Senrid

by Sherwood Smith

  “Of course it is,” he said derisively. “‘Moral’ just translates out to ‘I’m right and you’re wrong,’ therefore I had a moral obligation to reclaim our old lands until your friend elbowed in—”

  I was so mad I had to get out of there. It was either that or strangle that creep. So I flung myself into the water and whooshed out my breath in a big storm of bubbles. I couldn’t hear voices—couldn’t see anything but the blue-lit spheres rising like perfect round crystals to the surface.

  I didn’t go anywhere. Where would I go? So I lay there underwater, enjoying the magic, and trying to get rid of my rage, justified as it was. Anger was useless, and my temper had gotten me into too many messes for me to give in to it now.

  So I decided I had to go back. I wouldn’t apologize—that would be fake, since I regretted nothing I’d said—but I’d go on as if that exchange hadn’t happened, and if Senrid did the same, then, well, at least we could work together long enough to get away from this world, and never see one another again.

  So I let myself float up to the surface, but when my head broke, I heard Senrid say, “…another bigmouthed, cowardly hypocrite as bad as Kyale. Worse, because she’s managed to learn a few spells.” He had to be talking about me. My anger whazoomed back!

  Autumn said, “I don’t know Kyale, but I do know that CJ is no hypocrite—what she says is what she thinks—and she’s no coward. No one who stands up to Shnit of the Chwahir, on behalf of not just friends but people she doesn’t know, is a coward.”

  “Shnit of the Chwahir, eh?” Senrid said, and he laughed. But it wasn’t a mean laugh—not a haw haw!, but more of a hoo, really?

  Severely embarrassed, I ducked below the surface again. Leander had also gone into the water. He was way below me, almost out of sight.

  Stretching my arms before me into a point and kicking hard, I dove downward, the water streaming around me, and followed him.

  We swam like that for a long time, Leander diving ever deeper, and looking around; he saw me because you can’t hide in the water, but then I wasn’t trying to hide. Finally he slowed, waiting for me to catch up, and stretched out a hand—we could ‘talk’ by thinking at one another, if we touched. I grabbed his wrist.

  I didn’t think it would be easy, but it shouldn’t be nearly so hard if all four of us look. Let’s go back and get the others.

  I thought back: What are we looking for?

  What Senrid said: evidence of an outside agent of some sort.

  Not someone lurking around, spying? I made a face—as if someone really were watching me.

  No. If someone sent us, then what we’re looking for has to be outside of the norm, and it has to be reasonably close by, or why weren’t we dropped anywhere else on the world? Leander thought at me.

  In silence we swam all the way back, and when we broke surface, Leander explained his idea to Senrid.

  Lights shining from the city indicated that others were waking up. Senrid said, “Let’s go now.”

  We all knew he didn’t want Kyale insisting on accompanying us, which she would if she saw Leander leaving. Leander said nothing; I looked at his face as he treaded water near me. His dark hair was plastered down over his forehead, and his face was completely blank. I was not the only one who wanted to get this mess over with and get home.

  Autumn gave me a rather rueful grin, then she dove. I followed.

  This time Senrid led the way, and we swam down and down, looking for I-didn’t-know-what. The others seemed to know; at least they kept scanning back and forth.

  Autumn shot ahead, swimming with a remarkable speed. We followed until we reached our island, now settled onto the bottom of the ocean. The trees waved gently in the water, which was dimly lit by shifting shafts from the morning sun far above.

  We circled the island, striking into an even deeper area—and the next sudden move was from Senrid.

  He flung out his arms, and I stopped, somersaulting. Leander swooped down and clamped a hand on Senrid’s arm. Autumn next; I grabbed her, so I wouldn’t have to touch Senrid, because the mean part of me wanted to pinch or scratch, to hurt him like his comment about Faline’s big mouth had hurt me. Then I forgot my grudge when Senrid’s thought came;… sensed black magic—and hey! The binding is lifted. I have my magic back.

  Same here! Leander and I had the same thought at the same time.

