Od Magic

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  He sat up, catching his breath. Not Valoren, then, he thought with relief. He wondered what shape his fear had made of him. Sitting in the wild emptiness, with the clouds scudding above him and the wind soughing through the brush, he concentrated. A juniper bush spangled with its round red berries caught his eye. Old habits of stillness, solitude, silence pervaded his bones, freed his mind from language. He drew green into himself, sharp, stubby needles, smooth waxy garnet, tough branch and trunk that clung close to earth and weathered the worst of winter. He drew its smell into his skin, let the needles prickle through his thoughts, his eyes, until he felt himself rooted to the harsh land around him, so deeply that he could have tapped its hidden waters while he stretched his thousand windblown fingers out for light.

  When he found his own shape again, driven there by some submerged impulse, he was startled at how high the pale sun burned behind the cloud. He stood up unsteadily. Then he felt what had roused him out of his hiding place. The chill, nagging dread, the sense of being watched in secret, of being silently followed, gusted through him, seeped into his thoughts. He hunkered down quickly, looking around him for the shape he needed: something that moved close to earth, that could travel swiftly, tirelessly, and unobtrusively, and that knew how to hide at the crack of a twig. Wind brought him a scent before he glimpsed it: a silver fox hunting nearby in the brush. He watched it, let the shape flow into him for a long, timeless moment. Then he rose and padded away quickly, nose to the rich, redolent wind that came down from the north.

  So he moved across Numis, hardly sensing time pass, sometimes forgetting what shape he had taken, sometimes impelled, by the constant harrying of the menace at his heels, to fold the landscape into great, thin swaths in order to keep a pace ahead of terror. In this piecemeal fashion, he crossed a land he seldom saw out of human eyes, and certainly never passed a human word with anyone.

  Finally, shaking some animal’s night vision out of his eyes at dawn to see if anything was familiar yet, he recognized a jagged, pointed tooth on the horizon. Its bare dark peak glowed under a rare finger of sun. He stood gazing at it, feeling its ancient silence in his heart: the place where time had stopped and magic had found a place to hide itself so securely that even the word itself had vanished.

  Skrygard Mountain.

  By then he could scarcely remember his own name. Words had become too bulky to carry with him on his desperate flight across Numis; they scattered away from him with each shape he took, each wild eye he looked from that reshaped a wordless world. Night and day meant nothing; he could see as easily in either. Sun and moon became his guides; one kept him on his path as well as the other. Dark and light, warmth and cold, wind and earth and water, he drew into his skin and bones and marrow. Becoming them, he lost the need to name them.

  He kept the word for fear. It never left him, for the magic that dogged him across Numis tracked his every turn, recognized him within every shape. Even in that moment, when he paused to see the world for a moment out of human eyes, remember human names, he scarcely took a breath free of fear. He sensed it almost immediately, the power that pursued him. He remembered that name, too, but it seemed to small a word to contain such magic. Valoren had become as faceless and relentless as the coldest of the northern winds, the one that killed, that froze and broke the hearts of stones. Brenden vanished as soon as he felt it. A small, dark shape that rode the winds took a straight, lonely crow’s flight to Skrygard Mountain.

  He felt the place before his crow’s eye recognized the raw, barren peak. He felt himself drawn to it; the crow angled down toward the little empty plane of snow on the mountain’s flank. His heart saw for him, then, glimpsing an ancient, wordless, secret power that had been left undisturbed so long there was no name left in the world for it. He winged toward it; it reached out to him. He felt his shape blur as he neared, peel away from him until it seemed his own shadow had stripped itself free, gone tumbling away on the wind.

  He opened his mind to the forgotten mysteries of Numis. With a brief, bright shock, as though he had swallowed a star, or fallen into the sun, he took in their power with their shape.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Sulys had walked nearly all the way around the Twilight Quarter before she realized that there was no way in. The butter-colored satin had drifted away on the school stairs during her precipitous flight from her betrothed. She had snagged someone’s cloak on her way out the door. The cloak, dark and massively hooded, covered her from head to foot and even dragged along the ground. Awkward in the carbuncle shoes, she kept tripping over it. But at least she felt hidden, disguised from everyone but Valoren. His eyes kept finding her in memory, distant and critical, as though she were a beginning student who had accidentally dropped a toad into his brightly bubbling cauldron. There would be, she thought grimly, no living with a mind like that. She would have to skulk behind her own smiling, agreeable face just to keep herself safe from his suspicious mind, his probing eye. She could never tell him the truth.

