Lady of the Trillium

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  “I think it has one now.”

  “What?”

  “You. Fio, you’re the Archimage. Think—or at least try to think. Haramis and Uzun have spent the past three years trying to teach me how to be an Archimage, and you’ve learned everything I have and then some. So you know how to be Archimage. And if Var has been sitting there, waiting, until someone with the right knowledge and skills came along …”

  “Waiting to reach out and grab the first suitable candidate …” Fiolon could feel the land in every part of his body. “It certainly grabbed me,” he thought, “but how do I control it? I’ve been lying here for who knows how long, and I can sense the land, but I can’t move my body, or even feel it properly.”

  “Try music.” Mikayla’s thought swept through him, faintly amused. “That’s always been your favorite way of bringing order out of chaos.”

  “Music.” Fiolon breathed in deeply and exhaled slowly, struggling for control. The winds became a chorus of fipple-flutes of varying sizes and pitches. But now they were together and the sounds they made harmonized. The waves hitting the shore became the dominant beat, and the flow of the river the weak beat, as the pulse of the land settled into a smooth rhythm. Fiolon could feel his heart pumping in time to it, and the blood flowed easily through his veins as the river ran to the sea. The sounds of the Glismak and the Wyvilo faded into counterpoint in the background, to be examined more carefully later. Fiolon opened his eyes and slowly and carefully sat up. His body was stiff and sore, so presumably he had been lying there for quite some time, but the lammergeier still stood over him, keeping watch.

  “White Lord?” The bird’s thoughts came to him as clearly as Mikayla’s ever had. “Do you wish to continue your journey?”

  Fiolon blinked up at the bird. “Can you take me to Mutavari?”

  “Of course, White Lord.”

  The bird stretched out a wing and assisted Fiolon to climb onto its back, and they flew onward, south to the sea, and to the court of Var.

  Mikayla opened her eyes and tried to sit up. When that failed, she rolled over, falling off the edge of the bed and landing on her hands and knees on the floor. I wonder if that’s what Haramis meant when she spoke of “land sense.” I’ll have to ask her.

  Mikayla dragged herself to her feet and hobbled around her room, holding on to the furniture, until her legs were willing to support her again. How long have I been lying here? she wondered. Maybe I should get something to eat; I’m dreadfully hungry.

  But her curiosity about what had happened to Fiolon was stronger than her hunger. She checked her appearance in the mirror, thinking that there was no point in annoying Haramis before she even opened her mouth. There was nothing she could do about the pale, tired, circles-under-the-eyes look on her face, but she brushed her hair and straightened her tunic before heading for Haramis’s room.

  Haramis’s door was open about halfway, but Haramis was sleeping, with Lady Bevis dozing in a chair at her bedside. Mikayla looked for Uzun, but the spot at the head of Haramis’s bed where she had last seen him was empty. Oh, no! she thought in dismay. Fiolon told her it was too hot for him there!

  Mikayla turned and ran for the sitting room. Uzun was back in his place in the corner by the fireplace, but the fire had been allowed to die down to a very low level. “Uzun!” she gasped, dropping to the hearth and trying to blow more life into the flames. “Talk to me!” she pleaded. “What happened to you?”

  “Fiolon was right.” Mikayla felt tears fill her eyes. The harp’s strings were badly out of tune and his voice was creaky. Mikayla lit the lamps in the room with a word of command, although the effort made her sag limply onto the hearth. But even lying there she could see the damage to the harp’s finish and, more ominously, several cracks in the wood of his frame. “It was too hot in the Lady’s room,” Uzun continued, “and the hallways were too cold, and now the temperature in here isn’t right.…” His voice trailed off.

  Pure fury gave Mikayla the strength to rise to her feet and pull repeatedly at the bellpull to summon Enya.

  It seemed forever before the housekeeper appeared, clad in her nightclothes and yawning. “So you’re done sulking, are you?” She regarded Mikayla with disfavor. “The Lady said you could eat whenever you chose to leave your room, but do you have any idea what time it is?”

