Twenty-Three

"WELL, SO DO I." ALEA SAID. "IT WAS ALLOUETTE, I've learned that much—but I don't know how she hurt him, don't really understand how she could have cut him so deeply." She scowled, anger gathering. "I don't think I can ever forgive her for that!"

"Don't be sure," Rod pleaded. "It wasn't the Allouette we know now that scarred him. The woman you've met still has to be distracted from hating herself for her crimes."

"I'll agree with her every word," Alea said bitterly. "How could Cordelia and Geoffrey forgive her? How could Gregory fall in love with a woman who could do that to a man?"

"Because he didn't have much choice." Rod turned away to gaze at the fire. "Of course, they all think they know what Allouette did, but Gregory was too young to understand. Even Geoffrey didn't, though I'm sure he thought he did. Cordelia, though, she was old enough to know. In fact, it was she who helped patch him up."

"But she won't talk about it," Alea said. "She won't violate his confidence, she told me. That means you're the only one who knows Magnus well enough to tell me what I need to know, and who might be willing."

"He won't tell you himself?" Rod's brow creased with sadness. "There was a time when he was very open."

"Was there really?" Alea stared into his eyes with an intensity that was almost frightening. "When he was a boy? Tell me of him!"

Rod studied her a few minutes, then smiled with nostalgia as he looked away. "He was bright and quick, though always with that exaggerated sense of responsibility that comes with being the eldest…".

"There must have been a time when he wasn't eldest," Alea pressed. "Cordelia is three years younger than he, isn't she? What was he like when he was an only child?"

"Bold." Rod smiled back over the years. "A sunny disposition, always happy, somewhat mischievous—and very bold. It never occurred to him to be afraid." He turned to her, a wrinkle forming between his eyebrows. "He was blond then, you know—golden-haired."

"No." Alea stared wide-eyed, drinking in every bit of information. "How could he have grown to be black-haired?"

"That was the result of a little family trip we took," Rod said, "an excursion into a land of faery, where magic really worked, and where we discovered that we each had an analog, a person very much like us fulfilling a role very much like the ones we hold here on Gramarye."

"This is only a story, isn't it?" Alea asked.

"No, it's quite a bit more." Rod told her how three-year-old Geoffrey had been kidnapped through a dimensional gate and how the whole family had gone after him and how, years later when all four children were in a predicament that went beyond even their powers, Magnus had reached out to that alternate self and borrowed bis talents—but had gained more than he expected, for his hair had turned black, as his analogue's was, and his sunny nature had developed a somber side that was usually hidden but surfaced when he was distracted.

"Too fanciful to believe," Alea breathed, but Rod could see in her face that she did.

"I came back from it with a temper that was absolutely vile," Rod admitted. "It took years for me to expunge it— and that, only with Gwen's help."

"Is that what Magnus meant when he said you were cured when he was cursed?" Alea asked.

"Did he say that?" Rod asked in surprise, then, "Yes, I can see how he would. Not then, of course—years later. I'd lapsed into mental illness, you see—the aftereffects of an attempt at poisoning, but it's past now …"

Alea remembered what Magnus had told her and reserved her own opinion on the issue.

"I've always felt very guilty about that." Rod stared into the fire. "If I hadn't gone crazy just then, if I could have been more patient and understanding, maybe I could have protected him…" His voice trailed off; his stare intensified.

Alea saw his pain and reached forward to rest her hand on his in sympathy. "You can't blame yourself for being ill," she said softly.

"No. No, I can't, can I?" Rod turned to her with a bleak smile. "Or if I can, I shouldn't. But the timing was absolutely deplorable—a cursed coincidence, if you will."

The word struck an alarm inside Alea. She stiffened and said, "Magnus told me that you taught him to be wary of coincidence."

Rod stared at her.

After a minute, he turned back to the fire, nodding. "Yes, I did teach him that. Should have remembered it myself. Odd that I didn't see it till now—but the female viper who hurt him might very easily have reached into my mind and kicked off the madness again, to keep me from helping him."

"Who was that female viper?" Alea demanded, and when Rod sat silent, looking guilty, she said, "It was Allouette, wasn't it?"

"Her name was 'Finister' then," Rod told her, "almost a different person. 'Allouette' is the name her real mother had given her, before she was kidnapped—only a baby." He turned to her with a very earnest gaze, covering her hand with his own. "You mustn't blame her for what she did—she does enough of that herself. She'd been reared by a pair of emotional assassins who brainwashed her into paranoia, crushed her self-esteem, twisted her natural goodness into a thirst for blood and for mayhem, and left her an emotional cripple. Curing her was the hardest job Gwen ever tackled—but also her proudest accomplishment, next to the children she'd reared herself."

Alea noticed he didn't mention his own role in that upbringing but was prudent enough not to ask why. "All right, I'll try not to blame Allouette, even though I can see how hard Magnus has to try not to. Why? What did she do to him?"

"Promise you won't hold it against her."

"I'll do my best," Alea said, "I'll try my hardest to be kind and understanding and not judge. I can promise not to take revenge, but I can't promise not to want to."

Rod gazed into her eyes a minute, then gave a short nod. "Good enough. That's all I have any right to ask. Well, then, here's what she did." But he turned back to gaze into the fire as he told her of Allouette's gigantic capacity as a projective telepath, of her ability to make people who met her think they saw someone quite different—more beautiful or more ugly, depending on what she needed of the situation—and her talent of instant hypnotism, of bending her victim's mind to fall in love with her even at her ugliest. He told her of Finister's pose as the young unfaithful wife of an old knight, who enticed Magnus into her bedchamber and arranged for her "husband" to burst in upon them. Then he told of Finister's posing as the ugliest witch in the north country, of her compelling Magnus to fall in love with her anyway, of his resistance, and of her compulsion making him believe he was a snake bound forever to crawl around the base of a tree—then of Cordelia's breaking that spell and restoring her brother to humanity. He went on, telling of the wild, fey beauty who led Magnus on a wilder chase and, when he had fallen in love with her, leaving him cold, plunging him into despair, into a depression so deep that he couldn't even see that it wasn't real, couldn't wrestle his way out of it—but had, at his parents' urging, ridden to find the Green Witch, who had cured him of the worst of that depression, though she couldn't relieve him of the residual self-contempt deep within.

"So the Green Witch left him in such condition that he could be healed, but wasn't yet," Alea said slowly.

"That was beyond her," Rod said, "maybe because Magnus needed to let time dim the pain, or because he had to reach the emotional point at which he could realize, not just with his mind, but deep within, that those seemingly-different women were really only one in three disguises, and that not all women were like them."

"That not all of us seek to enslave him or degrade him, you mean?"