Chapter 3
Gina hitched herself up to sit on the table she’d used to create a human space in Morag’s vast home. Lewis’s meeting with Morag hadn’t gone at all the way she’d foreseen. She’d anticipated some shock or rejection on his part when he first viewed Morag, but he’d barely blinked. The news that he’d been secretly bespelled exercised him far more.
But then, how would she feel to learn herself powerless and unknowingly constrained?
Dear heaven. When Lewis returned to the Collegium, tomorrow, he’d be out for blood.
Morag had been characteristically clever to open with that ploy. From reluctance, Lewis was now a motivated student.
“Please, sit down,” Morag invited him. “I’ll begin with a story.”
Gina nodded to Lewis to take the armchair.
“I could begin with the story of myself and my presence on Earth, but Gina can tell you that, human to human, and I will answer any questions you have, later. For now, let us begin with you.” She settled on the floor, curling her tail around her front legs as a cat might. “Eleven months ago I sensed your fight with the weather mage not so many miles distant from here.”
Lewis leaned forward sharply. “You sensed a weather mage?”
“Yes.”
“And you sensed the storm itself, the lives lost, my magic burning out…but you didn’t act.”
“Earth is for the Earth-born to determine. I am bound by guest law, forbidden from intervening.” The tip of her tail beat the floor gently twice. “I can only make you aware of the capacity in yourselves. Your choices must shape your world.”
Gina couldn’t see Lewis’s face. She slipped off the table and pulled its chair around and slightly away from the rug so that she could see his reaction. It was hardly worth the effort.
He was expressionless. “A harsh rule. To have the power to do good and not use it is not a neutral choice.”
“But what is good and what is ill? What are the consequences of even the best-intentioned act?” Morag was unoffended by his criticism. If anything she sounded sad and sympathetic. “We had terrible wars. Sapient species were destroyed before we learned to be non-interventionist. We cannot live another’s life for them, no matter how much standing by hurts us.”
In the silence, the low hum of Morag’s home vibrated reassurance. Gina wasn’t sure if Lewis could perceive it, or whether that comfort was something time and house witchery instincts had attuned her to.
Lewis nodded once, apparently accepting Morag’s words. Or at least, accepting that she wouldn’t change her mind or policy. “You said the ice storm occurred not far from here, so we’re in northern Canada?”
“Yes. My kind likes the cold. We do not have snow on our home world, but it is a delight and plaything for us. I choose to make my home in a pleasant place.”
“And an isolated one,” he observed.
“Isolation depends on how one travels,” Morag said gently. “Which brings us back to my story.”
Her wings lifted and settled. She’d told Gina once that they were vestigial limbs, remnants of when dragons had once soared via muscular power and aerodynamics. Now, her kind had other ways of moving through the world. The Deeper Path.
Lewis watched the transparent wings fold and appear to vanish against the blackness of Morag’s hide. He frowned.
“How we view the world determines how we interact with it,” she said. “When you had magic, you saw the world as lit and influenced by that power. You could change things in ways that the majority of humans, those you call mundanes, could not imagine. They are limited by their ordinary sight. You had mage sight. But to me, your mage sight was itself a limitation. Describe to me how you saw magic.”
Gina called up her own mage sight, letting it overlay the physical reality of Morag’s chamber. A pale shimmer of translucent gold spread over all of Morag’s home, but thickened and shifted into strands of magic where Gina herself had used house witchery skills on her small corner of human habitation where she now sat with Lewis.
He was a blank space in the world of gold, as a mundane would be. Magic didn’t avoid him, but it didn’t flow to him or coil around him as it did for a magic user.
Gina summoned her own magic, letting it coat her right hand and slide off to form a glowing ball of light that she tossed up into the air and, with a thought, allowed to dissipate. It disintegrated in a shower of rose scent.
