There was a key-fiddle somewhere in the hall, its smooth tones ringing out over the cacophony of men's voices. Midwinter. Though dark for much of the day, and even darker through the night, the dwellings of men were lit with flame and candlelight, and hung with greenery and strands of candied nuts and dried fruit. There was no lack of joy, and the mage walked among them all, casting glowing baubles of light into the rafters where they danced like fireflies. The maids wore their white robes on this night, their hair loose and shining, their cheeks aglow. Men's faces were rosy with drink, their boasts hurled at each other with good-natured loud arrogance. The mage's roving eye caught that of a young girl who'd been stealing glances at him all evening, and as he passed by, he caught her around the waist and whirled her into a dance, the key-fiddle joined now by flutes and pipes and drums. The roof-beams resounded with music and laughter, and he thought that life could be no better than this, and if worse was to come, well then, they'd all face it with full bellies and proud hearts.
He wanted a kiss from the girl he threw carelessly into the dance, following behind her with agile steps and catching her up again, twirling her along his arm and behind him. He heard the ghost of her giggle and grinned; then he felt her hands slide along his flanks and curve round the small of his back as she danced round again to face him. But as he drew her close to take what he wanted, her father snatched her by her shoulder and pulled her back.
'Not for you!' The man jutted out his chin, his forked blond beard quivering in his indignation. He shoved his daughter away. 'Get back to your mother, wench! I'll have words with you later.'
'She is free to dance with whichever man she chooses,' said the mage. He folded his arms across his chest. 'Any maid here is free to choose.'
'Still not for you, heathen witch! The one you will have has already been chosen, and I'll not have your hands defiling my daughter too!'
So that was it. There was a new religion sweeping the land, its black-robed monks proclaiming peace and compassion, and redemption in the afterlife for all those who would turn coat and swear to the new god. The mage had thought that men raised by the sword would be eager to throw the monks out on their backsides, but it seemed not all men thought them a scourge.
'You disapprove of the rites,' he said. It was a statement of the obvious, not a question, but the man snarled, grabbed the mage's collar, and smashed his fist into his jaw.
The mage went down, spitting blood, but was up again in an instant, fire from his fist slamming into the dirt at the warrior's feet. Around them, a circle bereft of people had opened up. If there was to be a fight between a warrior and a mage, then most people wanted to be far away from it. They knew their mage well; they knew he could fight.
'You don't want to do this,' he told the warrior. 'Trust me. Your daughter isn't worth fighting over. And if you wish to fight someone anyway, then why not fight the son of a bitch who has gotten her with child?'
A gasp rang out round the hall, and hot on its heels was a deep, vibrant growl of rage from the warrior's throat. But it wasn't aimed at the mage, who straightened from his fighting stance and walked away into the night, determined to drink as much of the potent värrtir spirits as he could find. Come tomorrow, there would be two lots of blood on his hands, and he wouldn't be able to wash its stain from his soul.
Soufien knew where he was bound. If he closed his eyes, the images came unbidden, second nature, to his brain, and sometimes he couldn't shake them free, but such was his country. A part of him, the prison of his own soul. He called it home, to himself as well as others, in the hope that somebody, somewhere, would be convinced.
He wasn't.
The high tower of Cartha towered above the canyon, red rock, red sky, and red, red dust. It rose from the rock and pierced the blazing sky, a sheer arrow of stone where no foot could gain purchase to enter. On one side was a desert of gold-red sand, on the other, the sheer drop of the canyon. Such barrenness, it was said, could only come from the heart of the mage who had built it, crumbling the land with his bitterness and hate, turning all hard as iron.
Some others said he was cursed, that everything he touched turned to red dust, a reminder of the blood he'd shed. Innocent blood. For centuries, the stories said, the canyons and mountains had rung with his howls, turning the milk of mothers to sour curds, and the blood of warriors to yellow bile. The walls of Cartha ran red with blood and echoed with screams. Once, the road, now long lost, had been lined with gibbets. The stories said that the crows that crowded the tower's roof were there in the hopes the gibbets would come again...
