Mirror Kingdoms: The Best of Peter S. Beagle

by Peter S. Beagle

  “Such as yours,” I said, and she nodded. I said, “But it could not bring my father back to you. He loved my mother on sight, loves her still. Nothing could have changed that.”

  “The Being gave me a greater gift.” Dragine’s voice was surprisingly gentle, almost dreamy. “Shall I show you?”

  She raised both arms, crossed them at the wrists, pointed at me with both pairs of middle and index fingers, and spoke a rhyme that Willalou had drummed into my head so hard, so often, that I knew to drop flat on my belly as two gouts of fire, shaped like dragon heads, leaped from Dragine’s fingertips and shot past me, hissing like full-sized wyrms. Ordinarily such sendings burst within seconds, harmless as Thieves’ Day crackers; but these doubled on their sizzling trails and came racing for me again. There were eyes in those tiny fire-faces, and they saw me.

  But I know a rhyme worth two of that, and I sang it, rising to a crouch—sang it back at Dragine, not at the dragon-heads, and they promptly popped like milkweed seedpods, and were gone.

  I stood up slowly, glancing sideways at Lathro as I did so. He had not moved, nor did he appear to have noticed what had taken place. I said loudly to Dragine, “That was what your Being taught you? That was worth a slice of your soul? You ought to ask for your payment back.”

  Dragine was breathing hard: deep animal inhalations—such as you breathe now, in the darkness, waiting for the moon to be gone. She said, “The Being has no interest in souls. What it took in payment for my new power was my ability to love, for which I had no more use in any case, nor ever would. I have no complaints. See now!”

  And with those last words—and a few others—she Shifted, and on the instant it was a great sheknath who stood in her place: hindquarters higher than the mighty bowed forelegs, jaws and chest and shoulders still muddy from digging out its most recent meal. It rose on its hind legs and roared at me, but I sang my mother’s favorite old lullaby, and it dropped down and promptly went to sleep. Dragine was some little while regaining her true shape, and she was not pleased when she finally managed it.

  “I will not fight with you,” she declared. “I did not summon you for that, but to watch you lose your man to a fantasy, as I lost mine. It lasts longer than destruction, grief does. As you will learn.”

  Whereupon she made a sign before Lathro’s face. The eager life came back into his brown eyes to break my heart, but he never looked at me, only asking Dragine, “Is it time? Has the Being come at last?”

  “Soon, boy,” she answered him soothingly. “Very soon now.” Her eyes were full of triumph as she looked back at me, saying, “You see how it is? He has no care for you, nor for anything but his desire. The memory of Willalou’s daughter has vanished, making you a ghost to him, and any dream of your future together just that, a dream, long slipped away with the morning. Nor will being made a maj—oh, yes, the Being will certainly grant his wish—bring him home to you, no more than I will ever have your father back. So here we both are, abandoned forever by our loves—” and this time the smile was as joyously murderous as a rock-targ’s skull-baring grin, just before it strikes for the throat or the contents of your stomach—“and all of it, all, due to the devices of the clever, wicked woman from whose wickedness you spring. Do you understand me at last, witch-girl?”

  “No,” I said. “I will not. I will not understand you.” Rather than listen further to her, or to myself, I turned desperately to Lathro, saying, “Love, love, here I am, your Moon-Fox, your Breya. Can’t you see me, don’t you know me at all?” I even shook him a little, grasping his shoulders, to no avail.

  His eyes were warm and alive, as I have said, but I was not in them. Whoever he saw standing before him, shrilling like a locust, it was not I. He spoke for the first time, saying, with some wonder in his voice, “You are so pretty. I never imagined the Being would be pretty.”

  I choked on my own sudden tears, and Dragine laughed in purest delight, sounding almost like a happy child. “Nay, she’s no Being, boy, she can give you nothing you need, my word on it. Come, we’ll call now, you and I.”

