A Sorcerer’s Treason

by Sarah Zettel

  The question seemed to take him aback for a moment, but then he shrugged. “Sakra dra Dhiren Phanidraela. Who is your master? What are his plans?”

  Indignation straightened Bridget’s spine. “I have no master. What do you take me for?”

  That made Sakra frown. “Then what are the plans of the one who brought you here?”

  You’re very free, said Bridget’s mind. Why would I answer any question of yours? You kidnap me, you terrify me and then you lock me in a cell. You are the one who should explain yourself.

  But her mouth said, “He means to take me to the dowager empress so that together we may break Ananda’s hold on the emperor.”

  It took her a moment to realize she had even spoken aloud. But then her hand clutched her own throat. “What have you done to me?”

  The corner of Sakra’s mouth turned up. “You are a poor sorcerer indeed if you could not smell the truth weaving in that bread.”

  Again Bridget’s stomach roiled. Idiot! She should have realized. She knew who this man was, she should have known not to take what she was given.

  “How does Valin Kalami intend to proceed?”

  Bridget’s mind tried to clamp her jaw shut, but she said, “He has not told me. He only says that it has been prophesied that my presence will return the rule of Isavalta to the dowager.”

  Sakra leaned closer. Bridget, unable to endure any more, lashed out, striking him hard against his ear with her open hand. She jumped to her feet and ran to the door, only to find it locked. She had been so intent on the bread she had not heard him turn the key. She pounded her fist against the door and turned to face her captor, who was looking at her with of face full of startled amusement.

  “Stop this! Kill me, or whatever it is you intend. I know nothing. I have had no time to learn.”

  “Who is your mother?” asked Sakra.

  Bridget did not even try to struggle against answering. “Ingrid Loftfield Lederle,” she said, pushing herself away from the door and crossing back to the bed.

  “Hear that, my father-god,” breathed Sakra, and there was no mistaking the tone of wonder in his voice. “Who would have believed the Avanasidoch would have so little learning in her?”

  Now it was Bridget’s turn to frown. “What do you mean?” she demanded, turning to face him fully. “Why would you care about my mother?”

  “You do not know?” Sakra rose to his feet. “You truly do not know?”

  Bridget’s hand clamped around the bedpost. “Would I have asked if I did?” she answered heatedly. But through the rising anger, she felt some small relief. Apparently, she had at least a little control over the form of her answers.

  But Sakra did not seem to be listening. His eyes stared off into the distance, and Bridget could not help wondering what he saw. “Where is your mother?”

  “She is dead.” She paused, and then of her own will she ventured, “She died giving birth to me.” Perhaps if she appeared cooperative she could get answers to a few questions of her own.

  That brought his attention back to her and the present. “I’m sorry,” he said unexpectedly.

  Bridget lifted her chin and said nothing. Statements, it seemed, did not compel a response.

  Sakra moved closer. Then a smile lit his eyes, perhaps as he remembered a clout on his ear. He stepped back to a more respectable distance. “How do you intend to help Kalami?”

  Bridget’s mouth opened, but this time she was ready. “I intend to learn what he can teach me.” She folded her hands in front of her. “What were those things that kidnapped me?”

  Sakra frowned again, but it looked as if he were frowning to keep from smiling. “You mean to question me now? Answer for answer?”

  “If I can,” said Bridget. She had it now. There was a split second between question and the moment of compulsion. She had that long to formulate her reply.

  Sakra snorted, and sat down on the stool. He looked up at her, his forehead wrinkled and his whole manner saying that he was puzzled. “No, I think I will not play that game.” He rubbed his chin. “But I think I will ask you what you truly know of Valin Kalami.”

  Bridget had her answer ready before the last syllable left his mouth. “I know what I’ve seen.”

  “Pay attention, for these are the limits of magic,” muttered Sakra under his breath, and Bridget felt herself smile a little with satisfaction at his frustration. “What have you seen?”

  Anticipating the question, Bridget picked out what she hoped would be the most baffling answer. Perhaps she could distract him with trivialities. “I have seen him giving wine to foxes.”

