With a mental shrug, Lythande decided that rumor had not exaggerated Tashgan's accomplishments. Lythande unslung the lute and sang a number of simple ballads, judging accurately the level of the lady's taste. She listened with a faintly bored smile, tapping her fingers restlessly and not even, Lythande noticed, in time to the music. Well, it was shelter for the night.
"Tashgan, dear fellow, always gave me lessons on the lute and on the clavier," the lady murmured. "I understand that you have come to—take over his lessons? How kind of the dear man; I am so bored here, and so alone, I spend all my time with my music. But now the palace servants will be escorting us to dinner, and my husband, the Count, is so jealous. Please do play for dinner in the Great Hall? And you will stay for a few days, will you not, to give me—private lessons?"
Lythande said, of course, that such talents as the gods had given were all entirely at the lady's service.
At dinner in the great hall, the Count, a huge, bluff, and not unkindly man whom Lythande liked at once, called in all his servants, nobles, housefolk, and even allowed the waiters and cooks to come in from the kitchens that they might hear the minstrel's music. Lythande was glad to play a succession of ballads and songs, to give the news of Tashgan's succession to the High-lordship of Tschardain, and to tell whatever news had been making the rounds of the fair at Old Gandrin.
The pretty Countess listened to music and news with the same bored expression. But when the party was about to break up for the night, she murmured to Lythande, "Tomorrow the Count will hunt. Perhaps then we could meet for my—lessons?" Lythande noted that the Countess's hands were literally trembling with eagerness.
/ should have known, Lythande thought. With Tashgan's reputation as a womanizer, with all that he said about Ellifanwy's love charms. Now what am I to do? Lythande stared morosely at the enchanted lute, cursing Tashgan and the curiosity which had impelled the exchange of instruments.
To attempt an unbinding-spell, even if it destroyed the lute? Lythande was not quite ready for that yet. It was a beautiful lute. And no matter how lascivious the Countess, however eager for illicit adventure, there would be, there always were, servants and witnesses.
Who ever thought 1 would think of a fat chamberlain and a couple of inept ladies-in-waiting as chaperones?
All the next morning, and all the three mornings after that, Lythande, under the eyes of the servants, deferentially placed and replaced the Countess's fingers on the strings of her lute, the keyboard of her clavier, murmuring of new songs, of chords and harmonies, of fingering and practice. By the end of the third morning the Countess was huffy and sniffing, and had ceased trying to touch Lythande's hand surreptitiously on the keyboard.
"On the morrow, Lady, I must depart," Lythande said. That morning the curious pufl of the enchanted lute had begun to make itself felt, and the magician knew it would grow stronger with every hour.
"Courtesy bids us welcome the guest who comes and speed the guest who departs," said the Countess, and for a final time she sought Lythande's slender fingers.
"Perhaps next year—when we know one another better, dear boy," she murmured.
"It shall be my pleasure to know my lady better," Lythande lied, bowing. A random thought crossed the magician's mind.
"Are you—Beauty? If so, Tashgan bade me give you his love."
The Countess simpered. "Well, he called me his lovely spirit of music," she said coyly, "but who knows, he might have called me Beauty when he spoke of me to someone else. The dear, dear boy. Is it true he will not be coming back?"
"I fear not, madam. His duties are many in his own country now."
The Countess sighed.
"What a loss to music! I tell you, Lythande, he was a minstrel of minstrels; I shall never know his like again," she said, and posed sentimentally with her hand over her heart.
"Very likely not," said Lythande, bowing to take leave.
Lythande moved northward, drawn by curiosity and by the spell of the wandering hite. It was a new experience for the Pilgrim Adept, to travel without knowing where each day would lead, and the magician savored it with curiosity unbounded. Lythande had attempted a few simple unbinding-spells, so far without success; all the simpler spells had proved insufficient, and unlike Tashgan, Lythande did not make the mistake of underestimating Ellifanwy's spells, when the wizardess had been operating within the sphere of her own competence.
