Background for Edward Vandaleur

Edward is the companion I'm played in Jeff Tidball's Ars Magica. My maga is Rhiannon, who features largely in this story. According to the background for Mythic Europe, the setting for Ars Magica, magi come from different traditions within the Order of Hermes, called Houses (the House Flambeau, for example, specializes in destructive magic whereas House Ex Miscellanea is a British-based order including wise-folk and hedge wizards). Magi live and study together in Covenants, which may include individuals from more than one house.

In Summary:The Vandaleurs are a family of Norman nobles with a heritable version of the mages' Gift. They have been using magic covertly for what appears to have been a very long time, passing the knowledge down through the family and using it to maintain an advantage among the mundanes.The Order of Hermes has only found about them recently. A branch of the Vandaleurs in Cambridgeshire, England organized a diabolist conspiracy that was quashed in AD 1216 by agents from the Mere House (a loosely organized covenant mostly of House Ex Miscellanea) and members of the Seelie Court of Faerie. A few Vandaleurs died in the incident, along with their ally King John, and one defected, but the rest maintain control of the fief and the favor of the Church, if not of their new king. Most worrying for the Order is the fact that Baron Vandaleur's wife, Constance, is a former member of the Order, of House Flambeau specifically, who disappeared in 1187 only to resurface in this incident. She or possibly earlier defectors from the Order have taught the Vandaleurs many of the Order's secrets, including the parma magica. Another branch of the family is known to hold a fief in Normandy, but it is not yet known if they are covert magicians as well.

In General: Edward was born in 1195, the fourth son of Constance and Baron Guillaume Vandaleur. All four of Constance's children were Gifted, which is unusual, even for the Vandaleurs. All four were raised to be both Norman knights and diabolist magi. As each turned 12 years old, he entered into an initial demonic pact during which the child permitted his Gift to be tainted by Constance and her Hellish masters. The Vandaleurs' baronial fief is up in the Fens of northern Cambridgeshire, a marshy and isolated region, flooded for much of the year.

Since the Vandaleurs choose keep to themselves for obvious reasons, Edward was not fostered out to another family, but made squire to his oldest brother Vincent, who treated him badly. The boys and the other knights of the household fought for the Vandaleurs' ally, King John, trying to defend the king's possessions in France. Edward learned the arts of war on the losing side on various French battlefields between 1211 and 1215. Another of his brothers, Frederick, fell in one of these battles.

Vincent took gleeful part in pillage and rapine between battles, but left Edward to hold the horses and to watch out for other knights. The acts that Edward witnessed inspired him with horror rather than a desire to become the monster that Vincent had made himself. In 1212, when Edward observed the assembly and procession of the Children's Crusade, he knew all to well what kind of ruin would befall the young Crusaders, and it troubled him greatly, although he did not know why.

In 1214, the Vandaleurs were called upon to begin a project for their Hellish patrons. All they had to do was create a seedbed in which to plant a seed of another Tree of Knowledge (the first grew in Eden, and is described in the book of Genesis) in the central court of their castle. The bed was to be made up human corpses. The tree grew with horrible speed: within two years, it was over 60' tall, with spreading limbs, and ready to bear fruit. The princes of Hell were laying the groundwork for a plan to recorrupt humanity. The Seelie Court of Faerie, relatively powerful in East Anglia, wondered at the infernal aura of what was apparently an icon of nature, but finally realized what it was and committed themselves to its destruction.

In 1216, the British were finally driven out of France, and Edward was old enough to be knighted and finally free of Vincent. So he returned home for the knighthood ceremony and completed it. But before it could be followed up with the traditional final pact with Hell, the hedge-witch Rhiannon, dispatched by the Faerie and Mere House, destroyed the Tree. Edward and his other brother, Guy, were sent after her. Rhiannon ambushed Guy in the woods and killed him, but Edward proved a little cannier and luckier.

Constance would not let Edward return home until he had found Rhiannon and/or her allies, so he concentrated on terrorizing the local hedge wizards to either get information out of them or to lure her out of hiding. So Rhiannon asked Mere House, the local covenant, to concoct evidence that Edward was actually betraying the Vandaleurs. Such evidence duly fell into Constance's hands. In a fit of perversity, Rhiannon warned Edward that his family had turned on him before Vincent and the household troops caught him.

So Edward tried to flee to London, but Constance arranged through King John to have a priest from the army Edward had fought for in France accuse him of having become a Pagan and apostate. So the Church started hunting him as well. So Edward dared not leave the wilds of Cambridgeshire for fear of the Church, nor could he stay there for fear of his own kin. So he tried to throw himself on the mercy of the local Pagan outlaws (allies of the Mere House). The outlaws were all set to kill him as a Norman and a Vandaleur, since they had suffered greatly at the hands of the local nobility, but decided to tell Rhiannon first. Greatly amused at the situation, Rhiannon decided that Edward really was in no position to rejoin the Vandaleurs, and was pretty cute besides, so she decided to take him with her.

