Unlike in Sartor, there was no mysterious forest in Marloven Hess for Senrid to guide invaders to. His illusory roads were meant to guide any attacking Norsundrians onto ground that Forthan and Senrid had chosen, guarded by wings of South Army.
That meant walking the entire area step by step, and altering the landscape one boulder and weed at a time, in order to fool the sweeping eye—taking care never to create an image so out of place that it required a second look.
When they finished, Senrid gratefully went back to his capital, but Hibern was not finished. Once Tsauderei chose the likeliest locale, Hibern had transferred to Sartor, where she spent four long, bitterly cold days in heavy snow grubbing along the southern border. She’d stooped and searched, paused and whispered illusion spells over and over as she broke seed husks in half, and placed moldering bits of brick or wood to mark the place where each illusion would be evoked.
She looked up into Erai-Yanya’s waiting face, and it occurred to her for the first time to wonder how many hours, days, months, even years of labor, performed with dread and hope and maybe even glee, but mostly grimly endured tedium, adults did that no one knew about, though it was for the world’s benefit.
She squared herself on her cushion, and summed up those untold hours in the cold, her bleeding hands and unexpected bruises, with, “I took what I learned to Sartor, where I transformed the road Tsauderei suggested, masking it and creating a new road to Shendoral. I’m to demonstrate for Atan and Chief Veltos. Tsauderei said you really ought to be there.”
Erai-Yanya smiled thinly, in complete understanding. “So . . . you did all the work, but I’m to be there to give your labors a semblance of legitimacy in the eyes of the Sartoran mages?” She sneezed again, nodded, and said, “Now, I’ll look at my notecase.”
She vanished into her own chamber, leaving Hibern to appreciate how her tutor had understood not only everything she said, but everything unsaid.
When Erai-Yanya emerged again, she had brushed out her hair and skewered it neatly on her head, and she wore her usual warm, shapeless robe. She said briskly, “You will not be surprised to learn that I’ve been invited to join you in your meeting with Tsauderei and Chief Veltos of the Sartoran mage guild on Sartor’s border tomorrow.”
Hibern flicked up her palm in assent.
“Currently under a blizzard, Tsauderei says. So tomorrow might turn into the day after.” Erai-Yanya’s thin smile faded, and she indicated the dramatic crack in the wall that served as a window. She gazed out at Liere in the abandoned kitchen garden, who crouched over the now-neat rows, straightened, then walked into the woods with something in her hands before returning. “What’s she doing?”
“Carrying snails and caterpillars to the weedy area down by the stream.”
“Snails.” Erai-Yanya made a warding motion. “One of the many, many things I loathed about gardening was grubbing for snails, and picking caterpillars off the cabbages.” She grimaced as an uncomfortable idea occurred. “I suppose she can hear snails’ thoughts?”
“Thinking of all the snails you squished?” Hibern asked her tutor candidly. “I did. And I asked her. She said it’s not hearing or seeing, but the closest she can come is perceiving tiny, dim lights in the realm of the mind. That’s how she finds them so easily.”
“Why is she doing it? More of the self-punishment that Arthur can’t seem to talk her out of? She can’t enjoy it.”
“She says she likes doing it because she knows how,” Hibern explained. “Tending their kitchen garden was hers and her sister’s job where she lived before. But here, nobody criticizes her. I guess her father never noticed anything anyone did, except to criticize.” Hibern grinned as she gathered up the breakfast eggshells. “She thought your abandoned garden was hundreds of years old.”
“Just twenty.” Erai-Yanya huffed out her breath. “Walk with me.”
Hibern complied, glad she hadn’t begun work.
“My mother gave me that garden to tend when I turned six or seven, saying I needed to understand the connection between human and soil, water, and air. How the Waste Spell we use every day, and the animal droppings we wand, are spread through soil, where they in turn enrich the plants. She also declared that I needed discipline. All I thought about when I flicked snails out of the garden or yanked weeds was how much I hated that chore.”