Ellifanwy might not have been able to cope with a were-dragon. But for binding-spells and enchantments, she had had no peer. Every night Lythande attempted a new unbinding-spell, at the conclusion of which the lute remained enchanted and Lythande was racking a brain which had lived three ordinary lifetimes for yet more unbinding spells.
Summer lay on the land north of Old Gandrin, and every night Lythande was welcomed to inn or castle, manor or Great House, where news and songs were welcomed with eagerness. Now and again a wistful matron or pretty housewife, innkeeper's daughter or merchant's consort, would linger at Lythande's side, with a lovesick word or two about Tashgan; Lythande's apparent absorption in the music, the cool sexless voice and the elegantly correct manner, left them sighing, but not offended. Once, indeed, in an isolated farmstead where Lythande had sung ancient rowdy ballads, when the farmer snored the farmer's wife crept to the straw pallet and murmured, but Lythande pretended to be asleep and the farm wife crept away without a touch.
But when she had crawled back to the farmer's side, Lythande lay awake, troubled. Damn Tashgan and his womanizing. He might have spread joy among neglected wives and lonely ladies from Tschardain to Northwander, for so many years that even his successor was welcomed and cosseted and seduced; and for a time it had been amusing. But Lythande was experienced enough to know that this playing with fire could not continue.
And it was playing with fire, indeed. Lythande knew something of fire, and fire elementals—the Pilgrim Adept was familiar with fire, even the fire of were-dragons. But no were-dragon alive could rival the rage of a scorned woman, and sooner or later one of them would turn nasty. The Countess had simply believed Lythande was shy, and put her hopes in another year. (By then, Lythande thought, surely one of the spells would prove adequate to take off the enchantment.) It had been a close call with the farmer's wife; suppose she had tried rumbling about the mage-robe when Lythande slept?
That would have been disaster.
For, like all adepts of the Blue Star, Lythande cherished a secret which might never be known; and on it all the magician's power depended. And Lythande's secret was doubly dangerous; Lythande was a woman, the only woman ever to bear the Blue Star.
In disguise, she had penetrated the secret Temple and the Place Which Is Not, and not till she already bore the blue star between her brows had she been exposed and discovered.
Too late, then, for death, for she was sacrosanct till the final battle of Law and Chaos at the end of the . world. Too late to be sent forth from them. But not too late for the curse.
Be then what you have chosen to seem, so had run the doom. Until the end of the world, on that day when you are proclaimed a woman before any man but myself . . . thus had spoken the ancient Master of the Star . . . on that day you are stripped of power and on that day you may be slain.
Traveling northward at the lute's call, Lythande sat on the side of a hill, the lute stripped of its wrappings and laid before her. If for a time this had been, amusing, it was so no longer. Besides, if she was not free of the spell by Yule, she would be guesting in Tashgan's own castle—and that she had no wish to do.
Now it was time for strong remedies. At first it had been mildly amusing to work her way through the simpler spells, beginning with, "Be ye unbound and opened, let no magic remain save what I myself place there," which was the sort of spell a farmer's wife might speak over her churn if she fancied some neighboring herb-wife or witch had soured her milk, and working her way up through degrees of complexity to the ancient charm beginning, "Asmigo, Asmago ..." which can be spoken only in the dark of t
he moon in the presence of three gray mice.
None of them had worked. It was evident that, knowing of Ellifanwy's incompetence with her last were-dragon, and her success with love-charms (to Lythande, the last refuge of incompetent sorcery) Lythande had seriously underestimated Ellifanwy's spell.
And so it was time to bypass all the simpler lore of spells to bind and unbind, and proceed to the strongest unbinding-spell she knew. Unbinding-spells were not Lythande's specialty—she seldom had cause to use them. But once she had inadvertently taken upon herself a sword spell-bonded to the shrine of Larith, and had never managed to unbind it, but had been forced to make a journey of many days to return the sword whence it had come; after which, Lythande had made a special study of a few strong spells of that kind, lest her curiosity, or desire for unusual experiences, lead her again into such trouble. She had held this one in reserve; she had never known it to fail.
