By the fire’s light, did she see a faint smile on Maleonarial’s lips? “Do as you must, Leksand.”
“I will.” With that, Leksand flung the box, awkward in his timing and motion, so the parchment roll and pen came loose.
A spark caught the parchment midair, turning it to a torch.
The pen of Surano glass, made on an isle none from Tananen had ever seen, tumbled through the air, its amber and cream like frozen flame.
Struck stone.
Shattered into sparks of its own, sparks that did nothing to light the plume of black rising up, splitting into grasping fingers, and even as Kait shouted a warning that burned her throat and used Her Words— “ ”
The fingers found her dear boy—
And took him.
* * *
Flames blew out, then roared as if renewed. The stones of the bridge and circling the pond cracked and split, and whatever the daughter intended with her shout, the result was the breaking of the weir and the release of whatever lived in it. Maleonarial heard the cries from those now downstream and wading, heard Harn call out and Dom, but had no time for them nor care.
He faced what had been Leksand, seeing black lightning course through the whites of his eyes, eyes now cold and hard. Saw lips pull back in a pleased smirk those lips would never have made by nature, and it was only then he realized Kait had thrown herself at what had been her son and was beating it with her fists. “Outta him, damn ye! OUT!”
He pulled her back, held her tight against his chest so they could both stare helplessly. “After is too late,” he said, to himself, not to her.
“No.” Kait twisted free and spat at the feet of the Eater. “Give him back.”
The eyes cleared, then filled with horror. Leksand put out a shaking hand. “Momma—”
Before their hands could touch, black flickered to stain the white and the smirk returned, became something darker. “Mine. Mine. Mine.” This voice was foul. Was this what Kait heard in the stone? Too high. Too thin. Filled with echoes of itself.
A self delighting in pain of any kind.
But talking. Responding. “What do you want for him?” Maleonarial demanded. “Tell us.”
“Nothing here. Here. Nothing.” The eyes turned cunning, shifted to the crowd of mage scribes. “Feed us. Feed us. FEED US.”
Her Words spoken by the daughter rattled the world. These were sly and dangerous. They tried to seize his heart, weaken his will, and Maleonarial didn’t dare think of Leksand, trapped with that inside him. Most of all, he didn’t dare think of the cleansing fire, so close, and how this body of his had the strength to pick up the boy and toss him in like an armload of wood.
There had to be another way.
“It’s The Deathless Goddess you want. Her magic. I can take you to where She lives.” A blow landed on his chest. Another and he caught Kait’s fists in his hands but didn’t dare look down at her. “We can use the carriage. She’s not far.”
In a dreadful parody of snake, or smoke, the body bent at hips and shoulders, twisting as the eyes, or something unseen, studied him. Then, high and thin, spittle forming at the edge of lips, “Liar! Liar! Liar!”
Distrustful creature. Maleonarial released Kait, who’d gone too still. “I want The Hag to end. I want my life and the boy’s.” Deliberately, he relaxed his stance, added a cutting mockery to his tone. “I’ve tried to end Her hold on us for years. Can you destroy Her or not?”
Eyes cleared, filling with tears. “No! You can’t! We defend—” Kait whimpered as the black returned. “YES!! Where? WHERE?!”
“Not far,” he repeated. “This is the bargain. You release Leksand, free and unharmed. I take you to Her Soul.”
Dire muttering as if it argued with itself.
A hand, fingers like ice, took his. A broken whisper. “Not even for m’laddie, mage. Please.”
Not looking down, he squeezed those fingers the slightest bit, before shaking his hand free. Aloud, “You’ll be a mother again, not daughter and slave.”
Trust me, he’d tried to say with that one touch. Could she?
“Ride host there. Free there. THERE!” The Eater’s voice filled with anticipation. “FEAST. FEAST. DESTROY HER!”
Fear came like a tide with the words, with the stark hunger in that voice, the evil in it. Bile rising in his throat, Maleonarial fought to stand where he was and not run. Stayed where he was because Kait Alder stood, facing the Eater with him.
And when she spoke, he remembered courage.
“You go back to hiding and leave m’laddie be till then.” She took a step closer, and did the ground tremble beneath her small foot? “I’ll be watching. I’ll know.”
The black left Leksand’s eyes. Bargain accepted.
Maleonarial made himself endure the boy’s accusing glare.
Only the young could look so betrayed.
* * *
Her tongue probed her cheek, retreated from what felt a blister. Similarly, Kait’s thoughts circled around a notion that felt—hazardous, to imagine. She’d used Her Words without hesitation or thought. What she’d said?
Made no sense at all. To me. Unless The Lady spoke through her lips to proclaim this the right and only choice, to sit and sway in a carriage she was coming to hate mightily, trusting the man driving what were surely the ugliest horses ever made.
To save her son, at unspeakable cost.
“You can’t trust it, Momma,” Leksand said, with the low tremor to his voice that spoke of fury and fear. Contained, barely. “You can’t bargain with it.”
“We’ll see, won’t we.” She lifted her hand to signal no more. The Eater might be tucked away and quiet; it wasn’t gone. Who knew what it could hear?
