Stories from Mistress

Throughout the evening, I get an opportunity I didn’t expect to have for a long, long while. I ask questions that only one person would know the answer to, and she answers me.  

She tells me how she found me.

Or rather, how I found her. It’s a long story, and carries her history with it as well as mine.   She was a misfit when she was young, and her master taught her in an old, traditional way, far from society and from any formal academies. When she left her master’s care, she became something of a mercenary with her own band of misfits. It was, in her opinion, entirely by accident that she got involved in a nasty bit of imperial court drama. By the end of it, she and her misfit company had crossed half the empire and stopped a plot to topple the Carthian monarchy. Evidently there had been a fraction in the court that believed Carthians should occupy a position in the Empire similar to the one dwarves once had - bound without love.   At the end of it, she met the Empress for the first time, and was granted two boons: An imperial order that gave her company formal legitimacy, and a quest to search the frontier for someone who was not born of an ancient or powerful lineage, not destined by a thread of fate, but whose heart could match the Empress’ love of her people. She found three people before she found me.   The first stayed at her side for five years before she discovered that his love was for his people but not the Empire, and he would have subjugated the Carthians given the opportunity.   The second, a gifted healer, stayed for ten years. But while she would love and tend to her people, she wouldn’t die for them. That, obviously, is a requirement of the role I now hold.   To find the third, she turned to her own magic of dreaming and spirit calling. The third one she found spent nearly a quarter century with her. He was a swordsman, with a mastery of motion in his sword fighting. They went out together to protect a caravan crossing the frontier, in what should have been a simple mission. Instead, they faced ravenous magical beasts who attacked them unexpectedly. To this day, Mistress doesn’t understand why her student chose to use his magic to topple a wagon between a beast and a family of merchants, instead of speeding himself there instead, or defeating a beast closer at hand to him. Instead, he toppled a wagon when normally, he struggled to even levitate a small object. So he died, and Mistress blamed herself for judging him ready when he wasn’t, and for not teaching him well enough.   The grief stopped her search for years, and when she took it up again, she sought someone with potential, but who wasn’t already on a path. Her feeling of defeat grew for fifty years and was nearly giving up when I found her in a dream without even knowing what I was doing.   I was so young, but in my dreams I heard someone so unbearably sad that I reached out to comfort her in whatever childlike way I could. I didn’t realize she was real until the day she rode up to my farm, in a memory that even now I can recall. She found me because of my actions, not my fate. Over the years she's joked several times that I am the greatest boon the Empress ever granted her.  

She tells me of how our relationship developed.

From the first moment we knew one another, I was caring for her. She found me because I had reached out with help. As an apprentice, I was a member of her family and we had a clear exchange: She would teach me and refine my talents, and I would take burdens from her life in whatever way I could.   In the beginning it was simple - chores, gathering components, caring for her horse and home. After 20 years in her service I was ready to study at an imperial academy and spent half of each year there. In my first year, I felt my obligation to service, but I couldn’t take away the physical labour from so far away. It wasn’t until I returned from my first term that I realized how much we had missed one another. The summer before I returned to the academy, I began looking for new ways to lessen the strain of her challenges and duties, made more daunting by her growing status.   The first change, in her memory, was a day when I prepared her evening meal as usual, but for the first time prepared a foot bath scented with lemon and honeysuckle. It was a new sort of relationship, not romantic, but more intimate.   For the second year at the academy, I began writing her letters to lessen the ache of her missing me (and vice versa). When she visited the capital, I studied furiously so that we could spend time together. I came to realize how much she depended on me, and how firmly I refused to fail her.   When I finally left the academy, I returned as her apprentice but much closer in status to the other members of her company, much more able to stand on my own. As her company shifted as people came and went, I grew into her right hand, following her places where I usually would not be permitted, and speaking on her behalf when needed.   As her status grew, she was given a title and an estate enviably close to the capital, where usually new nobles would be adopted into existing families or given lands along the frontier. She became a political figure, and people would increasingly see her position instead of seeing her for herself. Her company drifted away from the formality and responsibilities of her new role. Once again, I started feeling the loneliness and sadness that had drawn me to her in our first memories. She spoke of a growing space between her and everyone else, that even when she was in the same room, they felt increasingly far away.   “There is no space between us, and there never will be unless you command it so,” I told her, and she ran her fingers through my hair, “If there truly wasn’t any space between us, I could kiss you now…” “You can. Now and for as long as you wish,”   For nearly a century we had danced around this, until it snuck up on us and melted the space between us into a kiss.   What a story to hear at this moment, speaking to this past version of my Mistress, separated by the gap in my memories, the barrier mountains, and the hundreds and hundreds of years both forward and back.  

