The Circle of the Mage

Bryn asked around the village, but nobody wanted to speak of the mage. When they did they made a hasty sign of the Ox and said, “Stay away from that strange wretch, boy. Not many are foolish enough to visit him.”

  “And those that do?” pressed Bryn. “They get what they want, no?”

  “Yes,” people said. Then they made the sign of the Ox and said, “No more questions.”

  It was high summer, hot enough for sweat to cake around Bryn’s lips. Above ground the air shimmered with heat. The cramped cellar of the village brewery was an oven. 

  His thighs burned. You had to tread the sickleberries into mash before noon, or they tasted of copper pennies. Finally he washed his feet and bade a hasty farewell to the brewmaster. 

  The mage, so they said, was a few hour’s walk into the Deep Forest. When Bryn pressed for details, men laughed darkly and muttered, You’ll know you’re close when things start to change. He walked into the forest already feeling a fool. The trees were drooped and wilted, the soil bone-dry beneath his shoes. Even the bird calls sounded tired. But soon they faded into silence. The closer Bryn got to the mage’s home, the greener the trees became. Then drizzled with white. Bryn heard a crunch and looked down. He was walking on snow. 

  He belched a laugh of surprise, and the laugh came out as mist.

Everything in the mage’s home was round. The table, the empty hearth, the skylight. Not surprising: it was an enormous old sicklewine barrel laid on its side, big enough to feed a barrackful of thirsty soldiers for a year. Bryn wondered how the mage got it into this dark, thick corner of the forest. An oak tree had grown half-around the barrel, caging it in roots.

  Inside was warm and clean. Weak light trickled through the hole in the curved roof of the barrel-hut. Bryn sniffed the air. It didn’t smell of sicklewine in here. It smelled of milk and wet grass. Not unpleasant, but persistent.

  The mage was thin and bright-eyed. He’d opened the round door of the barrel when Bryn was a few steps away and jerked his head as if to say, Come in, I haven't all day.

Bryn felt he should speak first. 

“I come —”

  “I know why you've come,” said the mage. 

  He rasped the skin of his gaunt cheek with the back of his hand. “For love.”

  “How do you know this?” said Bryn.

  The mage sighed. “I need no dark spells to see the obvious, boy.” His voice was high, and left an echo in Bryn’s ears like a ringing bell. “You’re a skinny know-nothing runt. Look at those innocent cow eyes — you're too kind to have any enemies, and…”

  Without warning the mage thrust forward and opened Bryn’s jaw. He pulled out Bryn’s retreating tongue, ran his finger over it and peered as if reading a map. 

  “…Hmm, you’ve still got all your teeth. You're just good-looking enough to catch the attention of a village girl, but not good-looking enough to compete with the real strapping lads. You're poor, obviously, but want a woman more than you'd ever want gold. Add it all up, you’re here for love.”

  The barrel was warm, though there was no fire. Or was he just embarrassed? Bryn nodded, and told the mage about Lona. How she made him feel, how she knew he existed, was pleasant enough, but seemed to gaze through him, not at him. He thought the mage would interrupt him, but the clear blue eyes watched him, blinking slowly, until his story was told.

  “And you want me to do…what?”

  Bryn cleared his throat. “I want, well, Lona. Forever.”

  The mage nodded. He seemed suddenly tired. “People come to me for two things only, boy. Love, and hate. To curse a rival. Or to make someone fall in love with them — and I’m not sure the two are so different.”

  “What do you mean?”

  The mage sniffed. “All-consuming. Aching. Wretched, total hunger for the object you crave. Am I speaking of love, or hate?”

  Now Bryn became impatient. He fished into his cloak and brought out a cheap hessian purse. He slapped it on the half-moon table between them. The muted clink was loud in the room.

  “Will you help me,” said Bryn, “or not.”

  The mage sighed and held the threadbare purse for a long minute. 

  “You can untie it and count, if you like,” Bryn pressed.

