Od Magic

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  Brenden Vetch has a gift. With an innate sense he cannot explain to himself or describe to others, he connects to the agricultural world, nurturing gardens to flourish and instinctively knowing the healing properties each plant and herb has to offer. But Brenden’s gift isolates him from people—and from becoming part of a community.

  Until the day he receives a personal invitation from the wizard Od. She needs a gardener for her school in the great city of Kelior, where every potential wizard must be trained to serve the Kingdom of Numis. For decades the rulers of Numis have controlled the school, believing they can contain the power within it—and punish any wizard who dares defy the law.

  But unknown to the reigning monarchy is the power possessed by the school’s new gardener—a power that even Brenden isn’t fully aware of, and which is the true reason Od recruited him…

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  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Copyright © 2005 by Patricia A. McKillip.

  Cover art by Kinuko Y. Craft.

  Cover design by Judith Murello.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  ACE and the “A” design are trademarks belonging to Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Ace hardcover edition / June 2005

  Ace trade paperback edition / June 2006

  Ace trade paperback ISBN: 0-441-01334-1

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Ace hardcover edition as follows:

  McKillip, Patricia A.

  Od magic / Patricia A. McKillip.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-441-01248-5

  1. Wizards—Fiction. 2. Gardeners—Fiction. 3. Kings and rulers—Succession—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3563.C38O425 2005

  813'.54—dc22

  2004065734

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  Twenty-six

  Twenty-seven

  ONE

  Brenden Vetch found the Od School of Magic beneath a cobbler’s shoe on a busy street in the ancient city of Kelior. The sign hung over the door of a tiny shop that badly needed paint. Brenden gazed incredulously at the door, then again at the sign. Od, it insisted, in neat black letters, School of Magic. From the sign a shoe depended: a wooden clog, sturdy enough to sail, fastened to the sign with a dowel through its center like a mast.

  Brenden hesitated. People jostled around him, strangers all of them, for he was a long way from home. Home was the rocky hills and cold, deep rivers of the north country, valleys patterned green and gold and all the colors of wildflowers for three short seasons of the year, while the blank white wasteland of the fourth seemed to last forever. He had walked down from there. The royal city, older than the Kingdom of Numis itself, had sprawled past its gates and stone walls centuries before. Brenden had spent the previous day just getting from its outer boundaries of fields and cottages, taverns and markets, across one of its five bridges and within the shadow of the walls of the inner city. The gates had long since moldered away; streets ran through the walls where they had once stood locked and barred against strangers and the night. Nobody guarded them now; they let anyone in, even the likes of the dusty, footsore traveler with nothing to his name but an old leather pack, and little enough in that but seeds.

  He had spent all but his last coins on a meal and a bed the night before. He had been too tired to thread his way through the bewildering maze of streets. Cobbles ran like stone rivers underfoot, everywhere and anywhere, meeting and parting, braiding and fraying without pattern. He had no idea so many people existed. Making his way patiently through them the next day, he glimpsed now and then what looked like a great castle towering above the city. The king’s house, he assumed, its ramparts and lofty towers raised high so that the king could see his enemies coming along the river or over the distant mountains. The door to the school, he was told when he asked, stood in its shadow. There was a sign, saying very plainly what it was. Nobody mentioned the shoe, but it had been fixed for an entire season in Brenden’s memory.

  Look for the door under the shoe.

  He had not understood about the shoe; it had seemed, in the context, some magical word. Well, there was the sign, plain as a pauper’s grave. And there was the shoe, looking very like a shoe. He scratched his head and hovered, waiting vaguely for another kind of sign.

  I have been asked to come, he reminded himself to give himself courage. I have been invited.

  The invitation had come to him the same spring day on which, a year earlier, he had seen his last of Meryd. That he remembered vividly, for her going was etched in his heart. Not that he blamed Meryd. He’d gone wild, reclusive as an animal, she said, since his parents had died. That meant, by his calculations, she had put up with the worst of him for a year and half a season. His parents had died two years before at the bleak, muddy end of winter, from some strange fever that had swept through the village. He had tried everything to save them, every smelly, evil-tasting concoction he had ever cobbled together from root and leaf, bark and berry for human or animal. He managed to keep his brother alive, and most of the villagers who came down with it. But his parents had caught it first, and died while he was still flailing about in the withered world for a cure.

  His brother Jode had left him as well, a few months after their deaths, to see what the world had to offer, he said, besides hardship and grief. He had tried to talk Brenden into leaving his sorrow behind in the silent cottage, and coming with him. But Brenden refused.

