Od Magic

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “Really. How unusual.”

  “And the king’s.” Her brows went up; her eyes widened, glimpsing, he saw, the first intimations of trouble.

  “My father noticed I was gone? He never notices me when I’m around; I didn’t expect him to notice that I wasn’t.”

  Ceta, who read his expressions like a language, said abruptly, “Valoren could have found her easily.”

  “Valoren didn’t think to look for her in the school. He and the king are convinced that some power within the Twilight Quarter—perhaps Tyramin’s—has stolen the princess away. The royal guard has closed the Twilight Gate, and I suspect that the wizards have engaged the full force of their powers to set a guard along the riverbank so that no one can enter or leave the quarter. They are all searching in the wrong place.”

  “Tyramin!” Sulys exclaimed incredulously. She stood, looked down at her bare feet and reached impatiently for her shoes, one of which for some reason held a candle in it. She shook it out. “It is so like them both—Valoren and my father—to blame some innocent trickster for what they failed to see under their own noses.” She dropped the shoes, stepped into them. “Where are they?”

  “I last saw them in Wye’s chambers,” Yar answered. “But that was in the late afternoon, when Valoren sent me out to search for our missing gardener. I doubt that the king is still there at this hour.”

  The women looked at one another, then back at him. “At what hour?” Sulys asked warily.

  “It’s nearly dawn.”

  She sucked in a horrified breath. “It can’t be.”

  “Time plays odd tricks in the labyrinth, especially when you bring magic into it. Spells take their own time, here.”

  “You’ve been out all night looking for the gardener?” Ceta said incredulously. “When I heard that the king was angry, and you were missing, I thought—” She checked, a little color rising into her face. “I couldn’t guess what you might have done.”

  “Nothing,” he said softly. “Yet. I looked for you before I left, to tell you not to wait for me. I gave the librarian a message for you.”

  “I had gone up to your chambers to look for you. I didn’t return to the library; I came here with Princess Sulys. I didn’t talk to the librarian until much later. He told me then where you had gone. Did you find the gardener?”

  “Yes. And no.”

  “You found Tyramin.”

  He looked at her silently, added the question in her eyes, the water in the goblet, and the princess’s magic together. “Yes,” he said again, “and no. Somehow the gardener became confused with Tyramin, so I went to look for him among the Illusions and Enchantments. Did you really think I would offer my talents to a traveling magician?”

  “Not to the magician,” she answered simply. It was one of the rare moments that he saw her face without a smile anywhere in it. “Down here, I realized that I don’t know anymore what you might or might not do.”

  “Strange,” he breathed. “Up there, so did I.”

  He felt the princess’s tension then, and stepped very close to Ceta to study the map on the stone underneath all the odds and ends scattered over it. “I’ve never used this, but it might be easiest for you if—”

  He was interrupted by something resembling a snort from Ceta.

  “That will get you anywhere but out,” she said roundly; her voice sounded less strained. “But, Yar, look—I think it has more to do with—”

  “It really doesn’t work?” he marveled. “No wonder the students get lost down here. What was she thinking?”

  “It does lead somewhere. Look at this.” She brushed a few buttons and bones off the stone, tapped the carving beneath. “Yar, I think this pyramid in the center is Skrygard Mountain, and the path is the way to it.”

  He looked at her. Then he closed his eyes, held them closed, trying to follow the labyrinthine path of her logic and failing utterly. “How,” he demanded, “could your mind make that leap from the depths of a school in Kelior to a mountain in northern Numis?”

  “I can’t quite remember at this hour of the morning how I got from here to there, but I bet I’m right.”

  The princess cleared her throat. “I don’t really care where we go,” she said uneasily, “but I suppose we should go somewhere. Yar, can you lead us out?”

  “I can try.”

  Ceta blew out flames, swept everything off the stone into the basket, leaving some candle drippings and a lighted candle for each of them. “In case we get separated,” she told them. The corner of her mouth slid upward faintly as she handed Yar his candle. “Lead us into morning,” she suggested, and, with no small amount of astonishment, he did.

