The Locksmith

by Howe, Barbara;

  The spell was more complicated than anything we had tried so far, but I understood the theory behind shields, and I was getting good at them. My teachers obviously didn’t think we needed to know this one, but I wanted to see if I could make it work.

  I went over the spell in my head many times in the next few days. One evening, after hurrying through supper to be the first to reach the Warlock’s study, I crossed my fingers, took a deep breath, and cast the spell.

  I staggered as a weight, like dozens of layers of heavy quilting, seemed to settle on my shoulders and burden my limbs. Walking to the fireplace was like wading through a sea of molasses. An hour of this and I would have nothing left for tomorrow’s practice.

  How could I test it? A normal fire wasn’t hot enough. I was standing in the embers, feeling silly, when the two warlocks walked in.

  Beorn came over to the fireplace and rumbled, “You’re up to something, aren’t you? What now?”

  The Warlock had stopped dead just inside the door, tension evident in his neck and shoulders. I stepped out of the fireplace and dusted myself off, watching the Fire Warlock. “I was trying out the shield against lava, but I couldn’t think of a way to test it.”

  “You’re catching on fast. Jean, how about melting a rock?”

  The Warlock didn’t seem to have heard him. He came closer, treading like a cat stalking a bird.

  Had I done something wrong? This should have pleased him. He was making me nervous.

  I glanced from him to Beorn. Both men were staring at me with fire in their eyes.

  The Warlock said, “Let us test it in the practice room.” He led me through the fire, Beorn following. The box of magical burn treatments flew the length of the practice room and landed at my feet. The Warlock picked up one of the iron bars and held it out to me. “I will heat the iron. Touch it with the back of your hand, and pull away quickly if it begins to burn.”

  I held my hand against the cold metal. It warmed, became hot, then searing. It glowed red, then yellow. The Warlock seemed to be holding his breath. The metal sagged, deforming, then ran over my arm and dripped onto the floor. Through it all, the sense of heavy padding remained. My skin did not even blister.

  The Warlock tossed the rest of the iron bar away, and pulled me away from the molten puddle. Before I had time to wonder what was coming next his arms were around me, his mouth coming down hard on mine.

  Does a mouse welcome the attentions of the cat about to consume it? I dug my hands into his back, and answered him fire for fire. His left arm, like an iron bar across my back, clamped me against him while his right hand moved over me, exploring, caressing. I felt the heat rising in him, the mounting excitement, the inferno in my own heart responding. I was no longer thinking, only feeling.

  And the shield, that precious shield, slipped, faltered under a spear of searing pain, and came crashing down. My clothes were on fire, his touch blistering me. Then Beorn was pulling us apart, shouting, sucking the heat away. The Warlock let go and I fell, slipping into blessed blackness even before I hit the floor.

  Burn Medicine

  Cloth covered my face, my hands. My arms and legs were swaddled like a newborn’s. A burial shroud?

  I opened my mouth to scream, and choked on something hard and cold.

  A hand pulled the cloth away from my eyes. “Sorry,” the earth witch said. “The ice is supposed to sooth your burned tongue, not make you gag.”

  I stared at the healer, panic forgotten. They had wrapped me from head to foot in the Earth Guild burn cloths, and still she looked as if she had fallen into a vat of boiling water. What had I looked like before they fetched her? I gagged again.

  I looked around for the Fire Warlock. I had to turn my head a few degrees to see him. He was sitting on one of the metal chairs, elbows on knees, his face buried in his hands. He was as still as a marble statue. Keeping my head turned took too much effort. I went back to staring at the earth witch.

  Her blisters shrank and disappeared; the angry red faded to ashen grey. Her head lolled against Beorn’s supporting arm. The burns she’d stolen from me were healing, but at a cost to her.

  “You’ll be fine,” she said, slurring the words. “It doesn’t feel like it now, but you will be. I pray no more of you fool hotheads get any ideas tonight…” She closed her eyes.

