Life Giver

by Lisa Lowell

  “Do you often get called away?” Yeolani asked Vamilion as he watched the spot where the Queen had left. “It seems very demanding, having to go deal with every injury or illness in the Land.”

  “For her, yes. She is going about constantly, but she’s also training other, non-magical healers. It’s the nature of her gift. Me, not so much. I deal with earthquakes, volcanoes, and avalanches as emergencies, but for the most part, my dealings are with the people in the mountains. I teach them the way I taught you. I teach them to mill grain, harness water, and forge steel, all the skills that they need to pass down through the ages. That’s one reason why we live so long: to teach these skills and be sure they're not lost. I was about to start bringing writing to the Land, but then Honiea found you, which changed the plan.”

  “Well,” Yeolani sighed. “Thank you for teaching me. I don’t think I could stumble on this…this …barrel of fish without it.”

  “You probably can’t,” Vamilion admitted with a chuckle. “I kind of had to do that. Owailion isn’t very patient with teaching, and he was the only magician at the time.”

  “Owailion?”

  “He is the first Wise One. He awoke here in the Land with no memory of where he was born. He had these powers and learned how to use them from the dragons but with the Land sealed. God Himself gave him his Seeking tasks to make our Talismans and our palaces. It’s one of his…”

  “Wait,” Yeolani interrupted. “Palaces? Like big stone walls and ramparts and such? Honiea didn’t mention palaces.”

  Vamilion nodded. “She didn’t want that to tempt you, for they are glorious. There are sixteen grand homes scattered throughout the Land. One of your tasks, when you are Seeking, is to find the one that belongs to you. Mine is in the south in the Vamilion Mountains, which is where I get my common name. It’s one way we can claim the title ‘King.’ With emigrants from so many lands, they have trouble respecting our magic because we don’t use it like magicians in other lands. We have these places to garner the people’s respect. The fancy clothing also does that. But we rarely sit in our palaces or travel about wearing such finery.”

  “I was going to ask about that,” Yeolani added. “What’s with all the gold and silk in the middle of a burned-out forest? It seems a bit silly.”

  Vamilion chuckled, admitting to that. “It probably is. However, the change in our clothing is a little out of our control much of the time. Whenever we do high magic or take an oath, we change into that finery as a witness of who we are. It shows I’m Vamilion, the King of the Mountains.”

  “And what will I be the King of?” Yeolani asked eagerly. “King of Forests and Hunting? Please, not King of the Sea.”

  Vamilion shrugged. “That’s for the future to reveal. I knew when I first saw the mountains. My homeland is mostly forest, and I had only seen the mountains from afar. Then when I changed into my finery the first time, I was curious. Finally, when I saw the Vamilion Mountains, I felt such a sense of awe…” his voice trailed off lost in wonder, and Yeolani had to tease him.

  “Like you’d seen the most beautiful woman in the world?” Yeolani teased.

  Vamilion blushed and looked down. “Precisely. The mountains suddenly made so much sense to me. I could feel the different types of rock and understand their thoughts and motives.”

  “Whoa, wait…their thoughts? Rocks have thoughts?”

  “I don’t know what else to call it. They give me promptings. I can sense when they are under pressure and are about to slip, causing an earthquake. I perceive it as anger or unrest. Are they sentient; no, but they are aware of me as I am aware of them. They don’t really react to mankind in general unless it’s the miners, but the stone reacts to me and does as I ask.”

  Yeolani sat back under the late-night sky and considered what Vamilion said. He could have asked a thousand more questions, but something in him wanted to stop and think as well, testing his new perceptions, looking for clues.

  “That’s probably a wise thing to do,” Vamilion commented to Yeolani’s unspoken musings.

  “Which reminds me. How do you do that listening to my thoughts?”

  “Aren’t you tired? You’ve learned much tonight. You should stop and think about what you’ve been taught. And sleep. You’ll dream, and dreams for a Wise One are windows to where your Seeking should guide you.”

  Yeolani was about to argue the point, but overhead the fairies began dancing and blended in with the stars, and he drifted off to sleep wondering if Vamilion had put a hex on him.