Lewis turned his head, apparently sensing the rose oil if not the magic. He turned back to Morag without commenting on it. “I used to see magic as golden light. It was diffused through the world, with strands of different thicknesses indicating a purposeful shaping of it or the presence of a powerful magic user. Mostly I saw it as cords in every thickness from silk thread to anchor rope. When I cast spells, those cords wove into new patterns.”
“Power and control,” Morag said. “Useful, if crude. Wasteful, though.”
Gina gathered in her magic. It came with a rush of warmth and comfort. What Morag described was an introduction to the concept of clarity of sight. Gina was haunted by her repeated failure to acquire it.
Morag’s large head swung in her direction. “But human, very human. Magic is part of humans’ shaping of your Earth. It is not to be despised. It is to be valued. It provides many things.”
That was definitely for her, not Lewis.
He’d picked up on it, too, and looked at her.
She tilted her chin. She didn’t want reassurance or pity.
Morag’s head dipped. A faint puff of lemon-yellow smoke drifted from her nostrils. A sigh. “Lewis, human magic is a way of seeing and manipulating possibilities in your world. It is a broad brushstroke. Yes, even your finest silk threads are clumsy beside what clarity of sight shows. But to see the deeper patterns that your mage sight hides, you have to erode it. You called it burn out. In fact, you channeled so much power through your mage sight structures that you burst them. They couldn’t contain it.
“It is not an easy thing to do. It requires discipline and determination to overcome your human instinct to remain linked to your world in a thousand different ways. Each of those ties, though you didn’t realize it, had to be severed. If even one had held, you couldn’t have pushed your magic through to burn out. It would have stopped short, even if it had to render you unconscious to do so.”
Gina touched her face. In her five attempts at attaining clarity of sight, she’d gone unconscious twice, suffered nose bleeds and agony throughout her body.
Lewis had suffered when he eroded his magic to save the people on the stricken cruise ship. But he had pushed through every pain and through the final hurdle she couldn’t overcome.
Morag’s voice was gentle, a nanny telling a bedtime story to a scared five-year-old. “In your determination to save the people on that boat, you sacrificed your own humanity.”
“I’m still me.”
“Yes,” Morag agreed. “Your sacrifice was a natural progression of your years of training and discipline. You have sacrificed much to serve your Collegium. You were never the strongest mage in your training group, not by innate magic. But you became stronger than all of them via the rigor with which you used your magic. None was wasted. You cut away all distractions. You devoted your life to serving the Collegium, to saving the innocent. Only Faith Olwen was a stronger mage within the Collegium, and she left it.”
“You watch happenings in the Collegium closely.”
“They have been exciting lately, and before then, it is wise for me to observe the state of human magic.”
“Does Gina spy for you?”
“Me?” Gina blinked. She’d pulled a leg up while she listened, wrapping her arms around it and resting her chin on her knee. Now, in shock, her leg dropped to the ground. “Morag can learn far more than I ever could. And I’m not a spy!”
“Your computer skills would assist you,” Lewis said.
“Good grief.” She was silenced. Did he really live his life in such a state of suspicion?
“No, Gina doesn’t spy for me.” Three tiny puffs of azure-blue smoke indicated Morag’s amusement. They drifted up to merge with the complex, shifting pattern of the opal roof. “I can learn anything I need to know myself. Earth has been my home for many centuries. Gina provides companionship and a link to humanity. I value her friendship and her house witchery comforts.”
Gina smiled, acknowledging and reciprocating Morag’s claim of friendship. However, there was more to their relationship than Morag implied. Gina had inherited the role of dragon knight from her aunt Deborah, who had achieved clarity of sight and journeyed now on the Deeper Path. Aunt Deborah had been blunt. “We serve Morag, and all humanity, by reminding her of who we are, our needs, hopes and vulnerabilities. She is a guest here, but if she had no contact with humans, how long would it be before she forgot her guest status? We remind her that humanity’s needs must come before her desires.”