The land is the soul of its mage.
But that was a long time ago. No-one alive now knew the real reason for Cartha. The place held no sound more sinister than the endless wind that cried in through the tunnels of rock, and nothing moved in the emptiness save for the gallows-birds that gathered on the roof of the tower to survey the red, red dust. Its owner, when he was there, barely occupied it. His presence, in other places vast and imposing, shrunk in on him when he was here, in Cartha, and he became as a ghost, the wraith the ordinary folk said he was as he moved silently among his books and herb-pots. Even the dust remained undisturbed by him.
His attention elsewhere, he landed badly with a crack of a fragile bone. He silently screamed as he reset it, infusing his own body with numbness, just enough to dull the pain and allow him to hobble to the kettle that hung, forlorn, on an iron hook in the hearth. No fire was lit, but it was only the water he wanted. Taking a handful of herbs from a cracked terracotta cannister, he dropped them into the kettle, swirled the water with his knife, and poured a cup. It tasted foul enough, its colour inky with the plant's black liquor, but for all this he never bothered to sweeten it. He drained it, then sat to let the painkiller work. It was a devillish way to travel, but there was no beast that would carry him, not even one of the mighty winged wyrms from the North. He'd learned the trick from one of the great mages who had once lived, years ago, so many now that he could barely remember a time when he'd not known its secrets.
He had not used his study as such for long years. He hadn't needed to. Even had he sought new knowledge, there was no book that contained anything he didn't already know, and he'd written many of those whose subject was magic. No, this room was little more than a dumping ground, a prison, a hated box he couldn't get out of, not for long. Always Cartha dragged him back, just when he thought he could get the night's cold into his bones, it dragged him back and infused him once more with heat. He'd burn here, he knew. One day.
Until then, this untidy room of dust and relics, was his...home. He had little inkling of what significance that word had these days, but he had no other. Home was where the soul was.
The room, located at the top of the tower, had an air of abandonment that suggested its owner was never there, that perhaps no-one came there anymore. But the pile of broken weapons on the large oak desk said that someone had indeed been there, and continued to go there, adding to the collection with a kind of fiendish indifference to his possessions. The books he left in their place, though they were his too. The dust gathered and shrouded them in forgetfulness, and he didn't care to remember who he'd been.
They - the small folk - called him the wraith, because he had no other name to give them, none that he would risk giving. They called him Soufien Nath out of spite perhaps, or respect; he couldn't tell the difference. It suited him. Tall and slender, he ghosted about his world as if made of shadow. His hair, long and silver-white, coiled recklessly down his rigid back in untidy twists, studded here and there with a storm-jewel of hard iron-blue. Some said he'd ripped those from the belly-scales of a mighty dragon, and he didn't bother to dispel the myth. He wore an expression that was at once hard and closed, and gentle with grief, deep lines of sorrow scoring the corners of a mouth that rarely smiled, and when he spoke, it was barely above a whisper. Only his eyes held anything of the man he'd once been, their shape a dark-rimmed almond, their colour a vibrant storm-blue flecked with gold.
Once, he'd been a scholar, and a lover, a powerful man with the world at his feet. He was a ruin now, condemned to wander, a ghost without rest, throughout lands that were far from home. It was a banishment of his own making, a spell he'd woven to bind him away from the place he'd caused most harm to those he'd loved.
And instead of books, he collected the instruments of dead men's pain.
His limbs were liquid now, the plant's healing working well on his bruises. He could risk rising, putting weight on the newly-set bone. There was only one thing he wanted to look at, and that was his land of Cartha, stretching away to the horizon like a sea of blood. On his windowsill there was a potted plant, the only thing that would grow here. Tiny scalloped leaves twined over the rim and about the pot's base, and delicate heart-shaped petals formed flowers whose red was redder than the dust of the land. The mage stroked a finger along one of the stems, half in disgust, and half in reverence. It hurt, this touch of a plant that could kill him. He kept it there as the only thing that could end his life.
Except that he never quite wanted to die. He was quite determined to be damned instead.