  In the night the fairies began speaking to him, buzzing about his head and even touching his face with their delicate wings. He heard their voices, shrill and insistent, but speaking a tongue he could not quite understand. The wind seemed to blow them away from him, and they struggled to remain above him, lighting his way. In his dream, he dashed through the trees, running faster than humanly possible toward the edge of the forest. He had to get out, and the fairies kept blocking his line of sight. If they didn’t get out of his way, he’d plow right into one of the trees that stood thick around him like soldiers, enemy sentinels. He ran without panic, but he definitely felt an urgency. He must get out of the forest, out of the closed in, suffocating closeness of the trees.

  Then he burst free from the branches to an opening so vast it might as well have been the ocean. Off to his left, he noted the mountains, so he must have run south out of Fallon, but he couldn’t care less. The blue sky overhead seemed to burn with summer brightness. And fresh spring grasses, knee high and blowing gently, stirred in him a longing to roll in the green. He froze in awe, and the fairies caught up, hovering, clouding his vision of the open plains. Angrily he waved them away…and woke up with a start.

  “Damn the fairies!” he growled as he sat up in the dawning light.

  It was too dark to see, but he heard the gentle thumps as fairies fell, lightless, all around him like pinecones shaken from the trees above. Every one of them was dead. In horror, he picked one up off his blanket and saw the creature for the first time without their flitting and glow interfering. Like a tiny woman, dressed in finest gauze, with the wings of a dragonfly, she could have been human in form except for the extreme size. She was no more than the length of his little finger.

  “Vamilion!” he shouted, horrified by what he’d done. “I killed them.”

  Vamilion, who lay wrapped in blankets on the other side of the cold fire, sat up blearily and tried to focus. He must have gleaned enough just from the scene, as well as Yeolani’s thoughts, for he bolted from his bed and came to Yeolani’s side. Then, without a thought, the King of the Mountains stuck his hand into the air, conjured a lit candle, and held it high.

  Honiea came immediately, stepping out of the dawning sun. She too was wordless, letting her eyes make her conclusions. She began gathering dead fairies into her apron with an alien look on her face: half fear, half revulsion. Yeolani could barely keep himself from crying, not only at the dead fairies but the piercing disappointment his mentors must have in him. To his horror, he realized that he had done this with magic.

  “How?” Honiea asked, still gathering bodies.

  “I…I…I was dreaming. They were blocking my view. I was so irritated that I…I cursed them, and it woke me, and they all came raining down like this. Can you heal them?”

  Honiea sat on the ground with her lap full of dead, lightless fairies and shook her head regretfully. “I can’t cure dead…but fairies don’t die. They’re magical, like us. I’ve never seen anything like this. I don’t know.”

  “You have to try,” Yeolani begged. “They can’t die. It will be my fault, my magic, and it will be so wrong. I’ll never use magic again if…”

  “Make no oaths, boy,” growled Vamilion. “Let’s let Honiea work.”

  Vamilion bodily lifted Yeolani off the ground from where he knelt grieving and marshaled him away from their camp, toward the mountains in the east. For his part, Yeolani couldn’t think. His mind seemed to bog down in a tar pit
of guilt, and he could barely move.

  “Sit,” Vamilion ordered, and Yeolani obeyed, perching on a boulder that had fallen down the face of the mountain and onto the bank of the creek that lined the forest. In the slightly more open air, Yeolani almost managed to breathe again.

  “Now, you wanted to learn to listen in on thoughts? Listen to Honiea’s. Hear her work to save those fairies. She is performing enough magic right now that you should have no problem getting through her shields. Close your eyes and hear her mind’s voice. She’s just through the trees there. You can sense her. Stretch out and touch Honiea’s mind.”

  Yeolani didn’t want to try. He felt afraid of what he might hear, that he might harm her somehow with a stray thought or distract her from her desperate efforts. He also couldn’t resist listening in. He imagined his way back into the woods, past the burned-out cabin and into the cool shadows. In his mind’s eye, he saw Honiea’s golden head bent in concentration over the remains lying in her apron. He imagined she was speaking aloud to the fairies so he could hear… and to his surprise, he could.

