Maera Tor

Maera Tor is the name the Reach gives to its greatest act of ashcraft, and perhaps its most grievous. In the autumn of 236 AS, on a stubbled field north of Harrowgate, a single Hollowed woman stopped the advance of a Khaddan host that Varrow's armies had twice failed to hold. What it cost her is sung in every tavern along the Sull and argued over in every chapter-house of the Lantern-Wardens: she burned, by her own account given the night before, the whole of her remembered life. She survived the battle by some hours. Accounts differ as to whether what survived her was still, in any useful sense, Maera Tor.

What the Archive Can Confirm

The firm record is thin, and most of it is administrative. Muster rolls of House Dunmore name her captain of a free company of some two hundred spears, engaged in the spring of 235 AS for border service in the eastern marches. A pay-ledger of the same house records her as "M. Tor, the Hollowed", drawing double wages, which accords with the imperial custom of the period: ashcraft was legal in Varrow but mistrusted, and those who practised it in the Empire's service were paid for the risk of being near their own soldiers. Letters of the marcher lord Wystan Dunmore, preserved at Caldmere, describe her as useful, feared by her own men, and increasingly reluctant to spend herself on small workings for the comfort of officers.

Of the battle itself, three near-contemporary accounts survive. All agree on the outline. The Khaddan host — under a Khagan the steppe chronicles name Temmet — had crossed the march in strength during a failed harvest year, burnt Thornwick, and was driving west when Dunmore's and Corrow's levies made their stand at Hollowfield. The imperial line broke at midmorning. What happened next is attested by the Corrow chaplain's letter, by a Khaddan account carried to Saverra by horse-traders some years later, and by the muster-out rolls of Dunmore's company: the killing stopped within the hour, the Khaddan turned their horses, and they did not come back across the march for a generation.

The Song and the Working

The song — the archive counts nine distinct ballads, of which the Caldmere broadsheet version is the best known and the least trustworthy — says she called fire from the sky, or froze the Khaddan horses in their traces, or opened the earth. The sober accounts are quieter and, to the archivist's mind, stranger. The Corrow chaplain writes of a great cold and a light "like the winter seam drawn down to the field", of men on both sides weeping without knowing why, and of the Khaddan rear ranks simply turning away. The Khaddan account speaks of their horses refusing the field and of the Khagan ordering retreat "as a man wakes from a fever". Ashcraft cannot create anything from nothing, and it cannot work at such scale by any teaching the Collegium of Ash will admit to. What she did, precisely, no surviving witness could describe, and this gap is the seed of every legend that followed.

What is agreed is the cost. She had kept a remembrance-book — the practice was already common among the Hollowed — and on the eve of battle she gave it, by several accounts, to her lieutenant with instructions that it be read to her afterwards. The book does not survive. The lieutenant's own account, dictated in old age, says he read it to her the following morning in a tent at the field's edge, and that she listened politely, as one listens to news of a stranger, and asked whether the woman in the book had been happy. She died before noon. The Hask, who exile the Hollowed and call ashcraft the slowest form of self-murder, nonetheless count her among the honoured dead in certain of their fire-tales, which the archive records without attempting to explain.

Who Benefits from the Telling

Each party that remembers Maera Tor remembers a different woman. The Pale Choir teaches her as proof of its doctrine: that a memory burned is an offering given to the Wound, and that her greatness was the greatness of her gift. Choir sermons do not dwell on the morning after. The Collegium in Saverra cites her as a warning about unlicensed scale, and points out — fairly — that no licensed Hollowed has ever attempted anything like it, nor been asked to. In Varrow's barrack-rooms she is simply the general who won, and recruiting-serjeants still sing the broadsheet version when the wine is paid for.

The Lantern-Wardens, who refuse ashcraft and will not travel with the Hollowed, hold the bleakest reading. A marginal note in the Lamphouse copy of the Corrow chaplain's letter, in a hand the archivists date to the following century, asks the question the song avoids: if she burned all that she was, then who was it that fought at Hollowfield? The note has no answer appended. The archive offers none either, and observes only that the Khaddan chronicles give the field a name of their own, which horse-traders render roughly as the place where something looked back.

M. Tor, the Hollowed. Double wages, by her own asking.