“And so we become distracted,” Morag said. “It is something humans do. You have many interests and many ties on your emotions. My hypothesis is that these distractions are why what you call magic is revealed to you as cords of golden light. It must be substantial to your vision or you wouldn’t be able to focus on it.”
It wasn’t the first time Morag had implied or flat out told Gina that as a human she had many competing interests in her life. Gina struggled with the notion. Family were essential. She couldn’t—and wouldn’t—weaken her ties to them. Nor did she want to let go of her house. Her home needed to be maintained. Old houses took a lot of work and she loved her garden. She loved the sensual pleasure of working in it. Even the soreness of tired muscles after turning over dirt for new planting had a rightness to it.
“If I understand you,” Lewis said. “You’re saying that I have burned out a barrier to seeing magic differently because I’ve had years of cutting away anything that distracted me from serving the Collegium?”
“You have understood.”
“It is a message I’ve heard before,” he said evenly.
Both Morag and Gina stared at him. The stars in the dragon’s eyes swirled in surprise. “You have heard of the Deeper Path before?”
“No, I have heard that I’ve sacrificed my humanity to serving the Collegium before.” The faintest trace of pain in his low voice. “From my parents, from former partners, from those I’ve served with and those I’ve brought to justice.”
Had everyone told Lewis he was inhuman?
Were they blind?
She hadn’t been drowning in lust for a cold machine. Lewis was so devastatingly attractive because he unconsciously challenged a woman to unlock all the passion she could sense he controlled. But perhaps other women had tried and failed to answer that challenge? Gina ought to take it as a warning.
She straightened on her chair. Not that she wanted to get involved with a man setting out on the Deeper Path. He’d be living her dream and leaving her behind.
No, she had more sense than to choose that self-destructive route.
“Very well,” Morag was brusque, perhaps to hide her sympathy. “It is time to show you what your discipline has earned you. Clarity of sight is within you. I’ll simply teach you a technique for awakening it. If you’re ready?”
A long pause. “Begin.”
Lewis locked away old emotions of regret and loss. The dragon and Gina’s intense interest had lured him into sharing more than he’d meant to. His loneliness was a private matter. Yet the same discipline they’d been discussing enabled him to shut down his emotions and concentrate on Morag’s instructions.
“Clarity of sight is silver for humans. One of Gina’s ancestors described it to me as the reality behind reality. He said that the world he saw with his human eyes was a layer of paint providing a simplistic picture of a truer, crisper, and confusing reality. Clarity of sight lifted that paint layer. I want you to do that with me as your focus. I am unfamiliar to you and my reality is the Deeper Path. I should be an easy subject for you to see truly, unclouded by your experience. Remember to look for silver.”
Morag stood.
Lewis locked his muscles. Instinct had him wanting to be up and ready to fight. Talking with Morag, she had a very human voice. She could have been a lecturer at the Collegium. But when she moved, then his limbic system saw a great and terrifying lizard. Could dinosaurs have evolved into this if they hadn’t died out first?
Or perhaps they had evolved to this, on some distant planet.
Using the meditation technique all guardian trainees were taught to center their magic, Lewis steadied himself. Breathing evenly, he stared at Morag. She remained black. No silver of this alien sight.
“Old patterns of being won’t help you,” she said. “Release them. Do you remember the first time you used magic?”
“No.”
“Really?” Gina asked. “I was seven and dropped the soda bottle on an illicit fridge raid. My magic cleaned up the spill after I wished hard to undo it. I was so shocked, I dropped the ice-cream container, too. Then Mom caught me.” Laughter in her voice, and love. Gina hadn’t been punished for her fridge raid.
Cute stories were irrelevant. Lewis studied Morag, visually tracing the oddness of her intelligent reptilian face. Her eyes were remarkable, a profound blue with pupils of…no, not silver. Light, though, rather than the black voids of human eyes. He answered her question. “I can’t remember a time when I didn’t use magic. I liked to see the golden threads and watch them wind around objects. I could make the objects appear and disappear, even float them. My parents are stage magicians, so I copied their conjuring.”
