Od Magic

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  She bore as much as she could in a windowless chamber Fanerl had chosen as her battlefield for the event. The room was too warm, the air cloyed with the scents of dried petals in bowls mingling with lamp oil. Sulys, surrounded by seamstresses, shoemakers, ribbons and fabric and laces, her ladies cooing, Fanerl draping her with this and that until she felt like an elaborate cake in the royal kitchens, wanted, after an hour or so, to burst into tears or scream.

  She did neither. She ran instead, when Fanerl left the room in the company of three maids who kept bringing her the wrong shade of silk hanging they were purloining from the windows in adjoining chambers. Sulys looked around. Everyone was talking, examining fabric and ribbons, trying on jeweled buckles the shoemakers had brought. Nobody noticed when she walked out the door in a pair of shoes with jewels like great gaudy beetles all over them. She fled down the nearest passage into the gardens, thinking morosely of Aunt Fanerl chattering away and never hearing the alarmed silence around her. If one of Sulys’s ladies had the sense to throw a veil over her own face and stand in the princess’s place, Fanerl would never even know she had gone.

  It was twilight by then, and chilly. She had only a forgotten swath of butter-colored satin draped over her shoulders. The cool air in the gardens smelled of earth and rain, and late apples still hanging on the trees. She walked swiftly, taking deep breaths of it, trying to clear her head. The still, secretive face of her betrothed kept intruding into her thoughts. As it would intrude into her life, soon enough. It doesn’t matter, she told herself fiercely. It doesn’t matter. I will find my own happiness, like Dittany. Somehow.

  But it did matter. She stopped near the edge of the royal gardens, stared up at the massive, graceful towers, the broad walls with their lovely, colored casements opening to the students’ chambers, all brightly lit as though behind them, the budding wizards were deep in their studies, absorbing words and transforming them into magic. Also behind one of them was her honey-eyed betrothed, his rigid, powerful mind the crowning achievement of the School of Magic that had begun, centuries before, in the abandoned cobbler’s shop.

  She began to walk again, with some idea now of where she was going. She would not marry masked chance and find out what face it wore for good or ill after the event. Nor would she go masked to her own wedding. She would show Valoren her true thoughts and let him make his own choice then. If he and her father grew scales and breathed fire at her, so be it.

  She went through the small gate in the wall between the school and the castle, and then along the path that led to a side door into the school. She had no idea where Valoren might be, and she saw no one who might be able to tell her, just the occasional tardy student hurrying, by the smells and sounds coming out of the dining hall, to supper. She wandered a little, came to the main hallway with its broad marble stairways on both sides leading upward, both empty except for the sound of some slow steps coming down.

  A woman rounded the graceful curve in one stairway. She was willowy and dark-haired, dressed in fine silks that mingled sky-blue and palest gold as they drifted around her long limbs. They struck Sulys in that moment as being the perfect colors for a wedding dress. Her eyes rose to the face above the clothes and she recognized Ceta Thiel, Valoren’s cousin, who might possibly know where to find him.

  Ceta had stopped, midstairs, at the sight of her.

  “Lady Sulys?” she said wonderingly, and Sulys remembered the raw length of satin over her bare shoulders and the hideous shoes on her feet.

  “I’m a fugitive,” she confessed to Ceta, who was hurrying down the rest of the stairs, “from the wedding preparations.” Ceta’s eyes, kinder and more perceptive than her cousin’s, actually smiled.

  “Is that the chosen color?”

  “I hope not. I look terrible in butter.”

  “You need a shade with some fire in it.”

  “Aunt Fanerl does not believe in fire. Have you seen Valoren?”

  “I’ve seen nobody.” Ceta sighed. “I’ve been up in the tower, waiting for Yar Ayrwood to take me through the labyrinth. He seems to have vanished.”

  “Have you heard my father shouting? Valoren would be with him.”

  “Why would the king be shouting at his wizards?”

  “I don’t know. He was disturbed and heading this way when last I saw him.”

  Ceta’s dark brows crumpled; she glanced up the silent stairway, looking disturbed herself by the news. “That may explain Yar’s disappearance,” she breathed. “Oh, I hope not. I hope he hasn’t done something reckless.”

