“You shall see it later. You won’t be disappointed,” she promised.
The tale of the Deodand was drawn from him, and appropriate exclamations were forthcoming from the distaff sides of the table.
“She knew about it,” said Rianna, with blunt indignation. “She should have killed it before it could attack an innocent traveler. I would have.”
Turjan patted her hand. “I don’t doubt you would have tried. But they are dangerous creatures. I suppose she thought an innocent traveler would distract it enough to provide an opportunity for the bow.”
“It was a magical bow, wasn’t it, Father?”
“Probably. But even with magic, a Deodand is a formidable adversary.” He looked at Bosk. “That’s the first lesson of apprenticeship—that you cannot escape unscathed every time.”
“I won’t forget it,” said the boy. As he spoke, he felt himself beginning to yawn, and he tried to stifle it, but with little success.
Turjan pushed his chair back from the table. “The second lesson will be tomorrow.” He gestured to the servant who had scurried forward to clear the table. “This can wait. Show Master Bosk back to his bedchamber.”
In the morning, there was fruit and porridge at the same table, and then Turjan took him to the library where he would be studying. Rianna was there already, sitting at a long table, reading from a book as thick as her fist. She had a pad of vellum under her right hand and was copying a diagram to it in a meticulous hand. There were many tomes in the bookcases lining the walls, and a variety of pads and writing implements on the table.
“There is considerable wisdom in this room,” said Turjan. “For now, you will spend your mornings investigating it, and after the midday meal each day, we will test what you have absorbed and determine what other techniques may enhance it. The collection has been laid out to begin with the simplest principles, here.” He pointed to the highest shelf closest to the door. “You will work your way to the right on this first bookcase, and when you reach the end of the shelf, you will begin on the next lower. The first case should require approximately a year.”
Bosk looked around the room with some dismay. He counted twelve cases.
“Did you think an apprenticeship in sorcery would be brief, young Bosk?” said Turjan.
Bosk straightened his shoulders and went to the first shelf to take down the initial volume. It was heavy. He set it on the table. “I see from the vacant place that your daughter is more than a year ahead of me.”
“So she is. That is one of the advantages of being born to sorcery.”
“Then, with your permission, I will endeavor to learn from her as well as from yourself.”
Rianna looked up from her book, but said nothing.
Turjan smiled. “Well, we’ll see what sort of teacher she makes.” At the door, he said, “The midday meal will be in the tower garden. Rianna will show you. And Bosk—the books are by many different authors, and after a time you will find a certain repetition in them, though with variation. That, too, will be important to you.” Then he was gone.
Bosk settled at the opposite end of the table from Rianna and ran his hands over the leather tooling of his book’s cover. The script was so ornate that at first he could not read it, but by following its curves with a finger, he managed to spell out “Laccodel.” He opened it to the first page. It was handwritten, but readable enough, and proved to be a history of Laccodel’s attempts to reproduce the work of an older mage, part diary, part exercise book. Bosk chose a pad and stylus and made a few notes, though he did not at all understand what the notes meant. After a time, he looked at Rianna, who was annotating her diagrams with arcane sigils and tinted inks. She seemed so intent on her work that he hesitated to disturb her. Yet soon enough she glanced up at him, and he thought he might offer a bit of polite conversation.
“What are you studying?” he said.
She added a stroke to the top of her drawing. “The Third Evolution of Mazirian’s Diminution.”
“Ah,” he said, not knowing what else might be appropriate.
“My goal is to perfect it before my tenth birthday.”
“And that will be…?
“Not long. Has Laccodel bored you already? His prose is turgid in the extreme.”
“Not bored. Merely mystified,” said Bosk.
She smiled with pursed lips. “He is a foundation of sorcery. He knew Phandaal himself.”
“Your father spoke of Phandaal when he was at Boreal Verge. Who was he?”
“One cannot study sorcery without studying Phandaal.” She turned to her book once more. “You’ll learn about him and the rest of the great ones if you keep reading.”
