by Melanie Rawn
Naturally, at this point the Captal showed up. Back from an afternoon ride into Heathering, she slid from her saddle laughing so hard she could barely stand up. Her mare, a Maurgen Dappleback of sixteen venerable years, was not at all disposed to such nonsense in her stable. Horses had no patience with magic. So the mare let fly both hooves into the Globe as it spun past. All the magic burst into a million sparks: the Prentice escaped, and then the cat, and then the mouse, but nobody noticed the latter two scurry away because the sparks had set the nearest hay bale on fire.
“They say,” concluded Jored Karellos, telling the story at dinner one night, “that the Captal was still laughing as she helped put out the fire.”
Everyone at the table chortled, but Josselin Mikleine raised a finger in warning, speaking in dire tones belied by dancing gray eyes. “The two Prentices were assigned to mucking out stalls for the next six weeks, and the cat was never more seen at Mage Hall.”
“Smart cat,” Jored grinned.
“Who were the Prentices?” Taigan asked.
“Nobody knows,” said Josselin. “Or at least anybody who does know isn’t telling.”
“And the moral of the tale, my children?” Jored inquired sententiously.
Joss beat him to it. “If you build a better mousetrap, it’ll find a path to the door!”
Taigan and Mikel thought the story as funny as everyone else did, but to them the moral of the tale was that the two Prentices just didn’t try hard enough. Thus they entered the stables that midnight not to build a better mouse-trap, but to prove to themselves—and all concerned, especially the Captal—that they were powerful enough in their magic to ensphere a living thing and produce it tomorrow morning perfectly safe and sound.
They weren’t after a mouse, or a cat—and they certainly weren’t going to experiment on each other. No, the real challenge was the animal that didn’t believe in spells.
They were going to present the Captal with her own horse, gift-wrapped in magic.
Worthy of their father at his most outrageous, it was, of course, Taigan’s idea. It would amuse everyone at Mage Hall, and the Captal would get a good laugh out of it (she hadn’t been seen to so much as smile for weeks), but it would also show everybody that they knew what they were doing when it came to magic.
The stables were dark and quiet but for the sleepy snorting of the horses and skittering of mice and rats as they avoided hunting felines. Mikel lit a glass-shaded lamp beside the tack-room door, and sat on a hay bale, and began his lesson.
“All right, stand in front of me—not too close, if you louse this up I don’t want you to singe my eyebrows off. Imagine you’re holding one of the glass balls. Sort of feel it in your hands. Now find your magic inside your head. Get it?”
“I think so.”
“You have to know so before you can do this, Teggie.”
She paused a moment, then squeezed her eyes shut. “Got it.”
“All right, now you send it down your arms, and form it around the glass in your hand—like shaping clay around a mold—”
“But there isn’t any glass in my hands!”
“You have to imagine it, to give you something to shape the magic around,” Mikel responded patiently.
“Magic,” Taigan said, opening her eyes, “is not imaginary.”
“Oh?” He leaned against a stall door, folding his arms. “What is it, then—solid rock?”
“You know what I mean. And stop sounding so superior, just because you can do this and I can’t—yet.” She paused. “You can do it, can’t you?”
For answer, Mikel cupped his hands in front of his chest, frowning with concentration. A Mage Globe flickered into being. It was hazy around the edges, and more gray than white, and the usual lightning didn’t flash across the surface but instead crawled in little snail-trails, but it was a Mage Globe.
“There. You see? Told you.”
It was how they’d accomplished things all their lives—one of them learning how, and egging the other on with smug demonstration of the new skill. Taigan had been first to learn how to jump her pony over the garden hedge; Mikel, how to do fractions; her proficiency at dancing had spurred him to at least reasonable grace; he’d taken to the water like a fish and she’d followed him in because she was damned if she’d be left behind in anything. Only his music had eluded her. And she had nothing to match it with, unless you counted being good with her knives—but he was by all accounts getting very good with a sword, so he was still at least one up on her.
