The Way Into Magic: Book Two of The Great Way

by Harry Connolly

  “You see?” the princess assured them. “We simply needed to convince them we were people of importance.”

  They were admitted at spearpoint. Ivy continued to speak to everyone around her as though they were her subjects and she expected them to welcome her. They didn’t. Still, it was good to be out of the wilderness.

  However, it became immediately clear that they had not been brought inside the fort itself. Beyond this first wall was another moat, this one spanned by a slender bridge. South of that was a tumbledown expanse of boulders and a low stone wall manned by men with extraordinarily long spears. Even the Ozzhuacks didn’t carry spears that long. The boulders were very like the stones just outside the walls at Fort Samsit, except no one had cleared a path through them; only a flimsy wooden walkway allowed them to cross.

  It made sense. The narrow wooden span across the water and the stones could be withdrawn--or burned with soldiers still upon it. A Peradaini square would be unable to cross that uneven ground in formation. It would have been impossible for them to hold their shield wall while scrambling from rock to rock.

  No wonder the Peradaini kings had found it difficult to invade the peninsula. Cazia had never seen a fortification with more than one layer of defense; the Toal might not have had access to scholarly magic or iron weapons, but they made do with ingenuity.

  The girls were marched across the walkways in single file, with soldiers in front of them and behind. The wood buckled alarmingly, but it held. There was no gate at the low wall ahead, but a wooden staircase was lowered for them.

  Beyond that was another high stone wall with numerous arrow slits. This had a traditional gate, and it swung open to allow them through.

  The inner yard of the fort was like the one in Samsit or at the gates of Peradain: soldiers drilled, servants carried burdens, cleaned, or rushed about on their daily errands, someone barked orders, someone cracked a lash over the heads of okshim to move a cart southward toward the inner gate. The only differences were the colors the soldiers wore, the stone walls made of mortared black stone instead of the pink granite blocks scholars created, and that Cazia couldn’t understand anything anyone said.

  The first thing that happened inside the courtyard was that they were all forced to kneel in the dirt and remain utterly still. “I do not know what they want,” Ivy said. “This is not the usual way the Toal treat guests.”

  Except it was clear that they were not guests. Not yet, at least. The man with the tall white plume emerged from a doorway with a second man in tow. This new fellow had deep brown skin, like Cazia’s, and long black hair. His face was worn and he looked so exhausted, she thought he might fall over.

  Scholar. She wasn’t sure why she thought so, but she did. He certainly wasn’t wearing a scholar’s robes; he was dressed in Indregai white. Still, there was something about the roughness of his hands and the wariness in his manner that suggested he was a mining scholar.

  The man with the plume--Cazia really had to learn what that big feather was supposed to indicate, so she knew to call him “watch commander” or “archery target” or whatever his rank was--pointed at the three girls. The exhausted man held his hand just above Cazia’s shoulder, then Ivy’s, then Kinz’s.

  “Nothing,” he said, surprising her by speaking Peradaini.

  “Try again,” the archery target ordered.

  He did, physically touching them this time. “There’s nothing,” the exhausted man said again. His voice was without tone or inflection. He appeared to be too tired for emotion. “I sense no magic in any of them.”

  He was dismissed. Cazia fought the urge to call out for him to stay, if only so she could hear people talking her language. She also had a vague urge to rescue him somehow.

  When they had a chance, Cazia was going to touch a Tilkilit stone again; that was the only reason the scholar couldn’t sense the magic in her, and she wanted to be ready in case there was another spot inspection.

  One of the soldiers took the iron crown and the circlet from inside Kinz’s robes and brought them to the commander, who clutched at them greedily. Ivy protested but Kinz shushed her.

  The girls were then escorted across the yard into a cool, dark wooden room. The only light came from a slot cut into the wall just below the ceiling. There was a long table set with bowls of broth and loaves of bread, and beside that was a set of three cots.

  “A cell!” Ivy exclaimed to them. “They have put us in a cell!”