  He took them both to Wye’s chamber, since neither showed any sign of wanting to go elsewhere. He felt the power within as he opened the door, like air so massed and fused it seemed about to transform itself into a different element. The princess seemed aware of it as well; her weary face grew paler, set as against a coming storm.

  Nearly all of the teaching wizards were in there, silently weaving thought and will together, so still they didn’t seem to breathe or even see. Some of them had slipped out of their human shapes, to come closer yet to their makings: one had blurred into the half shadows of dawn, another’s face seemed roughly shaped out of the uneven bulges and cracks of stone. Valoren, gazing at the interruption out of wide, unblinking eyes as it entered, seemed, to Yar, oblivious of them all. But Sulys gave a little, startled gasp at the predatory stare, and Valoren blinked. The dense air, trembling as with some low, immense sound too deep to be heard, seemed to thin a little as his thoughts frayed out of it.

  “Sulys,” he breathed, a cob strand of sound, but enough to tangle the threads of the spell around them like a stone thrown through a web. His eyes went to Ceta, then to Yar. “Where have you been?” he asked. “Where did you find the princess?”

  Color flared into Sulys’s face; she took a step toward him, catching his attention again, though for a moment she seemed unable to speak.

  “You might ask me,” she said when she could. “I am, after all, standing in front of you. I’ve been down in the labyrinth, doing everything I could think of to get your attention.”

  “The labyrinth?” he said bewilderedly. “Why didn’t you just come up here?” He turned again to Yar. “Then where have you been?”

  “Doing what you asked me to do,” Yar said tersely. “Looking for the gardener.”

  “You didn’t find him.”

  “I found him, and lost him again.”

  “You lost him! How could you lose him? Is he with Tyramin? Is he, himself, Tyramin? And powerful enough to elude even you?”

  Yar hesitated, trying to find the simplest way through that tangle. “No. Brenden Vetch is not Tyramin. He is our gardener. Or was, until he frightened himself with his own power.”

  “Why didn’t he come back here with you?”

  “We frightened him, too, I think. He didn’t explain himself, and he didn’t tell me where he was going.”

  The pale eyes slid away from him briefly, as though they saw through walls, across the sleeping city. “I’ll find him,” the wizard said simply. “What about Tyramin?”

  “I don’t know. You didn’t ask me to find Tyramin. If he hasn’t been found, Arneth Pyt must still be looking.”

  A trace of color fanned across the wizard’s sallow cheeks, the nearest Yar had seen to a display of temper. “It shouldn’t be that difficult to find a gardener or a traveling magician. Must I look for them both myself?”

  “I found the princess,” Yar reminded him.

  “Apparently she was never lost.”

  “Apparently,” Sulys said abruptly, “I am invisible. You talk around me, you don’t see me when I’m under the same roof, even when I’m in the same room—”

  “You were hiding from me,” Valoren said slowly. “So it seems.”

  “I wanted you to find me—I wanted to talk—”

  “Yes. There are simpler ways to do that
than to play games and worry the entire court.” Sulys drew a breath sharply; he held up his hand. “Now, perhaps, is not the time.”

  Sulys held her breath; so did everyone, it seemed to Yar, in that precarious moment. Then the princess turned, pulled open the heavy door, and went through it without a word, slamming it so hard behind her that Yar winced and Wye, on the far side of the room, put her hands over her ears.

  Ceta broke the spellbound silence. “You,” she said crisply to her cousin, “are going to lose her.”

  He looked at her, then at the door, as though he were trying to figure out why it had made such a noise. “Nonsense,” he said absently. “We are bound by contract and by our fathers’ wishes. We’ll have time to discuss this later.”

  Ceta rubbed her eyes tiredly. “Talk to her, Valoren. Go after her.”

  “I haven’t time,” he protested. “There are dark powers loose in Numis, and we must find them. I am going to the Twilight Quarter myself to search for Tyramin. Yar, come with me; I want to question you. And you can take the magician back to face the king when we’ve captured him. I’ll find the gardener then, if I have to track him all the way to the north country.”

