The Summoned Mage (Convergence Book 1)

by Melissa McShane

  His voice trailed off, and his gaze slipped to a point somewhere above my head, where it stayed for long enough that I became impatient.

  “Excuse me,” I said sarcastically, “but if you’re done, I’d like to leave this place. Though I imagine you’ll just take me back to my cell.”

  That brought his attention back to my face. “Are you not comfortable?” he said. “I thought we had corrected the misunderstanding that put you in that unused storage room first.”

  “It’s comfortable, but as long as I’m not free to leave, it’s a cell,” I said.

  “You would not be safe outside the Darssan.”

  “I can take care of myself.”

  “Undoubtedly,” he said, and he got this sour look on his face, “but not all the dangers you would face are the kind that respond to being set on fire.”

  That made me want to laugh. So he hadn’t been so composed when I tried to burn him last night. I said, “Are they the kind that respond to being thrown into a countertop?”

  He actually smiled! It was a thin, anemic little thing, but it staggered me. “You seemed surprised anyone might fight back against you,” he said.

  “Most people don’t,” I said, and immediately wished I hadn’t, because that was the sort of information he did not need to have, and of course he jumped on it.

  “You often use your magic aggressively?” he said.

  Damn, damn, damn. “Sometimes,” I said.

  “Then you mean people in your homeland lack the ability to respond. Is magic something rare, where you come from?”

  Damn times one hundred. “It is,” I said. I don’t know why I didn’t lie to him, but I had a feeling he would know if I did, and that might mean he’d keep an even closer eye on me. So I suppose I do know why I didn’t lie.

  “And all magic is like yours? You do not use kathanas or th’an?” he said.

  “Those words don’t even translate.” This was when I figured out why there were words the cap hadn’t bothered to give me. Anything my language doesn’t have a concept for gets left in their words.

  “Th’an.” Sai Aleynten waved his fingers in the air, again like writing, and the table shifted two inches to the left, startling me. “You saw them on the other aeden in the safe room, and no doubt on the walls of the cavern. And a kathana is using th’an in patterns, combined together, to work magic.”

  At this point, I have to stop and justify myself. I know I wrote I wouldn’t give away any more than I had to. That I was going to get more information out of him than he did from me. And he’s arrogant and I don’t like him and I don’t want him to have the satisfaction of thinking his interrogation succeeded.

  But.

  This was what I’ve dreamed of ever since the magic awoke—being in a place where I didn’t have to fear being killed for what I can do. And Sai Aleynten’s magic might be nothing like mine, but what if there’s something in it that teaches me more about my own? I couldn’t help myself. So if this decision causes a total disaster, and my future self reads this and wants to kill me, I want to point out you were me once and this was your decision too.

  Anyway. I told him about my magic. I told him everything. All about pouvrin and how I learn the shape of them, and the research I’ve done over the last ten years, and the kind of pouvrin I can do and the ones I’m still not sure of.

  I didn’t tell him how magic is feared in my country, in the nearby countries even, and I didn’t tell him anything about how scared I am sometimes when I realize I might be the only person who can do what I do, and I didn’t tell him about the magic waking up inside me—I haven’t told anyone that, haven’t even written it in any of the record books I’ve kept, not that I have access to any of them but this one now—but everything else, I poured out to Sai Aleynten like water from an ever-flowing spring.

  He sat there, his smug face impassive and therefore marginally less smug, listening without comment, until the flow dried up and I sat back, my throat and mouth dry from speaking. Then he stood up and went to a cabinet on the far wall, and returned with a pitcher and a couple of glasses, which he set in front of me.

  He made a gesture, sort of an invitation, and I looked and saw the pitcher was empty. So I did the water-summoning pouvra and filled the pitcher about three-fourths of the way. And he wiggled his fingers again, and the pitcher floated off the table and poured water into the glasses, wobbling a bit and spilling a few drops. That awkwardness—I looked at Sai Aleynten, and he was smiling that thin little smile again, but this time there was actual humor in his eyes, and for a minute I forgot I don’t like him.

  We drank, and sat silent again for a minute or two. I felt drained, like I’d been practicing pouvrin all day, and I couldn’t think of anything else I wanted to say to Sai Aleynten. Besides, I’d been doing all the talking; I decided it was his turn.

  Finally, he said, “The kathana was to summon something. A book. We have been working for three days to discover why it brought you instead. As I said, it should not have summoned anything living.”

  “Do you know how to send me back?” I said.

  There was another long pause. Then he said, “We are trying to discover this as well.”

  “What is this place?” I said. “This Darssan?”

  A third pause. My momentary lapse of judgment that had me disliking Sai Aleynten less vanished. “If you’re afraid of giving away your secrets, you ought to ask yourself who I could possibly tell them to,” I said. “And I’ve already told you all of mine.” This was untrue. There are any number of things I hadn’t told him that are frankly none of his business. But it was true in the specific context of our conversation.

  He looked at me in silence for a moment longer, his face growing more expressionless, then he said, “The Darssan is a place where mages come to learn and to teach others. It provides resources and shelter and a certain amount of protection against those who would like to turn our magic to their own purposes.”

