Wild Magic

by Jude Fisher

  She felt her smile fade at these memories: felt it by the release of the muscles in her face. Turning, she reached over and retrieved the mirror from its place on the tapestried settle beside the bed, and tilted the pretty artefact until the first rays of the dawn’s light were caught between its sheeny plate and her pale, pale skin. The silver gave back to her an oval face as white as milk, except where her husband’s beard had during the night rasped her chin and cheek and brought a faint pink flush to the surface, and a pair of green eyes, more sea-green than leaf-green. Ravn called them ‘mermaid’s eyes’ and laughingly insisted on checking her feet each morning for signs of her secret nightly excursions: for fronds of seaweed, he said; for seahorses, flippers or scales! She had no idea what he meant by this, and had solemnly told him so, which surprised him much, for surely everyone knew the tales of the selkies of the Northern Isles, who borrowed human form to seduce unwary sailors and fishermen, and then slipped into their fishy skins at night and returned to their ocean homeland, leaving their lovers mazed and heartbroken? She smiled again into the mirror and watched her lips curve up into a pale pink bow, saw how her cheeks rounded and the skin around her eyes creased. She relaxed the expression and stared mercilessly at her changed image in the reflective surface. In this strong morning light she was able to spy out the vaguest of lines running from the sides of her nose to the corners of her mouth, fanning outward from her eyes. She had not thought she knew how to smile, or make any other such expression; but these faint marks told another story.

  The Master had always treated her as a thing rather than any sort of person, a solace and pastime for his pleasure alone in the chilly, empty world of Sanctuary, and until this time she had never questioned her place in that world: but now a new thought came to her.

  In some lost past, she must have smiled and frowned and pursed her lips enough times to have etched these small lines into her skin.

  In some lost past, therefore, she must have had another life.

  Feelings that she could put no name to welled up in her. She dropped the mirror to her lap, barely registering its cold touch on her naked skin. Beside her, her husband stirred briefly, eyelids flickering, then he stilled and slipped back into deep sleep. She reached out and brushed a frond of his black hair away from his brow, and felt herself calmed by the sheer simplicity of the act. Such a man of many parts, she thought, taking in the conjunction of the weatherbeaten skin of his face and neck with the vulnerable whiteness of his chest and belly; at the dark hands and forearms flung wide upon the linen sheet which contrasted with legs so pale they were like limbs belonging to another man. Only the curling black hair that grew everywhere upon him knit the whole together, blurred the seams, confused the edges.

  Leaning towards him, she laid the mirror now on its side before his sleeping face and watched as his breath bloomed on the cold metal. The bloom faded and died, then was restored with each new passage of warm air. Then she wiped the mirror on the sheet and breathed on it herself.

  Nothing.

  The metal remained pristine, unblemished.

  ‘For all your reputation, there is no heat in you,’ she remembered the Master saying to her. Then, under the binding of his magic, it had been as much as she could do to concentrate on the sound his words made; it was only now, away from his influence, that she began to see what he might have meant by this, yet no matter how many times she tried the test, the result was still the same and she still had no better understanding of who she was or where she had come from. It was a mystery that was coming to obsess her, to drive her mind ceaselessly through every hour of the day and night.

  All she knew was that she had owned no knowledge, no identity or volition while she lived with the Master. It was as if his sorcery had smothered them as a wet cloak might smother flames before a fire could catch hold. All she had known in her years in Sanctuary was how to arouse Rahe’s ardour and slake his lusts: other than this, she had drifted as in a dream. It was only after she had left the island that she had felt any sense of herself return. But even after several months of travelling amongst the fantastic people and places of Elda, she had still been quiescent, content to drift in Virelai’s wake; content to do what he asked of her with the men he brought to the wagon. Content, that is, until he had tried to sell her to a southern lord – a man whose touch had made her skin creep, made her shudder with a revulsion she could neither name nor comprehend except to know with a deep, primal instinct that he was full of death and she wanted no part of him.