  “Yar?” Sulys said surprisedly. “Wasn’t he the one—”

  “Yes.”

  “He has never give my father a moment’s—”

  “I know.”

  Sulys eyed her. “Do you really think he is capable?”

  “I don’t know.” Ceta folded her arms and brooded up the stairwell as though wishing might produce the wizard. Her voice grew very soft. “He has been worrying me lately; I can believe he might have done something ill considered enough to inspire the royal wrath.”

  “Really?” Sulys asked hopefully. “For instance, what?”

  “I can’t imagine.”

  “Oh.”

  Ceta seemed to hear the disappointment in Sulys’s voice; she glanced bewilderedly at the princess and was distracted again by her apparel. “You must be cold, my lady. Perhaps you should wait for a more peaceful moment to discuss things with my cousin.”

  “No. I have made up my mind. I am going to speak to him tonight while I have the courage. Even if he only wants to marry for ambition’s sake—and I can’t see any other indication at this point—there are things I must tell him. We have hardly spoken. I thought we should get a few matters clear between us before we marry.”

  “Oh, without a doubt you should,” Ceta said firmly. “I had the same trouble with my husband, Lord Thiel. Before we married, he rarely spoke; afterwards, he never listened. I might as well have been a bird singing in a bush.”

  “What did you do about it?”

  “Nothing helped, until he solved the problem by dying.”

  “Oh,” said Sulys. “Oh, yes.”

  “I take it my cousin is not easy to talk to.”

  “He would like to be, I think,” Sulys answered carefully. “But he doesn’t hear me when I speak, and I don’t think he would like what I have to say if he began to listen to me.”

  Ceta gazed at her, amazed. “What could you possibly have to say to him that—” She stopped herself. “What a question. I’m sorry, my lady. It’s Valoren you need to tell, not me.”

  “No.” Sulys hesitated, continued impulsively, “I would—I would like—I have no one to give me advice except my great-grandmother.”

  “Ah.”

  “And Aunt Fanerl, of course.”

  “Of course,” Ceta said with sympathy. “We all have them. Mine was my grandmother, who told me endlessly that reading was bad for the skin and would wash the color out of my eyes.”

  Sulys laughed. The unexpected sound surprised her; she had forgotten that she could. She took a step closer to Ceta. “Do you—can you stay for a little and talk to me? I desperately need advice.”

  “Of course,” Ceta answered quickly. “Of course I can. But where—” She glanced around them doubtfully. “We can’t talk privately in the library, the students will be roaming the halls when they’ve finished supper, the gardens will be dark and cold, and I don’t know how long we would be private in Yar’s chambers…”

  “You mentioned a labyrinth,” Sulys suggested. “I’ve heard it’s a very small thing, down in the cellar. That would be private and warm enough, I would think. We could take plenty of candles in case we get lost. No one would interrupt us there.”

  Ceta hesitated for a breath. Then she cast away doubt and shrugged lightly. “Well, as you said, it’s a small place, and I wanted to go there anyway to see if the tales of it are true.”

  “What tales?”

  “That it takes a dif
ferent shape for everyone who goes into it.”

  Sulys was already plucking tapers from their sconces along the walls, blowing them out and filling her makeshift shawl with them. “That may be so,” she said absently, “but as far as I’ve heard, everyone makes their way back out eventually.”

  “I suppose if we get truly lost, someone will find us,” Ceta said, and began to pick her own bouquet of tapers. “They haven’t lost even a beginning student down there yet.”

  She handed a final taper, still burning, to the princess, who followed her to the cellar stairs and into the dark.

  TWELVE

  Brenden recognized the Twilight Quarter easily. It was the only place waking up just as the rest of the city began closing itself away from the night. He passed through the Twilight Gate when it was still just light enough to see the stalls lining the square beyond, pushing back shutters and curtains like insects opening their wings to reveal the hidden color. Streets ran without pattern away from the square, curved between high, narrow buildings beginning to part their hangings, open their doors to cast a crosshatch of light over the dusky street below. The city behind Brenden seemed to vanish; he stood at the boundary of a secret world that appeared by night and disappeared by day. Entranced by colors, smells, sounds, he watched it thoughtlessly until a pair of horses snorted impatiently behind him, and he was jostled by others crossing the borders of the night world.

