“Do you want me to take you back to the palace?”
“No,” she answered simply. “I want to get inside the Twilight Quarter.”
He was startled. But he didn’t argue, as she thought he would; unexpectedly, he acknowledged her magic. “It takes you like that,” he told her. “You’ve learned what you can from your great-grandmother; that isn’t enough for you. You are drawn to the something in the magician’s magic; it calls to you.”
She straightened abruptly in her chair. “Is it true?” she whispered. “His magic?”
He did not answer her directly, only murmured, “With Valoren leaving Kelior, it’s a good time to find out. I can tell you something that should help you get past the gate. No one else knows this.”
“What?”
“Arneth Pyt loves the magician’s daughter. Tell Arneth you will do what you can for her, and I think you’ll find Tyramin easily. Let him know that I told you this. He’ll trust me. I knew that he was protecting her, and I didn’t tell Valoren.”
“Yar,” Ceta said wonderingly. “How can you possibly know such a thing?”
He smiled again. “I learned it wandering around the Twilight Quarter in the dark looking for a gardener.”
“Of course you did.” She reached out, touched the princess lightly as she tried to make her way unobtrusively past them toward the door. “Wait for Arneth Pyt to come here,” she suggested. “You don’t want to run into Valoren now. Eat something. I have a pair of boots that may fit you better than those shoes; I’ll have Shera find them for you.”
Sulys subsided back into the chair, listening for a knock on the door as she nibbled, and hearing the soft voices weaving gently together for a few moments longer, until a final word faded into the air, and the wizard was gone.
TWENTY-TWO
Appearing briefly in the school to put on clothes more suitable to the harsher northern weather, Yar looked for his heavy cloak, didn’t find it, and remembered Elver. He found another cloak, older and a bit frayed at the hem, and put that on instead. He dropped some coins into his pocket, forgetting Elver, his thoughts turning to Brenden, wondering how far he had gotten, and then to the labyrinth, which he would reach with his next step, moving so swiftly through the school that no one would realize he had come and gone.
But his chamber door opened before he could take that step. And there was Wye, her seamed face the color of ivory, shadowed with exhaustion. Encounters with the king and the exacting Valoren had shaken her composure badly.
“Yar, where have you been?” she demanded.
“Mostly trying to do what Valoren asked,” he answered gently.
“And now where are you going?”
“To help Valoren with Brenden Vetch. Or to help Brenden with Valoren, whichever seems most appropriate.”
“I need you more than either of them. Some of the older teachers binding the Twilight Quarter could use your strength. You must persuade Valoren to—” She stopped, seeing something in his eyes, something he had left unsaid; she knew him that well. “Yar.”
He stepped out, closed the door behind them, avoiding her scrutiny. The ubiquitous Elver, whom he had left sleeping beside a fire pit at dawn, popped into his mind again. He said, to change the subject, “I’ve had no time to tell you. The young student Elver followed me into the Twilight Quarter yesterday when Valoren sent me to find the gardener.”
“Who?”
“Elver. I explained to him that he had expelled himself from the school, which he accepted without much regret. He’s staying at his uncle’s on Crescent Street. Marsh was the name, I think—something Marsh. Some kind of fish. When anyone has time to notice him missing, that’s where he’ll be.”
“I don’t,” Wye said with a touch of asperity, “have any idea what you are talking about.”
“Bream. That was it. Bream Marsh.”
“Yar, where are you going?”
He paused, meeting her eyes again, letting her see his own filling with distances, with uncertainty, with wonder. “I’m sorry to leave you with all this. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
Her white brows puckered; she tried to read his mind without crossing the boundaries of courtesy. “What,” she asked softly, “have you discovered that has put that expression back on your face for the first time since you passed beneath the cobbler’s shoe?”
“I don’t know,” he answered unsteadily. “I won’t know until I see it. If.”
“Well, what—where shall I tell Valoren you’ve gone?”
“You don’t know.”
“Yar, be careful,” she pleaded.
“I have been for nineteen years. That’s long enough.”
He felt her eyes on him as he went down the tower stairs. But she left him his privacy; he went unobserved into the labyrinth.
This time it showed him its own path, unentangled by his thoughts. He was astonished how easily he found the center: a turn or two and there he was, blinking away the dark to examine the center stone with a wizard’s vision. The map carved into it looked far more elaborate than the labyrinth around him. He could see the pyramid Ceta had described very clearly, again looking nothing like it should. He wondered where Od had begun this labyrinth, what door to open to find it, what road to begin walking, what thread she had left, centuries before, to follow.
It should begin here, he thought, illumined. Within this labyrinth. The first step to Skrygard Mountain should be the step I take from where I stand, looking at this map and seeing where it begins and ends.
He studied it for a while longer, saw no other answer to the riddle Od had set. To find the beginning of the maze, he had to know where it ended. No one would guess that without having pieced together, as Ceta had, the clues in the scattered fragments of Od’s writings through the centuries. No student, perceiving the discrepancy in the map at the center of the labyrinth, could have accidentally gone there, for Od had not made anything about Skrygard Mountain part of the common lore or the accepted teachings of the school. Ceta’s curious mind and sensitive heart had seen between the lines of Od’s writings, pieced a sentence found in the king’s library to a faded paragraph in an obscure scroll gathering cobwebs in the school’s library. Knowing where the secret labyrinth ended was the center stone of Od’s spell.
