“About what?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, why didn’t she talk to Valoren?”
“Apparently she tried. They quarreled, I heard, in front of the wizards, instead of talking, and then she disappeared again.”
“Where was she the first time?” the king asked. “Hiding in the school cellar or some such morbid place? In the dark with the beetles?”
“Someplace like that.”
“And now she’s with Ceta, and Valoren couldn’t charm her back home? What ails the girl? Doesn’t she like him?” The king glanced around him at the silence. “No one knows?”
“Valoren might know,” Enys answered doubtfully.
“Valoren is pursuing the rumor of some monstrous power in the north country,” Galin said grimly. “A wedding is the last thing on his mind.”
The High Warden stared at him; the counselor rocked slightly at the news. “My lord,” he said, shocked, “should we prepare for attack?”
“I have no idea. His only source for the threat is a few lines that Od wrote centuries ago. He thinks the powers have been dormant in all this time, but may have something to do with the missing gardener. I don’t know,” he added restively, “what so many nebulous bits and pieces—a gardener, a trick monger, a sentence in an ancient scroll—will add up to in the end. Valoren will tell us.”
“Surely Od would have warned us,” the prince said.
“Maybe her way of warning us was to send the gardener here,” the king answered. “That was Valoren’s suggestion.”
“Why didn’t she just come and tell us herself?” Enys asked skeptically. “She rescued Kelior once before.”
“It would seem more helpful than inflicting a dangerous gardener on us.” The king stopped, as though trying to envision such a thing, then blinked and said again, irritably, “I don’t know. Nothing makes sense. I can’t even understand my own daughter, let alone these obscure threats and portents that may be threatening us and maybe not—Arneth.”
“Yes, my lord,” Arneth said quickly.
“My daughter is apparently still speaking to you, at least. I want her back under this roof and attending to her wedding before she vanishes out of our lives like her—” He stopped again, rendering himself speechless with what he almost said. The prince eyed him mutely, disquieted. The king tossed his hands in the air, and said it. “Like her mother. I’ll give you a message for her and Lady Thiel: that you will escort both of them, together with the magician and his company, tomorrow evening to watch Tyramin perform.” He fixed Arneth with a questioning glance, then Enys. “Will that do? Do you think she’ll come?”
Arneth, who had been asked by the princess to do just that, let the prince answer. Enys seemed to cast his thoughts back to a young woman he had once known, but now was not certain he would even recognize. “Yes,” he said hesitantly. “I’m not sure why I think so. But I think it will please her.”
The king was silent a moment, adrift in his own memories; Arneth glimpsed the bewilderment of loss in his eyes. Then he said briskly to no one, “Good. Maybe she’ll talk to somebody then, and one thing in this murky confusion of events will begin to clear itself up.” He turned restively, made for the door, his entourage falling in behind him. “The rest must wait for Valoren.”
TWENTY-FIVE
Brenden refused to come out.
Yar, waiting patiently in the snow, could hardly blame him. Words, he discovered early, were of no use. Talking to one of the strange, silent beings was like trying to converse with a boulder. He knew no words old enough, slow enough, for such an ancient thing to hear, when a single word in its own language might begin in one century, end in another. When he let their minds seep into his, tell him what they chose, they filled him with emanations, images. So Brenden spoke to him, in this language older than words. When Yar tried to answer, letting his own awareness venture into the dark, weather-beaten masks of power, he found himself halfway down the flank of the mountain, lifting his face out of the snow.
For some time, all he could see or think or feel was a painful brightness as though he had been struck by lightning, and a force like water plunging over the sheer edge of a cliff. He had barely touched the surface of such power when it flung him and his curiosity away on a spume white surge of motion. When the burning in his head eased a little, he heard his name again, a gentle, persistent awareness of him flowing out of wherever Brenden had hidden himself. He struggled up slowly, staring at mysteries, stunned by their power, and by Brenden, who had opened his mind to them as easily as he might have opened himself to a bog lily, and had lived, Yar assumed, to tell about it.
He walked back up to the bulky shapes circling the place where he had made his fire. He lit another, warmed his sodden bones, and went back to waiting, keeping his mind still, open to whatever chose to enter.
He didn’t see what shape Valoren took to reach the mountain. He felt the gentle, wordless company of minds withdraw swiftly as small animals startling away from a hawk’s shadow. He stirred, puzzled, oddly lonely, and found that he was not alone. The young wizard had come out of nowhere to stand near his fire. He was staring upward at the faceless, nameless enormities around him. At the touch of Yar’s eyes he whirled abruptly, his face as colorless as the snow and wary, Yar saw with surprise, even of him.
“What are they?” His voice trembled with shock or the cold. Yar, searching for words, for a place to begin, couldn’t find them fast enough. Valoren reached him at a step, gripped his arms, and hauled him to his feet. Yar sensed the tension in him drawn dangerously fine. “Yar!”
He found words finally. “They are everything you fear.”
Valoren’s hold on him tightened; he breathed incredulously, “You aren’t afraid—”
“They’re terrified of you.”
