by Dave Luckett
She shuddered, biting her lip, but shook her head, denying. "That was a criminal act. And it hadn't come to that, yet." Gerd stared at her. "Well, and it mightn't have," she added. He let her own voice read her doubts back to her. She shook her head and drew her covers closer. "It was against the law, what they did. Law and ancient custom."
"Oh? But if they're the ones who broke the law, why are we the ones hiding in the hills? Only we're right to be running away, of course. How much good do you think it would do, to complain about them in the lord's court?" Silence, but stubborn silence. Gerd stared at the dark line of her brow and cheekbone, the gleam of her eyes. "And now we are heading north. What lies that way?"
Silence. Then, reluctantly, "There are still places where mages are respected."
"Places where they are fighting back, in fact. Which returns us to the question I asked already."
"It isn't a war."
"Then what is it?"
He had come face to face with her, his head propped on his hand. She looked up at him. "The words are hard to find," she said. "It's history."
"Ah. Complicated, is it? Well, of course, I wouldn't understand something like that."
She waved that away. "Long history."
"It has to start somewhere. I'm not sleepy yet." Nor was he. The blood was singing in his ears.
She sighed, and her breath tickled his cheek. "It starts with dragons."
"Somehow I had the feeling that it might." And he did have. He couldn't have said why.
"It is said that they were the first. That they were here before us, and that they brought us forth in some way. Some stories say they formed us of clay, others that they opened a path to heaven, where we lived. However it happened, they and we have been dancing together ever since, except that the dragons call the tune, and they change it from time to time for reasons that we do not understand."
"Dancing together." He said it as a statement, not questioning.
"This is only what I think - or, rather, what my father thought. We challenge them. They challenge us. Each improves the other. Like dancing partners."
"Or like pets." He said it as a sort of testing, a challenge.
"No. No man is pet to a dragon. They don't have the thought, 'pet'."
He considered. "A man once told me that a dragon is pet to no man, either." The pass, the watch-house, Master Hawken's cloak billowing around his shanks, the amused gleam in his eye.
"Of course not. Dancing partners is closer. But the steps of the dance change, as I said." She craned her neck, to stare out of the opening of the tent. Stars were showing between rifts of cloud. "I think we received the gift of magic from them, in some way." She said it hesitantly, as if advancing an idea she had formed herself, not knowing its worth.
He frowned. "Doesn't magic need words, for them as for us?" The hall at Hardrange came into his mind, and the face of the bard as he chanted 'The Lay of the Carrine Dragon.'
"Need? I don't know. Dragons have no words, though it is said - I don't understand this - that they taught us the Ancient Language. But they don't need words for magic. A dragon is magic. Not one who works magic, or makes magic. Is magic, magic in its very nature. For us, magic is found in words, but that is how we are. Words are like lenses. They ... sharpen, they make more clear. That is, for us. For a dragon, who can say what words are? They themselves cannot. But however it happened, as steps in the dance, we learned - some of us - to use magic ourselves. Where else could we have learned it, but from them?"
He waited, considering that, although other things intruded. Her breath on his cheek, the scent of her hair, her warmth close beside him. He cleared his throat. "And the war?"
"I was coming to that. The dragons... well, I think they test themselves against us. Sometimes if you test something, you destroy it in the testing. But it tells you what the limits are." She shook her head. "The dragons, well, I think they want to know their limits. And ours. Perhaps, when they know them perfectly, they will have no further use for us. I don't know. I do know they take our shape sometimes, and go among us. I can't think why."
"To challenge us, perhaps. To use magic the way we do. The war."
She considered. "Well, they test themselves against us. Against our magic, in the past. Dragon-slayers were always mages, once. But the last one was the Meldun master."
"Meldun master?"
"We don't know his name. We know him only from the book of spells he left, which is unsigned. But he was certainly the one who slew the Gundlin Worm, as Saint Thammas tells us. Thammas didn't know his name, either, it seems." She paused. "But that was four hundred years ago. No mage has come forward with similar powers since."
"But there have been other dragon-slayers."
"Rarely. But not mages. We have been ... thrust aside. And that is what you call the war."
"Ah. At last."
"Magic has fallen away. There is no use denying it. Even up-country, the old mage-towers are being broken down and rebuilt as manor houses, or castles. There are few powerful mages, and spells are hedged about with wards and restrictions that were not known in ages past. Nothing new has been done in centuries. Yet magic will return, of that I am certain."
Gerd let the silence remain for a moment. Nela had said all that she seemed willing to say. He had to complete it. "But meanwhile, other things change. Steel gets - well, not better, but more common." He thought of the ancient sword he had placed so that its hilt was within reach. It had been made at a time when a sword was the badge of a gentleman. Now any hunt servant might wear one. "Easier to find, anyway. Cities get bigger and trade increases. Larger, better ships get built. Forges become workshops and workshops grow to become..." He gestured. He didn't have the word. He suspected that there was no word, just as there was none for honeymelon. No word, because the language hadn't changed, though the world had. "Steel-mills," he said, running two words together, ignoring her grimace.
