Od Magic

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “Will we be taught that?”

  “I assume you mean warfare, not healing a crippled magpie,” Yar said mildly, stifling his weariness for the subject, which came up as regularly as the gates opened to new students. “If you have a gift for wizardly warfare, believe me it will come under the sharp scrutiny of the king and his counselors. You will be taught how best to use your powers for Numis. You will never leave Numis to go roaming out of curiosity and wonder, as Od does. You will be considered too valuable a weapon. If you are permitted to leave, it will be to fight Numis’s battles. If you go without the king’s permission, you will be considered a traitor, a renegade, an enemy, and the wizard who tracks you down and rids Numis of the threat of you will be rewarded.” He smiled a little, thinly. “So be careful what you wish for. The rulers of Numis have never forgotten how close Isham came to losing the realm, and they have learned to see enemies everywhere. Even within the walls of this school.”

  The warrior’s son only shrugged slightly, undaunted. “If I had such power, why wouldn’t I use it for Numis? I would want to use it for someone. I don’t understand how Od could discover how to wield the wind like a weapon and not want to do it again.”

  “The kings have let Od roam,” another student commented. “They aren’t afraid that she’ll use her powers to attack Numis in the service of another king.”

  Yar nodded. “It’s a subtle distinction. She proved her loyalty and friendship to Numis by rescuing Kelior and by keeping her school here. No one wants to risk offending her by trying to restrict her freedom. She might just laugh and vanish out of Numis forever. Then the rulers of Numis would have to look for her behind every threat to its borders.”

  “I don’t want to become a weapon,” a young woman said aggrievedly. Her voice held the hit of a neighboring kingdom. “Master Yar, aren’t there other magics in wind and water besides death?”

  “Oh, there are,” Yar said, relieved to get out of the bottomless quagmire of power and politics. “There are, indeed. Let’s adjourn to the library to see what Od herself has written about that.”

  He led them down from the great central tower in which he taught and lived in comfortable chambers overlooking the busy complex of rooftops, arches, parapet walls, buttresses, turrets, huge glass domes, gardens perched on high flat roofs above the city to catch the light. Yar could see very easily into the private gardens of the royal household. But as King Galin pointed out, it was futile to try to keep anything private from wizards. That worked both ways, Yar had learned early in his years there. The king kept a close eye on the school, which rulers of Numis had come to regard as highly and as jealously as their private coffers. Whether it was a flaw of innocence or of ambition in Od’s character to have placed her school in the shadow of the king’s house, nobody knew for certain. After several centuries the wizards had stopped arguing about it, so not to offend the king in whose house they had somehow come to dwell.

  Yar left his students under the eye of the librarian, who was gathering Od’s fragile scrolls and letters off the shelves for them to decipher. He was about to take the quickest way up to the rooftop gardens to warn the new gardener of an impending invasion of students, when a vague form intruded, disturbing his concentration before he could vanish. He gathered himself together again, blinked the world back into view, and found Valoren Greye in his way.

  Yar was not surprised. The formidable young wizard, a former student recently raised to the position of king’s counselor, seemed to be everywhere at once when new students entered the school. He was the nearest King Galin had to eyes in the back of his head, and took his responsibilities with what Yar considered an inordinate amount of zeal.

  Yar, who could remember a time years earlier when Valoren knew how to smile, regarded the lean, somber, butter-haired counselor quizzically. “What is it?”

  “I’ve been asked by the king to cast an eye over the new students, begin to get to know them, so that if problems arise, we’ll be aware of them early.”

  Yar nodded briefly, understanding the problems to be anything that ultimately might threaten the crown on Galin’s head. “I haven’t seen any.”

  “You weren’t looking for them.”

  “No,” Yar agreed, reining in a flash of annoyance. “But after nineteen years here I have learned to recognize a few things on the first day.”

  Valoren absorbed that without comment, continued gravely, “I thought it would be simplest if I came to one of your classes, listened to your students. You, of course, would be aware of my presence.”

