Sleight of Hand

by Peter S. Beagle

  He had no idea what I meant. Lathro never lied, not to anyone. I told him the truth of his Outside birth, and of his coming to Kalagira as an infant, and he took it in as flesh parts before the candor of an arrow: I even heard the soft gasp as it went home. Then I made him make love with me, there, for the very first time, with half a dozen coach horses looking on, because it was all I knew to do to comfort him.

  In time, when we could at last distinguish the beating of his heart from my own, he said, “Breya. You have to leave me.”

  I stared at him. There was no answer in me. He said, “You come from a great line of majkes, and you will grow to be the greatest of all that line, as your mother said. Am I to be the cause of that line ending with you? I love you better than that, Breya Drom.”

  “And I love you better than my grandchildren,” I answered him. “What have they ever done for me?” I meant to make him laugh, but clearly failed. I went on, “I am not responsible to my line, Lathro. I am responsible for my life—our life together. For the rest of it, I could be as happy here, right here with you, as anywhere else in the world. I would never ask for more than this—cleaning stables, rubbing down horses, currying them, loving in their good smell. This is happiness for me, Lathro, don’t you understand?”

  He quieted me with a finger across my lips. “Beloved, this is contentment, nothing more. I haven’t your education, but I know the difference. I am no one, son of nothing, and always will be. But magic is part of what you are—you could no more abandon it than step out of that beautiful tea-colored skin you wear so well. And with no daughters to pass it on to, and they to theirs—”

  “What if I married someone else, but only had sons? The magic would end then just as surely.”

  “But at least they would be Kalagira men, such children, able to pass the knack to their own daughters if fate so willed. Ours could not.”

  “It wouldn’t matter!” I tried to hush him with kisses, but he put me aside. “Yes, it would, Breya. Yes, you would live in joy with me anywhere—a stable, a woodcutter’s shack, a swineherd’s one-room hovel—I know that, how could I not know that? And you would never think for a moment of envying the life of another person on this earth, or of using power to make us more than we already were together.” He kissed my fingers then, slowly, one by one. He said, “But children…. grandchildren…. great-grandchildren…. all without magic, never to have it, none of them—look at me, Breya, and tell me you would not ever regret your choice. No, straight at me, there’s my girl. Tell me now.”

  Unlike Lathro, I am a very good liar. Daughter of Willalou, how should I not be? What is all magic but lying, a grandly ruthless reshaping of reality to our purposes? I lied you here, did I not, singing to you of slaughter, luring you with your own hunger? But I could not lie to Lathro in that moment. I wanted him to be wrong, with all my heart…. but I was not certain, so I lowered my eyes and turned away.

  “There’s my girl,” he said again, and there was more love and understanding in his voice than I could bear. I took my leave of him as soon as I could, and he did not try to keep me, though I wanted him to. Love as we might, I was a long time forgiving him for knowing me.

  We did not see each other for some while after that. My doing.

  Nor did I have much to do with my mother and father. I stayed in my own quarters, speaking to no one, eating hardly at all, creating small, spiteful enchantments that shame me today, for their pettiness as much as their malice; and generally sulking—I can find no kinder word for my behavior, and I have tried. Something was so, and its soness stood between me and my heart’s desire; and though I willed it not to be so, it was more powerful than my will.

  I did much of my sulking in one shuttered storeroom, perhaps because of its particular air of dank misery, perhaps merely because my parents always knew where I was, and what I was doing, and could come and find me there doing it, if they really wanted to. Only they had better not try.

  Dunreath chanced on me when he came into the storeroom looking for the ingredients to a glaze he had not used in years. He might well have missed me, huddled silent in a corner as I was; but, blundering in the darkness, he stumbled over me, letting out a yelp of startlement. He is a big, absent-minded sort of man, my father, happiest at his wheel and kiln; but he does know about love, and at a glance he had my measure.

  “Child,” he said, awkward as a troll at a tea party. “Child, Breya, don’t, please. Don’t cry, Breya.” And he patted my hair with his rough potter’s hand.

