Renegades Magic

by Robin Hobb

  Abruptly the door of the tent was flipped open and two servers entered carrying a laden table. There was a single large bowl on it, the size of a punch bowl, holding a chowderlike substance. The aroma that rose from it was both delicious and repellent, as if someone had prepared a succulent dish and then attempted to conceal a strong medicine in it. The two men carrying it positioned the table carefully on the uneven floor and left. Soldier’s Boy breathed a sigh of relief as the tent door fell into place, but an instant later, it was lifted again, and more feeders entered. One carried a large ewer of water and a cup. Others brought various food dishes—breads, new greens, fish, and fowl—that they set down near the vat of chowder.

  This parade of food was followed by the feeder whom Kinrove had put in charge of us. She was a buxom, comely young woman, with long gleaming black hair and her face patterned with tiny specks like a scattering of fine seed. Her name was Wurta, and as she introduced herself she seemed very pleased to have been given such an important task. She almost ignored Soldier’s Boy, speaking directly to Olikea, feeder to feeder.

  “I have been given instructions that I must pass on to you,” she announced. At her words, Olikea rose, reluctantly leaving Likari, and came to stand beside my chair. The seed-speckled feeder spoke briskly, almost officiously, as she stepped up to the table and stirred the vat of creamy-brown chowder, releasing clouds of steam trapped beneath its thick surface. “This, all of this, he must eat. We have done our best to give it a pleasant flavor, but the roots that feed this magic have their own strong taste. It may be hard for him to stomach. Kinrove has had us flavor his water to give him some respite from it. These other foods are for you to feed him sparingly. Do not let him fill his belly with them; most of what he eats must be this soup, and Kinrove judges that he must eat it all. ”

  Wurta was interrupted by a loud snuffing noise. Likari, eyes still closed, had lifted his head from the bedding and was sniffing after the steam rising from the chowder pot. His face had a blank, infantile look, or perhaps more like that of a still-blind puppy mindlessly seeking the scent of food. Olikea looked at him with a gaze full of horror.

  “Oh, no, he must have none of this,” Wurta said quickly as her eyes followed the direction of his snuffling. “I will have something else brought for him right away. And some washwater? Yes. ”

  She hastened away to fulfill those errands while Soldier’s Boy leaned forward and hesitantly lifted the ladle from the pot. He touched it to his lips, and then took a mouthful. It did not taste awful. He swallowed it and waited, anticipating a bitter aftertaste. Nothing. No, there was something, a perfumy tang. Not unpleasant, but not something I would ever associate with food. It rather reminded me of the food served to us at the Academy. There was a lot of it, but none of it tasted so delicious as to make one long for more.

  Likari stopped his sniffing and suddenly sagged back onto the bed. If the sound of his muffled snores were an indication, he had fallen into a new depth of sleep. Olikea looked relieved. She turned her attention back to Soldier’s Boy. “Perhaps you should begin eating while it is still warm and fresh,” she suggested. So saying, she came and ladled up a bowlful of the stuff and set it before him.

  Soldier’s Boy ate it. He ate the next three bowls of it as well. It was warm and not unpleasant, though the perfume began to be annoying. Olikea, watchful as ever, offered him a bit of the fish and some bread. It cleared his palate of the soup, and when he was finished she served him up another bowlful of the stuff and he attacked it manfully.

  About a third of the way through the cauldron Wurta shepherded in a team of feeders with a large pot of aromatic salve, food for Likari, and a washtub and several pots of warmed water. She smoothly suggested that Olikea wake her son, wash him, and then feed him. While she was doing that, Wurta proposed that Soldier’s Boy would accompany them to where he could be treated with the salve that Kinrove had had them prepare. Olikea looked doubtful at this, but Soldier’s Boy put her mind at ease. “I am well able to speak for myself in how I am cared for. But I do not wish to entrust Likari to anyone else but you. Take care of him. I am sure I will be back soon. ”

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  “I should be taking care of you. I am your feeder,” she said, but her voice held no conviction and her eyes kept moving toward her son.

  “So is Likari. Tend to him for now. If I require you, I can send for you. ”

  “As you wish,” she said with relief, and even before Soldier’s Boy had left the tent, she had moved to Likari’s side.