  “I don’t care what time it is!” Mikayla snapped furiously, gesturing at the harp. “Just look at that fire! Are you deliberately trying to destroy Master Uzun? Surely after all these years, you know the level the fire is supposed to be kept at.”

  “By the Flower!” Enya looked in dismay from the fire to the harp, then closed her eyes briefly to bespeak the other servants. “There will be more wood here in a few minutes, Princess,” she said quickly. “I am terribly sorry; we let the fire go out when Haramis had Master Uzun moved upstairs, since no one was using this room, and she had him moved back only this evening, and we …” Her voice trailed off.

  You forgot, Mikayla finished the sentence in her head. There was no point in berating the housekeeper further, however; the point had obviously been made. But Mikayla resolved to check on Uzun’s condition at frequent intervals just the same. “Master Uzun is back here now, and I shall be continuing to use this room,” she said quietly, “so I would appreciate it if the temperature could be maintained at its customary level.”

  “Yes, Princess,” Enya said quickly. “I’ll make sure of it. And I’ll go bring up a tray for you. You must be hungry; you haven’t eaten in days.”

  “Thank you, Enya.” Mikayla made herself smile at the housekeeper, despite her lingering annoyance at the way Uzun had been mistreated. “That’s very kind of you. I’m afraid that I was working and lost track of the time.”

  As soon as Enya was out of earshot, Uzun asked, “Working? Locked in your room for over two days? Just what were you doing?”

  “Over two days?” Mikayla asked. “No wonder I’m so hungry. I hope they’ll feed Fiolon when he gets to Mutavari.”

  “You were linked with Fiolon again.” It wasn’t a question, so it didn’t matter that Uzun couldn’t see Mikayla nod her head. “What happened to him?”

  “It was really strange, Uzun,” Mikayla began, then stopped speaking as one of the Vispi men came in with an armload of wood and began to fix the fire. He was still working on the fire when Enya arrived with a tray containing a large bowl of adop soup and half a loaf of bread. She admonished Mikayla to eat slowly so that she wouldn’t make herself ill. Mikayla began to nibble on the end of the loaf, waiting for the servants to leave so that she could talk freely to Uzun.

  When they were alone again, she told him what had happened. “Do you think that Fiolon really is Archimage of Var?” she finished.

  “It certainly sounds like it,” the harp replied. “But I wouldn’t tell Lady Haramis about it.”

  “I wasn’t planning to,” Mikayla assured him, “but I don’t think she’ll get suspicious if I ask her what it was like when she became Archimage, do you?”

  “Not suspicious of Fiolon, at any rate,” Uzun said dryly. He sighed in satisfaction. “I do feel better now that the fire has been built up, Princess. Thank you for that.”

  “They should have done it without my having to order it,” Mikayla said, pressing her lips together in annoyance. “If they actually managed to forget that you are a sentient being who needs regular care, I’ll make certain that that doesn’t happen again! I’ll stop in and see you as much as I can, Uzun.”

  “If you’re not knocked out for days at a time again,” the harp pointed out.

  “I shouldn’t be,” Mikayla said cheerfully. “An experience that intense has to be a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence.”

  She went to talk to Haramis the next morning. Encouraging her to reminisce about her youth wasn’t at all difficult, and the descriptions made Mikayla even more certain that her theory of what had happened to Fiolon was correct.

  But when she ventured a very general question about what it
felt like to have land sense, Haramis glared at her. “Have you developed land sense for Ruwenda?” she asked sharply.

  “No, Lady!” Mikayla gasped in horror, shaking her head vigorously. By the Flower, she realized with sudden dismay, she’s lost the land sense! But I certainly don’t have it, and Fiolon doesn’t—not for Ruwenda. So who does? Does anyone? She cast her mind outward, trying to sense the land. Faint images came back; the land was still ill, and there was still nothing Mikayla could do about it. “I only wondered, that’s all. You said something about it once.”

  Haramis looked at her in disdain. “It is not something which need concern you yet. Go to the library and continue your studies there.”