 “That would be difficult,” said the mage, carelessly. He lifted lifted his other arm from the baggy folds of his cloak. It ended at a stump, smooth and grey as a newborn baby’s head. 

  “Don’t bother saying you're sorry, I know you are. Anyway,” the mage said, “it's not your money I want, nor need.” He lifted his droopy eyes to the roof of the barrel, as if searching for words. “You're not at the market here, squabbling over the price of a hen. You are tethering another person’s soul to yours. You need a deeper currency.” The mage looked down again, bored into Bryn with his gaze. His hand was empty of the purse now. 

  “And yet you've taken my money anyway,” said Bryn, indignant.

  “Have I?”

  Something crinkled in his cloak. Bryn reached in and felt the soft material of the purse.

  The mage smiled wanly. “Don’t bother asking how I did that. Although,” he coughed, “I never get tired of seeing people see it happen.”

  Bryn felt tired now. He thought of his home; his mother who smelt of firewood and clean sweat. She’d be cooking vegetable stew now. Maybe she’d even made honeycakes. It felt like another country. His head ached from the grassy smell.

  “What do you need of me, mage. Please, just tell me.”

  The mage pursed his thin lips as if to say, so be it. “Your finger,” he said.

  “My finger? To do what with?” said Bryn.

  “You come here with a pouchful of coppers, as if buying pepper-leeks at the market. No. Everyone thinks it is that simple. But what you ask for requires…sacrifice.”

  Bryn snorted. Sacrifice? He had been sick with love for months, done all he could. He had tithed to the church of the Ox. Wrapped the heel of loaf and cheese his mother gave each morning for work, and pressed it into the hands of The Blessed Blind. Troupes of them passed through the village each morning, begging for alms. The man took Bryn’s bread, smiled with sightless eyes and whispered, “Blessings upon you, child. May you soon see what you wish to see.” 

  Bryn had even buried his favourite possession, an oak lute that took him three weeks to carve. He’d dug into the ground with frost-bitten hands and invoked the Ox to hear him, make the girl want him. 

  All that, and nothing. 

  When he told this to the mage, laughter churned around the barrel. The high, wheezing chuckles seemed to ring in Bryn’s ears, even when the mage stopped.

  “You give away a few trinkets, feed a fat see-nothing and you think this can bind a girl’s heart. I wish I could say you were the first.” The mage clapped his good hand against his wrist impatiently. “Enough games. I need your finger, boy. That is the price to get what you want.”

  Bryn backed into the concave wall. One of the barrel ribs poked into his shoulder. “I don’t understand you. You’re moon-kissed. I should have known, everyone told me. But if you think I’m going to let you cut off my finger…”

  The mage approached slowly. The light, wherever it was coming from, seemed to leach away, and his blue eyes were lost in the murk. “Me? No, boy. It’s you who has to cut it off.”

  The mage sat Bryn down and in his high voice, spoke as if from rote, like he’d said the words countless times before. Yes, the mage had ways to dull the pain. Silvery, brittle cloudsbain seeds; or a thumb-length of fluxroot (“How apt!”); or a muttered chant that turned pain to pleasure for a few sweet seconds. All of them would do the job — none of them would get Bryn what he wanted. Sacrifice and pain, they were essential. 

  “We can talk in circles all night, little one. Round and round like a mill-donkey,” said the mage. He pointed at Bryn’s lap with his stump. “But I think you’ve already made your choice.”

  Bryn looked down. In his hand suddenly, a small flensing knife. He’d seen the butcher boy using one, stripping the lean meat off a dead foal’s hoof.

  The blade glinted warmly. 

  The mage was still, a gaunt statue. Bryn took a breath, and raised the knife. He wanted the mage to say, Stop. You have proven yourself. I’ve never seen love this deep. But the mage just looked ageless and dismal, like he’d seen this a thousand times. Bryn bent his head, and went to work.

  Sunset painted the cold forest pink. Bryn stumbled out of the barrel’s circle door. He felt a little drunk. His arm throbbed, pain trickling all the way up to his elbow. The cold seemed to bite into every nerve of his skin.

