The First Confessor: The Legend of Magda Searus

Chapter 5

Warm summer air rising up the towering outer Keep wall and spilling over onto the rampart ruffled Magda’s shortened hair, pulling strands around in front of her face. As she made her way along the deserted rampart, she reached up and drew her hair back. It felt strange, foreign, to her touch now that it only just brushed her shoulders rather than going down to the small of her back.

A lot of people, women mostly, paid very close attention to the length of a woman’s hair because, while not always absolute, length was a fairly accurate indication of their relative social standing and thus their importance. Ingratiating oneself to the right person could bring benefits. Crossing the wrong person could bring trouble. Hair length was a valuable marker.

Being the wife of the First Wizard meant wearing her hair longer than most women. It also meant that many women with shorter hair often fawned over her. Magda never took such flattery seriously, but she tried to always be gracious about it. She knew it was not her, but her position, that drew the interest of most of them.

To Magda, having not been born noble, her long hair had merely been a way to open doors, to get an audience and be heard on matters important to her. She had cared about Baraccus, not how long she was allowed to grow her hair simply because she was married to him. While she had come to like the look of it on her, she didn’t attach worth to that which she had not earned.

Since her long hair had begun to be a part of her life for the year Baraccus had courted her and the two years since she had been married to him, she had thought that she might miss it.

She didn’t, really. She only missed him.

Her grand wedding to Baraccus seemed forever ago. She had been so young. She still was, she supposed.

With the long hair gone, in a way it felt as if a weight had been lifted from her shoulders in more ways than one. She no longer had a responsibility to live up to what others expected of her. She was herself again, her real self, not a person defined by an artificial mark of worth.

To an extent, she also felt a sense of liberation from her standing, from the need to act in a manner befitting her place as others saw it. Now, she had no place, no standing. She was in a way free of the prison of standing. But none of that mattered now, for far more important reasons than the length of her hair.

Baraccus had given her a new life because of what they meant to each other. Without him she had no life. Her standing didn’t really matter in that equation.

Reaching the right spot, the spot forever burned into her memory, Magda stepped up into the opening in the massive, crenellated outer Keep wall. She inched out toward the edge. Beyond the toes of her boots peeking out from under her skirts, the dark stone of the wall dropped away for thousands of feet. Below the foundation of the Keep, the cliff dropped even farther to the ledges and boulders below. Feathery tufts of clouds drifted along the cliff walls beneath her. It was a frightening, dizzying place to stand.

Magda felt small and insignificant up on the top edge of the towering wall. The wind at times was strong enough to threaten to lift her from her perch. She imagined that it might even carry her away like a leaf in the wind.

The beautiful city of Aydindril lay spread out below, flowing across rolling hills that spilled from the foot of the mountain. Green fields surrounded the city, and out beyond them lay dense forests. From its place high on the mountain, the monolithic Wizard’s Keep stood watch over the mother city sparkling like a jewel set in that verdant carpet.

Magda could see men leading horses and wagons as they returned from their work in the fields. Smoke rose from chimneys all across the valley as women prepared the evening meal for their families. Slow-moving crowds, visiting markets, shops, or going about their work, made their way through the tangled net of streets.

While she could see the activity, she heard none of the hooves of the horses, the rumble of wagons, the cry of street vendors. From this distance the lofty world up at the Keep was silent but for the calls of birds wheeling overhead and the sound of the wind over ramparts and around the towers.

Magda had always thought of the Keep, more than anything, as mute. Though hundreds of people lived and worked in the enormous stone fortress, went about their lives, raised families, were born, lived, and died there, the Keep itself witnessed it all in brooding silence. The dark presence of the place stoically watched centuries and lives come and go.

These massive battlements where she stood had watched her husband’s life end. This was the very spot where he had stood in the last precious moments of his life.

She thought, fleetingly, that she didn’t want to follow him, but the whispers from the back of her mind overwhelmed those doubts. What else was there for her?

Magda looked out at the world spread out far below, knowing that this was what he would have seen as he stood in this very place. She tried to imagine the thoughts he must have wrestled with in his last moments of life.

She wondered if he thought of her in those last moments, or if some terrible, weighty matter had taken even that from him.

She was sure that he must have been sad, heartbroken even, that he was about to leave her, that his life was about to be finished. It must have been agony.

Baraccus had loved life. She could not imagine him taking his life without a powerful reason.

Still, he had. That was all that mattered now. Everything had changed and there was no calling it back.

Her world had changed.

Her world had ended.

At the same time she felt shame for focusing so narrowly on her own world, her own life, her own loss. With the war raging, the world had ended for a great many people. The wives of the men Baraccus had sent to the Temple of the Winds still waited in silent misery, hoping their loved ones might return. Magda knew that they never would. Baraccus had told her so. Yet they still clung to the hope that those men could yet come home. Other women, the wives of men gone off to war, wailed in anguish when they received the terrible news that their men would not be returning. The corridors of the Keep often echoed with the forlorn cries of the women and children left behind.

Like Baraccus, Magda hated the war and the terrible toll it took on everyone. So many had already lost their lives. So many yet would. And still there was no end in sight. Why couldn’t they be left in peace? Why must there always be those seeking conquest or domination?

There were so many other women who had lost their husbands, fathers, brothers, sons. She was not alone in such suffering. She felt the heavy weight of shame for feeling so sorry for herself when others, too, were going through the same agony.

Yet she could not help being smothered beneath the whispers of her own grief.

She also felt a deep sense of guilt over those she was abandoning. She had given voice before the council to those who had no voice. Over the last couple of years she had gradually become the conscience of the council, reminding them of their duty to protect those who could not protect themselves. The night wisps, for example, that she had seen only days before, depended on others to speak for them and their need to be left in peace lest their fragile lives be silenced for good.

Because of her standing, she had often been able to go before the council and remind them of their duty to all those who lived in the Midlands. Sometimes, when she explained the situation to them, they did the right thing. Sometimes she shamed them into doing the right thing. Sometimes they looked forward to her recommendations.

But without standing she could no longer be that voice before the council. It was wrong that being married to a man of standing in turn gave her standing, but that’s the way the world worked.

She was proud that she had made friends of those rare and secretive beings that few had ever seen, or ever would see. She was grateful for all the friends she had made of far-flung peoples of the Midlands. She had made the effort to learn many of their languages, and because of that they had come to trust her when they would trust no other. She was proud of what she had been able to do to protect their peaceful, isolated lives.

She thought that maybe she had also been able to bring some understanding between different peoples, different tribes and communities, and in so doing helped in some small way to make them all feel a part of the larger Midlands.

But when her husband had ended his life, he had also inadvertently taken away her voice before the council.

Her life no longer had a noble purpose, except to herself.

And at that moment, her own life meant nothing to her but insufferable anguish with no end in sight. She felt as if she was caught up in a raging torrent of sorrow.

She just wanted the hopeless agony to end.

Inner whispers urged her to end the suffering.