Mrs. Etaris stopped and frowned back at me. “This will be a difficult conversation if you cannot participate, Mr. Greenwing.”
“The ring went into the sink,” I explained, lifting my right hand to show her its absence.
“I’ll go look for it,” Mr. Dart said, resettling his sling
“Thank you,” I replied meekly, then laughed at Hal’s expression. “I acquired a ring last week that has the property of suppressing magic—and therefore my sneezes—when I wear it.”
Hal frowned. “You can’t be allergic to magic, in that case; the ring would still set you off.”
“Indeed,” said Mrs. Etaris, gazing at him thoughtfully. “Are you a practitioner, ah, Mr. Lingham?”
He shrugged. “A minor one. I was taught the basics before the Fall, of course, and afterwards my mother felt that even if it were dreadfully unfashionable it behoved me to know what can, or at least could, be done.”
“A wise woman,” Mrs. Etaris said. She then looked arrested at the way that Hal laughed in response. I wanted to ask why she looked so surprised, but before I could gather breath the moment passed, and Hal went on.
“She is. She’s also a fair practitioner herself and doesn’t much like having to refrain in polite company. She’s not the only one of her circle, either. I don’t think it’ll be too many years before the fashion comes around. Certainly by the time Wulf is king; he’s been making lights since he was an infant.”
Wulf must be Prince Wulfric, King Roald’s grandson.
“That may be for the best,” Mrs. Etaris was saying.
I rallied myself away from the daunting thought that Hal knew the future king by his nickname. They were probably related. “Mr. Dart and I will be at the vanguard, then,” I said lightly, “if only by necessity.”
“Never admit to fashion being a result of necessity,” Mrs. Etaris admonished with mock severity.
“Where did you acquire a magic ring, anyway? They are not exactly common.”
I swallowed. “I won it in a game of Poacher from a Tarvenol duellist while waiting for Violet at the Green Dragon. That’s a tavern on the other side of town.”
“Oh, of course.”
“Mr. Dart is returning,” Mrs. Etaris murmured.
“I can see the ring but can’t reach it,” Mr. Dart reported, and after a small discussion I went to sit on the bank again while they went in together.
After a while I began to feel restless. I had gotten into the habit of long cross-country runs while at university, when—in retrospect—the wireweed and ensorcellments and Lady knew what else Lark had been doing got too much. I had not been able to go either as often or for as long I liked since I returned. Running was not something anyone else did for pleasure, and my capacity to take sidelong glances and outright comments occasionally faltered.
I had gone running yesterday for an hour before breakfast, but even that was going to have to stop, as the year was well into autumn and soon there would not be enough light, and people were certainly beginning to talk about this new eccentricity of Jemis Greenwing’s.
I hugged my knees and frowned at the stretch of road visible between the cottage and a clump of tall bushes.
Violet had been the one to suggest I join the cross-country team.
It had been in the library one day. I was on cataloguing duty, which I’d loved, until that afternoon when suddenly I could no longer focus on the words before me. Violet had been looking for a book, she’d said, and asked if I were feverish.
I’d felt as if I were jumping out of my skin with excess energy.
(My unknown and uncontrolled magic flaring up under the catalyst of wireweed? The drug overstimulating me? There was so much I didn’t know.)
She’d said I must have been spending too much time indoors and that she’d heard the games master was putting together a cross-country running team, and I had the right build for it. It was a sport they did at home, she’d said; though not, of course, where that was.
I had been desperate for some outlet to the energy, and went to the try-outs. And even though initially Lark had disapproved of the amount of time I shortly began spending running, after a few days she’d stopped pouting and started encouraging.
I’d run nearly as much as I’d studied; more, in the last few months of my degree. What Lark had been doing when I was out for my three- and four-hour loops I did not know.
Perhaps I could guess, though that additional betrayal hurt more than I would have thought, after all the rest. Lark behaved like a queen, and there were always many courtiers willing to usurp my place at her side.
