for him made it an excellent target) and her sticking her tongue out at him because she knew it drove him crazy. The Magus, predictably, had not warmed up to Katharine, not immediately; it took him a couple of years; in the interim, he looked at her as a sort of little sister who delighted in driving him to madness. After they did become reciprocal friends, they indulged in a strange sort of camaraderie, of wit and close friendship.

Then, as they got older, the large age gap between them seemed to widen and it became a friendship of an adult and a child. This was only underscored by the Magus become Katharine's Latin tutor. Katharine became aware of a gulf between them.

But then the years turned again, Katharine grew up, and they were finally on equal footing again, two young adults, equal footing intellectually and to a lesser extent emotionally. But Katharine soon became aware of another gulf opening up between them as the one of age fell away. She didn't quite understand it, but she knew it made her sad, the way a child was sad when something pleasant ended.

However, in that one day, locked away in the library mending worn out volumes, Katharine could forget that. Forget that she and her friend were both changing, growing closer and growing apart, forget that she was forever being besieged by suitors, forget that her father might eventually decide that one of them was a useful man to have and that his daughter would prove useful in ensuring their loyalty, forget every bit of responsibility that would fall upon her the day her father died, and forget everything.

"Magus, can I help you at all with that?"

A simple, ready pleasure suffused his face. "Of course!" He gestured to the other chair. The Magus spoke again, but Katharine didn't hear.

The dizziness had returned again, too insistent to be ignored. Katharine braced her hands on the table, trying desperately to steady herself. Why was this happening to her? Her sight paled and dimmed, her blood seemed to stop in her very veins. She was swimming down, down, down, but she wasn't swimming, she was drowning.

As though it were in another room, Katharine heard a thump and something crashing. Her glazed eyes studied the ceiling with fascination.

From far away, she heard someone crying out, the bang of a chair hitting the floor. "My Lady, my Lady!" There was a short pause. "Lady Katharine?" Another pause, strangely humming. "Katharine! Katharine!"

Then, there was nothing.

.x.X.x.

The Magus's shouts for help alerted two guards, who immediately helped return Katharine to her quarters. Her father and a physician were summoned the moment she was laid down on her bed.

The Magus wasn't exactly what anyone would consider capable of keeping a cool head in moments of crisis, but he tried his best to rationally explain what had happened to Katharine.

The physician took in the sparse amounts of information gleaned from the highly overwrought young man with terse nods of the head and an almost disdainful air, before leaning over his royal patient and taking in the sight of her. Katharine had already fallen into fever, if the burning of her skin was any indication. He performed a slow, painstaking examination of his young patient.

All this Katharine watched with a strange, almost detached fascination. The physician's eyes were brown, and bore into her as though he was seeing through her, not just looking at her.

Eventually, the physician gave his diagnosis. "It is as I suspected. Two of the refugees have died from this, and your daughter, your Highness, seems to have contracted it as well. It is the sickness."

Everyone knew exactly what 'sickness' the old man was speaking of.

And Katharine registered with disinterested amazement as the Magus, for whatever reason, burst into tears at the flat, impersonal diagnosis.

Magus, why?

.x.X.x.

Among the residents of Castle Wyvern, Katharine was the first to catch the sickness, but she was only the first of many. The sickness naturally spread like wildfire amongst the refugees, who had been the original carriers; within the week, all but a dozen were dead. Many of the castle guards and servants fell ill, unable to attend to their duties. Even some of the gargoyles were struck down, though apart from the youngest they recovered quickly.

A deathly quiet was descending upon Castle Wyvern.

Both the Magus and Prince Malcolm fell ill. The Magus had it but mildly and was well enough to walk within days. Prince Malcolm was not so lucky.

.x.X.x.

Even with a multitude of wool blankets and fur coverlets pulled about her person, even with a fire roaring in the hearth, even with the bedchamber as unbearably sweltering as it was, Katharine was still cold enough to shiver.

Her body ached as though she were an exhausted soldier put through drill upon drill, battle after battle… The very walls of her bedchamber seemed to groan with her hurts and the deep pangs in her muscles and her bones.

A small image formed in Katharine's mind, inflating until it became life-sized and her muddled mind recognized it for what it was. She was recalling her mother, after she had had one of her uncounted miscarriages. Princess Elena had lain spread eagle in bed, listless and pallid, silent and unresponsive, her thick wealth of golden brown hair spread about her, dull and limp.

