Chapter 52: The Child Sage
Frey didn't remember exactly, but she'd been told the story several times about when her parents figured out her elemental alignment and had the confirmation that she was an earthmate. It was when she was three years old and still shared a room with her twin brother Arthur. There was a dark night when both of them were having trouble getting to sleep. Remembering what their father did to create an orb of light, she tried and cast a light spell so that things weren't so dark.
The orb lasted not even a second before it burst into a shower of sparkles. She tried again for the same result. By then, Arthur was smiling and asked her to do it again. They enjoyed a little fireworks show in their room until their father came in to see what was going on.
The next day, she tried to demonstrate the sparkling spell to some other adults only to get a perfect orb of light just like her father could cast. She didn't get the sparkles until Arthur came over to see what she was doing. The adults all said that she had an amazing talent and genius for magic, but it would be some time until they had a recognizable sign of being an earthmate out of her twin.
There were seven children in Grelin, most earthmates but not all of them. They gathered almost every day in a one room schoolhouse to be taught by various adults in the community. While some of the kids got antsy sitting inside learning, Frey loved it. The teachers often let her pick her own subjects after she got far ahead in the ones they expected the kids to learn.
One time, the town mill stopped unexpectedly. The blades kept turning, but the grindstones weren't moving. It was a big problem that all the adults talked about, since flour and milled grains were something they sold a lot of to other towns. Since it wasn't working, Frey and her best friend Nem were able to get inside to see the big gears and shafts that should make it work. It wasn't an obvious problem, but they found wind runes in the blades and the shaft they were attached to. When the girls followed them, they stopped at a point where the shaft had gone strangely insubstantial. That reminded Frey of ghosts, so she stayed up until dark to find out.
"Come on, Arthur, we're gonna fix the windmill," she whispered to keep him from changing to pajamas.
"How are we doing that?" he asked.
"Cause it's a ghost's spell, I think. You're gonna undo its spell, and we'll see if the ghost comes back. If it does, I'm gonna beat it." She was confident in this plan because while Arthur was bad at a lot of spells, he was the only one in town able to undo spells with hardly any effort.
"Um, okay," he said, a little scared.
"We'll be fine," Frey said. They crept out of their home to avoid their parents' notice, then hurried over to the windmill. Nem met them there and followed along.
As she planned, Arthur undid the magic that made the shaft insubstantial. They had to keep tracking the wind runes (much easier with her brother along) to find other insubstantial spots as well. The windmill's operator had pulled one of the last gears out of place so that it could be worked on without starting up the grindstones. However, the runes indicated that once it was back in place, it would be working again. The three didn't have the strength to move the gear back in place even with magic, since the twins were seven and Nem was nine.
Then the ghost appeared, a monster with a ragged blue cloak and a sickle. Its face was covered in burlap, but the eyes indicated that it was a monster, not a person's ghost. "You did a bad thing, ghost, so I'm gonna send you back," Frey said, not scared at all. Nearby, Nem had her eyes closed trying not to be scared.
"W-wait a moment," Arthur said. He'd been worried about the ghost appearing, but now he went right up to it. "It's sad. I think its tears are what's making things go ghostly."
"Huh, why's it sad?" She wasn't sure what to do. Monsters were monsters, potential troublemakers that could do a lot of damage like this. Although mostly they just hurt people. She hadn't ever thought of a monster being sad.
"I don't know," he said, holding a hand out to it. It immediately tried to slash him with its sickle.
Frey managed to pull him back. "Be careful, it'll hurt you."
"But now it's scared too," Arthur said, still sympathetic to it. He opened up his bag and found a carrot inside. Even if it had attacked him, he went right back to it and offered it the carrot. "Here, if you leave here and don't cause trouble, you can have this."
"I don't know if it'll understand," Nem said.
The ghost whimpered at the offer, pulling its sickle close. But then it caught scent of the carrot and came closer to see if it could take it. When Arthur gave it over, the ghost monster made a sound that was almost happy and took hold of his arm. "It's happy now," Arthur said, happy it worked. "I think it wants to stay with me. I'll keep it out of the windmill."