  “What do you want us to do?” Wye asked resignedly.

  “Bind the Twilight Quarter again. Tyramin may have slipped through our net when the princess interrupted us, but it’s unlikely he has had time.”

  Yar put a hand on Ceta’s arm, met her rueful smile with his own. He would have bid her farewell, but Valoren, taking a step toward the door, paused as though he sensed the unspoken words behind his back.

  “Yar.”

  Yar bowed his head, not trusting himself to speak, and followed.

  NINETEEN

  Arneth Pyt watched the sun rise over the Twilight Quarter through a bleary smudge of cloud and river mist. Around him the streets were empty but for a cat slinking through an alley. Somewhere a shutter banged shut against an obtrusive finger of light. A torch along the wall guttered out. Arneth heard one of the motionless guards stifle a yawn. His own eyes felt gritty. He was waiting, ostensibly, for the change of guard to relieve the tired men at the gate who had been there all night. When relief came and positioned itself, then he would continue his futile searching for a gardener whose face he had never seen, a princess who probably did not want to be found, and a magician whom Arneth had no intention of finding if he could avoid it.

  He wondered how Mistral could possibly hide herself, let alone her performers, from the entire school of wizards. She couldn’t hide her mind, Arneth thought, straining his own mind to the limits as he tried to imagine what went on in her head. She might hide her face, but how could she hide her magic from the likes of Valoren? It could not be possible. The captain of the guard said something to him. He pulled himself out of his nebulous speculations and turned.

  “What?”

  “I hear the relief guard coming.”

  Arneth grunted, recognizing the sound of two dozen horsemen moving across the cobbles beyond the gate. “Good,” he said. “Take the night guard out first so they can get in.”

  “Yes, sir. Do you want me to stay and help you search?”

  “No. Go to bed.”

  The captain nodded and turned his mount. He signaled to the guards; they fell in behind him. Arneth shifted to give them room. He watched the last of the riders disappear into the archway. His thoughts strayed again to Mistral as he waited for the captain of the relief guard to ride into the quarter. There was silence on the other side of the wall. With sudden impatience he urged his horse forward, wondering if they needed an invitation.

  Two figures emerged from the shadows of the gate: men on their feet, moving noiselessly as wizards knew how to do, seeming to balance on air. Arneth’s jaw clenched as he recognized Valoren. The other, a tall, dark-haired man wearing a dour expression like a piece of armor, he had seen before but could not name.

  Arneth heard the horses begin to move through the gate behind them. He dismounted, went to meet the wizards while the relief guard ranged itself along the wall.

  “This is Yar Ayrwood,” Valoren told him. “He has come to help us search. I take it that you do need help.”

  Arneth gave a cautious nod. If the imperturbable Valoren had been anyone else, Arneth would have suspected him or holding his temper on a very short leash. “My lord,” he answered as crisply as he could, “I intend to resume my search as soon as the relief guard is positioned and instructed.”

  The wizard favored him with a curdled glance that reminded Arneth of his father. “You have been looking all night and found—what, exactly?”

  Arneth thumbed his brow, looking for some tactful word for nothing. He found the wizard Yar’s eyes on him, a disconcerting clarity in them. “My lord, I have never seen the gardener’s face.”

  “Never mind the gardener,” Valoren said shortly. “You were told to find Tyramin.”

  “He is proving extremely elusive.”

  “Elusive! He performed last night! You could have dragged him off the stage then.”

  “My lord, you were the one who counseled discretion,” Arneth pointed out mildly. “I was trying—”

  “You tried and failed. Show us where he keeps himself.”

  “I doubt that he’s still there.”

  Something close to a healthy color flowed across Valoren’s face. “Don’t tell me what you think, just do as I tell you,” he snapped, startling Arneth. He apparently startled himself as well; he closed his eyes briefly, drew a long breath, while Yar contemplated a pair of squabbling starlings on a nearby roof. “Take us,” Valoren said finally, tersely, “to the place where you saw Tyramin perform.”

