The Turning of the Wheel

Dance stood there, mouth hanging open. He stared at the grey-faced old man who had delivered the verdict, attempting to form words out of the maelstrom of confusion, hurt, and disbelief in his head.

“But, I am…” he faltered, not sure how to proceed. If he was to claim he had been the best in the trials, he would sound arrogant on the one hand while insulting to the other applicants on the other. Even though it was true.

The maester finished for him. “The best in your level.”

“Yes!” Dance’s breath gusted out in relief at not having to say it himself.

“And yet you have been rejected from the acadamie. Do you know why?”

“No. Really. I don’t,” Dance lied. “I passed all the tests. I studied diligently. I am able to spark a candle at a distance and turn pig’s ears into biscuits!” He had done everything he possibly could to convince the wheel of fate that had ground him down for so long to finally turn in his favor.

The old man nodded gravely, raising his lofty eyebrows in anticipation. “And yet…”

“I was courteous to my peers, even tutored that kid from the Eastern Shore! I bet he passed.”

“Indeed, he did.” The maester seemed to feel this response was adequate and leaned back into his chair with much creaking of limbs and adjusting of his maester’s cloak around his thin frame. He gestured a gnarled hand at Dance, indicating it was time for him to leave the office, never to return.

It felt like a slap in the face. Dance found himself rubbing his cheek as if he had been physically struck by the careless gesture. He took four shaky backwards paces to the door, before stopping. “I need to know why.” His voice came out like a thin wheeze from a broken bellows, barely disturbing the air in the gloomy book-bound room.

The maester took his time, leaning toward him in a slow shuffle of gabardine and velvet. “Your father was accepted to the academy.”

“What of it? My da was a good mage. I feel I can be too.”

“But that is just it. Your family already gained entry into these halls. The privileges conferred upon you as a result of that are considerable. We cannot keep granting the same families entry into our institution generation upon generation.”

“Why not? That’s how the guilds work. If your da’s a silversmith, you’re a silversmith. If your maam’s a leather monger, you’ll be a leather monger. Why are the magical arts different?”

“For those honorable professions, the craftsman is paid in an equitable exchange of labor or goods.” The wrinkled hand fluttered over a pewter scales on the desk. “A horseshoe for eight loaves of wheat bread, a new dress for a new pestle. That system has balance.” He tipped the crosspiece of the scales from side to side. “A mage does not trade in this equitable exchange. Mages alter the warp and weft of the fabric of our world. They can wield great influence.” His ink-stained index finger began to push down on one of the trays of the scales. “Thus, there is no balance. Influence and wealth would become consolidated into few families. To allow that kind of privilege to filter to the same few families would be unfair.”

“But I didn’t gain any privilege from my father’s appointment!”

The maester merely raised one shelf of an eyebrow.

“My father was….” Dance paused, uncomfortable with spilling his family’s humiliation here in this hallowed place. But needs must. He stiffened his back. “My father used his talent unwisely.”

The eyebrow raised a notch further. “Allow me a surmise. He attempted to create the philosopher’s stone.” The elder’s voice dripped with condescension.

“No! Well, not quite…”

“A potion to make a woman the most beautiful of all.” Was that a tinge of sarcasm Dance detected?

“Not really…”

The master held out a hand, stopping the flow of Dance’s protestation. “Please assure me he did not seek the potion for immortality!”

“No! No! Er…not exactly. It wasn’t like that.”

The maester waited in the dimness behind his desk, a man whose years were uncountable, whose wisdom unimaginable, who saw the ways of time past and to come. Dance realized the old man probably already knew the whole sordid story anyway, so gave up his tale of woe as an offering to the gods of luck. Perhaps a little sympathy might grease the wheel for his acceptance. “My dad was a good mage and made ample coin from scrying, charming the crops, brewing small curatives for ailments. But he…well…he wanted more. He thought to invest his earnings in a new dock for our town -White Harbor - so that we, the town too, might benefit from the trade.”

“Economics! That’s truly an arcane magic. Almost a dark art as it were.”

“As it was,” Dance agreed. “He lost everything when a storm destroyed the new docks.” Why hadn’t he just stuck to potions to ease the joints and spells to ease the heart?

“I see,” the maester murmured. “Had he tended to the little matters in the daily lives of the people in your community as he was trained, scrying for the sailors for instance, he should have seen the storm coming.”