But this Mage Globe thing—this she could do. This she would do. It was all a matter of learning how to use the magic already inside her. And if Jenira Doriaz wasn’t going to teach her, then she’d have to learn it from Mikel.
Accordingly, she again shut her eyes, and cupped her hands, and tried very hard to imagine the feel of the glass ball.
It took shape in her hands, the coolness of it, the smooth curves, the bubble-weight that suddenly grew heavier as her mind gave forth of its magic, and she opened her eyes to see a pale gray-gold glow shaped between her palms in a perfect sphere—
“I did it!” she gasped.
And it vanished.
“Don’t worry,” her brother soothed. “Same thing happened to me the first time.”
“Did you see it? I did it! I felt it!” She clapped her hands together, grinning. “Now I’m going to make it come back, and this time without imagining any silly old piece of glass either!” She shut her eyes and felt the kindling along her arms, down wrists to palms. She felt as if she juggled stars in her hands, stars made of dazzling light and searing heat that could never hurt her because she controlled these stars—they were hers, created of her magic that tingled on her skin and danced off her fingertips.
She didn’t hear the cats yowling, or the horses screaming, or her brother’s single horrified shout of her name.
She did hear the Captal’s stern command, and a gout of ice surging up her numb arms, following the path of her magic back into her skull.
STOP. NOW.
And all at once it was as it had been all her life—the magic was locked inside her. Warded. Shut away, boxed up, denied her—
No! she screamed inside her head. You can’t—not when I’m just learning to use it!
She opened her eyes, blinking away tears of rage and frustration. The Captal stood before her, like a slim black candle with flaming golden hair. Taigan saw her through a crystalline sphere shot with yellow and crimson and deep blue lightning.
It wasn’t a Ward that imprisoned her magic. It was a Mage Globe, imprisoning her.
She couldn’t hear anything. She could see the Captal’s lips move, and Mikel walk shakily to the Captal’s side, one sleeve of his shirt blackened as if he’d fallen into a pile of soot. He said something, shook his head, and the Captal nodded.
The Mage Globe disappeared. Taigan pulled in a deep breath, wondering why the air smelled burned.
“How dare you?” the Captal demanded. “Is this how you repay the kindness and patience of your teachers?”
Mikel stood by in miserable silence. Taigan tried to meet the Captal’s black gaze, and couldn’t. She looked anywhere but at this woman who had once been their adored Aunt Caisha—and saw that the whole space before the tack room, hay bale and wooden walls and the halters hanging on nails, was . . . singed. As if flames had shot through the area, extinguished before they could catch fire and burn. She looked again at Mikel’s shirt, and whimpered low in her throat at realizing what she had done.
“Is this how you repay your mother, for bringing you here before you were ready?” the Captal asked in a voice that charred the pride off Taigan’s soul. “Is this how you repay me?”
“I—I didn’t mean—”
“You didn’t mean to. But you did. Until your training is equal to your power, you’d best be careful of what you do. Or you’re liable to kill without meaning to.�
�� She conjured up a brilliantly glowing sphere from thin air. “You want your magic very badly, don’t you, Taigan? And you, Mikel? To affirm your own magic by teaching her what a Mage with over fifty years’ experience couldn’t teach her? Well, here’s more magic. Inside this is all the knowledge about Mage Globes you could possibly want. Take it. Either of you, both of you—I don’t care. Take it. Will it make you a Mage Guardian?”
Mikel’s blue eyes filled. “No,” he whispered. “I’m sorry, Captal.”
She glared at him for a moment longer, then turned on Taigan. “What about you? You seem to want magic even more than he does. Take this, why don’t you? That way, you’ll know how without ever having to go to the trouble of learning how. Take it!”
Taigan shook her head, unable to speak.
The Mage Globe dissolved in a glare of crimson light. “I think we can all agree that what you did tonight surpasses mere stupidity. I leave it to you to decide which of your actions were cowardly, and which were the barest beginnings of wisdom.”
