Briarheart

by Mercedes Lackey

  Brianna closed her eyes and put her hands together palm to palm at chin level, as if she were praying. I watched her in the way I had learned to watch for magic, and I immediately saw a glow about her that increased with every intake of breath. Then, slowly and gracefully, she moved her hands so the palms faced outward, and the glow became a shell surrounding her at the level of her palms. She pushed gently, and the shell of light expanded until it touched the walls of Gerrold’s room.

  And the walls expanded!

  My eyes practically popped out of my head, and I wasn’t the only one.

  She dropped her hands when the walls were as far apart as the ones inside her cottage, uttered a sigh, and opened her eyes. “We won’t need more than a couple of hours, I would think,” she said, a little breathlessly. “But since you are all here, there are some experiments I would like to conduct with Gerrold’s help.”

  There was the circle of clutter where the walls had originally been, then an expanse of clean stone floor from there to the walls. The owl had already gone off into the night. The cats had leapt up to their padded perches, tails bushed with alarm. The ferret had swarmed up Gerrold’s leg and was now huddled in his arms and shaking. The crow was so frozen that you’d have thought him stuffed. Only the raven and the hedgehog seemed unalarmed. The hedgehog was still asleep in half a cup on the hearth even though the hearth was several feet away from where it had been. And the raven eyed all of us before yawning and closing his eyes again. I could only suppose he had seen all this before, or at least something enough like it that he didn’t care.

  That this had all taken place in complete silence only made it more unnerving.

  “You can unwrap the sword now, Miri, and unsheathe it,” Brianna said. I did so, then something occurred to me.

  “If the sword can’t be touched by Fae magic, why does the sheath work?”

  “Ah, excellent question. It doesn’t unless the sword is well away from you or sheathed. Once the sword is sheathed, because the lining is silk, you don’t have its protection anymore,” Brianna said, then Gerrold took the sword from me and laid it down on a workbench. “Remember this for the future, all of you. Silk insulates against all magic. If you need to pick up or carry something you suspect to be bespelled, wrap it in silk first.”

  Gerrold made several gestures over the sword, muttering things under his breath, and the words on the blade lit up with a soft yellow glow. He and Brianna bent over it, heads together, while Brianna took the words down on vellum. Then they turned the sword over and did the same on the other side.

  “I’ll keep these safe,” Brianna said, folding the pieces of vellum as soon as the ink was dry, and—well, I didn’t exactly see what she did with them. One moment they were there, the next they were not.

  “And I have it all up here,” Gerrold replied, tapping his head. He made a wiping motion above the blade, and the words on it vanished. I took this chance to look around at my fellow Companions. They weren’t as startled or as alarmed as they had been the first time they saw magic, but they were certainly enraptured.

  “Come take it, Miri,” Gerrold said to me, gesturing to the sword. “I’d really rather you handled it just to be on the safe side.”

  I came and got it, but Brianna shook her head when I went to sheathe it. “I want to make some experiments first,” she said. “I never got the chance when your ancestor had it, and the more we know, the better use we can make of its powers. Go stand there, if you please.” She gestured to a spot about halfway into the clear stretch of floor. “Now hold it in front of you, straight up and down.”

  She looked over her shoulder at Gerrold. “Get some chalk, would you? You’ll see why in a moment.”

  As he went to a box on the far wall for a piece of chalk, I took my place and stood as she had directed. “This is completely harmless,” she told me. “But the important thing is that the magic is visible.” And with that, she held out one hand, her palm toward me.

  Her hand lit up like the setting sun, and the entire room lit up with an orange radiance.

  Everywhere except behind the sword. I glanced behind me and saw a cone of shadow. It was quite out of proportion to the thin blade of the sword, so I could only assume that the effect of the blade was wider than its actual breadth.

  Gerrold saw what she wanted immediately and moved behind me, scribing the limits of the cone on the floor with the chalk. Brianna closed her hand and the light stopped, and the two of them examined the lines on the floor.