  “Yes, Lady.” Mikayla curtsied and left the room. She had read every book in Haramis’s library long since, but she knew that the servants would tell Haramis if she disobeyed, so she went to the library and spent the rest of the afternoon holding an open book and thinking. Her thoughts were not happy ones.

  20

  “By the Lords of the Air, Uzun, stop telling me not to upset Lady Haramis!” Mikayla glared at the harp. She had come to him for sympathy after another of her arguments with Haramis, but Uzun wasn’t cooperating. Haramis had allegedly resumed training Mikayla, but this training largely consisted of having Mikayla sit at her bedside for long hours while Haramis told her the same things over and over and over again. Mikayla spent a lot of time fighting a losing battle not to scream with frustration.

  “I don’t understand why you’re not upset with her,” she snarled at Uzun. “Just look at what she did to you! First she turns you into a harp; then, when we get a new body for you—and you don’t know what I had to promise to get that!—she forbids us to transfer you; and to top it all off, she has you dragged up to her room where she’s keeping it hot enough to cause permanent damage to the harp—after Fiolon warned her that it would! In your place I’d be furious with her!”

  Uzun sighed. “I don’t have to be angry with her, Mikayla; you’re angry enough for both of us. Try to remember that she’s been ill. She didn’t intend to harm me, and she doesn’t intend to hurt you.”

  “That would be a much more convincing argument if she had showed any more consideration for us before she became ill than she does now,” Mikayla pointed out.

  “Just please don’t yell at her.” Uzun sighed again. “It hurts her feelings, and that’s bad for her recovery.”

  “Why should I care about her feelings?” Mikayla demanded furiously. “She doesn’t care about mine!” Haramis had recovered from her illness just enough to be thoroughly unpleasant to be around, and Mikayla was finding the strain intolerable.

  “Nobody cares about my feelings; I’m just a pawn. I’m not a person; I’m just a thing: Archimage-in-Training. Choose semisuitable child—it doesn’t matter if she’s a round peg, cut off the round parts and shove her in a square hole! Never mind what she wants, never mind how much you’re hurting her, never mind the damage you’re doing, never mind what she would have been if you hadn’t interfered. Haramis doesn’t care. Nobody cares! All anybody ever cares about is Haramis and what she wants!” Mikayla paused to blow her nose.

  “And whatever happens to Haramis, everybody blames me! If she gets a headache, it’s my fault. If she gets dizzy, or forgets to eat lunch, it’s my fault. If she fell down the stairs and I was at the other end of the Tower, somebody would blame it on me! I’m not a sorceress; I’m a scapegoat.

  “She says that she’s training me, she says that she’s trying to teach me to be the very best Archimage I can be—but, believe me, the day she realizes that I’m better than she is at anything, she’ll go through the roof of the Tower! She doesn’t want another Archimage; she wants a slave, to learn only what she wants me to learn and only up to the point she wants me to learn it.

  “The one thing I can’t ever, ever do is surpass her. I think if I did, she really would kill me. It’s a good thing that she conveniently managed to forget that I can talk to the lammergeiers as soon as Fiolon left!”

  “You should be ashamed of yourself, talking about the Lady Haramis like that,” Uzun said sternly.

  “Why should I be ashamed of myself? I never asked to come here. I’m doing my best, but I never seem to do anything right, and everybody hates me, and everybody blames everything that goes wrong on me. I wish I were dead!” She burst into tears, but continued to speak through her sobs. “And anytime I get unhappy, everybody just says ‘Oh, don’t upset Lady Haramis.’ Well, if Lady Haramis doesn’t want to be upset, maybe she should have chosen somebody else for her successor!

  “I know she’s part of my family, sort of, and I’m supposed to love her; I know she’s my mistress and I ought to serve her faithfully”—by now Mikayla was sobbing so hard that her words were coming out in short semi-intelligible bursts—“… but I don’t even like her … and I don’t like myself … and I don’t like my life. I hate it here; I’d rather live with a band of Skritek.”

  She scrambled to her feet and headed for the door. “I’m going out for a walk.”

  “Isn’t that dangerous?” Uzun protested. “Where are you going, and when will you be back? It’s not that long until dark.”