First she removed from her waist the twin daggers she bore. They had been spell-bonded to her in the Temple of the Blue Star, so that they might never be stolen or carelessly touched by the profane; the right-hand dagger for the dangers of a lonely road in dangerous country, whether wild beast or lawless men; the left-hand dagger for menaces less material, ghost or ghast, werewolf or ghoul. She did not wish to undo that spell by accident. She carried them out of range, or what she hoped would be out of range, set her pack with them, then returned to the lute and began the circlings and preliminary invocations of her spell. At last she reached the powerful phrases which could not be spoken save at the exact moment of high noon or midnight, ending with:
"Uthriel, Mastrakal, Ithragal, Ruvaghiel, angels and archangels of the Abyss, be what is bound together undone and freed, so may it be as it was commanded at the beginning of the world; So it was, so it is, so shall it be and no otherwise!"
Blue lightnings flamed from an empty sky; the Blue Star on Lythande's forehead crackled with icy force that was almost pain. Lythande could see the lines of light about the lute, pale against the noonday glare. One by one, the strings of the lute uncoiled from the pegs and slithered to the ground. The lace holding Lythande's tunic slowly unlaced itself, and the strip wriggled to the ground. The bootlaces, like twin serpents, crawled down the boots through the holes in reverse order, and writhed like live things to the ground. The intricate knot in her belt untied itself and the belt slithered away and fell.
Then, slowly, the threads sewing her tunic at sides and shoulders unraveled, coming free stitch by stitch, and the tunic, two pieces of cloth, fell to the ground, but the process did not stop there; the embroidered braid with which the tunic was trimmed came unsewed and uncoiled bit by bit till it was mere scraps of thread lying on the grass. The side seams unstitched themselves, a little at a time, in the breeches she wore; and finally the sewn stitches of the boots crawled down the leather so that the boots lay in pieces on the ground, while Lythande still stood on the bootsoles. Only the mage-robe, woven without seam and spelled into its final form, maintained its original shape, although the pin came undone, the metal bending itself to slip free of its clasp, and clinked on the hard stones.
Ruefully, Lythande gathered up the remains of clothing and boots. The boots could be resewn in the next town that boasted a cobbler's shop, and there were spare clothes in the pack she had fortunately thought to carry out of reach. Meanwhile it would not be the first time a Pilgrim Adept had gone barefoot, and it was worth the wreck of the clothing to be freed of the accursed, the disgusting, the fantastic enchantment laid on that lute.
It lay harmless and silent before the minstrel magician; a lute, Lythande hoped, like any other, bearing no magic but its own music. Lythande found a spare tunic and breeches in the pack, girded on the twin daggers once more (marveling at any spell that could untie the mage-knot her fingers had tied, by habit, on the belt) and sat down to re-string the lute.
Then she went southward, whistling.
At first Lythande thought the fierce pain between her brows was the glare of the noonday sunlight, and readjusted the deep cowl of the mage-robe so that her brow was shadowed. Then it occurred to her that perhaps the strong magic had wearied her, so she sat on a flat rock beside the trail and ate dried fruits and journey-bread from her pack, looking about to be sure she was unobserved except by a curious bird or two.
She fed the crumbs to the birds, and re-slung her pack and the lute. Only when she had traveled half a mile or so did she realize that the sun was no longer glaring in her eyes and that she was traveling northward again.
Well, this was unfamiliar country; she might well have mistaken her way. She stopped, reversed her bearings and began to retrace her steps.
An hour later, she found herself traveling northward again, and when she tried to turn toward Old Gandrin and the southlands the racking queasiness and pain were more than she could bear.
Damn the hedge-wizard who gave me that spell! Wryly, Lythande reflected that the curse was probably redundant. Turning northward, and feeling, with relief, the slackening of the pain of the binding-spell, Lythande resigned herself. She had always wanted to see the city of Northwander: there was a college of wizards there who were said to keep records of every spell which had ever wrought its magic upon the world. Now, at least, Lythande had the best of reasons for seeking them out.
But her steps lagged resentfully on the northward road.
There was no sign of city, village or castle. In even a small village she could have her boots resewn—she must think up some good story to explain how they had come undone—and in a larger city she might find a spell-candler who might sell her an unbinding-spell. Though, if the powerful spell she had already used did not work, she was unlikely to find a workable spell this side of Northwander and the college of wizards.
