Od Magic

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “Really?”

  “And then he went to Kelior to become a wizard, and I got married…I didn’t see much of him for years. When the king introduced him at court as his counselor, I almost didn’t recognize him. My sweet young cousin had grown so distant, so watchful. So—”

  “Suspicious,” Sulys said succinctly. “As though he’s waiting for you to do something wrong. How can anyone marry a man like that?”

  “But is he really like that?”

  “I don’t know! We tried to talk, but we might as well have been speaking different languages, and he didn’t give me time to find the courage to tell him things he has to know.”

  “What things?”

  “Things.” She held her breath, looking for words, loosed it helplessly. “Little things.”

  “Like what? You sing in your sleep? You hate being touched?”

  “Worse.”

  “Worse,” Ceta repeated blankly. “All right. You would rather be bound to a stake and burned to a crisp by a dragon than be married to anyone.”

  “I wouldn’t go that far.”

  “You love someone else.”

  Sulys shook her head, swallowing. “I wish I did,” she whispered. “I wish I loved someone. My great-grandmother married without love, and found a way to be happy. Is love always a matter of chance when you marry?”

  “Often enough. Not always.” She paused, gazing questioningly at Sulys. “What exactly are you afraid of? That you can never love Valoren, and you will be miserable for the rest of your life?”

  “That, of course.”

  “But that’s not all.”

  “No,” Sulys answered hollowly. Ceta waited wordlessly. Sulys bent finally, pulled one of her shoes off. She held it so that the jewels of red and blue and green reflected fire. Then she picked up a taper, blew it out. Smoking wick drew close to fire burning deep within a jewel. Fire filled Sulys’s eyes, flowed from jewel to princess, then to the candle wick. The fire flicked alive upon the wick, as green as emerald.

  Ceta’s gasp nearly blew it out. “Touch it,” Sulys said, staring into the jewel.

  Ceta drew a finger through it. “It’s cold,” she whispered.

  “It’s not real. Just a reflection. Illusion.” She blinked her eyes; the little green flame on the wick disappeared. “It’s just a game my great-grandmother taught me. Play magic, she calls it. Magic too unimportant to notice.” She moved her eyes from the wick to Ceta. “Do you think it will be too unimportant for Valoren to notice?”

  “I don’t—I have—” She paused, said more coherently, “I think I’m beginning to understand the problem. Where did the magic come from?”

  “My great-grandmother’s country. They permit such small things there.”

  “What else can you do?”

  Sulys glanced upward toward the shadowy vault above the labyrinth, half-expecting to see Valoren’s eyes searching the source of the power through the ceiling. “If I had some water, I might be able to see where Valoren is.”

  “Or Yar?”

  “Perhaps. Though my great-grandmother can see such things far more easily than I. Sometimes we find missing things that way. She can’t see well, and she’s always mislaying something. She also taught me to hide little secrets—a letter, or a ring, a flower—by sewing a certain pattern of stitchwork around it. Sometimes, when I look into a candle flame I can see what will happen.”

  “You can?”

  “She didn’t teach me that; I was born with it. But I’m sure I inherited it from her.”

  “Could your mother do these small things also?”

  “No. And she made my great-grandmother promise to keep such things secret. So I never told my mother what I can do; that way she wouldn’t have to keep secrets from my father. You see, that’s the other difficulty. I won’t be able to keep anything secret from Valoren. He’ll make me tell my father, and my father will—he’ll—I have no idea what he’ll do with a daughter working forbidden magic under his roof.”

  “And you won’t like Valoren any better for having forced you to confess.”

  “No,” she said starkly. “I won’t. So you see why I must talk to him before we do something that will force us to hate each other.”

  “Get married, you mean.”

  “Yes.”

  Ceta thought, long, jeweled fingers tapping at her lips. “Well,” she said finally, “this would be one way for you to get Valoren’s attention. He’ll either find out before you’re married, or after, and you’re right: far better for him to find out before. You could work some of your small magics now, and see if it brings him down here. I can fetch whatever you need. Are you hungry? I know where the kitchens are; it’s something I learned while working for long hours in the library.”

