Od Magic

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  She paused to catch a mole dangling precariously out of her pocket. The room was soundless again. She looked at the king. “Not everyone feared them. Some loved them. Saw the wonder and beauty in them. My mother, for instance.” One of the wizards made a sound like a mouse’s squeak. Od continued mildly, “You may have wondered where I got my powers. My mother told me to keep an eye open, through my wanderings, for such as these, and there I would find the face of my own power.”

  Sulys heard the king’s voice above the rest: an explosion of gabbled words through which Od waited patiently, until the hall was almost quiet again. “I recognized them when I saw them, rooted by time among the snow and trees and stones of Skrygard Mountain. If it was one of them who loved my mother for a time in human shape, I have no idea. So long ago, so many shapes ago, perhaps he—it wouldn’t remember. Or forgot the words for such a thing. That’s why I’ve lived so long. I thought it was time you all met what I was thinking about when I started the school. Power shaped by wonder and curiosity, even love. Not by fear and laws that shut out instead of inviting in.

  “So I brought these along for a visit. I hoped that Valoren, being among your most gifted, might try to find a way to talk to them.”

  Sulys watched the wizard sway a little, like a reed in the wind. “Me.”

  “Let them know they can live without being afraid.”

  The king found his voice again, asked incredulously, “Afraid of what?”

  “Of you.” Her eyes turned to the wizards again. “You might learn something from them. I hope so. Because if you can’t find a way to understand this ancient, wild magic that came out of the heart of Numis, then I will have to move my school to some other land that has learned how to hear it. That would be a pity. As well as a great bother. I would like to think that the rulers of Numis and I can continue to get along.”

  King Galin shifted abruptly, as though he had been bitten by the idea of such power abandoning his kingdom to belong to somebody else’s. “Yes,” he said quickly. “So would I. Perhaps you’ll take some time to explain to the teachers in more detail the changes you would like made in the school.”

  Od cast a glance upward toward his roof. “I began my school in a cobbler’s shop. Somehow, through the centuries, it has become part of your house. You make rules for your house; you make rules for my school. I need to explain a few things to you, too, before I go wandering off again. Change must come from within the laws of Numis as well to keep my school here.”

  Galin cleared his throat, looking for once almost helpless himself. “Yes,” he said gruffly; his eyes flicked at Sulys under his lowering brows. “My daughter was explaining something like that to me when you came in.” His attention wandered away from her, drawn again toward the dark, looming shapes emanating power throughout the hall as a river exudes mist. “You’re going to leave these here?” he asked huskily. “What if Valoren can’t control them?”

  “Oh, he can’t,” she answered cheerfully. “No one can. But he should be able to come to some kind of an understanding with them, so that you can all live peacefully together. If not, I’ll hear about it, I’m sure, wherever in the world I am.”

  The king opened his mouth; for the second time that evening nothing came out. He looked at Valoren, whose sallow face had grown waxen.

  “May I,” Valoren asked faintly, “ask for help among the wizards?”

  “Oh, I think you should,” Od assured him. “I think you’d better. Yar, for instance. He has a gift for recognizing odd magic. And for listening. And the new gardener, as well.”

  “The gardener,” the king echoed, mystified. “I keep hearing about the gardener. But I never see him. Where is he?”

  Od looked up at one of the mysterious shapes, then another, inciting a flurry of comments among the wizards. “Which one is he in? Yar, can you tell?”

  Yar shook his head, looking up as well, as was everyone in the hall, searching for a sign of the elusive gardener. “Maybe,” he suggested gently, “you should ask him to come out. Now that it’s safe.”

  Od smiled. “There’s a thought. The simplest magic: make a wish. Brenden, will you join us?”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  He did not understand the words, but he felt the wish. It drew at him, like a door opening in the night, spilling light and warmth into the vast dark he had become. Words meant nothing to him; it was what lay within them, around them, the forces that shaped them, that he heard. His name was one more noise among many around him; it could have been an insect’s chirr or a birdsong, for all it meant to him. What he comprehended was all that it meant to the one who spoke it.