  As Bryn walked home, a breeze fluttered the trees wildly, like they were urging him back. He tried to remember when he’d last eaten. Yesterday? His left index finger lay curled in his purse like a worm. He had bled surprisingly little. 

  “You can't know how much this hurts,” said Bryn, and the mage laughed darkly. Then he told Bryn what to do next.

  All he wanted to do now was sleep. Cradle a clay bowl in his good hand and drink mother’s vegetable soup. But that would have to come later. The mage had been clear. He had to place his finger under the girl’s pillow before dawn.

  The girl’s father was the brewer, of course. The brewmaster saw how his skinny young apprentice looked at her with hungry eyes. He did not take Bryn aside, mutter violent words like most fathers would. He knew Lona could fend for herself, and had better taste than to go for a poor sweating pup like this.

  The brewer did well. His house stood not just two floors, but three-high, proudly buttressing the market square. In the moonlight the dark, crooked third-floor windows looked like bruised eyes. A side chimney on the wall belched steam into the sticky night air. Today’s sicklewine was fermenting nicely in the cellar.

  How to get in? The thick main door was barred; behind it slept Noster, the family guard dog. By day Noster nuzzled Bryn, jowls trickling drool on the floor. By night the hound would not be so kind.

  He crept to the chimney, which butted out from the side of the house. Craning his neck, he tried to see if he could climb to the third floor. But it was made of smooth stone, and if he wasn’t pickled by the hot steam his fingers would surely slip in the wet heat. He slapped the mantle of the chimney and cursed quietly. 

  A dull rasp sang out above his head. A barnacle beetle. He reached up his arm, tapped the fist-sized insect.

  Yes, that might work.

  Bryn stepped back. He could see now the wall was strewn with barnacle beetles. Summer was their hibernation season. They sought out heat and plated themselves down against a surface, protected by their armoured shells. Some merchants made a good living scooping out the insect's body, glazing the smooth inside of the shell and firing them into cups and bowls. Bryn had heard of tribes across the sea that pressed beetles to the heart of criminals and war prisoners. Stirred by the heat of panicked breasts, the insect mandibles cut through chest bones and clamped themselves to the corpse. The beetle’s embrace, they called it.

  Bryn heaved himself up, wobbled one foot, the other flat against the shell. He felt a small vibration as the beetle gave out a quiet tick. It held.

He found another barnacle beetle above and, with a small jump, leapt up to it. Bryn’s finger-stump pulsed brutally as he heaved himself up, but momentum and fear gave him strength. 

  Finally his brow was at the open window. He peered into the dark room, saw a flash of auburn hair in the moonlight. It was her. Curled around her was the family’s house adder. Longer than a man’s arm span and thigh-thick, it slept with its spearlike head on his love’s arm. 

  Bryn’s stomach churned. He’d never seen their house adder. Stayed away from snakes of all kind. He knew they were supposed to be lucky, knew house adders kept you cool in the summer as their bodies drank in the heat from your sweating pores. But to him it felt like going to bed wrapped round a noose. Unbidden, an old nursery rhyme ticked away in his head: House-adder, house-adder, hangman’s friend…

  Quietly, he swung his leg over the window. The room smelled of lavender and sicklewine lees. He pulled his severed finger out of the pouch. The girl was on her side, facing away from him, the adder’s closed eye in the crook of her pale elbow. 

  Bryn took a deep, slow breath and crawled towards the bed. He rolled the finger to the wall. In his head it sounded fearfully loud, like a scuttling roach. But nothing stirred above his head.

  He backed out from under the bed and rose, slowly. The adder’s eye was open, a gold coin shining into him. Its tongue flicked out, but it didn’t move. Sensing the tongue, the girl murmured sleepily and wrapped the snake close into her chest. The gold coin disappeared. 

  Outside, the night air felt like velvet on his skin. Bryn ran home on feet that barely touched the cobblestones, his heart jackrabbiting in his chest.