  “Oh, yes.” Sulys sighed. “I forgot about supper when I ran away. But how will you find your way back here?”

  Ceta’s mouth crooked. “The same way I did before, I suppose. Sooner or later I will reach the point that the labyrinth is trying to make. Maybe it will be easier the second time. Now tell me what you need.”

  Sulys stood up, paced a moment in her bare feet, thinking. “Paper. Scissors, if you can find them. Water. A cup. Buttons. Well, never mind buttons. I can pull them off my sleeves. Ink, or something like it. I have cloth. We have plenty of candle wax; we can shape things out of that.”

  “I’d better bring more candles. And I have buttons, too.” Ceta revealed a long row of them down the front of her underskirt. “Anything else?”

  “Whatever looks magical in the kitchen.”

  “Everything looks magical in a kitchen when you’re hungry.” She hesitated. “Won’t they wonder where you are if you’re not at supper?”

  “No. They’ll just think I’m with my great-grandmother. They never really wonder unless they need me. Anyway, my father is still with the wizards, as far as I know. So I might as well be here as anywhere.”

  She rose to let Ceta study the map of the labyrinth again. Even in the flickering light the path back to the beginning seemed simple: a turn here, there, here again, then there, and there, and there you were, stepping into time and the world again.

  “I’ll let you know,” Ceta said dubiously. She paused before she left, gazing quizzically at Sulys. “Are you sure you want this here and now? Would you rather come back up with me?”

  “No, I wouldn’t. I don’t see any point to waiting.”

  “All right. I’ll hurry.”

  Left to her own devices, Sulys sat quietly for a few minutes, wondering about Valoren, and what the odds were that he might rather not wed himself to her suspect powers, and she could go live in disgrace and in perfect contentment in the tower with Dittany. A candle sputtered out. She lit another, made idle hand shadows on the wall. An idea sidled into her mind. She glanced at it, then gave it a second look. She thought: Why not? I have thread, I have fire, I have jewels on my shoes. Let’s see what it takes to get a wizard’s attention…

  She picked threads out of the rough edge of the satin around her shoulders. As Dittany showed her, she spread them on the face of the stone, in the shape of the first letter of Valoren’s name. She melted drops of wax on the tops and bottom of each V to hold them in place. Then she moved the light slowly back and forth across the transfixed letters.

  “Valoren,” she murmured. “Where are you? Valoren. Show me where you are. Where are you?”

  Light caught in carvings, spilled through circling stones. Shadow followed, clouding the passages. Light illumined them again, like a tiny sunrise, night following always behind it. After a while, during which absolutely nothing happened, not even Ceta, Sulys noticed how the letters intercepted passageways on the lace of the map, made walls through openings, V getting in the way everywhere through the spirals of the labyrinth.

  She sucked in breath, wondering if Ceta were bumping into them. She put the candle hastily into a pool of its own wax and pulled the threads back off the map. She was picking away the thumbnail chips of wax that
had held them down when Ceta finally appeared.

  She put baskets and other paraphernalia down on the stones, looking flushed and slightly askew.

  “It took forever to get back! As though the labyrinth were trying to keep me out.”

  “I think that was my fault,” Sulys confessed. “I was trying to lure Valoren down here. I accidentally laid my spell on top of the map.”

  “More likely it was my own tangled thoughts,” Ceta murmured as she unpacked a basket. “I heard some strange news from the librarian, who gave me paper and scissors and ink. String and candles I got from the kitchen, along with bread, cheese, cold roast chicken, cups, a crock of water, and pears. And a knife.”

  “What news?”

  “Some trouble in the Twilight Quarter. A mysterious fire attributed to Tyramin, a missing gardener, a missing wizard…The king and Valoren are still here, so they tell me, waiting with the wizards to see if their power is needed.”

  “A missing wizard? How can you tell if a wizard is missing, or if he just went off to do something magical? Who is he?”