  Autumn’s surprise and consternation flashed through us all. It was she who’d sensed the presence of magic that Leander had looked for, but couldn’t find.

  Senrid had found it because he knew that kind of magic.

  Black magic, Leander thought. His feelings leaked through along with the words: he was worried about what we’d do now.

  Senrid’s thought came, sardonic as his voice, but with no other emotions. Warded very neatly, too. It would have taken me longer to find it.

  What’s ‘it’? I asked.

  Mirror ward, a vicious one. It’s an enclosed area, so my guess is that someone is being kept prisoner inside.

  Can you break it? Leander asked. I sure can’t.

  Don 7 even try, Senrid said. This kind of mirror ward is especially designed for white magic. It’ll send your magic right back onto you instead of disintegrating it.

  Can you break it? Leander asked again.

  Yes. Easily. I had to practice setting them up for my uncle, and I always memorized the antidotes to his spells.

  Question is, are we ready for whatever happens when we break the ward? Especially since we just got proof someone put us here, and has been running us like yearlings on a longe line? Now some of his feelings leaked through—he was ready for a fight.

  Leander’s perplexity matched mine so closely that for a moment or two I got almost dizzy; Senrid might be ready for a battle, but what if we faced an army of mages? Even with our magic mysteriously restored, we weren’t ready for that. Or even an army without magic could do us in just as easily, I thought in disgust. May’s well be sweating it out in Marloven Hess all over again!

  But then came Autumn’s thought, sure and clear and kindly. This is not our world. Black magic is new here. I think we have to let the squid-folk, and the humans, and the tould-hayin know—and let them decide what to do.

  And so we did.

  Why make this part any longer? It’s not actually our story—we were only the “strange foreign visitors” who were the unwitting causes of events we didn’t even see.

  Autumn and Leander did all the talking. Senrid stayed by himself somewhere, and I slogged back and found Faline and Kitty, who were busy with the local kids.

  “What’s going on?” Kitty asked.

  “Magic stuff,” I said, too weary of it all to explain.

  And they didn’t want to hear it.

  “Yeccch,” Kitty and Faline said together. And laughed.

  Two more days passed, and then Senrid broke the spells. He’d warned the squid-folk that he didn’t know what kind of tracers were on the wards, and who they’d bring, but if they did bring some mages, we never saw them.

  That was the weird thing. We never saw the prisoners or the villains—someone had found this world, I guess, discovered they had no black magic, and thought it might serve as a hideout for prisoners now, and maybe serve some other purpose later.

  The squids shot from ignorance to a new, strong form of magic in those two days, with a speed that frightened us all—even Senrid.

  But they were going to wait until we were gone, and then close their world-gate off.

  And so we gave the bands back, and stood around in the stone city, and the humans all gathered to watch us go—

  But before any of us could perform a spell someone else got in first. Someone very fast, very powerful.

  Whazeem, suddenly transfer! Before anyone had a chance to say anything—which made me almost glad.

  Next thing I knew, I was sitting on the floor in the white castle, Faline next to me, our clothes making a pool of salt water on the glistening white floor.
/>   Clair came in, grinned when she saw us both, and she dropped right down next to us. “What happened?”

  “CJ got us outa bein’ pincushions,” Faline began. “But then we got splatted somewhere else, and nothing made any sense, except you shoulda seen their city!”

  I told Clair everything, and she listened, as always, without interrupting.

  “…so we never did find out who sent us—or why,” I finished. “And we don’t know who we rescued, where they come from, or who put them there. It’s so… so pointless!”

  Clair bit her lip, making her thinking hard face. Then spoke. “Not pointless. Not that much magic. Somebody didn’t want you kids killed, so he or she interfered. And sent you where magic was needed. Then brought you safely back when you’d done what you were sent to do.”

  “But who? Why? Why not just tell us?”

  She shook her head slowly. “It could be that Autumn’s magic at that cave place drew the eyes of someone very powerful. Or maybe Autumn herself is being watched.” She smiled a little. “Or Senrid.”