Their parents were surprised that they came back with a pet ghost, but let Arthur keep it as long as he took good care of it. The next day, the miller got the grindstones working again. Everyone in town soon heard that Frey, Nem, and Arthur had been the ones to fix the problem. They all praised Frey enthusiastically for being able to see the problem and solution. But she didn't find out until years later that their thanks and praise to Arthur had been grudgingly given, part of the reason why he preferred playing with the ghost over the other children for a time.
Not long after the windmill incident, the town elder gave Frey two notebooks. "Many people have recognized your skills, so the sages want to give you a test," she explained. "This notebook includes what needs to be done for the test, and this one is for you to write up the answers in. It's a big test, so you have a full season to complete it."
"Okay, I'll do it!" Frey agreed, happy to have the challenge.
But as she read through the notebook with the test questions, something became apparent very quickly. A full season was a long time to work on a project, but it was not long enough to work on this test. There were crafting projects, questions that wanted essays written, magic experiments, farming projects, book reports, and even some things that asked what was right or wrong in a situation (and those were very tricky situations that wanted citations and references). Even her mother's tests on Etherlink and the family research weren't this hard.
She talked about it with her family at dinner that evening. "I don't know if I can do this right," she said, upset at the thought of not doing well on a test. "There's so much to do to get it all done and some of it is going to take a long time and waiting. While she said I have a full season, that's not enough time to get through it without rushing and rushing makes mistakes."
"What's the test for?" their father asked.
"I don't know, but it came from the sages," Frey said.
"I've seen this before, but because of that, I can't answer all your questions about it," their mother said. Still, she smiled. "Get as much done as you can."
"But I won't get it done," she said.
"Maybe you should pick some of the questions that you'd do best at and focus on doing them really well," Arthur suggested. "It might balance out having to not answer others because you don't have the time to do them all. Like how I can't grow everything I want to."
"But would you get in trouble if you didn't grow what all your teachers ask you to?" she asked.
"Um, not really because they told me to grow a variety of what's in season," he said. "But then, it's almost summer and there's a lot of plants that grow best in summer. I want to try lots of them out and see how they do. But, it's not possible for me to grow all the different plants I've been offered. For one thing, I have a limited field space because I'm still learning and some plants take a lot longer than others. So what I'm gonna do is take some that I know I can grow really well already and have a quarter field of those always so I have a good score at the end of season review. Then I'll take some long growing plants that I've never worked with for another quarter. If I succeed with them, it'll add a lot to the review score. If I don't, then I'll learn what went wrong."
"Oh, so you have some guaranteed to get you a pass and some that will get you respect but aren't a guarantee," Frey said, considering that plan.
Arthur nodded. "Yeah, and then a third quarter of the field needs to rest for the season. In the last quarter, I'm going to grow quick growing plants that I'm not so good with, and those will change through the season so I can learn from them too. So I'm not growing all the vegetables at once, but at the end of the season, I should have a good variety to show my teachers."
His plans for how to divide up his farm work actually worked very well in helping Frey divide up the test questions as well. Arthur even let her borrow a small portion of his field so she could do the farming related questions and projects too. While it wasn't something she knew a lot about, it was like his last quarter of the field where he was experimenting on quick plants. She didn't have to do a lot on them but could learn something while working on the test. When Frey went to turn the test in after the time limit was up, she told the sage that she couldn't possibly finish the whole test in one season, but she did the best she could to answer as many as possible.
In spite of not being able the finish it, the test had been done well enough that before she turned eight, she was named an earthmate sage.
Magic was easy. She just had to watch someone else cast a spell and most of the time, she could mimic them to learn it herself. A few times, she landed herself in the white witch's care because she would try to mimic a powerful spell that she didn't have the rune points for. Once she figured out how to learn a spell from written instructions, she could learn them without even seeing them for herself. People kept asking her how she did it, so she read about magic so she could tell them exactly how.
Crafting was easy. It did take some time to learn new skills like sewing, gluing, hammering, cutting, and more. But once she knew how to do things, making items was a cinch. Design blueprints didn't need more than a quick look before she could put the item together as long as she had the needed materials. At times, she was stopped because she was a little girl and thus didn't have the strength or endurance to do heavy tasks. But as she grew older, she grew stronger and even became able to work at a forge by herself without injury.