  “Yar.” Ceta applied the knife vigorously to the bread a moment, then stopped midslice to gaze pleadingly at Sulys. “Will you look for him? I brought you water. He went to the Twilight Quarter sometime ago to bring the school’s new gardener back, and hasn’t returned. The wizards are all in seclusion in Wye’s chambers, along with Valoren and the king. I can’t ask if they have found him, and no one else has any idea where he is.”

  “Of course I’ll try.” She reached hungrily for bread and cheese, relieved that it was nothing more complex than a lost gardener and Tyramin’s tricks disturbing Kelior that night. Ceta balanced backward on the edge of the stone in her cross-legged fashion, picking at chicken with her fingers and studying the map as she ate.

  “You’d think that Od, who designed this labyrinth, would have written more clearly about its eccentricities, especially since she meant it to teach the students.”

  “Maybe she never got lost,” Sulys suggested. “She always knew where she was.”

  “Maybe. Yar thinks she didn’t fully understand her own powers. Or her own intentions, which is ultimately how the power of the wizards came under the control of the rulers.”

  “She traveled, didn’t she?” Sulys asked, vaguely remembering that her father had asked Ceta to write a book about Od and the rulers of Numis.

  “Yes, a great deal, to many distant lands.”

  “She might have gone to my great-grandmother’s country.”

  “Which is?” Ceta asked, licking her thumb.

  “Hestria, I think. Or was that the name of the royal city?”

  “Navar, in Hestria.”

  “Yes, that’s where she was born.”

  “Od visited Hestria, yes. So,” Ceta added, easily picking up the path of Sulys’s thought, “she might well have learned those small magics, too. Since nothing Od learned was forbidden in her own school, the magic you and Lady Dittany practice may well be lawful here.”

  “Except that I didn’t learn it from a wizard. And I kept it secret.”

  “Well, we’ll just see what the wizards have to say about that.”

  They finished their makeshift supper, put the scraps back into the basket. Ceta, who seemed oddly fascinated by the untrustworthy map, brushed crumbs off it, her fingertips lingering over the spirals. “That’s strange,” she murmured, bending over it suddenly. “Look. The center stone on the map is completely different.”

  Sulys, who was pouring water into an extremely ornate goblet that must have wandered into the school kitchen from the palace, set the crock down to see. On the map, the round center stone of the labyrinth, which they had just used as a supper table, had been carved as a pyramid.

  “It’s hard to carve a circle?” she guessed.

  “Whoever chiseled this managed perfectly well with the rest of the labyrinth.” Ceta crouched beside it, propped her chin on her hands at the edge of the map, her eyes narrowed. “I love maps; they have always fascinated me. Especially the very old ones, with pictures on them of sea monsters and the faces of the winds. Suppose…just suppose this is not the way into or out of the labyrinth, but a map of something entirely different. That would explain why it’s all but useless.”

  “A map of what?” Sulys asked bewilderedly.

  Ceta pondered, then tapped the tiny pyramid. “A map showing the way to that.”

  “But what is it? And where is it?”

  “I’m not sure. A fortress, maybe, or a mountain. Someplace that Od wanted hidden and yet at the same time wanted it to be found.”

  “I think the chisel just slipped.”

  “Perhaps.” Ceta’s voice had grown very soft. She was seeing something in the pattern, her eyes luminous in the candlelight, intent. “Oh, I wonder,” she whispered. “I wonder…We have to find Yar. It’s Od’s secret, and it would be safe with him.”

  “What secret?” Sulys asked, her skin prickling at the notion that even Od kept things hidden from the wizards.

  “A mountain. Not even Yar knew about it until I showed him the name in Od’s writings. I wonder if this is how you get there from here, if you are a wizard.”

  “Where?”

  “North. Far north.” She straightened, her eyes still full of whatever mystery the stone had shown her. “I wonder if we could follow this map to go there, see what she’s writing about.”

  “Now?”

  Ceta shook map and mountain out of her eyes, seeing Sulys again and why they had come down there in the first place. “No, of course not. I’m sorry. One problem at a time. Where were we?”