  Sakra’s head snapped up. “When?” he asked sharply.

  Startled, Bridget had no time to form her own answer and one fell from her mouth. “When I had my vision.”

  Sakra rose slowly to his feet, his face flushed. “You have visions of the mind?”

  There was something eager in his eyes that made Bridget’s breath catch in her throat. Again, her tongue answered without her. “Yes. I see the future, and sometimes the past.”

  “Have you seen my mistress?”

  Bridget swallowed, struggling to regain her composure. “I have seen her afraid.”

  “And myself, at a time other than when we met in the graveyard in dream?”

  Bridget shook her head. “Only in the reflection of a mirror Kalami showed me.” Her tongue her own again, she added, “What do you mean when we met in the graveyard?”

  Sakra stepped forward until he was a bare inch from her. Bridget smelled the warmth of him, the scents of baking and smoke from the fire. She swallowed, and tried not to shrink from his closeness or from the way his autumn eyes stared into hers.

  “It has been taken from you,” he said to her. “I see traces of that in your eyes. Who took it from you? Was it Kalami?”

  “No,” Bridget herself said. “It was the fox.” What fox? She struggled to find some memory, some clue, but nothing came to her. New fear made her hands tremble and she shoved them into her apron pockets before Sakra could see.

  To her relief, Sakra moved away a few paces. Uneasiness filled his face and he fingered the end of one of his braids. “And when you saw Kalami giving the wine to foxes, was that vision of the past, or future?”

  “The past.”

  That made him pause. Understanding came into his eyes, and turned his whole face grim. Whatever sympathy or amusement he had momentarily felt vanished completely. He thumped his fist once against the wall, and his other hand strayed to his waist, seeking the knife, Bridget was sure. Her hands went suddenly cold and closed around the fabric of her apron.

  “Can you compel these visions?” Sakra asked, too quickly for Bridget to shape her answer.

  “No.” It was all she could do to keep the nervousness out of her voice. “They come when they will.”

  “Have you had any visions since you came to Isavalta?”

  “No.”

  Sakra stood silent for a moment, measuring Bridget with his eyes and judging what he saw. Bridget met his gaze unflinchingly, daring him to make a move or utter an insult, although inside her resolve wavered and she tried to think what the room contained that could turn a knife’s edge. At the same time, she wanted desperately to question him. What was the fox her mouth had spoken of without her consent? Was it related to the foxes she had seen dealing with Valin and chasing Ananda? How could such a creature be in Bayfield? Had it followed Valin?

  What else in this land of crow-dwarves and sorcerers did she have to fear?

  “I will have to think on what you have told me.” Being careful not to turn his back on her, Sakra returned to the door. He produced both key and knife, and let himself out.

  Bridget stayed where she was until she heard the bolt slide home. Her hands rubbed restlessly together and she didn’t know what to think. Almost automatically, she began pacing again — from the bed, to the door, to the stool, to the night-soil jar and back to the bed again, over and over, as if she were chasing her though
ts around the room.

  What did he mean that they had met in dream? Why could she not escape from images of foxes? How could this man have ever heard of Ingrid Loftfield? Momma had once disappeared, yes, but that was to Madison, or maybe Chicago, some big city like that.

  But what if it wasn’t? Bridget’s hands clutched at each other. What if Momma went someplace much farther afield?

  Bridget carried no images of her mother as a living woman. She had one faded, tintype photograph that Poppa kept framed by his bedside. Ingrid Loftfield had a sweep of dark hair and pale skin, a wide mouth and widely spaced eyes. At some point, she had owned a white shirtwaist dress, for she had been photographed in it.

  From the bed, to the door, to the stool, to the night-soil jar and back again.

  Had Momma been here? Could it be possible? Was that why she had come back in her own mirror and shown Bridget Valin and the foxes? Had she somehow come to this place of winter and dwarf-crows? Bridget felt herself beginning to warm and her pacing grew more rapid. What had she done here? Where had she wandered? Had she seen those huge forests, the distant mountains? Had she been free? Would Bridget be free again, as Momma might have been, to explore this place, to do what she had set out to do? What had Momma set out to do here? Where had she gone and who had she met? A strange eagerness took hold of Bridget, moving her feet ever faster. She too wanted to be free, to do and to see, to soar through this land.

