"They are. I'm not alone by choice. The man I loved…died…and I don't have any choice now but to keep on going."
"Yes," Rhiana said. "I'm the same. My husband was killed in battle. For the last year and a half I've been without him."
Kate was surprised. It was hard to imagine the self-possessed, cool Rhiana as someone's wife. "It's hard, isn't it?"
"Very. I have my husband's advisors and they are some help, but all the concerns of Ruddy Smeachwykke descended upon my shoulders when he died. The taxes, the debates, the law. Some of the townsfolk thought I couldn't sit in judgment or determine a fair tariff or oversee marriages or bless the crops," she said, her voice dropping low. "They looked at me and decided I was young and a woman and alone, and they tried to appoint a successor for me."
"You run a town?" Kate asked.
Rhiana smiled slightly. "I am Lady Smeachwykke. And I kept them from appointing their damned replacement, too. I tested for an Adjudicator Without Title, which I added to being Adjudicator With Title, and I became a Juris." Her smile grew smug.
"Few people even qualify to begin study, and most study for years before testing. I looked like quite a genius when I tested, I tell you. What the testing board didn't know was that before Haddis died—Haddis was my husband's name—I spent years looking up precedents for him, and I frequently wrote his opinions for the Canons. So I knew my way through the Precepts and Canons of Law."
"So you're a lawyer."
"I'm a Juris. One of three Machnan Jurisa in all of Glenraven, and the only woman. People come before me and tell me their problems, and I determine the solutions. When I earned that honor, it became hard for the men who wanted to replace me to convince anyone that I wasn't capable of running Ruddy Smeachwykke."
"And you do magic."
"That's part of being a Juris. Being able to cast a truth spell and make it stick." She pointed to the Coke and said, "May I try one of those, or would you rather I didn't?"
"You're welcome to them anytime you want." Kate got Rhiana the Coke and showed her how to open the top.
"You look like you really enjoy these." She took a sip and immediately made an awful face. She took another tentative sip, wrinkled her nose, and looked at Kate.
Kate said, "They're an acquired taste."
"So is self-flagellation." Rhiana took one more tiny sip, shook her head, and put the can down on the counter. "But I've never seen the point."
"We'll find something that you like, then." Kate had a hard time not laughing at the faces the other woman was making.
"Ale," Rhiana told her, not hesitating. "Smoky red wines. Cider. Spring water."
"We'll find something."
Rhiana looked toward the living room, where the Kin and Kin-hera had gone, and said, "Do you miss your husband?"
"We weren't married yet, but yes…I miss him. I loved him very much."
"Did you?" Rhiana was still looking away from Kate. "I wonder what that would be like. I never loved Haddis. We were good friends. We rode and hawked and hunted together. We laughed at each other's jokes, and we were partners, but the question of love never occurred to either of us. He had his mistresses for that. I had the children."
She turned and looked at Kate. "Ours was an arranged marriage. He was twenty years my senior, and his first wife and his son, his only child, died in the Plagues. So he arranged with my father to marry me."
"You have children?"
"Three. A daughter and two sons. Both of my sons are interning. One is at Sarijann Castle with Torrin Sarijann. The other is with Bekka Shaita, Lady Dinnos. My daughter is learning keep management and magic at home."
Kate looked at Rhiana. She looked the same age as Kate, but she had three children who were old enough to be learning jobs. "How old are they?" she asked.
"Thirteen, twelve, and ten." Rhiana said, "I married at fourteen, and had the first boy when I was still sixteen."
"You were so young," Kate whispered before she realized the comment might be rude.
Rhiana didn't take offense. "Yes. But after the Plagues, so many people were dead that any woman who was of age married and started having children immediately."
I was feeling sorry for myself, Kate thought. I think I'll remember not to do that anymore.
