Od Magic

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “I remembered the king’s menagerie.

  “The monster took me to the king’s gardens, where I found the object of its desire chained to some enormous trees. It had been a gift, I learned later, and certainly an ambiguous one, from the ruler of a distant land upon the birth of the king’s son and heir. King Galin had taken a liking to it, though its mournful twilight bellowing invariably caused the young prince to wail at the top of his lungs. Amid a cataract of arrows, the monster descended into the gardens, rested its head upon the ground, and I stepped out of its mouth. I broke the chains easily. Both monsters flew away together. I fled from the gardens before I got shot or arrested. I was walking down the street, looking for the entrance to Od’s school and trying to brush fish scales off my shirt when someone passing me said, “Look for the door under the shoe.” Of course I looked for the owner of the voice instead, and glimpsed the back of a long-haired, barefoot giantess with what looked like a solid layer of pigeons clinging to her cloak.

  “Then I looked up and there was the cobbler’s shoe. So I went in the door. To my surprise, the wizards had been looking for me. They gave me clean clothes and took me immediately to the king, who, when he finished cursing the distant ruler and his intentions, questioned me closely. Finally, he asked me what I wanted as a reward. I told him why I had come to Kelior, and he handed me back to the wizards, who took me in.”

  Yar paused, felt the students’ intent, expectant minds wanting something more, a moral to the story, the satisfaction of virtue rewarded. He gave them what he had.

  “And here I have been ever since.”

  Later, with Ceta in her river house, he told her of Elver and the labyrinth, the disquieted students and their dreams, the broken pane in the library. She listened only absently, he thought, as she sat on the carpet and sorted obscure scrolls. But he was wrong. He cracked nuts, ate them with his wine, gazing out over the river, remembering the tale he had told. He realized that neither had spoken in some time. He turned, found her lovely blue-gray eyes upon him.

  “Is something wrong?” she asked.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Your voice sounds strange.”

  “How strange?”

  “Sad.”

  “I’m just tired. It was a lively night.”

  “Maybe. What were you thinking of when I spoke?”

  He was silent a moment, remembering, then felt bewilderment surface, like some great chunk of river bottom stirred afloat by the prodding of memory. “Shouldn’t there have been something more?” he wondered. “Something more I should have asked for, something more I should have done?”

  She sat back on her knees, holding a scroll open, bewildered herself. “When?”

  “When the king asked me what I wanted as a reward for rescuing Kelior.”

  “But you did ask for what you wanted,” Ceta reminded him. “You wanted, more than anything else, to study magic at Od’s school. That’s why you put your own life in danger to rescue it. You wanted magic more than life.”

  “I wanted what I thought was magic.” She shook her head, still perplexed; he tried again. “I had a dream of magic before I walked through the door beneath the shoe. Somehow, within the walls of Od’s school, I lost sight of that dream.”

  “But you were taught everything the wizards know.”

  “I was taught everything the wizards are permitted to know.”

  He saw the sudden wariness in her eyes. “Then you must know everything that a wizard needs to know.”

  “In Numis,” he said recklessly. “But what about in other lands where magic is as free as air, and you yourself make the path you travel?”

  “Now I think you are dreaming,” she said gently.

  “No, I think I have been dreaming until now. I think I should have turned away from Kelior and run as far and as fast across the borders of Numis as I could go.”

  She was staring at him, astonished and troubled. “Yar, what makes you think another kingdom would be better? Numis has been at peace for decades; nobody has to fear dangerous or renegade magic—”

  “Everyone fears it,” he interrupted. “Every moment, in that school. Fear is the foundation stone of all our magic.”

  “It is the foundation of all our laws,” she argued. “And so we are at peace.” But he was not, and neither was she; he had shaken her. She added softly, “You don’t say such things in your classes, do you? Yar, you would not give my cousin any reason to—to question you. Would you?”

  “Valoren,” he murmured, seeing the lean, sallow, humorless face as he spoke.

  “Yar, you haven’t—”

  “I wonder what he would do.” He saw her face then, and checked himself, his mouth crooked. “I’m sorry. I’m getting crotchety.”