  All at once, Bridget laughed. She practically was dancing her pacing steps, weaving around the room as if she were drunk.

  Weaving. Valin said magic was a thing woven. Could one weave a spell just by walking a pattern on the floor?

  Why not?

  Giddy as she was, Bridget would have believed she could flap her arms and fly to the moon. She began to run, tracing her steps on the floor over and over again, trying to keep from laughing. She thought about freedom. She thought about the places her mother might have been, the magic she might have seen, the royalty she might have met. Her mother had been free here. Momma had been free, Bridget would be free.

  Momma was free. I will be free. I will be free.

  The air shimmered as if with heat and wrapped around her like a blanket. She could feel it brush her skin. In a moment, it would bind her, lift her up and bear her away. She would be free.

  I am free!

  “No!”

  The door slammed open and Sakra lunged forward, his knife in front of him, trying to cut through the air as he had cut through the net that held her. Bridget just laughed at him, raising her arms to the air’s embrace.

  The world vanished.

  Chapter Eight

  The Vixen trotted easily through the piney woods, leaping over fallen logs, and picking her way delicately across fresh-running streams. Only the softest green light worked its way through the tightly clenched branches overhead, and the wind that ruffled her fur was cold and stale. The Vixen paid it no mind. She had her business to attend to, and would not be discomfited by such trappings.

  The pines gave way grudgingly to other trees — oak, yew and maple. The wind brought the scent of old bones, long picked clean. The Vixen turned toward it. She passed a decrepit birch tree, its tattered bark peeling from its trunk. The tree raised its branches to whip them into her eyes. She regarded it with a steady green gaze, and the tree branches lowered to sway dissolutely in the stale wind.

  A great crashing and barking sounded up ahead. The Vixen paused, her right forepaw raised. Two huge, black mastiffs broke through the trees, plunging straight for her, foam dripping from their red jaws. The Vixen, who appeared to be no more than any ordinary fox, looked at them. They snarled and howled, and the Vixen merely watched. At last, the snarls changed to whines and the dogs slunk back the way they came.

  The Vixen bristled her tail with impatience and followed them.

  Through a screen of thorny bracken, the Vixen came to a wooden fence that had broken and cracked in any number of places, only to be mended with twine and bone. A black cat with a blaze of white on its breast sat on the fence beside the sagging gate, washing its face.

  “And what will you do to try to stop me?” asked the Vixen of the cat.

  “Nothing,” replied the cat, licking its paw and combing its whiskers.

  The Vixen laid her front paws against the gate and pushed. It swung slowly open with a long, painful shriek from its rusted hinges. The Vixen, ears alert and whiskers twitching, stalked into the yard.

  The yard was a mass of gouged dirt, broken twigs and tufts of dead grass. It smelled of fresh soil and old graves. In its center, a cottage dark with age and secrecy turned slowly on a monstrous pair of scarred and scaled legs, their curling talons gouging up the dirt with every step.

  “Ishbushka!” The Vixen called out the house’s name. “Stand and face me! Kneel you down, for I have business with your mistress.”

  Ishbushka halted with the door toward the Vixen and, like an awful parody of an ancient woman, it knelt cautiously until its steps touched the ground. The pitted and worm-scarred door fell open.

  The Vixen mounted the stairs, feeling them quiver with each touch of her paws. She paused in the doorway, tail erect, to see how she might be greeted.

  Beyond the door, Baba Yaga the Bony-Legged Witch, the Witch with the Iron Teeth, sat wrapped in a tattered black robe working at her loom inside a room built of bones. Bones braced the filthy walls. Ribs curved overhead to make the roof beams. Skulls built the hearth and held up its mantel shelf. Bundles of bones and skulls hung from the white roof beams the way herbs might hang in a midwife’s cottage. Among the human bones were the skulls and bones of all manner of animals — birds, badgers, deer, wolf and, the Vixen noted with a twitch of her tail, foxes.