  “We’ll do this again, but this time hold the blade horizontally at chest height,” Brianna said at last, and I obeyed. Again, there was a cone of shadow behind me, this time much broader. Gerrold scribed the boundaries of this as well. Then Brianna had me point the sword at her. To my surprise, although the cone of shadow was narrower than it had been the first time, it was not as narrow as I had thought it would be.

  “Why…?” said Brianna as she stared at the lines.

  “Aha!” Gerrold’s face lit up. “Of course. I know what is going on here. When Miri holds the sword, the size of the cone of protection behind her is relative to her body size, not to the sword or how it is pointed.”

  “But—”

  “But when she holds it horizontally so the sword forms a bar across the front of her chest, that expands the shadow.”

  Brianna actually laughed. “I would never have been able to intuit that. And this is why human wizards are better at these deductions of logic than Fae, who rely on intuition.” She gestured at my friends. “All right, younglings, fit yourselves into this shadow and memorize where you may be in safety. That way, if some Fae sorceress decides to blast you, you may emerge unharmed.”

  My friends all crowded carefully inside the chalk marks, and we quickly figured out a formation that kept everyone’s arms and legs inside the safe zone. Gerrold and Brianna seemed very happy with the night’s work, and if they were pleased, then I was certainly content. I was thrilled that they had figured out a way that the sword’s protection could extend to cover all of us. I wasn’t eager to lead my friends into combat that I alone was immune from.

  Well, relatively immune. There were still perfectly ordinary weapons and some Fae used them.

  We all filed down the stairs, which were lit relatively well with oil lamps in sconces, but Giles lagged back a little. I guessed that he might want to talk, so I stayed next to him while the other four clattered and chattered on ahead. “How is life with the squires?” I asked. “Are you all right?” I was concerned for him; he was probably the only boy who wasn’t of noble blood in the lot. And we hadn’t really had much of a chance to chat, just the two of us, for weeks.

  He shrugged. “Today was hard, but Wulf didn’t let them keep at it for long. After that, I proved I was as good or better at fighting than any of them, so they’ve let me be. In fact, a couple of the fellows are all right. It helped that there were three of us, and Nat and Rob stood up for me.” He glanced at me out of the corner of his eye as we reached the bottom of the stairs and saw that the other four were nowhere in sight. “I must say, the squires’ quarters are worlds better than my old bed, though to hear the complaints from the rest, you’d think they were sleeping on hard stone in front of a cold hearth. Have Anna and Elle kept you up half the night with nattering?”

  I laughed. “They would have if I’d let them. They have their own room, so I’m not sure what they do after I tell them in my best Sir Delacar voice that it’s time to go to sleep.”

  “I kind of miss when it was just the two of us in the kitchen making bread,” he said after a moment of silence. “Things were a lot simpler then.”

  “No matter what, they wouldn’t have stayed that way for long,” I reminded him as we lingered near a torch so anyone passing by could see we weren’t up to shenanigans in the shadows. “Not with my having Fae blood. And not with my being the Queen’s daughter. Something was bound to happen sooner or later.”

  He scratched the back of his head. “I guess, w
hen you put it that way. I like being in the Companions, Miri… but I liked it better when things weren’t so complicated.”

  What could I say? I’d liked it better too. “We never seem to have much time to just be ourselves,” he added.

  “Neither do the squires,” I said, and Giles uttered a small chuckle.

  “Responsibilities,” he said.

  “The only person I’ve ever noticed who doesn’t have them is the jester.” I was trying to make him laugh again, and it worked. I didn’t point out that the jester has the responsibility, sometimes very heavy, of finding humor when things seem darkest.

  “I suppose we must be adults now,” he said. “Well, it looks as if we are going to have adventures as well as responsibilities, and there’s not much adventure in dough.”

  “Not unless someone casts an evil spell on it, and it rises from the bowl as a monster.” Now I made him laugh, a real laugh.

