Antimei

The Witch of the Wilderlands

Old Antimei is the greatest hedgewitch of the northlands, living in a sod-roofed croft in the highlands above Tolindir village. She no longer leaves her chair, though once the common folk of every settlement from the Pearwoods to the Mindens journeyed to find her. The arrival of the gurvani has reduced her practice to a handful of clients in the dwindling village below.

The Wilderlords are gone, Alurra. There were few enough of them to begin with, before the war. Now they've all died. Or been taken. Or fled beyond care.

— Antimei, Court Wizard

Alurra's Apprentice

Antimei accepts the blinded Alurra as her apprentice the day the village brings the girl to her, having foreseen the request before the runners arrived:

She'd known she was going on a trip. She had foreseen it.

— Court Wizard

She raises Alurra in the croft for two years, devising new ways to teach an illiterate, sightless girl the Art — reading aloud, shaping sticks into the form of letters, then watching as Alurra's natural beastmaster talent overcomes the rest. Antimei eventually accepts that her apprentice will become a Wild Mage rather than an Imperially-trained one, and stops trying to force the standard course.

The Forbidden Gift

Antimei carries the “forbidden gift of prophecy.” She has hidden a thirty-two-year written record of her visions, page by page, in disguised verse:

I wrote in verse, one leaf at a time. I hid it betwixt the pages of that book of Alka Alan poetry, so that it looked like a translation, not a prediction. . . . I've seen every night of my life for thirty-two years. Like an endless tapestry woven one thread a night.

— Antimei to Alurra, Court Wizard

The book is the central artefact of her vocation, written for one specific reader (who turns out to be Pentandra) and concealed inside an Alka Alon poetry volume to defeat any Censor who might find it.

The Vision That Cost Her Family

Once she was not Antimei. She was a happy adept in Inmar in southern Alshar, with a husband, three children, and a comfortable middle-class practice. A single client visit in the park at a convent school changed her life: the girl was Amandice, future Baroness, and the visions of what would unfold from that meeting drove Antimei to abandon her family that very afternoon. She fled north, took on a Wilderlands pseudonym, apprenticed under another hedgewitch for a winter, and walked deeper into the wilderness until she found the croft she had foreseen for herself in exile.

She'd shed a river of tears over the decades she'd been away from them. She had loved . . . but she had not known love in over thirty years. Kindness, generosity, friendship, these things the Wilderlands folk had for her in abundance. But love she was denied, the price she paid for her terrible Gift.

— Court Wizard

The book this Court Wizard arc opens with — the story Antimei begins telling Alurra in the croft — is the story of Pentandra's arrival in Vorone and the redemption of Amandice: “It all begins when a woman named Amandice – Baroness Amandice – decides she has had quite enough.”

Antimei is referenced repeatedly by Alurra as her departed teacher. The Wilderlands hedgewitch's sayings, tonics, and warnings about the Censorate (“run and hide if I ever noticed a black and white checkered cloak”) shape Alurra's adjustment to court life at Vorone.

Pentandra carries the disturbing weight of having read the entire concealed book of prophecies — against Antimei's explicit instructions — and is increasingly haunted by its incomplete verses through the Olum Seheri planning.

Antimei remains a posthumous-feeling presence: Alurra still quotes her teacher's remedies and aphorisms in court, and Pentandra still reads (and re-reads) the disguised volume of verse that has driven her policy decisions since Vorone.

Returned by Trygg

The hedgewitch who left her croft to die in the wilderness is alive in Inmar, restored by Trygg Allmother to the family she abandoned thirty years before. Rondal brings her unannounced to Pentandra at the Tower Arcane in Falas, where Alurra is the first to see her:

“Antimei!” the girl screamed, in near hysterics. “Antimei! Is it really you?”
“Alive, hale, and in the flesh,” the old woman assured her, as she swept her up in her arms.

— Hedgemage

She has reclaimed her real name, Jamarain, and spent three years quietly rebuilding ties with her grandchildren and visiting her husband's grave. The Inmar idyll has just been broken by a Nemovort and a draugen attacking the city, which is what brought her into the Footwizards' path.

The Duck-Egg Solution

Antimei's practical hedgewitchery solves a problem the warmagi could not:

Of course it was a Nemovort, Sir Rondal. And draugen. I've met both before, and I could recognize their taint. I just had no means of contending with either — I am an old woman, after all. Nor did I want to endanger the adepts I knew in Inmar. Instead, I searched for a cure.

— Antimei to Rondal, Hedgemage

A crushed pearl o' nymph, powdered to a fine dust and sealed into a duck's egg after it was heavily enchanted with verdant energy. It took weeks to prepare. But it worked. . . . She vanished like a passing rash.

— Antimei explaining her counter-Nemovort weapon, Hedgemage

New Visions

Trygg returned her to her family but did not end the visions. They have started again, with the warning that some choice of Minalan's will throw the prophecies off if he dies. She admits to Pentandra that her interpretive work was always less precise than the prophecies themselves:

My words were my attempt to interpret the visions. They were as exact as I could make them and fit together as well as I could. But they are my interpretations, not divine will. And they were not complete. The future is constantly in flux.

— Antimei, Hedgemage

And she catches Pentandra at it:

You found the bloody book, didn't you? . . . I warned you against doing that! And you read it, didn't you? You read every word!

— Antimei accusing Pentandra, Hedgemage

Pentandra confesses that the entire course of her career — the Tower Arcane, her policy decisions, even the meeting with the ancient shipwright in a smelly port city — has been driven by Antimei's incomplete verses. Antimei moves into Falas as Pentandra's house guest and resident seer.