Katharine knew she must look much as her mother had. She owed the coloring of her hair and eyes to her father, and her eyes were softer in shape, but Katharine knew she looked exactly as her mother had when she had lain near death, fading in and out until finally the candle burned down. That disturbed her immensely.

The Magus stood near the door, sweat rolling down his brow from the sheer heat of the bedchamber, unwilling or unable to close the distance between himself and her bed. He doubted Katharine even knew he was in the room.

He had never felt so helpless in his life, not even when Prince Malcolm had lain on his bed with poison coursing through his veins. There she was, struck down by fever, within arms length of Death, and he could do absolutely nothing but stand there like an imbecile. The Magus knew that there was no spell that could expel a sickness such as this from the body. Perhaps one day there would be, but for now…

Experimentation with different spells was a dangerous business. The results of the first test and many tests afterwards tended to range from absolutely horrific to ungodly in the extreme in terms of sheer monstrosity. Experimentation was forbidden on live subjects, though that had never stopped the Archmage.

But the Magus was not his master. He was not the Archmage, willing and often taking a sadistic pleasure in playing with people's lives and subjecting them to gruesome torture for his own amusement. He was not willing to maim, disfigure, kill, to barter away his morals and his soul in pursuit of one small thing that might not even accomplish what it was meant to.

The voice of his mother, collected, clever, and as remote as the Isle of Mona on the Severn Sea, came calling back to him out of the mists of time. It had been upwards of fifteen years since the Magus had laid eyes on his mother, but he could still remember. He could remember her pale blue eyes sparkling as she pointed out to him which plant brought down fever, which eased infection, as she spoke of remedies and traditional cures, which ones worked and which didn't.

He would do what he could, whatever he could.

But it still made the Magus sick to know that if the rampant pestilence decided it wanted Katharine for its own, he would be powerless to do anything but watch.

.x.X.x.

Prince Malcolm deteriorated even more quickly than his young daughter. Though the pestilence was at least not a wasting disease, he lost weight off of his bones from inability to eat and ingest anything solid.

He had ever been a strong man, and it frightened anyone and everyone to see Prince Malcolm brought so low, lying prostrate on his bed, growing thinner and smaller by each day. When he was conscious, he asked for his wife, and that roused even more fear.

The old physician had died of the very sickness he had strived to treat, and was replaced by a new one. This one took one look at Malcolm, and knew he was going to die.

But he said not a word.

.x.X.x.

"Absolutely not! You are not bleeding her!"

To say that the Magus and the new royal physician butted heads over Lady Katharine's treatment would have been an understatement.

The Magus had first noticed the dark marks on Katharine's arms, particularly on the inside below the elbow. Horrified that her illness might have morphed into plague, he had been seized by panic until he realized that the marks weren't on the right place to be plague.

That was when he realized that someone had performed the process of bloodletting on her.

Now, the physician was attempting to explain to an utterly irate Magus that bloodletting was a perfectly reasonable procedure.

"Sir," the man explained in a conciliatory, even patronizing tone, sweat beading in his lank brown hair, "bloodletting is necessary in the Lady's case! It will restore balance to her humors and relieve her of her illness! If I do not do this, she could die!"

"Rubbish!" The Magus snarled. "You're only making her worse!" He moved between the physician and the bed where Katharine laid half-conscious, watching the scene play out before her in a mixture of amazement and confusion; she had no idea what they were going on about.

He started up again, pointing a finger at the smaller man threateningly. "If you come near Lady Katharine or Prince Malcolm with that lancet again…"

The physician laughed, an ugly, derisive sound. "You'll what? Turn me into a frog?"

"I'll make you wish I had! Now out! Out!"

The physician decided at that point that it would be prudent to absent himself from Lady Katharine's quarters. Quickly.

The Magus hurled the bowl and lancet after him out the open door.

In retrospect, much later, the Magus would reflect that it probably hadn't been a good idea to so forcibly expel and alienate the physician. But if bleeding her to the extent that she became anemic was all he had intended to do, then the Magus did not regret it.

Still fuming, he noticed a jar sitting on a table. Picking it up, the Magus held it close to his eyes. The contents were black and lumpy, with a notable coat of slime.