He took a deep breath and opened his book at the beginning. Instead of notes, this time he wrote queries on his pad. When he had filled three pages with them, he heard Rianna close her book with a thump. He looked up and saw her gazing at him with her chin cupped in one hand.
“Hungry?” she said.
Only then did he realize that his stomach was clamoring.
The tower garden was at the highest extremity of the castle, a place of multicolored flowers that tilted their petals to face Bosk as he passed, as if they were curious about their visitor. The view from their midst was impressive—the Derna green within its steep banks, the forest stretching north and west, the towers of Kaiin gleaming like a pale mirage on the southern horizon. The meal was set out on a trestle table—cold meats, jellied broths, vegetables steamed with four distinct spices. Bosk sampled them all, pleased that not a single mushroom appeared on any platter.
“We do eat mushrooms,” said Rianna, “but Father thought they would bore you even more than Laccodel.”
Turjan arrived after they finished and asked Bosk what he had learned that morning. Bosk offered his queries, and the three spent the afternoon discussing them, Turjan deftly leading Bosk through concepts he had not quite comprehended and calling on Rianna to expand upon them. Bosk found his zest for the lore of sorcery increasing as every answer provoked new questions. He scarcely noticed the ruddy sun sinking toward the west until it shone in his eyes.
Turjan leaned back from the table. “You’ll do well enough, young Bosk. You have the desire, without which learning is mere rote.” He gazed out at the shadowed landscape. “Have you had enough for today?”
Bosk considered the length of the evening that lay before him. “If you’ll allow it, I’ll look at the book again before supper.”
Turjan smiled at him. “I think you’ll be better served just now by something else.” He turned to his daughter. “You’ve been chafing to show him the doll house.”
She rose eagerly.
“An introduction only,” her father said. “As we decided.”
She was already gesturing for Bosk to follow her.
One flight below was a high-ceilinged chamber that occupied the whole breadth of the tower, with tall windows and glowing sconces alternating on every wall. The center of the space was occupied by a duplicate in miniature of Castle Miir, complete to the roof garden paved with tiny replica flowers. At his first sight of it, Bosk was astonished by the detail of architecture, and even more astonished when, at Rianna’s touch, the outer wall split and swung open to reveal an interior as meticulously executed as the exterior. He knelt to peer at elaborately furnished cubicles, tapestries no larger than kerchiefs covering their walls, delicate chandeliers dangling from their ceilings. He found his own quarters, the bed and wardrobe and even the bath reproduced in toy size, a manikin no larger than his littlest finger standing at the door.
“Two years work,” said Rianna, pride in her voice. “Every bit of it crafted by my hands. I even wove the linens. And watch.” She spoke a phrase that Bosk could not quite make out, and draperies pulled themselves over the windows and the sconces went out, leaving a darkness so profound that he dared not move for fear of damaging something, possibly even himself. Then she spoke another phrase, and hundreds of tiny yellow-green lights, like so many firefl
ies, sprang into being in chandeliers and candelabra all through the doll house and in tiny lanterns outlining the gate, the courtyard, and the crenellations. There was light enough to allow Bosk to rise from his knees and walk surefooted all around the structure.
“How beautiful,” he said. “And after it is all complete…?”
She crossed her arms and smiled. “Then I’ll learn to make dolls that walk. And perhaps even talk.” She plucked the manikin from his room and showed it to him. It had yielding skin and limbs that flexed, and it could be bent into a sitting position and perched in a tiny chair. Rianna left it so in the main hall, where three other dolls sat at a table much like the one where last night’s meal had been served. One of the dolls was smaller than the others and had long black braids. She straightened that one and set it on a bed in another room. “I tried to convince some of the Twk people to live here. It’s much more comfortable than their gourds.” She took the two remaining original figures from the dining table and set them on a bed on the opposite side of the building. “But they refused.”
“The Twk people?”
“You’ll meet them.” She stepped back and touched the gate, and the miniature castle swung shut.
