The Outstretched Shadow ou(tom-1

by Mercedes Lackey

  He wanted to—he badly wanted to see the Queen again—but Kellen had the feeling that this was simply a polite offer that was made without the expectation that it would be accepted. And he hadn't seen Idalia since last night; she might be getting worried, if no one had known where he and Sandalon had been all afternoon.

  So he decided on declining, gracefully. "Thank you, but my sister will be expecting me, and I believe she will have many things to tell me by now."

  Ah. He was getting better at reading the Elves. That was polite relief on the nurse's face.

  "I bid you good evening, then," he said. He tried a bow, and congratulated himself that it was a little less awkward than yesterday's. Maybe he'd get the hang of this place eventually.

  "And we, you," the nurse replied, and with a friendly nod, turned and chivvied her charge away to his supper and bed.

  ON her way back to her lodging after her visit to Songmairie, Idalia stopped several times for supplies. Odd that it would have seemed to anyone who was only familiar with the wondertales about Elves, there was a little market in Sentarshadeen, full of stalls where Elven farmers and crafts-folk brought their wares—though admittedly, most Elves preferred to barter than purchase outright. Time, after all, was a commodity of which they had a significant supply. Even in the midst of drought, the stalls were occupied, and bargaining was going on at the usual leisurely Elven pace.

  Each handsome stall was different, though all were shaded with awnings, each awning was different as well. Some stalls were created in stark simplicity, some in an amusing froth of ornament; all delighted the eye.

  Idalia made her selections with care. Food and wine and a selection of ciders, of course, for any worker must take care of his tools, and one of the most important tools of a worker in magic was their own body. Another stop at a store that sold toys and games of all sorts, where she bought a set of the small polished counters for the game of gan.

  Idalia had no interest in playing gan, today or any other day—the rules were very simple, but the game itself took an Elven lifetime to learn to play well—but there were 144 counters to a gan set, small round cabochons of polished agate no bigger than her thumbnail, and she needed them for what she was about to do. The Elven proprietor sold them to her with barely concealed curiosity, though she was ostensibly engrossed in a game of xaqiue with a friend. By now everyone in Sentarshadeen knew Idalia was here, and that she'd agreed to use the Wild Magic to aid the Queen. Everything Idalia did would be food for gossip before the sound of her footsteps had died away in the street.

  And Jermayan would be sure to hear all of it, for she knew that he had not yet left Sentarshadeen, and indeed, had no intention of doing so.

  Furious with the sudden direction of her thoughts, Idalia forced the thought of him from her mind once more.

  By the time Idalia reached her own doorstep, it was piled with neatly wrapped bundles from the tradesmen whose shops she'd stopped at; she'd carried many of her own purchases, but not all. She set her walking staff outside the door and went inside, then spent a few minutes tidying the things away. Knowing that Sentarshadeen was her destination, she'd taken care to bring a few trade goods that would be of interest in Elven lands, and a Wildmage's credit was always good. If nothing else, charged keystones could serve as currency, for though the Elves had given up their part in the Greater Magic long ago, they still retained a facility with the small magics of hearth and woodland, and charged keystones were better than gold.

  Idalia wasn't really sure what the Elves did with the keystones, though they seemed to value them—she'd told Kellen once that only the Wild-mage who had charged a keystone could tap its power, and as far as she knew, that was true. Maybe the Elves were the exception to the rule; all she knew was that she had always found charged keystones eagerly accepted among the Elvenkind, for whatever reason, and so had not worried too much about not being able to pay her and Kellen's way.

  But she had not expected to be riding into a disaster of this magnitude, either, and that changed everything. Certainly while she was doing her best to deal with it, no one would be asking either her or Kellen to pay for anything, at least not in tangible goods.

  Before beginning her task, she forced herself to eat and drink and meditate for a while, fortifying herself for the work ahead, then selected a large flat cushion and placed it in the middle of the floor and seated herself upon it, facing west, the bag of gan counters in her lap. She spilled them out into a pool in her skirt, taking a moment to admire how the sun spilling through the windows made them glow and sparkle.

  Red agates and grey; stones of shining black and golden yellow; creamy white and deep moss-green… She ran them through her ringers, hearing them click against each other and feeling their smoothness, slowing her heartbeat and her breathing, readying herself for the task ahead.

  Sinking down deep within her own mind as her heartbeat slowed, Idalia imagined herself at the center of a wheel. Spokes radiated out from it: thick spokes for the cardinal points: west, south, east, north. Slenderer spokes between them cross-quartering the wheel: southwest, northwest, northeast, southeast… And between them, spokes still finer still, until the room in which she sat was gone, and in her imagination Idalia sat at the center of a silvery wheel, a compass-rose of sixty-four petals, all radiating outward from where she sat.

  She began in the west, searching for the source of the wrongness, the binding of wind and weather that she sensed lay behind the unnatural drought. In the spokes of the wheel she felt the sorrow of the Elves, their weariness and despair, but those things were natural, and she ignored them, seeking farther, deeper…

  There were flickers of shadow, faint hints of wrongness. Each time she sensed one, Idalia took a stone from her pile and set it on the floor in the direction the sensation had come from, and continued searching.