He promptly threw it into the fire.

A noxious, overwhelming smell of burning flesh greeted him after doing so. The contents shriveled and writhed, inexplicably letting out small screams of anguish.

Dear God. The Magus felt his face go slack in horror. Leeches. He didn't have the heart to nudge the ones writhing away from the fire back in, though he got rid of the dozens of little bodies later and aired out the room.

It was probably a good thing the physician had chosen to run out, because if he had still been in the room, the Magus probably would have killed him on the spot.

"Bloodletting and leeches," the Magus muttered disgustedly. "Ha! I have my own ways, and they do not involve parasites or knives."

.x.X.x.

First, it was a priest in the corner of her room.

Katharine could not and would never be sure if she was hallucinating or not. All the time, she was light-headed, her sight faded in or out, and her tongue seemed swollen and bloated in her mouth.

There was a priest in the corner of her room, never moving. He huddled, glowering at her, singing a hymn in Latin with a rough voice, the words almost accusing. The words were holy, but the voice behind them spoke of sin and damnation, of her faults and wrongs.

Then, the scene shifted. It was no longer a priest, but her mother, and the hymn was being sung in English. The room was suddenly flooded in sunlight Her mother shifted around the room, arranging earthenware vases of wildflowers, her golden-brown hair catching on sunlight and glistening like spun gold and bronze. It was always the back of her, never her face. She seemed to be a faceless phantom.

Finally, all that melted away. The voice was again male, slightly scratchy and hovering between tenor and baritone. The song was not the hymn, and it was neither in English nor in Latin. She wasn't sure how she knew, but it sounded more like a lullaby.

Katharine listened with fascination as, while the Magus tried to get her to eat something and take the concoction he had mixed, he absently sang Welsh lullabies over her.

.x.X.x.

"Keep the heretic out," the black-clad Father Fionnlagh barked to the guards, who dutifully bolted the door, ignoring the full-bodied slams against the door that could only be that of a grown man putting his full weight against the door trying to get in. "I want no interruptions."

Katharine opened her eyes, and found the father standing over her, a look on his face that conveyed both the stern and almost pitying.

He began to chant in Latin, moving around the bed. There was something official, something ancient about it.

Then Katharine realized. He was reciting the Last Rites.

But I'm not going to die! she tried to scream. But Katharine couldn't scream. She couldn't give voice to her protests. She couldn't talk, she couldn't lift her head or any of her limbs. She was so weak in her body that she could barely blink her eyes. She could only watch.

She knew she wasn't going to die, and she had a feeling Father Fionnlagh knew it too. The bizarre, macabre, premature ceremony was over quickly, and as Father Fionnlagh moved to leave, he muttered in Latin:

"Deus animae tuae misereatur."

.x.X.x.

The former gargoyle leader well-recognized the head of bone white hair and matching mantle before he landed on the battlements.

"It's not exactly a good night to be out, lad," he remarked, landing beside the young Magus who stood rigid, outlined white against an onyx sky.

The night was quiet, but the air was full of the smell of rain and clouds gathered in the distance. There was also a harsh, chill bite in the small sea breeze.

The Magus didn't answer, staring out, not to the sea, but to the small congregation of flickering fires, from that distance seeming to be only little candles, in the distance on the mainland. Another band of refugees, not allowed into the castle because of the sickness.

"I…had a question for you," he murmured somewhat hesitantly, not meeting the gargoyle's eyes. It was hard, hard being there, hard asking him, but he had to do it. For Katharine and Prince Malcolm. Especially Katharine.

The old gargoyle raised an eyebrow. "And?"

The Magus focused his eyes on the old gargoyle, avoiding the sight of the gargoyle's one, milky eye; his old master's work. "You have lived long, have you not?"

The gargoyle snorted, the wind catching his gray hair. "Do you consider one hundred and thirteen to be old, lad?"

"You must have lived through other outbreaks of this sickness. Have you ever seen anything used against it that worked?" The Magus was enough himself to know that his words were tainted with desperation with fear, but he didn't care anymore if the old gargoyle noticed.

The mentor said the last thing the Magus wanted to hear. "Nay." Two eyes, one blind, one seeing, fixed on his two good eyes. "The only cure there is, really, is time. Give the sickened time, and they'll either live or die." The words were drawn out, old.