  His lack of specificity suggested there were things he wasn’t telling me, but since I had my own secrets, I decided not to push. “So why were you trying to summon that book?” I asked.

  “That is not something you need to know,” he said, and once again he looked arrogant and smug.

  “Then you don’t need to know anything more about the pouvrin,” I said. I wanted to fling fire at him again, but my hip still hurt from where it had struck the counter, and I decided it wouldn’t get me what I wanted. So I took refuge in rudeness.

  “If you explain your magic, we might have a better chance of returning you,” he said.

  “I might say the same,” I said.

  We glared at each other for a while until he stood and said, “Master Peressten will come to you later. I will instruct him to answer as many of your questions as he is allowed, if you will extend him the same courtesy.”

  I couldn’t believe Sai Aleynten had bent even that much, so I only nodded and left the room, where I found a gray-robe waiting to take me back to my bedroom. It would be just like Sai Aleynten to make someone wait at the door that whole time—it must have been over an hour that we were talking. But I was too full of questions to have much room to be indignant on the poor man’s part.

  And that brings me to now. Terrael hasn’t appeared yet, which is also typical of Sai Aleynten, leaving me here with nothing to do, as far as he knows. I’m trying to come up with questions for Terrael—more accurately, I’m trying to work out which of the hundreds of questions I have are the most important. And I haven’t given up on trying to escape the Darssan. Sai Aleynten may be worried about safety, but I had to scrape a living for myself and Mam and Bridie since I was twelve, and I’ve been on my own since I was seventeen, and I’m not afraid of anything that might be outside these walls.

  18 Senessay (evening)

  Maybe I was wrong about that last sentence. Again I’m so overwhelmed by what I’ve learned I don’t know what to think anymore. So I’ll start with what I’m sure of, which is that Te
rrael wouldn’t meet my eyes when he finally showed up, about two hours after the end of my interrogation. The first thing he said was “I’m not sorry.”

  “I was furious with you earlier,” I told him, “but since I’m not dead, I decided to be glad it worked and forgive you. But if you ever try anything like that on me again I’ll strangle you with your own robe.” (That’s actually what I said, not me being clever in retrospect. Though I don’t know how I’d make it happen. Terrael’s tall and I think he’s stronger than he looks.)

  “That’s fair,” Terrael said, and then he looked at me and he didn’t look at all penitent. I get the feeling Terrael is the sort of person who can’t stand not trying new things, even potentially fatal things, which means we have a lot in common.

  Then we both started talking at once, stopped, started again, and then fell silent. It seemed Terrael had as many questions for me as I did for him. “Sai Aleynten said you’d answer my questions,” Terrael said.

  “He said you’d answer mine, too. So I think we should take turns,” I said, and Terrael nodded. “You can go first,” I added, because I could see he was about to jump out of his skin with impatience, another thing that told me he was fairly young. I realize, technically, I’m still fairly young myself—twenty-seven isn’t exactly ancient—but when I was his age, I’d already had cynicism beaten into me by life, and Terrael is just so eager all the time. But I’m getting off track.

  Terrael nodded, began to say something, then said, “Oh, we should probably go somewhere we can sit comfortably. This might take a while.”

  “That’s fine,” I said, but I was thinking If this takes a while, there had better be food. Terrael showed me to another sitting room, this one containing several chairs with actual backs, and I sat in one and immediately felt better. Soft chairs are so relaxing, and there’s something about them that makes me think of reading, which is one of the things I like best. Oh! Maybe Terrael’s Cap of Death made me able to read their language! I wish I’d thought of that when he was still here; he could have brought me a book. Something else to find out in the morning.

  Terrael perched on the edge of his seat so no part of him touched the chair back. “What country do you come from?” he asked. No preliminaries. Just what I’d expect of him.

  “Balaen,” I said. He looked confused and said he’d never heard of it. “I could show it to you on a map, if you have the right map,” I said.

  “Good idea! Let’s go—” he said, and I had to grab his hand and make him sit down.

  “I don’t think where I’m from is the most important issue right now,” I said. “Besides, it’s my turn.”

  “But that wasn’t really an answer!” Terrael said. He can be a little whiny.

  “Too bad for you. Why do you need—tan, was it?—to work magic?”

  “Th’an,” Terrael said. “It’s how magic works. I might as well ask you why you don’t need them. How did you learn to work magic?”

  “That wasn’t an answer,” I said.

  “Too bad for you,” Terrael said, and he grinned at me, which made me laugh. That broke down the reserve between us, and from there the conversation went more smoothly. I’ll summarize what I told him and what I learned from him, so I can get to the more interesting things.

  What I told him: I explained about magic being rare where I come from, and people who can do pouvrin being feared. I didn’t tell him about the magic waking up inside me—I’m never going to tell anyone about that—but I did explain how I’d spent ten years searching for old records and stories about pouvrin and learning to use them.

  I also told him the pouvrin I could do and the ones I was trying to discover, like the invisibility pouvra, and that made his eyes go extra wide and round, and he told me that was impossible for their magic. So I guess that’s one for my side, so there, Sai Aleynten and your flinging innocent women into convenient counters! (All right, so I attacked him first, but I was provoked.) Let’s see…I think the only other thing I told him was about how it felt to use a pouvra, which he seemed very interested in, though he wouldn’t say why and I didn’t care enough to ask.

