“Are you all right?” I asked, gasping as the contraction ceased and she could breathe again.
“Yeah,” she grunted. “That hurt. A lot.”
“It looked like it,” I said. “Can I get you anything?”
“Naught but ice or snow, now that the cauldron has spilled!” insisted another old biddy. “That’s the goddess’ command!”
“Um, all right,” I said, unaware of such a command. But then I only paid attention to the baking side of things, not the childbirth, when the priestess of Briga came to Talry when I was a child. “What about . . .” I said, trailing off when I realized I didn’t really have anything else to do but stand there and be terrified.
“You!” Mother Varen said, pointing a bony finger at me. “Out! ‘Tisn’t proper to have a man in the birthing chamber yet! These are sacred mysteries!”
“All . . . right,” I said, as they began to boil strips for bandages. “Let me just look at him one more time,” I said. Glancing at Alya for permission, I placed my hand on her belly and closed my eyes, sending my magical point of consciousness deep inside to view my son.
I had gotten pretty familiar with him and his snug little castle over the last few months, and while he was agitated, he didn’t seem distressed. “He’s fine,” I reassured Alya. “Heart’s beating, fists are clenched, and he’s ready to come out.”
“I love you!” she said, her eyes getting wider as the next contraction hit.
“Be gone, My Lord!” croaked Mother Varen, as someone grabbed my elbow and led me away. “We must begin the birthing ritual!” Alya had found the breath to scream this time. And then I was on the other side of a door that had been designed and enchanted to withstand a battering ram.
Thankfully Sir Cei was there to take care of me. He escorted me down to the crowded great hall, where I made the announcement to the folk who had been awakened by the fuss. Then Sir Cei led me over to the main table and poured a glass from a flask. It burned like a fire elemental, going down. I barely tasted it.
The next two days – yes, two days – was brutal and exhausting. While Briga did not see fit to bless Alya with a gentle birthing, it at least progressed without dire complications. The third time one of the old biddies descended the stairs to inform me of progress, she smiled wanly.
“He’s a stubborn one – nothing in his way, but he doesn’t want to come out yet.”
“He probably knows there’s five feet of snow on the ground!” offered one peasant nearby, chuckling. “If I’d my druthers between snow and stayin’ in some—”
“May I remind you that Lady Alya is your liege, Aguskan? And referring to her . . . privates in front of her husband during this sacred time, her husband who has a reputation for slaughtering entire armies with magic, might not be considered the best way to advance yourself.” Sir Cei said it calmly, but there was no mistaking the tone.
“Yes, milord!” he squeaked, and shut up.
“The truth is,” Sir Cei murmured as he poured another glass and began packing his pipe, “there is nothing more you can do. It is up to the goddess, now, and every living man’s mother diced herself with death on the birthing couch. You can do nothing, for all of your power. Nothing but wait.”
So I waited. Sir Cei was right. I didn’t have anything else to do. I waited, and I got drunk. For two days.
It was a hellish existence, worrying about the wife I loved and the son I’d yet to meet, knowing both were in danger and I could do nothing. Food was set before me, and I ate. Someone was always refilling my wine glass. I prayed. I slept. I walked the hall, I talked to people, I put on furs and walked the battlements and watched the blizzard rage . . . but nothing seemed to penetrate past the idea that my wife was in mortal danger.
A couple of times people tried to communicate with me psychically. After I explained what was happening, they left me alone. Penny was ecstatic and excited, so much so that I had to stop talking to her. I didn’t want to be cheered up. I wanted this to be over.
For two long days Alya struggled, and for two days I led a numbed existence. But around midnight on the third day I was napping near the great fire (which was almost unnecessary, considering how many bodies we had packed in the hall) when something odd happened.
I couldn’t put my finger on it at first – imagine hearing a sound a long way off, like a horse approaching. Only it wasn’t hoof beats, and it wasn’t sound. It was magic. Not a kind I was familiar with personally, but it screamed at me the way a witchstone would. In my dream it got closer and closer, growing larger and larger, until it overtook me in a great wave of nasty darkness.
