Od Magic

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “Enys,” she said between her teeth.

  “Actually, you won’t even have to leave the palace.”

  “Enys!”

  “You can’t guess?” he said with a little, pleased smile.

  “No!”

  “Our father’s newest counselor, the wizard Valoren Greye.” His smile broadened at her astonished silence. “He is young; his father, Lord Tenenbros, is very wealthy, with several large holdings in the north country. Valoren was recommended by the wizards to the king for his intelligence and skill; through the past year he has proved eminently worthy of his position here. Our father was very pleased that he asked to be considered as your suitor. Of course, neither of us wanted you to leave Kelior.” He waited; she still could not speak. “Surely you must be pleased.”

  A memory rose in her head of a young, lean, secretive face, limp pale hair, eyes the color of honeycomb, at once direct and amazingly opaque. She felt her mouth move finally heard her own voice. “We’ve scarcely spoken two words…How should I know?”

  “Well—”

  “I should have gone back to the Twilight Quarter,” she whispered.

  “What?”

  A helpless despair rose in her, that she would never see past the walls the Kings of Numis had placed around magic; she would never know how much more, if anything, there was to know. Not only must she marry one of her father’s nobles, but a wizard as well, who would not expect her, the king’s daughter, to have a thought of her own in her head. Any more than he did.

  “Sulys.”

  At least, in another country, her mother’s perhaps, she might have been able to think. She met Enys’s eyes finally, found them shuttered, like windows in an empty room. “Does our father want me?”

  “He’s waiting for you, yes. With Valoren.”

  “Why didn’t Valoren come? Why didn’t he come to me himself?”

  Her brother shrugged. “It’s proper, this way. He hardly knows you.”

  “I don’t know him!”

  “No. But you do know our father.”

  “Do I have a choice?”

  “I’ve seen your other choices,” Enys said so dryly that she stared at him again in horror. “You’d be wise to accept with as much good grace as you can muster.” He added as she stumbled past him down the stairs, “He really thought you would be pleased. And if there are reasons why you’re not, you should forget about them before your foot hits the next step. What our father cannot guess, Valoren will, and his first loyalty will be to the king. So forget your dreams, brush the potting soil off your skirt, and smile.”

  FIVE

  Brenden, walking into the roof garden in the morning, was seized by an exuberant gust that tried to whirl him over the wall along with the dried, golden leaves from the garden. He smelled the northern snow in the wind. He spent the rest of the day putting the greenhouse in order for the winter. It was a complex construct, running along one wall, of stone and wood and glass panels that slid open and shut against light and weather. He pulled dead, flowering vines out of the rafters, emptied withered plants and spent soil out of the pots and stacked them, put the plants that would survive the winter on one table to be watered, set his own tentative experiments, odd seedlings and cuttings that needed an eye kept on them, together on another table. He found a dilapidated broom and swept dust and dried petals out the door. He had upended the broom and was trying to untangle a stubborn vine from a shelf bracket, when he saw an odd growth in a crusty pot at his feet. He set aside the broom and hunkered down to examine it.

  It had neither eyes nor mouth, it was stuck in dirt, and it was green. By which he assumed it was probably a plant. But whether edible, medicinal, or magic, he couldn’t guess. It remained mute as he gazed at it. Perhaps it had nothing to say. Or it was simply dead. Or maybe it spoke a language of such profound magic that he couldn’t begin to understand it. He tried, listening for a long time until it occurred to him that there were other gardeners on the roofs, who had been at the school far longer than he, and who might be able to put a name to the peculiarity. After another time, during which he lay flat on the floor with a finger against the cool, thick flesh, and his mind an open door to whatever might enter, he gave up, brushed himself off, and went to consult the others.

  They came to gaze upon it: Sisal, who grew remedies for bruises and nightmares and indigestion, and Lemley, who grew vegetables for the table. Sisal, a tall, wiry woman with long straw-colored hair, rubbed her nose on her gardening glove and produced an opinion.