Learning was easy. She loved to read and the village of Grelin had a large collection of books throughout every building. She read from her family's collection, she borrowed books from the town elder, she browsed over shelves when invited to another house. If she didn't know something, she first went to see if there was a book on it. She read every day and occasionally read all day. Because she remembered everything she'd read, she learned a lot simply from reading.
One day, she talked with Arthur as she did many days, about what she was reading. This time from the Book of Guidance. "The earth's blessings are given out of love; those given such blessings must give back that love tenfold into the world to maintain their power. To do this, take care of the earth and the plants that grow from it. Respect all beings that live upon it. Give help to neighbors and strangers alike with no heed to rewards. Most of all, always remember that love is central to the powers of the earthmate tribe."
It was nearly their fourteenth birthday and for some reason, her brother had dyed his hair black. She thought it looked bad, but their parents had said they were that age when it was normal to experiment and figure out who they were. "That makes sense," he said. "We have to work the farm with love so that the plants grow up full of love. But then loving plants give greatly to us, so we have to keep giving back even to the next generation of plants. That's why your price has to be something you're passionate about. Otherwise, there won't be as much love and you'll get exhausted as you keep trying."
"Yeah, it makes a lot of sense with farming like you do," Frey said. "I was trying to figure it out about my crafting, but on checking some other books, it's the same kind of thing. I love learning and crafting, so I learn lots and use what I learn to craft things full of my passion. Then I give the things to others, maybe selling it to cover my costs. But the important thing is that they feel the love in my work and are happy with it. They give me gratitude and often more money and favors than I asked for it. So I have to turn that extra money and gratitude to my next project, learning more and making my crafting better every time."
"Good thing you learn so fast and make amazing things," Arthur said with a smile.
She smiled. "I'm doing what I love! And you're doing what you love too."
"Right, farming, and I love our family. And new people."
At the time, she didn't think to ask what he meant by loving their family and new people, not whoever he was excluding as 'old' people. She would regret missing that chance in a few weeks.
The winter that they turned fourteen was a very dry one. The autumn before had also been dry, not raining since the early weeks. For a village that relied on its farmland as heavily as Grelin did, the drought was becoming a serious threat. Even the most experienced farmers were only getting weak and poor crops. Worst of all, the drought seemed centered on Grelin. North Oaken was suffering too, but towns that were several hours of travel away were snowy as usual. The normal methods of calling rain weren't working.
Since Frey was so far ahead of her peers, the teacher in their one-room schoolhouse allowed her to study as she liked, even assisting the others if she happened to be studying the same subjects. Lately, she had been scouring a number of books trying to find a solution to the drought. She was onto something promising, but she cross-referenced it several times before she brought up the solution during school hours. "A few of the farmers have tried rain dances, but only on their own efforts," she said, pointing out an illustration of a group in a circle combining their efforts. "But the bonds between people increase the effectiveness of any magic being cast. So I think if a bunch of people in town came together for a circle dance for rain, it will work better. From the intensity of the drought that runes are reporting, I think we'll need at least two married couples within a dance of ten people for best effect. The others can be their children, siblings, or friends to further increase the effort."
"That's a brilliant idea, to bring together the community to solve a community problem," their teacher said, giving her a hug. "You ought to get your parents involved so that you can participate."
"I wouldn't be able to help," Arthur said, fiddling with a notebook. "But, it would help the farms. Thanks."
"I'm sorry," Frey said, but he was right. He was a rune breaker, which was why she needed to create a whole new form of the light orb spell in order to copy the explosion of sparkles that happened naturally whenever she cast near him. It was a sad thought, but one she soon let slip in the excitement of planning for the circle dance.
That excitement just kept growing as she told others and asked for participants. It was a brilliant solution, someone said. It was something they should have found obvious, but she had a special wisdom to put all the pieces together, someone else said that. While she had thought ten would work, they ended up with twelve people including her parents, herself, her best friend Neremissa (who really disliked her full name and wanted to be called Nem instead), and Nem's parents. The whole village came together one afternoon to break the drought. That is, all but Arthur. He had slipped off somewhere when school hours ended.
She asked one of the farmers participating to lead since she knew the basic enchantment best. The village elder stayed in the center to coordinate the effort while the rest of them held hands in the circle to start. While it wasn't a difficult spell, it was more involved then most since they needed to pull the currents into motion. Frey's research showed that this could take some time, but the winds would shift or clouds would grow when it was working.