  Soldier’s Boy followed Wurta and her assistants. They took him to a steam hut. It was small and tightly built of branches plastered over with earth. Inside, a big copper kettle boiled over a fire pit. All of them stripped before entering the hut, and once they were inside, with the door shut tight behind them, the heat and steam were close to unbearable. “First,” Wurta told him, “we must open your skin, so that the salve can soak into you. ”

  This involved him sitting in a chair while heavy cloths were dipped in the boiling water. The feeders allowed them to cool enough so that they could wring them out, and then immediately began to wrap him in them. They were not scalding, but hot enough to be unpleasant. Soldier’s Boy gritted his teeth and endured the treatment. When they removed the cloth, his skin was a bright scarlet by the firelight. His specks showed dark against the redness. The feeders went to work quickly, rubbing the salve into his flesh. As quickly as they covered his skin with the slippery stuff, they wrapped him afresh with the hot steaming cloths. Between the heat and the minty pungency of the salve, he felt giddy. The meal he had just eaten coiled and squirmed in his belly. He began to fervently wish that Olikea were there, to protect him from Kinrove’s feeders.

  I agreed with him. “They will kill you with this treatment,” I warned him. “Listen to your heart beating. You can scarcely breathe for the steam and the stink. Tell them to let you go; they’ll have to listen to you. You’re a Great One. You have what you came for; Likari is restored to you. You should leave and take him and Olikea back to the kin-clan. Let us find another way to solve our problem. ”

  It was getting hard for him to breathe. The air was hot and the pungent aroma of the salve seemed to only make it worse. Yet he said, “I will do whatever I must—”

  And the words died on his lips. For the briefest moment, he breathed music, not air. It lifted him weightlessly; he felt himself rise with it, float on it, towed away from the bonds of earth and up into the air.

  Just as abruptly, he was back in his flesh, and fighting, not for air, but for the music he had breathed but a moment before. “—to regain Lisana. ” He finished his thought in a hazy voice. He opened his arms wide, trying to bring the music back.

  “Do you feel that?” Wurta asked in wonder.

  Several of the others murmured awed assents.

  “He will dance,” Wurta said, but her tone conveyed far more than her words. “Kinrove spoke true. When he is one, he will be a river for the magic. The dance has already found him. We must hurry to be sure he consumes the rest of the food he will need. ”

  But it was already too late.

  They led Soldier’s Boy from the steam hut, still swathed in the hot wraps that held the herbal unguent against his skin. As we emerged from the darkness into the forest light, he took a deep breath of the clean, cool air that greeted him. And the blood that flowed through his body turned to music. He began to dance.

  The feeders cried out in alarm. Two seized his arms and tried to restrain him, shouting, “No, not yet, not yet! You are not prepared!” Someone else shouted, “Tell Kinrove! Run, run!” and yet another one cried out, “Fetch his own feeder! He may listen to her. ”

  When Olikea came running, I heard her voice. But Soldier’s Boy did not. He was caught up in a rapture of sound and movement, far past drunkenness, deeper than unconsciousness. I shouted for him and then reached for him as one might plunge an arm into a deep, cold lak
e to retrieve a comrade who had fallen overboard. But I could not reach him. No part of us touched anymore, and that realization terrified me. Instead of uniting us, Kinrove’s magic seemed to be separating us even more completely.

  Olikea rushed to him and seized his hands. “Oh, I should not have let them take you! I should not have listened to you at all. Nevare, Nevare, stop, stop dancing. Come back to me!”

  But he did not. Instead, he tried to pull her into the dance with him. He gripped her hands and dragged her along as he stepped and turned and bowed. Kinrove’s feeders cried out in fear, and four of them seized her and pulled her from his grasp. Then they fought her, holding her back as she shrieked and clawed and struggled to get back to him.

  “It will do you no good! He cannot hear you. If you let him seize you, he will drag and dance you to death. Remember your son, remember your boy! Stay here and care for him!”