  Nothing happened the next day, or the next. Nor the next week. Indignant, he shouldered his way through the round door of the mage’s hut.

  “I know why you’ve come,” said the mage.

  Bryn’s muscles were tight. Quietly he said, “You’ve tricked me.” 

  “Patience,” the mage sighed. “You’ll get what you want.”

  “When?” Bryn said, his eyes wild. “When? Tomorrow?”

  “Tomorrow,” snorted the mage. “You speak like the young. You have no concept of time.” He pointed his stump at the wall. “Outside, it's summer. Then it will be autumn. Winter. Spring. Summer again. Do you see? Round and round time goes, not a straight arrow but an echo.” Light from the hole in the ceiling left half the mage's thin face in shadow.

  Bryn screwed the four fingers of his hand to his face. “Why can’t you give a straight answer? Do you even know?” He gazed at the mage furiously. “Or are you a fraud? No wonder nobody here bothers with you. How did you become a mage? Did you learn your trade from a drunkard?”

  “No,” said the mage simply, stroking the half-moon table. “I learned it from the previous mage. I did not choose this trade, boy. Make no mistake. But I am good at what I do. I have done it for longer than you can conceive.” His voice sharpened. “Be patient. Now get out of my sight. Your hungry cow-eyes make me sick.” The mage flicked his stump, and the round door swung open behind Bryn, like a gaping jaw.

  Then one morning Bryn was cleaning the sicklewine barrel of skins when he heard her light tread behind him. Lona never came down to the close, wet heat of the cellar, not in the nine years Bryn had worked there. The house adder was wrapped around her, a liquid shawl around her perfect throat. She peered into the deep trough he was cleaning. The snake glid off her shoulders and balanced itself on the wooden lip, tongue flicking the rich air. 

  The girl looked up at Bryn and said, “Your face is so smooth. Bright.” 

  Dry-mouthed he tried to reply. “It’s the fermenting wine. It gives off a, a sort of miasma that brightens things. Let me show you.” 

  He shut the ragged curtain on the cellar window. The bars of dusty light were severed, and the cellar darkened, but only a little. In the trough, the remains of sicklewine glowed a soft emerald light.

  Lona clapped her hands. “Beautiful,” she laughed.

  He’d worked down here since he was a boy. Within weeks of his apprenticeship, he was used to the heavy fumes of the wine. And yet he felt drunk now — he must have been, or he wouldn't have had the courage to say it. 

  “The green light. It’s like your eyes,” he said.

  And she smiled.

  *

  They were married just a month when the conscription call came. 

  Horsemen, armoured like crabs, thundered through their village and said every able-bodied male between fifteen and fourty was now in the king’s service. In the north, legions of raiders had streamed across the border and threatened to burn the whole land down.

  Bryn went gladly. Service promised honour, but more importantly a good stipend. Loot. Advancement. 

  He learned how to fight, quickly, easily, like he was born to it. He strapped on a jerkin and scabbard and sword, thrumming with pride. He tucked his head with the other village boys and men and they sailed across the North Glass Lake to meet their foe. He made friends; cried over their bodies. He cut deep into men, and was cut into. Grew fat bruises and cuts on his shoulders and chest. And finally he sailed home, coins in his pocket and a scar on his face that his chuckling comrades said improved his looks.

  When he walked into the village he was nearly running, giddy with excitement. He reached their little thatch cabin and found it empty. The hearth cold and clean, like it had not been used in months. He sprinted to the brewer’s house. Panting, he looked at his father-in-law with wide eyes. The brewer looked at him and said, “You're alive.”

  “Yes,” breathed Bryn. “I’m alive. Where is my wife?”

  The brewer wiped his trembling jaw with his hand. “We weren't sure you would make it back alive. It's good to see you, boy.”

  “Where is your daughter,” said Bryn carefully, his scar and finger-stump throbbing. “Where is my wife.”

  Noster the dog nosed the brewer’s hip. The brewer stared down at the hound. “Sit down, Bryn,” he said.