  Kinz did not have any qualms about their accommodations. She went directly to the long table and drained a bowl of red broth. Cazia did the same, but the bread smelled of sweet wine and she found that she couldn’t eat it.

  Ivy was yelling through the door in her same high, imperious tone. Kinz turned toward Cazia and said, “She is calling for a doctor.”

  Cazia was thrown for a moment until she realized that “doctor” had a different meaning outside the empire. The heavy door eventually swung open and a gray-haired woman bustled in with a leather bag. Ivy insisted on examining the contents and was clearly not pleased. After a brief discussion, the old woman went away.

  “They think you’re my girls,” the princess said. “My servants, I mean. Never let anyone address you as girl or woman; once that insult takes hold, you’ll be a servant. At least, they’ll treat you like one, which is much the same thing.”

  While they waited for the “doctor” to return, Ivy taught them the words they should listen for: girl, woman, and servant. Then she taught them the word for man, in case they wanted to insult one of the men. It seemed that it was important to show your status by bad-mouthing people, she explained, then began to go through the complicated rules surrounding wit, jokes, and ridicule.

  The whole thing make Cazia’s pain-addled head spin. “Do they speak Ergoll?” she asked, just to change the subject.

  “Oh, no,” Ivy answered. “They speak Toal.”

  Cazia felt a flush of embarrassment. “Princess, how many languages do you speak?”

  “Toal barely even counts. It is like speaking Ergoll with a mouthful of pebbles, if you leave out all the nuance and beauty.”

  The doctor returned. She cut the arrow shaft and pulled it out of Cazia’s hand. The pain was so intense that she blacked out for a short while, waking to find her swollen hand soaking in a bowl of nasty-smelling black liquid. The doctor was speaking in soothing tones, but Cazia didn’t understand a word of it.

  “She is saying it does not appear infected,” Ivy said. She had gone even paler than usual. “But this fluid will clean the wound. Does it sting?”

  Cazia’s mouth felt as though it was full of glue. “No worse than getting shot with an arrow.”

  “She is going to make a poultice and wrap it tight so you do not lose too much more blood. She wants you to eat and drink more broth before you sleep again. And you have to keep this clean.”

  Ivy exchanged a few words with the doctor in an irritated tone, then said, “Just take common sense precautions about keeping it clean.” Clearly, the doctor had said something insulting, but Cazia felt too weak and wobbly to care.

  The old woman finally removed Cazia’s hand from the bowl of nasty, stinging water, then poured diluted wine over it to clean it. Cazia looked down at the injury--Great Way, it looked so small. How could so much pain come out of such a tiny hole?

  More blood welled up out of it, and the doctor laid a bundle of green herbs against the wound and began to wrap it in bandages. The cloth smelled of the same nasty black stuff.

  Every piece of Indregai cloth she’d ever seen was as pure white as it could be, except the dressing for her injury.

  She began to laugh. The old doctor looked at her with surprise and fear, as though Cazia was about to whip out a knife and begin killing. That only made her laugh harder.

  “It is okay.” Ivy was beside her, holding her good hand gently, and Kinz stood in front of her with her hand on the back of Cazia’s neck. Suddenly, the laughter evaporated and she felt tears runnin
g down her cheeks.

  No. She must never cry. She was a Peradaini scholar and tears meant she would have her fingers chopped off. Her ruined, useless fingers.

  The doctor knotted the bandage and stood. She gathered up her things and headed for the door.

  “I don’t understand,” Cazia said. “It still hurts. How can she be finished if it still hurts? It feels like I’m wearing a glove on this hand; can’t she make it better?”

  “Oh, big sister,” Ivy said. “You are not in your empire any more.”

  They made her eat a loaf of bread and drink another bowl of broth, then she was permitted to sleep. Sometime in the middle of the night, she was woken by five women with long bronze knives who wanted them all to strip. They did and were thoroughly examined. Cazia had barely enough energy to be envious of Kinz’s long, fit figure while also wondering at the awful scar above her left hip, then it was over. She dressed and fell back into a fitful sleep.