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  I caught only glimpses of that struggle. Soldier’s Boy’s eyes were wide, but he did not look at any of the people. He saw the trees and the shifting of light through the young leaves. He saw the fluttering of a single leaf, and his shaken fingers echoed it. He felt a light movement of the breeze on his face, and he danced backward, airily wafted on it. Like many a heavy man, he had strength in his legs beyond what one might expect. His movements were graceful and controlled; the unguent seemed to have loosened and oiled his muscles. He shifted, turned and lifted his hands to the sky, mimicking the rising steamy smoke from the sweat hut. From his half-closed eyes, I caught a glimpse of Kinrove, supported by two of his feeders. Dismay sagged his features.

  “It is too soon. Only half of him dances! I do not know what will happen now. Show me the kettle of food. How much did he eat?”

  Olikea had sunk to her knees, still weeping and wailing. Behind her, I glimpsed a very thin Likari, a blanket clasped around his bony shoulders, trying to hurry to his mother. When the boy saw me, a thin wail escaped his mouth. Pointing and weeping, he, too, sank to his knees. My only comfort was that at the sound of his voice, Olikea had turned. She caught her breath and then crawled to her son. When he would have risen and staggered toward me, she caught him and held him in her arms. At least he was safe from Kinrove’s mad dance.

  I was not. The music ran in my veins like boiling water seething down a pipe. It hurt and exhilarated at the same time. For me, the sensation reminded me of being whirled around and around by my older brother when I was small. It dizzied me and I could not focus my eye on any object. There was also the same sensation of imminent disaster. When Rosse had gripped me by wrist and ankle and flown me around and around, I had always known that if he lost his grip, I’d have bruises. But I’d also known that sooner or later, my brother would tire and would attempt to land me gently. That was what had allowed me to enjoy the experience.

  With Soldier’s Boy’s dance, there was no promise of respite. I could not find him in the densely twined music and dance. He had merged with it, become one with it rather than with me. I became even more aware of my body, or the body that had been mine. My lungs worked like bellows and my mouth was already dry. In a seizure of music, Soldier’s Boy danced. He turned and spun; he made small leaps off the ground, and then bent low and swayed, a tree caught in the wind. I felt that with every step he took, he retreated from me and ventured deeper into the music’s power.

  I caught a spinning glimpse of Kinrove in the chair that had been brought out for him. His face was grave, but his hands moved with Soldier’s Boy’s dance, almost as if he were conducting it. Did he command it? There was a chilling thought. Soldier’s Boy’s eyes had closed to slits. I focused on the little I could see. Most of it was sky, or a brief image of tree trunks. Olikea, tears on her cheeks. One of Kinrove’s feeders scratching her nose. The wall of the steam hut. Kinrove, weaving his fingers as his hands danced with me.

  On and on Soldier’s Boy danced, until he no longer leapt but shuffled and wove. After a time, it was a struggle to keep his head up or to lift his hands. Blood throbbed painfully in his feet and all the muscles along his spine shrieked that they had been torn loose from their anchorage. But on we danced.

  I had to stop it. Whatever Kinrove had believed this dance would do, it wasn’t accomplishing it. I was more separate from Soldier’s Boy than ever and it was destroying the body that housed us. Breath rasped in and out and his heart thundered in his ears. Veins pulsed in his calves. I stopped trying to see out of the eyes and turned my attention inward, seeking for Soldier’s Boy.

  His consciousness was all but gone. I could find no sign of his awareness of himself as something separate from the dancing magic. I groped deeper, following the magic and the dance that seethed through him like a river in flood, a frightening thing to behold. “Soldier’s Boy!” I shouted at it, wondering where he was in that rush, or if he had already melted into it completely. I dared not touch it. I wondered if I could seize control of the body now that he no longer consciously possessed it. Perhaps, if the dance magic had stolen him completely away, I could possess my body again.

  That thought gave me a surge of hope such as I had not felt for months. I readied myself, as best I could. There was so much to take control of, and I felt I must seize it all at once. My hands and arms, my shuffling feet, my bobbing head—how did anyone ever manage to control so many pieces of a living body at once? For only a second I marveled at that thought.

  Then I felt a sudden red lurch of pain in my chest. Soldier’s Boy staggered three steps to one side, and I thought we were falling. But he fetched up against a tree, clung there grimly for a moment, and then, as his heart steadied its thumping, he once more pushed himself free to stand upright and then to dance. It was then that I knew he would dance us to death. I spread myself out and attempted to inhabit my body once more.