  If someone died tonight, it would be my fault. Comforting thought, that.

  Beorn lowered the healer to the flagstone floor, and then bent over me, inspecting the wrappings. “How do you feel?”

  I used a barnyard phrase that had once made my father wash my mouth out with soap, and Beorn didn’t even blink. “Sounds about right.”

  He smoothed the burn cloth over my face, leaving my eyes free, then picked up the snoring witch. “I’ll be back in a few minutes. Don’t go anywhere.”

  As if. I closed my eyes. Keeping them open was too much work.

  The metal chair creaked. Soft footfalls padded towards me, followed by a whisper of movement. I opened my eyes to see the man I loved kneeling beside me. There was no colour in his face, and when he started to talk he choked, and had to fight for control for a long moment, before saying, in a shaking voice, “I am sorry.”

  He knelt with his head down for what seemed a long time, moving only to draw in long breaths, hold them, and exhale, before regaining command of his voice. “It seems a pathetically inadequate thing to say. I had no right to do this to you. I knew better. I certainly had been warned.”

  I mumbled, “Jean, I’m sorry I couldn’t keep the shield up.”

  There didn’t seem to be anything more either of us could say.

  When Beorn came back, he picked me up as if I was a goblet he might crush with his fingers, and carried me through the tunnel to my room. He put me on the bed and pulled the eider over me, then combed his fingers through his beard. “Lucinda, I’m sorry this happened. I saw it coming but I was too slow—”

  “You had a vision that he would kiss me?”

  “Hell, no, I don’t need to be a seer to know he’d grab a once-in-a-lifetime chance. Can’t blame him. I know how a man reacts to a pretty girl, and he’s been stuck in that damned Office for an awfully long time. I wouldn’t be as sane if I’d been there half as long.

  “I meant, the shield against lava is too dangerous, but I was dolt enough to hope it would work… Now you’re going to be fine in a few days. What you need now is sleep.”

  The ice was long gone, and the pain ebbing. I felt more like talking now. “But, Beorn—”

  “Sleep,” he ordered.

  “But I want to know…”

  I stopped. The room had been dark, but now there were shafts of light coming in through gaps in the shutters—light coming from a sun low on the western horizon. Mrs Cole was bending over me.

  “I’ve slept a whole day?”

  “Yes, honey, you have, and you look like you needed it. Arturos told me there’d been an accident, and you’d need some help getting unwrapped. I’ve brought you some supper, so let’s deal with those burn cloths.”

  She helped me into the bathroom, and peeled off the burn cloths. Sheets of dead skin came off along with them, showing brand new bright pink skin underneath. She clucked over me, inspecting the damage.

  “Well,” she said, “that Arturos got a good look at you, that’s for certain, but I’m sure it wasn’t a pretty sight at the time. Looks like you were pretty lucky, honey. You don’t have any scars—physical ones, anyway. The pinkness will wear off, and once your hair grows back—”

  “My hair?” My hands flew to my scalp, and met bare skin. I ran to the mirror, and recoiled from the bald demon staring back at me. I threw myself on the bed and howled.

  Mrs Cole tucked a blanket around me and patted me on the shoulder. “It’s not the end of the world. It will grow back in time—”

  “How much time
?” I said, between sobs. “Decades?”

  “It could have been worse. You survived. What were you doing, anyway?”

  “Playing with fire.”

  “I can see that. No, don’t tell me, I don’t need to know. As smoky and singed-looking as you are sometimes when you come out of there, I’ve known you’ve been doing more powerful fire magic than I ever wanted to deal with. I just don’t like that he misjudged what you were ready to handle. You can’t tell me that if Himself were there he’d have let you get burned that bad.”

  I didn’t refute that claim. I sobbed into my pillow while she fussed over me, peeling off the last bits of dead skin and reanointing my burns.

  On her way out, she said, “You’ve earned a holiday, anyway. I told Arturos you wouldn’t want to put your nose out of your room until your burns had healed, and he agreed, so you just stay here and I’ll bring you your food. Now, is there anything I can bring you from the library, dear?”