Chapter Eight
Rhiana didn't want to think about how much she missed her children. She didn't want to think about the fact that surely they had to believe she was dead. Perhaps Ty was back from Rikes Gate already, sitting down with the advisors and trying to figure out how to take over the work he was not completely prepared to shoulder. He was a sensible boy, and she thought he would do well in her stead, but she wanted to go home. She wanted to tell him that everything was fine, that she was alive and safe, that his world hadn't fallen apart.
The only way she could tell him that was if she found her way home.
She looked at Kate and said, "Perhaps we could get to work."
"The magic?"
"It's what I need to understand most desperately. Everything else can wait at least a while."
Kate nodded. She gathered a few things from her kitchen pantry, and switched out the lights as she led the way to her dining room table. "I don't know how useful you'll find this," she said, putting candles and an incense burner down on the table.
Rhiana shrugged. "I don't know either. But I have to find some way of working with the local magic if I ever hope to create a gate that will take us home."
"My way of working with magic may be completely useless to you. I can't create doors between worlds. I can't change weather or throw bolts of energy from my fingertips, and quite honestly, I don't know that anyone on Earth could. Magic to me has always been indirect, nothing more than a slow nudging to encourage things to go in the direction in which I want them to go."
Rhiana thought magic of that sort would be useless. When she cast a spell she wanted immediate results, and Kate was telling her immediate results were impossible. "Slow nudging isn't going to get us a gate," she said.
"No. But if I show you what I know, maybe you can see some way to use it and change it into what you need."
Rhiana nodded. That sounded reasonable.
"Okay. Watch me." Kate closed her eyes and began breathing slowly and rhythmically.
Rhiana watched her, leaving herself open to feel the flow of energy around the two of them. She recognized Kate's first actions as grounding and centering herself, and her next as creating a warded sphere within which the two of them would work. Both of these actions were the same ones Rhiana would have taken, though Kate's approach was different than Rhiana's would have been. However, the warded sphere startled her. As soon as Kate cast it, it billowed around the two of them, fierce and strong and blue-white to her mind's eye but invisible to her physical ones. In that simple sphere, Rhiana felt more magic than she had felt up to that moment in the whole of the Machine World. Kate had not touched the lines of power that coursed across the surface of her world, yet now those lines of power were drawn toward her as iron filings were drawn to a magnet.
Rhiana struggled to find Kate's power source. The planet's weak surface power now curled around her in a weak green nimbus, but she didn't use any of it. She didn't need it; that brilliant hot power surged through her and around the two of them, almost blindingly brilliant to Rhiana's magical senses. Then Kate opened her eyes. "I know that doesn't look like much, but what I've done is—" she started to say, but Rhiana interrupted her.
"Where did you find your power?"
Kate looked puzzled.
"Earth, air, fire, water?" Rhiana tried to clarify her question.
"The four magical elements?" Kate shook her head. "None of those. I use them very little, really."
"Then from which well do you draw?"
Kate shrugged. "It's a little vague, really. I know a lot of pagans call on a god or goddess, but I've never really thought about the universe's power in that way. I believe there is a creative force, a guiding force, perhaps, that ga
ve all of us our start. I draw from that."
Rhiana made a strangled little sound and closed her eyes. She considered her own world. Glenraven's magic ran on the surface where anyone who knew how to touch it could use it. But the source of Glenraven's magic, the entity Rhiana had always thought of as the real Glenraven, kept distant and untouchable, speaking only through its chosen Watchmistress or Watchmaster. Kate was speaking of tapping directly into that power. In fact, it was evident to Rhiana that she had successfully done so. The human woman, in an act Rhiana considered unthinkable hubris, was treating a deity like her own personal well.
Yet with this blinding force at her fingertips, she could only nudge events, without any certainty of the results she would get?
Maybe there were complications Rhiana couldn't see yet. She opened her eyes and looked at the human. "Now what?"