  IT was still a little too light for the lighting of lanterns, more late afternoon than evening, but Kellen's stomach was still on the dawn-to-dusk schedule that he and Idalia had kept in the Wildwood, and it was his stomach's opinion that it was time and more than time for dinner, preferably something involving a whole roast ox. He found his way home more quickly than he had the day before, hoping Idalia would be there. It would be a great relief to talk to someone he could ask a direct question of.

  He wondered how she'd spent her day, and if she'd have any news about the drought, and what they were going to do about it. Certainly her sources of information—both magical and about Sentarshadeen in general—ought to be better than his. He just hoped that old boyfriend of hers had the sense to keep out of her way, because if not…

  Well, it didn't really bear thinking about.

  But when he opened the door to the house, all was so quiet that for a moment he thought Idalia wasn't there at all. The great room was in shadow, but when he looked closely, the last rays of the afternoon sun spilling through the door showed him Idalia kneeling in the middle of the floor, with a large fan of pebbles spread out on the floor beside her right hand. And the whole room smelled—though that wasn't quite the right word—of magic. He wasn't sure how he knew, but he was certain of it.

  And at that moment, the world changed for him.

  I am a Wildmage…

  It was one thing to be called "Wildmage" by the Elves—and even at that Kellen felt as though he were masquerading as something he wasn't— and it was something quite different to be forced to acknowledge by the evidence of his own senses that it was true. He was a Wildmage, able to sense the currents of magic.

  "Idalia?" he asked hesitantly.

  She'd been sitting with her head slumped upon her chest as if she were asleep. Now she took a deep breath, straightened, and opened her eyes, looking up at him.

  "Kellen," she said, and blinked, and then added irrelevantly: "Look at the time."

  What has she been doing? It had to be something to do with the drought, of course, but what?

  She took a deep breath, stretching and uncoiling from where she s
at— carefully, Kellen saw, so as not to disturb the pattern of the stones spread around her. "Let's have some light. And I expect you're hungry." She blinked again, and then said, as if surprised, "So am I…"

  "What were you doing?" Kellen asked, following her toward the stove. He made a wide detour around the stones on the floor, feeling as if he were avoiding a wasp's nest.

  "Looking." She glanced toward the floor and her expression tightened unhappily. "And finding, though finding out what I found and what it means is going to take a lot more looking. And how was your day?"

  As she spoke, Idalia took a long metal wand that contained a braided wick and lit it at the hearth, then used it to light several of the lamps, banishing the darkness.

  He wondered how much she would really hear if he spoke to her. "I talked to a lot of people today, actually. I went out to the spring beyond the Palace—the one the unicorns drink from—and helped fill one of the water wagons. I also met the woman who made my clothes while I was helping to water the forest, but—"

  "But, what?" Idalia asked, turning, and raising an eyebrow at him.

  He sucked at his lower lip, trying to articulate what had bothered him about the encounter. "She doesn't seem to think much of them, so tomorrow I'm going to go to her shop so she can make me new ones—and that just doesn't seem right. I mean, Idalia, doesn't it seem to you that there are better things to worry about at a time like this than whether I'm wearing the right color tunic?"

  "Not for Elves," Idalia said—rather grimly, Kellen thought. "Elves are… perfectionists," she said, as if she was choosing her words with care. "If you stay here long enough, you'll find that there's no such thing as 'good enough' to the Elvenborn. They have a strong sense of, well, I sup' pose you'd call it 'fitness.' And until something meets their standards, they don't leave it alone—no matter what else might need doing at the same time."

  "But… now?" Kellen asked, bewildered. "With the drought, and everything?"

  "Elves do not hurry," Idalia said, taking a large pie from the sideboard and sliding it into the oven to warm. "They live a thousand years. They don't have wars, other than the Flower Wars—not recently at least, and not in any way we humans understand the concept. So…" She shrugged. "For most of them—not all, but most—there is never a sense of urgency about anything, and they can be so narrowly focused on their own personal obsessions that they weigh things like the drought and clothing design in equal importance. That is the negative side; the positive side, of course, is that they take a very long view of anything, and what may seem like a crisis to one of us is, often rightly, seen by one of them as little more than an inconsequential ripple."

  "I guess it's hard to see much wrong with that," Kellen said uncertainly.

  "Whereas," Idalia finished, with a wan smile, "something that is an ongoing offense to the eye and an irritation to the senses of all beholders, like an ill-fitting tunic, is a fault that should be corrected immediately."

  Kellen snorted, though privately he wondered if some of Idalia's refusal to even talk to Jermayan was because of just those things.

  He'd seen a great deal more than he had realized in the time he'd spent in the Wildwood and Merryvale. He'd seen flirtations and light-loves, and true-loves and courting couples, and above all, the deep devotion of the happily mated. He knew what love looked like, at least, from the outside, and he knew Idalia loved Jermayan. Caring for him as deeply as she did, and if Elves really did mate for life, how could she want him to spend centuries alone after her death? Now, if it had been him, he'd try and figure out a solution of some kind, but, well, it was her choice, and not his when it came down to it.

