Od Magic

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “No. I only needed to run away and think. Lady Thiel kindly let me stay with her.”

  “Ah. I’m glad you found someone to talk to.” She patted the empty chairs on either side of her. “Sit with me.” Beris, who had risen from one of them to curtsy, stepped toward a lonely chair behind them. But Sulys, shifting adroitly, claimed it first.

  “I’ll sit here,” she said, drawing the chair close so that Dittany could turn easily to see her. “I have my needlework, and I need the light.”

  “But, my dear, you hate to sew.”

  “I will be married soon. Lady Thiel says a woman with needlework in her hands is generally assumed to have no other thoughts in her head and can safely harbor any number of improprieties. That will come in handy, especially when I’m married to a wizard.”

  “I see,” Dittany said, blinking vaguely. “Beris brought some cakes in her handkerchief for us to nibble during the performance. Your father has been beside himself, I heard.”

  “How dreadful,” Sulys said absently, feeling herself grow tense now that the performance was about to begin. She searched the hall for Mistral, but the moon had vanished, it seemed. “One of him is difficult enough.”

  All the lights in the hall fluttered then, as though wind had swooped in to carry off taper flame, lamplight, torch fire. The doors shut with a hollow boom. Only the dancers’ skirts remained visible, wheels of sparkling silk and light seemingly attached to nothing. For an instant the hall was soundless.

  A staff struck the floor; lights streamed out of it, whirled through the hall. They broke into pieces, formed a flock of luminous butterflies that turned as one and showered down upon the towering figure standing in the middle of the hall.

  The butterflies flew back into his staff. It struck the floor again to illumine the lovely face of the moon, her porcelain mask changed into paint, her eyes like golden fire now, the warm, crimson smile on her lips inviting them all to be as delighted as she with what they saw.

  “I am Tyramin,” said the hairy, dark-eyed giant with his painted globe of a head and his voice like the rumble of the white bear in the royal menagerie. “Master of Illusions and Enchantments. And this enchantment is my beautiful daughter, who assists me.” They both bowed in the direction of the king among his wizards. “We offer you these diversions to make amends, and in hope that you will consider us from this moment friends of the Kingdom of Numis.”

  Light flooded the room from his staff. Sulys saw Dittany’s face turn lavender, then rose. And then the magician made the mundane world vanish around them with marvels, wonders of lights and fires, tricks and transformations, each lovelier and more astonishing than the last. So thoroughly did Tyramin charm the world away, not a sound came from it beyond the occasional gasp. Even the wizards, faced with the captivating power of his charms, watched silently, their eyes reflecting his fires. Sulys, astonished by the wonderful, secret powers of the calmly smiling Mistral, felt her heart change with every enchantment. It turned, like the magician’s daughter, into that deep red rose, its petals of fire blossoming wider, wider, until it began to spin, and her heart became the milk white bird that flew out of the heart of the rose. The bird soared; so did her heart. They sang. The bird became a long flowing spiral of colored paper that reached down from the ceiling to touch the floor. Within the spiral the magician’s daughter reappeared: first her pale oval face, then her wild hair, and finally her amber eyes, tinged with fire at another pound of Tyramin’s staff. Fire spiraled up the spinning paper, whirled around the magician’s daughter. Drums beat; Tyramin commanded. Fire consumed paper and disappeared. The magician’s daughter stood free, showing them her changeless, impervious smile, unaltered by the kiss of fire.

  Sulys picked up her needle then. Mistral could not turn her performers invisible in a hall full of wizards, she had explained to the princess. They must be hidden within thread. Each pattern on the scarf would conceal one performer; Sulys had only to close a pattern with a stitch at the exact moment. Then, depending on the king’s reaction to Tyramin’s magic, she would either give the scarf freely back to Mistral, or wait to pass it secretly to Arneth, who would take the invisible company out of Numis forever.