  The next day, the pain was worse. Was this how people dealt with injuries outside the empire? No wonder the Peradaini had conquered so much of Kal-Maddum. Great Way, the whole world should want to be Peradaini.

  She lay in her cot and spoke to no one, not even the soldier who had come to interrogate her in her own language.

  For years, she had feared the punishment for being hollowed out: to lose the use of her fingers and with it, her magic. In one unthinking moment, she had saved her friend’s life and lost forever the ability to cast spells. She did not regret the sacrifice and would have made the same choice again, but without her magic, she wasn’t Cazia Freewell any more.

  Nothing was never going to be right again.

  Chapter 19

  They stayed in the cell for five days and were forced to strip for a search every night. They all understood the Toal were afraid of allowing grunts through their defenses, and respected the precautions they took, no matter inconvenient they were.

  For Ivy, it was a different issue altogether: she insisted that it was dangerous to allow disrespect to go unchallenged or it might become worse.

  Still, there was nothing she could do about it, so she endured. As for Kinz and Cazia, they were content to be provided as much food as they could eat while doing as little as possible for a few days.

  And there was the matter of the Tilkilit stones. How many scholars did the Toal have? How useful would the stones be here, at Fort Whune? More importantly, would they be distributed until a way could be found to make more--if that was even possible?

  Ivy assured them they would not. Precious items like Kinz’s iron crown--when stripped from prisoners--would become the property of the commander here, for good or ill. Luckily, Kinz was able to hide the stones in her clothes; if only they could have hidden the crown as well.

  The doctor arrived every morning to inspect Cazia’s hand and change the bandage. The Captain of the Wall (that was the title of the man with the plume) arrived every afternoon to chat with them about where they had been and what they had seen. He spoke in Peradaini; Ivy and Kinz answered in Peradaini. Cazia barely took part in the discussions, even when addressed directly. Her hand was becoming worse every day, she thought. The fingers screamed in pain if she so much as brushed a piece of cloth against them, and the palm had no comfortable place to rest.

  When Cazia said as much, Kinz admonished her. “Your fingers. Your palm. You must not talk about them as though they belong to someone else. Trust me. Your body must remain yours if you are going to care for it and become strong.”

  She chose her words more carefully in the future, although her feeling hadn’t changed. The hand. Her magic. Would she trade the whole of the left hand for the ability to cast spells again? She was certain that she would.

  Every morning, Kinz touched her with an anti-magic stone. The scholar had not returned since that first meeting, but they were afraid he would.

  Absurdly, Cazia was most unhappy with the food. None of the girls liked eating bowls of mush, but Ivy claimed it was very like the food she had eaten when she was small, and was fitfully nostalgic about it. Cazia found it unbearably bland; with the pain, the isolation, the boredom, and the constant fear that they might be executed, the miserable paste they ate twice a day made her want to weep.

  The Captain of the Wall introduced himself every time he entered the cell, in a strangely formal style that annoyed Cazia deeply. He was a bit of a puzzle himself; she’d thought that everyone on the Indregai Peninsula looked like Ivy: red- or yellow-haired and fair-skinned, with a flush of red beneath their cheeks when the sun was hot or they worked too hard. However, while the Captain was indeed fair-skinned, his hair was long, glossy, and as black as Kinz’s own.

  On the third day, it occurred to her that she was supposed to be distracted by his manners and good looks. She wasn’t. His pale complexion reminded her of goat’s milk, and the very thought of it made her stomach flip. Little Spinner, turn him away, he must have been close to thirty! His every attempt to engage her failed.

  Finally, on the fifth day, he asked her to sing a song.

  “We hear rumors of the power and skill of the musicians of your empire, but I have never heard the work. Would you sing a song for me?”

  The idea was ludicrous on its face. Cazia was tempted to take a bowl of broth from the table and dump it over his head. Still, Ivy and Kinz thought it was a fine idea. When they saw that Cazia wasn’t enthused, they encouraged the Captain to go first.