“Yes.” What else could Dance say? His father had been entirely absorbed in his enterprise, seeking to exert influence with the lenders, ferreting out the best prices, forecasting the markets, and weaving account sheets more complicated than a heartsalve spell.

“Once he lost everything, then he sought the philosopher’s stone. He sent my older brothers into the mines for ore. They died in a collapse.”

The eyebrows came together in a hard V.

“Then he peddled lotions to make women more beautiful. But the third time he was dragged into divorce court to answer for the part his lotions played in marital discord, he’d had enough. Only then did he switch to longevity spells, figuring no one would sue him if they lived longer.”

“A failure surely.”

“No! He was great at that! Do you have any idea what a community is like when no one dies? How old everyone is? White Harbor is full to bursting with walking corpses!” Dance caught himself in mid-stream, recollecting the advanced age of the man before him. He backpedaled, mumbling, “My mother and sisters had to go into elder care. It doesn’t pay well.”

There was a span of silence filled by the soundlessness of dust motes drifting in the air.

“So, you see, there has been no privilege conferred to me through my father’s appointment to this acadamie,” Dance finished, his tale of hard luck flapping like a soiled tapestry in the space between them. Surely the maester would see how Dance deserved a turn of the wheel of his fortunes.

“I see this is true,” the elder said, his voice a gravelly delta at the mouth of an unaltering river of tradition. “But we cannot turn the tide of human affairs upon which we are all just bracken floating. Were we to give you the appointment, it would be someone else’s loss. That hardly seems fair.”

“But it isn’t fair to me!”

“That’s as it may be. Should the mages not follow established custom, chaos would break out, and who should know better the effects of chaos than one with such first-hand experience with them? You, young man, cannot gain entry into the academie.” The maester stared through Dance with eyes like sea stones, hard and cold. For a moment his hand hovered over the ledger open on the desk in front of him, a finger running down the names of applicants whose luck had not long since run out.

A kernel of hope flowered in Dance’s heart as the finger stopped and tapped the page momentarily. Was an applicant unworthy? Was there a miscalculation? “Perhaps,” the old voice mused. “Perhaps, were an applicant to drop out or be otherwise removed, the academie could consider allowing you to fill the vacancy. That is the only option I see.” The knobby hands curled around the ledger, snapping it shut in a definitive puff of dust.

“An alternate?” Dance gasped, both stunned at the gut punch of such a label yet leaping at the slim hope it offered.

“Perhaps it would be wiser, Dance Wright, were you to do as your surname suggests and pursue that noble profession.” The old man closed his eyes and blew lightly across his fingertips.

Dance stumbled as he abruptly found himself outside the academie. His father had often done the same thing when Dance was little and didn’t obey, just propel him unknowing through time and space at his own convenience. It was highly irritating. And disorienting. A carriage rattled past inches from his nose, hosing the front of his best tunic with mud spun from the wooden wheels. A rude shout from the startled driver added a final insult to this most ignominious hour of his brief life.

“How’d it go?” Frieda was sitting on the bench in front of the tavern across the narrow alley where they had agreed to meet before the rendering, eating an apple with studied casualness. 

Dance sank down beside her, his best friend from his very earliest memories. He shook his head slowly from side to side. “No good. They are holding to that stupid outdated rule about legacy admissions.”

Frieda nodded and tossed the apple core to a pig rooting in the doorway of the tavern. It grunted enthusiastically, nosing at the slick orange mud clotted along the roadside. “I’m that sorry, Dance. You and your family have had so much ill luck.”

“It’s not really all been ill luck. My da earned some of it.”

“But you didn’t, and now it has been your bad harvest.”

“True.”

Finally, Dance drew breath to say what he knew he should say. “Frieda, you harvested plenty of bad luck of your own. You deserve the turn of the wheel.” He tried to keep the hard edge of bitterness out of his voice.

She nodded. “I am to report as soon as I say goodbye.” She dangled her feet from the bench, watching as another carriage jolted past offering a brief glimpse of a woman’s face at the curtained windows. “It’s going to be hard to do this without you. We haven’t been apart for more than a few days in our whole lives.”

