Lady of the Trillium

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  “Can you teach me weather magic? In your present form?” Mikayla asked. “I don’t doubt for a moment that you can do magic—or could do it—but you’re going to have to tell me everything and rely on my eyes and my ability to describe results. Those aren’t exactly ideal teaching conditions.”

  “We’ll manage,” Uzun said briskly. “We have no other choice. What is it you want to learn first?”

  “Well,” Mikayla said, trying to think of all the necessary steps, “first I’d better make sure—first thing in the morning—that my theory about the plaza being a solar cell is correct. I’ll sweep a bit of it clear—at the edge of the chasm so we can just pitch the snow down there. I should be able to get a few of the Vispi to help, don’t you think? They can handle the cold.

  “Which reminds me,” she continued, “I’m going to have to raid Haramis’s wardrobe for tomorrow; I don’t own anything I can wear to go outside. And I’ll have to get the servants to make me some warm clothing. I’ll ask Enya at breakfast time, but I may need you to back me up. I suspect that Haramis may have ordered that I not have warm clothing so that I wouldn’t be able to escape from here.”

  “Surely not!” Uzun gasped. “Haramis wouldn’t do that.”

  “Then it must be coincidence that all I have are lightweight indoor tunics and slippers fit only for indoor use—the pair I was wearing the day Fiolon left were ruined when I went outside in them, and I could go outside only because Haramis let me wear one of her cloaks. And I need warm clothing even if I’m not going outside—you can’t imagine how cold the ice caves are!”

  “Then we’ll get you warm clothing,” Uzun said. “I had forgotten how cold it is here, outside of this room and the other rooms at mid-Tower. It’s been so long since I’ve moved from this spot.…”

  Oh, bother, Mikayla thought in dismay, now I’ve upset him again. She hastily went back to the original subject. “If the plaza is a solar cell, I’ll shove as much snow into the chasm as possible, then use rain to clear the rest. The plaza slopes a little bit toward the chasm, so that ought to work. Do you know anything about the geography around here? Is putting rain and snow into the chasm going to harm anything?”

  “To the best of my recollection,” Uzun said, “no. But remember that what I know of this area is derived from scrying and watching Haramis use the sand-table. It’s too cold for a Nyssomu to be outside—if Haramis needs to send one of us to the lowlands with a message, she seals him in a special version of a sleep sack and straps him onto a lammergeier. The lammergeier flies to a village in the lowlands, near the end of the Great Causeway, where the villagers unpack the messenger, and he continues on foot or by fronial from there.”

  “How does he breathe?” Mikayla asked curiously. “The sack must be pretty close to airtight if it keeps a Nyssomu anywhere near his normal temperature.”

  “It gets pretty stuffy,” Uzun admitted, “but, as the lammergeier flies, the village isn’t far away, so we’re in no danger of suffocating.”

  “Wouldn’t it be simpler just to send one of the Vispi?” Mikayla asked.

  Uzun actually laughed at that. “The Vispi refuse to leave the mountains. They are adamant on that subject.”

  “Why?” Mikayla asked.

  “I’m not sure,” Uzun said. “Perhaps part of the reason is to preserve their legendary status as the ‘Eyes in the Whirlwind’ whose true form no one ever sees.”

  “Come morning,” Mikayla said decisively, “they can whirl some snow from the plaza into the chasm.” She ticked off the steps in her mind: find out if there really is a solar cell there, uncover it if there is, let the sun charge the cell.… “I’ve got it, Uzun. The next weather magic I need to learn is how to keep the skies clear. Can you teach me that?”

  “Easily,” Uzun assured her.

  “Thank you,” Mikayla said. “I’ve got a busy day tomorrow, so I’m going to bed now. Good night, Uzun.”

  “Good night, Mikayla,” the harp replied, its strings absentmindedly starting to play a lullaby. Mikayla went down the hall, smiling as the music drifted after her.

  13

  Mikayla came down to the study early the next morning, just as the sun rose, carrying the spheres Haramis had given her. “I thought of something after I went to bed last night, Uzun,” she said. “I may not need to have the servants here make me warm clothes. I can have Fiolon bring me some from home. Even if my own don’t fit anymore, there are always the hand-downs from my older siblings—the housekeeper has several chests full of them.”