  What he told me: more about the Darssan—how it was founded centuries ago by a woman named Audryn, with the help of Castavir’s first king Eddon (Castavir is their country), and how it started as a place where mages could be safe from threat of persecution or death. It seems there was a time in their history where magic was as feared as it is in Balaen. And over the centuries it turned into a repository of knowledge and a home for mages, where they can study and create new kathanas to use for the benefit of Castavir.

  Terrael’s been here for three years. He didn’t come out and say it, but from what he did say I worked out that he’s a prodigy—mostly people don’t qualify for the Darssan until they’re at least twenty-one, and Terrael said he was nineteen. And he said Sai Aleynten is the head of the Darssan, something called a Wrelan, and has been for two years. It turns out “Sai” is a title, not a name; they call regular mages Master (and I don’t know why that translates when Sai doesn’t) and Sai means, basically, “great master.” Which might explain Sai Aleynten’s permanent smugness.

  I asked him about the kathana that brought me here, but his explanation was too technical for me to understand. Maybe if I knew more about their magic—but he repeated what Sai Aleynten had said about it not being able to summon anything living, and how they’d been analyzing it for flaws ever since I appeared. He did tell me more about what it was supposed to summon, a book that would help them create a powerful kathana, but when I asked what that was supposed to do, he said I should ask Sai Aleynten. Which means I’ll probably never find out, because the idea of going begging to Sai Aleynten, even for something like that, makes me irritable.

  Let’s see, what else… I asked him to explain more about his magic—like, if you work pouvrin by learning their shape and bending your will to the magic, then letting it come from within you, how do you learn th’an and so forth. Terrael had trouble with this; it sounded like it was something that came so naturally to him it was like trying to explain how to walk. But what I understood was that people studying to be mages have to learn hundreds of th’an and how to shape them perfectly. If you don’t get a th’an exactly right, nothing happens. So they practice their penmanship a lot.

  Then they have to learn the ways th’an can be combined into kathanas. Some combinations don’t do anything, but mages are always learning, or rediscovering, new combinations. And some mages get to be so good at th’an they can scribe runes on air and have them work as if they’d been written on stone. One more reason for Sai Aleynten to look smug. Really, it’s amazing he even deigns to walk among ordinary people.

  Right. That was another thing. Castavir—the whole region, in fact—went through this awful catastrophe several centuries ago, where a lot of knowledge was destroyed, and mages were feared, and they still haven’t recovered everything that was lost. I told Terrael my country had suffered something similar a long time ago, so it seems the catastrophe had a wider area of effect than either of us believed. We tried comparing histories, but couldn’t find anything in common. Then

  18 Senessay (later, same evening)

  I had to stop before because Terrael came to ask me more questions. Then Audryn—I haven’t written about her yet, I guess—she came to make Terrael leave me alone so I could sleep, but I really need to finish writing about this, because it has to be important.

  So, we compared histories. After about three hours, we were both tired, and Terrael suggested we get some food. This time, he took me to a big room with ten or twelve long tables and little backless stools lining them on both sides. A lot of gray-robes were sitting there, eating, and all of them looked at us—at me—when Terrael and I came in. Terrael ignored the attention and walked to an opening in the far wall, like a five-foot-square window with no glass, and I followed him.

  Beyond the window was the largest kitchen I’d ever seen in my life, and that includes the one in
the royal house in Venetry where the cook hid me while the guards searched the house. A man came to the window, looked at both of us, and walked away again. When he came back, he had a couple of plates piled with food: a slice of meat in thick brown gravy, mashed potatoes (finally, a food I recognized!), green peas that had been dried and then reconstituted, so they were mushy, and a thick slab of the unfamiliar brown bread perched on top of everything.

  Terrael handed one to me, thanked the man, and sat at the end of one of the tables where no one was sitting. He went at his food like it was the last meal he’d get all week. I was conscious of people still staring at me, so I used my best manners. Though now that I write that, it occurs to me I have no idea what these people consider good manners. Maybe Terrael inhaling his food is the pinnacle of proper eating etiquette in Castavir.

  “Will you look at the maps after dinner?” Terrael asked. His mouth was full of food and, I’m sorry, but there’s no way that’s good manners no matter what country you’re in. Since my mouth was also full of food, I nodded.

  “Are they letting the stranger out now?” said a young woman, sliding onto a stool beside Terrael. It took me a second to realize she was the young woman Terrael had spoken to the night he nearly killed me gave me their language, the one wearing the jeweled hair clip.

  “Her name is Thalessi, Audryn,” Terrael said, and this time he made sure his mouth was empty when he spoke. He also sat up straighter and couldn’t quite meet her eyes, and those are some more gestures, like nodding, that mean the same thing no matter what language you speak. I covered my mouth with my hand so I wouldn’t embarrass him, because it seemed like the young woman didn’t realize how Terrael felt, but I couldn’t help smiling. Really, people in love are sort of cute.