  “You’re getting restless,” she said more accurately. “Are you tired of me?”

  “In what realm of the imagination,” he wondered, “would that be possible?”

  “In any of several.” But the tension had left her voice, and the glance she cast at him was wry. “Maybe it’s the change of seasons. Winter on its way again, making you despondent.”

  “Maybe,” he breathed. “Well. We do what we do, and that’s the end of it.” He watched her shift scrolls and papers on the floor. “What are you doing?”

  “Trying to put Od’s life in order. Your story about rescuing Kelior from the monster and seeing Od will be the last in my account of her life; all this must fit in before.”

  No, he almost said, thinking of the gardener, there is one more tale.

  But he stopped himself, and was relieved when she veered away from Od, asking with a smile, “Have you heard about the princess and the wizard?”

  “What?”

  “Princess Sulys and Valoren—they are to be married. Perhaps one day a wizard-king will sit on the throne of Numis.” She gazed at him in astonishment. “How can that make you look so bleak?”

  He shook his head quickly. “I have no idea. I think my thoughts are still tangled in Od’s labyrinth.”

  “The boy Elver sounds very gifted,” she murmured, still looking bemused by Yar.

  “At least, singularly clearheaded,” he said, seizing the change of subject. “I don’t know yet about his gifts. We will see. I was with you when he arrived, and the first glimpse I had of him was in the labyrinth. He’s quick-witted and well-spoken, probably well educated. Some impoverished lord’s son, I would guess, who could not have afforded to enter through the main gate without the king’s favor.” He stopped, for Ceta had stopped listening to him. He waited patiently for her eyes, fixed on some nebulous distance, to come back to him.

  They did, finally. “What?”

  “What were you thinking?” he asked.

  “The labyrinth. Od’s labyrinth, you said. I never connected it with her. I thought the wizards built it.”

  “No.”

  “Did she write about it?”

  “Not a great deal, as far as I know. What we have is among her writings in the school’s library.”

  She tapped a scroll meditatively against her lips, musing again. “Then I must pay a visit to the school…I’ll ask Wye to take me to see the labyrinth, if you’re busy. It sounds fascinating.”

  “Be careful,” Yar said gravely. “It’s more complicated than even Od understood.” As is her school, he thought, but refrained from saying.

  But again she wasn’t listening; he could only guess at the labyrinth she was building within her imagination. “It must be like a mirror of your mind. No two ever alike…”

  “So it becomes, to everyone who walks it. But I don’t think that’s what Od intended.”

  “What lies in the center of a labyrinth?” she intoned like a riddle.

  “A map of how to get back out.”

  “Really? Is it accurate?”

  “I have no idea. I always cut a straight path through the walls. Except last night,” he remembered perplexedly.

  “What happened last night?”

 
; “I got a little lost.” He rose then, joined her on the carpet among the scrolls to forestall questions. He did not want to talk about misplacing himself; it would only trouble her again. “Let me help you. Where does it begin, Od’s life?”

  “In Numis, with a kiss.”

  “Show me.”

  She unrolled a scroll, pointed to the tiny figures painted on it in the margin, and the caption underneath. “Thus begins the life of the great wizard Od…”

  “Nobody,” he protested, “can document a kiss with any accuracy.”

  She let the scroll flip shut and rapped his head with it. “I can. Why couldn’t her mother?”

  “She wrote that?”

  “She was quite fond of her ungainly daughter. Od was extremely useful, from an early age, with the farm animals.”

  “Really.” He thought of the new gardener again, with his plants, and wondered if that was truly when he had first felt the need to keep secrets from Ceta. Her eyes were so close to his, trying to read his mind, that they blurred. She flung her braid around his neck and pulled him neatly from the labyrinth of his confusion with as much skill as any wizard, and far less fuss.

  He smiled. “Document this.”

  EIGHT

  Sulys stood on a stool in her undergarments, surrounded by cooing ladies, bolts of cloth, seamstresses, and her aunt Fanerl, the king’s sister, who seemed to be everywhere at once. She reminded Sulys of a spring, lean and coiled, bouncing at the slightest provocation. Even her graying chestnut curls, pinned like a bouquet atop her head, seemed to bob as she moved. She never stopped talking. Sulys tried to keep still while seamstresses unrolled great swaths of silk, dyed linen, satin and draped them over the princess for Fanerl to comment.