  She moved to the edge of the pool, spread her hands over the star-fish shimmering in its depths, and spoke to them too rapidly for me to catch more than a few of the words. They were in a tongue I had heard my mother speak: it is very old, and there are some bad stories about its origins. Lathro joined in the calling, briefly and stumblingly, as Dragine’s voice rose to a kind of shrill croon, not loud, but high, high enough that it disappeared at the end, like a lark or a falcon climbing out of sight. I wanted to cover my ears, but I didn’t. A moment later I very nearly covered my eyes, because the surface of the pool gradually began to swirl counterclockwise, right to left, gaining speed until the sound of its spinning echoed Dragine’s uncanny wail. It no longer looked like water: first it was black stone—then starlit spiraling diamond—and finally it was jeweled smoke, sparkling pale-blue smoke, whirling slowly into shape, like clay on my father’s wheel. A figure began to rise out of the little pool.

  It was man-shaped, but not a man. I never did determine what it was, or even what it chose to resemble, so sinuously and playfully did it sport from form to smoky near-form. At one moment it might have been a sort of hornless goat, dancing on its hind legs; but step closer to the pool, or consider it from another angle—or simply wait—and it seemed an enormous head, with black wriggly-wet things like eels where its teeth should have been, and that head was dancing too. Or let a small pewter cloud hide a star or two, and behold then a dead tree, its skeletal boughs aswarm with glittering, watchful stone eyes; or again you might suddenly be staring at a great almost-butterfly, burning as it whirled, yet never consumed, though its blaze dazzled even Dragine’s eyes. She turned from it to stare at me, and though she said nothing, yet I heard her in my mind, her silent laughter echoing within me.

  “She arranged it all, witch-girl. She set your man all afire to get rid of him… then set you to find him, after training you up to face the Being who comes when I call, as she well knows. A Being who has more power than she ever dreamed of having, for all her hopes, all her craving….”

  When the Being spoke out of its flaming, shifting whirlwind, it addressed itself directly to me. Through all its constant transformations its voice remained the same: a deep, deep buzzing that I heard along my spine and in my cheekbones more than in my ears. “There will be no confrontation between us, Breya Drom, because there is no reason for such a thing. You have already lost any battle there could be.”

  “Have I, then?” Compared to that voice, I sounded to myself like a little girl refusing to go to bed. But I was profoundly weary, and deeply frightened, and more stubbornly angry than either. I said, “Whatever battles my mother had in mind, she will have to find someone else to fight them. All I came for was Lathro Baraquil.”

  “And all he came for, he has already found.” The Being extended what was momentarily a hand toward Lathro, and he hungered toward it—that is the best word I can find—reaching out with his whole self, but I pushed his hand away before they could meet.

  “We are going home,” I said. “Lathro and I.”

  The Being chuckled. It had slowed its spinning—a dizzying effect by itself—and was regarding me out of a single eye in the flat face of a creature a bit like a furry fish. It buzzed. “Tell him that, girl.” Lathro looked as though he were about to jump into the pool: not to gain any gift from the Being, but to join with it, to become part of it, as he had been part of me so long ago. The Being said to him, “Ask and have, Lathro Baraquil.”

  Behind me Dragine laughed once, a single bark, bruising my ears. “Yes! Ask and have, boy. Ask and have!”

  And suddenly it was all too much for me—too much and too little at the same time. All of it, all: Lathro’s dream of carrying magic… Willalou’s shameless machinations… Dragine’s vengefulness… my own idiot journey in pursuit of my useless fantasies… the Being’s benign disregard… even being called witch-girl one time too many. Suddenly I wanted no further pa
rt of it, even if it cost me my one love. “Do what you will,” I said aloud, though none seemed to hear me. “Do what you please, I’m done.” And I turned my back on the lot of them, and I walked away.

  Nor did I turn again, not until I heard the Being’s insect-whirr once more, “Ask and have of me, Lathro Baraquil,” and Lathro’s voice, that I had first heard mumbling I come for a wash, saying now, loudly and boldly, “Then I ask for the full powers and abilities of a true maj, and I ask further—”

  But by then I was singing.