  “I’m going wherever I want to go, and I’ll be back when I’m damn good and ready—probably when the three moons rise together in the west!”

  And it might be that long after all, Mikayla thought uncomfortably several hours later. She was cold and completely lost in the dark. I could die out here. Storming out of the Tower with no supplies, no lantern, and clothes that really aren’t warm enough to wear outside after dark was not the most intelligent decision I ever made. I ought to control my temper better, I guess. If I live though this, I suppose I’ll really have to make more of an effort.…

  She trudged steadily onward, not knowing where she was going, but knowing that if she stopped, she would freeze to death all too quickly. And now that dying is a real possibility, she thought wryly, I’m not so sure that I want to die after all. But I’m still not sure that I want to go back to the Tower and be Haramis’s good little girl. I wish I had somewhere else to go. For that matter, I wish I could see where I’m going—I would have to pull a stupid stunt like this on an overcast night.

  It was then that her inability to see where she was putting her feet finally caught up with her. Whatever she stepped on—she was never sure; it happened so fast—slid under her feet, or maybe she slid, but she was slipping, falling past the edge of something, dropping terrifyingly fast. Then she hit the ground, or more accurately, the water. Running water.

  Funny, I didn’t think there was any unfrozen water anywhere near here. I wonder where I am. Not that it makes much difference now; I’ll be unconscious in minutes and dead soon after. Still she thrashed about, trying to keep her head out of the water enough to keep breathing. Suddenly something lifted her bodily out of the water by the back of her tunic (her cloak had been lost when she fell) and flew through the air with her.

  It was excruciatingly painful. Mikayla was soaked to the skin, and whatever was holding her was flying quickly. Icy-cold air stung her face and body, the wind slapped her wet hair into her face like a whip, and when a thick strand of her hair blew into her mouth, she discovered that the water on it had frozen solid. Claws poked through her tunic and scratched her back. She still couldn’t see anything in the dark night and was too miserable to care whether whatever carried her could see, or to wonder whether it was trying to rescue her or simply wanted her for a snack.

  They flew upward and it got even colder. It seemed that they flew forever, and then apparently they passed over a ridge and began to descend again. The air seemed much warmer suddenly, and Mikayla remembered that the Vispi lived in valleys warmed by hot springs and consorted with the lammergeiers. But lammergeiers were diurnal; a lammergeier shouldn’t even be awake at this hour, much less be able to see anything.

  Whatever it was, however, apparently it could see. Mikayla felt the change in air pressure and
flow as the wings above her swept back and inward as they entered some sort of tunnel or narrow cave.

  The claws released her, and she fell, again into water. But this water was boiling hot. It not only wants a snack, it wants it cooked! she thought, screaming in pain. She clutched at the stone side of the pool she was in, trying to drag herself out, but her muscles weren’t responding. All she could do was keep her head above the water and breathe in painful gasps. Tears ran down her face; she didn’t think anything in her life had ever hurt so much.

  It seemed forever before she noticed that the water wasn’t really boiling; it was just warm enough to be thawing her out, which was obviously necessary, however much it hurt. The pain began to lessen, she started to relax, and then she heard the voice in her head.

  “… and they call me a birdbrain!” it was saying. “What were you doing out alone at night, anyway?”

  “Running away,” Mikayla said crossly. “And now I suppose you’ll drag me straight back.” There was a dim light coming from a tunnel off to the left of the pool and she could see the pale shape of her rescuer. “You are a lammergeier, aren’t you?”

  “Of a sort,” it replied, leaning in for a closer look at her. She saw then that what she had taken for color caused by reflected light off the snow outside wasn’t; the bird really was white. Completely white. And his eyes … “Call me Red-Eye,” it said with a sigh. “Everyone else does.”

  “It is unusual coloring,” Mikayla said as politely as she could. “And you may call me Mika.” Never give out your true name to strangers—and this is definitely strange.

  “I may or may not return you to whatever you were running from,” the bird continued. “Since I ran away from my creators, I have a certain sympathy for runaways.”