  I wasn’t crying then, for a wonder, but that clumsy touch opened the sluicegates in earnest. I fell on his chest, wailing loudly and wildly enough to deafen the dead. My father held me, whispering whatever lame comfort he could, stroking my neck and shoulders as though I were clay to be petted and kneaded into life.

  “Girl, don’t weep so,” he begged me. “Don’t weep, I can’t bear it. I like the boy myself, always did, and if you want him so much, you should have him, that’s the way I look at it. To hell with our line, we’ve known magic long enough. Your mother would have married me if I’d been born Outside, everybody knows that. What bloody difference, hey?”

  Is there giving in marriage among demons? If that is so, then maybe—just maybe—you understand something about my father’s loyalty. If I knew anything about Willalou, it’s that she would never have married a man who was not from Kalagira. My mother loved Dunreath more than anyone, but she loved her heritage more, for good or ill. And Dunreath knew it, but loved her enough not to say so. There is more magic in this world than magicians dream.

  “I wish men could be majkes,” I told him when I finally stopped crying. “I do, I wish I could give Lathro my knack. He’d be so good—he’d know the right way to use the power, and I don’t, and I don’t care that I don’t. Mother’s determined to make me into a great enchantress, but it’s not what I want. Doesn’t what I want matter to anybody? Can’t I ever be ordinary and happy, like a man?”

  “No, love,” my father answered me. “No, you can’t be—and if you could be, you wouldn’t like it.” He went back to holding me then, and I went back to weeping. At some point he said, “Breya, you’re a hawk, born to soar, born for the heights. You were never meant for the barnyard.”

  And I remember wailing, “I’m not a bird—I’m human, I’m me!” and running away to find Lathro, with my heart wild in my throat and my eyes blind with loneliness and dread.

  By instinct, I looked for him neither in the smithy nor the stable, but at the moribund dika tree that had been our meeting place since we were children. It was dying then, and it is still stubbornly dying now; but our pet superstition was that our presence—and, in time, our love—was all that kept it putting out the occasional blossom or pale sprig of leaves. It is where I would have gone.

  But he was not there, under the tree. He had vanished completely, from the village and from my days, leaving not a trace of his passage.

  There are certain obvious advantages to being a maj of any sort. One is the ability to track down almost anyone you really set out to find. But nothing that I tried worked. And even Willalou, when I went to her, finally threw up her hands and said, “Daughter, wherever he may be, he has passed beyond my reach. Which is a worry by itself, as much as his being gone.”

  “Yes,” I said. “How thoughtless of him.” If my words sound harsh and unfilial…. well, remember that I was trying not to shatter into very small fragments. I said, “I will find him, Mother.”

  My mother said, “You will not.”

  I stared at her. Dunreath had spoiled me shamelessly, with no slightest regard to its effect on my future character; and while Willalou was sterner, I had known all my life that her no truly meant not now, don’t bother me, try me again in a day or two. But in this moment her lips were thinner, her eyes harder, than I had ever seen them. Protest dried up in my own mouth, and I actually backed away from her.

  She said, “Wherever that boy has run off to is no fit place for you. Not as you are, g
ifted beyond my imagining, and vulnerable as a newborn. You have disregarded my instruction all your life, shirked every lesson you could manage to avoid, studied nothing you found boring—and where are you now? Not only would you be useless in any peril when I am not by to rescue you, but you are utterly powerless to aid the one you claim to love. Tell me I am wrong, my daughter. I want to hear you tell me I am wrong.”

  She had never spoken so to me in my life. There was nothing for me to say; and if there had been, I would have known better than to say it. I waited in silence, staring down at the intricacies of my sandal straps, until she finally ran out of rage and breath more or less together. She said, “So. Now, at bloody last, we begin.”