  “No,” was what she mostly said. “The princess is sallow enough as it is. That yellow gold leaches color out of her. Let’s try this silk.”

  “What about the green?” Sulys asked, eyeing an interesting shade among the bolts.

  “Dreadful. It reminds me of peas.”

  “Then the purple.”

  “You can’t get married in purple.”

  “Why not?”

  Fanerl drew out a monotonous length of silk the color of curdled cream, wrapped it around Sulys’s shoulders. “Well,” she said doubtfully. “At least it doesn’t clash with anything.”

  “How could I clash? My eyes are blue, my hair is brown—what could possibly—”

  “Chestnut. You have chestnut hair. Exactly as mine used to be when I was young. I looked my best in the palest of apricot silk. Or mauve. Do we—No, we don’t. Why,” she demanded of the room in general, “have we no mauve?”

  “I will find mauve, my lady,” a seamstress said, hurrying out to the hall, where merchants and their assistants waited behind a fortification of fabric. Mauve was brought in, while the princess was discreetly hidden behind a swath of something the color of deep red wine.

  “This,” Sulys suggested. “I like this.”

  “No.” Her aunt watched while the mauve wound about Sulys’s arms. “No,” she said again, briskly. “What was I thinking? That’s a color for your great-grandmother Dittany, not for a young woman on her wedding day. Try that.”

  There was a flutter of receding mauve and impending goldenrod. The princess sank within them, magically disappearing in silk. She reappeared, sitting on the stool beneath them and scowling.

  “What does it matter?” she demanded. “If I get married in bog-mist gray or in raspberries and cream? Aren’t there more important things to consider? Or am I imagining that?”

  Her aunt’s eyes, glittering like a bird’s, almost seemed to see her for a moment. She drew a sharp breath. “That’s it! Cream with tiny raspberry roses here and there and in your hair. It will be wonderful. Stand up.” Sulys gritted her teeth, clambered up to stand on the stool again. Fanerl pointed. “That one. And that one.”

  “Aunt Fanerl—”

  “Be quiet, child. The last thing anyone wants is that you should be forced to think on such a day. Valoren will be Lord Tenenbros someday, a power indeed in the king’s court, both wizard and noble. And young and comely, too, still with all his hair and teeth. Your father chose well for you; I’m sure you are grateful. I suggest you practice smiling; you will need to do a great deal of it in the future.” She paused to watch Sulys’s effort. Then she closed her eyes tightly and pinched the bridge of her nose. “Your mother laughed at everything! Child, why can’t you be more like your mother?”

  An hour later, Sulys sat on the marble lip of a balustrade along the cages in her father’s menagerie, her hand between the bars, stroking the ears of a little golden beast with enormous eyes and very long, spidery limbs. Its hands wrapped lightly around her hand as she petted and scratched; it shifted its round head to help her find the places where it most wanted her fingers. Sulys leaned her own face against the cold iron bars, smelling the familiar odors of the tidy cages: grains, rotting fruit, fur, the constant, underlying stench of wild animal.

  The royal menagerie had been maintained for nearly a century. Some of the huge trees that shaded it were thrice as old; they formed a broad canopy of green and gold that Sulys found peaceful. In their enormous cage, birds from many lands darted and sang among flowering bushes and slender trees. Some birds were large, brilliant, and raucous; others like tiny flying jewels. Peacocks stalked the lawns beyond the cages; white owls slept among the trees. Other animals were fierce and quite dangerous. They ate raw meat and roared like thunder; they grew enormous sets of horns and frightening teeth. Sulys avoided them.

  Od herself had brought back strange, magical animals from her journeys in earlier years for the wizards to study. But a noble’s pampered son had gotten bitten, or burned, or something, and the king forbade them to be kept in the school. So out they went and into cages. They all languished. One or two died. Then one night they all simply disappeared behind the locked doors of their cages. Od, it was widely believed, had heard their distress and returned to free them. If so, no one saw her face except the animals. The animals themselves, great white cats that glowed in the dark, birds that sang fire, tiny flying dragons, creatures out of legend, were never again seen in Numis.