After fifteen minutes, no clouds had come. Instead, the sunlight began to intensify. They kept the rain dance going until a tree nearby caught on fire from the powerful light and had to be put out before it spread. People scattered to make sure other fire risks weren't igniting. But there was something peculiar about this sun. It seemed almost like an enchantment, one with runes that seemed to say that this was Arthur's doing.
There was no way to hide that from the others. "What is he doing?" someone asked their parents.
"That boy's a curse," the farmer in the group said.
"He is not!" Frey said, clenching a fist. "Arthur's a farmer too and he's having just as much trouble. He can't meant to have done something like this."
"But it is his doing, an evil act," she said.
"No, and I'll prove it," Frey insisted, then ran off. She had to find her brother and figure out what was going on.
But he was nowhere in town, nor anywhere in the farms nearby. Her parents eventually came to find her after dark; they hadn't seen him either. They were also sure that he couldn't have meant to intensify the drought like this, but couldn't explain why it seemed so clearly like his doing. Back home, they discussed what could be done. Arthur had trouble casting the smallest spells, so it shouldn't be hard to convince the others that he couldn't put together a big curse like this. They knew he wouldn't do something to harm his own farms as that was his blessing price. He wasn't evil. Although, in a place where magical arts had a strong history, his rune breaking power was a big obstacle.
The next day, Frey searched her brother's attic room in order to find a hair of his. She used that to craft a compass to help find him. It led her deep into the woods around Grelin, a long walk to a river. There, Arthur was sitting on the fallen bank, watching the water with a pointed stick like he was trying to fish without a pole. "Arthur, here you are," Frey said, relieved to find him.
"Don't call me that," he said in a sour mood. "I'm going by Lest now."
"Why's that?" she asked, going to a dry rock nearby to sit down.
"Because it fits better," he said. "Arthur's a hero's name, while everyone in town is like, be careful when you cast your spells lest he's around. So I'm better known as Lest."
"It's not that bad," Frey said.
"Yes it is," he said sharply. "Everybody loves you and thinks you're the most amazing person in town. Most of them hate me."
"You can't be sure," she said.
"I can because I feel what everybody else does, and they hate me!" Lest gasped and shuddered at some pain, dropping his makeshift fishing spear. "I'm not going back."
"Are you okay?" she asked, going over and taking his arm. His face was getting flushed pink.
"I'll be fine," he said, even though he seemed to have a fever.
"Mom, Dad, and I are worried about you; you should come back home." She tried to tug at him.
Lest yanked his arm away. "I'm not going back, I told you! I wasn't blessed by the earth; I was cursed by it. People don't want me there so I won't go back."
Frey thought she knew him best because they were twins. But she couldn't convince him to come back home and she'd had no idea he felt like that. Finding herself lost for the answers, maybe for the first time ever, she ended up leaving him out in the woods and coming back home in tears. How could she have failed her brother like that?
There had to be an answer. Arthur... Lest couldn't be evil. She was sure of those two things, but just had to figure it all out. Their parents weren't able to get him back home either, but they did get him to stay in an abandoned cabin in the woods so he had some shelter. As the drought continued through spring, he kept getting sicker every time they visited. Something had to be done, the problem had to be solved.
Frey turned all of her effort to researching Lest's talents and proving his innocence. The trouble was, his talents weren't common among earthmates. Not even his alignment was one that came up often. Of the seven elements, it was most common for earthmates and monsters to align with water, fire, wind, and earth. They were equally spread along with a neutral alignment, although no earthmate could be neutral. Light and dark alignments were uncommon and a love alignment was rare. That did answer one question, if in a way she hadn't hoped for.
She told her parents about it one evening. "Hate isn't an alignment, rather a corruption of love. But they both affect each other severely. If Lest hated something, it would poison his own runes and make him sick like this. But I can't see him hating anyone."
"It can happen to anyone who lets resentment build for a long time," Corrin said. "And he can feel the suspicion and resentment others have towards him deeply. It's not easy to remain forgiving in that situation."
"We'll handle breaking what hate he seems to have," Joyce said, patting Frey's hand. "You keep looking into this, as you seem to be doing well."