But then she nodded, reluctantly. "Yes. And even a dragon may be pierced by steel."
"Rarely," he said, repeating her words. He remembered thick drops of black blood hissing into the snow.
"Even so. And as magic has diminished, becoming more refractory, more chancy and difficult, so steel has become more reliable and more common. It has meant terrible things. Walse has become a sore on the face of the land, a foulness in the air that can be seen thirty miles off. Further up the river, there are whole lines of hills being torn to pieces to extract their ore. Forests over toward Agaren are being felled for charcoal. This cannot go on forever."
"But for now...?"
"For now, these are the days of iron. And of its masters, and of the cities they build, and of the trade they carry on. I think the dragons would have it so. For the time being, iron is the test they set themselves."
"By setting it for themselves, they shape us, too."
"So they do. I sometimes wonder if that is their true purpose."
"Or perhaps, it's to set us against one another." He stared into her face. "The war."
She sighed again. "As you say," she said, admitting it. "The war. The traders prosper. The cities get larger. Mines enrich their owners. Land produces more, and those with land and resources become wealthier and more grasping. But magic fails, and is banished. Any man may learn a trade, and most can learn a skill beyond that. Shrewdness is a common trait. A merchant may train sons or marry off daughters to shrewd young men, and thus perpetuate the family wealth, and increase it. Land abides, and it may be handed on to heirs. But a mage may not pass his powers on, for the gift is not only taught. It must be born, but it skips generations, and sometimes fails. If it is not born into his heirs, what then? What use is a mage without power?"
He saw, with a sudden lurch at the heart, the tears that threatened to spill, the scars of an old grief. He wanted to tell her that use and power were no way to rate a person. That it was no way for her to think of herself. No way for him to think of her. Instead, he could only object: "You have power. The dragon...
"
She turned it aside with a twitch of the hand, a catch of the breath, a laugh that was not a laugh. "Power? Oh, I am well-schooled. My father saw to that. I can colour the air, and it can fool you, if you don't know what to look for. I know herb-lore, and my healing-chant usually binds, although it is useless against fevers or growths. If I husband my power very carefully, I can sometimes see shapes in the water, or the thoughts behind a man's face. There are some other things I can do. Sometimes." She stared at the brightening stars, not seeing them. "I use every device known to the craft for increasing my power - the oldest words, the proper times and seasons, the right star-patterns, the wind in the proper quarter, the correct phase of the moon, the best materials - and still it's as weakly fickle as early spring sunshine. Sometimes, a gleam. Sometimes, nothing." She paused, looking into herself. Then: "I saw your power, and I envied you. I wanted to teach you, yes. I have never seen so strong a talent. But it wasn't only that. I wanted a share in it. I wanted something I cannot..."
The tears overwhelmed her. It was more than he could do not to reach out and touch her. His hand was on her shoulder before he could think, and her eyes rose to stare into his face. He took her in his arms, and for a moment she relaxed against him. Her hand reached up to caress his cheek, but it stopped, sudden in mid-air. She stiffened, becoming a bundle of cordwood. Confused, he released her. She rolled over, turning away, and said no more.
After a while, it seemed that she slept. Later, so did he.
*
"I am your teacher," she said. "You are my apprentice, I your master." Her lips quirked with almost-but-not-quite amusement. "Not your mistress."
Gerd said nothing, leading Jane. The words in the Mages' Tongue had been a sort of cross-language pun. They'd been moving steadily north for two days now, the country becoming rougher and wilder, the slopes steeper and stonier. There'd been no sign of pursuit, but Gerd continued to lay false trails at each halt. Each one would mean a new check for any pursuers, another round of casting for the spoor, another delay. A shower of rain had persisted for an hour, and had then died away. It would cover their tracks and wash away their scent.
"It was my fault, of course," she said, meditating, watching the ground. He said nothing. "Self-pity. I have always despised self-pity, and there I was, waving it like a banner, demanding to be comforted." She bent under a trailing branch. "Weakness." She delivered the word like a judge pronouncing sentence.
He knew that any demurral would have no effect. Anything else he might say - especially what he most wanted to say - would be worse. He kept silence.
"I am sorry for it," she said. "It was unfair and improper. Worse, it compromised my teaching and your learning. You think of me differently now."
He wanted to say that he did not, and it would have been true, but not in the way she meant. "You are my teacher," he said, instead. "And you are not weak. I’ve got a lot to learn, and you can teach me. How else should I think of that? Should I think that I have no regard for you? That I don’t care if you grieve? I never heard that a pupil should think that about his teacher."
She said nothing to that. They had come to a height, looking down into the head of a long wooded valley, looking north. She pointed into the blue distance. "We descend now. There's a track of sorts, once we reach the junction of this and the larger stream, down the valley." She looked up. The sky was clear. "We ... won't need the tent tonight. Tomorrow evening we should reach Shelstro. We will be safe there."