Yar took a step up onto the center of the stone, and whispered, “Skrygard Mountain.”
Shadows swirled around him the instant he spoke. They paled, whirled into mist so thick and close he couldn’t see his own boots or the stone beneath them. Standing, it seemed, within a roiling cloud, he had no idea if he were moving as well, or if he had just roused a passing storm in the school’s cellar. He waited. The mists did not part to reveal the world; they simply continued around him with a great deal of energy and no point whatever that he could see.
After a while, he stepped off the stone. The mists promptly vanished, left him staring upward at the barren crags and snow-covered flank of a mountain.
He felt the cold then, smelled pine and snow and stone. He turned, his thoughts beginning to form again, as though they, too, had turned into that blinding, churning mist. He looked down the mountain to the fields and marshes of the north country, across them, south toward Kelior, as far as he could see until the mists formed again, the lowering autumn sky hiding the rest of Numis.
Wonder struck him then with the force of wind: Od’s magic was still potent, and unpredictable as well, after all those centuries. She was still a force in Numis, finding ways to work her will, even in secret. He looked for her across the colorless landscape, or for Brenden Vetch, for anything, anyone in motion. No one was out in the chill, drab afternoon. In the distance, he could see a cluster of tiny stone houses tucked in a fold between hills, a vague smudge on a hillside that might have been a herd of something. Of fleeing and pursuing wizards he saw nothing, just a bird, a dark fleck moving across the endless cloud.
Something seemed to call to him out of the mountain’s silence, request his attention. He turned agai
n, looked up across the field of snow clinging to the steep side of the mountain. Huge trees lined the snow on both sides but did not encroach; bare rock jutted above it, looming crags angling together to form the pyramid at the center of Od’s map.
Below it, high on the snow line, he saw the strange, dark shapes.
They looked like jagged, misshapen trees, so old that their limbs had crumbled away, leaving only the suggestion of tree behind. Like stones that someone had begun to sculpt long ago and left for wind and weather to finish. Something, he thought, that once might have been alive, or had a recognizable resemblance to a common word. Now they were wordless, shapeless. Old things in perpetual snow, they seemed to him. He took a step or two up the mountain toward them, stopped as he felt their almost imperceptible withdrawal, the awareness of them fading in him like shadow fading at a sudden cloud.
They were alive, he realized. In their own way, they had spoken to him, told him of their awareness, their alarm. Painfully, as though it had been clenched like a fist for years, his heart opened; wonder spread its wings through him. A word he did not know, something he did not recognize, a power that was not defined within the laws of Numis: these things still existed, despite the king and all his counselors.
But what were they?
The missing faces of power, Od had called them. Its forgotten treasures. Hidden away for centuries, until they could be coaxed back into the world by someone powerful enough not to fear their power.
Do I have enough power? he wondered. Will I be afraid?
He took another step toward them. Another. He felt their tenuous awareness once again, their uncertainty, their waiting. He continued his slow movement toward them, while the pale light of late afternoon dimmed; the snow underfoot grew gray.
When he was close enough to see the dark stains of time or sorrow across their forms, the seams and gashes of weathering, he stopped. Somehow, they had grown huge during his trek upward. At a distance, they had seemed shrunken, dwindled, whittled down to human size. They loomed over him now, immense and silent as the ancient trees, watching him, he sensed, the way wizards watched, aware in thought and breath and skin, however they defined their hard, blackened husks.
“Who are you?” he asked aloud, and with his heart. But he did not know their language yet; they did not answer. After a while he kindled a fire in the snow, having nothing to burn but magic, and sat down to watch night fall over Numis as he waited.
For a long time nothing spoke except his fire. The world grew very dark, very still. Now and then he sensed wind, brisk and noisy, blowing through the valleys below, but on the mountain, in that dreaming place, nothing moved, perhaps not even time. A wizard tended his fire in the night. Yar saw himself from a distance, the way the moon might see him, or something crouched and watching him beyond his circle of light. He started at the thought, was himself again, staring back at the night. It seemed a sentient thing suddenly, enormous and aware, so close around him that he could have turned away from light and looked into its eyes.
That close, he marveled. He felt no fear, though, that these strange, powerful, nameless beings seemed to have crept as close around him as the dark. He might be dreaming, after all. He saw himself again, the wizard tending his fire in the snow, only his face and hands illumined. He looked at himself, he realized then, out of other eyes. They were very close, the forgotten ones, close enough to see the reflection of fire in his eyes. Then he saw himself again, far away now, a distant figure in a circle of fire and snow, on a plane of night.
Eyes closed; the figure vanished. Again he started, trying to regain an inner balance, but this time he couldn’t find himself. He saw only the endless dark across Numis, illumined by nothing, no one.
