“However,” Lythande continued, looking Raella straight in the eyes, “if you had done what you just did to anyone here but me—to Eirthe, or to Theo or Suella—that person would be either dead, or horribly burned and scarred for the rest of his or her life.”
“But Eirthe has magic!” Raella protested.
“I’m not as strong as Lythande,” Eirthe said shakily, “or as fast, and my shields aren’t nearly as good. I’d have been badly burned at the very least.”
“And Theo and Suella don’t have magic at all,” Raella said, her lip beginning to quiver. “I could kill somebody by mistake, the way Eirthe almost did, couldn’t I?” She started to cry. “I don’t want anybody else to die!”
“Of course you don’t.” Eirthe’s color was coming back and her voice had stopped shaking. “That’s what the college in Northwander is for. They can teach you not to hurt anyone by mistake. That’s why I went there.”
“Did you go there, too?” Raella asked Lythande.
Lythande shook her head. “I’m a lot older than I look, child. I learned magic in a faraway land before the school at Northwander was built. But I think it would be a very good place for you to go.” Raella didn’t reply, but she was obviously giving the matter serious thought.
“Right now, with your permission,” or without it, if necessary, “I’m going to put a spell on you that will stop you from doing magic for a day or two.”
Raella looked down at the grip Lythande still maintained on her arms and nodded. “Please,” she said. “I don’t want to hurt anybody.”
Lythande released her and Raella stood absolutely motionless until the spell was finished. Then she looked at them. “Will you please tell my brother he has to send me to that school?”
Lythande said, “You’re going to have to tell him that you want to go. The last time he asked you, you said you didn’t.”
Raella nodded. “All right. I’ll tell him. But will you help me explain why it’s important?”
“Of course we will,” Eirthe said, standing up and moving to put and arm around Raella’s shoulders. “But let’s wait until tomorrow after the guests leave, all right?”
“All right,” Raella said.
~o0o~
In the end it was two more days before the last of the vassals left and they could talk to Theo. Lythande sat in the solar with Eirthe, Raella, Theo, and Suella and explained, again, why it was important that Raella be properly trained immediately. Raella poured out a semi-coherent account of how she didn’t want to kill anyone—the way she almost had in the garden the other day, and Eirthe gave a much more coherent account of what had happened.
“I wondered where those burn marks on the wall came from,” Suella said. “Theo, if you have any doubts that they’re right about Raella, go and look! A couple of the stones even melted together.”
“She has enough power to melt stones?” Theo asked incredulously.
“I didn’t mean to,” Raella said timidly.
“Lots of power, very little control,” Lythande said. “She did hit the area she was aiming at—my head!”
“And that would have killed anybody but a really powerful wizard,” Raella said quickly, stumbling over the words. “So I want to go to that school where they won’t let me hurt anyone and can teach me how to control my magic.” She looked anxiously at Theo. “I know I said when I came home that I didn’t want to go, but I was wrong.” She gulped. “I need to go, before I hurt you or Suella or anyone else.”
Theo looked gravely at her. “Are you absolutely sure?”
Raella nodded. So did Eirthe and Lythande.
Theo frowned. “I don’t want to send you away, little sister, but if it’s that important, you can go.” He turned to Lythande. “What about school fees?”
“The school would teach her for nothing if they had to; an untrained mage is too dangerous to everyone. But I intend to give Rastafyre’s wand to the school to be studied; they’ll train her in exchange for that. He gave it to me as he died, and I can think of no better use for it.” Except as kindling, and that’s too dangerous.
Theo sighed. “Very well. I consent to your taking her to Northwander for training, but I want her to come home for any school holidays and after her training is done.”
“Home?” Raella lifted her head and looked at him through her tears.
“Home,” Theo repeated firmly. “This is your home and you are my sister. Nothing changes that.”
Raella hugged him tightly around the waist. “Thank you, Theo? Can I travel with Eirthe? Can she help me pack?”
“We’ll both help you pack,” Suella said, taking Raella’s hand. Eirthe followed them towards the next room.
Just as they reached the door, however, Suella turned her head back. “Lord Lythande?” she asked. “I’ll be playing my lute after dinner today. Could I persuade you to join me?”
