The Principate was dragging its feet recognizing the borders despite Cordelia’s best efforts, though she had assured Catherine that it was not malfeasance. It had been a year and a half since the fall of Keter, but work had only begun six months past.
“Though houses have been raised for workers and officials.” “We’re still laying the foundations,” the Warden admitted. “The rumours say that Cardinal grows by the day,” she said. Only then did she answer the implicit offer. The grey-eyed woman’s face twisted with grief before she mastered herself. “I meant it,” the Warden said, “when I said I owed him a debt. She would not pry at his secrets while standing over his grave. Roland had been a friend, one of the finest she’d ever had. “Especially not him,” the magistrate replied.Ĭatherine Foundling was the keeper of many secrets, and so she did not ask why the other woman had insisted on a closed casket funeral when the body was well-preserved and had allowed none to gaze at the body. “Most came to Beaumarais after he left, attracted by rumours of the school.” “None of the people who came knew him,” Magistrate Alisanne quietly said. The White Knight took a single look at the magistrate and the once-queen standing among red flowers before taking his leave with them, leaving them to the privacy of their grief. As dusk approached the crowd dispersed, heading back into town for the funerary banquet. A life spent for another is never wasted. A stele of stone was left to remember him by, simply reading: Roland de Beaumarais, the Rogue Sorcerer. Roland was buried by the banks of the spring among a bed of red flowers. “The debt I owe him is greater than words can convey.” “He took an arrow meant for me,” she quietly said. Catherine Foundling, when her turn came, spoke only two sentences. Of the people he had helped, the evils he had defeated. The eyes of the young wizards shone, when they heard of the company a man who’d once been a boy here had risen to keep. Hanno spoke instead, of the good he had seen Roland do and the love others yet bore for him. Eyes turned to her several times, expectant, but she never spoke a word. Magistrate Alisanne’s eyes were hard as flint all through the service. He’d fought off an evil wizard as a teenager, rumoured to be a Praesi warlock, and founded the small wizard school. Roland the Beaumarais, it seemed, was something of a local hero. Brother Albert did not take up too much of the talking, ceding the place instead to Roland’s father – his last living parent, after his mother’s death two years past from the green fever – who spoke of the light there had been in his son since he’d been a child, of how proud he was that he had gone out into the world to chase the murderer of his brother Olivier. Roland had said there would be a woman in Beaumarais and there was no need to ask who she might be. Catherine Foundling had known many a shade of grief over her years, both hers and that of others, so she did not ask why the beautiful grey-eyed woman could not stand to look at the coffin. Magistrate Alisanne handled the early arrangements, but then turned the affair over to Brother Albert. The burial of the Rogue Sorcerer, Roland de Beaumarais, attracted something of a crowd. Borders were still being drawn, after all, but Beaumarais might well be part of the lands ceded to Cardinal before the year was out. Neither recognized that they were being visited by the Warden and the White Knight until they were told, and quickly acceded to silence when it was asked of them. The temple built by the cottages made it plain that the House of Light was keeping on them, but both the brother there and the magistrate in nearby Beaumarais knew and approved of the school. Half a dozen wizard families and twice that in simple students had made their home in the Knightsgrave, a small hidden school of wizardry in the mountains. That was not unusual, in the Red Flower Vales – which in these parts the native Procerans called the Vermillion Valleys – but the mage tower surrounded by a few cottages was. It was a pretty sight, tall grass split by a burbling mountain spring whose banks grew thick with red flowers. The valley, they told Catherine, was called the Knightsgrave. In the end, we are told, they will all have mattered.” – Last page of the Book of All Things
That is our gift, and so the sum of the choices we have made will echo beyond the bounds of time. Yet it shall not be the end of everything, for though all came of the emptiness of Void to create is to make something from nothing. With the Last Dusk will come the passing of Creation, discording turning to concord as the wager of Fate is resolved. “At the end, there will be more than the Gods.