Hibern was grateful for her own escape. She would have done the work if Erai-Yanya had demanded it as part of her magic-learning, but she knew she would have hated it.
They stepped onto the terrace, and turned toward the pathway that would lead to the garden some hundred paces away.
Erai-Yanya continued. “So when she managed to lose herself mysteriously in that struggle over the dyr in Everon, when I was sixteen, I abandoned the garden that day. And Evend, who you know took over tutoring me, didn’t say a thing about it. That was one of the reasons I sent Arthur to him when it became apparent that Arthur needed to be around people.”
She bunched her skirt in one hand, and Hibern followed, watching birds darting overhead as she crushed eggshells in her palms.
“Patterns,” Erai-Yanya said. “My mother was fifty-five when she got me, after disappointment with the brother I’ve never met, who hated magic and ran off to sea. Her mother was even older when she was born. We who stay here share certain traits, you could say family traits, though not everyone in any family is exactly the same. My mother never knew how to play. She saw only wasted time. I think play has an important place. But she was an excellent mage.”
Hibern sensed that the point was coming. Erai-Yanya stopped, and shut her eyes. Hibern wondered if she was having some kind of reaction to her cross-world hop, and then her neck prickled when it hit her: Erai-Yanya was concentrating on a mind-shield. Hastily Hibern reinforced her own, annoyed that she’d let it lapse yet again.
As Hibern began dropping eggshells around the plants, Erai-Yanya said, “My mother spent many years trying to winnow out the truth about the powerful, mysterious dyra of Ancient Sartor.” She held up her thumb and forefinger as though holding one of the magical artifacts. “As did some of her foremothers. I inherited that task, and stubbornly stuck to it. And so I came to be recognized as the expert on dyra, though I know little enough.” Her voice dropped low, the words coming in a rush. “And that shopkeeper’s daughter out there in our garden, who never had a magic lesson in her life—she didn’t even know how to read—took up the thing, and used it against Siamis as if she’d been trained all her life. Everything is changing into an unrecognizable world, that is going to belong to you young people. But.” The sunburned little wrinkles around her eyes shifted as her brows rose. “Hibern. What are you doing with those eggshells?”
“Putting them around the vegetables. Liere says they discourage the snails.”
“My mother had me put the coffee grindings on the soil. It sometimes worked, though not when rain was heavy, but I suspect nothing works then. Or are eggshells better?”
“We haven’t been at it long.”
“I see.” Erai-Yanya blinked absently at the green shoots neatly growing sunward, then continued. “But. Back to the dyr. Since Sartor has returned, I’ve delved in their records, to find nothing. Admittedly the records are sparse, after so very many centuries. Even so, to find nothing whatsoever? Either dyra were so dangerous they were not written about, or they were so much a part of normal life that people didn’t write about them any more than we write each day about the air we breathe. But this we know from the Siamis enchantment: those things are dangerous. And maybe poisonous.”
She waited as Liere picked another plate of snails from the rows at the extreme edge of the garden, then vanished down the slope toward the stream.
“You know I study patterns. In magic. In families. In everything. Liere demonstrates patterns for . . . oh, maybe I’d better not say it. Most of what I know about her is secondhand. From my son, from th
e mages up north.” She looked troubled.
Hibern shivered. “You think something’s wrong with Liere?”
“I think there’s a reason she’s so frail, so colorless . . .” Erai-Yanya shrugged. “I thought at first her family starved her, but in spite of the fact that everyone who hosts her provides excellent food, and comfort, she doesn’t look a whit more healthy than she did when she was running over the world using the dyr to destroy Siamis’s enchantment.”
“You think the dyr poisoned her?”
“That’s my guess. Pending more information. I think she needs to be observed more carefully . . .” Erai-Yanya looked like she was going to say more, but Liere had returned after depositing the last of her snails, and approached them, an inquiring look on her face.
Erai-Yanya smiled at Liere. “Hibern and I need to go south tomorrow. Something about strengthening Sartor’s southern border ward. In the middle of a blizzard, as it happens. I suggest you rejoin my son in Bereth Ferian. You like midsummer up there, as I recollect.”