And with that, the Captal strode from the stables, leaving two frightened Prentice Mages behind her.
6
“So now they’re scared of me—isn’t that just perfect? I lost my temper and yelled at them and now they’re terrified of me and what am I going to do about it?”
Falundir looked slightly amused, presumably at the notion of Sarra and Collan’s children being terrified of anyone or anything.
The Captal had been pacing for a solid hour. The Bard had been watching for most of it, appearing at her door a few minutes after she returned from her face-off with the twins. At first she was silent; then she let loose a few of Gorynel Desse’s choicest expletives; then she wore down the nap of a Cloister rug a while longer; finally she started talking.
Gorsha, having expressed mild shock at her appropriation of the vulgarisms, further observed that everything she said was a question. “Do you know what they did tonight?” and “How could they be so stupid?” and “What if I hadn’t felt their magic?” and “Don’t they understand how dangerous it is?”
Falundir, of course, could not have answered even if he’d had answers.
“What am I going to tell Jenira and Tirez about how to take it from here?” and “How can I discipline them without making them fear me?” and “Should I have waited until they were older—or brought them here years ago?”
At last she heard a question she knew the answer to: “Should I take over their training myself?”
She sighed, shaking her head. “I can’t. They’re scared of me now.”
Falundir shrugged.
“You’re right,” she said, whether to him or herself, she didn’t know. She paused at a table to trim the wick of an old-fashioned lamp. “And I’ve got a hell of a nerve. Lecturing them on learning as opposed to knowing. I’m such a damned hypocrite. How did I get to be a Mage? The easiest way in the world—I had it all handed to me on a gilt plate.”
In the thirty-seven years since First Councillor Anniyas had cut out his tongue and slit every tendon in his fingers, Falundir had never even attempted speech. He did not move his lips to form words for others to read; he did nothing more than arch a brow or cock his head or smile or frown—when he deigned to react to other people at all. But Cailet, Sarra, and Collan were not “other people.” To them, when he wished to communicate and his List was not to hand, he hummed.
It worked best with Collan, who knew almost as many songs as the great Bard did. A few notes, a phrase, and Collan could identify not only the song but the lyric that said what Falundir meant. Sarra had scant ear for music, but nearly twenty years with a Minstrel husband had perforce taught her quite a few ballads, and Falundir was adept in his selection when he wanted to tell her something.
Cailet didn’t have to rely on her own knowledge. She had Gorynel Desse, Alin Ostin, Lusath Adennos, and Tamos Wolvar to identify the tunes for her.
Falundir was humming now, and after a moment the song flitted through her mind. And though she’d worked herself into a fine sulk, she couldn’t help but giggle.
“‘The world is a peach/And I am the pit/That the carelessly wealthy/Spew out with their spit’? Thanks!”
He grinned and kept humming, and the words of the next verse sang cockily in her head:
I am the pit
In the succulent peach
The wealthy bite into—
And shatter their teeth!
That brought a real laugh from her. “You’re impossible!”
Falundir smiled modestly.
“So what do I do about the twins?” She fell into an overstuffed armchair by the window. It was still dark outside, not even halfway through the night yet. “Maybe being scared of me isn’t so bad—if what you meant is that they’ve taken a big bite and cracked a tooth or two. But they really do have the strength to spit me out if they feel like it.” Propping her feet on the footstool, she contemplated the scuffed toes of her boots for a moment before continuing. “You wouldn’t believe what I saw when I unWorked those Wards. It was amazing enough when I set them in the first place—and it only got bigger by the time I Warded them again. Now. . . .”
It was a guilty pleasure to let loose this way, especially to someone who wouldn’t try to reason with her or ask questions she couldn’t answer. Falundir just listened. Not even Collan did that anymore. She kicked at the footstool, not so much because she wanted to as because she wanted to do it when someone could see her. She was the Captal, and she wasn’t supposed to have petty impulses like that. She wasn’t supposed to do or be a lot of things.