  “I hope he figures it out, if it’s he who’s being watched. He’s going to hate that,” I gloated. “Eccch. Speaking of Senrid how is Ndand? Where is she?”

  Clair waved a hand toward the great doors opening into the cloud city. “She’s probably still over listening to the musicians who play for the theater.”

  I sat up, my sodden gown squelching around me. “Huh? That little group with the flutes and the strings?”

  “Yes. The day I broke the last spell she changed.” Clair opened her eyes wide, drew in a breath, threw her arms wide. “Like this. She said she’d never seen color so bright, or heard sounds so clear and sweet—like birds. And wind through the trees. Her eyes were fine, by the way—or had been, until her father tried some sort of weird spell meant, I think, to make her able to see in the dark—”

  “Spy in the dark, is more like it.”

  “Probably. Anyway, when it didn’t work, he couldn’t undo it. His ability with magic is about what yours was after your first year here.”

  “Because he keeps messing up spells by cussing! Wow. Is she, well, like Senrid?” I made a prune-face.

  Clair grinned. “I don’t know what he’s like, except through your account, but she’s very quiet. Very deliberate in her movements, when she finally makes one. That first day I took her on a tour of the cloud city, and she kept stopping. I think we spent half a bell before the stained-glass display on Glazier Corner. Then, when she heard the musicians practice, she wouldn’t leave. She’s gone back there every day since, and sits and listens. I guess her father never permitted any kind of music, so she’d never heard any in her life. She can’t seem to get enough of it.”

  “She probably doesn’t want to go back to that spacklegnarg of a castle,” Faline spoke up for the first time, hugging her knees close. She chuckled. “I sure wouldn’t!”

  “She’s ambivalent. Afraid of her father. I told her there is no hurry in deciding. Come on! Let’s tell the others you’re home. You can get a bath—clear water—and get rid of that soggy-looking black dress, then how about that chocolate pie? Janil’s made one every few days, waiting for you to come home.”

  Faline jumped up. I got to my feet more slowly in that heavy, sodden dress. “Well, whoever the Prime Noser is who’s watching and blasting us places right and left, I trust that he, or she, or it has decided that Mearsies Heili and Marloven Hess won’t cross one another’s history again for a hundred years.”

  As usual, my prediction was a hundred percent wrong.

  So ends this segment of CJ Sherwood’s records.

  PART THREE

  ONE

  While Faline and CJ gratefully settled back into normal life, unknown to them, two more Mearsieans were about to meet Senrid.

  Puddlenose Sherwood was very certain of two things.

  One: he loathed and distrusted political power.

  Two: he loathed and distrusted most adults, especially those who sought political power.

  What shaped him this way?

  His mother, oldest daughter of King Tesmer Sherwood of Mearsies Heili, had passed the throne to her next sister because she couldn’t stand to stay in one place for long. She found and married another adventurer companion, and they had a child eventually, who it was easiest (they shortly discovered) to leave back at home with her sisters Mearsieanne and Murael.

  Puddlenose’s mother also had a brother, Doumei Sherwood, who had craved power right from the start. Since his two older sisters would not let him be king, he was early suborned by the Chwahir with promises of position and power if he turned against his own family and land, which he did.

  His first order was to get the baby, again which he did.

  Well, this isn’t Puddlenose’s story, so there is no purpose into going into the grim details of Puddlenose’s life among the Chwahir. Take it as truth that it was grim, and life-threatening, and that by the time he got away for good, Puddlenose had developed some remarkable survival traits, all of which he hid Under his natural desire to spend his life traveling, having fun, adventuring, and righting wrongs—the sort of wrongs he’d been helpless to right when he was small and held by Shnit.

  By then Puddlenose was fifteen. His younger cousin Clair, now queen of Mearsies Heili, gave him the spell for not aging, and so he stayed fifteen—a tall boy who’d shot up to just under six feet, with thick brown hair, a square, friendly face, and brown skin from all that traveling. Clair had also found and performed on him the Universal Language Spell, so once he heard a tongue, it translated itself into his mind as Mearsiean.