  “You’d better go catch up with Anna and Elle, and make sure they get some proper sleep tonight. Sir Delacar won’t like it if they turn up yawning.”

  “Off to my responsibilities.” And I bid him good night.

  But I couldn’t help but agree with him. It had been so much easier back when I was just the Queen’s other daughter. I had to keep even Giles at arm’s length now, because if there was one thing that traveled faster than arrows, it was gossip. It hadn’t mattered in the kitchen because we were under the eyes of many people all the time. But now? With our being together a lot and often on our own, it mattered. It mattered a lot.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  NOW SIR DELACAR HAD AN ENTIRELY NEW SET OF SKILLS FOR US to learn. No sooner had Brianna acquainted him with the “safe” zone that the sword and I cast than his cunning mind began to think of ways to use it—more than just the obvious of “everybody hide behind Miri”—and we began working on Delacar’s group maneuvers.

  I was also working on control and consistency with the Fae magic. When I practiced in our world, sometimes the power drew up instantly and did exactly what I wanted it to. Sometimes it was sluggish and weak, and it was all I could do to light a single candle. Brianna thought that this was probably because the human magic in me fought with the Fae magic for control, and Gerrold reckoned she was right. It’s not just wizards who have magic, at least according to Gerrold. All humans have at least a little bit. The difference between wizards and regular humans is that wizards have a lot more of it and are willing to invest every waking moment in learning how to build and control their magic, how to use spell components to help them, and how to create verbal components of spells. And I was going to have to deal with whatever magic I had inside me. So I needed to train myself so I could call on either to get what I needed instead of having them fight with each other.

  At the moment, Brianna was teaching me illusions—those came easily with Fae magic but were a piece of complicated spell casting when it came to the human version. But the Fae version didn’t last if the magician lost sight of it, and the human version lasted as long as the spell components did.

  When I was a child, there had been a wizard who had come to the palace in the guise of a jewel merchant and offered fabulous stones for prices just low enough to seem like a reasonable bargain. But Papa was not as naive as the wizard had supposed, and he had Gerrold with him whenever a merchant came to present goods. “It’s much easier to dispel an illusion than it is to cast one,” Gerrold told the King, which was a failure in human-cast illusions that Fae illusions didn’t suffer from. Moments after Gerrold touched the stones, they were revealed for the flawed, inferior things they actually were, and the merchant wizard found himself languishing in a jail cell until the King determined whether or not he’d defrauded anyone in Tirendell. I never learned what happened to him after that, but he wasn’t in the cell by the time we came to the palace. But that was something to keep in mind when Brianna and I worked out together, and dispelling illusion was very high on my list of things to learn.

  I’d just gotten used to the new pace of my life when it was all shattered. Shattered by the wail of a baby that woke me up out of deep sleep. There was only one baby in the palace, and I was already halfway to Aurora’s nursery before I realized that I was even out of bed.

  I wasn’t the only one to come running, but only Mama and Melalee beat me there. Melalee had my poor, precious sister in her arms, vainly trying to soothe her. Even in the dim candlelight, I could tell that there was something wrong. Her beautiful rosebud face was screwed up in an expression of pain, and she was white with fever.

  This wasn’t something I knew how to fight, so I backed into a corner while the doctor and Gerrold were both sent for and Melalee and Mama did their frantic best to soothe her—to no avail. I don’t think that anyone noticed I was there, to tell the truth. The more Aurora cried, the more people crowded into the room, all of them stiff with fear, none of them useful.

  The doctor came and pondered and prescribed and went off to his stillroom to make medicines. Gerrold came and stayed. I stood in the corner, anxiety and fear consuming me, as Gerrold sprinkled Aurora with powders and dusts while motes of magic surrounded his fingers and he sketched signs in the air. He must have been doing that for a good half an hour when something tapped on the window and every one of us in the room jumped and squeaked or yelped, Gerrold included. The spell Gerrold had been working on misfired in a flash of orange light.

