"I—I beg your pardon, sir?"
Aldous had found a little of his voice. It shook on the way out, but he got the words up, and to his credit he did not look away while he said them.
Sael paused.
He had, he realised, delivered rather a lot at once. The name, the title, the Charter, the remanding of the entire village to a kingdom that was possibly four days' walk away and had possibly not thought about Aldermere in a century. He had done it in the tone one used for the guilty, and before establishing that the man in front of him was, in fact, guilty of anything.
Hmm.
That was a point. The old man spoke for the village, yes, but speaking for a village and knowing every foul thing done within it were not the same. It was entirely possible Aldous had no notion of what happened to boys sold off benches, that such arrangements were made quietly, at the edges, without the elders' blessing. If that were so, then Sael had just descended out of the sky at dawn, frightened a poor and blameless old man half to death, and made a series of grave pronouncements over people who had done nothing but wake up. Which would be, on reflection, quite rude.
"You. Old man." Oz's voice cut cleanly across the whole of it. "You have functioning ears, I take it?"
The effect this had on the crowd was considerable.
Aldous's mouth came open while somewhere a child asked, quite loudly, whether the chicken had talked, and was shushed by three adults at once, none of whom looked certain of the answer themselves.
"Answer when you are spoken to," Oz said. "It was not a difficult question. Nod, if the words are too many."
"...Y-yes," Aldous managed. "I hear you."
"Good." Oz took a few unhurried steps forward across the grass, which the front row of the crowd matched with an equal and opposite number of steps backward. "Then attend closely, because I will say this part once. My companion is a kind being. It is his great and tiresome flaw. He is, at this very moment, standing there inventing reasons you might be innocent, because he would rather apologise to you than accuse you, and he will go on doing that until you give him cause to stop."
He tilted his head up at the old man.
"I am not a kind being. That is where we differ, and it is why he asks the questions and I ensure they are answered honestly. So." There was s small pause. "I am going to ask you about this place. And you are going to tell me the truth, all of it, because I can hear a lie the moment it leaves a man's mouth, and the last three who tried one on me are no longer in a condition to regret it. Do we have an understanding?"
Aldous had gone the colour of old ash.
"Wonderful. Now." Oz's voice did not rise. If anything it dropped, which was worse. "Did this village know what it was doing when it sold its own to the men with the wagons? Did you, all of you, knowingly put your neighbours and your children onto those carts, aware of where they were bound and what waited for them there?"
He let that settle a moment.
"Consider your answer carefully, old man. It is likely the most important one you will give in what remains of your life."
"P-pardon? I don't... I don't understand what's being—"
"I could explain it more slowly," Oz said, "though I suspect speed is not the difficulty."
He raised one wing and leveled it at Eron, who flinched under it as though the feathers themselves might carry a verdict.
"This child. Who sold him? And who among you knew it was being done?" The wing did not waver. "Answer now."
For a moment, there was nothing. Nobody wanted to be the first to speak.
Then Ilsa stepped forward.
"You heard him," she said. "Answer the question."
She didn't raise her voice. She stood there in her armour, back straight, every inch the highborn she was, and that was, Sael assumed, what broke them. Out here they couldn't tell an Archmage from a talking bird, but a highborn they understood, someone with a house, a name and the weight to see wrongs answered for; to their eyes she might well have come sent by their own king.
"It was the Harrow woman!" A thick-necked man near the middle, pushing it out fast. "Marla Harrow, her own boy, she brought him to the square herself—"
"You bought the Teller girl off those same wagons two winters back!" a woman rounded on him. "Don't you stand there and act innocent!"
"That was a debt, that was different!"
"It was not different!"
And then it came apart. A dozen voices over a dozen others, arms going up, fingers finding faces. It was her, it was him, it was the men from the low farms, it was Aldous who took the toll and looked away. It was the winter. It was always the winter. You don't know what it was like, the wheat came in black, two of mine already in the ground.
Every accusation was the same one underneath: it had happened, they'd all let it, and not one of them had believed anyone would ever come to ask.
Sael listened, said nothing, and let them show him the whole of it.
"ENOUGH!"
The word cracked out of Aldous with a force that shut every mouth in the square. But he wasn't looking at Sael. He'd rounded on his own people.
"Look at you. One outsider names the thing and you fall over each other to confess it." His voice shook, not with fear now. "Cowards. Every one of you spent that silver. You warmed your houses with it and you fed your children with it; you swore, all of us swore, that what happened here stayed here. And it takes a talking bird and a girl in armour to make you break in the time it takes to piss yourselves."
Nobody answered. A few looked at the ground.
"We agreed," he said, quieter, which was worse. "We agreed."
Then he turned to Sael.
His hand had already found the cord at his throat, and closed on whatever hung beneath his shirt.
"And you. We do not know you. We know a cloud, a girl in armour, and a mouthy bird, and a man wearing a dead legend's name like a borrowed coat. Sael the Great died hundreds of years ago; every child here could tell you as much. So do not imagine you can drop out of the sky, wave an old name at a few farmers, and carry off our silver and our secrets both."
Pale smoke had begun to leak between his fingers where they closed on the pendant. It didn't drift. It poured upward, thick and slow, gathering above his head, and the villagers who saw it started backing away from their own elder, some of them turning to run.
Eron pressed himself into the back of Sael's coat. Behind them Orion had Eirwyn up with his stance set, Ilsa's sword was already clear of the sheath, and Dan had come forward with his staff levelled.
Robin didn't wait. He put a bolt through the air at Aldous before anyone could tell him not to, a clean shot, dead for the old man's chest, and it stopped a hand's breadth from him and broke, the head shattering against nothing and the shaft dropping into the sinking grass.