  “Where do you go when you have no body then? A place like Limbo is not safe with all those demons. Is that where are you now? Where can you go instead?” Yeolani heard Honiea’s questioning.

  “Who is she speaking to?” Yeolani wondered aloud.

  “The souls of the dead fairies,” answered Vamilion. “They might be in Limbo, and she’s trying to encourage them to come back to their bodies. But Limbo is where human souls go, passing through on their way to heaven. It’s also where demons lurk. It’s their natural home. Honiea fears for them and wants them to come back here. If she can persuade them…”

  “I can help you,” Honiea insisted. “It’s safe. He didn’t mean to harm you. He’s new to magic and did not realize. You followed a dream. Your bodies are not damaged, just empty.”

  Some form of reply must have been given but Yeolani wasn’t hearing the fairy souls. He could only comprehend one side of the conversation. With an effort, he expanded his listening and realized that he was hearing the fairies’ reply, but the language still eluded him. Were they even capable of spoken words? Impressions only came to him. He sensed grief, confusion, a rallying around each other to struggle in their comprehension of what had happened to them.

  “Well, can I give you another body? Can I somehow give you another purpose too? It is not safe to follow the magicians anymore,” Honiea insisted.

  The fairy spirits replied something incomprehensible, but the tone sounded bitterly angry or frustrated. The squeaky little minds began coalescing, coming to a consensus.

  “But you cannot pass over,” Honiea tried again. “That is not your right. You are meant to be here in the Land. You can find another purpose. I will speak for you.”

  “Yeolani, break it off,” Vamilion ordered suddenly.

  Obedient to the abrupt command, the younger man pulled back into his own mind, bewildered. “Why? Did I do something wrong again?”

  “This is Honiea’s private magic. If I’m not mistaken, she is going to approach God and ask for help. You are not ready for that kind of conversation. Neither am I. It’s part of Honiea being a healer.”

  Yeolani sighed, relieved that he didn’t have to listen to such a difficult interview. His head was pounding, and he wanted to melt into the ground with sorrow. So, this is what they had meant; guilt over what magic made you do. Well, he had that regret and would carry it for an eternity. What more would he have to endure if already, in less than a day, he had cursed a group of sentient beings into oblivion? Couldn’t he undo what was done by accident?

  Vamilion obviously knew the answers to all these questions, but something in the Wise One’s stony face looked like Gil, refusing to go in that direction. Instead, Vamilion redirected him. “Why don’t you eat something, and then I’ll teach you how to block others from reading your thoughts?” Vamilion might have made it a question, but he didn’t allow it to be less than a command. He conjured two bowls of hot cereal, and they ate in the quiet beyond the creek in the morning’s summer sun. Yeolani slowly began to relax, calming and looking at what had happened with some perspective.

  “Good,” Vamilion began. “You’ve got to have a clear mind in order to defend your thoughts from invasion.”

  “Invasion? Maybe that’s what my instincts felt when I was dreaming about the fairies? Could they have been invading my dreams?” Yeolani asked eagerly.

  “Well, why don’t you tell me about your dream,” ordered Vamilion.

  In a way sharing about the dream unburdened Yeolani. The tension eased from his neck, and he began to feel less frantic. He bared his soul, trying to recall every nuance of the simple dream of rushing through the forest to the southern edge and encountering the open grassland. When he came to the part where the fairies clouded over him, blocking his view, he had to admit that he had been irritated with them at the time.

  “Can you show me? Remember the dream in your mind and then pass it to me like a handful of memory.” Vamilion demonstrated by passing to Yeolani a memory of the first day they’d met. Gil of the past stood at the front door with an ax and the boy, gaunt and haggard, standing in the cold. Yeolani rocked back at the clarity of the memory. His mind tried to savor it. Those days of innocence in the cabin seemed like ages ago. Was it only a day before that he had left to go hunting with Marit?