  The fact that she was here, now, in the royal chambers of Halbo Castle was all her own doing, and she felt some satisfaction in that. When she had escaped Virelai on the night of the Gathering, she had not known her own intention. To remove herself from the grasp of the deathly southern lord meant putting an ocean between them; and a ship bound for the north required the protection of an Eyran captain; but when she laid eyes upon Ravn Asharson the future came into clear focus. Assessing him at a glance as a powerful man, a man who could defend her against all comers, she knew at once that his soul cried out for the exotic; and so she had stepped into his orbit and drawn his eyes to her.

  In her short experience of the world beyond Sanctuary she had learned that women used whatever wiles they possessed to attract men to them, and that the conquest of a king would be regarded by most as a triumph, not an undertaking to be entered into lightly or by a woman of no breeding or heritage. But for the Rosa Eldi, this was no game of statesmanship, no play for status: it was a gambit made simply for survival, and so she had exerted the full force of her seductive magic upon him; he was utterly, inextricably bewitched.

  What she had not bargained for were the odd sensations he drew forth from her. These sensations, which she learned to term ‘feelings’, started with a vague tenderness toward a man so vulnerable her mere glance could bring him to his knees; then had grown into something altogether more demanding of their connection in the weeks of the voyage back to the northern capital and his careful introduction of her into the great castle he called his home. Now it had become something she could only think of as a slow fire burning deep inside her, so that instead of abandoning him as soon as the ship docked in Eyra as she had planned, she now experienced an almost physical pain every time he left her side.

  This pain was made all the worse by the fact that she knew she had wrought a powerful enchantment upon Ravn: she could not be sure that, without it, he would feel anything for her at all. And since she had thrown this veil of bewitchment over him, it was impossible to know his true character. It was like viewing an island through fogs: she sensed, beneath the miasma of the magic, something adamantine in him, something uncompromising and elemental; something that might challenge and thrill her into a greater understanding of love, of life, of the world and her place in it. But he moved and talked as if in a daze when he was with her; and when he was away, she knew nothing of him.

  It would, she pondered, leaning closer to trace the chiselled line of his mouth with the tip of her finger, be curious to withdraw the glamour and see just who this man she had chosen to ally herself to might truly be. But she did not yet dare to do it.

  And so, she moved further down the bed until her face was level with her husband’s chest. Then she laid her head down upon him and listened to the steady draw of his breath, to the powerful slow beat of his heart – like a tide, like a tide – and wondered whether she would ever learn what it was to be human in this world of Elda.

  One

  Intrigues

  Aran Aranson, Master of Rockfall, stood in the doorway of his smithy with the moon leering over his shoulder like the eye of some vengeful giant, and watched with disbelief as the dead woman came to her feet.

  In front of him, his second son Fent was on his knees, gazing up at the apparition he had killed only moments earlier, while his only daughter, Katla Aransen, lay as still as stone on the cold floor with blood all over her face and hands. The dead woman took a step towards him and the moonlight shon
e from her single eye so that she looked like an afterwalker, recently returned from the quiet of the burial howe to haunt those who had done it wrong in life, to straddle the rooftree of the houses till the timbers broke, to hag-ride the livestock till they ran mad; to terrorise all and sundry until the whole settlement was cursed and abandoned.

  His hand tightened on the pommel of the dagger he wore at his waist-belt. Severing the head, that’s the only thing that works with ghasts, old Gramma Garsen had told them, her face lit ghoulishly by the embers of the firepit, as he sat with all the other little boys of the steading, held rapt and terrified breathless by her words, You have to cut off the head and bury it as far from the body as you can. But would such simple advice work on a seither, one of the legendary magic-channellers of the Northern Isles? Aran drew the dagger and held it out before him, knowing it an inadequate weapon for the task at hand. Katla’s Red Sword, the prize weapon she had forged last year, with a carnelian set into the hilt, lay out of his reach; but if he could disable the seither with the dagger, then spring past her to retrieve it—

  ‘Put away that pin, Aran Aranson.’