  “That’s the ugliest plant I’ve ever seen.”

  “Don’t know what it is,” Lemley murmured, puffing an old pipe as he studied it. His weathered face was wrinkled like parched, cracked earth. “But I know I wouldn’t eat it.” He sent a miniature cloud into the air, and ventured a guess. “A mushroom, maybe?”

  “I’ve never seen a mushroom with thorns all over it like that.”

  Brenden prodded the bone-dry soil in the pot. “Do you think it’s still alive?”

  Sisal pulled off her glove, slid a finger between the thorns to touch the smooth, thick flesh. “Maybe it stores water in itself. Some do. The last gardener here might have brought it from her own country. Or maybe found it in a stall in the Twilight Quarter. Odd things turn up there. But which is it?” she wondered, glancing at Brenden. “Edible or medicinal or magical?”

  “Might be edible,” Lemley said dubiously, “but only if you’d boiled your last boot.”

  He looked at Brenden, too, then, through a cloud. They were expecting something, he realized, waiting for him to do something. Sisal prodded him with a question.

  “Did you ask it? What it had to say for itself?”

  “Oh,” he said, startled; no one had ever asked him that before. “Yes. It didn’t say. Or I didn’t understand.”

  Sisal’s eyes curved in a little smile. “Try again. That’s what you’re here for.”

  Brenden pondered the mystery, trying to imagine in what strange world a plant might grow thorns like fishhooks all over itself and form thick, stumpy leaves to hoard what little water came its way. Green seeped into his eyes; his mind grew vague, cloudy as it had done for hours on end when he lay in the bracken watching a new bud unfurl. He envisioned the oddity in a forest, on a moor, on top of a mountain; it seemed to belong nowhere but in its pot. So he took that dry, crumbling soil into his head and spread it everywhere under a blazing, blue-white sky. The plant spoke unexpectedly, filling his arid earth with those thorny, stumpy shapes, the only green that came out of that ground. A jagged flash of lightning ripped through his thoughts; thunder broke like a bone in his head. The hot rain pounded down. Even through the sudden storm he felt the hot light everywhere, intense and constant, air like invisible fire, igniting itself now and then in crimson flower that balanced crazily on the highest leaf, spread itself to take in more light, more heat…

  He felt some disturbance in the air around him, and opened his eyes to glimpse the flower growing out of his own fingers, huge and bright and already fading away as he stared.

  Sisal and Lemley were staring, too. Lemley’s pipe had gone out.

  He broke the silence after a moment, during which the wild rain in Brenden’s head died away. “Never saw anyone go that far, before. Not in forty-seven years and six gardeners of things magical.”

  “What—” Brenden’s voice caught. “How far did I go?”

  “You were in bloom,” Sisal said faintly.

  He looked down at himself. “Did I grow thorns?”

  “No. But you were turning green, there toward the end. Does it always happen to you that way?”

  “No,” he said, then amended that. “I don’t know. Nobody ever watched me before.”

  Lemley scratched an eyebrow, regarding him quizzically. “I wonder if someone should know. You might belong elsewhere. Down there among the wizards and students, not up here talking to plants.”

  “I came to garden,” Brenden said shortly, uninterested in the noisy, bewilderin
g world he had glimpsed within the school. “It’s peaceful up here. It’s where I belong.”

  The doubt and speculation lingered in their eyes, but they didn’t argue.

  Sisal just said vaguely, “Things will sort themselves out; they usually do, here. What did the plant tell you?”

  He told them as best he could, not knowing the words for all he saw. “It came from an empty, rocky land, very hot and dry except when storms crack open the sky. I’ve never seen anything like it. No grasses, no trees, just these, everywhere.”

  Lemley said, enlightened, “A desert, that would be. I’ve heard of them.”

  “Sounds like,” Sisal agreed. “But do we know which of us should care for it?”

  “It didn’t tell me that.”

