Od Magic

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  She bowed her head again. “Then we must keep looking.”

  They moved down the street. Yar went the opposite direction to retrieve the abandoned Elver.

  He found the boy in one of the little back rooms where the performers were wandering restively, most still in odd pieces of costume, jewels in their hair, flecks of glitter in smudged paint on their faces. They clustered around Yar eagerly as he entered.

  “You’ve come for the boy, haven’t you?” a curly-haired young man asked. “He says you’re a wizard. Did you chance across Mistral out there?”

  “Mistral?”

  “Tyramin’s daughter. There’s some kind of trouble in the quarter. We heard a rumor of royal guards at the Twilight Gate, and she’s not here to tell us what to do.”

  Yar shook Elver, who was drowsing on a pile of moth-eaten skins and old packing blankets. The boy got to his feet, yawning.

  “Yes, I saw her. I believe she was negotiating a route out of trouble with the quarter warden.”

  Some smiled; other faces grew tight, hard as fears were confirmed.

  “Tyramin’s magic came too close to real tonight,” someone breathed.

  “Where is Tyramin?” Yar asked curiously. “Why isn’t he here to tell you what to do?”

  They gazed at him, as though puzzled that he would ask. “We never see him after a performance. He rests, he invents new tricks—”

  “Even when you might be in danger?”

  “Mistral will know what to do,” they told him. “Tyramin dreams and performs. The master magician must hone his art; he thinks of nothing else. It’s Mistral who handles the world outside his head.”

  Yar grunted, wondering, “Who is he? This Tyramin?”

  They only looked at one another, shaking their heads and smiling; no one offered to give him any other name, much less explain him. His mystery was part of his disguise, Yar guessed. He tugged at Elver, who seemed spellbound by the shadowy curves within a dancer’s glittering bodice.

  “Thank you for letting him stay. If I see Mistral again, I’ll tell her that you’re waiting.”

  The streets beyond the warehouse were growing quiet; the moon had vanished. It was that dark, chilly, timeless hour, the dregs of night. Even the Twilight Quarter sensed the dawn beyond its farthest border. Elver, swaying with weariness, yawned hugely and tripped over the cobbles. Time, Yar thought, to return to the school, face whatever waited there.

  Elver stopped. He stood like a post in the middle of the street, refusing to take another step; Yar wondered if he had fallen asleep on his feet. Then his head turned slowly. He stared at a solid wall of black between two buildings whose front windows were still lit.

  “What is it?” Yar asked softly. And then the boy was gone, swallowed up so quickly into the darkness that he startled Yar. The wizard cast his own light into the alley, a pale fire ignited quickly and with little thought by his alarm. The flash, brief and cold as moonlight, illumined two figures. Then the alley went dark again. Yar, sighing with relief, stepped into the dark, stopping the two at the edge of light.

  “Brenden,” he whispered. “They’re searching for you.”

  “I know,” the gardener said bleakly.

  Yar’s hand closed on Elver’s thin shoulder. “How did you see him?” he asked. “I didn’t.”

  Elver scratched his head. “I think I was dreaming,” he answered vaguely. “I saw the stones in the wall move.”

  “In the dark?”

  He shrugged. “In my head.”

  Yar eyed him narrowly. Magic, it seemed, was revealing itself everywhere he looked in the Twilight Quarter that night. Unruly, unpredictable, and liable to cause them all a great deal of trouble before the long night was over.

  He looked at Brenden questioningly. The young man nodded. “I’ve been here in the dark for hours, I think. I remember when the stones seemed to crowd around me, into my mind. It seemed the safest thing to be. A stone wall. Nobody ever looks at a wall.”

  “We followed you down to the warehouse, then lost you. I’ve been searching for you since then.”

  Brenden nodded jerkily. “I thought I’d wait until dawn, then go on back home.”

  “Home.”

  “North. It’s quieter there.”

  “You’re frightened,” Yar told him. “You terrified yourself and then we did. It’s not easy to think clearly when you’re afraid.”

  “No,” Brenden agreed starkly. “I don’t know what’s happening in my own head. I don’t know how I’m doing the things I do. What if I do something wrong?”