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  It was the strangest sensation, as if I had flung myself onto the back of a galloping horse. I was there suddenly feeling the muscles move, feeling the jabs of pain from my abused feet. The body was mine, and not mine. I danced on, awkward and jolting, like a marionette whose strings have been seized by a child. I planted my feet, but my hands and arms flapped and waved. If I focused on holding them still, then my head wagged wildly and my errant feet began to slide sideways. Suddenly it was an all-out struggle between me and Soldier’s Boy as to who would control it. I felt him there, not as the twin of my mind, but as the body’s will. I clenched my body’s teeth and curled my hands into fists and held them there. I tightened the screaming muscles all along my spine, forbidding them to twist or sway or bow. I bent my arms into my chest and embraced myself, bent my head down to my chest and held it there. With a surge of resolution, I folded my legs under me. I crashed to the earth, falling hard, but still keeping my control. I rolled myself into as tight and still of a ball as my flesh would allow. I shouted stillness into myself and then realized my mistake. No, not my breath, not my heart. I pulled breath after deep breath into my lungs and tried to calm my leaping heart as if it were a wild creature I strove to soothe.

  “Be still, be still, be still,” I whispered to every part of myself.

  And that was how they caught me.

  I had no sense of becoming one with Soldier’s Boy. I felt no encounter with some “other self” hidden in my flesh. Instead, I was besieged by a decade of memories and thoughts. They were mine, they were his, but they had belonged to both of us, and I had always been aware of my twin lives and experiences. I had always been me, never Soldier’s Boy, never Nevare, always me. Carsina had broken his heart as much as mine, and I had longed for Lisana just as deeply as he had. I loved the forest and he wanted to make his father proud. It was me the mob had tried to murder in the streets of Gettys, and I had every right to hate them for it. Those were my trees that they were trying to cut, the wisdom of my elders, and it infuriated me that no one would listen to me.

  I rose slowly from the ground. My bo
dy settled into place around me. I was home. I was complete and all I had been meant to be. I was the perfect vessel for the magic and ready now to take up my task. Oh, but it was no task, it was joy. The magic and the music of that magic coursed through every vessel in my body, prompting me to the dance. My hands floated at the ends of my arms. I lifted my head and felt the music pull me taller. I moved with grace and beauty, dignity and purpose. I danced twice round Olikea and Likari, binding my protection round them. My hands wove, shaping a life for them. Then I moved to Kinrove and stood before him, meeting his eyes as I danced my independence of him. His hands might move and weave, but they were only his part of the dance. They did not control me. I turned my back on him, snapping the gossamer threads that had bound me to his magic. I opened my arms to the forest, and beyond it, to the wide world and all it contained. I opened my heart and my eyes and my mind, and I danced away from those who had been watching me. I had a task to do.

  I danced out of the world and back into it, into its truer deeper form. Place no longer bound me, nor time. Instead, I moved through the magic, called by a series of unfinished tasks.

  I returned to the Dancing Spindle. It was still; I had seen to that. I had engineered that the iron blade would fall to become a wedge beneath the tip of that magic artifact. But I had not finished that task. The Spindle still stood, and it still strained against the blade that bound it. How foolish of me. The very first time I had seen it, I had wondered at it. How could such a large spindle of stone remain balanced on such a tiny point? How could it not fall? The Gernian engineer had not been able to find an answer to that riddle, but the Speck mage knew it. He could see the filaments of magic that flowed from the tip of the spindle and shot off into the spirit world I had visited with the Kidona shaman all those years ago. Dewara had known.

  I danced up the many steps that spiraled up the tower. I danced on the tower’s top, and with my opened eyes, I could see the magic that held the spindle, like a string on a top. It was less than a string; it was a cobweb to me. I reached toward it. For a moment, I felt a shadow of a reservation about what I was about to do. Dewara had taught me, had been my mentor. Despite all the evil he had done me, did I not owe him something for that? And what of the wind-wizards, what of the other mages of the other Plainspeople? I sighed. They would have to go back to being individual mages, with each mastering only the power he himself could generate. The decision was made. With one hand over my head, I leapt, and my fingers snagged and tore that thread of magic.