  That stirred memory, gave the amorphous force he was an image, a definition. He shaped all that the image contained: the passions, the experiences, the memories, colors, sounds, shapes, and textures, and finally, all the words.

  So he became Brenden, standing in a great hall full of people who were all staring at him. He had felt the passions buffeting the shell he hid within, emotions flung hither and yon amid torrents of words. Now, it seemed, nobody was left with a word to say; he had startled them all away.

  Looking around, he recognized a few familiar faces: Yar, Od, Valoren, Mistral. All in the same place, he thought with wonder, and at the same time. He found comfort in Od’s smile, her calm eyes. Yar, who was also smiling, bowed his head to the burly, fair-haired, richly dressed man flanked by wizards and guards.

  He said, “You sent me to find Brenden Vetch, my lord. It took me longer than I anticipated. This is the missing gardener.”

  “I don’t think so,” King Galin breathed. “I don’t think he’s a gardener any longer.”

  Brenden sensed an odd tangle of emotions spilling out of Valoren. He met the light, stunned eyes and was startled by what he saw in them.

  “How much of their power,” Valoren asked raggedly, “did you take into yourself?”

  He considered the question, felt himself drift toward that raw, shapeless force that could shape anything. He confined himself to the gardener’s shape, answered slowly, “I don’t know. I’d have to use it to find out.” Then he put a word to what he felt in Valoren, what was flowing out of the gathering of wizards: no longer fear but wonder, filling the hall like air and light, minds opening like windows and doors shuttered and barred for centuries.

  Od felt it, Brenden saw; she drew it in with a breath, let it out again in a smile that seemed to shine out of her bones. “That’s better,” she said softly. Even the ancient shapes around them seemed to loose some attention outward: open a hidden eye, send out a tendril of curiosity.

  “Will you help me?” Valoren asked the gardener huskily. “You learned nothing in the school; you found all your power elsewhere. And you alone of all of us understand these—these beings. I tried to see into them—so did Yar—we both failed. It was like trying to swim up a raging cataract, or reason with fire.”

  Brenden looked hesitantly at Od. She nodded. “I’ve asked him to find a way to talk to them, so that they can live where they will at peace instead of hiding in fear.”

  “I’ll do what I can,” he told Valoren. “Though I don’t know how much I understand about them. Except that they weren’t afraid of me. I was something desperate trying to run out of the world, trying to hide; they must have understood that much.”

  A little color tinged the wizard’s face. “I put that fear into you,” he said softly. “But it wasn’t me pursuing you across Numis. It was Od herself.”

  Brenden stared at her; she said tranquilly, “I had to see how much power you possessed before I let you risk yourself with these. You ran farther than I intended; I couldn’t have stopped you, in the end.”

  “What are you saying?” the king asked incredulously. “That he is more powerful than you?”

  “At that moment, he was.”

  “And he learned this—where?”

  “From bog lilies, by the sound of it. Earth. Rain. Seeds.”

  Galin struggled, incoherent for a moment. “T
hen why bother with walls? Why books, teachers—”

  “Most are the better for them. A few can do without. Magic will spring up where it wills, King, and even in a lifetime you couldn’t make enough laws to stop it, any more than you can put out all the night fires in Numis with a breath, or contain the wind within four walls. Trust your wizards; let them come and go. What they find outside these walls and bring back to you may be worth more than you can imagine.”

  Galin cast a glance at the wizards, whose attention remained riveted on what had walked into his house. “I think I have no choice,” he murmured and inclined his head to Od. “Make your changes. I must trust you as well, it seems.”

  “Good,” she answered simply. Then she looked at the performers clustered around Tyramin, watching the complex and unexpected performance going on around them. “We interrupted other important matters you were attending. This can wait while you finish them.”

  Galin found his daughter’s face among the performers, asked a trifle dazedly, “Where were we?”

  “You were deciding what to do with me,” the princess reminded him.