  “But you didn’t,” Elver said eagerly, his tired eyes alight. “You saved the Twilight Quarter from burning up. You rescued that woman with the golden eyes.”

  “She rescued me.” Brenden hesitated, his eyes on Yar; his voice grew very soft. “I put the fire out. But she made the burned house look like itself again; she sent the water back into the river and put the fountain back together. She turned my magic into Tyramin’s trick.”

  “Did she,” Yar breathed.

  “She understood that I didn’t know what I was doing, or what I am. She wanted to talk, to explain things to me. But I ran away from her. I decided just to get away from everyone. It’s best that way.”

  “Not for the school. The wizard Valoren told the king about your powers, and now Wye is in trouble. And so am I, if I go back there without you.”

  “Valoren!” Brenden exclaimed. He cast a glance at the silent street as though the wizard might suddenly appear at the sound of his name. “How would he know what kind of powers I have? All we talked about was flowers.”

  “It’s his duty to be aware of these things. Wye saw the power in you. So did I. You don’t know how to conceal it. So now the king also knows, and with half the Twilight Quarter calling you Tyramin, even the street wardens know. There was a fire in the quarter that you put out by magic. Fire isn’t something anyone ignores in an ancient city. Nor does anyone easily forget the man who puts it out by summoning a river up out of the cobblestones.”

  Brenden slumped back against the wall but stopped himself somehow from vanishing back into it.

  “What should I do, then?” he pleaded. “To get us all out of trouble?”

  “He’s not Tyramin,” Elver protested. “And he’s done nothing wrong. He rescued the Twilight Quarter. The king should reward him the way he rewarded you for rescuing Kelior from the flying monsters.”

  “By keeping me under his eye and training me to teach only what he wanted me to know?” Yar asked sharply, startling himself as well as Elver. The boy stared back at him, wordless for once. “Where else did you think all your questions would lead?”

  “What flying monsters?” Brenden asked.

  “Never mind them now.” Yar sighed, pulling his thoughts together. “Elver has a point. You have done nothing wrong, and the king should be grateful to you. If you go home, Valoren will think you have something to hide, and he will come looking for you. He will find you, and he will bring you back to Kelior, one way or another. It would be better, I think, if you go back to the school by your own choice. The quarter warden is looking for you as well—”

  “For what?” Brenden asked incredulously. “Putting out a fire?”

  “For being associated with Tyramin, and with magic that is suspect, beyond the king’s control.”

  Brenden closed his eyes, opened them again. “I didn’t—I never said—I didn’t even know Tyramin’s name until they shouted it at me.”

  “We’ll go back and explain. May it be that simple. The Twilight Gate is just up the street. Keep to the shadows. And,” he added to the strangely mute Elver, “no talking.”

  They made it within sight of the gate without mishap. But the line of armed guards across it, men and horses raising a mist with their cold breaths, armor picking up stray gleams from the last stubborn lights still burning in the city, made them all duck back around a corner.

  “What should we do?” Brenden whispered.

  “I�
�m thinking.” For no reason at all, he thought of the strange, shadowless shapes Od had written about, who had hidden themselves and their power in a place not even the sun could find. Skrygard Mountain. That might be just far enough, he thought wearily, from the king’s justice and Valoren’s cold, relentless, shortsighted eyes.

  “We could all turn invisible,” Elver ventured. “I taught myself how.”

  “Why am I not surprised?” Yar murmured. A horse flicked an ear their direction, and he drew them farther back behind a food stall where dying coals still pulsed within the brickwork of the fire pit. But why should I? he argued with himself Why should I? Impulses and submerged angers chose that inconvenient moment to surface; he fought them, trying to think what would be best for Brenden, for Mistral and Tyramin, even for Elver, who seemed to have made his own impulsive decision.

  “Skrygard Mountain,” Brenden whispered, and Yar started. He looked at the gardener, who seemed surprised as well. “It just came into my head.”

  “It was in mine,” Yar told him. “You heard it. What do you know about Skrygard Mountain?”