“You left me at the table,” Bosk remarked.
Rianna laughed softly. “They’re only dolls, Bosk.” A phrase made the wall sconces spring to life, and another extinguished the miniature lights.
He followed her downstairs to supper, which again included no mushrooms.
Laccodel’s book occupied Bosk for many days, and then there was a second volume of Laccodel, and a third. By the time he had finished them and discussed their contents with Turjan and Rianna countless times, he felt he would know and hate Laccodel’s prose style any time he encountered it. Yet his first magical effort arose from Laccodel, a transformation of citrine dust into amethyst, and he could not help feeling triumph at the simple change from yellow to purple.
“Well done,” said Turjan. “And now back again.”
It took Bosk two weeks to manage that.
“Sometimes undoing is the more important of the two,” said Turjan.
“I prefer the purple,” said Bosk, and he changed the dust again and stored it in a vial to remind himself that he had learned something. It seemed very little for the many weeks he had been studying,
The next day, a Twk-man arrived during the midday meal. He was a tiny creature, no larger than Bosk’s littlest finger, greenish of skin, wearing a gauzy smock, and mounted on a dragonfly. As she did occasionally, Rianna’s mother had joined the apprentices in the roof garden, and all the flowers had turned their petals to her, but when the Twk-man alighted, they tilted to him instead. T’sain offered her hand, the dragonfly leaped to it, and she held it close to her ear and nodded at something its rider said in a soft, buzzing voice. Then steed and rider flashed to the flowers, where the tiny man gathered pollen from a dozen blossoms and stowed it in two sacks behind his legs.
“Dandanflores,” T’sain explained to Bosk. “Chieftain of the Twk people. They know all of the news of Ascolais.”
“The last time he visited,” said Rianna, “he told us you were coming.”
The Twk chieftain made a circle around Bosk’s head and flew off.
“Do they range far north?” Bosk asked.
“Not as far as Boreal Verge,” said T’sain.
“Ah.”
“Your family is too far away, Bosk.”
“Oh, I was just curious.” He did feel a twinge of disappointment, though.
“If you ever do want news from the Twk,” said Rianna, “you must pay for it.”
T’sain nodded. “They are as much merchants as your family, though their goods are less tangible.”
He considered that. “What sort of payment would be appropriate for such a small creature?”
“They like our pollen,” said T’sain, “as you saw.”
“And I make them clothes of spider silk, the softest in the world,” said her daughter. She frowned. “Now that you’ve seen one, don’t you think they would enjoy living in my doll house?”
“If I were one of them, I would.”
“We have discussed this before,” Rianna’s mother said, and her words were directed at Bosk rather than at her daughter. “The Twk have their own lives, and what they choose must be respected. They are neither toys nor slaves.”
Rianna bent her head over her food. “You’re right, of course. It’s just that…creating living toys is so difficult.”
Later, in the library, where both of them spent far more than the mornings Turjan required, Rianna said to Bosk, “Would you like to visit my doll house again?”
“Perhaps this evening. Just now, I’m trying to unravel one of Phandaal’s simpler spells.”
“Which?” She craned to see his book.
“The Insinuating Eye.”
“That is advanced for your stage of knowledge.”
“I’ve been reading ahead, trying to discern some overall structure to sorcery.”
“Father says there is no overall structure, that all is haphazard.”
“Phandaal thought there was structure.”
“Laccodel says Phandaal thought there was structure, which is not at all the same.”
Bosk sighed. “There are principles.”
“I see no great connections among them.”
“You are not even ten years old!” Bosk exclaimed. And then, at her injured expression, he said, “Forgive me. We are both very young in sorcery. What can we know?”
“You are younger than I,” she said in a low voice, and she slammed her book shut and left the room.
When she did not return, he descended to the doll house chamber and found her sitting cross-legged on the floor, the miniature castle open before her. She was arranging tiny platters in the drawers of a tiny sideboard. She did not look up at him.
