Dominick's Heart

Part III

Rowan Zarovan muttered to herself as she stumbled up the last steep spiral of stairs to the Grand Master's office. Balancing the four heavy tomes on one knee as she struggled with her ponderous iron key ring to unlock the office door.

"I swear, Harald," she complained under her breath, "someday I'll convince you that you don't need to back up three magical locks with a piece of iron." The key turned with a click and she stumbled into the outer office, a large, semicircular antechamber walled floor to ceiling with various texts and ledgers of the Great School's operations since its inception.

In the center of this most serious decor stood a single hardwood desk, sheathed in its own mess of stacked paperwork, course schedules, and various notes here and there. Someday I'll clean that, she promised herself for the hundredth time. Balancing the books on the corner of her personal disaster area, she crossed to the inner door, which stood ajar. The academic clutter within, no matter how eclectic and how voluminous, was nonetheless neat as a pin. As always. But there was no sign of its owner, which did surprise Rowan, for Harald had been working tirelessly this past week—day and night, even during class hours. Upon the third morning of her taking over his classes, Rowan had tried to blackmail him into telling her what was going on, but he only gestured vaguely toward his lecture notes and the door, his nose in a dusty sheaf of scrolls.

Sighing again, Rowan fetched the books from her desk and thunked them down on a chair near Harald's own desk, then pulled the door shut behind her.

She had no sooner settled into straightening out her papers ("Why on earth did I need to hang onto a schedule for Fall 1013?") when the outer door burst open and Harald swept into the antechamber. If not for the richly-dyed velvets and the supple, master-tooled boots, gloves, and cloak (not to mention the chain of office about his neck), one could never tell that Harald Haaskinz was one of the most powerful men in all Glantri. Grand Master of the Great School of Magic, Prince of Sablestone, master Water Elementalist...and other appointments or societies, of which Rowan knew little, but to which Harald nonetheless belonged. In appearance, he was naught but an aged academic, a man more suited to fireside reading and enlightened discussion rather than political debate and magical intrigue, but Harald was the scion of a noble family with a long history of political ambition and pursuit of arcane power, and history weighed heavy upon his stooped shoulders. Ever was he aware of his appearance, his reputation as the "Reluctant Prince," the scorn of his fellow rulers at their perception of him as nothing more than a glorified bookworm, holding his title until a more suitable ruler—meaning, his warrior-wizard son Dominick—came along. It chafed at him deeply, she knew... but, despite her best encouragement, he had done nothing to change that perception.

Whatever his intentions, right now he looked like a stuffy old academician...one who was up to something. He had a glint in his blue eyes that Rowan didn't particularly like. It wasn't his "mischievous" glint.

"What is it?" she said, hanging the cloak near the fire. It was raining again, she saw.

He stood before the hearth, making a production out of warming his hands and clearing his throat and playing innocent. "I, uhmm, thought we would go to Kern for a day or two," he said.

That caught her off guard. "You never want to go to Kern in the spring," she replied, brow furrowed. "Harald, what is going on? You've been holed up in that office all week long, poring over books and scrolls that are positively obscure. Then you ask me to go and dig these old research notes of Prince Étienne out of the Library. And now you want to run off to the middle of nowhere." The overwork was making her unduly harsh; she actually liked Kern, with its cozy manor house and western breezes. And the sunsets from the back portico were spectacular...

Her daydreaming had allowed him to pass off some lame excuse or another. She sighed (that's becoming habitual, she warned herself), knowing that she had no choice in the matter anyway. "Fine, Harald," she said. "Just tell me what you're up to."

The way he ignored her question told her all that she needed to know: whatever it was, it involved the same level of secrecy as he observed in reading those magically trapped tomes in his private library, or in his secret doings every equinox without fail. It was not for her to know.

"Very well," she sighed. "Kern it is."

Part I | Part II | Part III | Part IV | Part V | Part VI | Part VII