That woke me up. I shook my head enough to be able to cast magesight, which revealed a powerful magical force in the vicinity of my bedchamber. And since I was the only mage in residence at the moment, that was a problem. A very powerful problem, apparently.
“Oh, shit,” I whispered, as I felt the power grow and grow and grow, uncontained and undirected. It was akin to the kind of raw, naked energy that a young mage feels the first time their Talent quickens. An energy without form or fashion. Those, I knew, were very, very dangerous.
I considered casting some kind shielding spell, but I was unsure where to cast it or if it would even have an effect on the sudden, unknown spell being cast in my bedchamber. It was huge, a primal blot of bright green power that flooded my bedroom to the point where it leaked out all over the castle.
Something strange was happening. That spell had nothing to do with me.
I met Alya’s sister on the way to the tower, because she was coming to get me and she looked worried.
“He’s just not coming out,” Ela said, biting her lip nervously, her hand on her own very pregnant tummy. “It’s like he doesn’t want to be born. I don’t know what else to do. The old wives are saying to cut him out of her belly but . . . that’s my fucking sister! Do something, Min!” she exclaimed.
“I’ll take care of it – and her,” I assured her, giving her a kiss on the forehead and bounding up the stone stairs two at a time.
The scene in the birthing chamber was a lot more chaotic than when I’d left it. Alya, thankfully, was either passed out or asleep, her face and bedclothes soaked in sweat. Her belly heaved up and down with every labored breath she took, and one of the women, Old Peg, stood by with a knife.
“She’s having a hard time breathing,” Mother Varen said, placing a wet cloth on her head. “I think it will come to her or the child.”
“That is not an acceptable finish to this story,” I said flatly, pushing the woman out of the way. “I’m not a birthsister, but I can help. Clear the chamber! If you don’t need to be here, be elsewhere!” I commanded. All but two of the women retreated.
I looked down at my new bride, struggling to bring our child into the world, and suddenly I felt horribly guilty for selfishly putting her in this position.
“M-min?”
“Right here, Alya,” I soothed. “I’m going to try some magic to make you more comfortable.”
She passed out before I finished my sentence, she was so badly off. I could watch how fast her pulse was racing by the tic on her neck. I began by summoning a breeze to press against her face, encouraging her to breathe. Then I abandoned simple magesight and began a more intense probing of her big belly with a suite of more advanced scrying spells.
I could see the problem at once. My little boy really didn’t want to come out, that was apparent. Alya, for her part, seemed to have “wrapped” tendrils of magical force around the infant, keeping it in place. Alya wasn’t Talented (to my knowledge) in the slightest. I don’t know how, but somehow my little boy had entangled his shroud’s natural energy with Alya’s, and he was resisting every effort of her womb to expel him.
That was nearly impossible. Nearly. Most folks with Talent don’t know until they go through puberty, not in infancy. So how were both of them manifesting Talent like that, much less using it?
The spells had eased her breathing a bit, but she was still i
n a lot of pain. I glanced at the big curved knife the old lady had in her hand. That was not how I was going to lose my wife.
I pulled my sphere form its protective bag and placed it over the covers, between her legs. Then I positioned my hands around it and began probing to see what precisely was wrong. With the sphere’s help, I could tell pretty much anything about her body that I knew how to look for. In this case, the knot of energy between her and the baby was just too powerful. With the energy I summoned I began the biggest counterspell I knew, and then I realized it wasn’t what was required.
I switched to a more thaumaturgical perspective then, and approached the situation as a problem, not a spell. The problem was, as I learned by scrying the site, the baby had the umbilical cord wrapped around one shoulder, and refused to let go no matter what. He had manifested his power, raw power, unchained and untrained, on his limited world. It was wild magic, and he was acting out of nothing but fear.