"Mages rule there?"
"Rule, no. Are still honoured. So I believe."
"Believe? You don't know?"
"I have always lived in the south, in Walse or near it." She began to descend the slope, picking her way. Gerd followed, leading Jane. It was easy enough, a diagonal that led between boulders, becoming a long crease in the wide valley wall. "My father and I would come this far north in the summers. The magic was always stronger here, and it is still a stronghold." She gestured with her traveller's staff westward, towards the mountains. "Dragons still range those peaks. We saw them, sometimes, glittering like metal falcons in the sun, far, far off."
Gerd flicked a glance at the mountains, and saw no dragons. He followed, not asking further questions. After a while, she began teaching him the words of a feverstay chant. He already knew where to find the herbs that would help it, and their names.
They skirted the woods, retaining height until the valley broadened. The first signs of cultivation began to appear. They passed a camping-place, weeks old, but someone had eaten fish from the stream here. The water was now only a hundred paces off on their right. A few miles on they came to another brook crossing their path. It was almost wide enough to be called a river, and here the approach to the bank had been trodden. Another bare patch showed on the opposite side. A ford. The water flowed from left to right, joining the other. Downstream of the confluence, there might not be a crossing-place for many miles.
"Which way?" asked Gerd, as Nela seemed to hesitate.
She peered across the water, a hand shading her eyes, and answered sideways, as she often did. "There's a footpath, at least," she said, after a moment, and waded in, feeling the going with her staff.
Gerd waited until she had crossed what seemed to be the deepest part - thigh-deep - and was climbing out again. He coaxed Jane into the water and led her across, his hip against her downstream shoulder to give support. On the far side the bank shelved. They climbed it and found a track, following the water.
That night they ate the last of their provisions. There was grass for Jane. A fire gave warmth, and something more - cheer and a feeling of the ordinary. Gerd was reciting a chant he'd learned during the afternoon. It was a spell of scrying, a true sight, so that he would not be taken in by appearances again. Because of it, he saw the mage-shadow.
It came walking down the wooded slope towards them, moving with impossible strides, but walking nonetheless, soundlessly. At first he thought it was moonbeams striking down through the open canopy, coming and going as the young moon passed among clouds, but it moved too fast, with regular surging steps in the same rhythm as a man, with strides that were far longer. He saw it as it came glowing pale against the dark shadows, and his heart bounded into his throat. All the old fears surged up like cold black water. It was a spirit, a dead man come to share their firelight, seeking to warm at their hearth what could never be made warm again.
The chant dried in his throat. He gagged, gasped. Nela frowned, looked up and saw his face. She followed his eyes, muttering a string of words. Her own eyes narrowed, staring, but she shook her head.
"What do you see?" she hissed.
His hand had gone automatically to his sword-hilt and was grasping it, the knuckles white. "Light-shadow," he whispered, not able to name it in the Ancient Language. "A man, but taller and slighter. There, among the trees. It walks towards us."
Her lips moved again, shaping sound. She added a gesture, an opening of the hands. Then: "Ah. I caught a glimpse then. A sending."
He said nothing, drawing out an inch of steel, making sure that the blade slid easily. She moved a hand, patting the air, dismissing. "It's nothing." She spoke quietly, not moving her lips. "It can neither hurt nor be hurt. Someone has sent to see who we are, nothing more." She rose easily to her feet, taking her staff from the ground beside her, then leaning on it, facing the patch of striding light. Or not quite. Her eyes probed the shadows, but unseeing.
"We are of the craft and the Guild," she called. "Come."
Gerd could see it clearly now. It was half the height of a tree, the figure of a man in a drifting robe composed of what appeared to be starlight. He could see glowing eyes in a mist-face that shifted like water under a pale moon. He saw the impossible tallness and grace, the steps flowing, appearing not to touch the ground. It halted just beyond the firelit circle, and yet still it seemed to move, a patch of cloudy light fretted by a wind that didn't blow.
"Come," she said again. "See for yourself. We are no party
of lord's men."
It seemed to Gerd that it inspected them, cold eyes pale in a face that came and went with the moon-shadow. It drifted slowly on a wind that he couldn't feel, prying the shapes of their bundles on the ground. It saw the sword, and he felt the hilt under his hand grow suddenly cold. The misty face might have changed then. He thought so.
A moment later it dissolved, becoming wafts of mist that faded. "It's gone," he said, knowing that Nela could not see it.
She nodded, folded herself and sat by the fire again, crosslegged on her blankets. "He will come himself, now," she said. "Or send another."
Gerd unclasped his hand from the hilt of his sword, having to will each finger to release. "It's a mage, then," he said, his voice rusty.
"His sending," she corrected. "Perhaps he has seen our fire, or more likely he keeps a ward on the road."
Gerd glanced at the foot-track that ran beside the river. There was not a wheel-mark on it, hardly even a hoofprint. And they had met no-one on it in half a day's travel. Road? It was barely a path.