I frowned hard at the road again and made myself think of Violet. Violet had been full of helpful little suggestions that had gone much further towards mitigating my illness than anything the university physickers prescribed. Not really a surprise, now that I knew she’d known what it was.
But what, I wondered suddenly, watching a crow hopping along the road pecking at things, had Violet gotten out of it? Was it merely that she didn’t like what Lark was doing, and though she dared not or could not stop it, she did her best to make sure I didn’t end up ... well, however wireweed addicts usually ended up.
The crow tilted its head to one side, staring intently at some spot before it. I had never heard much about wireweed beyond the barest rumours until I was travelling in Ghilousette. There had been what I thought a disturbing number of incapacitated beggars on the streets of Newbury, treated by the hale citizens with terrifying disregard. When I’d been able to bestir myself out of my own despondency I’d asked a few people, who looked surprised and perturbed that I mentioned them. They were not citizens, I was told; they used magic.
Magic was illegal in Ghilousette, and at the time I had taken it at face value. But there was one incident that I had tried hard to suppress in my memory, when a drunkard in a tavern I’d gone to (needing, at last, company, even of the worst sort) had started railing against the duke and the infamous treatment of those born to magic and the epidemic of addiction as people tried to cope.
He had not belaboured wireweed, and at the time I had not thought of it except as one of an arsenal of possible drugs and liquor. He was drunk, and although the others in the tavern were ignoring his raving, they stopped him once he got to a certain point. Not before he’d said that the gibbet cage held the future of Ghilousette if the duke kept ignoring magic and the claims of his people.
I’d gone past the gibbet cage on my way to the Hall of Marvels. The Hall of Marvels had the best of Ghilousette, the glorious mechanical contrivances, all the unmagical devices that people invented to make up for the Fall and the dreadful results of the Interim in that duchy. A terrible stench had been the first thing to catch my attention, and when I had ceased sneezing in reaction there had been something else calling to me, making me look.
Inside the gibbet cage was a huddle of rags surrounded by rotting fruit and bones. It was a hot summer’s day and the stench and flies were almost unbearable. The good citizens of Newbury were walking past as if the thing wasn’t there. Even the two guards at the gate of the Hall of Marvels were paying no attention. I was drawn by horrified curiosity to step closer.
There was a man inside the huddle of rags, or what had been a man. He looked whole on the outside, despite the filth. He raised his head when I came between him and the sun, and looked at me.
I had been reading about wireweed this week, few though were the books Mrs. Etaris had on the subject. Wireweed gave its users such a pure and piercing intensity of connection and exaltation that it was nearly always immediately addicting. A few hits of wireweed and you felt as if the world was gilded and your source was the sun: as if, in fact, you were in love.
Even without an immoral wizard to augment the effect, wireweed burned up one’s natural magic. When that was gone the fortunate died.
The less fortunate became addicted to worse drugs, for wireweed was useless once there was nothing for it to burn. The truly unfortunate—
I ha
d a lot to thank Violet for, I thought.
The guards had come up to me and poked the man, or what had been a man, with a spear, and laughed roughly and said that that was what trafficking in magic brought you. But I had looked at the man and he had looked at me and I had seen hell and hunger and what happened when all the magic left a person.
If Hal had seen even an inkling of that in me, I thought—
Magistra Bellamy’s dog suddenly barked. I jumped up in agitation, whirling to look for it, and something grazed my shoulder and thudded loudly into the ground where I had been sitting.
I whirled back and stopped dead. It was an arrow.
Chapter Six
Mrs. Etaris has an Idea
THE ARROW HAD SUNK a good six inches into the ground. I stared at it. If the dog hadn’t barked—
Even as I thought that, the dog bolted past me, growling deep in her throat. At the same moment I realized that it was no bird arrow. It was a yardlong from a longbow.
I traced the angle of the arrow, spun around to follow the arc it must have taken. The arrow flight and the dog’s charge met at—two men.