  But if Jermayan was as much of a perfectionist as, say, Iletel or Tengitir, and spent as much time on things that didn't seem to matter one way or the other as far as Kellen could tell, he'd drive Idalia crazy in a year, let alone in sixty or seventy. So maybe that was a factor, as well.

  Still, in every way he'd yet seen, the Elves were so much better than humans that sometimes since he'd come to Sentarshadeen he felt almost ashamed to be human.

  IDALIA sat down beside the table, gazing back at the pattern of stones on the great room floor. North. There were tiny flaws in the balance to the west, only a few, and hints of trouble in the south and east—the direction of Armethalieh—but almost all of her stones had been laid out toward the north. That was the direction in which the trouble lay, and that was where she had to go looking next. Not in the direction of Armethalieh and the Council.

  And that was a great pity. Countering the meddling of High Magick would have been trivial to what she feared—and making trouble for Lycaelon would have been immensely satisfying.

  She glanced at Kellen, who was foraging among the drawers and cabinets of the food storage with the same single-minded interest as a bear in a honey-tree. She'd been doing her best to hint to him about the way the Elves' minds worked before he got himself too badly hurt, but she doubted she was getting much of anywhere. Right now, all Kellen could see was the perfection of Elven ways, but like anything else living, the Elves had their faults, too, stubborn inflexibility being chief among them.

  Compared to some among the Elves, Lycaehn Tavadon is vacillating and spineless.

  But Kellen wasn't worldly-wise enough yet to catch a hint. She supposed he'd just have to figure it out for himself—and he'd be wildly indignant when he did, too; as indignant as he'd been when he discovered the High Mages acted out of self-interest more than disinterested justice…

  "You look tired," Kellen said bluntly, turning back to her with the makings of a young feast in his hands. "Look, come sit down and I'll feed you."

  "I've been working," Idalia said, taking a seat at the table as he laid out sliced vegetables and meat, bread and cheese.

  "And you found out the drought's not a freak weather thing?" Kellen asked.

  She blinked. For a boy who was normally as thick as two short planks—to borrow a popular Merryvale saying—he did have disconcerting flashes of insight, portents of the man he would someday become.

  "Yes," Idalia admitted. There was no reason to keep the truth from Kellen; he'd be involved in the thick of it soon enough. "It isn't a natural thing. Ashaniel suspected as much; I suppose you must have guessed that. That was why she was so worried, even frightened. And rightly—to tie up the natural world like this requires an immense amount of power. I tried to call the rain today, and couldn't manage so much as a shift in the wind. That was proof: something, somewhere, is holding back the rain and doing it deliberately. Unnaturally. Now I have to find out who and where, if I can. I made a start on that today, and eliminated a few possibilities."

  "What can I do to help?" Kellen asked. Idalia blessed him for the bravery of his offer; she knew how wary Kellen still was of the Wild Magic—afraid, in fact.

  It was the City still working in him, as much as he'd want to deny it. Armethalieh hated change: everything the High Mages did "for the good of the City" was to keep change from happening there, even the natural normal change that occurred everywhere. And the Wild Magic was all about change: every spell a Wildmage cast changed him or her in some way, small or great. Deep down inside Kellen sensed that. And no matter how much he said he accepted it; no matter how much he said he'd cast off the chains of the City; he was still fighting against it.

  It was a battle no one could fight for him. The City's poisons would have to work their way out of his system naturally. Even telling him she knew what he was going through would do as much harm as good, Idalia suspected.

  "Nothing, yet," she answered. "It's delicate work, like following a trail through a forest. I'm not sure how long it will take, either. I don't know what I'm going to find, but whatever I find, I do know it won't be pleasant."

  She sighed and leaned forward. Kellen moved behind her, putting his hands on her shoulders to rub the tension out. "At least now I know it's nothing to do with the City. It's coming from the north. All the signs point to that."

  "What's
north of here?" Kellen asked idly. "All the maps in the City don't even go as far as the High Hills. Hah! What am I saying? They don't even go beyond the walls."

  Idalia sighed, feeling the muscle knots loosen. If she wished for one thing, it was that she and Kellen could have more time together before they were plunged into the trouble she saw coming.

  "North of the Elven Lands? Mountains. High desert. And… trouble." She did not yet want to tell him how much trouble. Let him enjoy his first few days among the Elves, and revel in their wonderful city. He'd find out the truth soon enough. They all would.

  Chapter Nineteen

  The Fruit of the Tree of Night

  IF ONLY THE High Mages knew how pleased with them she was at the moment, it would surely vex them unutterably, Queen Savilla thought delightedly. It was Armethalieh, with its foolish adventure, that had filled the slave pits in the Heart of Darkness to overflowing with refugees fleeing from those lands that the Mages had chosen to claim for their own. Ah, bless them! There had been no need to go a-hunting, with so many refugees simply flinging themselves into the traps.