  “The librarian might,” she suggested. “Maybe there’s a picture of it somewhere. Some writing about it. I’d go down there and ask. Can you find your way?”

  “I think so,” he answered, remembering a huge barn of a room near the stairs, books on shelves from floor to a ceiling so lofty it seemed that only magic could reach them. He was reluctant to leave the comforting solitude of the rooftops. But the other gardeners were watching expectantly; it was, so it seemed, part of his job. He consigned the thorny riddle to memory and went to find an answer.

  The hallways and stairs seemed as crowded as the city streets with students, all moving in the same direction with the single-mindedness of fish going upriver to spawn. Brenden, caught in their swarm, felt invisible. Most were richly dressed, highborn sons and daughters of powerful families. They spoke in low, dispassionate voices; their eyes no longer saw gardeners with dirt under their nails and boots that had walked across half a kingdom. He smelled what drew them: their supper, a portion of which would make its way eventually up to the gardeners. He saw a dark teacher’s robe here and there, wizards keeping an eye on the elegant students who had shed their own robes at the end of the day.

  Once the entire descending flow was brought to a halt when a prism in a chandelier caught fire and exploded in a hard, glittering shower of glass.

  A deep voice, booming eerily off the walls, demanded, “Who did that?”

  Out of the sudden silence, another voice rose, apologetic, but not, to Brenden’s ear, remorseful. “Sorry, Master Balius. It was a bet. I was sure I couldn’t do it.”

  “Who are you?”

  “I’m Elver.”

  “Who?”

  “Elver. I only just got here.”

  Master Balius, standing on the stairs near Brenden, raised his arm above the crowd. He was a tall, gray man with lines of perpetual severity etched deeply beside his mouth. “Well, Master Elver-who-only-just-got-here, walk with me while I teach you a few of the rules of this school, which, if you break as carelessly as you did that prism, will send you back out whatever door you came in.”

  There was a ripple through the bodies halted on the landing below. Movement began again, haltingly, after the ripple had climbed halfway up the stairs to join Master Balius. The teacher, declaiming rigorously through the clamor, was slowed by the weight of his words; Brenden, following, saw students flowing around the pair on both sides. After a moment or two, the students began bumping into the dark-haired young man being lectured. They would draw back in confusion, pat the air around him as though they couldn’t see what obstructed them. Cautiously, their faces puzzled, they would give him a wide berth as they passed. The young man, seeming to listen gravely to Master Balius, paid no attention to the jostling and bumping.

  Brenden, passing him, glanced at him curiously. He looked younger by a few years than most of the students; his clothes were plain and serviceable, neither patched nor ornate. He raised his head as Brenden went by, met his eyes; his own grew large, then flashed a smile at the gardener. Another student bumped him then, nearly sending him off the step. Master Balius broke off midlecture to gaze at him.

  “Elver!” he snapped. “For very good reasons, such as this, only students at the highest level are permitted to use spells of invisibility.”

  “Sorry, Master Balius,” Elver said meekly. “I didn’t know.”

  “Don’t just stand there invisible!”

  “Sorry.”

  Brenden stood there, blinking a moment; someone jostled him from behind, and he moved again. On the main floor, he let the students stream one way while he went another, toward where he thought he remembered seeing the library. It wasn’t there. The school quieted while he wandered, peering through doors at random. The halls emptied. Finally, he saw a likely pair of double doors, massive and ornate. He opened them. A great many faces glanced his direction, all busily chewing as he froze, startled, in the doorway.

  Backing abruptly, he smacked into someone too close on his heels.

  “Sorry,” he stammered, appalled, and wondering if he would have to send the stranger to Sisal, for he had one hand against his nose, which had collided with the back of Brenden’s head.

  “What are you doing?” the man demanded stuffily through his fingers. He was tall and thin, with lank pale hair and eyes not much darker than his hair. Those eyes, the color of beeswax, pinned Brenden motionless with their strangeness.

  “I was—I was looking for the library.”