  At first the brewer and his wife thought it was normal. The melancholy of a young soldier's wife. Lona wept, and wept. Stared glumly out of windows, badgered travellers for any news of the war. But as weeks grew into months she stopped weeping. Her face grew pinched as she retreated into herself, her eyes wide, blank circles. He’ll be back, her family said. Have courage. Have patience. But it only made her worse. Even hearing Bryn’s name sent her slack with pain that was like hunger, pacing the rooms like a wolf in heat.

  One night the brewer heard sounds in the kitchen. He crept down with a mace, thinking it was burglars. Lona was gathering straw and herbs from the floor. He watched her fold them into a ball, and stuff them under her dress.

  “What are you doing?” asked the brewer.

  “I’m to have his child,” she replied. “Bryn will be a father. I’ll hold a part of him in my arms, and he will come home.”

  The brewer ran for his wife, who gathered her daughter into bed. In the weeks that passed she stuffed more straw into her. Grew gaunt and cradled her belly and said, Why won’t it come, where is my baby, where is Bryn.

  It was a high summer morning when the brewer found her. Outside, crickets sang rustily in clouds of pollen. 

  She lay in bed as if asleep. A barnacle beetle was clamped on her chest like an upturned cup. How she’d prised one loose from the wall, nobody knew. The house adder nuzzled against her still-warm body. It was eating itself, its jaw clamped around its tail like a writhing hoop.

  “She was moon-kissed, boy. Mad with grief or loneliness, or… I don't know. We prayed to the Ox, we sent for a doctor, but nothing helped.” the brewer said heavily. “I don’t know.”

  But Bryn did.

  Leaf litter crunched beneath his boots. Autumn was sending a thrill of cold into the afternoon. But as Bryn neared the barrel hut, the air warmed, the trees shimmered into a deep spring green. 

  He kicked the door in. The mage didn’t turn.

  “Show me your face,” Bryn said through clenched teeth.

  The mage didn’t turn, simply said, “I know why you’ve come.”

  “Face me, you rancid old man,” Bryn croaked.

  The mage didn't turn. 

  Rage broke like a dam in Bryn. At war, he had kept the flensing knife the mage had given him, kept it close. The sharp blade never needed sharpening, the handle was always warm to the touch. But that was not why he kept it. It was a gift, a miracle that had given him his wife. Bryn took the knife and drove it into the neck of the mage.

  The mage turned unsteadily. His clear blue eyes lighted on Bryn. He stumbled slightly and fell upon Bryn. 

  “Thank you,” the mage breathed in a high voice. 

  Bryn’s arms were around the mage. They sank to their knees together. All the while the mage was whispering, chanting in a language Bryn didn't know. The words ran into each other until they became a thick buzz that filled the air, like Bryn was stuck in a swarming beehive. His head felt like it was in a cold iron vice.

  “Stop,” moaned Bryn, “Stop, I beg you.” His voice sounded different: high and soft. But the mage chanted on, and on, until the language became clear, like the mage was pouring water into Bryn. 

  Bryn looked down at the mage’s still body. He tried to push the body away. His arm felt strange. He looked, and where his hand used to be was an empty stump. And Bryn saw the world anew. Time was an echo, not an arrow.

      *

  Deep winter night, and a young man emerges into the clearing. The forest around is decked with snow, but the air around the round barrel hut is summer-warm. Nervously the young man opens circle door of the barrel. The mage turns and looks upon him, his scarred face resigned. He gestures to the seat with a four-fingered hand.

  “I know why you’ve come,” says the mage.

***

Daniel Seifert’s writing is published or forthcoming in The New York Times, Consequence, Open: The Journal of Arts and Letters, and the anthology Missed Connections: Microfiction From Asia. In 2023 he was shortlisted for the Bridport Prize, and longlisted for the Letter Review Prize. He is currently undertaking a Masters in Creative Writing at Lasalle College of the Arts in Singapore.