One held a longbow. He was unhurriedly raising it again, one arm reaching behind to his quiver for a second arrow. He was thirty yards away across open ground. They were in the shadow of a clump of trees along the river footpath. I was in plain sight.
I tensed. No sense standing like an idiot while someone shot me.
The second man made a sharp movement, something glinting in sunlight, the dog barked and lunged forward. The archer raised his bow with an evil grin I could see from here—
—And I snapped.
I had only ever fought once in earnest, when Violet had attacked me last weekend. I hadn’t known it was her, and I responded as if my life were in real danger. Which—in retrospect—it may well have been. I still wasn’t at all certain why Violet had come, or what I was to her. Or she to me.
I had not spoken to anyone about what it had felt like. Events had far outpaced it last week. As I re-entered that space of mortal danger, I felt a shock—not of fear but—
—delight.
It was a place of pure thought married to physical exertion. I had come close to it when studying the structure of a poem and discovering the key of its composition, but this was the inverse—the key was to the composition of life, the world itself snapping into sense around me.
The dog scared up a flock of pigeons feeding on the grass.
I grabbed the arrow with one hand and ran.
Not towards the cottage or the road, either of which would probably have been the sensible thing to do. I was far beyond common sense. It felt as if time had stopped around me, though I could hear shouting and barking and the stuttering wings of the pigeons, and see ahead of me the archer unhurriedly bringing down his arm with the second arrow.
The cross-country games master had insisted we practice sprinting as well as long distance running. You never know when that will make all the difference in a race, she’d said, and most people can only do one or the other because the muscles are different.
I had been good at it then.
I was still good at it now.
I covered the distance in something rather better than my usual six seconds, arriving before the dog had jumped on the first man or the pigeons had risen above the trees.
Two men. One with the now-useless longbow, which he was bringing down to try to fend off the dog.
The other man had a drawn knife and a short sword. He grinned at me, not so much evilly as cockily.
I’d never liked cockiness.
I feinted left with the arrow. As the cocky man raised his knife arm to block it, sword moving forward to my opening, I stepped left and sideways into the space created by his movement, inside his sword arm, and as he moved his sword back and out I brought up my right knee and right hand together, kneecap to groin and stiff fingers to throat, and as he crumpled I used the final energy of the motion to take the sword from his suddenly limp fingers. As I continued to swivel into his motion my left hand reversed its direction and brought the butt of the arrow down into his temple.
I landed in a guard position, ready to throw my weight behind the arrow at the archer, but he saw me and kicked the dog at me. While I tried not to stab it he turned and ran.
I tumbled over the dog and rolled upright to be sure no one else was there, and discovered I had an audience.
Mr. Dart, Hal, and Mrs. Etaris stood in a staggered line some ten yards away. Mrs. Etaris held a poker, Hal a plant pot, and Mr. Dart some sort of line. They were all staring at me in total consternation.
Mrs. Etaris recovered her poise first. “Mr. Greenwing, you are a man of many unexpected talents. Usually one is advised to run away from attackers, but in this case ...”
She trailed off. I gazed mutely at them. My blood was thundering in my ears.
Mr. Dart shook his head. “Mrs. Etaris had just opened the door when you cried out and the dog started to bark.”
I didn’t recall crying out.
Hal lowered the pot to rest against his thigh. “Dominus Lukel would be very proud.”
Dominus Lukel was the fighting master at Morrowlea. We’d had compulsory self-defence three times a week. It was my favourite class.
Mrs. Etaris smiled. “Perhaps Mr. Greenwing would like a cup of tea,” she suggested. She crossed the space between us and touched my arm. “Come, Mr. Greenwing.”
The world snapped back into its normal muddled confusion. I stared wildly from one to the other and then frantically for the poor dog. She wagged her tail and whined when I looked at her. “Good girl,” I said, going to pet her and then stopping when I realized I was still gripping the arrow and a sword in a fighting stance.