  The line of guards at the Twilight Gate brought her up sharply. There was no traffic at all in or out of the quarter. She gazed at them incredulously, and felt the complaints of her pinched, swollen feet. Everyone else, she remembered, was looking for Tyramin, too. She had no clear reason for her own urgent desire to see him, except that he must be everything Valoren was not. He was a different kind of magic, one that might be destroyed if Valoren and her father found him before she did. She turned away from the guard before they saw her, began to search for any chink in the high walls, a forgotten gate, a slump in the old stones that she could clamber over. Once inside, she could use her own small magics—water, maybe a bird—to find the magician, whom she might help escape Kelior, if he helped her escape what looked like a bleak and lonely marriage.

  Perhaps, she thought helplessly, I will just run away with the magician, become part of his company. I will travel to the land where my great-grandmother was born and learn what other magic is possible beyond the walls the wizards have built around Numis’s magic.

  There was yet another wall where the stone wall ended in the river. She had thought she might be able to swim around the old mossy stones where they moldered in the water. The air along the waterfront shimmered dangerously, and she recognized what all the powerful minds weaving together in Wye’s chamber had built with their magic. She stared at it, then turned abruptly, her eyes filling the weary tears. She limped from the magic before her mind got caught in someone’s stray thought, and she was discovered.

  There must be a way in, she thought coldly, blinking back the tears. There must be. I will find it.

  But at that moment, she could not think beyond her blistered feet. She took her shoes off, and remembered, at the flash of sullen morning light within the jewel, a kindly face. With great relief she pocketed the shoes and retraced her path to the elegant river houses lining the water, one of which, she knew, belonged to Ceta Thiel.

  Ceta didn’t seem entirely surprised to see her, once she recognized the black-swathed, hooded figure that the startled Shera had found pounding at the door.

  “I’m glad you came here,” she said simply, handing the cloak to Shera. Dressed in thin pastel silks, her own feet bare, she looked as though she must have just gotten out of bed. “Please, sit—that one is the most comfortable. Shera, see what you can find us for breakfast.” Sulys sank gratefully into a plump concoction of wood and stuffed tapestry. Ceta gazed down at her, absently twirling a strand of hair. A runaway princess, Sulys realized, was an awkward thing to find on your doorstep, and Ceta was frowning, but more in displeasure than in discomfort. “I can hardly blame you,” she said before Sulys could speak. “My cousin may be a shining example among wizards, but he has forgotten how to be human.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Sulys said wearily. “I can’t go home to that. What I want to do is find Tyramin, but I can’t get into the Twilight Quarter. It’s completely surrounded by wizards and guards.”

  “Tyramin,” Ceta said blankly.


  “I think he would understand my magic in a way that the wizards never could. At least we could be outcasts together. Which is what I feel like, now. I am too afraid of the man I’m supposed to marry to tell him the truth.”

  Ceta nodded. “He has turned into something of a monster,” she breathed. “I think that’s part of what has been troubling Yar.”

  “Yar.” Sulys straightened a little, glancing around. “Is he here? Maybe he could help me get past the wall.”

  “No. Valoren took him into the quarter to search for Tyramin.” She sat down beside Sulys, her mouth crooking. “There does seem to be true magic in the way no one is able to lay eyes on the magician. But Valoren will find him, I’m sure, and it would be worse for both of you to be found together.”

  “I could hide him, I think,” Sulys said very softly. “There’s a trick Dittany taught me that’s done with threads. It just might work on people. I don’t believe a wizard trained in Od’s school would know what to do with a needle and thread.”

  “I’m not even sure I know what to do with a needle and thread,” Ceta admitted. “I’m very sure Valoren wouldn’t. But I think he would recognize magic in them.”