  “Finding Yar.”

  “Oh, good.” She sat down firmly on the map so that it wouldn’t distract her, and watched Sulys finish filling the cup. “How does your spell work?”

  “It may very well not,” Sulys warned her. “My great-grandmother thinks it has something to do with the weather, but I doubt it.”

  “There is no weather down here.”

  “She says reflections get windblown, traveling from place to place. I think it has more to do with how clearly you are able to see, which is better some days than others.”

  “Internal weather.”

  “Yes.” She picked up a candle, tipped it to melt the wax onto stone. “Breath, wax, and fire…” Liquid wax made a Y on the stone. She used the bread knife to lift it gently when it hardened, float it on the water. She bent over the cup, breathed Yar’s name into it, then spelled it with the reflection of fire across the water. “Yar,” she whispered again. “Yar.” The name echoed in her head, rippled out across her thoughts. She had only a vague memory of meeting the wizard, but she formed the image of a teacher’s somber robe in her head, hoping that would keep the faces of any number of Yars throughout Kelior out of her cup. “Yar…”

  She found a man in her thoughts, like a waking dream, as she balanced between the thin boundary between water and air, fire and dark, name and image. She heard Ceta’s quick breath, and knew she was seeing the vision in the cup.

  “Is that Yar?” Sulys asked, trying not to wake herself.

  “Yes. But what on earth is he doing?”

  There was a flash of green and purple through the water. Stars glittered across the wizard. And then doves. And then a pair of human eyes, lucent amber and very beautiful, floated like a memory across his face.

  Sulys blinked. The image vanished. She looked questioningly at Ceta, who was still staring into the cup, her brows raised as high as they could go.

  “I thought that he went to the Twilight Quarter to look for a gardener.”

  “I know what that was!” Sulys exclaimed. “He’s watching Tyramin perform. Those were the Illusions and Enchantments.”

  “Evidently,” Ceta murmured a trifle dryly, still staring into the water as though Yar might be lingering in the bottom of the cup. She straightened finally, studied the air in front of her, frowning at it. “But why, I wonder? Is he so tired of his life that he’s going to run off to jo
in the magician’s company?”

  “Valoren,” Sulys said suddenly, and Ceta’s eyes moved to her.

  “My cousin is responsible for this, too?”

  “Valoren and my father are suspicious of Tyramin’s power. I heard them talking about it. They must have told Yar to watch him.”

  “A trickster?”

  “Small magics,” Sulys said darkly, pacing again, “may point the way to more complex dangers. So Valoren told me.” She stopped abruptly, remembering the small magic she had just done within a school full of wizards.

  They both stared upward a moment without breathing. Nothing happened. Wizards did not rain out of nowhere to investigate. No one came.

  “You’d think,” Ceta said tartly, “that someone practicing magic in the middle of the labyrinth in the middle of the night would attract more attention than this. Show me what else you can do.”

  “Everything?”

  Ceta pinched a guttering candle and lit another to take its place. “Why not? If Tyramin can get the attention of the entire school of wizards by pulling paper flowers out of his sleeves, why shouldn’t you?”

  “Maybe my power is too quiet.”

  “That’s the kind of power Valoren should fear most. If he’s worth the king’s trust, he’ll hear you, and if he’s worth your love, he’ll start listening to you. Keep trying.”

  SEVENTEEN

  Mistral, waiting for Arneth in a shadowy corner as he spoke to the guard, heard his stifled imprecation most clearly and drew her own conclusions. She shifted farther into the shadows and emptied her mind of all magic, as she did when she went about her business in the quarter, presenting her least remarkable face to the world. She waited. Arneth spoke a little longer to the guard, then turned away, his quick footsteps echoing through the empty streets, the drowsing, shuttered houses.

  He found her in the dark, told her softly, “Now Princess Sulys has disappeared. Of course they suspect Tyramin. The quarter will remain under guard.”

  “Why? Why Tyramin?”