  Anything but Terésa. I named a couple of books, and thanked her. When she came back I said, “Mrs Cole, Arturos saved my life. It wasn’t his fault; it was mine. I tried to do something I had no business trying yet. When you see the Warlock, please tell him I said that. I wouldn’t want him thinking I would let someone else take the blame for my mistake.”

  “If you say so, honey,” she said. “I’m still entitled to my own opinion, but I will tell him what you said. Goodnight, now.”

  Never, ever, lie to a warlock. What is the penalty when the warlock one lies to is oneself? I had plenty of time to contemplate that question, as I finally confessed that I had been lying to myself for months, clinging to the delusion that I was not in love with Jean Rehsavvy.

  I had plenty of time, too, to remember what my mother had said: be careful what you wish for, for you will surely get it. I had gotten what I wanted, and hated myself for it. I had behaved irresponsibly, not acknowledging what I was doing, and relying on his self-control to prevent a disaster. But I had jolted him out of his self-possession, and neither of us had been in control.

  I did not go down to the practice room to sleep, despite the noise, because I couldn’t face René’s curiosity. After four days, in which I mainly alternated dozing and crying, I had recovered enough strength to pace circuits of the room like a caged tiger. On every circuit, I stopped in front of the mirror, inspecting the hideous apparition that appeared there. Each time was a fresh shock. The bright pink had faded to pasty white, relieved only by the stubble on my scalp.

  Mrs Cole spread a story that my hair caught on fire after I dozed off too close to a candle. She said I would draw less attention if she explained my burns away before I reappeared. I agreed with the wisdom of this pretence, but it added force to my stomping. I’d rather they thought I was a seductress than silly or careless. I would prefer to tell the truth, but not at the cost of exposing the Fire Warlock to ridicule.

  Criticising the appearance of a person recovering from burns was bad manners. Students at the guild school suffered burns with distressing regularity, and everyone in Blazes had seen the effects, so I didn’t expect much overt reaction. What they thought or whispered behind my back was my bigger concern.

  The next morning, I tied a scarf Mrs Cole lent me under my chin, and crept out of my room for breakfast. In the dim light, the other bleary-eyed early risers paid me little heed as I shovelled scrambled eggs and toast onto a plate. I poured a cup of coffee and turned to leave, intending to eat in the practice room. I was congratulating myself on having escaped attention when a tug at my scarf sent it slithering backwards, exposing my bald head.

  Defeat

  I whirled. Half my coffee splashed across the buffet table.

  “You’re as bald as a billiard ball,” Jenny McNamara squealed, loud enough to make heads turn. “Mundanes like you can’t be trusted even with a candle.”

  I stared at her, breathing hard.

  She gloated. “You’re such a dimwit. Master Sven will gag when he sees you with no hair. He won’t have anything more to do with you.”

  Everyone in the dining room was turning to stare. I forced my bared teeth into a smile. “You’re welcome to him. I’m tired of his dithering. Besides, I could never respect someone that was rude to a burn victim.”

  She flushed and raised a hand as if to flame me. I swept past her and out of the dining room with my nose in the air.

  Master Sven was going to be furious. I was choking down dry toast with the dregs of the coffee when Beorn stormed into the practice room, slamming the door with such force that even on the other side of the cavernous room I jumped.

  He stalked across the room and came to a stop in front of me, scowling.

  I slid down in my chair. “You heard?”

  “Everybody in the Fortress has heard. If not now, they will by dinnertime.”

  He sat down beside me, blowing out through his moustache. He looked at me out of the corner of his eye. “I guess I lost my temper.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I told Jenny if Sven took up with her I’d make sure he was never named a mage—anyone that stupid wouldn’t deserve it.”

  I slid further down. “Beorn, you shouldn’t have. Sven may never speak to me again.”