  “Nothing much. I found myself there early last spring. In a quiet, cold, shadowy place. There were odd shapes in the snow. I don’t know anything about them.”

  “Still there,” Yar said wonderingly. “After all these centuries. What did you think when you saw them?”

  “They seemed alive. I don’t know why. I waited for them to speak. I listened. But I didn’t hear. So I turned around and went back down. Have you seen them?”

  Yar shook his head. “Od wrote about them.”

  “We could hide there.”

  “We could hide,” Yar repeated slowly, “like they did…But from what, I wonder.”

  Brenden nodded toward the guarded gate. “That,” he suggested simply. “And the likes of Valoren.” He shrugged a little at Yar’s quizzical gaze. “It’s just a thought. I’d rather be there, now, than here, that’s all.”

  Yar was silent, his thoughts straying from Skrygard Mountain to Ceta, who had first shown him the name. Elver huddled against the fire pit bricks, tugging a corner of Yar’s cloak over him. “At least it’s warm,” he mumbled, his eyes closing. “Tell me when you make up your mind.”

  Brenden drew breath, held it, then shifted to get up. “I should just go with the guard. You won’t have to explain anything to anyone then.”

  “Oh, I’ll have some explaining to do,” Yar said thinly. “Anyway, why should you? Why should you go back under guard?”

  “Because that’s the way the world is?”

  “Why should it be?”

  “Then we’ll go invisible. We can get back to the school without anyone noticing.” He added, at Yar’s stubborn silence, “You just told us what you thought would be best.”

  “I’m having second thoughts.”

  “Now?”

  “I don’t want to go back,” Yar said, and felt, as the words left his mouth, an enormous relief that all his despair and restlessness had finally found their way into words. “I know exactly what and how Valoren has been taught, and I know a few things he doesn’t. I am not allowed to say what I know. To become anything more than what I have been trained to be. I don’t teach lies, but I do not teach all I know is true, and I am not allowed the dangers of curiosity and wonder. If you go back, the king will reward you for rescuing Kelior, and at the same time he will put walls around you, so that the only power you will master will be under his command. I don’t know what to do for you, or even for myself. I only know that I don’t want to go back to what I have been.”

  “I don’t like the sound of where you’ve been, either,” Brenden said tersely. “Do we have a choice?”

  “No.” He was silent a little, thinking again for them all. Brenden waited, watching him. Yar heard a snore from Elver. He sighed. “Not at the moment, anyway. I’ll find Arneth Pyt and tell him that I’m taking you back to the school with me. He’ll be able to take the guard from the gate then, and let the magician and his daughter leave the quarter. That much we can do.”

  “I just came to Kelior to garden,” Brenden said helplessly. “Od said I could go home when I wanted.”

  “You could try telling Valoren that. It might help.” He put his hand on the young man’s shoulder, rendering him and the dreaming Elver as unremarkable as the brickwork. “No one will notice you if you don’t move. I’ll be back quickly.”

  Brenden nodded. Yar, scarcely more visible, cast about the emptying streets for the quarter warden. He found him easily, and, to his surprise, very close. Yar stepped around the corner and saw Arneth standing at the Twilight Gate, speaking to someone who had just ridden through it.

  The messenger’s voice did not carry, but the wizard’s ear picked it out like a thread in a weave across the air.

  “Lord Pyt sent me to tell you that absolutely no one is to be permitted to enter or leave the Twilight Quarter, and the gate will remain under guard until the king himself sends word.”

  “Now what?” Arneth demanded tightly, echoing the words in Yar’s head. The messenger leaned down toward him, nearly whispering, but Yar heard him.

  “Princess Sulys has vanished. She hasn’t been seen since before sunset. No one can find her. The king and Valoren fear that either Tyramin or the missing gardener—or both—may have something to do with her disappearance.”

  Arneth made a noise that sounded like a muffled curse. Yar raised his eyes to the vacuous sky and swallowed his own comments. He returned in a single step to his spell and found it broken.

  The brickwork that was Elver gave a snore and was still again. The brickwork that Brenden had been was nothing but bricks.