To me. On the other hand, those seemingly simple words had made sure no one would notice or care—not even Harn, busy aiding others—as the three of them hurried beneath the trees lining the brook become a flood, following the mage as he’d crossed by jumping from boulder to boulder.
A shortcut to where he’d left the wagons and carriage. The sole way to reach them that wasn’t aflame, for the school kept burning. The audience hall and the residences connected to it. The more innocent dining hall and its kitchen and storerooms.
And not so innocent upper floor. Kait looked at her son. “Do you know what became of Master Pageonarial?”
“He killed the other masters then himself.”
Her poor laddie. She resisted the impulse to pat him on the knee, for there was no comfort to offer.
Not even that his wish had come true, and Her Gift gone. Fled the Eater. Corrupted or withered by it. Whatever the cause, the person sitting across from her, disdaining the strap she held tightly, felt like the boy he’d been before Tiler’s Hold.
And would be again, Kait vowed. She kept her watch, clinging to the hope offered by the press of fingers over hers.
The hope that the mage who’d spent years trying to end The Lady, was willing now to save Her.
* * *
What pulled the carriage bucking and rocking over the hill and down had legs and bodies to pull, mouths to take bit and rein, but otherwise? The six were fit for the upper floor, written to last no longer than it took them to run to Her Tears.
If the axles survived the punishment. Maleonarial, braced on the driver’s seat, the wind of their passing blowing bell-laden hair behind him, judged it an even chance. After all, this was a hold lord’s carriage. A wealthy hold lord at that. The road from Alden Hold to the far canal wasn’t too far—
His teeth caught his tongue as wheels and seat dropped abruptly. He left the seat only to meet it on the way back up. The mage spat blood and grinned. For a man nigh death a handful of days ago?
He’d never felt so alive. “You found a way to stop Cil, Hag,” he whispered. “Saved me. I’d thought it for spite. But that wasn’
t it, was it?”
The road at last. The team jumped the ditch with a disconcerting howl of joy. Maleonarial held on—
—they made it. The road was well maintained and they surged forward, faster and faster, until he had to pull his cloak over his mouth to catch a breath.
To talk, with no one near to listen. A habit.
“You did it for this, didn’t you? To battle your enemy. All those years alone together. Did you come to know me so well, Hag, you’d known I would? I damn well didn’t.”
Despite the wind, something came to rest on his knee.
A gossamer, wings flattened, holding on with six hooked legs. Topaz eyes gazed up at him from what was an exquisite not-quite-a-rose nor fully-a-butterfly yet more beautiful than either. The head tilted, posing a question.
Maleonarial grunted. “I remember you. A nuisance. Tipped over my porridge.”
The head rotated around.
His gossamer, this. “My fingers were clumsy with the cold,” he assured it. Sprung from a moment’s costly daydream, that too. He’d had those, as well as frustration.
He bounced his knee. “Scat. You don’t want to be here any more than we do.”
For a wonder, it obeyed, winking away rather than flying.
A tiny laugh in his ear.
“If you’re trying to make me feel we’ve a chance, Hag,” Maleonarial grumbled to the empty air, “it’ll take more than that.”
Though he did feel it, just a little.
* * *
He felt his mother’s eyes on him and was grateful. Not for much right now, to be honest, but if she watched, the Eater would behave.
. . . dark the well and deep and down you fall . . .
Leksand shuddered.
“Laddie?”
“It’s nothing.” He could have told her, explained how the Eater snuck around and pulled him down, left trails of doubt and despair, but the effort daunted him.
And what more could she do?
She leaned forward, swaying with the carriage, to put her hands on his knees. “I can hear it. Muttering to itself. To you,” with a perception he hadn’t expected. “Try not to listen.”
He stared at her hands, half as long as his, strong, though, with work.
“Look at me.”
Her tone raised his eyes, when he couldn’t find the will. Her eyes—burned.
Which couldn’t be, because this was his Momma and Leksand blinked furiously, finding her eyes familiar and brown. She sat back. “Better?”
“Yes, but—” All at once he could think for himself. “Set me on fire, before we get there,” he said. “I’ve flint and steel.”
. . . no you don’t . . . no you won’t . . . down the well you fall . . .
He fumbled them from his pocket only to lose his grip and drop them. In a victory over the yammering in his head, he picked them up before they slid across the floor and held them out. “Here.”
“My brave laddie.” His mother took the flint and steel, then tucked them away. “No.”
“But—”
“The Eater lets you be, so long as it isn’t threatened.” Her eyes glistened. “I want to ride with you, not it.”
. . . weakness . . . weakness . . .
It wasn’t. It was strength, to insist on what they had, and not waste a moment. Leksand pulled open the curtains to either side, squinting in surprise to find the sun shining, relieved to feel the darkness in him retreat further. He pressed his nose to the window. “We’ve left farmland,” he announced, willing, like her, this moment be normal. “It’s a forest, but the trees are—Momma? What kind are they?”
She shifted sideways to see out without losing her view of him, then abruptly moved to her window.
“Those aren’t trees.”