She reminds me of who else she has in her life.

Doraal, her left hand, sounds a lot like Lyssa. He has magic that he couldn’t control, and Mistress was strong enough to be near him while he learned how to control it. He is an impossibly strong wildling who fights with a two-handed sword and has transmutation magic.   He is fiercely protective of our house but aside from his strength and warlike abilities he loves to garden, and care for nature. When Mistress found him, he couldn’t control his physical strength and it tore him apart to be so feared despite his gentle nature and desire to care for things. Mistress calls him Gentle Doraal.   He is more of a brother to me than any of my blood siblings - 50 years younger than me and came into our family after I’d finished with my academy training. I’ve been giving him books for years! Whenever I find a good book about flora, fauna, or herbology, I give it to him. Whenever I travel far from our home to somewhere distant, I try to bring back a sample of the plants there. What she says reminds me of Dal’s quiet patience with me when I first met him on the other side of the mountains.  

And she tells me a story of my academy years.

In theory, the academy is somewhere where your status is determined by your years of study, not your social class. But of course, people never forget who they are outside of school. As a frontier girl I was essentially the bottom of this invisible hierarchy, but after a few years I had standing because of my progress in my studies, at least.   Most students at the academy study subjects from various teachers at the academy and they learn a reliable set of skills that is suitable for either military or civilian life. They spend nearly 25 years at the school and learn their trade well, but it is not a combat school. None of the other students were apprenticed to an accomplished travelling adventurer who brought them into field work and taught them to fight properly with magic.   Eventually I was assigned a first-year student to serve as a page and lab assistant - someone to do chores and learn about the basics in the process. Nean was the child of an old but unimportant noble family who was there because commercial wizardry pays well and the family needed money.   Several students of my class standing or above took it upon themselves to torment Nean for his family’s situation and how he was now serving a frontier girl. Despite Nean’s efforts to hide this from me, I eventually found his arms covered in bruises from being goaded into a practice duel in which several elemental casters wielded the air like a club, knocking the wind out of him every time he got up. And he kept getting up, saying that he knew I would never give in, so he wouldn’t either.   When he pointed them out to me at the evening meal (all six of them), I confronted them about challenging my page and failing to even knock him down properly. Clearly some people were only managing to stay enrolled here because of their family names. When they challenged me to a duel, I brought in a senior student (the son of a frontier peddler) as a witness and duel master, despite him trying to talk me out of it.   And when we finally duelled, the difference between academy-trained students and someone with combat experience and the guidance of my Mistress became very clear. Three were sent to the infirmary, and I didn’t stop tossing the ringleader through the air until he had apologized.   No one bothered Nean again, but they certainly didn’t give me an easy time in the future, teachers included. When I returned to Mistress after this term, she sent me to a friend and former company member who worked as a professional duelist. At the time, she told me it was a reward, but now she can tell me that she wanted to give me more training to protect myself if I had to.   As for Nean, we maintained a friendship past our academy years. Last she heard of him, he was running a business as an illusionist and entertainer. And something of a back-alley dealer of discrete potions, when needed.  

And of a secret home we built.

She tells me this happened recently, in her time. There is an inhospitable sea of heavy and hot mineral water to the East of the Empire. The Empire claims the Western coast of it, but there is an island near the far shore with fresh water on it. Calling on an ancestor with sailing knowledge, Mistress guided a small ship there carrying just me, her, and Doraal.   She called spirits to protect it, I spun illusions to hide it, and Doraal laid physical traps to defend it. And in this secret, quiet place, only the Empress herself can find us.