She had come down from the mountain and was traversing a woody region, damp from the spring rains, which gradually grew wetter and wetter underfoot till Lythande's second-best boots squelched and let in water at every step. At the edges of the muck-dabbed trail •were soggy trees and drooping shagroots covered in hanging moss.
/ cannot believe that the lute means to lead me into this dismal bog, thought Lythande, but when, experimentally, she tried to reverse direction, the queasiness and pain returned. Indeed, the lute was leading her into the bog, farther and farther until it was all but impossible to distinguish between the soggy path and the mire to either side.
Where can the accursed thing be taking me? There was no sign of human habitation anywhere, nor any dwellers but the frogs who croaked off-key in dismal minor thirds. Was she indeed to sup tonight with the frogs and crocodiles who might inhabit this dreadful place?
To make matters worse, it began to drizzle—though it was already so wet underfoot that it made little difference to the supersaturated ground—and then to rain in good earnest.
The mage-robe was impervious to the damp, but Lythande's feet were soaked in the mud, her legs covered with mud and water halfway to the knees, and still the lute continued to lead her farther into the mire. It was dark now; even the mage's sharp eyes could no longer discern the path, and once she measured her length on the ground, soaking what garments remained dry under the mage-robe. She paused, intending, first to make a spell of light, and then to find some sort of shelter, even if only under a dry bush, to wait for light and sunshine and, perhaps, dry weather.
/ cannot believe, she thought crossly, that the lute has in sober truth led me into this impassable marsh! What sort of enchantment is that?
She had come to a standstill, and was searching in her mind for the most effective light-spell, wishing that she, like Eirthe, had access to a friendly fire-elemental to supply not only light but heat, when a glimmer showed through the murky darkness, and strengthened momentarily. A hunter's campfire? The cottage of a mushroom-farmer or a seller of frogskins or some such trade which could be carried on in this infernal sloshing wilderness?
Perhaps she could beg shelter there for the night.// this infernal lute will permit. T
he thought was grim. But as she turned her steps toward the light, there was the smallest of sounds from the lute. Satisfaction? Pleasure? Was this, then, some part of Tashgan's appointed rounds? She did not admire Ellifanwy's taste, if the old sorceress had indeed set this as a part of the lute's wandering.
She plodded on through the mire at such a speed as the sucking bog underfoot would allow, and after a time came to what looked like a cottage, with light spilling through the window. Inside the firelight was almost like the light of a fire-elemental, which came near to searing Lythande's eyes; but when she covered them and looked again, the light came from a perfectly ordinary fire in an ordinary fireplace, and by its glow Lythande saw a little old lady, in a gown of bottle-green, after the fashion of a few generations ago, with a white linen mutch covering her hair, pottering about the fire.
Lythande raised her hand to knock, but the door swung slowly open, and a soft sweet voice called out, "Come in, my dear; I have been expecting you."
The star on Lythande's brow prickled blue fire. Magic, then, nearby, and the little old lady was a hearth-witch or a wise-woman, which could explain why she made her home in this howling wilderness. Many women with magical powers were neither liked nor welcomed among mankind. Lythande, in her male disguise, had not been subjected to this, but she had seen it all too often during her long life.
She stepped inside, wiping the moisture from her eyes. Where had the little old lady gone? Facing her was a tall, imposing, beautiful woman, in a gown of green brocade and satin with a jeweled circlet in the satiny dark curls. Her eyes were fixed, in dismay and disbelief, on the lute and on Lythande. Her deep voice had almost the undertone of a beast's snarl.
"Tashgan's lute! But where is Tashgan? How did you come by his instrument?"
"Lady, it is a long story," Lythande said, through the burning of the Blue Star which told her that she was surrounded by alien magic, "and I have been wandering half the night in this accursed bog, and I am soaked to the very skin. I beg of you, allow me to warm myself at your fire, and you shall be told everything; there is time for the telling of many long tales before the final battle between Law and Chaos."
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