The Magus rubbed the skin between his eyes, bracing on the battlements. "I just…" He almost laughed; was he really confiding this to the old gargoyle? "I feel so helpless. There is close to nothing I can do to help them, any of them."

Then the mentor knew what this was all about. His hard face softened somewhat. "Lady Katharine is a strong lass," he told him, and spoke the truth. "She'll recover."

There were many more things the mentor could have said about Lady Katharine, but he let that drop. For all her blind fear and dislike, she wasn't a bad lass in her self and he hoped she would live for her own sake. And he knew it would have destroyed the lad in front of him to see her die.

The Magus nodded, closing his eyes. "I pray so," he murmured, his voice. The words of Father Fionnlagh rang in his ears still.

"The prayers of a conjurer will not help her now, only quicken her soul's descent into hell."

He would not listen.

Suddenly, something occurred to him. "Have any of your people fallen ill?"

The mentor's face darkened. "Aye. Two of the younger bairns in the rookery have died."

The Magus winced. "I am…sorry." And he was surprised to discover he meant it. It was probably the only civil conversation they would ever have.

"How does the Prince fare?"

That made the Magus turn away. "He… The Prince continues to be ill; his condition has not bettered."

A deep shudder went through the mentor's thick body. "That bad, then?"

"It just feels like it did after the Archmage poisoned him. Like the whole castle's holding its breath."

.x.X.x.

Katharine was dreaming, she was sure.

The field was virtually awash with yellow. Yellow flowers, yellow pollen, yellow butterflies, yellow everything. It was almost disturbing.

That she did not recognize this field disturbed her even more.

There was a strange smell in the air. It was musty and sweet, damp and old. Katharine wondered if it was death.

But no.

It was only decay.

Something was not right.

The trees were dead, the plants wilted, and all was but a twisted, mangled dream.

Something that could never live.

Katharine woke up, horribly weak, alone, but alive. It was stone silent in her quarters; the fire was out.

There was an urge in her, wild and primal, to get up, to walk, to go into the hallway outside.

With shaking hands, she started the laborious process of pushing away the myriad blankets and governments. There was no more strength left in her arms than there would have been in that of a newborn, but eventually she prevailed.

Walking proved difficult.

Her legs shook horribly, and she nearly fell several times. Her bare feet felt the chill of the floor where the lambskin rugs stopped through her entire body; her white linen shift tangled in her legs.

The door was ajar; she at least didn't have to push at it.

Stepping into the hall, leaning against the wall to keep from collapsing to the ground, an empty hall, eerily silent, met Katharine's sight.

Empty, but save one.

The Magus sat at a bench, his face utterly stricken. Then he looked up, and he blanched white as the pale specter of Death.

"My Lady." It took him barely a second to cover the distance between them. "You should go back inside."

"My father," Katharine croaked through parched lips. She had to make him understand. Why could he not understand? "My father."

Comprehension dawned in the Magus's eyes or seemed to. "Do not worry," he said softly. "Prince Malcolm is no longer in need of worry." Some note that Katharine did not recognize made his voice quaver.

She was too weak to protest or fight when the Magus took her arm in his hand and pressed at the small of her back with the other, gently pushing her forward back into her bedchamber.

She would have her answers soon enough.

.x.X.x.

That night, the Magus was back on the battlements, knowing the old gargoyle would come.

When he did, the Magus had only a few words to spare for him.

"Please find the one called Goliath. His Highness the Prince has asked to speak with you both."

.x.X.x.

The Magus leaned against the wall next to the heavy wooden door that led into Prince Malcolm's bedchamber.

The words that had been spoken for him, and for him alone before he'd been sent to find the two gargoyles still rang in his ears, still made his heart pound.

"Magus." Prince Malcolm hadn't called him by his given name since his young daughter had several years ago dubbed the nickname upon him. As much as it pained the Magus to admit it to himself, he missed hearing someone refer to him by his given name. "I need you to do me…a favor."

He leaned over his liege lord, forcibly reminded of a scene seven years past when a then-dying Prince Malcolm has asked a favor of him. And evidently Malcolm remembered too, for he smiled.

"It is always you I must ask this of, it seems, for I trust no other with the task. I…do not think I will be walking away from this one. When I am gone, I need you to look after Katharine for me."