  On one of his visits home he met a boy named Christoph who was a friend of one of Clair’s regional governors, originally from Earth, and together they adventured their way up and down the Toaran continent before they set out east over the sea.

  They were on another continent now, between adventures, seeking a place to sleep.

  And so a peaceful evening fell, that autumn of ‘735, not long after that day in the cave on the border of Marloven Hess. The sun moved west, leaving darkness over the rest of the continent—including Puddlenose and Christoph, asleep in a barn.

  Everyone transferred straight from the water world to home, except for 713 (now Claid again)—whose wish for a future life had vaguely centered on a place with a lot of horses, and so he was shifted to another continent entirely, where he found himself sitting at a roadside, a scattering of six-sided Sartoran coins around him, gleaming in the moonlight.

  Puzzled, he picked up the coins and trod off to begin a new life.

  The other who did not transfer home was Senrid.

  He was tired from the two sleepless days of magic preparation and the tense wait. He was dizzy from the long transfer. But he gathered the last of his energy and tried an assessment spell—and was not surprised that yet another ward against transferring home had been set against him. It would take access to his magic books to dissolve it. He was too weary to sustain more than a flash of anger, or even to explore his new surroundings. It was quiet, warm, dry, and smelled good, so he dropped flat into the fresh hay and slid instantly into slumber.

  He was running in dreamscapes when Christoph woke first.

  He woke because an outflung hand caught him squarely in the mazzard, which was an invitation to heave himself onto the snoring Puddlenose and try to choke him.

  A wrestling match started, a frequent occurrence, and despite the energetic thumps and grunts and the flying hay, one completely without malice. The battle ended only when the two rolled onto a third person.

  Puddlenose and Christoph scrambled back, and Senrid, rudely awakened, sat up, blinking.

  The three stared at one another in the warm reddish morning light. Cracks of bright morning sunrays slanted in between old boards in the barn wall. The air was warm, and dust motes swirled around them, brilliant pinpoints of gold.

  Christoph sneezed. He pointed at Senrid and said, in Mearsiean, “You smell like brine.”


  “I should think so,” Senrid answered in the same language.

  Puddlenose was silent. He noted the accent in the stranger’s voice, and the watchful expression in the gray-blue eyes. Otherwise Senrid looked somewhat like Christoph—short, blond, round-faced. Only Christoph’s usual expression was cheerful, his movements a kind of agreeable drift or slouch; this newcomer’s expression was wary, his posture tense.

  “Been in the ocean long enough,” Senrid continued.

  “In?” Christoph repeated. “Or on.”

  “In.”

  “How long?”

  “Hard to say. Could have been a week or a month. Time being different on other worlds, and the passing of nights hard to count when you’re far below the surface.”

  He spoke with precision, his tone bland.

  Puddlenose said, “I’m Puddlenose. He’s Christoph.”

  Wariness narrowed the other boy’s eyes. “I’m Senrid.”

  Puddlenose shrugged, Christoph nodded. If it was recognition the newcomer was expecting, he didn’t get it. They were used to strange adventures—and adventurers.

  “Of Marloven Hess.”

  No one reacted.

  Senrid ventured another question. “Your accent—are you Mearsieans?”

  “Our home base,” Puddlenose said, and he would have dropped the subject there, though his curiosity was now waking up and sniffing about. He’d learned to bide his time.

  Senrid’s face had gone tight, as if he were holding in rage as he glared at a pair of riding boots sitting neatly nearby. They had been transferred from the rock on the water world. Eventually it became clear that whoever had put Senrid here had done it without his permission or knowledge—and had left the boots as a not-so-subtle reminder that yes, he was being watched.

  Meanwhile Christoph had considered the preposition; Senrid hadn’t said ‘from’ as most people would, he’d said ‘of and in many lands that particular word often denoted dominion.

  “Of,” he asked, “as in it belongs to you?”

  “What of it?” Senrid countered.