While her mother had said that, Frey didn't feel like it was going well. The rune breaker talent was his most rare one and there was very little recorded about such earthmates. Unfortunately, the best known records of a rune breaker were that of a man who abused the power to ruin many lives. Everyone considered him evil. After going through many books, she finally found a passage where someone had tried to change him. The rune breaker said that he'd been driven away from many towns when he was young, as everyone called him cursed and didn't want him around. He said that he finally accepted that, a point that seemed to be when his path turned truly twisted. Along with that, his alignment had been that of earth. He wouldn't have had Lest's empathy further troubling him.
That just made things seem worse. That rune breaker might have turned evil because everyone had rejected him without giving him a chance. Thinking over that and hearing talk around town that people seemed to be glad Lest was gone, Frey worried about him ending up the same way. She still loved him and she knew their parents did too. But they'd only really convinced Nem to come visit Lest as a friend, since she believed in him too. There was also the concern if the hate really did destroy him, as she'd found records of such deaths in trying to find more about the alignment.
Three weeks after Lest had run out of town, the drought broke with a rain that seemed full of a painful sorrow. The water and air aligned earthmates were particularly affected by it, all feeling a sadness they couldn't fully explain. Joyce said it was because they'd finally gotten Lest to realize how his hate was making him sick. He'd gotten deeply upset right before the rain started. Yet, why was his emotional state influencing the weather? Looking at the problem from that angle brought Frey back to some passages in the Book of Guidance that finally had some answers that didn't make it seem like Lest's powers were evil.
She got so excited about it that she gave a cheerful yell and ran off to tell her mother before heading into the woods. But Joyce kept her from leaving. "It's great news, but you've been barely sleeping this whole time. Not only that, but it's getting late and will be dark by the time you get to his cabin. Go get a full night sleep and we'll go out to tell him tomorrow."
"But he deserves to know as soon as possible," Frey argued, but relented to her mother's request. Her weariness sank in on being mentioned and she found herself unable to stay awake much longer even though she wanted to pass on the good news.
The next morning, she and her parents headed out to visit Lest. It was raining again, a cool and heavy rain that made them use rain shields to keep the raindrops and mud from sticking to them. At the cabin, Lest was gloomy, but he seemed to cheer up at their visit. He was starting to get some plants to grow, mostly the simple turnips, toyherbs, and lettuces that could handle just about any conditions. It seemed the soil nutrients there had been used up by whoever had last lived in the cabin.
Frey explained about her answer as soon as she was allowed, explaining it as thoroughly as she could. "Magic is so ubiquitous in Norad that everyone assumes it's a natural force. And some of it is, but in truth, the vast majority of spells work by forming artificial bonds between natural runes to change their form and function. It's why you can't completely form something from nothing; there has to be something there to start with. Alchemy and magical crafting both require source materials to transform into a new item. Thus what you're actually doing as a rune breaker is dissolving the artificial bonds that people create."
"Wouldn't artificial bonds break in time anyhow?" Lest asked.
"Some do," she said. "But that's only after a really long time because runes have inertia too. They don't like their state to be changed, either in movement or stillness, or in bonded or loose. Or some spells become unbound when the rune points that were used to cast them are used up, causing the runes to become dull and exhausted. They flow back into the ether sea at that point, to be renewed."
"It's really about returning runes to their natural state, where they'd be if people didn't interfere with them," their mother Joyce said.
Frey smiled because that brought them to one of the stronger points. "Yeah, and I found a really interesting passage in the Book of Guidance that says that the element that best describes the natural state of runes is love. Love in the world continues the cycle of life, creates, and heals. Runes also flow in a way that follows the cycle of life, empowering it and being empowered in turn. Which means that putting artificial bonds on runes takes them out of the cycle. There's so many runes in the ether sea that what we use up in our lives isn't much of a dent. But still, your power reverts runes to their natural state, with the bonds they would naturally seek rather than those placed on them. It's not evil, it's just nature returning runes to the world's chi through you."
"But it's like evil when everyone around me uses magic every day and I wreck it for them," Lest said, not angry now but saddened at it.
"It's not evil until you choose to do evil things with it," Corrin said. "Right now, you don't have a lot of choice in it. But it is your power, so there must be a way for you to take control of it, even just moderating how much it influences."