For her part, Alya was desperately trying to deliver the baby . . . but every push did not bring him successfully into the world, it just pissed him off. I sank my perspective down and tried to commune with the kid, soothe him somehow. I tried to reason with him by mind, but there were no words there yet. I tried to project the empathetic idea that all birth is painful, but that it got a lot better afterward. Again, nothing.
As my thaumaturgy revealed that there weren’t any outside forces involved, I began to get the idea. If my child and my wife were bound, then the simplest and least destructive method of freeing them was an Unbinding spell. At least that was my theory – and it failed. Alya’s breathing became more ragged, and the baby was clearly unhappy, signifying the emotion by tap-dancing on my wife’s bladder from the inside.
I tried again, a more powerful unbinding this time. To my surprise, the baby pushed back from my spell, and pushed back hard. My head hurt instantly, and I had to contend with a wave of raw magical power washing over me.
I wasn’t so easily defeated, however. If a regular unbinding would not do, then I changed tactics. I tried other thaumaturgical means to un-do what they had accidentally done. It was a quandary, and I was running out of time. I began to chant and draw in the air the Morath Sigil.
It’s an obscure piece of thaumaturgy, one of those spells you use if you are de-constructing a magically-augmented artifact. It is supposed to be the most subtle way of parting two pieces. Usually they meant, say, a stuck fence gate or a magic relic that needs investigation. Most magi don’t bother to learn it, except as a component to other spells.
But the Morath Sigil has some unique properties. For one, it’s scalable; that is, the more power you put in, the more you get out, very straightforward. You can untie a knot in a string or an anchor chain with equal facility. You can lift protective runes off of three-hundred year old artifact, if you know what you’re doing. It’s a broadly-based spell that varies in intensity dependent upon the user.
I had no clear idea what I was dealing with here – Wild magic? Baby magic? Really, goddess?
“Magelord! The time grows near,” the Old Peg reminded me, the knife in her hand. “You must make a decision: the baby or your lady! She cannot bear too much more of this! It is cruel to make her suffer so! Which one?”
“Neither!” I demanded, savagely – I was not about to give up. “I shall have them both! Clear the room,” I ordered, and most of the volunteer nurses slipped away in fear of my voice. The brave stood near the fireplace, out of my way.
I built up the most powerful Morath Sigil I knew. For the first time I used the full power of my augmented sphere of irionite, my witchsphere, and tapped into the flow of power I’d created at the axis of the building for good measure. I poured every last drop into the Morath Sigil.
I can’t begin to describe the feeling of power I felt flowing through me. It was beyond anything I’d tasted before, like downing a glass of water and finding out it was actually a glass of 90 proof spirits. I didn’t think my body could sustain such a flow for any length of time by itself.
But . . . it was working. Sort of. The baby was still resisting, but Alya had relaxed. I felt the baby move almost three quarters of an inch on the next contraction. Alya was still out cold. I shaped the massive power as best I could, jamming it all into the Morath Sigil, but that’s as far as he got.
The problem was, my son was resisting my efforts. Every spell I used to try to influence him was rebuffed, sometimes with great force. Only the Morath Sigil had held. I remembered the Tree Folk sending their blessing through me to her, and I tried to keep that in mind, moving the magically tangible symbol over the Morath. That didn’t help much, but it kept them both calm, I noted.
Finally, when I felt the baby starting to slip from the grasp of my consciousness, I panicked. I had been gentle, up to now, but now I didn’t have a choice. I had to use everything I knew. And I was running out of options.
I remembered a prayer I recalled learning in childhood, a simple rhyming phrase praising The Bright One, the fire goddess Briga. It wasn’t a spell, just a prayer to the goddess that bakers’ kids and other devotees learn. I held that prayer in my mind as a symbol, remembering mine and Penny’s endless discussions on the efficacy of theurgy, and pushed the rest of my power through it.
It was a lot of energy, but I was desperate. My wife and my son were both in trouble. I figured if I could just let the baby slide out a little more, perhaps I could find a better way to approach the problem.