  Yar sighed noiselessly. “They’re in the library now. After that, I’m taking them up to the gardens. Many of them are so well brought up they have no idea where a pea has been before they find it on their plates, or that a weed growing out of the midden can cure what ails them.”

  Valoren’s eyes, almost as pale as his hair, contemplated that dispassionately; he commented, “They would not reveal much of themselves in either place. After that?”

  “After that to the labyrinth, then to the royal menagerie. They’ll come back to my chambers after the midday meal, where I’ll give them some idea of what they’ll be taught for the next few years and what they might be expected to do with it.”

  Valoren gave a slight nod. “Good. I’ll be there, then.”

  He turned; Yar watched him narrowly a moment, wondering if the brilliant, humorless Valoren was the culmination of everything he had been taught at Od’s school, or if he would have grown that way, anyway. Coming to no conclusion, he made his way up, with a thought and a step, to the gardens, where the new gardener, potting bulbs to bloom in the spring, nearly reeled off the roof at the sight of him.

  “I’m sorry,” Yar said quickly. “I wasn’t thinking.”

  Brenden drew an unsteady breath and let go of the roof wall. “I’m not used to magic.”

  Nor to heights, Yar suspected. The city swirled endlessly about them to the edge of the world, it seemed. Yar wondered if the young man could see as far as the home he had left. Something in the bleak eyes told him no: he was too far from everything he had known.

  “I came to warn you that I will be bringing students up here this morning. Only a few,” he assured Brenden, who looked alarmed at the thought of having to explain something. “A dozen or so. You can ignore them. I know enough to show them the difference between balm and rue.”

  Memory melted across the young man’s taut face. “It takes living to know that,” he said tersely. “Not magic.”

  Yar nodded. “Magic,” he answered wryly, “is how you use what, in spite of all your good intentions, you learn.”

  The gardener mulled that over. “That’s fair. Most of the time you don’t intend. Life just happens. And there’s no way around it.”

  Yar was silent, curious. Curiosity led his thoughts astray; they brushed the memory the young man had opened: a moment when something shapeless, unwieldy, and enormously powerful in him had roused itself and revealed its face. Startled, Yar’s thoughts scattered. He found the gardener’s eyes on him, heard himself say as if to something wild, “If you can’t bear the stone walls here, tell us before you leave.”

  “I think,” Brenden said tentatively, “it will be all right. For the while.”

  Yar returned to his students. He took them under the school to see the labyrinth, and up to the rooftop gardens and greenhouses, and to the king’s menagerie in the royal gardens, from which the teachers borrowed when they needed an animal to make a point. In the labyrinth he watched their faces, anticipating which students might require rescuing from their curiosity in the middle of the night.

  At midday, he dismissed them to eat and study. He felt the summons of a calm, orderly mind, and went up into the highest tower to talk to Wye.

  As usual during the day, she sat in her chambers, surrounded by books and papers, accounts, requests, letters from distant lands, sealed notes from the king. She had been at the school most of her long life. Her skin and hair were ivory, her eyes bla
ck, still and secret. Her aged face with its strong bones, which had once been beautiful, had not changed a line, Yar thought, in the nineteen years he had been at the school. After those nineteen years, he could scarcely remember the young, eager face he had worn when he walked in under the shoe.

  Wye finished a word in whatever she was writing and raised her eyes. They knew each other very well; he sensed trouble immediately, an inner conflict, confusion. She returned the pen to its holder and sat back in her chair.

  “Yar,” she said, her voice very soft for some obscure reason, “I have come to a decision.”

  “Yes?”

  “About the gardener.” She paused, lowered her eyes, shifted a paper an inch on her table, while he waited, unenlightened. “Have you mentioned to anyone how he came to be here?”

  “You mean which door he came in?”

  “Under the shoe,” she said, nodding. “As you did. And directed there by Od.”

  “No,” he answered, still baffled.

  “Well, don’t. Not to anyone. Especially not to Ceta.”