"Now we perform a spell. I think I'll renew the wards on the house. That needs to be done anyway." Kate did a few things with her candles, said some words, stood inside the sphere she'd created and faced the four compass points. During all of this, Rhiana saw that nothing was happening. The magic curled and surged around her, unchanged. Then Kate said, "Once I've formed the spell, I set it over the house." She closed her eyes again, and once again Rhiana felt awe at the amount of power that was suddenly in Kate's grasp. Enormous sheets of energy flung themselves outward, wrapping the house in blankets of crackling power so brilliant to Rhiana's second sight that she grasped instinctively at the weaker earth magic and pulled it in around herself as a buffer and a shield. Oddly, as soon as Kate's wards settled into the structure of the house, they effectively disappeared. Rhiana, eyes closed, was able to locate the power nestled within the wall nearest her, but the wards would give no warning of their presence to even the most talented wizard who was looking for telltales of magic.
Rhiana had never seen such superb wards, and she had never seen wards cast in such an irrational, bungling manner. The wards did not exist until Kate conjured them in her mind—what she had called her spellcasting was nothing but a diversion from the real magic this world had to offer.
Kate opened her eyes, shrugged, and smiled. "It isn't much, I suppose. Not compared to the sorts of magic you're used to. I've never had any problem with people breaking into my home, though. I could credit the wards…but I might just be lucky."
Rhiana considered that abrupt, unexpected, coiled power that had leapt out of nowhere and wrapped itself around the house, and she considered the woman who stood before her looking down at her, almost apologetically, and she shook her head.
"If I had that much power to work with, I could fly," she said. Her voice came out sounding curt, but she didn't care.
Kate's eyes widened. "All what power? I have never seen a single tangible result of my magic. There are some events in my life that I think I've influenced, but quite honestly, they were events I could have influenced by my behavior, too. And perhaps I did."
"Can't you see the power you summon up when you cast your house wards? Or when you create the circle in which you work? Can't you see that your magic is coming from your source, wherever that is, and not from the little ritual things you do. When you lit your candles and recited your poetry and drew your symbols in the air with your finger, you weren't doing anything. But both times when you closed your eyes and reached, you reached right into the heart of something stronger than anything I've ever seen before."
"What do you mean, see?"
"The circle you cast…the wards you threw. Can't you see them?"
"Of course not."
"I don't mean with your physical eyes. But with your inner eye…with your second sight…can't you see them with that?"
"No. I can…well, I can visualize them. I imagined them there, after all, and the picture I created when I imagined them…when I close my eyes I can see that. Or I can imagine it with my eyes open, of course."
"No. When you close your eyes, you should be able to see the sphere you cast around us as a brilliant blue-white light. Even if you aren't thinking about the energy you've called up, you should be able to see it as clearly with your eyes closed as you see this room when you have them open. With your eyes closed, you should be able to walk around the perimeter of your circle, never straying once from the edge…" She frowned, thoughtful. "But you can't, can you? Not at all. When you close your eyes, nothing is there but darkness."
Kate nodded. "That's right."
"What happens when you touch your wards?"
"Nothing."
"Nothing? Nothing at all?"
"Nothing. I know they're there—or at least I tell myself I know they're there, but I don't feel anything."
Rhiana raised her fingers to the blue-white curve of power that arced over her head and down behind her back. The deep, heady thrill of the magic reverberated against her fingertips as if she had touched the strings of an instrument another musician had just played. The purity and fierce strength of the magic Kate had cast was heartbreakingly beautiful.
And Kate was in essence blind and deaf to what she had done—more blind and deaf than the bell-ringer Kadurr had been deaf to her own Songs of Lost Souls, for she felt the vibrations of her bells in the soles of her feet, in her breastbone and her gut, in the palms of her hands and the bones of her face. Kate felt nothing. Nothing at all, and yet, magic-blind, she had found a source of power deeper and richer than anything Rhiana had ever touched.
"You can see what I've done, can't you?" Kate asked.
"Yes."
"And it's real, isn't it?"