  And so, indeed, it began: that insanely intensive course of training in everything that should have been woven into my bones and brain before ever I had need of them. My mother was absolutely pitiless, driving me without rest for either of us, constantly humiliating me to tears, whether over the nursery-simple rhymes that can confer invisibility, locate water in a desert, or heal a fatal wound; or when I, for the hundredth time, tangled up one of her fiendishly complicated invocations with another that was almost identical. She drilled me endlessly in the doggerel chants, phrases, and rituals of a dozen languages, all seemingly unrelated, that could, even so, be fitted together in a remarkable number of different ways to produce strikingly varied results. We battled through the night many a time, I and this terrible woman with my mother’s face: me with my mind turning to watery curds, and she haranguing me without cease, barking, “I taught you that when you were seven years old—or I thought I had—you should know it in your sleep. Where is your head?” To this day, I still hate that contemptuous question with no answer. “Where is your head?” over and over. “Where is your head?”

  Fortunately I learn quickly, when I learn at all; fortunately also, I have an ear for music. This is crucial for an enchantress, as it is not for a witch or a sorceress, since so much of our power lies in song. My mother has a perfectly good voice, but much preferred to recite her spells in a decidedly flat, plain manner—always while moving, letting her body sing the magic. But if I could not sing, I might as well be a witch in a cave, growling my incantations over a greasy, smoky fire. (Meaning no disrespect to Grandmother, who was actually a cheerful, sociable soul, like most witches.) As it was, Willalou sang me hoarse, day on day, night on night. “No, do it again—can’t you hear where you lose the rhythm? Where is your head?”

  Five endless months. Nearly six. I am grateful beyond words that the memory blurs. It was coming on autumn when my mother finally announced, with no preamble, “Well, I’ve done what I could. You’re still the poorest excuse for a proper enchantress I’ve ever seen, but at least I’m not quite so feared that you’ll put a spell on yourself, or call something you don’t want when you’re trying to summon Lathro.” She paused for a moment, and then added quietly, her voice that of the mother I knew for the first time in forever, “Which, by the way, would not do. Do not ever try to bring that boy of yours to you by magic, despite all temptation. Do you understand me, Breya?”

  Her eyes were dark with urgency, as I have only rarely seen them. I said, “I understand your meaning, mother. But not your reason. Why not?”

  My mother hesitated again, longer this time. She said finally, her voice uncharacteristically muffled, almost mumbling, “Because it will alert the Being he has gone to seek. And may have found by now.”

  I gaped at her. She went on, increasingly defensive, “He came to me the very day before he ran off. He wanted me to know—though he swore me not to tell you—that he was away in search of a creature he had heard tell of, powerful enough to change fate and make maj of an ordinary man.” She paused a third time. “Even a man of Kalagira. He thought such a change might help him carry magic for you, even Outside born, and would not listen when I warned him of the terrible price the Being would claim.”

  There is a difference between being truly speechless and not having the air to make the sound come out. I felt as though I had been struck in the stomach, having had no warning and no chance to brace myself. I said stupidly, “A creature.”

  “A Being,” my mother said. “It was old when your grandmother was not yet born, and its power is not of this world. I believe, if it so chose—”

  “A maj.” My voice was rising slowly, like floodwaters. “You think Lathro has gone to this—thing—to be magicked into the knack, so that he and I might perhaps have….” My mother nodded, looking guiltier by the minute. I whispered, “And you tell me this now?”

  “It would have done no good before. You would have hared off straight after him, and you no more suited for such a quest than a—a chicken!”

  “All this time,” I said. I was cold with fury, shaking uncontrollably. “All these days wasted going over and over this stupid spell, that baby rhyme, the Three Theories—”

  “—which you should have learned as a baby—”

  “And all the time, Lathro going further and further away, disappearing….” I couldn’t speak anymore; it was language disappearing now. I turned and walked out of the house. My mother said nothing, and did not follow.

  I left the next morning on Belgarth, the warhorse my father had accepted in payment for a great floral vase, so huge as to require three handles, that he had created for a lord’s wedding. Belgarth was getting on by then, and grown fat with inactivity; but I had learned to ride on his king’s couch of a back, and we were fond of each other. Besides, he always smelled wonderful, like a dew-damp hayfield warming in the morning sun, and his chestnut hide set off my coloring to perfection. And yes, majkes do indeed think about such things, like anyone else.