They were that old, he knew then. Older than the name of Numis. They were of a wild magic, as ancient as wind, as night. They had known the force of wind before it had a name; they had become fire before it had been tamed, when it roamed the earth at will, unconfined by hearth, candle, lantern. They, too, had wandered at will, then, power without language, shaping everything they saw, twig, bird, leaf, water, stone, earth, light. The image became the language of power, the language of the heart. No written words, no human law could restrict something that needed no language; no walls could imprison a power that could become the stone it saw, the bird that could fly between the bars. The air that made it soar.
With the ache of longing, Yar remembered glimpsing such power before he walked beneath the cobbler’s shoe and the doors of the school closed behind him. On the long road to Kelior, he had seen the possibility of it. Within the school, within the king’s laws, he had seen the impossibility of it. There language defined power. The spoken word, not the image itself, became the source. Words could go unheard; words could deceive; words could be imprecise, unpredictable, and forbidden. Words, used against those who had no language, could be devastating.
So he learned, during the night that seemed to last forever. Somewhere beyond the plane of darkness, he sensed a soggy dawn, the passing of a bitter day. Another night. The wordless tale was the history of magic in Numis, when the land had a name and early kings ruled it. The strange, nameless, wordless powers, who had grown seemingly out of the earth itself, caused great fear in the early inhabitants, some of whom had brought their own powers from distant places. They fought to kill; without language, the ancient powers could not explain themselves. They tried, taking the shape of humans to protect themselves, which only made the humans terrify one another, for they could no longer believe what they saw, and so mistrusted everyone.
The ancient face of power had retreated into itself so long ago no one remembered, and only Od had recognized it. Hints survived in old tales haunted by terrible creatures of the night, who could take a human face when they chose. That such power still existed anywhere in Numis, beyond language and beyond law, would have stunned the well-schooled wizards of Kelior.
Somewhere beyond him, snow was falling. Somewhere, he had a name. After a time, he remembered it. His fire had gone out; his bones were growing stiff. Someone had roused him, he thought, but when he opened his eyes to the gray light of day, he saw no one. Only the softly falling snow, and the great, weather-ravaged forces around him, which ringed him like immense, dark flames, or the memory of fire.
Someone said his name.
He stood up, clumsily, feeling his blood flow. Someone knew him; no one was there. He felt the gentle awareness emanating from within the ancient mysteries. Someone among the ring who knew language, knew his name.
He felt his throat close, wordless with wonder. Turning as he looked up, he searched all the blurred, unrecognizable faces of power for the one he knew.
He said, “Brenden?”
TWENTY-THREE
Mistral walked through the waking streets of the Twilight Quarter, wearing her life on her shoulders, in her hair, on the long skirt that would have spun itself into a perfect circle if she danced. It was a simple spell, but one she doubted the wizards of Kelior knew, requiring, as it did, needle and thread. She had sent her company scattering about the quarter, carrying money and the least that they needed with them. The magic in that was that there was no magic. They wore nothing, took nothing that might connect them with Tyramin. Not a silk shirt, not a glass pendant or painted buckle that, glittering in the light, might turn itself to jewel or gold. No masks, no face paint, nothing that might suggest illusion. In the Twilight Quarter, such colorlessness might draw attention to itself, but only from the capricious occupants, who wore their brightest to distinguish them from the night.
The rest of her life: the great masks, the trunks full of costumes, the ribbons and swaths of silk, the mirrors, drums, carpets, curtains, the profusion of oddments Tyramin used for his spells, even the painted wagons, she had hidden within a spell she had learned from a seamstress once when her father traveled through Hestia. How to hide secrets within stitches. How to render a thing invisible even to a wizard’s sight, so that all the magic lay in the threads
and none in the objects themselves that might betray them to inquisitive minds. She had whispered names of the images in her thoughts as she sewed them into random patterns on her skirt, her tunic, the scarf in her hair. She had left a few things visible, strewn about the warehouse to suggest a precipitous haste in leaving. There was nowhere to go; the royal guards and the wizards would still be searching for them. But they would only recognize Tyramin’s illusions; the mundane faces beneath the masks would pass unnoticed in the streets. Mistral doubted that even the most powerful of the wizards would think to suspect magic in the embroidery on a skirt.
The performers had separated, found lodgings anywhere they could throughout the quarter. The oxen and packhorses had been stabled since Tyramin arrived; Mistral didn’t bother to hide them, since one ox without its ribbons and spangles looked very like another. She had slipped back into the warehouse after Valoren had searched it. It seemed safest to stay there rather than risk being recognized in an inn or lodging house. She hid herself by day in one of the invisible wagons, which were drawn up in a line in the back of the warehouse. No one went there: nothing to see but the muddy riverbank and old dock posts rising out of the water. There, with Tyramin’s great, fearless head for company, she strengthened her spells within a labyrinth of threads and tried to come up with a trick for the magician that would surpass all others: how to transform the king’s fear into trust.
She thought so often of Arneth that she was afraid she might have sewn him into her sleeve and made him invisible. He had left a footprint in her heart, a little, restless, curious urge to follow, see what she would find in him when she found his face again. That, too, she must work somehow into Tyramin’s master spell: to convince the King of Numis with her magic that she was a harmless trickster, so that he would let her stay in the Twilight Quarter to be near the one man for whom she did not have to wear her masks.
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