  “Focus,” Vamilion reminded him. “Remember your dream for me.”

  Well, thought Yeolani as he gathered his scattered memories, recalled the remarkably well-preserved dream, and then magically passed it to his mentor. The younger man watched Vamilion's face as he processed what he saw and couldn't judge his opinion of the vision. Daring boldly, Yeolani tried his hand at listening into the King of Mountains' thoughts, and unlike when he listened in to Honiea, he met a thick wall of resistance. Rather than getting himself caught invading private thoughts, Yeolani backed off and waited for the results of the dream interpretation.

  Vamilion's eyes opened thoughtfully, and he nodded. "The fairies did invade your dream and got overly excited because it is a message of where your magic is going. You need to get out of this forest and away from its fairies. They tend to be…how would you say this…over-enthusiastic about magic. With you being so new, they blocked the whole message of the dream in their eagerness."

  "That's still no reason to kill them," Yeolani muttered. "I just didn't know to swear at them would kill them," he reasoned.

  "Neither did they. The fairies simply lack the good sense to leave you alone. You didn't kill every fairy in the forest, just the ones that invaded your dream."

  "How many?" Yeolani sighed. First his parents and now fairies. He probably should feel somewhat responsible for what had happened to his friend Arvid too.

  "You can't do that," Vamilion advised. "You'll have plenty of legitimate guilt without piling on for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. It doesn't matter how many fairies are now in Limbo. They were in the wrong place and you weren't. Now, let's focus on your dream. I want you to try to get through my shield to find out what I think of what you showed me."

  "Through that wall?" Yeolani was less than trusting of his ability – or even the safety of trying – to get through Vamilion's shields.

  The King of the Mountains chuckled. "Walls are my specialty. Yes, you can do it. And you cannot hurt me, so I'm the perfect person on which to try. Now, if you haven't noticed, the use of the imagination is the strongest skill a Wise One can invoke to tap into their magic."

  The sun passed overhead, and they barely moved away from their spot on the edge of the forest as Yeolani battered his mind at the wall around Vamilion's thoughts. At first, neither noticed the passage of time. Sometimes the younger man had to climb the wall or throw a mental hook at the shield, but Vamilion's barrier only grew higher, more slippery, and even formed so it enclosed Yeolani in a prison where he couldn't work any magic without devising some way out of the magical traps. Then he had to do all this whil
e constructing and forming his own walls. They took magical stabs at each other until Yeolani sat on his rock trembling with exhaustion.

  "Can we call a break before I pass out," he grumbled sometime after the sun had already set. "I'm about to vomit…if I had anything in my stomach," and he conjured a haunch of venison for something he could eat without having to think of anything else.

  Vamilion didn't object. Instead, he sat down beside his student and conjured his own supper. "So, that's why you never bother hiding your name," he commented as he surveyed his full meal plate to show you didn't have to do one magic thing at a time. He had crafted a three-course meal, broke through Yeolani's lax mental guard, and continued the conversation, all at once.

  "No fair. I wasn't ready," Yeolani mumbled with his mouth full and continued eating, not really caring that Vamilion was once again traipsing through his mind and right over the curb-sized shield he hadn't reinforced.

  "Ready or not, your shields should be up and strong constantly, especially when you are Seeking. There is evil magic out there, and you won't even know it's there before it attacks…in your sleep even. And I say again, that is still a silly reason not to protect your name."

  "It's personal, old man. If you'd murdered your parents…"

  "I didn't, and neither did you. Listen," Vamilion tried to reason with him, "your mother is dead at the hand of an abusive husband and your father is dead because he was a murderer. I'm sure she appreciates the effort to honor her, but I'm also sure she would want her magical son to survive. That means you drop your birth name. And why would you want to honor a wreck like your father…"

  "Yeon, so I don't forget how he was a wreck, and Lani, so I don't forget her love. It's that simple. If I'm going to live forever, I'll be the only one to remember, and everyone should be remembered by someone."

  "Then you had better think of a way to keep it a secret that you're magical. If you must keep it, at least just share it with a trusted Wise One."