The Poet's Eye - prose

The Eyes are the amulets remaining from the Something Wars.

---

Galen turned the amulet over in his hand. “I wish we knew where they came from.”
“The sorcerers?”
“The amulets. Or the sorcerers. Anything.”
She tipped her head up to look at him. “But we do.”
“What?”
“The amulets. We know where they came from, or at least who made them. Didn’t you learn that in your history?”
“No,” he admitted. “But how would I learn that? I’m just a stupid farm boy, or so I’ve been told.”
She made a face. “Did I ever actually say stupid?”
“Pretty sure you did.”
She sighed. “Well, let’s amend that to uneducated. You’ve shown remarkably good sense in business partners.”
“Fine. Now tell me how an uneducated farm boy should know the history of these amulets.”
“Because it’s part of the history of the wars.”
Galen stared at her. “All that knowledge was lost. Only the artifacts remain.”
She snorted. “Lost in the Heel, maybe.”
Galen remembered a temple brother talking about books being burned or stolen or lost—and he realized what as a boy he had not, that such a loss had beggared their own region, but not the world beyond, a world he had barely considered before he had run away to it. “Tell me.”
“The king’s mages made the amulets for the Selk wars—or the Rideis, I suppose we know now. Their names were Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. They all worked together to craft magic greater than any one or three mages could work alone. They made six amulets to support the defense against the invading Selks.”
“Rideis.”
“Whatever. When I learned this, they were Selks, and that’s how I can recite the lesson.”
“When was this?”
“This was long ago, about eight hundred years, during the reign of Ferdinand the Greater. But the amulets were kept after that war and used during the next, and the next. They were also used between war with the Selk—Rideis—in wars with other humans. Because once you have a magical amulet which can protect you in battle, why wouldn’t you use it?”
“And that’s how they spread across the country,” Galen said. “Because there would be no need of a weapon against the eastern Rideis all the way west in the Heel.” “Right. But they probably used it in that old territory war that you talked about back in Chapter One, the one the author can’t be bothered to look up right now because she’s writing on the clock.”
“Right. And then someone lost it—maybe his opponent hit him with steel instead of magic—and it stayed in the temple, until it was stolen.” The magnitude of it came to him. “The seven most powerful sorcerers in the history of our kingdom, maybe of the world, worked together to make this, and my uncles kept it in a wooden box in the hallway.”
“No accounting for uneducated farm boys,” Lisveth said.

Item type

Jewelry / Valuable

Raw materials & Components

Each amulet features a richly colored eye set in a wire frame with intricate wired tooling.