  I have no memory of making that decision, or of choosing the charm I sang. It has only happened so for me once or twice, since. What I do remember is that Lathro went mute on the instant, and that Dragine whirled, wrinkled lips drawn back, furiously chanting a counterspell that I warded off easily with a gesture. That made me overconfident—I was young, after all—and I was not prepared when the Being struck at me with… with what? A spell, was it? A cantrip of some sort? A hex, even? Did the Being know any of those words, did it think in those terms? No matter: my brain was too occupied with careening from one side of the universe to the other, and I could not find my legs and arms. There was a howling in my head.

  I stood up—somebody did, anyway—and saw that the Being had flowed into the form of something that might have set out to be a clawfooted, stinking churfa, and changed its mind halfway along, for the worse. It said, “Give over, Breya Drom. Go your way and leave me to mine, and your man to the way he has chosen. What he pays to walk it may not be what Dragine paid—but in any case, he is lost to you. Give over, child. Go home.”

  I might have done just that, had Dragine not squalled at that moment, “And tell your mother we are quits when you get there.” Her face was as savagely satisfied as though she had been making love all night long.

  Lathro was silent still, but not staring worshipfully at the Being now. He was looking directly toward me, and it seemed to me that there was at least something like recognition in his face—something surfacing that was near to being my Lathro. I dared not think any further than that.

  Not that there was time for it, since I had no illusions that the Being’s words meant truce; they certainly didn’t to me. Lathro was coming home with me, whether he wanted to or not—his desires had just become completely irrelevant. Dragine aimed a second spell at me: a spiteful thing that would likely have cost me a few years in beetle shape, had she managed it, but I batted it back at her like a featherball, such as children play with, and kept my attention focused on the Being. Willalou may indeed have decoyed me to its den and its acolyte to destroy it; my only concern now was to keep it from destroying me. Nothing in my body was working properly, except my blood, and that was up and raging. I took a deep breath, began walking directly towards the Being, and I sang as I went.

  Not until I began that song had I truly known I was an enchantress, for all my proud disdain. Do you understand me, huddling there, as far from me as the walls of your lair will let you, with your red eyes counting the minutes until the moon is gone? It was one of the many things I had never bothered to learn, you see. I knew who my mother was, for good or ill, and that my power descended from her, and from my mothers before her. I knew that Willalou was a sorceress, and that a sorceress thinks about magic—with great care, in most cases. But an enchantress is magic, is what she does: an enchantress dwells in a place, not without thought, but beyond it, somewhere on some other side. And I hadn’t known that, for all my mother’s harping on how much greater than herself I was born to be. Some things cannot be known, only experienced.

  With that song, with those charmed notes leaping up out of me like children—for all I knew at the time, the only children I was ever likely to have—I came of age.

  The Being had reverted to the whirling cone of pale-blue smoke that I had first seen rising out of the pool. I felt its enormous blasts of heat and energy hammering at me, and I know most of them connected somewhere, but it did not seem to matter, it seemed to be happening very far off, to someone else. The song I sang was our family’s ancient war chant: few beyond the family have ever heard it, and nobody sings it but us. I knew the Being could not have heard it before.

  The song built up momentum, like a sling whirled round and round the head until you at last let go. When I did, with the last stanza, the recoil—there is no other word—lifted me and hurled me across that open space, helpless as a new-hatched canary in a cloudburst. It slammed me first into a white wall, then tumbled me straight into Dragine’s pool. I seem to remember the water tasting somehow burned, but I could be wrong. I was drowning at the time.

  It was a shallow little pool, but you can drown just as easily in inches as in fathoms, and I wasn’t even conscious enough to lift my head out of the water. Lathro it was who picked me up, and then put me down carefully and dried my wet clothes as best he could. He whispered “Moon Fox… Moon Fox,” over and over as he did so.

