Transformation

by Carol Berg

  “It seems foolish, doesn’t it?” I tried to put it all out of mind. “Whatever comes, please don’t mention any of this to the Queen in the morning. Nothing of Galadon or Catrin. If anyone finds out I’m here and they’ve spoken to me, their lives will be very hard. It is a violation of their law.”

  Aleksander shook his head. “And you call the Derzhi cruel! I don’t understand this kind of punishment. Invisibility. Wouldn’t a good beating or a nice hanging suffice?”

  “Trade places with me for a day, my lord, and tell me which beating is a good one and which hanging is nice.”

  “I stand by my point.”

  “You must understand. Ezzarians spend their lives battling demons. They have to make sure that there is no possible channel through which a demon may reach them. No evil. No impurity. Our history tells us of horrors that can result when a demon follows a path of corruption back to those who are fighting it. I suppose we took it too far. Perhaps our attempt to protect ourselves has coiled about on its own tail and devours us. I don’t know anymore.”

  We walked in silence until we broke through the edge of the trees. Though the valley lay frosted and still in the moonlight, spring was in the air, a moist earthiness beyond the night’s chill that soothed the soul with the promise of warmth and growing. I inhaled deeply.

  “Who is this old man, Seyonne? I wouldn’t have thought anyone could set you so at odds with yourself.”

  I laughed. “Haven’t you guessed it? He was my likai.” At the very moment I said the word, Aleksander’s boot broke through an ice-crusted puddle. He slipped and cracked a knee on a sharp rock. “Damnation!” he said, sitting down hard and pressing a gloved hand over his bleeding knee.

  Whether it was the sudden injury, the thought of Dmitri, or the combination of the two, in one stomach-wrenching instant I felt every shred of warmth sucked out of my body.

  “Blessed Athos,” said Aleksander, clamping his fists to his temples. “Not again.” He struggled to his feet and sucked in a harsh breath.

  I grabbed his arm and pulled. “Hurry. Come back to the trees.” I suppose I held some faint hope that the enchantments woven about the edge of the woods might forestall the demon transformation, but as I helped the limping Aleksander across the barrier, it seemed I only made things worse. His body jerked in tortured spasm, and he cried out. The searing heat that poured off him forced me to drop his arm and fall back. He bent double and sank to his knees, groaning in mortal anguish, his torso stretching into impossible shapes, while his human aspect wavered and faded with agonizing swiftness.

  “My lord, you are in control,” I said, but the stray beam of moonlight illuminating his terror-filled eyes told me otherwise. No more than three minutes passed, and I stood facing a maddened shengar, jaws gaping wide as it roared its fury and pain. One paw was bloody, and the limping beast began to circle around behind me. Smoothly, slowly, I turned with it. “My lord, take hold of my voice. Keep the door open. Your pain will ease.”

  The huge cat screamed again in the harsh, bone-chilling cry of a tortured woman, so much more fearful than the throatier roar of larger beasts. I stood absolutely immobile, allowing the restless beast to examine me. I kept talking, but words seemed to make him angrier, so I fell silent, whispering my chant under my breath. “Stay calm, Aleksander. You are stronger than the beast. It is only the pain. The surprise. The crossing of an unholy enchantment with the weaving of light. I should have known. I’m sorry.”

  He did not attack. Rather, after a while, he loped off into the dark woodland. I sagged limp against the trunk of a towering fir, praying there were no Ezzarians wandering the forest that night. A shifting wind moved the trees, almost blinding me with the beams of the full moon. Distant laughter floated on the breeze along with wood smoke ... oh, breath of Verdonne ... of course there were Ezzarians out. It was the first full moon of spring—the birth of a new season. The night Ezzarian families built fires outside and told stories until dawn. A night of merriment and excitement for children allowed to stay up late. A night of wonder and companionship. Grabbing a thick branch broken from the fir, I took out after Aleksander, wondering if, after sixteen years, my legs remembered how to run.

  I heard him crashing through the brush ahead of me. I leaped fallen trees and ducked under limbs and paid no heed to scrub and branches that tore at my clothes. Occasionally I caught sight of the dark blur leaping with ease over obstacles I had to climb. But soon I smelled wood smoke, and I could no longer hear his passing. Perhaps it was only my terror, but I believed I heard the soft snarl of wicked anticipation as he slipped nearer the merry fire just ahead. I circled wide and ran toward the fire. “Wildcat!” I screamed. “Shengar! Take the children and get inside!”