"It'd be equally valid to claim that people using magic are doing a small evil in making artificial bonds," Joyce said. "But the gods have said that it's fine. If there were a spell that the will of the world did not want, the cost would be impossibly high because the runes would resist it."
They continued to talk until Lest accepted what she found as a good thing. However, it still didn't bring him home. Joyce gave him a spellbook that instructed how to manipulate chi in hopes that he could reign in his rune breaking power with it. Corrin gave him a book from the eastern nation that guided one to find inner calm, in hopes that such meditation would keep him from influencing the weather through a combination of his emotional state and his talents. Frey could only promise to keep researching and bring him other books that would help.
As she and her parents walked back to town that evening, she said, "I thought what I found would be enough to help, but you both did a lot more than me."
"We are your parents, after all," Corrin said in an affectionate tease.
Joyce took her hand. "That, and there's also something you need to realize too. No matter how strong they are, intelligence and talent alone won't solve every problem. If that were true, then the whole matter our family has been devoted to for centuries could have been worked out long ago."
"Well we're not even solving it ourselves even if I end up being the one to put the solution in action," Frey said. "All we two have been doing is putting together the pieces that everyone else spent their lives trying to find, and we're still missing pieces of it all."
"I hope all the pieces can be found," Joyce said, nodding in agreement. "Because even if we set past wrongs right, a hole in the picture means it's not completely solved yet."
"Excuse me, Sage Frey?"
Reluctant to answer, she slowed in her reading. It was one of the others in town and they usually got formal with her if they wanted to ask her for a favor. But she was doing some studying on the Guardians of Ventuswill, something that would be really important when it came time to bring her family's plans to fruition. Not only that, but she felt bad sometimes in working with them. These were the people who didn't care about Lest's feelings, the ones who drove him into a state of hate that nearly killed him and caused a harsh drought that they blamed him for. Frey tried to deal with them fairly as that's what the Book of Guidance suggested even for enemies. Still, it was really difficult when they didn't try to understand, not her twin brother and not the holy Book of Guidance itself.
She could keep trying an idea she'd had. "Huh? Oh, sorry, how long have you been there?"
"Not long, don't worry about it. What are you studying?" There was an admiring look that expected greatness.
Grinning, she put lots of enthusiasm into saying, "Fireworks! I'm learning how to make things explode into lots of color and noise!" It wasn't entirely a lie, since she found it a fun diversion lately. Although she hadn't put it to use yet, maybe she should.
The admiring look was dropped in favor of one that asked if she was serious. "That doesn't sound all that useful."
"But it should be fun! What is it, did you need something? I'd love to test out some things I've read."
"Uh, no, never mind. Just curious." There must have been something, as the person left to find someone else to help.
Frey felt bad in that too. But then, she was wary of everyone depending on her like with the failed rain dance. There was no way she could have known that Lest's empathy and rune breaking power was enough together to bend the atmospheric chi around him to reflect his strong emotions. For anything she did, there was a risk that something she could not know would make her fail again. Plus people kept asking her for sagely advice and assistance when she was only fifteen and not really all that wise or smart. She would help in important things, but not things they should be able to solve themselves with some research and work.
Acting goofy dissuaded them from relying on her too much. Which was good, she didn't want to fail others who trusted her again. Besides, it made life more fun. Frey turned her attention back to the book. Freeing the Guardians from their duties was one of several problem that she wouldn't back out on ever. Maybe she couldn't back out on it; there were weeks when she felt the weight of centuries in these responsibilities. She could feel the drive and dreams of many women before her trying to fix a problem that not even the gods could solve on their own. In that way, Frey had no choice in what path she was going to take in life. Her blood tied her to this and she could not deny it without denying herself.
But, she didn't mind that at all.
A/N: Backstory chapter! There's a few of these to come, some full chapters, some just parts of chapters. I felt it particularly important for Frey here because she hasn't had a lot of time being focused on. So here is how she got to be a sage and why she acts like she does, as well as some things on Lest that have been hinted at but not stated. Such as how this incident with the drought would be the event that Doug nearly threatened Lest with revealing way back in the Day of Lectures chapter. It wasn't many lines, but I already knew this was the source.