Aldous turned his head toward the fox slowly, and he looked, more than anything, insulted.
"Don't waste them," Oz said. He hadn't moved either. "The old goat is hung with enough talismans to turn aside a great deal worse than your string. You'll spend every bolt you have and put nothing on him but a temper."
As for Sael, he didn't move, simply watching the thing build.
And build it did. The smoke climbed past the roofs, past the well, past the tallest thing in the valley, folding in on itself as it rose and taking on a shape, shoulders, a torso, arms like thunderheads. Its head went up and up until it was lost somewhere in the grey of the sky, too high to find, and still the body kept widening beneath it. The ground under Aldous began to sink, pressing down in a slow bowl around him, the earth groaning under a weight it had never been built to hold.
Aldous stood at the foot of it, his hand still shut on the pendant.
"You will swear," he said. "All of you. That you were never here, that you saw nothing, that no word of this place reaches the crown or its courts or any soul with the power to act on it. You will swear it, you will leave, and you will never come here again." The thing settled another foot into the earth, and the whole valley shuddered with it. "Or I give the one order I need to give, and there will be nothing left here for anyone to come asking after. I have only ever had to give it once."
"...Hmm. You know," Sael said, watching the shape climb, "I truly did think there was a chance this one had no idea. That it was all being done at the edges, without him. I had half an apology ready."
"You always do," Oz said. "It is your defining inefficiency. Expect the worst of people and they will meet you there more often than not, Archmage, and on the rare occasion they don't, you may be pleasantly surprised. That is the correct way to hold it."
"What a terrible thing to say in front of children, Oz."
He turned, unhurried, to the four young ones braced at his back.
"Don't listen to him. People are worth the trouble of hoping about, most of the time; you will meet many who are kind for no reason at all, and it costs you nothing to leave the door open for them." He allowed for a small pause, considering. "You should simply also be ready, when the door opens, for it to be this instead."
He said it while a titan of smoke was folding the daylight out of the sky above him.
Aldous stared at them. The smoke titan stood beside him, blotting out the sky, and he looked from one of them to the next as if he'd misheard something.
"Now." Sael faced front again and drew one hand from his pocket. "Let me show you something, children. Watch closely; it's worth seeing done once."
He raised the hand, palm open, and closed it.
KRA-KABOOM!
The upper half of the elemental ceased to exist. There was no throwing it down, nor scattering it across the valley; the sound arrived and the top of the thing was simply not there anymore, and the blast did not stop at the smoke. It went up through the grey ceiling of the morning and kept going, and the clouds went with it, the whole overcast sheared open and rolled back to the horizon in every direction at once, so that what had been a low grey dawn became, between one breath and the next, a clean and cloudless sky with the first real sun of the day pouring straight down into the ruined square.
Aldous sat down hard in the sinking dirt. His legs had simply stopped.
He was not the only one. All across the square the villagers had gone down with him, knocked off their feet by the sound, some flat, some to their knees with their hands clamped over their ears, a few of the older ones staying down and not trying to rise at all.
"Ah. My apologies," Sael said to the crowd at large. "That spell moves faster than sound can, so it shoves all the air out of its way as it travels, and leaves an empty channel behind it. Then all that air slams back in at once to fill the gap, and that clap you heard was the air itself closing. It's nearly always louder than the spell that caused it." He paused. "I should have warned you first. It takes people off their feet if they aren't set for it."
Nobody appeared to be in any state to accept the apology, but he had offered it, which he felt was the part that mattered.
Sael was not finished. He turned his open hand over and drew it back toward himself, gently, and out of the churning remains of the lower half something small came loose and crossed the air to him: a thin curl of pale light, no bigger than a candleflame, that settled into his cupped palm and turned there, quivering.
He looked at it with something close to tenderness. Then he closed his other hand in the air, a small precise motion, and at Aldous's throat the pendant cracked clean across with a sound like ice giving way.
"There," Sael said to the light in his hand. "You're free now, friend. Go on."
The wisp brightened once, hung a moment as though it did not quite believe him, and then shot upward into the new-open sky and was gone.
"Binding an elemental," Sael said to Aldous now, "and setting it to do your killing against its will, is not the advantage you took it for. A thing held by force is only ever loyal to the moment the force ends." He glanced at the broken pendant. "You leaned your whole weight on a door that was waiting to be opened from the other side."
"Bhh—" Aldous got out, and nothing else came, and then a second, wet sound broke out of him, unmistakably a fart, loud in the quiet of the ruined square, and a smell rolled off him a moment after. Sael elected not to remark upon it. The man was old, beaten, and about to have a far worse morning still; he could at least keep that.
The others were not so gracious.
"Oooagh!" Robin had both hands clamped over his nose and mouth, ears flat, backing off a step, and Sael remembered a beat too late that a fox's nose was a good deal keener than a man's. He felt rather sorry for him. Orion had turned fully away, and Ilsa was breathing in slow through her mouth and not at all through anything else.
"...That is genuinely awful," Dan managed, a hand clamped over the lower half of his face.
Oz walked forward across the settling earth, unhurried, and stopped where the old man had fallen. Around him, Sael's hand moved once more, and the rest of the talismans strung about Aldous's neck and wrists went dark and dropped away, one after another, leaving him with nothing at all.
The rooster tilted his head down at him.
"Now that the theatrics are concluded," Oz said pleasantly, "I find I have a question of my own, and I would like it answered with great care." A bok. "Who, precisely, did you call a bird? A talking, wordy bird, I believe it was?"
Aldous looked at him, terrified.
"...Oh, god," he whispered.