  I didn’t stop to explain to the five or six yelling adults who leaped from the ground and snatched up whimpering children. I just dipped my branch in their fire, prayed it to catch quickly, and kept my ears focused on the snarl of fury to my left. He was moving. I threw down my still-unlit stick and picked up one the Ezzarians had left poking into the fire to stir the coals. It was too thin and would burn down quickly as I ran, but I couldn’t wait. Aleksander was running. As I took after him, I heard a shocked voice from behind me. “Verdonne’s mercy. Seyonne?”

  The shengar had found a game trail. A clearer path, easier to run. But it meant he was faster. Shengars were not like the kayeets of the desert who were the fastest beasts known in the world, fleeter than the graceful dune-runners and sand-deer who were their prey. But Aleksander was fast enough that I soon had a stitch in my side and heard the echo of Galadon’s insults from my youth. “Are you glued to the path? How in Verdonne’s name will you ever outrun a demon if you have stone feet?”

  I cleared my mind and commanded the blood to service my legs and my side and my lungs, and soon I could see him again ... and at least three fires in the trees. I bellowed with all the breath I could muster, “Hear me, Ezzarians,” as if they all could hear my desire. “Shengar! Take shelter!” I ran to each fire and made sure they heard, then took back to the game trail. Which way? I had to stop and silence my breathing so I could hear, desperately wishing for the increased acuity melydda had once provided me. Fool! I was not helpless. I still had senses that would be of use. Quickly I passed the back of my hand before my eyes and shifted into the realm of my extra senses. All I needed was to see enchantment.

  When I looked again, the trees of that forest were woven with silver threads, as if the goddess of the moon had dropped her nets to catch what magical birds might nest there. I had forgotten how beautiful were the weavings, and my damaged sight could catch only the merest hint of them, like looking at a rainbow through a smoked glass. But I had no time to savor it. Ahead of me the roiling purple and green ugliness of the demon enchantment was disappearing over a rise, and I took off through the trees, trying to keep my blazing brand from starting any other fires.

  I heard screams and ran faster yet, soon arriving at a rocky grotto where two men and three women had plastered themselves against the stone walls, pressing five or six children behind them. The shengar crouched low, bawling at them across the clearing, shy of the fire that burned innocently to its right. But the fire wasn’t big enough, and he was beginning to edge around it to get at the terrified people. “Here!” I said, stepping in between the shengar and the people, holding my pitiful torch so that two fires blocked its path. “You don’t want to do this. Listen to my voice. Leave these good people alone.” He screamed at me with fangs bared and muscles taut, ready to spring, and the children behind me wailed in shrill terror. “Keep them quiet and still,” I said over my shoulder. I waved my burning branch, and the cat shied backward slightly. “Think, Zander. You don’t want to do this.” One of the men got the idea and stepped to the campfire to grab a stick of his own. Aleksander bawled harshly at the man, and I was afraid he was going to leap the small fire and take the man before he could get his branch burning well enough. “Begone from here,” I said, waving the torch
at Aleksander again. “Stay in control.”

  The cat backed away a little more, and I stepped toward it, waving the branch until it slunk into the trees and disappeared. Bending over to ease the cramps in my legs, I caught a glimpse of the man standing over the fire. “Garen,” I blurted out. He was the miller’s son from my home village, a close friend who perennially won any contest of strength. After a year in the world as a Searcher, he’d come home to take over the mill when his father died ... about two days before the Derzhi invasion.

  He stared squinting across the fire. “Thank—” His eyes widened and glazed out of focus. “Come,” he said, waving to the others, “let’s get the children inside.” I had disappeared from his sight as surely as if my body had become transparent. I turned and ran after the cat with the weight of lead in my gut.

  The next group of storytellers had already set a ring of fire about themselves, and the next, and soon I began to find the fires deserted. Perhaps the word had spread. About the time I decided I couldn’t run another step, I heard a triumphant scream up a small rise just ahead of me. My feet sped forward on their own, and I had to grab a tree to stop myself running right into a place I didn’t want to be. Aleksander had found himself a yearling buck, and he lay in the moonlit glade happily gnawing on its belly. His muzzle and the snow were bright with blood.