  The seither’s voice was deep and resonant: too powerful for a woman heart-pierced only moments earlier. He found his hand faltering, as if there were more power in her words than just their meaning.

  ‘Would you bring down the same curse on yourself as I placed on your murderous son?’

  May all your ventures meet with disaster.

  Aran had never thought himself as a particularly superstitious man but now he felt an icy dread upon him as if the dead woman had reached out and placed a chilly finger on his heart.

  ‘I do not understand what has happened here,’ he managed at last.

  The seither, Festrin One-Eye, smiled grimly. There was blood on her teeth and gums, blood which looked black in that garish light. They do not bleed as we do, Gramma Garsen had said; they swell to twice their normal size and their veins fill with black fluid, one drop of which would sear a hillside for eternity.

  ‘Do you really think me aptagangur, Aran Aranson?’ Festrin said with remarkable sweetness, and began to unlace the ties of her tunic.

  Aran’s eyes dropped unwillingly from the seither’s face to where her clever fingers pulled apart the bows and knots. Beneath her hands the torn and bloodstained fabric parted easily; but although he had seen the Red Sword rammed home to the hilt by a panicked Fent there was no sign of any hurt there – no ragged hole, gouting the blood that had spurted over Katla as she tended to the dying woman; not even the closed purple of a stab-wound newly healed. Nothing but smooth white skin, and the swell of her breasts. Aran felt his mouth drop open like any fool’s.

  Fent spun to regard his father, his face waxy with shock. ‘I killed her,’ he whispered. ‘I saw her die.’

  Festrin stepped around the boy as if he were of no more consequence than a stray dog, keeping her eyes all the while on the Master of Rockfall. ‘Your daughter is a rare creature, Aran Aranson. She tried to give her life for mine, but do not fear – she is still alive. She will recover herself. Mark well what I say. Do not waste her. Do not bargain her away like a prize ewe; nor wrap her in silks and mothballs. Earth-magic flows through her, and something else as well—’ She leaned towards him and poked him hard in the shoulder with one long, lean finger. ‘Look well to your daughter, Master of Rockfall; because if you do not, I shall return for her and you will wish I had never set foot on this island.’

  And having delivered this pronouncement, she was past him, her form silhouetted for a moment, tall and straight as a monolith, in the frame of the smithy door; and then she was gone.

  No one saw the seither leave. No boat was missing from its moorings the next day, nor was any horse gone from the stables. All Tam Fox, the leader of the group of mummers with whom Festrin One-Eye had come to Rockfall, could offer by way of explanation was to tap the side of his nose and declare: ‘Best not to enquire how seithers travel the world.’

  Katla spent two days in the bed to which Aran carried her, sleeping as deeply as a sick child, waking briefly, then sleeping again. But on the third day when he came to sit by her he found the bedclothes thrown off onto the floor in a heap and her boots missing from their place beside the door.

  Aran walked the enclosures and checked the outhouses, but to no avail. At last he took the path down to the harbour where, reduced to simple methods by the club-hand she had earned from the burning, she would sometimes sit and dangle a crabline from the seawall, but the only folk down there were the fishermen taking their boats out on the early tide.