  Sulys, holding her breath, counting tricks, knew by the order of them when the performance drew toward its end. When it seemed the world could hold no more wonders, Tyramin astonished his rapt audience yet again, turning his dancers, his musicians, his assistants one by one into dreams, illusions, that vanished at a flash of light into some other world. Each time his staff sparked, Sulys stitched. She knotted the thread, and the performer vanished; she broke it, knotted it again, and found another pattern to complete. Finally, only the magician and his daughter stood alone on the floor. He turned her into a flowing fountain of paper roses, then his staff spat light. Sulys stitched. His daughter’s crimson smile lingered for a moment in the air, holding everyone’s eyes. Sulys turned the scarf to the last unfinished pattern, stitched again. The smile vanished. And with it, everyone realized suddenly, so had Tyramin.

  The silence held a few moments longer in the hall as everyone waited for the next illusion, the next enchantment. Nothing was left of the performers, not a fallen star or a feather. A deep murmur came from the direction of the dais, as though from a beast awakened abruptly, but not sure yet why. Sulys saw her father roused and beginning to wonder where his prey had gone. Around him, the wizards were looking vaguely perplexed. They might have seen magic, their faces said, but then again maybe not; but if not, then what exactly had they seen?

  The king opened his mouth; the princess’s hands closed tightly over the ends of the scarf she had slipped around her neck. But it was her great-grandmother’s voice that broke the spellbound silence in the hall.

  She had turned suddenly to stare at the princess’s handiwork. “I know!” she cried with delight. “I taught you that trick! You’ve hidden them all in the threads.” Sulys felt the blood leave her face. Dittany put a satin-covered knuckle to her mouth, her eyes growing wide. “Oh, dear,” she whispered. “Did I say that?”

  The king stood up, frowning at his daughter as though she were some stranger who had wandered into his hall. “Sulys?” The name came out like a bark. “What does she mean? What trick? What threads?”

  Sulys, frozen, heard Mistral’s deep, cool voice very clearly in her head: Free us.

  She stood up shakily. Dittany groped toward her, blinking away tears; Sulys paused to pat her hand. Then she went to face her father and the ranks of wizards around him. The crowd was soundless again, mute with amazement, as though the missing princess had been conjured out of Tyramin’s staff.

  She curtsied wordlessly, then pulled the cloth from around her neck and began to pull out the gleaming stitches. As the broken threads drifted to the floor, one by one the company became visible again: the dancers, musicians, assistants. After them, the magician’s daughter reappeared, though her smile did not. Her face was masked now by its oval of white porcelain, eyes hidden within the seemingly empty dark. Sulys pulled a final, shimmering thread and revealed the magician, discovered in his hiding place, his trick revealed. He bowed to the king, and then to Sulys, but beyond that had no comment.

  Sulys cleared her throat. “It’s one of the tricks I learned from Dittany,” she said to her stupefied father and the wizards. “How to hide little things within threads. Play magic from Hestria, she calls it. The magician’s daughter showed me how much more you can hide.”

  The king made a couple more menagerie noises before he finally settled on words. “Is that where you’ve been? Hiding with this magician?”

  “No. I’ve been staying with Lady Thiel. I disguised myself as a wizard and found the magician’s daughter in the Twilight Quarter. I had—There were things I found I could do from a very early age. Some of it seemed kin to Tyramin’s magic. So I went looking for him.”

  Her father was still staring at her as though he had never seen her before. “Your mother never told me you could do such things.”<
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  “She didn’t know. Dittany and I kept it secret from her, so that she wouldn’t have to hide it from you.” She paused, resisted an impulse to wring her chilly fingers. “I tried to tell Valoren. I thought he should know this about me before we married. Unfortunately, he had no time to listen to me. Please don’t blame my great-grandmother. She didn’t teach me everything I know. Some things, like seeing a gift of peacocks in a candle flame, I was born knowing how to do. They seemed harmless bits of magic. Things too unimportant to attract the wizards’ attention. Or to bother you about. Until now. And I was—now—”

  “You were what?”

  “I was afraid to tell you,” she said softly. “And like Valoren, you had no time for me. Always it was Tyramin this, or the gardener that.” She gave a small shrug of resignation. “And now, I really don’t care what you do to me. The important thing is that you and Valoren know. I suppose you could exile me and my great-grandmother to Hestria. They like our kind of magic there. Or marry me to someone in a strange land where what I know is not forbidden.”