  “Were you.” The young man’s voice sounded oddly remote, as though his thoughts had suddenly veered away from his pain. He dropped his hand; to his relief, Brenden saw no blood. He studied Brenden much as Brenden had studied the outlandish plant. “Who are you?”

  “I’m a—I’m the new gardener.”

  “Which one?”

  “Brenden. Brenden Vetch.”

  “I mean, are you turnips? Or foxglove?”

  “Neither. I’m the third gardener.”

  “Indeed.” He was a wizard, Brenden realized suddenly. He had a look in his eyes of standing guard over a closed door to a windowless room that might contain enormous treasure, or total chaos, or something completely unnameable that should never see the light of day. He came to a decision about Brenden; he seemed to take a step closer to him without moving. “Maybe you could help me. I need a gift. Something unusual. Perhaps with a touch of magic in it. Might you have something like that in your garden?”

  “I might,” Brenden answered, picking his words carefully under the disquieting gaze. “But I might not know it. I’m not used to recognizing magic when I see it. You’ll have to look for yourself.”

  “You see it in me,” the young man said softly. “You just told me so.”

  Brenden was silent, puzzled without knowing why by this lanky, dour young wizard. “Are you a teacher?” he asked finally.

  “No. My name is Valoren Greye. I am one of King Galin’s counselors. My father is Lord Tenenbros. You may recognize the name, being of the north country yourself, I would guess.”

  “The name blew through our village now and then. I never saw a face to put with it.”

  “Was this what brought you so far from home? You were drawn by the magic?”

  “No. I didn’t know this place existed. I was asked to come.”

  “Then you must be very skilled at what you do, for rumors of you to have reached as far as Kelior.” He paused; a flush appeared along his sallow cheekbones, which he explained in the next breath. “I want a gift for Princess Sulys. We are to be married. The papers have been drawn up, and will be signed in a ceremony tomorrow morning. I want some small token to give her when we are formally bound. Something other than roses from her father’s gardens.”

  Brenden nodded again, enlightened but at a loss. “You’d best come up with me and choose for yourself. If I can find my way back.”

  “I know the way.”

  He followed the wizard Valoren, watched him gaze curiously out of those light, secret eyes at everything he passed. Everyone else seemed to be at supper; they met no one Brenden recognized, only a student or two hurrying through the halls. Valoren scrutinized them as well, as though storing their faces somewhere behind his eyes for future reference.

&n
bsp; In the hothouses and greenhouses, he applied his keen attention to the plants. Some were still in flower, cascading veils of tiny white and purple blossoms; others bloomed the vibrant colors of the season’s dying leaves. The wizard sniffed them, asked a question now and then.

  “What’s this good for?”

  “It helps you see in the dark.”

  “And these?”

  “I watched for them when I made my way through the bogs. The ground around them was always solid.”

  The wizard grunted softly. “Have you any bog lilies? I remember them from home. The golden ones that smell like cinnamon.”

  “Only bulbs. None in flower.”

  “Of course, they always bloom in early spring. Pity. What magic is there in them?”

  Brenden hesitated, shrugged slightly. “Nothing I know of. I just brought them to remind me of home.”

  “The magic of memory…” Valoren stopped in front of the nameless plant, snagged, it seemed, by the thorns. “Does this bloom?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is the flower grotesque as well?”

  “No. It’s beautiful.”

  “What is it called?”

  “I don’t know. I only just noticed it today.”

  The wizard’s eyes moved from the strange plant to focus on him. “Then how do you know it blooms?”

  “I saw—I—” He stopped, under the wide, intent gaze, drew breath and began again. “It spoke. It showed me. That’s how I know what plants might be good for. Or not.”

  “Who taught you to do that? See into plants?”

  “No one.”

  “No one?” Valoren echoed incredulously.

  “Well, no one ever told me that plants couldn’t speak and that I couldn’t see what they said. It was something I just did.”

  “What other things did you find you could just do?”