  “The Lady won’t like it,” Uzun warned.

  “Won’t like what?”

  “Having Fiolon here.”

  “Then she should have stayed here and stayed healthy enough to be in a position to object,” Mikayla snapped. “She can’t very well train me to be the next Archimage when she doesn’t even remember my existence!”

  “Maybe she does by now,” Uzun said hopefully.

  “That’s why I brought the spheres with me,” Mikayla said. “We can bespeak Fiolon and see how she’s doing.”

  “Very well.” Uzun sighed. “It’s not as if I could stop you anyway.”

  “You make it sound as though I’m proposing to practice black magic! What does Haramis have against Fiolon anyway?” Mikayla had wondered about this for a long time, ever since she had realized that Haramis disliked Fiolon.

  “He’s male.”

  “And?” That’s hardly a reason, and surely she has some reason for disliking him, though I can’t imagine what it could be. He’s always been better behaved than I am, and he was polite and respectful to her, which is more than I was.

  “I think that’s all, really,” the harp admitted. “The only male human sorcerer she ever met or heard of was Orogastus, which was not much of a recommendation.”

  “It was also almost two hundreds ago!” Mikayla protested. “That’s an awfully long time to distrust an entire sex based on the actions of one person!”

  “Haramis is a woman of strong opinions,” Uzun said mildly.

  “Strong, unchanging opinions,” Mikayla agreed grimly. “If you weren’t being so polite, you’d call her unreasonably stubborn.” She sighed. “Let’s see if Fiolon can tell us how she’s doing.”

  Getting in touch with Fiolon was a bit more difficult than usual, since Mikayla had to wake him up in the process. But finally his sleepy face appeared in her sphere and he grumbled, “What do you want?”

  “Good morning to you, too,” Mikayla replied. “First, Uzun would like to know how Haramis is doing.”

  “The healers seem encouraged,” Fiolon said, “but I was in there yesterday—very briefly—and she called me a Labornoki spy. She seems to be up to the point in her life where the invasion was taking place. She keeps asking where Uzun is, and why he isn’t in attendance on her, so she obviously doesn’t remember that she turned him into a harp.”

  “Oh, I wish I could attend on her!” Uzun said passionately. “Do you suppose that if we packaged me very carefully …”

  “No, I’m afraid not,” Mikayla said. “You wouldn’t fit in one of the sleep sacks she uses to transport Nyssomu, and you’re the wrong shape to strap onto a lammergeier’s back. And Haramis would be very upset indeed if you were damaged in the attempt. Besides, at this point, it might be quite a shock to her to find out that she had turned you into a harp.”

  “I suppose you’re right.” Uzun sighed.

  “So, Fiolon,” Mikayla continued hopefully, “she doesn’t remember either of us and probably won’t for quite a while, right?”

  “It looks that way.”

  “Good,” Mikayla said with satisfaction. “And nobody else is likely to question your absence if you say you’re going exploring.”

  “What am I exploring?” Fiolon asked cautiously.

  “You’ll love it,” Mikayla promised him. “Orogastus built this place on top of a series of ice caves filled with devices of the Vanished Ones. And then he collected everything of theirs he could find—and
it’s all in barrels and boxes in the level under the stables. It’s an absolute trove of knowledge!”

  “Some of which may be extremely dangerous,” Uzun admonished them.

  “If you’re planning to poke around and mess with devices Orogastus collected, I’d better come keep an eye on you,” Fiolon said with more enthusiasm than Mikayla had heard from him since Haramis sent him away.

  “Absolutely you should,” she agreed promptly. “Who knows what sort of trouble I might get into without you here to restrain my enthusiasm for strange and new things?”

  “Shall I bring back the fronials the Archimage sent me here on?” Fiolon asked.

  “No, leave them there,” Mikayla said. “She may need them when she’s well enough to come home. I’ve been talking to the lammergeiers, and none of them can bespeak her since she took ill.”

  Uzun gave a gasp of dismay, and Mikayla hastily added, “Of course, that may change as she gets better. Right now she presumably doesn’t remember that she’s supposed to be able to speak to them, and that may be the only problem.