Before I could decide what to do, the matter was taken out of my hands. The big ball of energy burst, quite unexpectedly.
That caused several unusual things to happen at once. The baby slipped his head out past the umbilical around his shoulder and his panic abated as he no longer appeared to be fighting for his life. Likewise, when the energy from the sigil affected Alya, her own shroud faded in strength, giving Junior a little extra wiggle room. I think I fainted. I know I lost control.
But the spell had more power than I realized. In an instant everyone in Sevendor was confronted with a bright wave of raw magical power emanating from my bedroom and sweeping out in a bright green wave in all directions. I heard dozens of shrieks and screams, and everyone’s eyesight was blinded for a moment by a light that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at the same time.
I regained consciousness because I was suddenly throwing up.
I wasn’t the only one, I learned later. Both of my apprentices had vomited, as had Cei, and a dozen or so others. Alya did too, but I was told that was normal in delivery. At the time I just felt wretched and heaved far too much wine into the rushes on the floor. While everyone else was looking around in wonder.
Every bit of rock, in every direction, was now a brilliant, shiny white.
“Oh, my,” I moaned, my head and stomach reeling. “This is . . . this is . . . oh,” I said, as I felt another wave.
Someone eventually helped me to my feet and gave me a glass of water to rinse my mouth. I sat there stupefied as I marveled at the incredible transformation.
It wasn’t just the castle rock – it was all rock, in every direction, we figured out later. The castle stones, the natural stones, every rock and pebble, every speck of dust and clod of soil were turned white that day.
The cliff face to the south of the castle was affected as well. In fact, the effect didn’t diminish in the castle, we discovered later, but covered everything for nearly two miles in every direction. At the periphery, it faded out over the course of a hundred yards, until the stone was once again normal. Sevendor Village, Westwood, Genly, even as far as Southridge, every scrap of rock was transformed into . . . what? When I had recovered sufficiently, I looked around in wonder myself.
We did a lot of testing to determine what happened, afterwards – the basic chemical composition of the stone hadn’t changed, exactly, but it had been . . . augmented magically somehow, creating stone with some unique properties. But at the time it was just white, white, white, as if the entre castle had been made out
of huge blocks of ice and snow.
It was a mystery. And honestly not the most pressing one.
“He’s past the worst of it,” Old Peg said, putting the knife away. “I think we can take it from here now that you . . .” she said, trailing off. She didn’t have any more of an idea of what I did than I did.
I gave the baby and Alya one last check – and noticed that it was suddenly ridiculously simple to do magic here now. I stumbled down stairs and into the hall, where someone put a blanket over my shoulders and let me nap a few moments. I studiously ignored the stares and the cries of wonder and astonishment because my head was throbbing.
Later one of the crones descended the suddenly-brilliant stairs and summoned me. She said not a word – I was told later that it was tradition, that no one must inform the father of the fate of the wife and child until he’s seen them with his own eyes. I don’t know why. Just one of those traditions.
But what I saw put the wonder of the castle’s transformation to shame. My son was in the cradle near the fire, a nursemaid hovering over him. Perfectly formed, recently bathed, and . . . completely the wrong shape and color.
“My boy is purple? Trygg Allmother and Briga the Bright One, what have I done?” I lamented.
The crone cackled. “All babies are thus, Magelord. Worry not, he’s a fine, healthy lad, blessed with a magnificent head and a fine set of lungs. See for yourself!” She moved out of the way, and I summoned a magelight without thinking. Hardly necessary, considering how reflective everything was, now.
He was, indeed, magnificent. I’d never been able to distinguish between various familial characteristics in babies before – one baby looked like every other baby. But this one . . . suddenly I saw what other people did.
My father’s thick jaw. His mother’s honey-colored hair and browline. His grandmother’s ears, Alya’s lips, and, when he opened his eyes, I saw that they were mine. “What a wonder you are,” I breathed. He looked at me, curiously, and then began to cry.
The Spellmonger Series: Book 03 - Magelord Page 26