  I sank down by the tree. My chest was on fire. My legs cramped into knots that made me want to howl. If the shengar decided that a wretched slave was a better meal than the fallen buck, I could not have moved one handspan to prevent him. Galadon’s surety that I could regain my strength and stamina with only a few weeks of decent food and physical training seemed only slightly less laughable than his surety that submitting to the five days of Warden’s testing would restore my power.

  I pulled my torn cloak about me and doused my smoldering branch in the snow. While I watched the shengar sate his hunger, I leaned my head against the tree and tried to map out in my mind the route we had run. It was impossible. How were we ever going to find our way back to the settlement?

  Shouts from the way we’d come woke me from a drowse. The shengar was still gnawing on a haunch bone, showing no sign of reverting back to the Prince’s true form. Soon, if all went as before. Its ears pricked at the closing sounds. I pulled up my hood and stood up, stretching out my cramps and moving around behind the tree.

  “This way! See the tracks!”

  The shengar dropped the bone and a low rumble of disturbance came from his chest. It wasn’t a good idea to interrupt a shengar at its feeding. I slipped a short way down the hill thinking to intercept the hunters, but I hadn’t counted on them being mounted. Three riders galloped past, and the shengar roared.

  “There!” shouted one of the riders. A woman. “Take it.”

  “Get behind, so it can’t run,” called a man.

  “Wait!” I cried, chasing after them. Panic muted my senses so I didn’t notice the tremor the voices set up in my skin. “Don’t!” I crested the rise just in time to see one of the mounted hunters let fly a spear. It fell short, just in front of the furious, blood-streaked cat. “He’s human,” I cried hoarsely, terrified they couldn’t hear me over the pounding of blood in my ears. I grabbed the stirrup of the nearest rider. “You mustn’t hurt him. He’s enchanted.”

  “Human?” It was the woman. “Oh, sweet Valdis, this is the supplicant!”

  “I’ve got him!” cried the hunter from across the glade, as the cat screamed in pain. “Finish him with your sword, Daffyd.”

  I ran to the shengar, who lay sprawled in a pool of blood with a spear protruding from its side. I couldn’t tell which blood was the cat’s and which was the buck’s.

  “My lord, can you hear me?” I pressed fingers to the beast’s breast and it snarled feebly, trying to nip them off, telling me what I wanted to know. “We’ll take care of you,” I said. “No Derzhi warrior was ever taken with a single spear. Is that not true?”

  The riders had dismounted and come up behind me.

  “Does he live?” asked the woman.

  “Yes,” I said, “but sorely wounded. Bleeding badly. Is there a healer who could help him?”

  “None that know of shengars.”

  “He will change ... soon.” A blast of hot air rippled through the glade, and the shengar growled ... then moaned ... and the image wavered. As the two images battled for supremacy, Aleksander cried out in anguish and the people behind me gasped in horrified astonishment. I had no attention to spare for them.

  “Soon, soon, my lord,” I said, moving back slightly so I would not touch him during his change. “Hold on to my voice. We’ll help you as soon as the change is over.”

  For a moment I thought him dead, he lay so limp and cold in the bloodstained snow. I ripped off my cloak and my shirt, then, hoping I wasn’t going to make things worse, I eased out the spear, pressing my wadded shirt to the gushing wound in Aleksander’s belly. I used his leather belt to hold the shirt in place, then wrapped him in my cloak, using the edge of it to wipe the blood from his face. “He needs a healer,” I said. “If you could take him on your horses ...”

  But they did not answer, and, in an instant, I realized what I had done. I was wearing only a slave tunic with my breeches, and the crossed circle on my shoulder would be glaring at them. They would see that I was Ezzarian and know what I was, and perhaps, like Garen, they would know my name.

  “I ask only that you care for him as Ezzarians have always cared for those who come as supplicants,” I said, hoping they would listen to what I said even if they would not acknowledge hearing it. Then I took the offensive in my own war and looked up ... into the faces of my wife, the Queen of Ezzaria, and her husband, who had once been my dearest friend.