  The Being itself was out of the pool, stumbling near me—almost over me, as I sat up—on absurdly pink pigeon feet far too small for the hulking, unwieldy form it appeared to have been trapped in by my song. I cannot adequately describe that shape: it had something of flesh to it, but more was quite simply wooden, or almost wooden… and there was, about the face, if that is what it was, a sort of… No. No. All I know is that it was dying, and blind, and that I felt sorry for it, for the Being, whatever it had so nearly cost Lathro and me. And when it managed to buzz out, “I have had my price, all the same….” before it toppled and crashed down, there were tears in my eyes. I did not understand what it had told me, not then.

  Lathro took my hand without speaking. I said, “Well, there goes your chance at magic. Perhaps you’ll forgive me one day.”

  Dragine was on her knees beside the fallen Being. After a moment she reached out slowly to touch the blind face, that face that I cannot portray any more than I could the look in her eyes. Lathro took my own face between his hands, as of old, this time so gently and timorously that I could barely feel it. He said, “The question is whether you can forgive me. I only wanted to be a proper match for you, Breya.”

  I stopped him, and not gently. “And just exactly what have you been to me since we were five years old? Can you honestly imagine me partnered with anyone else in the entire world? Anyone?”

  “No. No, I never could, you know that. But then our children—”

  “Bugger the children!” I picked that word up from Dunreath when I was quite small, and he was having a bad day with his pots and jugs. “If my line’s knack comes to an end with me—well, so it does. Too many majkes in the family, anyway, and not enough blacksmiths.” Bruised and hurting everywhere, I was yet holding him so hard that I was having as much trouble breathing as he was. I said, “Home. We are going home now.”

  Strangely—or perhaps not—Dragine showed me no rancor for having caused the end of the Being; indeed, she showed nothing at all, but only crouched on her heels by the great dead thing, still touching it now and again. Once, when she looked up and saw me staring, as I could not help doing, she said in her desert voice, “It was my friend. Go away.”

  So we took the road home to Kalagira, the two of us astride Belgarth, who carries double easily, though he complains vigorously in the mornings. It took us a long time, but we didn’t mind. There’s little to tell of that passage, except for a moment I do like to remember, when I suggested proudly to Lathro that he had but to say the word and I could surely make our journey a great deal easier for everyone involved, and perhaps even eliminate it altogether. What’s the good of being an enchantress, after all, if you can’t show off for your beloved once in a while?

  But Lathro refused. He said—and I have it still in my head, word for firm word—“Breya Drom, through my foolishness we have already missed too much of our time together in this world, and risked all. I will not lose another minute of you, another second, for good or ill, ever again.”

  When we reached my home, I asked Lathro to stable Belgarth for me, and
he nodded understandingly. “You’ll want some time alone with your mother. Of course.” I watched him walk away with the old horse, and felt my heart floating after him. Then I left my shoes at the door, and went in.

  She was practicing on her kiit in her workroom; I could hear the music as I came along the corridor. Her hands are not quite big enough for the full-sized instrument she insists on using, but she plays well all the same—I loved to have her play me to sleep when I was small.

  She spoke to me before I had even reached her workroom. “Welcome, daughter. Welcome, my pride.” No one catches Willalou unaware: and what I now was she would have sensed two villages away.

  She put down the kiit and came swiftly to enfold me, but I held her off with a raised hand. How strange that did feel, evading my mother’s embrace for the first time in my life. I could hear the comforting old sound of Dunreath’s wheel going, deep in his own studio, and was desperately glad that he was not present. I said, “We talk.”

  She stood straight now, as always, and looked into my eyes and shrugged slightly. She said, “I did what was necessary. No more, and no less.”

  “I think not,” I said. “I think bloody not.”

  “The Being is dead. There will be no others, and so no witches or sorceresses who should never have been majkes, not ever. Dragine had no power in her before her desperate bargain, and she is broken now, no danger to anyone. You did these things, not I, and it is a little late for qualms and regrets. As though you had any need of them.”

  I had to fight off the appeal of her smile, exactly as I had had to deal with Dragine’s spells, except that this was much harder, and took much more of me. I said, “You manipulated everything. Everything. You goaded Lathro into running off to make himself worthy of me, thinking that would be the end of him—and then you put me through that whole charade of training—”