  “Anyway,” she continued her instructions to Fiolon, “pack all the warm clothing you can get your hands on, for you and for me. Go into the clothing chests if you have to—I think I’ve grown a bit taller since I’ve been here. But what fits you will probably still fit me. Be sure to bring warm mittens and boots; it’s very cold in the ice caves, and we’ll probably have to spend quite a bit of time there. Then tell the servants something plausible to explain your absence—don’t tell them you’re coming here, not after that stupid scene Haramis made right before she took ill—and go east on the Great Causeway until it crosses the river. Then go north half a league on the west bank of the river, and a lammergeier will meet you there. Have you got all that?”

  “Yes,” Fiolon said promptly, his sleepiness completely gone. “I should be there about midday or shortly thereafter.”

  “Wonderful,” Mikayla said. “I’ll have Enya make up a room for you, but I may be a bit vague about how long you’ll be staying.”

  “That’s probably a good idea,” Fiolon agreed, “since we don’t know how long I will stay.”

  Mikayla bundled up in the warmest clothes she could find in Haramis’s room. When Enya protested against her borrowing Haramis’s clothing without permission, Mikayla took the opportunity to tell her that she was expecting Fiolon later that day with her own clothing and to ask Enya to prepare a room for him. “As for the Lady Haramis, they are caring for her at the Citadel and are hopeful about her recovery, but I’m afraid that at present she’s in no condition to give permission for anything. Until she recovers, I shall be continuing my studies under Master Uzun’s direction.”

  Enya might not have been happy about it, but there wasn’t much she could do. At Mikayla’s request, she assigned one of the Vispi to help Mikayla dig snow off the plaza. Enya didn’t like it, but Mikayla didn’t care.

  It was great to be outdoors. Mikayla felt more alive and more real than she had since she had first come to the Tower. Being shut up indoors with Haramis made her feel like a shadow or a ghost, but now, outside in the sunlight, she felt wonderful, perhaps even slightly larger than life, connected to the rest of the world, instead of cut off from it. And Fiolon would be with her again today. Mikayla was happier than she ever remembered being in her entire life. Even the grumbling of the Vispi whom Enya had assigned to help her couldn’t dampen her spirits.

  It took the two of them the rest of the morning to clear snow completely off a small area of the plaza next to the chasm, but by midday, Mikayla was able to return indoors, soak in Haramis’s tub until her body thawed out, then order a very large lunch to be served in the study, where she gave Uzun the good news.

  “It’s a solar cell, all right,” she said, “thank the Lords of the Air. If the solar cell hadn’t extended across the plaza, we’d probably have had to tear down the building to recharge the cell.” She grinned. “Haramis really wouldn’t have liked that.”

  “So what will you do now?” Uzun asked.

  “I’ve asked the Vispi to shove as much of the snow on the plaza into the chasm as possible; that will mean that I’ll have less of it to melt when I make it rain, which I plan to do tomorrow. This afternoon, you can explain to me how to keep the temperature high enough so that the rain doesn’t turn to snow, and how to keep the skies clear once I’ve got the plaza free of snow. It’s a good thing that the plaza is on the south side of the Tower—at least it will get what sun there is. But it will probably still take several days to recharge the power. Once I’ve got the mirror working reliably, I can use it to check on Haramis. And it’s possible that it—or maybe something else stored down there—will give me the clue I need to learn how to make you a new body.”

  “New body?” came a voice from the door. “Is there something wrong with the harp?”

  “Fiolon!” Mikayla leapt to her feet and ran to hug her friend. It felt wonderful; she hadn’t realized how starved she had been for human contact, and how much she had missed Fiolon. He had grown more than she had while they had been apart; when she had seen him last they had been the same height, but now he was half a head taller than she was. But he still felt the same, solid and reassuring, her best friend, her other half. Their psychic bond was a good thing, but being with him in person was much better.

  “I’m so glad to see you!” She dragged him to a seat at the table, sat down across from him, and looked him over. His hair was longer than he had worn it before and was windblown from the journey, but to Mikayla he looked beautiful, especially when he looked up and smiled at her. She felt warm all over. “Are you hungry?” she asked. “I ordered enough lunch for both of us.”