Valoren stared at them, then at Yar. He asked hoarsely, “How can you tell?”
“Why do you think they have chosen the most isolated place in Numis to hide themselves?”
“Why did they come to Numis at all? Why did they choose Numis?”
“They were born here.”
The young wizard’s hands slackened. “No,” he whispered. “No. You saw what Od wrote—They brought terror into Numis.”
“I listened to them. They told me.”
“You let them into your mind? Yar, they could tell you any lies!” He glanced around them suddenly, bewildered, remembering what he had come for. “Where is Brenden Vetch? You said he would be here.”
“He is,” Yar said briefly, anticipating trouble. But it was past time to hide things from Valoren, even the gardener.
“Where?”
Yar looked up at the circle of dark, rough-hewn shapes around them, all silently listening, he knew, and wondered how much, if anything, they understood. Perhaps, given their disastrous history with humans, they understood only too well what all the shouting was about. Valoren followed his glance; his quick breath whitened the air.
“In there? They took him?”
“I don’t think so,” Yar answered. “I think he vanished into them to hide.”
Valoren was silent, his attention sliding from shape to shape as though he might recognize some part of Brenden, his eye or his hair, in a runnel or a stump. Then his face grew very still, as he focused his thoughts and his powers.
Yar said sharply, “Don’t—”
But Valoren did, even as he spoke. Yar, catching at him, was thrown off his feet by the force that tossed Valoren away as easily as a twig in a torrent. Valoren, crying out, landed heavily on top of him. Yar lay in the snow for a moment, catching his breath, then pulled himself free and held out a hand to the ashen-faced wizard, who was blinking as though he had gone blind.
“As I was saying,” Yar continued grimly, as Valoren pulled himself up to sit slumped and cradling his head in his hands, “don’t go into their minds. Let them come into you. You’ll hear them, if you listen. If you invite them in. If they sense that you mean them no harm.”
Yar’s sigh, dredged from the depths, blew a mist between them. “Of course they can be destroyed,” he said impatiently. “Why do you think they’ve been hiding up here all these centuries? But why would you want to destroy such power? Such wonders?”
“They’re lawless, renegade—who knows what they might do?” He gazed back obstinately at Yar, both hands at his brow, pushing against the headache Yar knew he had gotten from venturing into the unknown. “What do you suggest we do to make them safe? Bring them back to the school and put them into a classroom to restructure their magic?”
“I suggest we leave them alone.”
“And Brenden Vetch with them? Think what powers a human might have, combining his own powers with theirs.”
“What makes you think that Brenden would be more successful than you or I? He’s alive; that’s all I know. He remembers my name. Other than that, he hasn’t spoken a word.”
“He’s trapped,” Valoren said flatly.
“He is terrified. He found what he thought was the safest place in Numis to hide.”
“Here? They eat wizards, it seems.”
“He was hiding from you.”
“Why? If he had nothing to hide?”
“You frightened him?” Yar guessed. “Maybe he thought that, if he stayed at the school and learned what we had to teach, he would turn into you?”
Valoren stared at him. He closed his eyes at a stab of pain, opened them again, and asked heavily, “What’s wrong with that? The king is pleased with me. Isn’t that the point of the school: to strengthen the powers of Numis? If we let such raw, lawless power exist within our boundaries, it could destroy everything we know.”
“I don’t think so. I think we could learn unimaginable things from them.”
“I can’t imagine anything but danger.”
“I know you can’t. That’s why they fear you.”
Valoren shook his head, and winced again. “I don’t understand you. Od began her school in Kelior with permission from the king; she used her own powers to protect Numis. Her purpose was clear: to bring order to the chaos of unschooled, unruly power by bringing it to submission under the laws of the king. These wild powers have no place in the land that Od chose.”
“She calls them forgotten treasures,” Yar reminded him.
“She writes of terror ruling Numis if they are freed.”
“If they are feared.”
“How could they not be?” Valoren exclaimed, looking up at them through snow, which had begun to fall again, lightly, upon the massive, silent shapes, flakes catching on a bulky curve, an upraised stump. He turned to Yar again, the same incredulity in his eyes, as though Yar seemed one of them. “We were taught the same rules of magic at the same school. You were my first teacher. How can we both see exactly the same thing and define it so differently?”
“You are seeing what the king would fear. I see—” Yar paused, felt their attention again, their awareness of him. Wonder swept through him, fierce curiosity, longing. “I see,” he whispered, “all the possibilities of magic.”
Valoren rubbed his eyes, trying to clear his vision, perhaps, more likely still fighting the headache that Yar’s ideas kept fueling. “You think what they want you to think.”
“You think what King Galin wants you to think.”
“I think I should go now and bring back the entire school of wizards. All the power we possess might be enough to drive them out of Numis.”