  His brows went up. Ceta, in whose lovely river house he dwelled for much of the time after the sun went down, had close connections by family to Valoren and by marriage to the king’s court. What she was not to know, he realized suddenly, neither was the king. His lips parted, closed again. He sat down on a corner of Wye’s sturdy worktable, gazing at her questioningly.

  She shifted under that gaze, but met it without blinking. “He is, after all, only a gardener,” she said firmly. “The king does not interest himself with gardeners at the school. That’s my business.”

  Yar remembered the enormous, untapped power, much of it disguised as grief and loneliness, he had sensed in the young man potting bulbs. “Is it?” he breathed, fixing her again with a bog-water eye. “Is it, indeed?”

  “Od sent you here through her secret doorway, and look where it got you.”

  “You don’t need to remind me.”

  “Teaching the children of the rich and powerful how to become more powerful for their king and his court.”

  “Perhaps that’s what Od intended.”

  “Do you believe that?” she asked, her voice so unexpectedly wistful that he searched himself before he answered. Memory beckoned; he walked a little way down a forgotten path, where air had taught him, and light, and dirt, and dark. He had wrested his own magic out of necessity. Dark was not an abstract on a page in a book, but something to become, to eat, to battle, to breathe, to take apart before it took him apart, and to refashion, only when he had defined it, into a word again with which he could live in peace.

  “But that was a long time ago,” he whispered. He saw Wye again, waiting for his answer, her eyes oddly vulnerable. He said simply, “No. I believe that I failed the powers I had. I didn’t realize, as the years passed, how these walls that keep us safe and comfortable have also put such limits on our vision. We teach from the books the kings and their wizards have permitted us to keep. We teach the word for dark. We have forgotten the night.”

  “Brenden has not forgotten,” Wye said, her voice web-thin again.

  “No.”

  “You felt it, then. All that power.”

  “Yes.”

  “He barely knows he has it. No one need know. Od sent him here for a reason. I know what this school would make of that power. What I want to see is what he might make of himself. So.”

  Yar nodded. “I am mum,” he promised, rising from her desk, “on the subject of shoes.”

  Wye picked up her pen again, paused before she dipped it. “He could use someone to talk to,” she suggested. “You might look in on him now and then, when you have more time. Explain things to him if he finds the courage to ask. He might tell you more about himself.”

  “Why me? Why not you?”

  “Because I didn’t pass under the cobbler’s shoe. Because he is like you.”

  Yar laughed softly. “Maybe once. A long time ago. But I’ll do what I can.”

  He spent that evening, as usual, with Ceta, amusing her with the day’s small incidents and the peculiar questions he had encountered. Daughter of a northern lord, Ceta had been given the house by her father upon her marriage to a noble with country estates, who preferred living near the king’s court. The marriage, Ceta confessed to Yar, had been mainly one of duty; when the young noble died unexpectedly, she was not entirely bereft. She refused to marry again, using grief as her defense. Yar had met her several years before in the king’s private library, where he had gone in search of a missing book of Od’s and found the lovely widow, a perpetual student of history, immersed in it. Now they sat together on furs and rugs in the deep ledge of a window overlooking the river, nibbling spiced meats, pickled vegetables, olives, cheese and flat bread with their fingers. Below them on the broad river ships and boats with their lamps lit sailed serenely past on water reflecting the lavender twilight.

  Behind them books and scrolls lay scattered on opulent, ancient carpets from lands whose names Yar was not entirely sure he knew how to spell. Ceta, who wrote with a clear, lucid style and researched with enthusiasm, was gaining a reputation for scholarship. The king had asked her to write a history of Od and her School of Magic, with emphasis on the influence the Kings of Numis had on its growth and renown. Yar had grown used to walking through the changing tide line of books and papers on her floor.

  “I ran across a very old piece of her writing today,” she told Yar, when he spoke of his students’ difficulties with Od’s eccentric accounts of magic. “About some outlandish country—”

  “What was she doing there?”