  Even the loom where Baba Yaga muttered and mumbled to herself had been built of bones. Giant leg bones made its upright beams, arm bones made the more delicate cross bracing. Instead of thread, the loom had been strung with sinew. The Vixen sniffed delicately at the faded carrion scent and dismissed it.

  Baba Yaga bent close over her work under the light of a candle of white fat. Her gnarled fingers shot a shuttle made from an ancient jawbone back and forth, creating a weft made of sinews and hair. Under her feet, the pedals clacked like great teeth. The air around her trembled as she drew down the magic and trapped it in her grisly weaving.

  The Vixen sat back on her haunches, curling her tail around her feet, and, with some little difficulty, composed herself to patience.

  The candle burned. The shuttle whispered as the witch whisked it back and forth. The pedals clattered and clacked. The cat sauntered past the Vixen without giving her a glance, curled up in a corner and, to all appearances, went to sleep.

  After a time, Baba Yaga said, “The daughter is mine.”

  “The mother is yours,” said the Vixen. “Your claim extends no further.”

  “Blood makes my claim for me.” Baba Yaga stilled her shuttle, but did not raise her milky eyes from her work. “Who owns the mother, owns all the daughters.”

  The Vixen turned one ear toward the yard, as if what she heard out there interested her more than what she heard inside the cottage. “What if I disputed your claim?”

  Now the witch lifted her head and spoke straight to the Vixen. The candlelight glinted dully on the black iron of her teeth. “Who brought the mother here? Set all in motion? Who drew the daughter from the living world into the Silent Lands?”

  The Vixen shrugged. “Fate? Chance? Perhaps it was the flight of birds in autumn? How can even we know all that guides the path of the living and the mortal?” The Vixen’s green eyes gleamed. “I say you have no claim here. What say you?”

  Baba Yaga stood on legs so skinny they might well have been a pair of bones taken from Ishbushka’s walls. “I say that if Ishbushka closes her door, you will be trapped in here with me until the world’s end. What good will you be to your wounded sons then?”

  The Vixen yawned, displaying all her sharp, white teeth. “As delightf
ul as I find your company, and as pleasant as is your invitation, I fear I must decline.” She combed one ear with paw. “Perhaps you would be willing to game for her.”

  The witch threw back her head and laughed. Ishbushka shuddered at the harsh, throaty sound. “What could you possibly have to bet in such a game?”

  The Vixen paced back and forth in the threshold, her head cocked, apparently considering this problem. “Perhaps I could bet you my skull for your collection.” She lifted her nose toward the bundles of bones hanging from the rib roof beams.

  “Oh, no.” Baba Yaga narrowed her pale eyes. “I know that trick. How would I lay claim to your skull if I could not touch your skin, or neck, or blood, none of which you will wager to me?” She grinned then, as if at a sudden, entertaining thought. “If you lose, you will deliver to me the skull of your oldest son.”

  The Vixen’s ears flattened against her scalp and she curled her lip up to snarl at the witch. In the corner, the cat lifted its head and the Vixen saw the wary gleam in its golden eyes.

  With an effort, she lifted her ears. “Done,” she said softly.

  “Done,” replied Baba Yaga.

  The witch stretched up one arm to the nearest bundle of bones and brought down a leather bag. From it, she shook out a handful of bleached knucklebones.

  The Vixen changed. Now facing the witch stood a sleek woman with red hair and white skin wearing a long, scarlet shift bound with a girdle of braided hair, rust, black and white. Only her eyes remained her own.

  Baba Yaga hefted the bones in her hand. “One, two, three!”

  She tossed the bones into the air. Witch and Vixen each snatched at them, grabbing a cluster as they fell. The remaining bones changed at once into small grey moths and flew out the door. The cat leapt up and bounded after them.

  “Four,” said Baba Yaga, making her guess as to how many bones the Vixen had caught.

  “Six,” said the Vixen, as her guess of Baba Yaga’s catch.

  Both opened their hands. Only three bones lay on the Vixen’s smooth palm, while Baba Yaga did in fact cradle six bones in her horny hand.