  Her father’s face grew streaked with color as though he were about to erupt. “You grew up among wizards; you know the laws of Numis! You should have studied at the school, instead of practicing proscribed magic with your great-grandmother under my roof. Did that never occur to you?”

  Sulys drew breath, loosed it noiselessly, to steady her voice. “Yes. It occurred to me. But I was afraid the wizards would take away everything I know and replace it only with what they know. I do things with threads and buttons and bones. I don’t imagine that a needle and thread or the wishbone of a goose is common equipment for a student of Od’s school.”

  “Wishbone?” one of the wizards echoed faintly.

  Her eyes moved from the king to the gathering around him of the most powerful in his realm. “If you let magic into Numis instead of shutting it out, your wizards would know what a wishbone can do.”

  The wizards consulted one another wordlessly. The king swallowed what must have been a thunderbolt, judging by his expression. Sulys waited, still uncertain what the wizards had truly seen in Tyramin’s magic and wishing against hope that they would simply turn her out the door along with the performers, since they would have to read between the lines of the laws of Numis to find one that would permit her to use her threads and bones. Around her, every eye was upon her, and not a few mouths hung gracelessly open. Except for her aunt Fanerl, whose mouth was clamped shut at the idea of Sulys’s wedding hanging by a thread. Tyramin and his performers were motionless; they hardly seemed to breathe. As though, Sulys thought, if they were just still enough, the king might mistake them for air.

  The wizard Balius, harsh lines running deep along his mouth, said slowly, “My lord, there was more magic here tonight than can be accounted for by a simple wishbone. There is more than illusion in those tricks.”

  “They came here freely,” Sulys reminded the king desperately. “They mean no harm.”

  “Laws were broken,” the wizard said inflexibly.

  “To make real roses out of paper?”

  “For whatever reason, Tyramin has worked forbidden magic in the king’s house.”

  “So have I,” Sulys said adamantly. “So have I. What you do to Tyramin, you must do to me.”

  “There are ways of undoing methods of magic, ways of retraining minds improperly taught, which might be appropriate for one such as Tyramin—”

  “You mean, you would go into the magician’s thoughts?” Sulys breathed, aghast. “Force him to change the way he thinks of magic?”

  “It has been done to recalcitrant wizards. Only in extreme cases. I don’t think—”

  “I don’t think so, either,” Galin snapped. “This is my daughter you are threatening, not some renegade wizard!”

  Balius inclined his head to the fuming king. “As I was about to say, my lord, I don’t think that would be at all appropriate for the princess. The king holds the power of law, of arms, of magic in Numis. It is not for us to say what to do with your daughter. Except for Valoren, perhaps, who would expect his wife to obey the laws of the land, especially when the land is her father’s.”

  “Valoren!” Sulys felt the blood rush into her face, heard something in her voice that sounded remarkably like her father. “I’m not going to change the way I think for Valoren. Or you. Or my father, or anyone else in this land. You will have to exile me or find a way to live with me, because I won’t give up a button’s worth of magic.”

  “You just used a thread’s worth of magic to conceal magic from me,” her father reminded her forcibly.

  “Because you are harassing something innocent and harmless! You and Valoren—you want to mold wizards like coins that all look alike; if it doesn’t bear your seal, it is worth nothing and must be destroyed. Or it is dangerous and must be destroyed. There’s no place for any kind of magic that’s of no use to you. No place for charms, or marvels, or enchantments, for anything you or Valoren can’t understand. I can’t marry someone who would look at me as a threat or an aberration or—or a task to be undertaken—”

  She heard a muffled imprecation from Fanerl. Galin, his face mottling, growled pithily, “You will do as you’re told, and that’s the end.”

  She thought about that for a split second, answered calmly, “No. I won’t. What will you do?”

  Galin opened his mouth; nothing came out. She had rendered him speechless, Sulys saw with amazement. He truly did not know. There was no law in Numis to tell him; he had to look elsewhere for an answer. Where would he look? she wondered. How long would he permit this moment of doubt to exist? Long enough to begin to doubt other things as well?