Lythande bowed. “I would be honored, Lady Suella.”
As she accompanied Lord Theo down the stairs to the hall, Lythande asked, “How good a musician is she?” I wouldn’t want to outshine her too much.
“She’s very good,” Theo said. “It appears that both my sisters prove the old saying: ‘The children of cats can catch mice.’”
Afterword
Elisabeth Waters
Lythande’s development began on June 3, 1930, a few seconds after the birth of Marion Eleanor Zimmer, when Marion’s mother discovered—to her horror and astonishment—that she had given birth to a daughter instead of the son she had expected and wanted. Evelyn Zimmer spent a large part of Marion’s childhood telling her that boys were more important than girls. Marion spent her life proving her mother wrong.
Lythande is both musician and magician. The musician was influenced by the aunt for whom Marion was named, a composer, and by Aunt Marion’s husband, first a church organist and later an Episcopal priest. Marion lived with them for a time during her teens. She was baptized in the Episcopal Church then, at the age of fifteen, strengthening both her love of Church music and her familiarity with ritual magic. (Anyone who thinks Christians don’t use ritual magic should spend some time with High-Church Anglicans.)
Another musical influence was the Metropolitan Opera. As a young girl Marion made sure to do the family ironing at two o’clock on Saturday afternoons, when “Live from the Met” broadcast that week’s opera. In addition to her life-long appreciation for music, it also gave her some skill in foreign languages, although she admitted that her German was better suited to asking if there was a dragon in the vicinity or when the next swan boat was expected than mundane questions such as “where is the train station?”
Opera also helped train the magician. Dragons and enchanted swan boats may not help you with everyday travel in Germany, but they do stretch your mind, introduce you to the strange and fantastic (and to the rules that limit even the most powerful types of magic), and accustom you to being in a different world every week.
Marion wrote the first Lythande story for a shared-world anthology called Thieves’ World. (It’s a true challenge to write a story without revealing the gender of the main character. Marion left the manuscript with me to be sent in—she was staying at my parents’ house on her way to England—and I found two places where I needed to change pronouns into nouns before I mailed it.) Unfortunately, neither Marion nor Lythande found that world to be a particularly congenial place, so Lythande left, never to return. (Given the nature of a shared world, other authors could include Lythande in their stories, but Marion never wrote another story set there.) By the time she wrote the second Lythande story (“The Incompetent Magician”) for her anthology Greyhaven in 1982, Lythande had moved to the city of Old Gandrin, on a world called “the world of the Twin Suns.” She remained there for the next two stories (“Somebody Else’s Magic” and “Sea Wrack”), which were published in Fantasy and Science Fiction. Then she started to jump worlds again.
I had written a story for the first volume of another shared-world anthology: Magi
c in Ithkar, edited by Andre Norton, and published in 1985. I was working as Marion’s secretary at the time, so she heard all about it. Marion was interested in doing a story for that world, so she wrote “The Wandering Lute” using my character Eirthe the candle maker at the beginning of the story. The story immediately moved away from the trade fair where it started, and Andre rejected it on the grounds that it wasn’t set firmly enough in Ithkar. Given that a global search and replace to change “Ithkar” to “Old Gandrin” was all it took to make it a non-Ithkar story, nobody disputes that Andre was absolutely right. But when Marion’s agent sold the story to The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, somehow the wrong version got printed, so Lythande was—very briefly, and after a fashion—on Ithkar.
Marion continued to write Lythande stories for various projects, and she even let me use Lythande, along with my character Eirthe from the Ithkar anthology, for my story “Out of the Frying Pan” in Sword & Sorceress in 1991. That story was, of course, from Eirthe’s viewpoint. Lythande’s version of it appears in this volume as “The Virgin and the Volcano.”
“The Gratitude of Kings”—a Lythande novella—was first published by Roc as a Christmas gift book in 1997, and went on to be reprinted in France, Germany, Italy, and Portugal.
At the time of her death in 1999, Marion was working on “The Children of Cats,” having coined a proverb “The children of cats can catch mice.” The “cat” in question was the magician from her second story, thus bringing the cycle pretty much full circle.