  “Yes, my lord,” Arneth said, and turned to mount again. Feeling safer above the wizard, he risked a question. “Should I send part of the guard to look for Princess Sulys?”

  “The princess has been found,” Valoren said, so shortly that Arneth decided not to ask where.

  The wizards, who could have flown over the rooftops as far as Arneth knew, walked quickly beside his horse. They spoke quietly enough, but did not seem to care that they were overheard, for which Arneth was grateful. He would have grown a third ear to listen after Valoren asked Yar, with bewildered asperity, “Why did she slam the door like that? What did I do to make her so angry?”

  “She needs to talk to you,” the wizard answered.

  “Now? She needs this precisely when the dangers to Kelior are demanding the whole of our attention?”

  “She was in the labyrinth all night; she had no idea what was happening in the rest of the world.”

  “What was she doing in the labyrinth, of all places?”

  Yar did not answer. Arneth glanced at him curiously; so did Valoren, but more like an owl, alerted and fixed by some prey. Yar chose to answer the look. “Yes. I can tell you. But it’s for her to speak.”

  “Is it important?”

  Again, Yar seemed wordless for a moment. Then he said with some force, “If she believes with such passion that it is important, then it most certainly should be to you. You will lose her if you can’t figure out how to listen to her.”

  “She won’t defy her father,” Valoren answered, which seemed, even to Arneth, completely beside the point.

  “Maybe not,” Yar said somberly. “But if you have no time to learn to know her before you marry her, why would she assume you would find time afterward?”

  “That was why she spent the night in the cellar? So that I would know her better?”

  “In the labyrinth,” Yar amended. “And yes. If you had been there with her, it would have made more sense than it sounds.”

  The owl’s glare became more focused, even brighter. Arneth could almost see the ruffled feathers. “You presume, Master Yar, to know us both too well.”

  “I listened and found her,” Yar said pointedly. “You didn’t. That is why she slammed the door.”

  There was a silence, during which Arneth, his nape hairs prickling, sensed an imminent display
of wizardly pique. Quickly he turned them down a side street, where they could finally see the worn roof of the warehouse. He pointed. “There. That’s where Tyramin performs.”

  Valoren turned his disconcerting gaze to the bulky old building looming at the river’s edge. Yar looked at Arneth instead, a dark, enigmatic glance that made the quarter warden shift his own eyes, ft was as though the wizard had guessed something, had seen something that passed between Arneth and the magician’s complicated daughter. But how could he? Arneth wondered. He had never seen Yar in the Twilight Quarter before.

  “Let’s go in,” Valoren murmured. “We’ll find out which of you it takes to arrest the trickster.”

  Arneth tried to keep his thoughts still, his face impassive, as they rode toward the warehouse. Deliberately not thinking of Mistral’s name, he found it constantly in his head like a persistent insect. She couldn’t possibly have had time to hide herself. What was the worst that could happen to her if she were found? He had no idea, he realized. Nor did he know what she might consider the worst. Exile, maybe; he had heard of that happening a time or two to unruly wizards. Mistral had spent her life wandering through strange lands; exile would scarcely be a punishment. Being forced to put on a student’s robe and to stay shut up in the school while she restructured her magic to meet the exacting laws of Numis would be worse, Arneth guessed. But the worst Valoren could do, Arneth could not imagine. He couldn’t help trying though, until, a street away from the warehouse, he heard Valoren say:

  “Who is Mistral?”

  Arneth felt his skin constrict. He said nothing; Valoren would have to drag an answer from between his teeth.

  Unaccountably, Yar came to his rescue. “She is the magician’s daughter. She assists him while he performs. So I’ve heard.”

  Valoren grunted. “The name strayed into my thoughts.”

  “From the warehouse, no doubt.”

  Arneth found his voice, said steadily, “I’ve questioned her a time or two. She took me to talk to Tyramin. He was disguised for his performance then, but he seemed harmless beneath the mask.”

  “We shall see,” Valoren promised.