  “
What’s here for you but ghosts?” Jode had demanded, not wanting to part with him, either. He was still stringy and pale from the fever, but Brenden saw the strength back in his eyes, and the determination. “Come and see the world.”

  “No.”

  He felt a hand on his shoulder as he stood in the doorway staring out.

  “It wasn’t your fault,” Jode said huskily. “You did everything you could for all of us. More.”

  “I know.”

  “We’ll go to Kelior, see what kind of cottage the king lives in.”

  “No.” He heard himself then, words thudding out of him like stones. He tried to explain, his eyes on the slow night tide turning the distant hills purple, the low shrubs covering them soft as lambs’ wool in the fading light. “I’d miss the wind.”

  “What?”

  “I need it. The sounds of it. The smells.”

  “Wind’s everywhere,” Jode said bewilderedly. “Even in Kelior.”

  He couldn’t see what Brenden saw: how the curve of the windswept hills, the random scents of fox and bog lily, the taste of grass, the dank grit of earth itself between the teeth held a mystery he needed to know. Why he needed, he had only an incoherent idea. But he tried to explain. “It was how I found what cured you.”

  Jode loosed him, came to stand against the doorpost opposite, gazing at his brother. His dark, lank hair hanging over his eyes, he looked like a wild hill pony, Brenden thought, and as stubborn. “I don’t understand.”

  “I saw what I was using—I smelled it—I understood it in a different way. It was just some wild bulbs I put away for the winter. I must have looked at them a hundred times. And then I looked at them again, and they told me something they hadn’t before.”

  “Talking bulbs.”

  “Things speak,” Brenden said. His gaze slid away from Jode, back to the fields, their scents changing with the twilight, to the hills that rose, dark now and secret, against the dying light. “I need to learn to listen to them.”

  Jode was silent, staring at him. “I wish,” he said finally, “you’d listen to yourself. You’re gabbling. Are you feeling all right? I’m not leaving if you’re coming down sick, too.”

  “I’m not. But don’t go.”

  “I have to,” Jode said restlessly. “All I see in here are ghosts. Her peeling apples, weaving, singing songs we heard in the cradle; him walking in, smelling of fields, whittling bone buttons for her in winter, whistling what she sings. Sang. And you wandering in and out like a ghost yourself, with barely a word to offer anyone. You stay and talk to your plants. I need some life in my life.”

  Brenden was silent. Tall and muscular from his peculiar habits of roaming and foraging, he had been worn down himself as well from the desperate winter. His hair, shaggy and pale as milkweed, collected stray burrs and bits of bracken. He looked, Jode had told him, like an old hermit. He was beginning to feel like one, with Jode leaving. He made another effort. “Where are you going?”

  “South.”

  “To Kelior?”

  “Maybe that far, maybe not.” He touched Brenden again. “I’ll let you know when I finally stop, in case you want to join me.”

  He left the next day. Brenden, alone in the cottage for the first time since he was born, found solace where he could, in things growing, in the season’s changing, even in the wind’s voice growing hollow and high in winter, like a gaunt old wolf. Sorrow was like sleeping on stones, he decided. You had to settle all its bumps and sharp edges, come to terms against them, shift them around until they became bearable, and then carry your bed wherever you went. He had pretty much arranged all the hard bulkiness of memory and grief into a balanced load when Meryd came into his life and the load, for a time, became immeasurably lighter.

  She was also one of the things he had looked at countless times, until suddenly she changed under his eyes into something he did not recognize. She seemed to feel the same about him. They woke up one day and astonished one another. She turned from a gawky, sharp-shinned girl with perpetual scars on her elbows, into a young woman with skin like a peach and hair like never-ending night. For a while, she almost turned him human again.

  She stayed with him, he knew, for as long as she could. Sometimes she was there in the cottage, sometimes not. So was he, drifting in and out of her life as she appeared and disappeared in his, the long year after his parents had died and Jode had gone. Some nights he spent in the bracken; some nights in bed with her. He never asked where she went when she left; he was only glad to see her when she returned. It was the only way, he realized later, he could have lived his life then, a stranger in it himself, exploring the borders of day and night, real and dream, death and life. He thought she knew that. He thought it was what she wanted.

  But he was wrong.

  “It’s too sad,” she had said, sitting bolt upright in bed in his cottage one night. “It’s too sad around here. I can’t bear it. I have to leave.”

  He put his arms around her, thinking she must be still asleep. He whispered into her hair, “You’re dreaming.”