"Yes. Real and powerful."
"Can you teach me how to see it?"
"No." Rhiana looked at the human woman. "Could you teach a blind woman how to see, or teach a deaf woman how to hear?"
"No. But I could find ways to show that woman how to compensate for the sense she didn't have."
"Hold your hand up and lift it until you touch the circle you've created. When your hand touches the circle, stop."
Kate raised a hand and lifted it slowly, falteringly, and Rhiana could tell she felt nothing. Her hand rose, stopped, rose, stopped, rose right through the leading edge of the sphere without faltering even slightly, rose until her fingertips were completely through, stopped, rose incrementally and stopped a final time. "There?"
Rhiana wanted to weep. "No," she said softly. "Lower." She felt helpless, watching Kate lower her hand again, face scrunched with concentration, trying so hard to feel the magic. The sight was as sad to her as if she had been watching a blind child trying to make his eyes function by sheer willpower. "Right there," she told Kate, as the other woman began to move past the sphere she had created.
"You really feel something there?"
"Yes."
"I don't."
"I know."
They stood looking at each other, and Rhiana said, "This is the problem. You cannot tell me how to find the power source you've used, because whatever sense you have used to locate it, I obviously don't have. I cannot feel anything in this world of yours that could be the source of such tremendous power. I can't show you how to use the power, because you can neither see nor feel it."
"What about telling me the spells you use, and letting me try them."
"Spells? The things you did with words and your hands and the lighting of the incense?"
"Yes."
Rhiana shook her head. "Pointless. Those things didn't even work for you. You did something in your head that worked, but if you don't know what it was, you can't tell me how to do it. And I don't use spells of the sort you mean. I…" She sighed. "I'm not sure how to put into words what I do. I shift the energies I use directly, shaping and forming them, directing them by sight and feel. I could show you if you could see, but you can't see. I could guide your hands and mind if you could feel. But telling you would be worse than useless."
Kate pulled out her chair and settled into it. "You're saying no matter what we do, we will not be able to get magic to work for us. That we won't be abl
e to create your gate."
"Yes. I suppose I am."
"I don't accept that. We're missing something. The book insisted that we needed each other, and that what we had to do, we could only do together."
"The book says. That book says. Hah. That book dragged us here and trapped us, and I have the feeling that the only thing that is ever going to get us home is our own hard work. If there is any way to get home." Rhiana pulled out her own chair and sat, too. She closed her eyes and felt the flow of power from the sphere. She tried to imagine the effect of bursting through wards set by someone magically blind, and wondered if they would do too little or too much or nothing at all. She tried to sense the source of power Kate had used, and all the while her frustration grew. Did the damned book know Kate was a magical cripple? Did it know that out of all the people on this planet, it had drawn Rhiana to someone who couldn't teach her what she needed to know and couldn't do what needed to be done? Didn't it care that it had marooned her and three other Glenraveners? Didn't it—
"Perhaps," Kate said, "I could draw up the energy and pass it on to you."
—matter that Rhiana had a home and friends and that she was responsible for the people of Ruddy Smeachwykke and…
Something of what Kate said penetrated her self-pity. Rhiana opened her eyes. "What did you say?"
"I said, perhaps I could draw up the energy and pass it on to you."
Rhiana sat forward and rested her arms on the table. "Could you do that? Never mind. Silly of me to ask—you don't know whether you could do it or not. You've been taking everything you do on faith."
"Not precisely. I keep a mirror book. I record what I've done, and write down any results that might be applicable. I've seen enough success to be fairly certain I was doing something."
"Trust me—that's essentially doing it on faith." Rhiana wondered if she would have had the patience to stick with something she couldn't see and couldn't feel, trying to control it blindly, keeping a book in which she wrote down what she had done and while she waited to see if her actions had any effects. She doubted she would have.
Marion Zimmer Bradley & Holly Lisle - [Glenraven 02] Page 6