“Where did these come from?” I said a touch hysterically.
Mrs. Etaris glanced sympathetically at me, then returned to kneeling over the body of my attacker. I stared at first the weapons and then the man in horror. “Did I kill him?”
“Not for want of skill,” Mrs. Etaris said. “You obviously know exactly where to hit someone’s temple to knock them unconscious.”
“I don’t think I do!”
Mr. Dart was shaking his head. “Jemis, you jumped up—that’s when we saw you. You grabbed the arrow and sprinted up here after the dog, then, uh ...”
“Then took out two ruffians with considerable poise,” Hal supplied.
The events of the past five minutes seemed as if they belonged in a book I had read years ago. But I was holding the arrow and the sword and however oddly I could feel every motion in my body, and my heart surely would not have been thundering this loudly if that hadn’t happened. If I hadn’t done that. This. This.
I took several deep breaths.
Hal took a step forward. “How were you not on the fencing team at Morrowlea?”
I forced my gaze away from the highwayman. “Same practice time as cross-country.”
“Their loss.”
Mrs. Etaris was examining the dog, her hands competent and gentle. She said, “You were on the cross-country team?”
“Long-distance running,” Hal supplied again.
My voice came out in the same strangely distant tone. “This was so different. Everything was so perfectly clear and simple. I didn’t have any doubts about what to do at all.”
Mrs. Etaris stood up. “I had a friend once who experienced a similar sort of battle madness. He’d start singing and you knew things were about to become ... interesting.”
“You did?” Mr. Dart said in amazement.
Mrs. Etaris sighed and smiled and patted her hair into place. She was wearing a sensible light grey apron over a blue dress and did not look as if she had ever done anything more untoward than—
—Than show a remarkable flair for espionage when sneaking around the Talgarths’ manor house last week.
“I had a somewhat wild youth,” she said mildly. “Mr. Dart, you’re still holding that line? Excellent. Let us truss Mr. Greenwing’s
captive until we decide what to do with him. Mr. Lingham, you look to be a stout sort of gentleman—could you bring Poppy with you? That is to say, Magistra Bellamy’s dog.”
Hal nodded and crouched next to the dog, then looked a bit uncertain as to what to do with the pot. I fumbled sword and arrow into one hand so I could take the pot. I couldn’t seem to let go of the arrow.
“Thank you,” Hal said, grunting as he took the dog in his arms and stood up. We turned to see that Mr. Dart and Mrs. Etaris had tugged the unconscious man to a seated position slumping against the trunk of a willow. I frowned at him more carefully.
The man was dressed in rough clothes of neither fashion nor fit. He was scruffy, dark hair tangled and straggling past his shoulders, face mid-brown from dirt more than ethnicity, facial hair beyond stubble but not quite thick enough to be a beard. He smelled rather sour.
“Ruffian,” Mr. Dart suggested, wrinkling his nose.
“Perhaps,” said Mrs. Etaris, and efficiently bound his wrists behind the tree. We all stared some more.
“It must have been a very wild youth,” I ventured.
“You would be amazed at what goes on at a finishing school for young ladies, Mr. Greenwing.”
Hal laughed abruptly, and the dog (evidently taking this to be directed at her), licked his face. “My sister said the same thing. She went to Dame Elwen’s Academy in Kingsbury.”
“And you?” I asked as we started to walk back to the cottage. It seemed an absurdly long distance to have crossed: why had that been my first reaction? It was so obvious that I ought to have run to the cottage. Or around the shrubbery. Or anywhere but straight at two attackers.
Hal raised his eyebrows. “Odlington, of course. Elianne and I may be twins but I’d be hard pressed to pass for a girl.”
I MANAGED TO PRY MY fingers off the arrow long enough to take the ring Mr. Dart handed me, and we went inside the cottage for the next round of conversation. Mrs. Etaris led us into the kitchen, where the cupboard under the sink had its hinges off and a large amount of the plumbing removed.
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