  “I’m not! You are!” She pulled away from him, her eyes as startled and vulnerable as a newborn’s. “You never talk to me. You wander through my life like a ghost. I never know when I’ll see you. Sometimes I think you’d never notice if I never came back, and so I stay away for days, and I’m right, you never notice! But I come back anyway.”

  He tried to hold her again, bewildered, making soothing sounds; she shook her head fiercely, her wild dark hair flying. “And then you leave, and I don’t know where you are, and when you come back you never even tell me where—”

  “Nowhere,” he told her desperately. “Just out. Watching things. Learning—I told you—”

  “Did you?”

  “I thought you knew—”

  “What? What do I know? You never tell me!”

  “I’m sorry,” he said, shaken. “When I’m out, I’m with things that haven’t got a human language. Stones. Wildflowers. I just forget to talk, that’s all. I forget the need of it.”

  “Well, I don’t! I need your voice, I need words out of you—”

  “I’ll try,” he promised recklessly. “I’ll do better—”

  “I can’t,” she said, her face turned away from him as she rolled abruptly to her feet and began to dress. “I can’t do any better for you. I’ve tried and tried, and I can’t any longer. I need to be with someone who needs to be human. You’ve forgotten.”

  He felt his heart crack as she took a step away from him; a word tore out of it, in a voice neither of them recognized. “No!”

  For an instant it seemed as though she could not move; the word tangled around her ankles, held her by the hair, weighed down her bones. He felt something unfamiliar in himself: a stone that was part of the burden he carried. But it was not sorrow at all; it was a word he had never learned. The strange force drained out of him, left him confused. And then horrified as Meryd moved again with a faint cry. He glimpsed her white, stunned face as she glanced fearfully back at him.

  Then she ran, leaving him her shoes and that expression to remember her by.

  Where she went, he did not know; no one else seemed to, either. She might have fled over the hill to the next village; she might have gone clear to Kelior. So her mother, whose life he had saved, told him when he went to ask about Meryd. Her mother’s eyes did not blame him.

  “Spring,” she just said gently. “Spring took her. She went looking for something to make her smile. We can only hope she finds it, and that she tells us when she does.”

  He blamed himself. He lay awake night after night with that one, trying to find a place for this memory, this stone in his mind, trying to find a way to live with it. When a house full of past would not let him sleep, he left it, slept with the stars and the foxes. He wandered, trying to lose himself so that past would lose sight of him. He followed the lengthening days so far north that he caught up with winter again, unexpectedly, on Skrygard Mountain, an iron-faced, cragg
y peak so steep even the sun could not get over it to melt the snow along one flank.

  Brenden smelled it before he saw it: the patch of white surrounded by trees taller than any he had ever seen. The silence of stone, of snow, seemed a word itself, one he could almost hear, in a language he could almost understand. He had left the wind itself somewhere in the meadows below, rollicking among the wildflowers. Here all was still. Something had spoken its last word here, perhaps eons ago, and the silence after the word ended still lingered over the place.

  Or maybe, he wondered, listening, it was the silence just before the spoken word?

  There were odd shapes scattered on the field of snow. Ancient dark, charred stumps they seemed, on the verge of turning into stone. Brenden, gazing at them, waited for memory or his eyes to sort out their lines, give them some familiar shape. They had no name in any world he knew. He shifted in the snow, beginning to feel the chill. Their silence drew at him. The strange, motionless forms seemed about to flick an eye at him, grow mouths, speak. He lingered, hearing the silence as an indrawn breath, just before thought turns to sound and forms the word.

  Nothing spoke.

  Maybe nothing ever had. He turned reluctantly, driven away by the cold, but still listening until he passed into noisy spring again and found his way back home. He took the silence with him, though; he heard it in his dreams, where a part of him waited patiently for the ancient dreamers to speak a word as old and slow as stone.

  Gradually, as summer deepened, he swallowed his own bulky stones of grief and loneliness, and gave himself to the seasons.

  He learned the language of plants by smell and taste; hunkered down on the earth, he listened to them grow for hours. He wandered in the wild woods, the empty heaths and bog lands, searching for things he couldn’t name. He watched them, saw what animals ate this mushroom, that berry, that leaf. He took plants home and experimented, recklessly on himself, but very carefully on his animals. The world could live without him, but he couldn’t live without his goat, his chickens, his sheep. He made himself sick a time or two, then cured himself. His garden and animals flourished. So did those of the neighbors who came to him for advice.