  “Good,” Fiolon said, reaching for a plate. “I’m starved. But I brought everything you asked for. And I brought all the music boxes, too—it occurred to me that Master Uzun may not have heard all the tunes on the ones we found in the ruins.”

  “That was very thoughtful of you, Lord Fiolon,” Uzun said, in tones as close to enthusiastic as Mikayla had ever heard from him. “I shall look forward to hearing them.”

  Fiolon paused to gulp down a large bite of food, then turned to Uzun. “Is something wrong with your harp?” he asked anxiously.

  “No, not at all,” Uzun said. “It’s just that with Mikayla here and Haramis gone, I’m finding being a harp to be rather confining.”

  Fiolon nodded. “There is a difference between loving music and being music,” he agreed, “and keeping track of what Mikayla is up to is not something you can do if you’re stuck in one place. I’ll do what I can to help.”

  “You can start by studying weather magic with the princess,” Uzun said tartly. “We don’t need any more accidental snowstorms.”

  The three of them spent the rest of the afternoon in technical discussions of weather and how to control it, and Uzun ordered them to bed directly after supper. “You have a busy day ahead of you tomorrow, and you’ll need all your strength.”

  Neither Mikayla nor Fiolon was disposed to argue with that statement; they went to their rooms immediately. They’d both had one busy day already.

  The next morning, they ate breakfast early and went over the process with Uzun one more time before going to the workroom. With two of them to power the spells, making it rain wasn’t difficult at all. Once they had the basic spell set, they moved to the window to watch it work.

  At first it was just soft rain, almost a heavy mist, but as the storm gathered itself together the rain grew heavier. In the workroom, which lacked the warm air grilles of the living quarters, it was cold and damp.

  “This is really depressing weather,” Fiolon remarked.

  “But it is clearing that plaza,” Mikayla pointed out.

  “How can you tell?”

  Mikayla smiled at Fiolon’s grumpy tone. She had always been the optimist of the pair. Still, he did have a point. Between the rain and the wind and the snow higher up on the mountain, there was a great cloud of dim fog a
ll around the Tower, and visibility was limited. Mikayla admitted, but only to herself, that she had not anticipated the fog. It looked like the ghost of a giant Vispi.

  “Be thankful Haramis isn’t here,” she said. “Remember how when she was starting to teach me, she’d pick the most horrible, seemingly useless things and demand that I tell her what they were good for?”

  Fiolon nodded. “So what’s the fog good for?”

  “If you watch the way it drifts, you can tell which way the wind blows here. Rain and snow are a little too solid and heavy; the fog is light enough and visible enough so that you can see the pattern.”

  “Hmm.” Fiolon studied it for several minutes. “The wind seems to be coming from the west—from Mount Gidris. That’s where Haramis found her Talisman, you know.”

  “Did she?” Mikayla asked. “No, I didn’t know. What’s on Mount Gidris?”

  “A bunch of ice caves, which tend to be rather unstable. Don’t go exploring there, Mika, all right?”

  “I’m not planning to—oh, no; I think we’ve got trouble.” Mikayla pointed to the precipitation still falling from the sky.

  It was late afternoon, and the rain was beginning to change to hailstones. “Stop it,” Fiolon said, dashing back to the table. “Quickly!”

  Mikayla was right behind him, and together they pushed the storm down the slope and away from the Tower. When the clouds were gone, the sun shone faintly near the western horizon.

  “The courtyard’s still wet”—Mikayla sighed—“and it will probably freeze over tonight. I do hope that once the cell is charged, we’ll be able to find some way of keeping it free of snow.”

  “Me, too,” Fiolon said. “I’d hate to have to go through this every few days.”

  “Well, we’re done for today at least,” Mikayla pointed out. “We’ll try to finish up tomorrow. Let’s go down to the kitchen; I want to get something hot to drink and to tell the servants to stay out of the plaza. I don’t want any of them hurt.”

  Enya found a couple of small stools for them to sit on and provided hot drinks for them at once; she had a large pot of hot ladu-juice set over the fire. Next to the fire were several very unhappy-looking Vispi.