  He did, and it was awful. Not that his voice was bad--it was fine and clear--but the song itself would have bored Peradaini children. La dee la dee la dee la dee was the entire melody, with a brief leelee dee thrown in here and there. He sang it for much too long, but when he stopped, he said he’d cut it short. It was a walking song, he explained, used to help people find their way in the days before map-making.

  Ivy and Kinz wanted to hear the one she’d sung for them on the mountain. Didn’t she remember the one?

  She did, of course. River Overrunning. The song that had made Old Stoneface--Tyr Tejohn Treygar, she corrected herself, since he wasn’t an Enemy anymore--famous. Did they really want to hear it? She wasn’t much of a singer, Song knew.

  She sat up and took a deep breath. When she’d sung for the girls in their tunnel, she had been on the verge of being hollowed out. Perhaps she’d gone over it. In any event, she'd felt a certain detachment from the grief that every ruined scholar feels. Her hollowed-out grief had come from some other place, from something awful that exists behind her magic.

  None of that was available to her now. She had only the grief of her lost magic, and with it the loss of everything she had ever hoped for her life.

  She began to sing without planning to start. How long had it been since she’d thought of Old Stoneface, the man who had tried to hurl himself to his death to save the prince and all of his friends, her included? It was such an odd thing to remember at a moment like this.

  Lar had told her not three months before that Peradaini songs were made of symbolism, and as she sang about being helpless while loved ones were washed away, she realized this was a song about war.

  Suddenly, she was singing about more than just the loss of her magic. There was also Tyr Treygar and Lar himself, both surely lost to The Blessing. There was Bitt and Tim and Jagia and Pagesh and also her own brother, dead by her unknowing hand. Song preserve the memory of all they had known, because Fire had taken them and Cazia was alone among strangers in a crumbling world.

  When the song was over, the captain only stared at her, openmouthed. His face was paler than it had ever been, and his helmet, which he normally held on his left knee, had nearly fallen to the floor. For the first time ever, she thought he looked handsome. Without his careful manners and knowing, patronizing expression, he seemed like a genuine human being. Cazia suddenly wondered what it would be like to kiss him.

  She turned toward the wall and lay down. The Captain stood, took his leave, and locked the cell door behind him. Enemy, she thought unkindly. She’d
hoped to put that instinct behind her, but not yet. Not yet.

  The door swung open. This time, it was an older man with dark circles under his eyes and thinning red hair. The older man dragged that same Peradaini scholar into the room and pushed him at Cazia.

  “You look like you’ve slept and eaten,” Cazia said to him. It was true; he looked almost healthy.

  “I won’t lie to them for you no matter how polite you are,” he responded. He laid his long hand on her shoulder—Great Way, he was so warm, he felt almost feverish. He kept it there, his eyes shut tight. After a moment, he lifted his hand. “Nothing,” he said to the red-haired man.

  “How can it be nothing?” the older man demanded. His voice boomed in the stone room. He must have been the one in charge; an underling would have been taught to control his tone. Also, the princess was right; he spoke Peradaini as if he had little stones in his mouth. “How can it be nothing?”

  The scholar shrugged. “It’s not magic. She hasn’t been trained. She’s never cast a spell in her life. I could tell if she had.”

  The old man glared at the scholar, who only shrugged again.

  Ivy stepped forward. “It is a song, commander. Not a magic spell. Only a song.” She looked at the scholar, who seemed to be uncomfortable with her attention. “Is there a form of magic that can make a man weep? Or that can break someone’s heart?”

  The scholar turned toward the commander. “There isn’t. It’s the truth; magic can only affect the physical world.”

  “Well,” the old man said. He ran his fingers through his thinning red hair. “Well well well. I wonder if I could ask you to sing again, young lady. There will be a feast tonight with quite a few Toal nobles present. I’m sure they would be fascinated to learn more about this Peradaini song.”

  “You’ll let me out of my cell?” Cazia asked. “So I can sing for the entertainment of your guests?”

  “Obviously. You would also be invited to dine with us, if you impress us.”