  Sulys found the little golden creature magical in its own way: it recognized her, greeted her with little piping cries, and seemed to like the sound of her voice.

  “Which,” she told it darkly, “is more than I can say for my family. No one ever listens to me.” The warm, furry head bent lower to get her fingers onto its neck. “You’d think the man who intends to marry you would want to know something about what he will be living with. But it doesn’t seem so. Valoren at least pretends to listen to me when I tell him something. But I don’t think he’s really there behind his eyes. And he doesn’t hear anything I say that my father would not want to hear. I mean that quite literally. He does not hear. Not that I would say very much of those things to him anyway. If he did hear them, he would go off immediately and tell my father. For example, do you think I would dare tell my betrothed about the small things my great-grandmother Dittany and I do when we are together? No. And do you think I would tell him about sneaking into the Twilight Quarter at night by myself? Never. And—” She tried to lean closer for emphasis, but only pushed harder against the bars. “Do you imagine that under any circumstances he might be persuaded to accompany me? Do you? If so, I wish you would tell me…I am about to marry a man with closed doors behind his eyes and Do Not Enter signs on his mind, and who knows what warnings attached to his heart. And does anyone care? Besides me? No.”

  The creature sighed under her hand, slumped into itself, shifting her scratching down its backbone. She contemplated it, smiling a little, ruefully, at the long, dry fingers clinging to her hand. “No,” she whispered. “But you, at least, like my company.”

  She heard voices then, becoming clearer among the incomprehensible shrieks and mutterings of animals around her. She shifted, her captured arm outstretched against the bars, to peer around the side o
f the cage. She recognized the craggy, sour face of the High Warden, Lord Pyt, and jerked back. The man facing him, his back to Sulys, was her father.

  He had come here among the cages to be private, she guessed. No one else was around but the caretakers; if anyone else saw them, it would not be considered unusual for the king to be out for a stroll to inspect his menagerie. Sulys peeked out again. The king drew something raw and bloody out of a sack and tossed it between the bars of the cage facing him. A low rumble acknowledged it. The long slender fingers around Sulys’s tightened; the little creature squeaked nervously.

  The king was very tall, his fair hair lightening now toward silver. He had the voice of something that preferred its meals raw and could outroar everyone else. Sulys had heard his laughter as well, many times as she grew up; it seemed to have ceased to exist since her mother had died. He and Enys had both grown grim and prickly without the wry, golden-haired queen to make them laugh.

  So have I, Sulys thought, watching the back of her father’s head. I wouldn’t know how to make anyone laugh.

  The two men watched the animal feed while they spoke, their voices traveling clearly to Sulys between the cages.

  “My lord,” said Murat Pyt, “he saw Tyramin’s performance. But he was unable to talk to the magician himself. Only to the magician’s daughter, who revealed very little about her father and certainly added nothing to what is commonly known.”

  “And what is commonly known?” Galin asked. To Sulys’s amazement, he leaned forward, snapped his fingers, then slid his hand between the bars of the cage. She caught her breath. He did not instantly howl in agony; his hard face grew intent, curiously remote, as though it reflected the animal’s expression. His forearm moved; he seemed to be stroking the beast who had just consumed the bloody offering.

  Like me, Sulys thought, astonished again. He comes here to pet things. Only he pets things that might eat him.

  “Not much,” Lord Pyt answered him. “Ambiguities. Contradictions. Nothing seems certain. Tyramin was born in the remote backlands of Numis; he was born in a distant country; he was born here in Kelior. He is a trickster, he is a wizard. He wears a disguise when he performs; his face remains unseen. Arneth has his ways of finding things out. Reluctantly at your counselor Valoren’s request, I have given him leave from some of his duties as quarter warden to learn more about this vagrant magician who charms and enchants. The last time someone enchanted the Twilight Quarter the King of Numis nearly lost his city.”