  “Would he? If he didn’t know to look for it?”

  “I don’t know.” She brooded silently, while Shera set an enormous tray laden with dense, spicy breads and cakes, dried fruit, soft cheeses, pickled eggs, and smoked fish onto a table in front of them. “Thank you, Shera. What happens to people when they grow up, I wonder? Valoren was very sweet when he was younger, and he had a great deal more sense.”

  “Like my brother Enys,” Sulys said, casting a polite glance at the tray. “He used to like me before.”

  “Before?”

  “Before our mother died. Now I seem to annoy him constantly, and he never smiles.” She toyed with a dried pear, thinking of Enys’s prickly expression. “I suppose grief changes people. But it’s as though I have lost them all—my father and Enys as well as—” She paused, put the fruit down very carefully, and swallowed the fire out of her throat. “As well. Only Dittany didn’t change.”

  Ceta poured her a cup of cool water scented with mint; Sulys sipped it gratefully.

  “Is there anyone I can send for?” Ceta asked worriedly. “You can’t just wander alone around Kelior. Of course you may stay here for as long as you like, though you should let your father know where you are.”

  “I suppose I should,” Sulys murmured, with a bleak eye on her future. “But then nothing would change, would it?”

  “Then what will you do?”

  “I don’t know…Sell these ugly shoes, perhaps, and pay a boatman to take me out of Kelior.” She leaned back into the silky tapestry, her eyes closing. “Or I could disappear like Tyramin into the Twilight Quarter, use my magic to earn my bread. Find missing things for people, tell fortunes in ashes. My great-grandmother would miss me, but she has Beris, and I could send her crows every day with messages. What do you think?” She opened her eyes again at an exasperated noise from Ceta.

  “I wish—” she began, rising and beginning to pace. “I wish my brilliant cousin—”

  What she wished for Valoren she did not say, for, turning, she nearly ran into him. He had appeared out of nowhere with Yar beside him. Sulys, frozen in her chair and staring at him, thought with dread: I will never feel alone again, if we marry, I will never feel private…

  “You might have knocked,” Ceta told him sharply. “I’m hardly dressed for company.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said absently, his eyes on Sulys. “We are in a hurry.”

  “At least tell us that you are searching for the princess.”

  He sighed, made a visible effort at tact. “I would have, if I’d realized she was missing again. You,” he amended to Sulys. “You were missing. I know that you and I must talk, but there is no time, now. I came to ask Ceta what Od wrote about Skrygard Mountain.”

  Ceta’s mouth opened, closed wordlessly. She gazed at Yar as though, Sulys saw with amazement, he had wantonly broken something precious to her. “You told him.”

  “I had no choice.”

  “Indeed he did not,” Valoren said bluntly. “I gave him none. I think the gardener has fled to Skrygard Mountain, where those strange, powerful beings I found in Yar’s thoughts have hidden themselves. It could be extremely dangerous to Numis if Brenden Vetch is not found before he reaches them. I need to know what Od wrote.”

  Ceta’s eyes pleaded with Yar; he shook his head a little, helplessly. “Show him.” His mouth twisted ruefully at her silence. “You wanted to know what they are.”

  “But not this way—not disturbed—They are ancient, and so quiet no one remembers them, and who knows if they’re even still there?”

  “Brenden knows,” Yar told her gently. “He spoke of them.”

  “Are those Od’s writings?” Valoren asked, looking at an untidy scattering of scrolls and manuscript along one side of the carpet. Ceta moved toward them defensively, but Valoren was there, somehow, before her, already kneeling and rifling through them. He looked up at her, waiting; Ceta spoke to Yar before she took another step.

  “Are you going with him?”

  “I don’t—”

  “Yes,” Valoren answered for him.

  “Then I’ll show you what you need to know,” Ceta told him reluctantly. “I found another piece of the puzzle earlier this morning among manuscripts I borrowed a while ago from the king’s library.” She picked a piece of tattered parchment off a table, handed it to the wizard. “I put it aside for Yar to read when he came.”