* * *
Gossamers. Tall, seemingly still, and so many they appeared the edge of a forest, making Leksand’s confusion understandable. But they weren’t still. Rather than move with the carriage, the same gossamers reappeared in view over and over as though skipping through the solid world and Kait wanted to warn them to flee their company, the Eater, but it was too late.
Hadn’t she summoned them?
To me. Words she’d spoken on impulse. Why? She sat back, staring across at Leksand, and tried not tremble. Was she, like Maleonarial, willing to conspire with the Eater, to pay an unimaginable cost, for her son’s life?
Leksand pressed his lips together, the eyes meeting hers wide and round. Prudent, not to ask a question to inform what rode within him. Perhaps their survival, not to rouse it now to feed.
The carriage slowed without warning and he took another look outside. “We’ve come to another road. I’d hang on,” he cautioned, hand seeking the strap. “It’s not as—”
The rest of what he’d have said was lost in the protest of a well-built carriage hitting what had to be the worst road in Tananen. Kait hung onto her strap with both hands, counting it an accomplishment to stay near her seat, for there was no staying seated. She risked a look out herself, for anything had to be better than this, to see they raced between reed grass and brown-headed cattails, gossamers like a horizon of flickering bronze.
They’d entered the vast fen called Her Tears.
* * *
There were those who professed to know the mind and intent of The Deathless Goddess, which assumed there was a mind and intent to be known. Something Maleonarial often doubted.
What would those intimates say now? For instead of shielding Her Blessed Gossamers from the Eater, a plague of the things accompanied them, a number increasing the further along the rotten excuse for a road they traveled into Her Tears, and he knew them. Some were his—
Some were Cil’s, watching him with topaz eyes that held the memory of his shape.
Maleonarial would have waved, but it took both hands to stay on the seat. At least he’d no need to guide the team; there was but one possible path.
Were the gossamers bait? The willful wisps of mischief hardly constituted reinforcements. Tippers of porridge. Tuggers of hair. Glimpses of glorious wonder—
The Hag stole socks.
And life, he reminded himself, his body no longer so young. She’d the unquestioned power to do that.
What else? The mage had a new and troubling sense whatever intervention he’d hoped to inspire—after all, what was one Eater against an undying omnipotent goddess, and The Hag owed them help for a change—the odds were excellent mere mortals might not recognize or survive it.
The carriage lurched and slipped, wheels close to mired in the steadily worsening surface. Kait and Leksand made no outcry, though being shaken and likely bruised.
Tough, the pair from Woodshaven. Close, that too. He’d met his share of villagers, hard-working and cheerful about it. Stayed with families, but this mother and son had a bond unlike anything he’d experienced. What that said about the paucity of his life, well, he’d had no choice in it, had he?
The boy’s Gift had vanished. It must have happened when the Eater possessed him, but he hadn’t noticed in the moment. Whether fled or consumed, the absence might be a mercy.
Though if whatever lay ahead included the best of all outcomes? The end of The Hag as well as the Eater? Freedom for every mage and daughter and acolyte?
He’d die a happy man. Would rather live as one, but he’d accepted the probable outcome when he’d walked from the school the first time.
They hadn’t arrived yet. Maleonarial turned his thoughts to a practical problem. The team he’d made would expire soon and he’d prefer not to write another.
Hard to find bearings, between the ever-changing gossamers and featureless fen. It’d been summer when he’d ridden here to visit Her Soul. They should be close, but that could be as much wishful thinking as the end of magic.
If the team failed too soon, the Eater might ke
ep Leksand’s body in order to walk the rest of the road, if walking was what you’d call trying to pull boots from the cloying mud.
Unless the Eater, lured by the abundance of gossamers, left in pursuit.
Then what? What did an Eater gain by consuming magic, be it gossamer or Slog? He’d seen no sign it made the things more powerful. They remained as annoyingly mysterious as The Hag and he’d ask Pageonarial—
A death to lay squarely at whatever passed for the Eaters’ feet. Add the months the historian had lived isolated and in fear.
Fear. Anger. Grief and regret. Even hope. Maleonarial stared straight ahead, jaw clenched. Emotion was the enemy of clarity. Of focus. He’d taught himself patience, those long years. Discipline. Concentration. He forced himself to relax, let Her Words float through his consciousness, stopping none of them. No need to examine this possibility or that. He was the most powerful mage scribe in Tananen, but intentions were of no use—
He sat straighter.
Ahead the sun failed to penetrate what wasn’t a distant, indistinct rise in the ground, but a nearer bank of fog.
Her Soul.
* * *
. . . close . . . close . . . closer . . .
Leksand put his hands over his ears, but it didn’t keep out the fell voice, with its HUNGER—
“Leave him BE!” Arms went around him, his mother abandoning her hold on the strap to join his struggle.
Whether it was her words or presence, or strength he gained from their contact, the voice retreated to a foul muttering. He lowered his hands in time to steady them both as the carriage leaned far to one side, then righted. “Better,” he half gasped.
“Not if we turn t’jelly in this pisspot,” she replied grimly, making him think of his bladder, for it had been a while.
The Gossamer Mage Page 32