Especially scared. That was the trouble. And that made her angry. But she wasn’t allowed to get angry. The instant she raised her voice, everyone shrank back as if about to be blasted to cinders with her magic.
But if she could indulge in the silliness of kicking the inoffensive footstool, she could also indulge in admitting the truth to Falundir. He would never—could never—tell.
“They’re frightening in their potential,” she said quietly. “And now they’re scared of me because I’m scared of them.”
Falundir nodded patiently, blue eyes bright in an almost unlined face. One useless hand gestured gracefully for her to go on.
But she had nothing else to say. Anger’s brief spark had died, leaving her exhausted. She spread her hands helplessly, let them drop to her lap.
“I don’t know what to do.”
The Bard was quiet for a time, then began to hum a slower, gentler song. It took Cailet a minute, but this one she identified herself, from a long time ago when she was a newly Made Captal and Collan had sung her to sleep.
Come and lie you down, little one,
The golden sun’s a-yawning,
Ladymoon’s quilt of silver stars
Will wrap you ‘round till morning. . . .
And whether it was the beauty of his voice—the one thing Anniyas had been unable to take away from him—or that voice augmented by his magic, she felt her head drooping back against the soft comfort of the chair.
Sent to sleep like a child. . . .
To someone as old as he, you are a child, Caisha.
Mm . . . it’ll be nice to be old. . . .
Age has little meaning. All you have to do to grow old is
live long enough.
Or fast enough.
Sleep, Caisha.
7
IF Elin Alvassy was surprised by a visit from Sarra, only her chief butler knew it. By the time Sarra and Taguare arrived in her private reception salon, she had had five minutes to collect herself, and rose to greet her guests with a warm smile.
Sarra, who had just been escorted through her own childhood home (and of course had not told the footman that she knew very well the way to the north wing), could not completely hide her astonishment at the changes Elin had made here. Not that she’d set foot in the Octagon Court since that ho
rrible night in 969; Ambrai belonged to the last of the Alvassy daughters now, and Sarra would have it no other way. There were ghosts here for her. She’d never considered before that Elin must feel the same ghosts.
“Yes, we’ve made quite a few changes,” Elin said in response to Sarra’s stare. “It’s not the way it was during my childhood, which is all for the better as far as I’m concerned. There are memories enough without everything looking just the same.”
“I feel the same way about Roseguard,” Sarra told her quickly. “I didn’t mean to appear so shocked—it’s just so different from the woodcuts done during Lady Allynis’s time. This room was much bigger then, wasn’t it?”
“It used to be the Tapestry Room—very famous, I’m not surprised you recognized it. We’ve had to put weight-bearing walls in quite a few of the old grand salons.” Elin gestured her visitors to a pair of couches facing a broad bay window, where an efficient staff had already laid out cold drinks and nibble-food. “It was less expensive to do it this way than to shore it up from inside the remaining walls. There are dozens of rooms we still can’t use. I don’t know if we’ll ever be able to put them to rights.”
Sarra sat down. Taguare busied himself with pouring drinks for the ladies and selecting choice tidbits for their plates. She thanked him, sipped something strong and icy that tasted of citrus and just enough wine, and looked out onto the gardens. These, too, had changed. The elegant formal plantings her grandmother had favored had been replaced by an easygoing ramble of trees and shrubs and flowers; Lady Allynis’s precisely geometrical pebbled walks had become meandering pathways or were overgrown with grass. Sarra was grateful that the little shrine where she had married Collan nearly twenty years ago was out of sight on the other side of the Court. She didn’t want to know what changes had been made there.
She hadn’t been sure what it would feel like to come back. She’d been even less sure why she wanted to. Now she knew: this life was dead for her. She’d known it the instant she walked up from the wharves and seen the vast expanse of the palace before her. What she had been, who she had been—the child who had scampered through these halls, built mud castles in the flower beds and massive forts of the furniture, and been beloved of parents and grandparents and all who knew her—that child no longer existed. And if the daughter of Maichen Ambrai did not exist, neither did the daughter of Auvry Feiran.