Liere said, “Senrid thought I ought to hide here.”
Erai-Yanya took in the neat rows in the garden before saying cordially, “I realize that to a certain extent Senrid’s life depended on his being able to out-think his uncle, but it does not follow that all adults are as easily out-thought. Or to put it another way: stupid.”
Liere flushed. “Senrid doesn’t think all adults are stupid.” At Erai-Yanya’s wry eyebrow lift, Liere turned even redder. “Well, he knows when he’s been stupid.”
“I don’t doubt it, and I have nothing else to say on the subject, having exchanged little converse with him. But I truly believe that Chief Oalthoreh and the entire northern mage school are all capable of keeping you safe.”
* * *
Sartor
What Atan saw when Chief Veltos entered a room was iron discipline, focused austerity, and above all, authority.
What Veltos Jhaer saw in her own mirror was a middle-aged failure.
She yanked down her dark blue robe with its three hard-earned stars, and headed for the Destination, thinking grimly that when she was dead, she hoped it would be said about her that she never shirked her duty. But she suspected that her only claim to fame would be that she lost the mage war to Detlev of Norsunder, causing Sartor to vanish for nearly a century.
Her defensive strategy—the greatest share of her work time was given to this—was to reproduce that spell, only to be used to remove Sartor magically from Norsunder’s grip. But such a defense could only work if it was an absolute surprise, which meant keeping it secret.
So far, she had not been able to reproduce Detlev’s magic, or even to penetrate his intent. Meanwhile, she must wrest the time from her research to train a young, uneducated queen who knew just enough magic to ask dangerous questions. Veltos had to make certain that the girl didn’t become willful, which would make her dangerous herself.
Veltos’s head already ached after a restless night. Transfer magic turned her inside out, then thrust her back into the world. She pulled on her thick mittens, her head turtling into the scarf she’d wound around her neck and ears.
A thin silhouette in the bleak, low sunlight resolved into the gaunt form of Tsauderei, seated on a carved stone bench.
As Veltos stepped off the temporary Destination, she controlled the spurt of disappointment. She knew it was unworthy to have deliberately come early, a silent gesture of moral superiority. In her day, only kings and queens kept others waiting.
But here was the old mage. He had chosen the site, traced the Destination magic onto an old terrace, and provided everyone with a transfer token. That meant he had also swept the area for magical traps or tricks, but still she crossed the tile terrace, recognizing the interlocked garland pattern as one popular some nine centuries back, and reached to drop the token into Tsauderei’s hand.
“Thank you for timeliness, Veltos,” Tsauderei said.
“You will forgive my desire to be sure of her majesty’s safety?”
“Contrary. I would expect you to do your duty as you perceive it,” he said, and watched as she paced the terrace’s perimeter, whispering her tracer spells.
She was aware of his scrutiny, aware of his smile, this elderly man who had been born a generation after her fiftieth birthday while she was senselessly prisoned outside of the world. Having ascertained that no evil spells lurked for the unwary, she looked around. The terrace was the only solid part of what had once been a sizable dwelling overlooking the Hvas River below, beyond which lay the uninhabited lands that eventually led to the Norsunder Base.
“Do you know whose baras-territory this was, and what happened to it?” Tsauderei asked. “The ruin being much older than last century’s war.”
“All I know is that it had to have been subordinate to Chandos.” She was going to add that she had never studied wars, so she didn’t know which had resulted in the destruction of what had probably been a beautiful dwelling. Her life had been dedicated to constructive matters. Civilization.
Until she led the mages to defeat, and the kingdom to ruin.
And so she bowed her head, prepared to let this upstart from Sarendan lecture her on her own history, but he said, “I wondered. Found it by accident, when the spell over Sartor began receding. Never mind. It’s a perfect spot from which to observe the southeast end of your border—”
He abandoned the rest of his observation as the air flickered and Erai-Yanya appeared, managing to look scruffy to Veltos even in a heavy coat, scarf, hat, and mittens. She was followed by that Marloven girl whom Erai-Yanya had unaccountably selected out of all the possible mage students in the world.