  Dunreath made no objection to my taking his horse, but he looked so wretched that it hurt my heart, and I would have turned back then, if I could have. When he held me, I whispered, “I’m sorry,” which I could not say to Willalou, even when she held my stirrup while I mounted, and we bade each other farewell. Nor did she ask forgiveness for what she had said and done, but only stood at Belgarth’s head, tall and beautiful and dry-eyed, looking straight at me. She said, “I have no counsel for you, and only one suggestion. Accept it or not, as you choose.”

  I waited, not speaking. My mother said, “All I know of this Being that you and Lathro seek, is that it is in some way bound to running water. Look for it near rivers, brooks, the smallest streams, search where running water is used by men—in mills, in tanneries, canals, weirs. And if you go north, towards Chun—remember, Lathro may have been born there—seek out a river town called Mulleary, and a woman named Dragine. We were acquainted long ago. If anyone in the land knows where this Being can be found, it will be Dragine.” The way she held my gaze with her own was as near to an embrace as makes no matter. “Goodbye, then, my daughter,” and she stood aside to let Belgarth pass.

  I did not look back as I rode away.

  I had never been beyond the borders of Kalagira, nor even close to them. I had never been away from home for longer than three days. Yet here I was, journeying alone into what, for me, was wilderness: the country roads winding more or less towards Chun, so ill-kept and overgrown that half a dozen bandits could be crouched within arm’s-reach and you not know—and beyond those, the bare hills surrounding Fors na’ Shachim and the Queen’s black castle. Belgarth wasn’t much concerned with scenery—he’s all for tiltyards, short, lumbering charges with murderous clashes at the end of them—and he wasn’t happy with stony little roads overhung with brambly vines. Yet he strode on gallantly all the same, a warhorse ever, war or no. There would have been little forage for him, in the normal way; but I made certain to bring rich grass to birth unseasonably, wherever we made camp, and water pooling out of stones. And yes, it was my mother who finally hammered that smallest charm into me—and yes, I should have learned it at the same time I learned to dress myself.

  It seemed the most practical thing—grudge it as I might—to follow Willalou’s suggestion and seek out the Dragi
ne woman. I had no notion of what a Being—and did that signify demon, lamia, yaroth, or some other monster?—powerful enough to turn a mortal man into a maj might look or be like, and if there was someone who did I had many questions to ask. I heeded my mother’s hint about running water as well, and set out to trace the course of everything flowing south of Fors na’ Shachim. Of course it was a completely absurd notion—was that a laugh? Does your kind actually make a sound to express amusement?—but I was frightened for my man, and certain that nothing was beyond one as much in love as I.

  Yes, that is a laugh-sound, isn’t it? But as dark and distorted as you are.

  Often I let Belgarth choose our road—why not, since all horses, left to themselves, will go toward the smell of water, and all paths were the same to me so long as they headed eventually toward Chun? Meanwhile I practiced my spells, like any novice, as we covered the country foot by plodding foot: singing to mark earth and stone and the air itself, to keep us from wandering in circles or unwittingly doubling back on our trail.

  As for what I would do when I at last saw Lathro Baraquil’s face, I had forced myself, days and miles back, to banish such imaginings altogether. I might—or might not, even after Willalou’s improvised disciplines—be a match for the Being I sought; but even if I were, that was no guarantee Lathro would choose to return home with me when I found him. What if he had not yet found the Being, but insisted on continuing the search? Or what if he had already become a maj and considered himself far too grand now for a scab-kneed childhood playmate? Too many unknown factors; nothing to do but trudge on, singing.

  We kept almost entirely to the mountains: since so many of the streams and rivers of this region spring up there, it did seem to improve the odds at least somewhat. But we might as well have been seeking roses in the Northern Barrens, for I encountered no smallest trace of Lathro, nor of the Being I was hunting so steadfastly. I learned not a thing from the rare traveler, and nothing at all in any of the few villages in which I stabled Belgarth and passed the night. Yet I could not rid myself of the awareness of both of them, the conviction that they were somewhere nearby, whatever my training, my observations, or my inborn senses told me to the contrary. The heart is not the infallible guide it claims to be, but it does get a few things right now and then.