So, for a couple of months, Edward lived the outlaw life in the carrs of Norfolk with Rhiannon. Meantime, Constance, disgusted with her lack of progress and frightened by Hell's demands for vengeance, summoned a diabolic hunter to destroy Rhiannon and Edward. With the help of the Faerie and the Mere House, Rhiannon and Edward managed to stay ahead of the fiend. Finally the prima of the Mere House told them that she'd devised a ritual to dispel the demon but that Edward would have to cast it. So, he did, but the ritual destroyed his Gift as well (which the Mere House magi knew to be tainted).

Constance dared not invoke any more demons at this point until she had something to offer them, and the forces of Hell demanded a major accounting and offering on Hallowe'en. So the Vandaleurs called in their very last marker and asked for a meeting with King John in King's Lynn in early October. He promised to commit his resources for a serious witch-hunt in Norfolk, intended to damage the Mere House, but as he hurried back to central England, his household was attacked by Faeries and Hermetic magic during the crossing of the Wellstream, and all his retainers and household items were washed away. King John himself escaped but died of disease within a week.

In the meantime, Robert, the Bishop of Ely and Abbot of Thorney, had long known that something was very wrong up in the fens and suspected that the Vandaleurs were behind at least some of it. His agents observed a number of episodes in the feud between the Vandaleurs and the Mere House, and he finally managed to get one of the Mere-House magi in for questioning. The prima finally went in and told the bishop much of what was going on. Surprisingly, he elected to be reasonable (in the prima's opinion) and rather than haul any of the Mere House magi or companions in for being various combinations of Pagans, magicians, and outlaws, he agreed to help them continue their feud against the Vandaleurs. Bishop Robert also warned the new king, Henry, to distrust the Vandaleurs, although he could not accuse them of specifics without proof.

But the accusation against Edward still stood, and if he remained hiding in the Fens, it was only a matter of time before his family got him. If he fled elsewhere, it was likely someone else would. So, Bishop Robert told him to face the charges and offered his protection should Edward survive them. At this time, Rhiannon told Edward that she was pregnant and had decided to leave Cambridgshire before Constance learned of her grandchildren. This left Edward in a serious dilemma: his new family was all he had, and he realized that he did not want to give it up. However, he was unlikely to survive long enough as an outlaw even to meet his offspring. Somehow, he managed to persuade Rhiannon to marry him if he could get acquitted.

Ordinarily, Edward could plead innocent in a church court and be acquitted by the testimony of character witnesses, but Edward's only remaining friends were as obviously Pagan as he was accused of being. So, Edward used his recent status as a knight to invoke the old custom of trial by combat. The knight-champion he faced gave him no quarter, so Edward had to kill the man. Theoretically acquitted, but more unpopular with most of the Church and the English nobility than ever, he publicly made the promise that Robert had suggested to him earlier, to join the Crusade in Spain for three years.

Rhiannon was willing to marry him, but, much to his dismay, had no desire to give birth and raise her children in Spain, which she pointed out, was a war-zone full of fanatic Crusaders. She elected to return to the borderlands of Wales and told Edward to come back in three years. Bishop Robert demanded that Edward get her to promise to get the children baptized. This seemed like a doomed prospect until it occurred to Edward to tell her that baptism would make the children far less valuable to Constance and much safer from diabolic magic as well.

So Edward has been beating back the Moors for the past three years. He has written to Rhiannon regularly, and she has come to visit him several times. She never brought the children (she had triplets); she has no idea how to turn them into ravens old enough to fly.

Recently, House Ex Miscellanea has decided to have Rhiannon move to a Continental mixed-House covenant. So she has been checking out covenants in Brittany, which is also Celtic country. Shortly before Edward's three years expired, he received news from Bishop Robert's secretary: the bishop was summoned to Rome, but when he got there, could not find the person who had issued the summons or anyone who had authorized it. Then he was murdered and there are no leads on the culprit.

So Edward said less-than-sincere farewells to his Crusading compatriots then headed north to the location mentioned in Rhiannon's last letter. Her servant and the babies were still there. Edward noticed with mixed feelings that the kids have the bright-green eyes that all Gifted Vandaleurs have. Rhiannon has already warned him that they are all "blessed" with lycanthropy. The servant told Edward that, when nearby Covenants didn't work out, Rhiannon decided to check out a covenant in Normandy. So Edward packed his new household up and headed off to meet Normandy.

Rhiannon, Edward, the Vandaleurs, the Mere House, and Robert, Bishop of Ely, are all fictitious. Ginni Rose is to blame for the Tree-of-Knowledge plot.