  “He will.” Beorn grinned. “It’s not your fault Jenny’s a ninny.”

  Master Sven arrived, a bit later, with René hard on his heels. The boy bounded across the room, shouting, “Lucinda, where have you been? What—”

  He stopped in mid-bounce. “Wow. I never saw anybody look like that before.”

  My stomach clenched. “Thanks a lot.”

  Beorn cuffed him. “That was rude. Say you’re sorry.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean… Why is it rude? I wouldn’t mind if I got burned and she said that to me.”

  Master Sven rolled his eyes. At least he wasn’t gagging.

  René said, “That story about a candle is hogwash. What did happen?”

  Beorn barked, “None of your business. No questions.”

  “But I want to know—”

  Beorn grabbed him by the collar and snarled. “I said, none of your damn business. Do you want to practice fire magic, or do you want to go back to working in the food stores?”

  René’s eyes flicked back and forth between Beorn and me. “Practice magic.”

  “Good. Let’s get to work.”

  Jenny and her friends ate dinner in a little island of empty space amid the jostling horde.

  I was mobbed. Scholars, most with averted eyes, assured me I would feel more like myself in a week or two. Mundane staff patted me on the shoulder and whispered, “Thank you for standing up to that harpy. It isn’t right for them to treat mundanes like dirt.” Witches and wizards I had never spoken to before came by to tell me in gruesome detail about burns they had suffered at the school, and that accidents could happen to anybody—it wasn’t anything to be ashamed of.

  Through it all, Master Sven hovered at my elbow, saying little. Every time I looked up his eyes were on me, until I wanted to throw something, anything, at him. He gave us a reading assignment that afternoon, and I fled to a private corner in the dimmer recesses of the library. I was glad not only to get away from his scrutiny, but my mind was not on witchcraft. I left the book I was supposed to read on a table, and picked up a drama that I could already quote by heart, Terésa.

  I was still trying to settle into a comfortable position when Master Sven walked through the stacks and sat down beside me, glowering.

  He said, “Forgive me for following you, but I wanted to talk to you alone, without René.”

  “I’m sorry about what I said to Jenny…”

  He waved a hand. “Don’t be. You’re right, I have been dithering.”

  I shifted in my seat, edging away from him. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”

  “Forget it. I want to k
now what happened. And don’t tell me it’s none of my business. I love you. That makes it my business.”

  Now he tells me? I stared at him, my hands with a mind of their own flipping the book in my lap face down. He glanced at it, and must have seen the title. He seemed to deflate, the anger in his face fading into distress. He said, “Oh, drown it, Lucinda. Is that how it is?”

  I nodded without meeting his eyes. “I tried to use a shield against lava, but I couldn’t keep it up.”

  We sat side-by-side, alone in our own miseries. He said, “I should have guessed. I’ve seen how you look at each other.” Several times he started to say something else, thought better of it, and lapsed back into silence. At length, he said, “I’m sorry, for both of you,” and walked away, his shoulders sagging. I stared after him until he was out of sight.

  I rode the stairs that evening to the Warlock’s study with a dry mouth and sweaty palms. Being a warlock is about being in control, is it? How could I face him? I’d had five days and I still hadn’t gotten myself under control.

  He met me at the door, and we both recoiled. He looked as if he had aged a decade since I had last seen him. His eyes, always so alive, seemed dim. His face was grey with exhaustion.

  He said, “Oh, my dear, your hair. I am so sorry.”

  I looked him straight in the eye. “It doesn’t matter. Really.”

  He rewarded me with the old ghost of a smile that I always found so charming. “Thank you, my dear, but you are a terrible liar.” The amusement faded. “Neither of us is any shape to continue these sessions on the Office. It would be better for both of us to get to bed earlier and get what sleep we can.”

  He paused, and took a deep breath. Exhaled and drew in another. “A change of scene would do you good. You would benefit from going to the Warren, and staying with the Earth Mother.”

  My jaw fell open. “You’re joking, right?”