  Ceta wrapped an errant strand of long, dark hair around her finger and brooded out the window. She was very tall, lanky; her folded legs barely fit across the ledge. One bent knee hung out the open window, attracting insects with the yellow, perfumed silk fluttering down from it. “Oh, I remember,” she said abruptly. “It only sounded like some outlandish realm. She was actually traveling in Numis, but so far north that I didn’t recognize the place she described. The manuscript must have traveled with her for some time. I think her mice tried to make a nest out of it.”

  She picked out the plumpest olive, nibbled around its seed. Yar leaned back, watching a gnat tangle itself in her drifting hair. “Is there a point,” he inquired mildly, “to your tale?”

  She spat the olive pit into her hand and tossed it out the window. “Only that you made me remember it. And that she bothered to write about it.”

  “Write what?”

  “What she saw. Whatever that was. I’d never heard of it.” She uncoiled her legs, slid off the ledge to her piles on the carpet. “I’ll find it for you.”

  Yar watched her long fingers play among the scrolls. “Here it is—No. Here.” She picked up a battered, rolled manuscript so stained and crumbled it was difficult to open.

  “It looks,” Yar murmured, “as though she sat on it.”

  “It is very well traveled.” She brought it to him; he frowned down at the faded words growing more elusive in the deepening twilight.

  “‘In the shadow,’” he read haltingly, “‘of Skrygard Mountain, I found them. They had no faces. Blind and mouthless, old stones, old weathered stumps. Still they saw without eyes, without words they spoke. They wait. I found a crippled owl in the snow and took her down with me.’”

  “I can’t imagine,” Ceta interrupted, “what they might be. Do you know?”

  Yar shook his head, moved by the passage, but not knowing why. “It’s a haunting image. I have absolutely no idea. Did you ask Wye?”

  “Yes. She suggested I ask you.”

  “What about your cousin Valoren?”

  She shrugged lightly. “Valoren learned everything he knows at the school. If you and Wye don’t know what Od is talking about, why would he? Od might have written more about them; maybe something else will turn up. It’s, not important. It must not be, or everyone would understand it.”

  “I suppose so,” Yar agreed, dist
racted by her labyrinthine pacing among her papers. “I suppose not.”

  She raised her dulcet, genial voice, and called, “Shera—Lights!” Then she returned to the window, took her seat. She studied Yar as her housekeeper lit the lamps and candles, each burning reflection darkening the river behind it and drawing their faces more clearly out of the dark.

  He said ruefully as a candle illumined her blue-gray eyes, “I should leave soon.” Wye preferred the teachers to spend nights at the school while the new students adjusted. Some of them had terrible dreams. Others discovered gifts they never knew they had, and their experiments could be alarming. Yar had known students to lose themselves in the labyrinth, sneak into the king’s menagerie, blow things up.

  Ceta’s long mouth slid awry again. “Ah, well…I have a cousin in your classes, did you know that?”

  “A student?”

  “Yes. Lord Tenenbros’s daughter Marcia. Valoren’s sister.”

  Yar made an ambiguous noise. Another student bound to the service of the king…He found Ceta’s eyes on him, disconcertingly limpid.

  “You disapprove.”

  He sighed noiselessly, spread his hands. “I have no alternatives to offer. The very walls of the school are owned by the rulers of Numis. Why should they not train wizards to their own advantage?”

  “Why not?” she asked him, genuinely puzzled. “You offer no alternatives, but sometimes I think you see them. Or you think you do. Are you getting restless in your comfortable life?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Then perhaps you should leave teaching for a while and offer your own services to the nobles of Numis.” He did not answer; she added after a moment, “Have I offended you?”

  “I was thinking thoughts of insurrection.”

  She laughed, but breathlessly; her hand went out as though to cover his mouth. “Don’t. Not even in jest. Anyone would think you’ve been spending time in the unruly Twilight Quarter.”

  He put his hand on her ankle, toyed with the thin gold chain around it. “Is the Twilight Quarter still unruly? I haven’t been there for years. Not even to retrieve a student exploring the delights of the forbidden. Students have grown so cautious, these days; they never do anything wrong anymore.”