The two looked bewildered, as to be expected; the time difference was not all that much in east-to-west measure, but to them it must look as if the sun had leaped far to the north, plunging them into cold.
Veltos put her hands together in the polite gesture of greeting, then walked away to the edge of the terrace not only to let them recover from the transfer, but to scold herself into composure. She gazed hard at the silvery ribbon of iced-over river below. Erai-Yanya might look like a northcoast beggar, but she was a Vithyavadnais—a formidable line of mages, many of whom had apparently been at least as idiosyncratic. That did not lessen their skill.
There was no excuse for the young queen to have turned to that Marloven girl for aid for this venture. Veltos could only see this unexplainable preference as a covert reminder of her own failure a century ago, and her current inability to secure Sartor against further enchantment.
Erai-Yanya and the Marloven girl began chatting with Tsauderei, their voices distinct, curiously brittle on the frozen air, then they all fell silent at the brief stir of air of a new arrival, and there was the young queen, who insisted on her parents’ intimate, family-only heart-name, Atan.
“I hope you will pardon my tardiness,” Atan said, and her polite smile widened. “Hibern! You’re here!”
“Ready when you are,” Hibern said.
“First.” Tsauderei thumped his gloved hands on his bony knees, his breath clouding. “Erai-Yanya, is there anything to report from your time on Geth?”
“I could talk for half a day about how differently they do things, and about the difficulties of making oneself clear when the Language Spell turns out to be two centuries out of date. But I won’t. We know that Norsunder has been poking around, and the Geth mages think it has something to do with transfer magic.”
“They’re looking for rift magic,” Veltos exclaimed.
“Or ancient, hidden artifacts?” Atan asked, turning from one to another. “The way we’ve been searching?”
“Little success either will bring, I should think,” Tsauderei commented. “My understanding is, that world was mostly settled by runaways from Sartorias-deles after the Fall, who then instituted extreme measures to control magic, so there would never be a repeat
of the Fall. The only way they’d have powerful ancient artifacts would be if they brought them, and I defy Norsunder to find what Geth’s mages have spent centuries making sure is well concealed.”
Erai-Yanya said, “You know the problem with spying on Norsunder, how sparse information is, and that’s usually distorted. But I’ll give you details later, if you like. When we aren’t freezing our noses and ears off.” She turned to Tsauderei. “The last time I was here, someone was talking about instituting an Emras Defense, one that is perfectly balanced between light and dark.”
Veltos bit her lip. With these two, she did not need to point out the long-standing debate between the Sartoran Council and the Bereth Ferian mages about who Emras’s tutor really had been. Whether or not he was actually Detlev in some guise, or a Marloven dark mage, didn’t really matter: the best Emras Defense that magic could manage now, with hundreds of anchor points, would only buy time. Magic could always be broken by stronger magic.
She said, “As for hidden artifacts, there is one we all know about, and you have charge of it. You even have someone who does know how to use it, though she is a child.” Veltos would not willingly speak that highly inappropriate name ‘Sartora,’ and she kept forgetting the child’s given name.
“I sent Liere away,” Erai-Yanya said. “She doesn’t understand the dyr any more than we do. Less.”
“But she used it.”
“For one spell,” Erai-Yanya said. “To break an enchantment that built an illusory boundary around minds. The dyr is only useful for that same spell. Liere was relieved when she surrendered it to me, and she has never asked me to bring it out of hiding.”
“If she does, don’t,” Tsauderei cut in. “The magic in the dyr augments these other spells in some way none of us understand. All we know is we cannot control it.”
Veltos began a noiseless sigh, halting when the clouding of her breath betrayed her. “But from all reports she has no discipline, no course of study, and is most often to be found in Marloven Hess, of all the inappropriate places.” She turned Hibern’s way, palms together. “I speak only the truth as I see it.”
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