“I think we should both go back,” Yar said. “We can’t end this argument because we don’t know enough—”
“Go back and do what? Wait a decade or two for Od to come along so that she can explain these creatures more clearly than she did throughout five centuries? I doubt that she knows any more about them than what she wrote. We don’t need to discuss; we need to act now, with or without—”
Yar gave a sudden murmur that stopped Valoren. A dark figure was leaning quietly against one of the mysteries, listening to them argue. Yar blinked falling snow out of his eyes, but they kept showing him the same thing anyway. Brenden? he thought at first blink. But, no, the figure was too slight, even allowing for the bulk of the shape looming over it. Valoren, seeing it, too, started and took a surprising step closer to Yar, whose eyes had begun to narrow. The cloak, far too long for its wearer, was dragging in the snow.
“It’s the eel,” he breathed, stunned.
“Who?” Valoren demanded.
“Elver. The student. He’s been following me everywhere.”
“A student! How could he possibly—”
“How could you possibly have followed—” Yar stopped, cutting short a sentence and a stride at once. He stood still, not knowing yet what he was looking at, but certain it couldn’t be what he saw.
The boy pushed back the hood, and said calmly, “I didn’t follow you. I followed Brenden Vetch. He needed to learn a few things, and learn them fast, and he did that very well indeed, thinking that it was Valoren on his heels, harrying him across Numis. But it was me.”
Yar heard Valoren’s breath stop. Then he heard himself speak again, though he didn’t recognize his own voice.
“Od?”
The boy unpinned the cloak; the gray-haired giantess caught it as it fell.
TWENTY-SIX
The princess and Ceta rode with Arneth to the Twilight Gate at dusk to bring Tyramin to the king. Outside the wall, they watched as the guards at the gate parted to let the magician’s company through. The wagons, brightly painted with shooting stars, genially smiling suns, full moons with more enigmatic smiles, had their curtains and shutters pulled to, their doors shut. They enclosed their secret worlds as tightly as cocoons, the drab creatures in them busily transforming into marvels, enchantments. The oxen, trailing ribbons and strands of paper flowers from their horns, were led by slender figures in black from hair to heel, their faces masked; the only color about them came from the ribbons braided into their long hair.
Behind the last wagon rode the moon.
So it seemed to Sulys when she appeared. The moon was rising out of the Twilight Gate, her face an oval of porcelain, her eyes black and empty as the night, her hair streaming behind her in great waves, planets caught in it, and shooting stars. Long streamers of silk, the shimmering, half-glimpsed colors of lights in the coldest north, held her to earth by wrist and ankle and throat. Dancers carried the ends of silk, whirling now and then at whim, bright skirts throwing off flickering swarms of sparks.
The moon’s eyes turned briefly to watch the princess as she passed with her constellation of dancers. The guards closed around them, a long line on either side. Arneth, followed by the two women, rode to the head of the procession. He led the guards up the road and into the broad, cobbled yard nearest the great hall. There the lines of guards diverged to circle the wagons, which were drawn up close to the palace steps. The broad, massive doors were open wide; the oxen might have pulled the wagons into the hall but for the steps. Ceta and Sulys dismounted. The princess, staring at the iron-bound doors, swallowed a burning in her throat. She straightened the long, dark, filmy scarf around her throat. Its endlessly coiled threads glittered faintly in the torchlight. Her fingers found the threaded needle hidden along one edge, then dropped. Head held so high it seemed balanced precariously and in danger of floating away, she went up the steps and into her father’s presence.
Most of the court and the school, including some of the older students, had gathered in the great hall with the king. Predictably, he didn’t notice his daughter; he was on the other side
of the vast room conferring with some of the counselors. Enys stood beside him, frowning as he listened. There was a startling lack of Valoren in the little gathering. Sulys looked around, hoping against hope that he was still in the north. Ceta touched her lightly.
“Isn’t that your great-grandmother?”
Sulys turned, surprised. Dittany had actually come down from her tower for the occasion, with Beris in attendance. Her great-grandmother seemed frosted and scalloped like a confection in strawberry-colored satin and cream lace. Even her lapdog was festooned with ribbons. They were sitting by themselves in a quiet corner under a torch, Sulys noted; not many took an interest anymore in the aged dowager from a distant land.
She said softly, “She hasn’t left her tower since my mother’s funeral. Let’s sit with her. Nobody will see me working there.”
But her ladies had seen her; she was suddenly surrounded by women cooing and chattering all at once. Her aunt Fanerl pushed among them, shrilling a dozen questions in one breath and not listening for answers to any of them. Even Ceta looked a bit dazed by the noise and the crush after the tranquil peace of her river house. Sulys gripped her wrist, drew her firmly past her aunt, who rarely remembered whom she talked at as long as there was a face in front of her. Heading in the general direction of Dittany, the princess brought herself face-to-face with her father.
They stared at one another, startled. A din of drumbeats overwhelmed the noise in the hall. Dancers spun like tops through the doors, causing clusters in the middle of the floor to break apart, flee in all directions toward the chairs lining the walls. The king, urged toward the wizards by his counselors, went one way; Sulys went another, to her great-grandmother, who embraced the wayward princess with joy.
“Oh, my dear. You’ve come back. I was afraid you had run off with the magician, and I’d never see you again. Everyone had you running away with somebody different.”
Od Magic Page 24