  I was the first to recover and the closest to the window, so I flung it open, and as I had hoped, Brianna was hovering outside, her scarlet wings a blur. She caught the edges of the window with both hands and deftly swung herself inside with folded wings, then dropped lightly to the floor. The maneuver was impossibly graceful, but I suppose when you have centuries to practice, you can make anything look easy and graceful. My heart rose. Surely Brianna would be able to put everything right again!

  She didn’t say a word as she huddled over Aurora with Gerrold, the two of them putting their heads together, murmuring in tense voices, and occasionally casting some magic. My heart began to sink again as I took in the expression of tense worry on both their faces—and as nothing they did made Aurora any better.

  The doctor came, dosed Aurora with something that also made no difference even past the time it should have taken effect, and he left muttering to himself. The sky lightened to predawn gray. Aurora continued to cry, but now it was the thin wail of a baby losing strength. My heart was in knots, and so was my stomach.

  Now Papa and Mama joined the tense conversation over the cradle. I strained my ears to hear. “Unicorn’s horn,” Gerrold said, when I could finally make something out.

  Mama looked puzzled. “Why?” she asked.

  “Whatever this is, it’s not a poison; and it’s not a spell that either of us recognizes. Magic is involved and, we think, a disease. And I am certain that someone caused it, but we are running out of time and options. Unicorn’s horn can cure anything that isn’t a wound,” Gerrold explained.

  “There hasn’t been a report of a unicorn in this kingdom in a century,” Papa said. “That was why King Stefan banned their hunting, but by then, I am afraid, it was too late. And I’ve never seen even a sliver of horn.”

  “Send out a proclamation!” Brianna exclaimed. “Surely someone—”

  By this time, I had stolen out, dressed in a heartbeat, belted on my dagger; and I was running for the garden and the door in the tree. There might still be unicorns about; just because no one had seen them didn’t mean there weren’t any. They were notoriously stealthy, and after being hunted relentlessly, they weren’t going to take the chance that someone would ignore the law.

  And if anyone would know if there were any unicorns left, it would be Lobo and Clarion.

  I burst out onto the road to Brianna’s cottage well into the forest. Under cover of the dense trees, it was still dark. The forest was a very different thing at night than it was by daylight, and with a chill down my backbone, I regretted that I hadn’t brought my sword or at leas
t a sword and a lantern. Things scuttled about in the undergrowth, and I felt many eyes on me, not all of them friendly. Would illusions help me against wild beasts? But I hadn’t really learned how to create them yet.

  Stupid! I scolded myself, still so knotted up with fear for Aurora that I had trouble thinking. Make a light.

  My Fae magic came to hand at once, and I made a little globe of light and set it to float over my head. I trotted in the direction of Brianna’s cottage. I suspected Lobo had his den somewhere nearby. It would make sense; they were friends and allies, and it would be smart to be close enough to come to each other’s aid. “Lobo!” I called as I ran. “Lobo!”

  I was just about to Brianna’s cottage when there was the sound of something crashing through the bushes on the right side of the road. My heart jumped into my mouth; I staggered back a few steps, my hand on my mostly useless dagger; and I came very close to shrieking as Clarion leapt out of the undergrowth into the middle of the road.

  “Wretched child, what do you mean by running down the road shouting like that?” he asked, panting and clearly out of breath, all four hooves planted firmly in the dust of the road as if he expected to receive the charge of… something… at any moment. “Something terrible might have heard you!”

  “Something terrible has already happened,” I said, and I told him quickly about Aurora. Well, as quickly as I could in and around the occasional sob of fear. All I could think about was how my baby sister had looked just before I left.

  His attitude changed immediately.

  “This is dreadful!” he proclaimed, just as Lobo, also out of breath, pushed his way through the same set of bushes. “Lobo! Something appalling has happened to the little Princess!” Clarion repeated what I had told him, without the crying, as I stood there wiping my eyes on my sleeve and trying to get my emotions under control.