Dance thought back to a childhood spent playing in the caves along the shore searching for pirate treasure long abandoned. Stealing, no borrowing, old man Goatsinger’s ponies to ride up the high ridge to watch the sunsets. Startling the sheep in Grandma Haggis’ field and watching their white tails bounce away across the meadow. But above all, he remembered the magic they used to play at, the small enchantments they devised when they had to watch the little ones in the creche while the adults brought in the harvest. They’d set elaborate traps and tricks pretending to be magicians themselves, easily impressing their little charges.

“Remember that time you soaked a tree fungus in strong ale and tossed it in the fire?”

Frieda nodded enthusiastically. “What an explosion! The littluns all thought I’d summoned a demon!” She tipped her head back, catching the thin light seeping down the narrow alley in her laughter. “How about that time you tricked them into thinking you could turn leaves into birds by making them fly in the updrafts off the cliffs?”

“They believed anything,” Dance acknowledged with a grin. “I’m lucky they didn’t try flying off the cliffs themselves.” He sat there a moment longer, knowing it all needed to end and not sure how to end it.

“We spent so much time pretending at magic, Frieda. What am I supposed to do now?” He thought of the maester’s parting shot about following his family’s occupation. “Do you have any idea how hard it is to make wheels? Uncle Burkhut tried to teach me a few years ago. I have no gift as a wheelwright. My gift is for magic. I can feel it here, in my fingers tingling.”

“That’s probably poor circulation from your arm band. It’s too tight.”

“What would you do if you had not been accepted?”

“I expect I’d spend my days washing ash and collecting piss for Maam’s laundry. Or shoveling shit in Da’s livery. Pretty much the same thing either way.” Frieda’s life had been no sunny day either, Dance reflected.

“What if you could pick anything you wanted? If the guilds weren’t set in stone.”

“If I couldn’t be a mage either? Bakery. Definitely bakery. Standing in the window of the bakery of a winter’s day watching the breads rise. It is a magic of its own. The doughs warming and growing by the ovens, the bakers shaping them; it’s like sleight of hand. Whipping the flatbread discs for into the air like spinning plates, twisting the knottybuns, plaiting the festival breads, patting down loaves into the pans like lambs all snug in their stalls.” She sighed, eyes half-shut in pleasure.

“You’re making me hungry.”

“Baking is an unacknowledged magic.”

He smiled. His friend had always had a gift for seeing the world in a brighter light. “I like that. Well, the baker’s guild is sealed up tight as a crab pot. You’ll just have to be a mage.”

They sat there, studying the blank face of the academie that shortly only one of them would enter. The space between them began to stretch out into an awkward silence. At the mouth of the alley, he could hear the rumblings of a carriage careening over the cobbles. A man shouted, his voice hoarse and urgent. “Out of the way, in the name of the king!” The carriage was massive, powered by some arcane magic. Four horses, white wraiths billowing steam, hooves sparking against the stones of the road, pulled a heavy conveyance through the crowded alley as if chased by demons. Dance wondered at the power that drove the carriage, magics he himself would never be able to harness.

Beside him, Frieda abruptly stood, turning to face him as she held out her hand in farewell. She blinked fiercely, her eyes wet. In the road, the white horses pounded closer, and the pig grunted in alarm. A mother ran out into the road, folding a child into the safety of her skirts. The apple seller hastened to shove her baskets up against the academie wall. And Frieda stepped backwards, slipping in the soft slop of mud the pig had rooted up along the roadside.

For one long moment, Dance saw his future change. He saw her body tipping like a game piece flicked down by an opponent. Her arms pinwheeled as she struggled to regain her balance. Behind her, the wheels of the monstrous carriage screamed against the stones, shaking the ground. And behind that, Dance saw the maester’s finger hovering over the names on the roster, poised to flick, to tap, to eliminate. If there was an opening, if there was a vacancy…

He lashed out a hand to grab Frieda by the belt, hauling her into the safety of the tavern doorway. She yelped as the conveyance thundered past in an assault of noise and heat. The pig squealed its indignation.

A shopkeeper threw a rock at the back of the carriage, which smacked against the siding with a hard thunk. To Dance’s ears, it was the sound of a ledger snapping shut.

He stared at the receding vehicle, Frieda uttering soft curses at his side.

“You’ll do well at the academie, Frieda,” he said finally. “Come back to the village when you are a mage. I will be proud of you.”

“And what will you do, Dance?”

“I think I will not wait for the wheel of fortune to turn my way. I think there is other unacknowledged magic in the world for me to discover.”

Watching her walk away, he realized he was smiling.