  Chapter 24

  The moon was sinking toward the horizon, leaving the forest dark and haunted as I trudged down the hill. Ysanne and Rhys and their companion Daffyd, a man unknown to me, had made a litter for Aleksander and taken him away. I tried to help, to ease Aleksander, to speed their departure, but I might have been only a moon shadow for all the notice they took of me. Even in that first moment of revelation their eyes had betrayed nothing, as if the ground beneath my feet was all they could see. I knew how it was done. Gods have mercy, I had done it in the past, never understanding the horror it was for the one unseen, the utter desolation of the spirit to be told so explicitly that one did not exist, that flesh and blood were not enough, and that there was no remedy for it.

  At least I had their tracks to follow. Only once did I depart from the horse-scented path, to light a branch in the smoldering coals of an abandoned moon fire. The small torch helped me see the tracks and droppings, and helped to keep a bit of warmth in my hands and face. The first real clothes I’d had in forever, and I’d already lost half of them. I laughed aloud as I walked. Aleksander would think it a good joke. The humor echoed hollow in the silent trees.

  The years had touched Ysanne with magnificence. Even in the torchlight I could see with what artistry time had sculpted her girlish softness into true beauty. I longed to look in her eyes to see whether or not the garden of her spirit still flourished behind her wall of stillness. So few had ever been permitted to see it. Her Serene Majesty ... the brittle iron of her girlhood now tempered by time and adversity. She was born to be queen.

  Her family had lived in a village some twenty leagues from my own. Ysanne had been taken into Queen Tarya’s house to train when she was five and found to have an astonishing level of melydda. Too young to be so far from home, to live in a huge house with fifty courtiers and a busy woman older than her grandmother. Queen Tarya was set in her ways and forced Ysanne to train exactly as she herself had done fifty years in the past, not allowing the girl’s brilliance to move her along faster or skip any step, but rather making her take every step twice over. Tarya never let her so much as demonstrate the marvelous variations of her talent she discovered as she grew. Because her awestruck parents would not dispute the Queen, Ysanne had
no choice. For ten years she bottled up loneliness and fury, determined not to yield, sure the old woman was trying to make her quit or crush her spirit. But on Ysanne’s fifteenth birthday, Queen Tarya smiled and embraced her and told her that she was the most powerful Aife ever born in Ezzaria, and that the rai-kirah would not prevail as long as her talent was fed by the fire within her.

  “Then, why did you never allow me to use it?” Ysanne had asked in mystification. “Why did you bury me in the old ways all these years?”

  The Queen had laughed at her and said that her talent needed little schooling. But her patience ... that was a different matter. No Aife could afford to be impatient.

  Only after I had known her a very long time did Ysanne tell me of that day. She wasn’t one to admit that anyone ever found her wanting.

  To be an Aife, a portal-maker, was the most difficult of all Ezzarian callings. To weave one’s own being into the soul of another so completely as to shape a physical reality was hard enough when the person was healthy and whole of mind. But to do such a thing to a subject who hosted a demon—a person perhaps mad, perhaps vicious, perhaps violent—was intricate and dangerous work. Wardens were more celebrated, as warriors so often are, but no Warden could have taken one step into a battle, much less have had the confidence and freedom to do what was necessary, without absolute, unshakable trust in his Aife. If the portal closed behind him, he would be trapped forever in another person’s soul, and without the solidity of the Aife’s shaping, he would tumble into an abyss of madness where no rescuer could ever find him.

  Mentors like Galadon had a network of colleagues throughout Ezzaria, all of them watching for the right pairing for their students. Warden and Aife, Searcher and Comforter, Scholar and Spellmaker, all of our skills were honed to work in pairings, except for the Weaver, of course, who always worked alone. The Searcher’s skill at discovering demons lurking in the heart of madness or cruelty was worth little without a Comforter to envelope the victim in enchantment. And the touch of the Comforter that spun the thread of power back to the Aife had no security without the physical skills of the Searcher to protect him. Though all were working toward the same purpose, our talents needed to balance like the roles in some complex dance figure, where your life and your sanity might depend on the footwork of your partner as it blended with your own. The announcement of a new pairing was in every way equal to a birth or a death or a marriage. This is not to say that every pair married. In fact, it was more common not to marry. But the intimacy of Warden and Aife was extraordinary. It was hard to imagine being married to one woman while walking souls with another.