  He wandered, astonished by dancers’ glittering, whirling skirts, by giants with painted faces stalking through the crowds. Wye had given him some money for his work; he spent a coin on mutton rolled around cloves of garlic and roasted on a skewer, another on a cup of ale. He ate watching a knife-thrower extinguish candles with his blades. After a while, as the streets filled and the line between torchlight and night grew more intense, he remembered why he had come there.

  He looked for plants. It seemed an implausible thing to find in that upside-down day, in that season. But he found stalls that carried potted herbs he recognized and other oddments that he didn’t. He stopped to study one with long, green swords for leaves, each blade serrated along the edges. It had healing properties, the old woman within the stall told him. It soothed burned flesh, kept small wounds clean, and made rough hands smooth. She bent her head closer, the fringe of brass beads on her veil catching firelight, and added softly, “It has its magic, too, young master, if you put it out at nights to take in moonlight. The moon pulls a pure white flower out of it that you give to the girl of your choice when the moon is full. One whiff of it, and she will love you until the moon sets again.”

  “And after?”

  She cackled. “After that you’re on your own. From the north, are you?”

  “How do you know?”

  “I know. Everyone in the world passes through the Twilight Quarter once. Pay me now, and I’ll keep the plant for you until you’re ready to leave.”

  Brenden shook his head, unable to conceive of anyone who might compel a magic flower out of him. “Another time. But I have a strange plant myself; maybe you could tell me the name of it.”

  He described it. She didn’t know, she said, but Grovlin might, two streets that way; he sold squash and rutabagas at that time of the year, but in spring his stall was full of peculiarities. Brenden thanked her and turned away and saw Meryd.

  He felt his heart twist painfully in his chest; stones of grief shifted precariously, threatened to fall. He tried to call her. His voice would not come. He watched her move away from him, lithe and graceful, her long, heavy hair feathering out of the dark bundle at her neck, the pearly skin of her cheek and jaw and eyelid briefly flushed with the hot light from coals under a grill. He tried again to say her name; sound stuck in his throat as though he had forgotten how to speak. The angle of her head shifted; he only saw the back of her now, moving inexorably away, leaving him again. Before the crowds closed around her, he broke what seemed a spell over his limbs and found he could move.

  He ran after her, his hand outstretched, caught her shoulder finally. She turned. Words pushing at last into his throat died again. Some trick of the quarter had transformed her into a stranger, he thought bewilderedly. Or else the illusion he had named Meryd had never been there at all.

  “Sor—sorry,” he stammered, releasing her hastily. She gazed at him expressionlessly a moment. Her eyes, a lovely, glittering amber, were nothing like Meryd’s, he saw. Meryd’s were sky-blue, and they knew him. “I thought—you were someone—”

  “Someone else,” she said. Her voice, unexpectedly deep, sweet, made him want to hear more of it. She smiled as though she read his mind. Then the smile faded a little; her eyes widened, became remote again, stranger’s eyes, but gazing at him as though they recognized him.

  “Who are you?” she asked abruptly.

  “No one. Brenden Vetch. Just a gardener at the school.” He added, at her silence, “I came down from the north country, this past season. I knew someone with your dark hair, who might have found her way to Kelior.”

  “You’re a gardener.”

  “I’m looking for a plant.” He backed a step. “I won’t trouble you. I just thought—”

  “You thought you knew someone,” she finished softly, “among all these strangers.”

  He swallowed, mute again, feeling the stones he carried with him everywhere, the terrible weight of his solitude. He shifted them mentally, settled them as though they were a sack of boulders over his shoulder. Her eyes flickered oddly, reflecting light, he realized bewilderedly, like an animal across a night fire. Such things must be common, he guessed, in the Twilight Quarter.

  “I hope you find her,” she said, and turned away, lost from sight in a step as a giant who was twirling firebrands crossed her path, trailing a wake of onlookers down the street.