He sat down beside her. “I truly am sorry.”
She did not speak.
He shifted to one knee. “I beg your forgiveness, Lady Rianna.”
After a long moment, she said, “I know a great deal more than you do.”
“Of course you do. It’s why I depend upon you to help me.” He eased back to a sitting position and gestured toward the sideboard. “Can I help you with this?”
She shook her head. “Your hands are too clumsy.”
“I wish they were not.”
She shut the last drawer with the tip of one finger. “Do you really want to do something for me?”
“I’ll do whatever you ask.”
She looked at him at last, sullenness fading from her lips. “I’ll teach you a spell if you’ll promise not to tell Father. He’d say you’re not ready for it.”
“You have my promise,” said Bosk.
“It’s Mazirian’s Diminution.”
“The one you are studying.”
“Yes. I’ll teach you the First and Second Evolutions, and you must commit both to memory. Both.”
“And they will accomplish…?”
She smiled just a trifle then. “A visit to my doll house.”
“Ah,” he said. “Diminution. Of course.”
“Will you do it?”
He thought of the amethyst dust he had taken such pride in creating. It seemed like nothing now. “Yes!”
The spells were complex, requiring certain pauses, certain intonations, and a few sounds that did not quite seem human. Memorizing them was by no means simple. Yet after little more than an hour of drill, Bosk felt he had them. To be certain, he wrote them on a scrap of vellum, following Laccodel’s model syllabary, and tucked it into his pocket.
“I’ll go first,” said Rianna, and in a matter of heartbeats, she had shrunk to the size of the Twk-man.
Bosk gasped. Knowing it would be effective and seeing it happen were very different things.
Rianna’s voice was tiny, piping, though he knew she must be shouting. “Come along!”
He took a deep breath and uttered the spell.
He began to feel dizzy. As the walls of the tower chamber seemed to rush upward all around him, he fell to his knees, fighting to control his churning stomach. In a moment, though, the room steadied, the dizziness faded, and Rianna was beside him, helping him stagger to his feet. Nearby, the miniature castle was huge, and the ceiling of the chamber was as far away as the sky. Bosk took a few wobbling steps and laughed with the sheer joy of accomplishment. His stride was as firm as ever by the time he and Rianna entered the doll house version of Miir.
Bosk found their exploration beguiling. Everything was familiar yet simultaneously strange and wonderful. He would have lost himself in the place and stayed until dark to see the lights bloom, but Rianna was concerned that one of her parents might appear to fetch them to supper, and she fairly dragged him out. He was glad, then, that he had the scrap of vellum, for he had forgotten some of the reversal spell. Rianna cautioned him to stand well away from the gate for the process, and she herself trotted even farther off. While she sprouted upward like some impossible plant, he went over the sounds silently half a dozen times, listening to them in his mind.
“Bosk, we have to go to supper,” said Rianna, and her voice was so loud he had to press his hands over his ears to bear it.
He needed three tries to get the spell right, but he finally saw the duplicate of Castle Miir shrink away from him and the ceiling of the tower chamber slam downward. He lost his balance again, and Rianna pulled at him with both hands to keep him from tumbling into her creation.
“The dizziness will be less with practice,” she said. “Now tell me, apprentice Bosk, what do you truly think of my doll house?”
“Rianna,” he said, “you and your doll house are astonishing.”
She seemed pleased with that answer, and he guessed that he had finally been forgiven for his affront. He went to supper smiling, and when Turjan asked why he was so cheerful, he said only that he thought his studies were going well.
He liked Mazirian’s Diminution, his first major spell, and over the next few weeks, he practiced to perfect both Evolutions, at first only when Rianna was present, but eventually alone in his bedchamber. There, too, he worked on the Spell of the Insinuating Eye. Turjan knew about the latter and let him continue, as long as he also spent time with the appropriate preceding books. The Insinuating Eye had little potential for damaging the practitioner; it simply allowed him to see things that were far away.
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