“But you were doing it for real,” Gina said.
“Yes. They taught me not to let other people see my magic. They said theirs was for show and mine was for service.” He remembered the distinction settling into his young mind. There’d been a rightness to it. The golden threads were too beautiful, almost solemn in their power, too important to be wasted on audiences looking for a couple of hours’ entertainment.
Was there gold in Morag’s pupils?
She tilted her head. The slight movement sent new patterns of reflected light from the opal walls dancing over her skin.
He blinked, squeezed tight his eyes and looked again. Silver had shimmered for an instant. And had it gotten cold in here? Extreme tiredness felt like this. Mind and body seemed to grow distant from each other. Detached. He wasn’t exhausted. He made sure he got five hours of sleep every night.
“How old were you when you started Collegium guardian training?” Gina asked.
“Ten.”
“Dear God.”
The shock and disapproval in her voice distracted him. He looked away from Morag to her. “I discussed it with my parents. I wanted to serve. I wanted the discipline of training, to live in one place rather than travel from theatre to theatre. It was like boarding school.”
“You were ten.”
“They wouldn’t accept me any younger.” He studied the dragon again. She was a remarkable creature, large yet balanced. Alien but true to herself. As a child he’d had dinosaur figurines that he’d animated in secret, encouraging them to roam the floors of his temporary bedrooms in guest houses where his parents stayed while on tour. He’d forgotten those games.
“You were ten!” Gina repeated. It sounded like a protest.
Morag, on the other hand—or claw—sounded satisfied. “You loved your magic. So when it burned out, you mourned its beauty. That is good. Look truly, Lewis. Clarity of sight has even more beauty. But you have to let go of what you had.”
“I have.”
“To some extent. That renunciation is why you were able to burn out your magic in the controlled manner that makes this possible. You shed your magic in layers. Consider those layers now.”
He frowned. He hadn’t noticed layers in the urgent, agonizing battle with the Arctic weather mage. He’d pulled on his magic, fed it efficiently through his spell, and then, pulled harder, tearing the magic from the world, through his
bones, into the spell until he couldn’t channel any more. It had been a fight for survival with the weather mage. The other mage hadn’t been stronger than Lewis, but he’d been favored by using his own talent (weather magic) and the fact that a storm once summoned had its own force. Lewis had had to fight both.
He had pulled the magic from the world. But that hadn’t been the first step. Every spell began with the coil of magic within a magic user. That was why trainee Collegium guardians were taught to center their magic. The more magic within them, the stronger that initial kindling spark.
So he had started his spell with his own magic, then fed it magic pulled from the environment. Standard practice. But feeling the magic scouring his bones hadn’t been normal. That’s when he’d known he was burning out his magic—and he’d kept going. His prayer had been that the weather mage would collapse before Lewis’s magic failed.
As the man had.
Two other Collegium guardians had found the weather mage three days later. Dead. The autopsy had concluded the man had died from the strain of fighting to control the ice storm. His heart had given out.
But Lewis still wondered. Such a convenient death.
Layers. Magic in him. Magic in the world. Magic feeding through him.
“Magic is a crutch humans use to hop towards the Deeper Path,” Morag said. “You have the potential to change the world, but you do so through your three dimensional bodies. That limits you. But you’ve shed those limits, Lewis. You can see the world as it is.”
“Are you saying I’ll see in more than three dimensions? Is that even possible?”
“I see in seven dimensions, when I concentrate,” she replied. “The Deeper Path will enable you to choose how you see the world, and how you move through it. But first you must open your mind to clarity of sight.”
The first layer. He sank his attention to his center, hollow with the absence of magic. For the first time, he explored that emptiness. Always before he’d searched it for any flicker of golden magic, any familiar echo of that warmth. This time he tried to see the emptiness.
Dragon Knight (The Collegium Book 3) Page 4