For all of Marion’s accomplishments, however, she and Lythande had one thing in common. Both of them started their careers with people believing they were men. Unlike Lythande, who had to be male in order to get what she most wanted in life, Marion didn’t deliberately set out to hide her gender. But she had a the masculine spelling of her first name, she was active in the science-fiction community, and she typed her correspondence, so there was no handwriting to give clues. She lived in small towns, first in upstate New York and then in Texas, so she didn’t meet other fans and professionals in person before she started attending conventions.
She said frequently in later years that she never met an editor who cared if she was male, female, or a monkey hitting the keyboard as long as she produced saleable stories. While this is probably correct (although it might be difficult to get a Social Security Number for a monkey), I think it’s possible that her earliest sales may have been made to editors who truly didn’t know she was female. Also, at the time she started selling, female authors had names like Leigh Brackett, and C.L. Moore (and few people knew that C.L. stood for Catherine Lucille). Women could write science fiction, but they couldn’t have it published under an obviously female name. That, fortunately, is one of the many things that changed during Marion’s lifetime. It’s also one of the things she was proud to have helped to change.
Copyright & Credits
The Complete Lythande
Marion Zimmer Bradley
Elisabeth Waters, Editor
Copyright © 2013 by The Marion Zimmer Bradley Literary Works Trust and Elisabeth Waters
Cover Art copyright © 2013 by Larry Dixon
Cover Design copyright © 2013 by Dave Smeds
All rights reserved.
Book View Café Publishing Cooperative Edition November 5, 2013
ISBN-13: 978-1-61138-326-3
ISBN-10: 1-61138-326-9
Production team: Judith Tarr, Proofreader; Vonda N. McIntyre, Ebook Formatter
v20131006vnm
www.bookviewcafe.com
Original Publication
The Secret of the Blue Star, Thieves’ World, 1979
The Incompetent Magician, Greyhaven, 1983
Somebody Else’s Magic, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, 1984
Sea Wrack, Moonsingers’s Friends, 1985
The Wandering Lute, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, 1986
Bitch, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction 1987
The Walker Behind, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction 1987
The Malice of the Demon, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction 1988
The Footsteps of Retribution, MZB’s FANTASY Magazine # 11, 1991
The Wuzzles, MZB’s FANTASY Magazine # 14, 1991
The Virgin and the Volcano, Sword & Sorceress VIII, 1991 (rewritten)
Chalice of Tears, Grails, 1992
To Kill the Undead, MZB’s FANTASY Magazine # 23, 1994
To Drive the Cold Winter Away, Space Opera, 1995
Fool’s Fire, MZB’s FANTASY Magazine # 26, 1995
Here There Be Dragons, Excalibur, 1995
North to Northwander, MZB’s FANTASY Magazine # 36, 1997
Goblin Market, MZB’s FANTASY Magazine # 44, 1999
The Gratitude of Kings, Wildside Press, 1997
The Children of Cats, not previously published
About the Author
Marion Zimmer was born in Albany, New York, on June 3, 1930, and married Robert Alden Bradley in 1949. Mrs. Bradley received her B.A. in 1964 from Hardin Simmons University in Abilene, Texas, then did graduate work at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1965-67.
She was a science fiction/fantasy fan from her middle teens and made her first professional sale to Vortex Science Fiction in 1952. She wrote everything from science fiction to Gothics, but is probably best known for her Darkover novels. In addition to her novels, Mrs. Bradley edited many magazines, amateur and professional, including Marion Zimmer Bradley’s FANTASY Magazine, which she started in 1988. She also edited an annual anthology called Sword and Sorceress for DAW Books.
Over the years she turned more to fantasy. She wrote a novel of the women in the Arthurian legends—Morgan Le Fay, the Lady of the Lake, and others—entitled The Mists of Avalon, which made the New York Times bestseller list both in hardcover and trade paperback, and she also wrote The Firebrand, a novel about the women of the Trojan War.
She died in Berkeley, California on September 25, 1999, four days after suffering a major heart attack. For more information, see her website: www.mzbworks.com
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