"Sire," the Magus pointed out, a hint of wry humor entering his voice. "When you are gone, the whole castle will be looking after Lady Katharine."

He laughed. "Aye, that they will. But you know what I mean. You two have ever been close. She will need a friend, someone who can give advice she can trust. Just look after her, please. Consider it the plea of a father who is not sure what sort of world he's leaving his daughter to."

Yes, he would look after Katharine. He would look after her until the day that he died.

He didn't need Prince Malcolm to ask him to do that.

Now, all was silent but for the beating of the Magus's own heart.

He knew that when the gargoyles returned into the corridor, it would mean that Prince Malcolm was dead.

.x.X.x.

When Katharine woke up three days later, she found the Magus sitting in a chair near her bed, reading through the Iliad with a disinterest in what was going on around him that she knew to be false.

Something was wrong. His face was drawn, even more so than it had been during the days past. He seemed utterly spent, like the life had been forcibly sucked from him.

But Katharine was willing to ignore that.

She smiled. "Magus." She spoke softly to get his attention, and found that her voice, and her body along with it was stronger than it had been in what seemed like an eternity.

He looked up and smiled, relief shining plainly on his face. "Your Highness." He moved to stand by her bedside. "How do you feel?"

Katharine frowned. The altered form of address caught her attention. "Magus," she whispered softly, fearing the answer, "what has happened to my father?"

.x.X.x.

It was still early, only about seven in the morning. Everything seemed cast slightly gray, from the rolling hills to the sky above to the sea below.

Prince Malcolm had been buried outside the castle on Wyvern Hill, next to his wife and all of the brothers and sisters that Katharine had never been able to know.

You…died?

It seemed so inconceivable. The strong arms that had lifted her as a baby, the laugh that had filled her heart, the love that had always sheltered her and made her feel warm on the coldest winter day… The father who had been so much more than that.

And now he was gone.

It wasn't fair. It couldn't be. He had been young, despite the gray clustering in his dark hair. He had been healthy. He had been good, he had been kind.

He was her father.

Katharine shook her head, almost wishing that she could cry. But as she ever was during such times, she was almost perfectly composed, despite her own wishes.

"He was lucid in the end." The Magus had accompanied her out; he kept his distance, trying to afford her some measure of privacy. "He wished you luck, and wished to convey his love." Even his voice had to crack at that.

And now there was a new gulf between them too, and Katharine wished more than anything that she could close it up. But she didn't know what it was she wished for.

Shoes hit the wilting grass, and he was standing next to her. "Are you well, your Highness?"

And suddenly Katharine knew what she wanted. She wanted things to stay the same between them. She didn't want things to change.

Without really knowing why, with no purpose in mind, she pulled him to her, shaking with repressed emotions of anger, grief, fear, pain all twisting inside her like a writhing snake as she clung to that one illusion that she had always had when she was a child, that nothing would ever have to change.

It was the Magus who pulled away first, giving her a bewildered stare that was confused, understanding, shocked and tender all at once. He seemed to be having difficulty deciding whether he knew what that was about or not.

Katharine self-consciously brushed a strand of hair out of her face. "I am sorry, I should not have done that. Just…" She smiled weakly up at her oldest friend, who cautiously smiled back. "Just promise me things will not change between us, at least?"

In the interim of silence, the sea broke against the jagged rocks below, booming and roaring hollowly in the melody that Katharine had always loved.

Finally, the Magus did speak. "I…can't." It seemed to affect him terribly to say so, smiling as though with a mouth full of broken teeth, but say it he did. "Your Highness, if you watch for long enough the very face of the Earth will change. Change will come whether you welcome it or not."

Biting her lip, Katharine turned her eyes down the hill northwards. It wasn't what she wanted to hear. Why couldn't things stay the same, just for a little while?

Then, the neigh of a horse, several horses, cut into their hearing.

A small party of riders made their way south to Castle Wyvern. They were dressed richly. Katharine recognized who rode at the head.

"King Kenneth comes to pay his respects," the Magus murmured, peering as she did towards the party.

Katharine knew he was right. Change would come, and it would sweep her up with it, regardless of her personal inclination.

Forcing her legs to move, Katharine began the long walk down the hill to meet her uncle's party.