  She never knew. Before he could tell her, the huge hall doors opened with a bang that brought the wizards to their feet. The performers whirled, drawing more closely together. Sulys heard guards shouting as they ran through inner doors, swords hissing out of their scabbards. She turned bewilderedly, alone and uncertain in the center of the room, wondering if one of the wizards, impatient with her arguing, had summoned guards to stop her. She heard a sword drawn too close to her and gasped as someone gripped her arm, pulled her into the cluster of performers. It was Arneth Pyt, she realized, standing between her and Mistral with his sword in his hand.

  “What is it?” she cried. “Are we under arrest?”

  “I don’t know,” he answered breathlessly, and asked Mistral, “Do you?”

  But she only shook her head. “No.” Her porcelain face remained untroubled, but her voice trembled. “Something is at the door.”

  Sulys saw all color and expression flow out of Arneth’s face. Magic came in the king’s door, stood under his roof. That was the only word she could find in her head for these huge, strange beings that had wandered in from the night. They had no faces, no recognizable limbs; they might have been walking stones or tree trunks. But they were alive, and she could sense their power like silent thunder in the air.

  Valoren walked among those giants. He looked peculiar, Sulys thought dazedly; his face had lost its aloofness, its certainty. Yar was with him, and so was the strangest woman Sulys had ever seen. She was very tall, big-boned; her hair, ivory streaked with ash, swept past her knees. A bird seemed to be nesting in it. Others perched on her shoulders, peered out from under her ears. Her great horny feet were bare. A green-and-turquoise snake was coiled around one ankle.

  She heard a sudden exclamation from Ceta. The guards surrounding the king and his heir still had their swords raised toward the threat. But the wizards were murmuring, wonder Sulys had no idea they possessed flowing into their eyes.

  She heard her father’s amazed voice crack a syllable into two. “Od?”

  “King Galin,” the woman said, giving him a friendly nod.

  “What are you—what are these—”

  “This is the face of the oldest living magic of Numis. They’ve been hiding up in the north country since the reign of King Telios.”

  “Telios! That’s—that was—”


  “A while back,” she agreed. “But it never hurts to get reacquainted with the past. Nor,” she added after a pause, “to offer a guest welcome. If that’s the case, of course.”

  “Of course,” the king agreed hastily. “Every door in my house is open to you. As Numis’s savior and great friend, you are always welcome.”

  “Thank you, King Galin. I would like to keep my welcome certain here.”

  “Has anything,” Galin asked carefully, “occurred to make you less than certain?”

  “A great deal,” she answered amiably. “I paid a visit very recently to the school to see how I would fare in it if I were a student there. I got myself expelled within the first week.”

  Sulys, feeling sound bubble up in her, put her hands over her mouth; others didn’t catch their barks of laughter so gracefully.

  “It seemed to me,” Od continued, “that the students are lacking a certain vision. So I brought these here to remind the teachers what magic looks like before it becomes words on a page.” Her broad, homely face turned to Valoren; Sulys saw her eyes then, tranquil, gray as cloud and as impenetrable, filled as they were with centuries of seeing. “Tell them what it looks like to you, Valoren.”

  “Like nothing,” he said hoarsely, “I’ve ever seen in my life.”

  “And you’ve been studying magic nearly half your life. Your face shows it. You are the face of the magic that comes out of my school. You were, anyway. And now look at you. Look at all of you.” She gestured toward the wizards massed behind the king; even the most severe of faces, Sulys saw, looked melted and vulnerable as they stared back at Od and what she had brought with her. “Now,” she told them, “you are wearing the faces I had hoped to see come out of my school.”

  “What are they?” Balius pleaded. “Please tell us.”

  She nodded. “I interrupted another argument on Skrygard Mountain earlier. It seems the day for it. The argument was between Yar and Valoren, about whether or not these should be destroyed. They’re very old, and they only want to live in peace. I’ve known about them all my life, though it took me a century or two to find them. Long ago, when they lived freely in the land before it became Numis, they took any shape that caught their curiosity, that kindled their wonder. They never knew the words for what they shaped; their magic is that old. Humans came to fear them in their dangerous shapes, and killed them when they discovered them in defenseless shapes—songbirds, small animals, wildflowers. To protect themselves, they sometimes took a human shape. Some even learned a few words. That only terrified most humans, since who could ever tell if the stranger they saw was truly human?”