  He went out to the end of the mole anyway and turned back to stare inland. The steading at Rockfall was no grand affair like some of the other great halls of Eyra’s clan chiefs, but it was a fine and sturdy longhouse constructed from timbers shipped out from the mainland in the time of Aran’s great-grandfather, from stone dug out of the surrounding hillsides, and roofed in the traditional fashion with peat and turf. Even on this fine summer morning a curl of smoke rose from the central fire that maintained all day and night throughout the year. My home, Aran thought with pride, taking in the bustle of activity in the enclosures, the shimmering field of barley, the white specks of sheep up on the mountain pastures. When he had taken over responsibility for Rockfall after the last war, the hall had been in a state of disrepair, the crop-fields fallow, the outhouses tumbled down. Aran Stenson had paid little mind to his land, preferring a life on the sea, ‘trading’ as he liked to call it, though others might consider it simple piracy. The Istrians, for example. Aran Aranson smiled. He had done his duty by his family; he had made Rockfall a steading to be proud of. It had taken years of hard and selfless work; he had rebuilt much of the hall with his own hands, in the days when they could barely afford to feed themselves, let alone their retainers. He and Bera had raised a family, and lost five children to stillbirth and disease along the way. He had won support from his neighbours and from lords and clan chiefs across Eyra for his steady voice and fair dealings in a hundred lawsuits, and his strong arm in enforcing them. He had made himself a man to be reckoned with by walking the line of sense and responsibility all these long years; and now he considered he had earned the right to follow his own dreams and enjoy the adventures he had missed out on as a young man, and had been promising himself ever since. That promise had propelled him through the difficulties of his marriage and the dullness of the farming. It had kept him steady all these years, and now he would have his reward.

  He patted the pouch he wore about his neck. In it there nestled a scrap of parchment, an ancient map he had come by from a nomad trader at the Allfair. That map would bring riches his forebears could never have imagined. His pursuit of the treasure it guaranteed was hardly, therefore, a selfish thing: it would provide for his family far better than his staying on Rockfall and managing the farm, or by mining and trading the rare sardonyx out of the heart of the island, which was both costly and time-consuming. No, in one fell swoop, with some luck, some audacity and the right vessel, he would make their fortunes. Bera could live like the rich woman she had always dreamed she would be. His sons could buy a veritable fleet of longships, sail the Ravenway, or, in Fent’s case, go raiding the Istrian coast, before they settled for some good land and a wife to plough. And as for Katla, wherever she might be . . .

  He scanned the landscape absent-mindedly for his daughter, his thoughts already drifting out onto the high seas, to the north, with their drifting floes and towering bergs and secret islands wreathed in mist . . .

  Drawn back to the ocean by the seductive images in his head, he watched the last of the fishing boats sail out of the bay, passing the dramatic spike of the Hound’s Tooth, the rocky headland which provided the island with its look-out position to all points south and west. On its very apex, a detached rock stood out, balanced precariously on its seaward lip. He narrowed his eyes, and as he did so, the sun crested the mountains of the island’s interior and cast their light across the cliffs so th
at he was suddenly able to make out – instead of a rock – a tiny figure, its red hair haloed by the sun.

  Katla!

  Katla Aransen sat on the top of the Hound’s Tooth, her face thrust out towards the sea, her feet dangling over three hundred feet of clear space to the water breaking over the rocks below. She had risen at dawn filled with an energy she could put no name to and had fled the house before any of her family were awake. In these last few days, she had seen and heard so much that it had all become a great jumble in her head: Festrin’s talk of earth-magic, her father’s plans to steal the King’s shipmaker for his mad expedition into the frozen north; the voice in her head that had rumbled like thunder when she had channelled whatever force it was that had brought the seither back from the brink of death . . .

  The implications of this last act in particular were so mystifying that she could not bear to talk to another soul until she had made some sense of it for herself. And so she had run down to the water’s edge and climbed to the top of the cliff by her favourite route.

  Climbing always cleared her head of troubles, especially a dizzying ascent like the dauntingly sheer seaward face of the Hound’s Tooth, which required every bit of her concentration. Being unable to climb all these months because of her injuries, and believing that she never would again, on account of the awkwardness of the clubbed hand, had been the worst punishment of all.

  She held the afflicted arm up in the air now, twisted it this way and that. Still she could not believe the marvel of it. Where before there had been a great welted mass of red-and-white scar tissue, now she had four fingers and a thumb again, albeit pale and thin in comparison with her other tanned and muscular hand. It was hard to believe she was healed; harder still to comprehend that she had brought about that healing herself. It was perplexing and strange, and she half-expected at any moment to look down and find the old monstrosity there again. So she tried not to think about it at all, in case doing so might tempt the Fates and remind them of her unworthiness as a recipient of this miracle.