  Brenden stood staring at where she had been, seeing nothing now, not even memory, for nothing was all he had, he knew then. Nothing and stones. Nothing and the stones of sorrow he had been living with for so long he couldn’t remember how to live without. They weighed in him again, great massive things he nearly could not balance, could not settle. His grief, his loneliness, his anger at being left again and again, seemed impossible to quiet. They threatened to roll, threatened to thunder, despite all his efforts to calm them. Like legendary beasts in a menagerie, agitated by storm, they paced, cracking flagstones with their gigantic feet; they strained against their bars, distorting their cages, while he, the helpless mortal, barefoot and drenched in the furious storm, ran desperately from one to the next to placate them.

  But they would not be still. Aware, for the first time, of something in himself that was stronger than the strength he knew, he came close to panic. What would happen if it broke free? If the boulders roared and rolled, if the beasts snapped the bars of their cages and burst into the world?

  “What is it?” he heard himself ask breathlessly, and when someone screamed in answer, he thought that the enormity inside of him had finally taken shape on the streets of the Twilight Quarter.

  He looked for it frantically, seeing outside of himself again. Everyone was staring upward, including the giant juggler. The only monster Brenden saw was fire. One of the giant’s burning brands, he realized, must have flown far too high. It had been caught on a tiny balcony at the top of a house and was busily eating the hangings on both sides of the window. Still hungry, it swarmed up toward the roof. Glass shattered suddenly; what looked like a bucket flew out the broken window and over the balcony railing. Someone followed it. There were sharp, scattered screams from the crowd around Brenden. The figure did not fall like the bucket. She stopped at the balcony’s edge, careened over it, caught herself with a movement so precariously balanced it did not seem human. Her dark, rippling hair flowed free; Brenden could not see the color of her eyes.

  She cried out. Meryd? he thought confusedly. But there was no time to wonder. The fire eating her roof would jump to the houses beside it like an acrobat-magician, scaling heights, making things disappear, transfo
rming the old houses into cinder. He looked around desperately, saw a dancer with a golden sash around her waist. Her fists jammed over her mouth, she squeaked rhythmically in horror. When Brenden grabbed the end of her sash and pulled, she tucked in her arms and whirled as though she were in the middle of her dance. Brenden spun her off-balance into the giant. He teetered, broke into three parts that tumbled into the crowd, one of them catching the dancer as she fell.

  The sash had no weight to carry it. Brenden carried weight; he carried so much weight it was overwhelming him, so much that a heart’s worth of weight was nothing to him. He attached his heart to the end of the sash and flung it upward toward the balcony. It was not long enough to reach. So he made it longer, letting the end he held trail through him into the wild dark he carried always. Weighted with sorrow, fed endless hungers and chaos, the sash flung itself around the balcony, elongated into a narrow bridge of gold between the gardener and the fire.

  The crowd gasped. The woman leaped to meet it, caught it midfall, and breaths stopped. The sash held. She slid jerkily down it, limp as a rag doll but for her hands that shifted and clung, shifted and clung. She was barely halfway down when the roof caught fire. The balcony railing, a scrollwork of iron attached to the wooden beams of the house, was beginning to wobble. A corner sprang loose. The sash bounced; the woman swung, still a floor or two above the crowd. The giant, who had reassembled itself without its painted head into young men standing on one another, was still too short to catch hold of her. Her hair fanned through the air as she turned her head to look fearfully at the balcony. Brenden, remembering such a long, lovely dark that shielded him at night from thought, pulled more out of himself, an implacable strength to match his wish. It hammered the railing back into place against the burning wall; the flame he felt licking at it as futilely as words could not free it again.

  The woman descended. The giant, swaying and hovering, was poised to catch her as she neared. The crowd closed around the giant, keeping it upright as the woman made her way toward it. Brenden still could not see her face clearly. The crowd murmured anxiously. Someone had caught the fallen bucket; it was passing from hand to hand on its way to the little fountain in the middle of the street. Someone near the house threw the water at the fire. It arched upward a little way, then splashed down again, drenching the upturned faces.