  Valoren read it to himself. Sulys, watching him warily, as they all were, was surprised by an expression she hadn’t seen before. In anyone else, she might have called it wonder.

  “What is it?” Yar asked him.

  “‘They,’” Valoren read aloud, “‘are the forgotten treasures of power. The missing faces of it. The hidden. The secrets of Skrygard must only be found by someone strong enough to wake them and fearless enough to free them. Otherwise, terror will rule over Numis again, and the land will lose its heart.’” He raised his eyes to stare at Yar. “Do you have any idea what these are?”

  “No.”

  “Terror will rule…Surely they must not be freed. If Brenden Vetch reaches them—if his power has some root in theirs—”

  “If you drag such fears with you to Skrygard Mountain,” Yar said sharply, “there may well be the disaster that Od predicts.”

  “We must hurry,” Valoren said, setting the paper down and ignoring what seemed to Sulys to be some very sound advice. “The gardener’s powers seem untrained, unpredictable—we have no idea how quickly he can travel, and we must be there waiting for him.”

  “He probably hasn’t even found his way out of Kelior yet,” Yar said dourly. “He did walk all the way here.”

  Valoren ignored that, too. “We should leave now. Yar—”

  “Valoren,” Ceta interrupted, “at least give us a moment’s privacy before you take him to the hinterlands. And I do mean private; don’t just make yourself invisible and listen to us.”

  “I would hardly do that,” Valoren said stiffly. “Besides, Yar would sense me.” He paused, then lowered his head an inch. “I’ll give you an hour. Meet me in Wye’s chambers then.” He looked at the princess, who had begun to hope that he had forgotten her. “Shall I escort you back to the palace? It will give us a few moments to talk, before I must explain to the king where I’m going. You could tell me what you needed so desperately to say that you spent the night in the labyrinth.”

  Sulys cleared her throat, said carefully, “I think that now is not the time to distract you with my concerns. And I need far more than a few moments of your time. It can wait.”

  He seemed suddenly curious, she thought uneasily, as though he scented something trying to elude him. “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then we will talk, I promise, when this is over. Arneth Pyt is at the Twilight Gate now;
I’ll send him here to escort you back.” He turned to Yar. “I’ll see you shortly.”

  He used the door this time. Ceta stepped close to Yar, but did not speak until they heard the sound of it closing behind the wizard. Sulys was about to rise to take her leave; Yar had opened his mouth to speak; Ceta held them both motionless with her sudden, fierce whisper. “Yar. Use the labyrinth. Go now.”

  “What?”

  “I’m sure it will take you there! Warn those—those mysteries about Valoren—warn Brenden. Do what you can. Don’t let Valoren disturb them.”

  “Do you realize,” he asked her steadily, “what you are telling me to do?”

  “Yes.”

  “You know your cousin. He fears the worst. He may assume the worst when he finds me missing: that I have taken sides against the king and the school of wizards with Brenden Vetch and these strange powers.”

  “He may. But you are right: Valoren could very likely be Od’s worst fear. Find your way there and protect them.”

  “He’ll come here looking for me,” he warned her. “He’s very difficult to lie to.”

  “I do,” Sulys reminded them, “all the time. He doesn’t see what he doesn’t expect.”

  “Just go,” Ceta urged him. “Try the labyrinth. If it doesn’t work, you’ll have no choice but to go with Valoren. But you must at least try. If he questions me, I’ll tell him you left me, as far as I know, to do what he asked.”

  He smiled a little, tightly, and shifted a strand of hair out of her eyelashes. “You would never have suggested that I keep secrets from king and court before.”

  “No,” she answered gravely. “Perhaps it’s Od herself who inspired me to look at things differently. Her way instead of Valoren’s. You’ve been unhappy; you want to change. I had to change a little myself to see that.”

  He kissed her gently. Sulys watched his wry, kindly experienced face, and wondered what it would take for Valoren to wear such an expression. Years? Life? A startling and unexpected turn of events that might make him question everything he knew? She found Yar’s eyes on her suddenly, and wondered if he had sensed his name in her head.