  SIXTEEN

  The missing princess sat with Ceta on the center stone of the labyrinth. They had been talking for many melted candles; there was no other way in that windowless, magical place to measure the passing of time. They had lost sight of one another immediately upon entering the stonework. Sulys had heard Ceta’s astonished comment very clearly. Then their voices, calling back and forth, sounded with bewildering randomness, one moment separated by a single wall, it seemed, and the next by the entire labyrinth. Sulys, wending her way alone through the shadowy place, blocked time and again by walls that seemed to rise up out of nowhere, took comfort from Ceta’s unperturbed voice.

  “But what’s the point of it?” Sulys demanded once, exasperated by the endless fits and starts of the path. “Going around and around and getting nowhere?” Ceta answered something; the words, oddly faint, bounced off stone, frayed beyond recognition. “What?” Sulys shouted back, alarmed.

  “I think it’s meant to imitate your life,” Ceta called back, abruptly very close and startlingly loud.

  “Well,” Sulys answered after some thought, “it does remind me of Aunt Fanerl and my wedding.”

  Ceta laughed, far away again. Sulys smiled wryly, struck by a skewed vision of the topsy-turvy preparations, which had resulted in her escape in a pair of dreadful shoes and a length of fabric to run in circles through a labyrinth. It shouldn’t be that difficult, she thought. I should just tell Aunt Fanerl what I want. But that, she realized instantly, was not the problem. She could not want anything unless she wanted Valoren.

  She nearly tumbled over a broad stone in her way. Its sides had been carved into a perfect circle; the top was flat. Tired and footsore, she sat down, deciding to wait and see if Ceta might wander along. She called; Ceta answered from some distance. Sulys lifted her taper, looking for the nearest opening in the wall. The marble made a ring around her, she realized; there was no place left to go.

  “Oh, I’m here,” she whispered. Her little circle of light illumined other half-burned candles and blackened ends dropped by previous questers. She picked up a few, lit them with her candle, and fastened them in their hardening wax onto the stone around her. She called out Ceta’s name, telling her excitedly, “I’m here!”

  “Do you see a round stone with a map on it?” Ceta asked, sounding very close again.


  Sulys looked around, then got up and studied the stone she had been sitting on. There were carvings in it, a neat spiral through what looked like a very simple maze, nothing that resembled the elaborate, obstacle-riddled path that had impeded her. “Yes,” she called back, adding dourly, “a map of something anyway. Nowhere I’ve been.”

  “Then you have reached the center.”

  “Where are you?”

  “I don’t know,” Ceta answered.

  And suddenly there she was, stepping through the ring and blinking.

  “How strange,” she breathed, joining the princess to gaze down at the center stone. “I kept thinking of Yar and coming up against walls. As though the maze had refashioned itself around my thoughts. But this little map looks like nowhere I’ve been, either.”

  “Maybe it’s the way out?”

  “I hope so. I hope it’s that simple.” She lingered, frowning down at it, still thinking of the wizard, Sulys guessed. Ceta said slowly, “It was when I told you I didn’t know where I was that I found myself here. As if this is not the end of the maze but the beginning. The place where you finally realize you are lost.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “That I finally understood that I have no idea where Yar is, these days. What he’s thinking, what’s troubling him. That he might have gone somewhere I’m afraid to follow. I didn’t want to admit that anything might be wrong between us.”

  Sulys nodded, comprehending the gist if not the details. “I was thinking of Valoren, and I kept stumbling into our wedding. My brother Enys saw it: that I can’t care about it unless I care about him, and so far I’ve found no reason at all to care about anything.”

  Ceta sat down on the center stone, folding up her long legs in a fashion that would have caused Aunt Fanerl’s curls to uncoil. Sulys relighted a candle that had sputtered beneath Ceta’s silks, and sat beside her, sliding her feet with relief out of their shoes.

  “Yes,” Ceta said simply. “I felt much the same about my marriage.”

  “Do you know your cousin well?”

  “I knew him better when we were growing up than I do now. He borrowed my books. He liked studying peculiar insects, I remember, and he kept a pet raven. He used to know how to laugh.”