  The king looked at her silently a moment, then at the ancient shapes of a magic that had found its way, despite all his laws, across his threshold.

  He shook his head, said heavily, “What’s standing in our midst makes the question of what to do about your magic an exceedingly moot point. I have no idea what to do with you. Except to hope that you won’t leave us.”

  The gusty sigh of relief she loosed could be heard throughout the hall. “Thank you, Father,” she whispered. “It was the last thing I wanted.” She cleared her throat, asked more clearly, “And Tyramin?”

  The king’s eyes moved to the silent, masked magician. “I can only repeat to you what I said to my daughter about her magic. I’ll assume that yours is as you describe it: illusions and enchantments. Beyond that, as long as you do no harm in Numis, I don’t want to know.”

  “My lord, I do,” Valoren pleaded. “If there is magic in the magician that I haven’t learned, it may help me to try to understand these creatures. There is a power in concealment, even if it is not magic. I need—I need all the help I can get. Even from the most unlikely places. Please. Ask him to reveal his face.”

  There was a long rustle of silk and shifted shoe and breath around the hall as everyone leaned toward the magician. The king looked at the silent giant, who seemed more kin to the enormous, faceless beings than to the humans around him.

  “As a gesture of friendship?” Galin suggested.

  One huge, gauntlet loosed the staff; the magician’s daughter caught it as it fell. Both hands rose, wrestled with the painted head. Finally, the great globe parted company with the shirt; the gauntlets brought it down and tucked it under one arm.

  There was nothing beneath it. The hall sounded suddenly like the king’s menagerie when every bird and animal clamored in it at once; Dittany’s lapdog bounced on her knee with the force of its barking. Then the powerful giant slowly crumpled and folded like a puppet onto the floor.

  The magician’s beautiful daughter took off her flawless porcelain mask to reveal the weary, smiling, human face of magic.

  “My lord,” she said to the king, “I am Tyramin.”

  Galin stared at her, stupefied. Then he threw back his head and laughed, the sound booming like Tyramin’s laughter off the walls, and the hall erupted once again, with shouts and applause at the magician’s final trick.

  “Because of you,” the king said when he could speak, “my counselor Valoren nearly had Kelior up in arms. Things must change indeed, when a traveling magician and a gardener can throw my city into turmoil.”

  “I’m sorry,” Valoren said to him, his shaking voice nearly inaudible.

  “You did what I expected you to do,” Galin said briefly, and went among the performers to his daughter’s side.

  Brenden, standing quietly as a tree in an ancient, weathered grove, asked Od, “Where should we take these?”

  “I think they’ll feel safe among the old trees near the menagerie. They’ll follow you, if you ask them. It’s peaceful out there, and full of wild things.” She paused, studying him thoughtfully, and added, reading his mind, “I know you’ll want to be off, testing your own powers, seeing what you can do with yourself. But I hope you’ll stay a while, help Valoren, and try to show the wizards how you learned what you learned.”

  “I’m not sure I know that myself. I never thought about it.”

  “Well, try and put it into words. That is the language the wizards of Numis know best, so far.”

  “I’ll try,” he said, and was silent a little, watching Yar find a lovely, dark-haired woman in the crowd, and Valoren drift uncertainly toward the king’s daughter. He felt his own loneliness then, and knew he had become completely human again. But the grinding weight of sorrow had left him, he realized, and he could face his own powers with a great deal of curiosity and only a prudent amount of fear.

  Od laid her hand on his shoulder, patted it. “I’ll be away then. I think Galin and the wizards can sort things out themselves. Watch over Valoren for a while; make sure he doesn’t accidentally kill himself.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Where else? To find another gardener.”

  He watched her leave. Turning again, he saw familiar faces drawing toward him: Valoren, grown almost unrecognizable without his arrogance, Yar with an arm around his love, the wizards, even the king, his daughter’s hand tucked securely under his elbow as he crossed the hall. Brenden drew his peace from within the oldest magic in Numis and let the uncertain future come.